Authors: Chengyang Zhang, Wenchuan Zhang, Bo Li, Mengran Li, Bob Zhang, Yuhao Yi, Hong Bu, Jiancheng Lv
Abstract: Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and agent workflows have shown strong promise for computational pathology, yet reliable patch-level reasoning remains challenging. End-to-end pathology MLLMs often hallucinate morphological features, while recent agentic systems usually merge tool outputs and retrieved knowledge into a shared context, making decisions vulnerable to conflicting evidence and context contamination. We propose PathoSage, a three-stage framework that explicitly separates knowledge retrieval, evidence collection, and evidence adjudication for patch-level pathology multimodal reasoning. Its core component, Structured Evidence Deliberation, independently evaluates heterogeneous evidence from tools, performs conflict analysis, and generates the final judgment in a fresh context to reduce anchoring bias. We further introduce a training-free Beta-Bernoulli experience system with continuous credit assignment to model long-term tool reliability and construct similarity-weighted priors for future tool use. Experiments show that PathoSage effectively mitigates VQA hallucinations and classifier disagreement, outperforming strong pathology MLLM and agentic baselines. Our results highlight explicit evidence adjudication and reliability-aware tool modeling as key ingredients for robust pathology agents.
Authors: Guangzhi Sun, Yixuan Li, Yudong Yang, Chao Zhang
Abstract: Audio-visual large language models (LLMs) hold strong promise for long-form video understanding, yet their long-video inference is fundamentally limited by the linear growth of video tokens and key-value (KV) caches. We present OmniMem, a memory-efficient streaming framework designed specifically for audio-visual LLMs. Unlike existing compression methods that treat all tokens uniformly, OmniMem introduces a modality-aware memory allocation strategy that separately manages visual and audio contexts, addressing the severe token imbalance between the two modalities. OmniMem further preserves informative and non-redundant KV states through perturbation-aware memory selection, enabling compact memory without sacrificing long-range understanding. To strengthen compression under realistic deployment constraints, we also explore budget-aware fine-tuning, which encourages the model to consolidate useful information into retained memory. Experiments on VideoMME Long, LVBench, and LVOmniBench with video-SALMONN 2+ and Qwen-2.5-Omni show that OmniMem consistently improves over strong training-free compression baselines by 2-4% absolute accuracy under the same memory budgets, with an additional 1-2% gain after fine-tuning.
Authors: Bo Zhang, Borui Zhang, Chenghao Jiang, Minglei Shi, Xiaofeng Wang, Zheng Zhu, Jie Zhou, Jiwen Lu
Abstract: Personal AI agents must increasingly operate across APIs, shells, web surfaces, and desktop GUIs, yet many systems remain tuned to a single interface and offer limited support for user teaching and auditability. We present Syll, an open-source, self-hosted multimodal agent harness that unifies MCP/API tools, CLI execution, and visual GUI control in a modular runtime, enabling agents to coordinate computer use across heterogeneous interfaces while streamlining how users and agents exchange information. At the core of Syll is a bidirectional user-agent interaction layer: users teach procedures through direct demonstration, which Syll compiles into reusable skills; agent execution is translated back into multimodal evidence -- logs, keyframes, and approval checkpoints -- for inspection and control. Syll further externalizes memory, skills, routines, and governance as editable local artifacts, supporting straightforward inspection, extension, and downstream development. Our implementation has been validated on production desktop applications including Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Audition, Stardew Valley, macOS Finder and others. We report mechanism-oriented studies that validate multimodal routing, teachable GUI replay, and persistent local artifacts. We hope Syll can serve as a practical open-source foundation for personal automation that users can teach, inspect, and continuously extend.
Authors: Kai A. Horstmann, Ethan Lin, Alice A. Robie, Jennifer J. Sun, Kristin Branson
Abstract: Agentic AI tools offer a promising path to automating software development bottlenecks in scientific research pipelines, particularly for stages that take domain experts days to months to build, where scientists care about correctness and robustness, not implementation details. We present an empirical study of general-purpose coding agents on a fly optogenetics data-to-discovery pipeline. We assess agents on tasks substantially larger than existing benchmarks, datasets orders of magnitude bigger, and evaluation criteria grounded in domain expert standards. We show that agents can solve several individual pipeline stages, suggesting stage-level automation is tractable. By analyzing agents' code iterations, we show that they struggle most when there is not a pre-defined criterion to iterate on, and they must instead use their scientific judgment to assess their current solution, a key open challenge. Mirroring scientific practice, they sometimes attempt visual inspection of intermediate outputs for self-evaluation, but largely fail to interpret what they see or act on it appropriately. Solving the end-to-end pipeline correctly requires stringing together successes across all pipeline stages, and this is beyond agents' current abilities. We identify challenges largely absent from existing benchmarks, including computational resource management and generalization to large held-out data collections. Finally, we distill principles for constructing scientific tasks and rigorous evaluation criteria for open-ended problems.
Authors: Mujtaba Farhan, Maheep Chaudhary
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning abilities on mathematical and multi-hop planning tasks. The CoCoNuT (Chain of Continuous Thought) paradigm~\cite{hao2024coconut} extends this by enabling models to reason in latent space, exploring multiple reasoning paths simultaneously rather than committing to a single chain early on. However, we identify a limitation we term the \textbf{concept bottleneck}. At each reasoning pass, intermediate hidden states are overwritten, causing the model to lose critical facts computed in earlier steps as reasoning depth increases. We observe this empirically. On HotpotQA, vanilla CoCoNuT (10.4\% EM) fails to improve over the CoT baseline (11.0\% EM), and performance degrades with curriculum depth on GSM8K. To address this, we propose \textbf{AGCLR} (Adaptive Gated Continuous Latent Reasoning), which augments CoCoNuT with a \textit{Gated Concept Stream}. A persistent residual memory maintained across all reasoning passes, controlled by three learned gates: a \textit{write} gate that commits intermediate facts to memory, a \textit{read} gate that retrieves relevant prior states, and a \textit{forget} gate that prunes irrelevant context. Evaluated on GSM8K, HotpotQA, and ProsQA using GPT-2 as our base model, AGCLR achieves consistent improvements across all types of datasets. With the performance gap compounding as curriculum depth increases, directly resolving the concept bottleneck. Code available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/JJJJ/README.md
Authors: Kaouther Mouheb, Amos Pomp, Antoine Manenti, Romy de Haan, Farog Faghir, Joy Martens, Harro Seelaar, Francesco Mattace-Raso, Meike W. Vernooij, Frank J. Wolters, Stefan Klein, Esther E. Bron
Abstract: Objectives: Automatic data extraction from free-text radiology reports enables large-scale research, but few studies assessed the performance of large language models (LLMs) on Dutch neuroradiology reports. Methods: We analyzed 947 brain MRI reports from a tertiary memory clinic (2016-2021), authored by consultant neuroradiologists. Trained medical students annotated thirty variables; 100 reports were double-annotated to assess inter-rater reliability. We evaluated the performance of the open-weight LLM LLaMA 3.1 using different languages (Dutch vs. English translation) and few-shot prompting with different example selection strategies. Performance was evaluated using balanced accuracy for categorical variables, accuracy and mean absolute error for counts, and text similarity for free-text. Metrics were computed across 10 random splits of the 947 reports. Results: LLaMA 3.1 demonstrated high zero-shot performance for visual rating scores (mean [95%-CI]): Medial Temporal Atrophy: 90% [77-100%] on the left and 96% [94-99%] on the right, Global Cortical Atrophy: 87% [83-91%], and Fazekas: 94% [93-96%]. Microbleed mentions were detected with 93% accuracy [92-95%] and infarct mentions with 82% [80-84%]. Text similarity for lesion location reached 0.95 [0.95-0.96]. Performance was lower for numerical variables: 80% [78-82%] for the number of microbleeds and 66% [63-68%] for infarcts. English translation yielded comparable results. Few-shot prompting improved performance for numerical variables, achieving 92% [90-93%] for microbleeds and 81% [77-85%] for infarcts using structural similarity-based selection. Conclusion: LLaMA 3.1 shows strong potential for extracting data from Dutch neuroradiology reports. Few-shot prompting enhances performance for numerical variables, whereas challenges remain for location-specific variables.
Authors: S. F. M. van Vlijmen, H. D. Lethe jr
Abstract: This article offers a perspective on the nature of chatbots as genuine conversation partners when discussing problems in relation to their solutions. What can chatbots do and what can't they do, and how can this be explained? Our argument draws on Aggregation Dynamics, Cognitive Linguistics, Neuropsychology and Psychology. Our argument focuses on basic chatbots in the hope of thereby making statements about the core functionality of more advanced chatbots. Basic chatbots are assumed to consist of a Large Language Model (LLM) with a simple interface. The main results are: a description of human understanding and thinking based on so-called metaphorical problem propagations; the hypothesis that text dataset used for training LLMs have specific characteristics and that these text datasets only partially imitate human thinking and understanding; the hypothesis that the LLM training process encodes artificial metaphorical problem propagations into an LLM from these datasets; our conclusion that a basic chatbot cannot be a thinking partner capable of matching humans; our conclusion that further development of the Large Language Model will not lead to this either. Yann LeCun states: "Animals and humans exhibit learning abilities and understandings of the world that are far beyond the capabilities of current AI and machine learning (ML) systems." Our conclusions are in line with this. LeCun's vision and ours are at odds with the optimism of Big Tech. That does not alter the fact that chatbots exist, that they are being used on a massive scale, by both individuals and organisations, and that it is therefore socially and politically important to understand them. Our article aims to contribute to the discussion on the functioning, benefits and drawbacks of chatbots. We have not yet encountered the approach we used to arrive at our conclusions in our research into how chatbots work.
Authors: Venkatesh Kolluru, Rajat Shinde, Abdelhak Marouane, Caden Helbling, Deepak Shah, Othneil Drew, Iksha Gurung, Manil Maskey, Rahul Ramachandran
Abstract: Floods are among the most destructive natural hazards, and their increasing frequency under climate change makes satellite-based inundation mapping essential for disaster response. Geospatial foundation models pretrained on satellite archives offer geographic transferability, but their operational reliability across diverse, unseen events remains uncharacterized. Here we deploy Prithvi-EO-2.0 across 19 out-of-distribution flood events (2017-2025) spanning six continents, eight climate zones, and six flood mechanisms, validating against two independent reference products. Detection accuracy depended jointly on land cover and flood type, with cropland yielding the highest agreement (IoU=52%) and riverine events the strongest detection (F1=0.69), while tree cover and built-up areas showed near-zero detection (IoU=4%) regardless of flood mechanism. Dual-reference validation revealed that apparent model error partly reflects definitional inconsistency between reference products rather than detection failure. Iterative pipeline testing identified 23 failure modes, with pipeline engineering dominating initial error over model capacity. These findings establish environment-dependent detection boundaries for operational satellite flood mapping.
Authors: Ratnadeep Das, Atri Chatterjee, Sitikantha Roy
Abstract: Alzheimer's disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder, and its progression varies substantially across patients. Existing work aims to forecast patients' future cognitive state, with minimal focus on reconstructing the state from past visits. Furthermore, in current research, quantifying predictive uncertainty remains underexplored and relies on costly modalities such as MRI, PET, and CSF, limiting their deployment in resource-limited settings. In this research, our primary objectives are: First, bidirectional prediction of cognitive scores from irregular visits to present the complete disease trajectory. Second, to enable interpolation and extrapolation capabilities to assist clinicians in informed prognostic decision making, and third, to provide a well-calibrated uncertainty estimate for all predictions, and finally, to achieve the objectives using the modalities available during routine visits. We propose a unified framework, GNOVA: A GRU-Neural ODE Variational Autoencoder. The architecture combines a Gated Recurrent Unit encoder and a Neural ODE decoder within a variational autoencoder framework. In our work, we forecast the CDR-SB and MMSE Scores. The GRU encoder allows for any number of inputs at any time point. The Neural-ODE decoder performs continuous estimation, allowing interpolation and extrapolation at any desired time point. The Variational autoencoder allows for uncertainty estimation in predictions. We worked with 1,727 patients from the ADNI dataset over 10 years; the model achieved mean absolute errors of 1.35 and 2.28 for CDR-SB and MMSE scores, respectively, without requiring any neuroimaging or biomarker data. Feature-ablation studies revealed that age, BMI, and APOE4 status were strong predictors. The proposed framework enables the reconstruction of incomplete patient histories and the anticipation of future cognitive states.
Authors: Haocheng Lv, Huaping Zhang, Qiuchi Li, Lei Li, Chunxiao Gao
Abstract: Multimodal reasoning requires a path that retains integrity over a wide range of constraints, from visual grounding to logic consistency. However, the current Process Reward Models focus on heuristically defined rewards that equally weigh these factors, which may lead to the concealment of individual dimension failures by the dominating factors, without guaranteeing the validity of the reasoning process in general.
Authors: Yiyang Zhao, Zhuo Zhang, Qingxuan Le, Lizhen Qu, Zenglin Xu
Abstract: The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) from passive assistants to autonomous, execution-capable agents has introduced critical operational risks. Most current evaluation frameworks neglect procedural compliance, leading to ''Machiavellian'' behaviors where agents strategically violate safety rules to maximize rewards - a direct manifestation of Goodhart's Law. To address this blind spot, we introduce MAC-Bench, a dynamic, adversarial benchmark designed to evaluate the procedural alignment of multi-agent systems under realistic pressure. We propose the SERV(Seed - Evolve - Refine - Verify) pipeline, an ``Agent-as-a-Benchmark'' paradigm that transforms unstructured legal texts into executable, contamination-free scenarios. By synthesizing holographic sandbox environments and injecting calibrated social-engineering pressure vectors, MAC-Bench forces agents into Pareto-optimal trade-offs between task success and regulatory adherence. We introduced novel metrics: the Compliance-Weighted Success Rate (CSR) and the Machiavellian Gap (MG), and conducted a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art frontier models to reveal the pervasive trade-offs between success and compliance.
Authors: Sanjay Kariyappa, G. Edward Suh
Abstract: Reasoning language models deployed in agentic workflows must follow an instruction hierarchy: when instructions from different sources conflict, the model should obey the highest-privilege applicable instruction. Existing benchmarks largely measure this behavior end-to-end, asking whether the final response is compliant. However, a non-compliant response can arise from several distinct failures: the model may fail to identify the relevant instructions in context, fail to resolve conflicts among identified instructions, or correctly resolve the conflict in its reasoning while still producing a violating response. We introduce a white-box diagnostic framework that localizes instruction hierarchy failures into instruction identification, conflict resolution, and response realization, making failures more interpretable. We evaluate three reasoning models--Gemma-4-31B-IT, Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, and Claude Sonnet 4.6--on long-context adaptations of IHEval and IHChallenge, and find that the dominant failure mode varies across models, tasks, and context length. Building on the observation that models can often detect conflicts and output violations when explicitly prompted, we propose two training-free self-monitoring mechanisms: a parallel input monitor for low-latency conflict detection before generation, and a sequential output monitor for response-level review and repair. Across Gemma-4-31B-IT, Claude Sonnet 4.6, and GPT-5.3, the strongest monitor reduces rule-following non-compliance by 81-99%, with GPT-5.3 reductions of 86% under static attacks and 45% under adaptive attacks.
Authors: Shangbin Feng, Yike Wang, Weijia Shi, Luke Zettlemoyer, Yejin Choi, Yulia Tsvetkov
Abstract: Humanity is a mosaic of multifaceted talents and needs, and any truly intelligent AI must reflect that richness. Yet the LLMs used by all are built by the few -- a centralized market of monolithic AI models structurally ill-suited to capture the diversity of human knowledge, reasoning, and values. Here we introduce scaling participation, a new paradigm in which modular AI systems are built from the bottom up through the contributions of diverse stakeholders. Participants contribute small models trained on their own interests and priorities; these models then collaborate in modular frameworks as compositional AI systems. Participatory AI systems outperform monolithic LLMs by up to 15.4% across 15 tasks, such as reasoning and factuality, surpassing models larger than all contributed components combined. Further experiments show that participatory AI systems benefit from contributor diversity, substantially improve on each contributor's original priorities, and exhibit emergent capabilities that allow them to solve over 15% of problems where all individual models fail. Scaling participation provides a technical foundation for transitioning from the monolithic status quo toward an open, bottom-up, and collaborative AI future.
Authors: Hoang-Loc La, Truong-Thanh Le, Amir Taherkordi, Phuong Hoai Ha
Abstract: Recently, the efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) deployment has become a critical concern in practical applications. While post-training quantization (PTQ) and structural pruning are established techniques for reducing memory footprint and inference latency, most existing PTQ approaches optimize quantization errors on a per-layer basis, overlooking how errors accumulate and propagate through the network, often resulting in suboptimal solutions. Traditional pipelines also tend to apply pruning and quantization in isolation or sequentially, further compounding sub-optimality. We introduce a novel end-to-end framework that addresses these limitations in two key ways. First, we propose a novel mixed-precision PTQ strategy that directly minimizes global error propagation across the entire model, rather than isolating layer-wise errors. Building on this, we develop a novel joint optimization approach that simultaneously learns structural pruning decisions and mixed-precision quantization policies within a unified search space. Extensive experiments show that, at ultra-low precisions (1-3 bits), our quantization method reduces WikiText perplexity by up to 21% compared to state-of-the-art (SoTA) weight-activation quantization baselines. Against leading weight-only quantization methods, it achieves up to 59% and 85% lower perplexity on WikiText and C4, respectively. Compared to the SoTA joint pruning-and-quantization techniques, our proposed method delivers superior perplexity and reasoning performance at ultra-low bits.
Authors: Akshay J. Dave, David Grabaskas, Joseph A. Renevitz, Richard B. Vilim
Abstract: Regulatory review of advanced nuclear reactor designs routinely spans more than three years and consumes hundreds of millions of dollars in combined regulator and applicant labor. We present the Regulatory Context Protocol (RCP), an Agent-to-Agent communication standard that replaces the formal human-to-human pipeline between regulators and applicants with a structured, auditable agentic channel, while preserving human oversight at safety-significant decision points. The protocol is calibrated against an analysis of 1,236 documents from U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission advanced reactor dockets and demonstrated with a working multi-agent pilot. Against an 89M USD, 42-month Reconstructed Baseline, RCP cuts costs by 50-77 percent (21M-44M USD) and timelines by 65 percent (15 months). Without a shared protocol, Standalone Agents reach only 54M-74M USD and 21 months. The residual cost-and-time gap is structural, not algorithmic: it traces to the inter-organizational pipeline that only an agent-to-agent standard can compress. The same bottleneck - formal multi-party review under strict auditability requirements - characterizes pharmaceutical approvals, environmental permitting, financial supervision, and aviation certification. The US regulatory paperwork burden carries a 426.5 billion USD annual opportunity cost; replicated broadly, the projected 50-77 percent reduction implies savings on the order of 210-330 billion USD per year - approaching 1 percent of US GDP.
Authors: Anissa Alloula, Federico Licini, Ava Batchkala, Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant
Abstract: LLMs-as-judges are the only way to evaluate safety at scale. Despite their importance, LLM-judges themselves are rarely evaluated beyond human agreement in simple, static benchmarks. We therefore investigate two under-explored but crucial properties of LLMs-as-judges: their susceptibility to relying on in context-information, and their steerability to differing safety definitions, which may not align with their internal safety priors. We evaluate the safety judging abilities of many generalist LLMs and safety-specific judges, and investigate the impact of task demonstrations, novel in-context information, and changing safety definitions. We find that while LLM-judges can learn from new information, they are broadly unlikely to adjust their evaluations if the context or safety definition contradicts their prior.
Authors: Alejandro Botas, Paul de Font-Reaulx, Luke Hewitt
Abstract: Current AI models frequently exhibit epistemic sycophancy, endorsing claims to agree with a user. Existing evaluations typically measure this either by assessing what it takes to make a model shift a binary endorsement or by eliciting an explicit probability in a proposition. However, much user-facing sycophantic behavior is demonstrated through shifts in graded support expressed through ordinary language. We propose the AI Epistemic Deference Index (AEDI): a continuous, unidimensional score representing how sensitive the support expressed in a model's output is to the attitude expressed in a user's prompt. To generate AEDI, we provide a new protocol for estimating probabilities from natural language outputs, using LLMs-as-judges validated for consistency and correlation to human judgment. We deploy it on a new curated database of 500 propositions across diverse topics and 16,000 prompts varying in user attitude, testing eight prominent models. Every model exhibits substantial deference, though with large and systematic differences across providers, with Claude models demonstrating the least, and Grok and Gemini models the most. The effect is amplified in prompts requesting a written artifact, and concentrated on propositions where models hold weaker priors. We release AEDI as an easy-to-update benchmark and measurement pipeline for output-level sycophancy evaluation.
Authors: Rahul Suresh Babu, Laxmipriya Ganesh Iyer
Abstract: Tool-augmented large language model agents increasingly rely on external APIs, but standard tool schemas describe how to call a tool, not when the tool is causally appropriate or what task state it produces. Causal tool filtering addresses this gap by using lightweight contracts that specify each tool's preconditions, effects, risk level, and cost. However, manually writing and maintaining such contracts does not scale to large or changing tool ecosystems. We introduce Contract2Tool, a framework for inferring tool contracts from metadata, schemas, documentation, and execution traces. Contract2Tool converts observable tool evidence into normalized symbolic contracts that can be evaluated intrinsically and deployed inside downstream causal tool filtering. We evaluate learned contracts against gold preconditions, effects, and risk labels, and measure their downstream utility on multi-step agent tasks. Our results show that hybrid documentation-and-trace evidence produces contracts accurate enough to preserve most of the reliability and efficiency benefits of gold contracts. Learned-contract CMTF achieves 0.980 downstream success, close to 0.990 for gold-contract CMTF, while reducing visible tools from 100 to 1 and reducing average token usage from 26,172 to 2,528 relative to all-tools exposure. These results suggest that learned contracts can provide a scalable contract layer between tool schemas and reliable agent execution.
Authors: Suleyman Armagan Er, Danilo Ribeiro, Yogesh Virkar, Surafel Lakew, Adi Kalyanpur, James Gung, Thomas Delteil, Arshit Gupta
Abstract: Modern large language model (LLM) agents can use external tools to help users solve complex tasks. However, for problems that require learning from long-term historical events or from previous agent-environment interactions, LLM agents are required to use memory mechanisms to store and retrieve experiences. While sophisticated memory systems exist for dialogue agents, few studies have empirically examined how to improve agents' tool-using capabilities through past user-agent conversations. We propose MemToolAgent, a framework that improves tool use through memory management. Our approach contains a memory extraction module that processes past experiences into structured memory entries, and a retrieval module that dynamically selects a subset of the stored memory entries. This enables more personalized and accurate responses aligned with user preferences and feedback without requiring LLM fine-tuning. In summary, this work has three main contributions: (1) a unified memory entry format that improves both general-purpose and personalized tool use without LLM fine-tuning, (2) a reflection-based memory extraction that uses environment and user feedback to distill wrong executions into critiques to store, and (3) a retrieval module that chooses how many past experiences to use based on the memory similarity distribution. MemToolAgent achieves 29%, 80%, and 17% relative improvements compared to strong baselines on the WorkBench, NESTFUL, and PEToolBench benchmarks, respectively.
Authors: Da Li, Xinxin Li, Xingyu Cui, Jin Xu, Juan Zhang, Junping Yin
Abstract: Neural symbolic regression models improve inference efficiency by shifting structural search to pretraining, but their one-pass autoregressive decoding is prone to error accumulation, which may lead to generating structurally incorrect expressions, especially in complex expression generation scenarios. Existing rectification strategies can alleviate this issue, but they often depend on restarting global search, thereby weakening the efficiency advantage of neural models, and remain susceptible to error accumulation. In this paper, we propose EditSR, a two-layer framework that combines a neural symbolic regression model in the first layer with an edit-based Rectifier in the second layer to achieve efficient prediction and post-hoc rectification. Instead of restarting the global search, we maintain rectification efficiency by pretraining the Rectifier. Specifically, we formulate the rectification process as a step-by-step state-transition chain starting from an incorrect expression, and develop a state-transition algorithm to construct supervised rectification chains for training the Rectifier. To ensure syntactic validity throughout rectification, each edit action is restricted to a syntactically valid space so that every edited expression remains parseable. In addition, because each edit decision is conditioned on the current state rather than the history, the Rectifier allows errors made in earlier steps to be rectified by subsequent edits, thereby reducing the risk of error accumulation. Extensive experiments and ablation studies show that EditSR substantially improves symbolic structure recovery with limited extra cost, with more pronounced gains on complex expressions, where one-pass autoregressive decoding is more susceptible to error accumulation.
Authors: Kelly McConvey, Jalehsadat Mahdavimoghaddam, Nima Jamali, Maksym Taranukhin, Sajad Ebrahimi, Wentao Zhang, Yuntian Deng, Karen Eltis, Maura R. Grossman, Vered Shwartz, Ebrahim Bagheri
Abstract: The growing ability of generative models to produce realistic documents poses a direct challenge to evidentiary workflows in the justice system and the courts, where decisions increasingly depend on the authenticity of evidence such as receipts, communications, and administrative records. Unlike social media or academic settings, evidentiary documents are often only subtly altered, with small, localized edits that preserve overall plausibility while changing legal meaning. Yet progress on automated detection remains limited, largely due to the absence of suitable training and evaluation data especially suited for the justice system requirements. Existing resources are either focused on photos of human faces or natural scenery or on narrowly scoped academic or social media document types, and do not capture the structure, diversity, or manipulation patterns characteristic of real-world evidentiary data. As a result, current detection systems do not necessarily learn meaningful signals appropriate for the justice system. We introduce the CIFAR Synthetic Evidence Corpus, a dataset designed to enable rigorous evaluation of evidence verification under realistic and controlled conditions. The corpus spans multiple document families and a spectrum of manipulation strategies, from small field-level edits to complete document fabrication, and is constructed using a diverse set of state-of-the-art generative tools. It is organized to systematically vary both manipulation complexity and generation method, while enforcing source-level separation between training and test data to reflect real-world generalization challenges.
Authors: Yuan Shen, Xiaojun Wu, Linghua Yu
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are entering clinical practice based on benchmark accuracy that may fail to detect safety-relevant failure modes. Here we present AI-MASLD, a stress-audit framework that adapts the logic of metabolic stress testing from hepatology to the evaluation of clinical LLMs. Using 240 clinical cases across six narrative perturbation probes, we subjected seven models to double-stress testing and quantified performance through three indices: metabolic index (MI), perturbation flip rate (PFR), and counterfactual fairness index (CFI). Under clean baseline conditions, all models performed uniformly well. Under realistic narrative stress, performance diverged sharply, revealing two distinct stress-response phenotypes. Quantized models exhibited pseudonormalization, in which low flip rates hid functional collapse. Medical supervised fine-tuning systematically degraded logical stability, fairness, and information extraction. An open-weight model matched or exceeded proprietary alternatives on every safety dimension. These findings establish narrative stress auditing as a necessary complement to accuracy-based evaluation.
Authors: Zekai Zhang, Jinglin Zhang, Qinghui Chen, Gang Li, Da Chen, Shuainan Jing, He Wang, Dagang Li, Cong Liu, Cong Bai, Shengyong Chen
Abstract: Large-scale Visual-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural visual tasks, yet their application to industrial defect detection remains challenging due to two fundamental limitations: (i) the scarcity of large-scale industrial datasets that cover diverse defect categories across multiple domains, and (ii) the reliance on manual prompts (points, boxes, masks) that introduce subjective noise and lack text-visual interaction for fine-grained understanding. To address these challenges, we introduce a Large-Scale Multi-Modal Industrial Open-Closed benchmark (MMIOC-1M) containing over one million samples across $14$ super-categories, $29$ industrial scenes, and $351$ defect subcategories. To our knowledge, MMIOC-1M is the first unified largest benchmark supporting both open-vocabulary and closed-set industrial detection, providing valuable pre-training data for LVLMs in industrial scenarios. Furthermore, we propose a Refined Text-Visual Prompt Network (RTVPNet) that incorporates three key innovations: (1) an expert-assisted domain projection mechanism that enables rapid adaptation of general vision models to industrial domains, (2) an energy-based sparse sampling strategy that automatically generates refined visual prompts without manual intervention, and (3) a bidirectional text-visual interaction module that enhances cross-modal semantic alignment and understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RTVPNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on MMIOC-1M, LVIS, and COCO benchmarks while maintaining computational efficiency. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/hellozzk/MMIO.
Authors: Omar Mahmoud, Aly M. Kassem, Thommen George Karimpanal, Buddhika Laknath Semage, Negar Rostamzadeh, Golnoosh Farnadi, Santu Rana
Abstract: Backdoor attacks in large language models (LLMs) are often treated as isolated trigger-response failures, motivating defenses tailored to specific triggers or behaviors. We show this view is incomplete. Across diverse backdoor behaviors, we identify a shared latent mechanism that can be detected, causally controlled, and suppressed. Using sparse autoencoders (SAEs) on residual-stream activations, we find a small set of latent features consistently activated across jailbreaking, refusal manipulation, password-locking, bias induction, sentiment misclassification, and country-conditioned harmful advice. These features generalize across Qwen3, Gemma~3, and Llama~3.1 models from 4B to 32B parameters, and across both fine-tuning and weight-editing attacks. Through bidirectional activation steering, we show these features are causal: suppressing them reduces attack success, while amplifying them induces target behaviors on clean prompts. We further train lightweight SAE-feature classifiers that generalize zero-shot to unseen backdoors and outperform residual-stream and weight-diffing baselines. Finally, we introduce Concept Ablation Fine-Tuning (CAFT), which suppresses backdoor formation by ablating the shared latent subspace during training. Together, our results suggest that many backdoors rely on a transferable latent mechanism, enabling unified detection and mitigation.
Authors: Zekai Zhang, Qinghui Chen, Maomao Xiong, Shijiao Ding, Zhanzhi Su, Xinjie Yao, Yiming Sun, Cong Bai, Jinglin Zhang
Abstract: Large Visual Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable success in vision tasks. However, the significant differences between industrial and natural scenes make applying LVLMs challenging. Existing LVLMs rely on user-provided prompts to segment objects. This often leads to suboptimal performance due to the inclusion of irrelevant pixels. In addition, the scarcity of data also makes the application of LVLMs in industrial scenarios remain unexplored. To fill this gap, this paper proposes an open industrial dataset and a Refined Text-Visual Prompt (RTVP) for zero-shot industrial defect detection. First, this paper constructs the Multi-Modal Industrial Open Dataset (MMIO) containing 80K+ samples. MMIO contains diverse industrial categories, including 6 super categories and 18 subcategories. MMIO is the first large-scale multi-scenes pre-training dataset for industrial zero-shot learning, and provides valuable training data for open models in future industrial scenarios. Based on MMIO, this paper provides a RTVP specifically for industrial zero-shot tasks. RTVP has two significant advantages: First, this paper designs an expert-guided large model domain adaptation mechanism and designs an industrial zero-shot method based on Mobile-SAM, which enhances the generalization ability of large models in industrial scenarios. Second, RTVP automatically generates visual prompts directly from images and considers text-visual prompt interactions ignored by previous LVLM, improving visual and textual content understanding. RTVP achieves SOTA with 42.2% and 24.7% AP in zero-shot and closed scenes of MMIO.
Authors: Xiaoyan Zhao, Haoting Ni, Yang Zhang, Chunyuan Zheng, Haoxuan Li, Fuli Feng
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly rely on reward models to align their outputs with diverse user preferences. While personalized reward models aim to capture such heterogeneity, they are often trained on imbalanced user preference data and may therefore favor users whose preferences are more common in the training population. In this paper, we identify this failure mode as personalized reward bias, where reward modeling quality varies systematically with preference support rate. We formulate its mitigation as a Pareto fairness problem over group utilities, aiming to improve under-served users without degrading other user groups. To this end, we propose PAFO, a Pareto fairness optimization framework for personalized reward modeling. PAFO first trains group-specialized reward models for majority and minority preference groups, then constructs conditional margin-level supervision to distill their heterogeneous preference boundaries into a single unified model. The resulting model uses group information only during training and requires no explicit group labels at inference time. Experiments on Personal-LLM and DSP show that PAFO improves both minority-group and majority-group accuracy while reducing user-level unfairness across multiple metrics, demonstrating its effectiveness for fairer LLM personalization.
Authors: Harshil Patel, Kunal Pai
Abstract: As the Model Context Protocol (MCP) standardizes tool-calling for autonomous agents, it introduces a critical, unexamined attack surface: the error-handling loop. We hypothesize that tool error messages possess implicit authority, triggering corrective reasoning modes that bypass standard safety heuristics. We introduce VATS (Vulnerability Analysis of Tool Streams), a mutation-driven framework that systematically evolves adversarial payloads across seven structural and linguistic dimensions. Our evaluation across four frontier models, Gemini 3.1 Pro, GPT-5.5, GLM-5.1, and Qwen3-Coder, demonstrates that error-path injection triples the success rate of standard indirect prompt injection (IPI), achieving up to 100% compliance in controlled evaluations. We isolate structural positioning (sandwiching instructions within error context) as the most effective exploit vector across all tested models. While we find that production framework guardrails can mitigate these vulnerabilities, the inherent susceptibility of the model layer poses a systemic risk to bespoke agentic workflows.
Authors: Sera Choi, Wonje Choi, Saehun Chun, Daehee Lee, Jooyoung Kim, Chaeun Lee, Honguk Woo
Abstract: Effective skill grounding is essential for deploying reusable skills in embodied agents, as even minor embodiment or environmental differences can render an entire skill incompatible. This challenge is particularly pronounced in embodied settings, where agents must operate in dynamic, partially observable environments without access to large language models (LLMs). In this setting, reliance on LLMs is impractical, while small language models (sLMs) remain insufficient for the effective skill grounding required for reliable long-horizon control. We present RECENT, a refactoring-centric agent framework that enables efficient skill grounding with sLMs by decoupling skill semantics from embodiment- and environment-specific execution binding. By representing skills as executable code, RECENT preserves the semantic intent encoded in a skill's control structure while grounding it by modifying only execution bindings through localized refactoring, rather than regenerating code from scratch. We evaluate RECENT across diverse skill grounding scenarios spanning multiple robot embodiments in dynamic environments, demonstrating robust long-horizon performance when deployed with an sLM. Across all scenarios, RECENT achieves the best performance among sLM-based Code-as-Policies (CaP) methods and matches the task performance of LLM-based CaP.
Authors: Jianling Gao, Chongyang Tao, Jiayuan Bai, Liu Yang, Xuanguang Pan, Jinrui Liu, Shihao Xing, Xiaohan Xu, Jie Liang, Shuai Ma
Abstract: Existing text-to-SQL benchmarks are largely centered on SQLite, making it difficult to evaluate whether models can generalize across heterogeneous SQL dialects. However, real-world database systems differ substantially in syntax, functions, type systems, and execution semantics, so the same natural language intent often requires dialect-specific SQL realizations. We introduce UniQL, a human-verified benchmark for cross-dialect text-to-SQL evaluation. UniQL aligns 1,534 natural language questions with executable SQL annotations across 16 SQL dialects, yielding 24,544 dialect-specific queries. All dialects share the same intents, aligned schemas and database contents, enabling controlled evaluation of dialect generalization. UniQL is constructed through a hybrid pipeline combining database migration, SQL translation, execution-guided verification, iterative rule summarization, and human validation. Experiments on both open-source and closed-source LLMs show that current models remain far from dialect-universal, with substantial performance variation across database systems and limited transfer from SQLite success to other dialects. These findings highlight the need for aligned cross-dialect benchmarks and more dialect-aware text-to-SQL methods. Code and data are available at https://github.com/JerryGao818/UniQL
Authors: Dimitrios Michail, Eleni Saka, Ioannis Giannopoulos, Ioannis Papoutsis
Abstract: We present OSMGraphCLIP, a CLIP-style geospatial representation model that learns global location embeddings from freely available OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. OSMGraphCLIP represents geographic environments as heterogeneous graphs of typed OSM features, preserving the topological and semantic relationships among roads, buildings, land-use regions, and points of interest. A multi-scale graph encoder captures both fine-grained local structure and broader landscape composition, and supervises a spherical-harmonics location encoder through a contrastive alignment objective. We evaluate OSMGraphCLIP across a diverse suite of downstream geospatial regression and classification tasks spanning climate, ecology, socioeconomic indicators, public health, land cover, biodiversity, and wildfire forecasting, and show that structured OSM data alone supports strong global location representations across domains. OSMGraphCLIP matches or exceeds satellite-based baselines on the majority of benchmarks, with the most pronounced advantage on socioeconomic and public-health tasks, where OSM's explicit semantic annotation of the built environment encodes patterns of human activity that satellite pixels can only capture indirectly. On ecological and environmental tasks, the model remains closely competitive with imagery-based methods despite using no Earth observation data. Qualitative analysis confirms that the learned embeddings organize geographic space coherently, recovering biome boundaries, urban gradients, and tropical--temperate distinctions from map topology alone.
Authors: Amine El Hattami, Nicolas Chapados, Christopher Pal
Abstract: AI agents increasingly turn past experience into reusable artifacts such as code, workflows, and procedural memories. Reuse can improve efficiency, but it also creates a lifecycle reliability problem: artifacts that succeed once may fail under environment drift, underspecified tasks, or changing task distributions, especially in web automation. We introduce SKILL.nb, a framework for governing reusable agent workflows with evidence-calibrated lifecycle policies. SKILL.nb uses selective formalization: execution evidence decides which workflow steps should become executable code, which should remain natural-language guided, and when those choices should be revised. Workflows are stored as auditable, versioned notebooks that interleave natural-language guidance, multi-language executable cells, validation gates, fallback paths, and multimodal evidence such as outputs, screenshots, and error traces. At runtime, gate-conditioned execution lets each step run code when its gates validate, or fall back locally when drift invalidates the executable realization. On WebArena-Verified, SKILL.nb achieves 53.7% single-round success, improving over the strongest baseline by 3.9 percentage points. Across three re-executions, it retains 91.7% of initially successful tasks, 15.5 points above the next best method. Under bounded repair, it recovers 72.9% of subsequent failures while limiting post-repair regressions to 4.2%, compared with 15.0% to 17.0% for persistent baselines. It also leads on Mind2Web cross-website and cross-domain splits. In a GitLab migration test, SKILL.nb preserves performance when reusing frozen state learned on GitLab 15.7, with frozen-versus-fresh target-version gaps of -1.7 points on GitLab 16.11 and +0.6 points on GitLab 18.9. These results identify lifecycle governance and gate-conditioned execution as reliability axes beyond one-shot task success.
Authors: Donghao Huang, Tomas Drietomsky, Benjamin Barrett, Zhaoxia Wang
Abstract: Financial transaction processing requires extracting structured merchant information from noisy, abbreviated bank transaction strings at scale. Our current production system, a LoRA-fine-tuned LLaMA 3.1-8B, achieves 96.95% F1 on this task, but deploying 8-billion-parameter models imposes prohibitive memory, latency, and cost constraints. To identify more efficient alternatives, we conduct a deployment-focused study of 24 model variants spanning four model families: Gemma 3 (270M, 1B, 4B), Qwen 3.5 (0.8B, 2B, 4B), Aya (3.35B), and LLaMA 3.1-8B, systematically evaluating accuracy, inference throughput, training cost, and hardware behavior to assess production suitability. Our findings show that: (1) reproducing the LLaMA 3.1-8B fine-tune with a LoRA rank of 8 achieves 96.75% F1, only 0.20 points below the rank-32 baseline; (2) Qwen 3.5 4B with JSON-only prompting reaches 96.60% F1, within 0.35 points of the 8B baseline while using roughly half the parameters; (3) the 0.8B Qwen 3.5 model achieves 94.75% F1, matching models 2.5-4x larger and offering an attractive latency-accuracy trade-off; (4) chain-of-thought fine-tuning generally improves F1 by 0.3-1.8 points across most models, although Qwen 3.5 4B performs best with direct JSON-only prompting; and (5) Qwen 3.5 Think and Nothink training templates produce nearly identical results (F1 differences <0.004), indicating that explicit reasoning supervision is unnecessary for structured extraction tasks. We further deploy all 14 fine-tuned sub-8B models as Databricks Model Serving endpoints and observe that benchmark performance transfers reliably to production, with an average F1 change of only 0.8 points. Aya 3.35B, based on the Cohere2 architecture, is the sole exception, exhibiting a 3-5 point decline under serving conditions. Based on these results, we provide deployment recommendations across accuracy and latency requirements, ...
Authors: Zhe Xu, Zhengyu Zhang, Zhiyuan Cai, Jiahao Xu, Yijie Lin, Ziyi Liu, Junlin Hou, Hongyi Wang, Yuxiang Nie, Ling Liang, Yihui Wang, Yingxue Xu, Ronald Cheong Kin Chan, Li Liang, Hao Chen
Abstract: Pathology is the cornerstone of modern medicine, where accurate decision-making relies heavily on evidence-based practices. While artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform clinical workflows, the intersection of AI and evidence-based medicine remains under-explored, with primitive attempts restricted to text-only general medicine. In this work, we present PathPocket, a multimodal AI agentic co-pilot designed specifically for evidence grounded pathology. We construct the most comprehensive pathology evidence corpus to date, encompassing approximately 110,472 public and authorized documents structured across a rigorous hierarchy of evidence from clinical guideline to expert opinion. From this meticulously graded foundation, we build a large-scale multimodal pathology hypergraph containing over 4.55 million entities and 7.10 million relations. Serving as a robust knowledge engine, this hypergraph provides traceable evidence for a collaborative multi-agent reasoning framework integrating input understanding, evidence retrieval, filtering, and diagnosis generation. This enables PathPocket to seamlessly resolve a wide spectrum of clinical tasks, ranging from text-only queries to complex multimodal diagnostics involving region-of-interest (ROI) and gigapixel whole-slide images (WSIs). We rigorously evaluate the system on a multidimensional benchmark of over 200,000 real-world cases, where it significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-arts. Crucially, extensive user studies demonstrate that PathPocket substantially improves the diagnostic accuracy and confidence of pathologists. By directly grounding pathology interpretations in verifiable literature, PathPocket offers a practical and scalable solution for the future of evidence grounded computational pathology.
Authors: Yasushi Sakai, Allen Song, Kent Larson
Abstract: Majority voting over sampled answers is the dominant unsupervised aggregator for multi-sample LLM inference. We show that piping the signals every sample carries into a delegation-based aggregator (Propagational Proxy Voting, PPV) yields an unsupervised consensus rule that beats majority on MMLU-Pro by +1.5 pp overall and +2.24 pp on the non-trivial subset (paired McNemar p ~ 1.0e-14, n = 8,099). Majority discards two free signals every sample carries: within-group letter entropy and between-group reasoning geometry. PPV exposes two per-voter levers that consume exactly these signals: WHEN (how much weight a voter keeps on its own pick) and WHOM (how it splits the remainder across peers). We drive WHEN with letter entropy and WHOM with per-question-centered embedding cosine. The method needs no gold labels and no auxiliary training: per question, we partition 128 sampled generations into 16 groups, compute each group's letter-level semantic entropy and reasoning embedding centroid, and feed both into a stochastic delegation matrix whose stationary distribution selects the consensus answer. We walk through an example in which PPV overturns a clear 10-6 majority for the wrong letter: the 10-voter majority cluster is geometrically incoherent (mean within-cluster cosine -0.02) while the 6-voter minority is tight (+0.26), so propagated delegation mass concentrates on the minority's answer even though entropy alone would keep the majority ahead. We further report delegation strategies with negative results that constrain the design space for unsupervised LLM aggregation: no within-question ensemble of confidence modes closes the oracle gap.
Authors: Zayx Shawn
Abstract: Self-evolving agents improve by repeatedly proposing changes to their own prompts, skills, or workflows and keeping those that score higher on a small held-out set. Almost all effort has gone into the proposer that generates candidates; we argue the weak point is the acceptor, the rule that decides whether to commit a change. Applied hundreds of times against the same noisy dev estimate, the ubiquitous "keep it if the score went up" rule is uncontrolled adaptive multiple testing: the agent effectively p-hacks itself, accumulating false commits that make it churn and drift rather than improve. We recast committing as a sequential hypothesis test and propose PACE (Paired Anytime-valid Commit Evaluation), a training-free, anytime-valid commit gate. Each candidate is compared to the incumbent on identical instances and committed only when a testing-by-betting e-process accumulates decisive evidence, stopping early to save evaluations and controlling each candidate's false-commit probability at a user-set level even under optional stopping (a per-decision guarantee). On Qwen2.5 agents (0.5B-3B) self-evolving at the prompt level on GSM8K, SVAMP, and ARC-Challenge, greedy acceptance commits 30-42% false and 10-33% harmful edits when a genuine improvement is hidden among noisy proposals, while PACE commits the real one and essentially nothing else, matching greedy's held-out accuracy at sharply lower variance and about 18% lower evaluation cost. With no real gain available, greedy commits 13-21 spurious self-modifications per run (72-100% false) and degrades the most fragile agent by 4.9 points, while PACE holds at baseline. Reliability of self-evolution depends on the acceptor, not only on the proposer.
Authors: Qingxiang Liu, Anqi Liang, Zhuoyang Jiang, Yutian Jiang, Sisuo Lyu, Yu Ji, Haomin Wen, Yuxuan Liang
Abstract: Predicting a user's next Point-of-Interest (POI) based on their historical check-in records is a fundamental task in location-based services. While recent methods incorporating large language models have shown strong reasoning capabilities and promising results, they typically formulate the prediction task as a one-step trajectory-to-location mapping problem, making predictions prone to shallow trajectory correlations and historical frequency bias. We argue that users rarely choose locations directly and instead, they usually first form a traveling intention and then accordingly select specific POIs. Motivated by this insight, we propose IntentPOI, a two-stage intention-guided reasoning framework. In the thinking stage, we infer users' intermediate intentions by incorporating historical mobility patterns, similar peer behaviors, and the temporal contexts. In the acting stage, we first construct a compact candidate pool, and then perform intention-guided reasoning to identify locations that best align with the inferred intention. By explicitly decoupling intention inference from location prediction, IntentPOI transforms the next POI prediction from direct trajectory matching into intention-guided reasoning. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that IntentPOI consistently outperforms eleven state-of-the-art baselines.
Authors: Siyu Lou, Yao Yan, Yuntian Chen, Quanshi Zhang
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) differ in architecture, training data, and optimization procedures, yet they may still develop similar internal inference patterns. In this paper, we examine this hypothesis using interaction-based explanations. We find that LLMs often share interaction patterns when predicting the same target token from the same prompt. This consistency is more pronounced among advanced LLMs. Shared interactions also tend to be lower-order and show weaker positive-negative cancellation than non-shared interactions. These results suggest that advanced LLMs may be implicitly optimized toward common inference patterns, even though the mechanisms that give rise to such cross-model consistency remain open.
Authors: Yichen Chen, Siying Li, Yuhang Liang, Lijun Wang, Renyang Liu
Abstract: Fraud detection in payment, e-commerce, and telecommunications systems requires accuracy at the individual level, robustness under severe class imbalance, and ease of understanding for risk managers. Existing methods fall at least one of these requirements: automated machine learning systems search a fixed numerical space without semantic awareness of the dataset; graph neural network-based methods require pre-defined relational graphs and remain opaque at the individual-decision level; and the design of general-purpose large language model (LLM) agents does not consider the recall and precision constraints specific to real-world fraud detection. In this paper, we propose SAGE, the first end-to-end LLM-driven multi-agent framework for fraud detection. SAGE coordinates three dedicated agents that make decisions based on a six-layer Data Diagnostic Tree (DDT) and a Markov decision process guided by natural-language gradients, automatically optimizing the model under a fraud-specific reward. On five fraud datasets and five LLM backbones, SAGE wins $96.00\%$ of method--dataset comparisons and improves F1 by an average of $40.86\%$ over baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/yichenC1c/SAGE.
Authors: Xinyu Guan, Qianyang Zhao, Yuming Deng
Abstract: Tool-using LLM agents often fail not because relevant text is absent, but because decisive evidence is not selected, compressed, or surfaced at action time. We present CICL, a decision-aware context layer that turns instance evidence into a context graph, routes deterministic, Opus-assisted, Qwen, Codex/GPT-5.5, and Qwen-QLoRA judgments through a shared eight-field schema, scores units by action shift, outcome uplift, necessity, and negative-transfer risk, and packs high-utility evidence as typed memory cards for a budgeted agent. The design separates the measured decision signal from the judge model, so frontier annotation, local surrogates, and lightweight rankers can be compared under one auditable protocol. Empirically, CICL yields a concrete open-benchmark gain while exposing its limits. On 50 SWE-bench Verified file-retrieval instances, direct Qwen3.6-plus reranking of BM25 top-50 candidates raises hit@1 from 0.58 to 0.78 and MRR@10 from 0.634 to 0.790, with all 2,500 judgments parseable. Controlled diagnostics show action-criticality: at budget 120, CICL reaches F1 0.620 on v1 and 0.425 on v3, and removing the top-utility semantic v3 unit collapses F1 to 0.000. Supplementary checks add Qwen-QLoRA agreement over 710 candidates, a small 200-label real-code Opus-assisted signal, and a three-instance patch smoke validating retrieval-to-patch plumbing without claiming official SWE-bench success. RepoBench-R summaries still beat cards, and compact rankers do not yet replace the heuristic. CICL contributes a reproducible measurement and selection layer for decision-critical context, not an end-to-end coding-agent repair claim.
Authors: Hyogon Ryu, Jeonghwan Kim, Yewon Lim, Chaeun Lee, Jeongwook Kim, Donghoon Ham
Abstract: Evaluating LLM-powered interactive social agents is challenging because socially relevant behaviors depend not only on isolated outputs, but also on prior interactions, social roles, and downstream actions. Existing methods typically allow a target agent to act freely in an environment and then score the resulting trajectory. However, this passive setup can miss capabilities that only become observable under specific social circumstances; for example, conflict handling may remain untested if no disagreement arises. We propose Online Agent-as-a-Judge, a situation-generating evaluation framework for interactive social agents. Online Agent-as-a-Judge deploys an in-world evaluator agent that interacts with the target agent through the environment's native dialogue and action protocol, actively eliciting situations relevant to the evaluation criteria. The resulting trajectories provide evidence for assessing both immediate responses and subsequent behavior. In a life-simulation environment with $32$ designer-authored social criteria, Online Agent-as-a-Judge improves criteria coverage and agreement with human labels, yielding more reliable evidence-grounded evaluations of behaviors that passive methods can leave unobserved.
Authors: Tanush Swaminathan, Runmin Jiang, Letian Zhang, Min Xu
Abstract: LLM-based scientific agents have shown strong capacity for autonomous research, yet their safety layers remain structurally divorced from core reasoning: they inspect pipeline outputs rather than shaping the deliberation that produces them. This separation opens two failure modes: safety signals accumulated at one stage are discarded before the next, and sequences of individually benign tool calls can compose into harmful outcomes that no single-step filter detects. To address these challenges, we introduce \textbf{SciTrace}, a framework that weaves safety reasoning into every stage of the scientific agent pipeline. SciTrace couples two complementary mechanisms: a \textit{Safety-Intrinsic Reasoning Loop} (SIR) that maintains a cumulative risk state across the Thinker, Experimenter, Writer, and Reviewer stages through joint task-and-safety deliberation, and a \textit{Compositional Tool-Chain Verifier} (CTV) that performs trajectory-aware safety checks before execution, catching risks that surface only across multi-step tool sequences. Evaluated on 240 high-risk research tasks and 120 tool-related risk tasks spanning six scientific domains, SciTrace achieves state-of-the-art (\textbf{SOTA}) safety among compared frameworks across four backbone models: it consistently improves tool call safety and adversarial robustness while preserving scientific output quality, and it uncovers \textbf{78.8\%} of the compositional tool-chain escapes that single-step monitors miss. The project website is available at https://opensciagent.github.io/SciTrace/.
Authors: Yiheng Wang, Yueqian Lin, Lichen Zhu, Yudong Liu, Hai "Helen" Li, Yiran Chen
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made substantial advancements in video understanding, yet the reliability of their responses remains underexplored. This work presents a diagnostic study of absent answer detection for MLLMs in video understanding, where the correct answer is deliberately excluded from the candidate set and a reliable model is expected to recognize that no valid option exists. We evaluate the absent answer detection behavior under three settings: multiple-choice questions augmented with an ``None of the Above'' option, open-ended generation with a detection instruction, and standard evaluation without any guidance. Across a diverse set of models and benchmarks, we find that MLLMs overwhelmingly select plausible distractors rather than detecting the absent answer. This failure is more pronounced in temporal reasoning tasks and worsens with denser frame sampling. We further explore chain-of-thought prompting as a mitigation strategy and find that while it substantially improves detection rates, performance remains unsatisfactory, suggesting that prompting-based strategies alone are insufficient to fully address this limitation. These findings expose a systematic failure in absent answer detection and highlight the need for explicit detection mechanisms in multimodal systems.
Authors: Wisdom Dogah
Abstract: Verifiability, attribution, and reproducibility are foundational requirements of scientific knowledge, yet current publishing infrastructure does not enforce them at scale. We introduce Traxia, an agent-native scientific publishing framework in which AI research agents publish verifiable papers, build reputational identities, peer-review one another, and collaborate with humans in a shared provenance model. Traxia treats agents as first-class epistemic participants: every paper carries a reasoning trace, every claim a confidence interval, every agent a cryptographically signed identity, and every collaboration an immutable contribution log. We formalise five components: Agent Identity and Registry, Verifiable Publishing Layer, four-tier Peer Review Protocol, Reputation and Staking Engine, and a Knowledge Graph with contradiction detection. The framework targets reproducibility failure, provenance opacity, and exclusion of Global South research capacity. This paper presents architectural foundations and formal specifications only; it does not report empirical results. Evaluation and deeper component studies will follow in subsequent papers. A prototype partially implements core formalisms; the full system remains under active development.
Authors: Jonas Gehrlein, Grzegorz Miebs, Matteo Brunelli, Adam Mielniczuk, Mi{\l}osz Kadzi\'nski
Abstract: We consider a problem arising in proof-of-stake blockchain environments, where agents called nominators select validators - entities responsible for maintaining the blockchain's physical infrastructure. The selection process is inherently subjective and multi-criterial and combines with the fact that nominators commonly operate through multiple accounts. This gives rise to a portfolio selection problem, where agents seek to distribute their nominations across accounts to diversify risk. We propose a decision support framework to optimize this selection by simultaneously maximizing two objectives: the expected utility of the validators likely to be allocated, representing portfolio quality and profitability, and the expected entropy of the allocation, representing diversification and risk mitigation across stashes. Validator utilities are derived using an original active preference learning procedure based on multi-attribute value theory, with emphasis on top-ranked validators. The resulting bi-objective optimization problem is solved with a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm and, to support the final choice, we introduce an interactive binary search navigation procedure that guides the nominator through the front and identifies a satisfactory trade-off with only a few questions. Numerical experiments examine the optimization strategies, while an expert assessment involving five experienced nominators confirms the approach's practical relevance and usefulness.
Authors: Junyi Yao, Zihao Zheng
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) and agentic systems are increasingly proposed for financial trading, yet their reported performance remains difficult to compare because studies vary in data provenance, temporal split discipline, execution timing, turnover treatment, and transaction-cost modeling. This article presents a targeted topical review and reproducibility audit of execution realism in LLM-based trading research. A coded evidence matrix covering 30 trade-relevant primary studies is used to assess point-in-time controls, split transparency, held-out evaluation, cost and turnover treatment, execution semantics, universe definition, and artifact release. Across the audited sample, architecture reporting is generally clearer than the evaluation assumptions needed to judge whether a trading result is economically interpretable or reproducible. A 10-equity worked example is included only as a methodological scaffold to illustrate how explicit friction and timing choices can materially compress active-strategy results. The main conclusion is that the next useful step for LLM trading research is not only better agent design, but also clearer reporting standards for execution realism, reproducibility, and evaluation comparability.
Authors: Philip Quirke
Abstract: In mechanistic interpretability, attention heads are commonly elevated to role claims (e.g., "this head represents addition") when they are necessary for a behavior, encode it linearly, and recover that behavior when restored after ablation. We show this evidence is insufficient: across three 7-8B instruction-tuned models and five computation families, heads passing all three checks routinely fail to transfer the computation when their activations are patched into a different prompt under matched controls. We introduce KID (Knowing / Intent / Doing), a role-assignment lens for attention heads, and pair it with a three-stage pipeline: capability-selective screening (CSS), singular value decomposition (SVD), and activation transduction under matched controls. Our results document a preliminary role taxonomy (including prompt-trajectory stabilizers, answer-side logit-bias heads, and soft computation-pattern carriers) and show that the same-answer control (a transduction target sharing the answer string but not the requested computation) is an underused check that exposes broad state transfer masquerading as semantic specificity.
Authors: David Thorstad
Abstract: A key premise in leading arguments for existential risk from artificial intelligence is that malfunctioning artificial agents could not be easily shut down. This motivates the catastrophic shutdown problem of ensuring that agents can be shut down before they cause an existential catastrophe. A range of arguments and theorems are offered to suggest that solving the catastrophic shutdown problem is difficult, bolstering arguments for existential risk and motivating a search for solutions to the catastrophic shutdown problem. This paper argues for two conclusions. First, existing arguments do not establish the difficulty of solving the catastrophic shutdown problem. Second, concern for the catastrophic shutdown problem has led to technical solutions that impose a high safety tax on model performance.
Authors: John Chen, Sihan Cheng, Can Gurkan, H M Abdul Fattah
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as long-horizon agents with decision-making capacities. While LLMs can show ethical competence on dilemmas such as trolley problems, this competence may not translate to complex, agentic scenarios. We study this gap in Civilization V, a multiplayer game with a complex decision-making landscape including economy, diplomacy, technology, and military strategy. Starting from 130 high-tension LLM self-play episodes, in which an LLM player spontaneously escalated nuclear authorization, we replay them across 13 models with three prompt interventions: an ethical prompt naming nuclear harm, removal of the previous model's decision-making rationale, and high-stakes framing emphasizing real-world impacts. No interventions nor their combinations reliably eliminate emergent escalation. We identify three failure pathways: ethical reasoning that fails to surface without prompting, fails to appear even when prompted, or surfaces but fails to take effect when strategic counter-factors dominate. Evaluations of agentic models, therefore, must test whether ethical reasoning is spontaneously invoked and behaviorally effective in complex decision-making contexts, beyond whether it can be elicited in isolation.
Authors: Mahshad Koohi Habibi Dehkordi, Shuxin Zhou, Yehoshua Perl, Fadi P. Deek, James Geller, Gai Elhanan, Andrew J. Einstein, Luke Lindemann, Vipina K. Keloth
Abstract: Electronic health record (EHR) notes are dense medical documents containing large amounts of information, often filled with complex medical jargon. Highlighting all details in EHRs helps reduce the likelihood of missing crucial information by drawing attention to key content. This study proposes the design of a Cardiology Interface Terminology (CIT) to accurately highlight all details in EHR notes of cardiology patients. We introduce an innovative Machine Learning (ML) technique for the design of CIT. The ML technique requires training data. Manual preparation of such training data is time-consuming and expensive. The process of the CIT design includes three phases. In the first two phases, we innovatively derive a training data CIT to be used by the third phase, ML technique. We start by designing an initial CIT, composed of several components: the cardiology-related sub-hierarchies of SNOMED, other SNOMED concepts mined from EHRs of build set, and necessary components of terms e.g., medical abbreviations and medications. Utilizing an iterative process, fine-grained phrases containing initial CIT concepts are extracted from build set as CIT concept candidates. The candidate concepts are semi-automatically reviewed before being added to CIT, yielding the training data CIT, TCIT. In the third phase, a ML model is trained with TCIT to identify candidates fitting to be concepts in the CIT. This model is used to extract further concepts from build set, yielding the final CIT. The final CIT is then used to highlight the test set and evaluate the extent to which it captures details in an unseen EHR dataset. For this purpose, four evaluation metrics, coverage, breadth, completeness, and conciseness are used. The highlighted test set has a coverage of 74.21%, with a breadth of 1.68. For 20 random notes in test set, the average completeness is 98.2% and average conciseness is 84.2%.
Authors: Ashkan Ansarifard (Sapienza University of Rome), Matteo Mancanelli (Sapienza University of Rome), Elena Umili (Sapienza University of Rome), Fabio Patrizi (Sapienza University of Rome)
Abstract: In this work we study offline reinforcement learning (RL) under temporally extended task constraints expressed in Linear Temporal Logic over finite traces (LTLf). Recently, transformer-based approaches such as Trajectory Transformers and Decision Transformers have been adopted to address RL as a sequence modeling problem. However, these methods optimize purely for reward and do not account for high-level temporal requirements. Here, we introduce a neurosymbolic framework that injects LTLf background knowledge into such transformer-based RL policies. Our approach compiles LTLf formulas into deterministic finite automata (DFAs) and integrates them into the learning process through a differentiable representation and a logic-based loss function. In particular, we derive differentiable satisfaction signals from DFA progression and use them as a regularization term during training. The resulting method is architecture-agnostic across different models. We evaluate the proposed framework on navigation environments with specification suites covering combinations of safety and reachability temporal properties. Experimental results show that incorporating background knowledge not only improves constraint satisfaction, but also maintains competitive return compared to vanilla baselines.
Authors: Ger\c{c}ek Budak (Department of Industrial Engineering, Ankara Y{\i}ld{\i}r{\i}m Beyaz{\i}t University, Ke\c{c}i\"oren, Ankara 06010, T\"urkiye), Faraz Gholamzadeh Gharehgheshlaghi (Department of Industrial Engineering, Ankara Y{\i}ld{\i}r{\i}m Beyaz{\i}t University, Ke\c{c}i\"oren, Ankara 06010, T\"urkiye), Melika Barjesteh Vaezi (Department of Kinesiology and Sport Management, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, United States), Ahmad Gholizadeh Lonbar (Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA)
Abstract: The coffee supply chain is one of the most complex agri-food networks, marked by geographically dispersed production, multi-tier coordination, and high sensitivity to quality and freshness. While sustainability and digitalization have gained attention, demand forecasting, optimization, and traceability are often treated separately. This study presents a two-phase integrated framework. First, a hybrid CNN-LSTM model is used for demand forecasting. On the public Coffee Chain Sales dataset with chronological 70/15/15 splitting, the model achieves MAE of 22.87 and R^2 of 0.90, outperforming the best deep learning benchmark by ~12% and classical methods by over 30%. In the second phase, the forecasted demand feeds a tri-objective mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model that jointly minimizes cost, minimizes carbon emissions, and maximizes product freshness in a multi-period, multimodal, closed-loop supply chain with circular recovery. Freshness is modeled via exponential decay based on inventory age. Using the epsilon-constraint method, 25 Pareto solutions are obtained. Sensitivity and policy analyses show that balanced sustainability policies can reduce emissions by 22.4% with only a 9.9% cost increase while maintaining near-optimal freshness. Keywords: Coffee supply chain; Deep learning; Demand forecasting; Multi-objective optimization; Circular economy; CNN-LSTM; Mixed-integer linear programming.
Authors: Kale-ab Abebe Tessera, Andras Szecsenyi, Cameron Barker, Alexander Rutherford, Davide Paglieri, Aidan Scannell, Henry Gouk, Elliot J. Crowley, Tim Rockt\"aschel, Amos Storkey
Abstract: As language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents, they must coordinate with others over long horizons in open-ended interactive tasks. Yet existing evaluations rarely test these demands together, instead emphasising single-agent tasks, short interactions, or highly structured multi-agent settings. We introduce $alem$, a JAX-based benchmark for open-ended multi-agent coordination built on Craftax-like dynamics. Alem embeds procedurally generated coordination tasks, soft specialisation, communication, and controllable coordination difficulty into a long-horizon survival world with exploration, crafting, trading, and combat. We evaluate $13$ modern LLMs zero-shot within homogeneous teams, with trained MARL agents as reference points. Current LLM agents remain far from solving alem, averaging only ~6% normalised return, but their failures are not uniform. On the hardest coordination setting, zero-shot Gemini-3.1-Pro-High approaches MARL agents trained for one billion steps, while GPT-5.4-High achieves strong base-task reward but much lower coordination reward. This contrast shows that individual task competence does not imply coordination competence. Ablations show that communication is the largest contributor to coordination, while memory and reasoning help when used to maintain multi-step plans. Overall, our results identify coordination as a distinct bottleneck for frontier LLM agents, separate from single-agent capabilities. Alem makes this bottleneck measurable and provides a controlled testbed for developing agents that communicate, allocate roles, and execute shared plans. Code is available at https://github.com/alem-world/alem-env.
Authors: Ilia Zaznov, Atta Badii, Julian Kunkel, Alfonso Dufour
Abstract: This study addresses the optimal execution of large stock sell programs by introducing TT-DAC-PS (Twin-Target Deterministic Actor-Critic with Policy Smoothing), a deterministic actor-critic architecture that combines twin exponential-moving-average critic targets with pessimistic min backup, TD3-style target policy smoothing noise, delayed actor updates, and conservative Q regularisation to curb overestimation. Exploration uses Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) noise with a hybrid schedule: deterministic episode-wise decay, variance-guided adjustment based on recent reward dispersion, and a Soft Actor-Critic (SAC)-style temperature that is learned and mapped to the noise scale. The environment integrates Almgren-Chriss (AC) trade impact with Limit Order Book (LOB) prices and volumes, normalised state features, per-step volume participation caps, and a utility-based reward. The trade execution algorithm is applied to LOB data for ten U.S. stocks. Performance is assessed against reinforcement-learning baseline algorithms, including Proximal Policy Optimisation (PPO), Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), and Advantage Actor-Critic (A2C), as well as alternative trade execution algorithms, including Time-Weighted Average Price (TWAP), Volume-Weighted Average Price (VWAP), and AC. The proposed model consistently reduces mean implementation shortfall percentage with competitive variance, outperforming classical baselines and standard reinforcement-learning benchmark models.
Authors: Boai Sun, Wenjin Guo, Zongmin Yu, Liu Yang
Abstract: While data-intensive deep reinforcement learning can optimize complex control policies, scientific discovery in physical systems fundamentally requires an interpretable chain of reasoning that connects physical evidence to structured control architectures. Here, we present a self-evolving scientific-agent workflow, driven by large language models and iterative code generation, that automates controller construction while preserving strict interpretability and rigorous physical reasoning. Instead of adjusting weights, the agent deploys candidate strategies into physical simulations, actively diagnoses dynamic behaviors from multimodal evidence, and translates these observations into progressive source-code refinements. We demonstrate this framework on a highly non-linear fluid-structure interaction problem: an underactuated, two-joint dogfish swimmer tasked with spatial target reaching using only joint angular accelerations. Starting from a propulsive seed policy that exhibits a one-sided steering bias, the agent autonomously discovers and refines a unified controller that robustly captures all canonical targets. Remarkably, without any retraining or target-specific branching, the synthesized control policy generalizes to unseen static targets and dynamically curved pursuit trajectories. The auditable evolve log reveals an emergent control architecture built upon traveling-wave propulsion, body-frame target guidance, yaw-rate feedback, signed mean-tail curvature, and adaptive cadence relief. Our results show that an autonomous scientific agent can successfully transform accumulated physical evidence into robust, mathematically readable control policy, while maintaining a fully traceable process of scientific discovery.
Authors: Li Jiang, Haoran Xu, Yichuan Ding, Amy Zhang
Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a central post-training tool for large language models (LLMs), providing dense per-token teacher supervision along the student's own rollouts. In this work, we identify a common structural cause underlying OPD, which we call prefix failure. Under prefix failure, dense per-token supervision induces a bimodal teacher mixture and fragmented gradients that token-level loss truncation or reweighting fail to address. This observation motivates us to move beyond token-level loss interventions toward trajectory-level output corrections. We thus propose Trajectory-Refined Distillation (TRD), a trajectory-level correction method that revises the student's rollout under the teacher guidance while within on-policy support. By correcting problematic prefixes before distillation, TRD mitigates prefix failure at its source. Moreover, TRD improves the exploration by exposing the student to alternative valid derivations under teacher guidance, even when the original rolls are already correct. TRD can also be applied to on-policy self-distillation (OPSD), a parameter-sharing variant that uses the student model conditioned on privileged informations as the teacher. Across a wide range of benchmarks and base models at multiple scales, TRD consistently outperforms prior baselines, improving single-attempt accuracy and broadening reasoning coverage. Code is available at https://github.com/louieworth/trd
Authors: Yanyan Wu, Boyi Zhang, Yanlin Liu, Xinyu Fang, Jining Luan, Meiqi Zhang, Jiacheng Liu, Hao Zeng, Dexu Yu, Chang Liu, Hanwen Du, Yongxin Ni, Youhua Li
Abstract: Financial portfolio trading is naturally formulated as a reinforcement learning problem, where an agent sequentially rebalances assets under changing market conditions to balance return, risk, and transaction costs. Yet in non-stationary markets, raw OHLCV states and short-horizon return rewards often provide an under-specified learning interface, motivating large language models as a way to inject financial knowledge into state and reward design while constraining open-ended generation. To this end, we propose GIFT, an LLM-guided framework for state-reward interface design in PPO-based financial reinforcement learning. Rather than using the LLM to make trading decisions, GIFT uses Factor-guided State Enhancement to generate state features from financial-factor primitives, Risk-rule-guided Reward Shaping to generate auxiliary rewards from portfolio-risk rules, and Diagnostic-guided Refinement to revise candidate interfaces using PPO rollout diagnostics. After refinement, GIFT fixes the selected state-reward interface before evaluation, with no further LLM queries or interface updates at test time. Comprehensive rolling-window experiments across diverse market regimes and portfolio scenarios demonstrate that GIFT improves learning-signal quality and out-of-sample risk-adjusted portfolio performance over baselines. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/KAG778/GIFT .
Authors: Alain Gutierrez, Marianne Huchard, Pierre Martin, Andr\'e Miralles, Violaine Prince
Abstract: Knowledge extraction from symbolic data often produces abstractions that are formally defined but not immediately interpretable by users. Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) and Relational Concept Analysis (RCA) provide representative settings for this issue: they generate explicit conceptual structures, implications, and relational dependencies from object descriptions and relations. Although these structures are explainable by design, their concepts are often identified by technical labels, which limits their use as human-interpretable knowledge units. Assigning meaningful names to such concepts is therefore a key issue for interpretation, navigation, validation, and reuse by domain experts. This paper investigates concept naming in FCA and RCA from a symbolic knowledge representation perspective. We first characterize the linguistic and terminological challenges involved in naming generated symbolic abstractions, including ambiguity, discrimination, concision, and consistency across related concepts. We then propose a configurable framework for LLM-assisted concept naming. The framework relies on a variability model that controls which sources of information are exposed during naming, such as intent, extent, inherited information, neighboring concepts, implications, and relational attributes. It thereby makes explicit the semantic choices involved in moving from formal concept descriptions to human-readable names. The approach is illustrated as a proof of concept on a small relational dataset in the pizzeria domain. This illustration shows how different configurations influence the names suggested by an LLM, and how naming variability can reveal interpretation choices, relational dependencies, and possible modeling issues in the underlying symbolic data.
Authors: Rahul Gorijavolu, Kaushik Madapati, Pritika Vig, Rawan Abulibdeh, Nikhil Jaiswal, Mahri Kadyrova, Zeamanuel Hailu Tesfaye, Charles Senteio, Paula Maurutto, Leo Anthony Celi
Abstract: Background: Consumer-facing large language models are now a common source of health information, and they interpret and personalize responses rather than retrieve them. Whether their responses vary across users is a clinical, equity, and governance question, sharpened by evidence that sycophantic responses can alter judgment and increase trust. Objective: To evaluate response variation and sycophancy in consumer-facing health LLMs under conditions resembling ordinary patient use. Methods: We constructed simulated user profiles differing in geography, browsing context, expressed beliefs, and social determinants of health, drawing on literature linking social context to health attitudes. We adapted validated instruments, including the Vaccination Attitudes Examination scale and reproductive attitudes scales, into multi-turn prompts designed to elicit clinically meaningful variation across users. Results: The evaluation encountered five linked barriers. Factual prompts produced stable responses that masked sycophancy emerging over multi-turn conversation. Browser-based interfaces did not disclose which signals influence outputs and could not be reset to a clean baseline. Large-scale testing was restricted by terms of service, rate limits, and bot detection. Accuracy-based criteria could not capture tone, framing, or omission, and LLM-as-judge methods risked shared alignment bias. Models changed without traceable version identifiers, preventing reliable replication. Conclusions: No reliable independent evaluation framework yet exists for examining how consumer-facing health LLMs behave in ordinary use. Oversight requires disclosure of personalization signals, stable version identifiers, researcher safe harbor programs, and post-deployment monitoring of health-related outputs.
Authors: Yao Cheng, Siqiang Luo
Abstract: Relational deep learning (RDL) converts relational databases (RDBs) into heterogeneous graphs, but graphs derived directly from database schemas are often not well suited for how graph neural networks (GNNs) perform relational reasoning. We study what makes a relational graph suitable for deep learning and show that schema-derived graphs suffer from two systematic failures: information overload and semantic fragmentation. Our empirical analysis reveals that the desired graph is not the raw schema, but a result of controlled structural adaptation. Performance depends on balancing two operations: mitigating information overload via filtering, and repairing semantic fragmentation via injection. Specifically, filtering serves as a bias-variance knob with non-monotonic effects, while injection improves performance only when it explicitly restores the relational dependencies missing from the original schema. Based on these findings, we develop an end-to-end structural optimizer that applies both operations to adapt relational graphs automatically. Across 26 tasks spanning classification, regression, and recommendation, the optimized graphs consistently improve accuracy while often reducing inference cost.
Authors: Minyoung Hwang, Seokhyun Lee, Changhee Lee
Abstract: As deep language models (DLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, understanding their decision rationale becomes paramount for ensuring trust, safety, and accountability. However, achieving this vital level of interpretability is particularly challenging when these DLMs operate as black-box systems (e.g., via APIs), where access to internal model states (e.g., parameters, gradients) is restricted. Despite numerous efforts, existing explanation methods often fail to concurrently satisfy three key desiderata: (i) inference-time efficiency, (ii) black-box compatibility without inducing out-of-distribution behavior, and (iii) comprehensible explanations grounded in the input's linguistic structure. To address these challenges, we propose a method that explains predictions of DLMs by selecting a small, informative subset of input words. We formulate this as an amortized optimization problem, enabling efficient one-shot inference without the need for input-specific search. Our selection policy is trained via REINFORCE-style policy gradients, allowing discrete word selection in a fully gradient-free setting. To enhance interpretability and align with human linguistic intuition, we integrate graph-structured knowledge into this selection process, fostering linguistically coherent subsets that result in explanations both highly informative and cognitively meaningful to end-users. We evaluated our method on diverse DLM architectures and multiple real-world datasets. It consistently identifies word subsets with enhanced discriminative power and stronger alignment with linguistically salient cues, outperforming both conventional black-box compatible methods and gradient-based approaches that are given oracle access to the black-box model's gradients for a more challenging benchmark. Our code is available at here.
Authors: Nicholas Leisegang, Thomas Meyer, Sebastian Rudolph
Abstract: In this paper, we integrate the defeasible logic of Kraus, Lehmann and Magidor (KLM) with the standpoint logic framework of G\'omez \'Alvarez and Rudolph. This is done with the goal of formally expressing knowledge taking into account multiple (possibly contradicting) viewpoints, which in turn may hold defeasible beliefs. In doing so, we utilise Defeasible Restricted Standpoint Logics (DRSL), introduced by Leisegang et al. Our work expands on previous work by providing a foundational representation result for DRSL semantics and systematically lifting several well-known entailment relations from the propositional case to the standpoint-enhanced setting. In particular, we characterise the semantics for DRSL through a set of KLM-style postulates adapted for the standpoints case. We furthermore provide a means to lift preferential entailment, and the class of entailment relations based on single ranking functions from the purely propositional to the standpoint-enhanced context, including rational and lexicographic closure. We show this can be done equivalently through semantic and algorithmic means. Furthermore, we show that, for each considered form of entailment, the complexity class of entailment checking does not change when moving from propositional KLM to DRSL.
Authors: Jason Starace
Abstract: Published agent capability scores conflate what a model can do with what its scaffold lets it do, and the magnitude of this elicitation gap is not well characterized under controlled conditions. This study executes a pre-registered controlled comparison of three scaffolds (ReAct, a Planner-Actor-Rater multi-agent design, and planner-then-executor) across five models from three providers (Claude Opus 4.7, Sonnet 4.6, Haiku 4.5; Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview; GPT-5.5) on GAIA validation Levels 1 and 2, holding tasks and conditions fixed, with three attempts per question. Scaffold choice alone moves measured accuracy by as much as 28 percentage points within a single model (Opus, Level 2, robust slice), confirming the pre-registered hypothesis that scaffold variation produces gaps of at least 10 points. The pre-registered prediction that more capable models would be less scaffold-sensitive is rejected in direction: scaffold effects vary significantly by model in every dataset slice, but the most capable Anthropic model gains the most from structured scaffolds at the harder level, and tier-scaling holds only at Level 1 under the robust slice. The multi-agent advantage over ReAct at Level 2 appears within the Anthropic family but not for the cross-provider models, making model family rather than capability tier the conditioning variable, and the predicted planner-executor advantage on file-reading tasks is falsified. Structured scaffolds make fewer tool calls yet recover more often from mid-trajectory errors at the harder level, and a single cell (Gemini with planner-then-executor) is the cheapest at both levels and the most accurate at Level 2. These results indicate that single-scaffold capability numbers are scaffold-conditional estimates and that the elicitation gap is not guaranteed to shrink as models improve.
Authors: Lu Jia, Haibo Tong, Feifei Zhao, Jindong Li, Dongqi Liang, Ping Wu, Qian Zhang, Yi Zeng
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evolving from simple text-based interaction systems into LLM agents that can maintain memory, use tools, access external environments, and execute tasks. As their capabilities and autonomy expand, the safety risks they face also become more diverse. Existing evaluations often rely on manually written scenarios, static prompts, or final-output judgments, making it difficult to capture the diverse risks that agents may face during task execution. We introduce VESTA, a fully automated scenario generation and safety evaluation framework for LLM agents. Based on five risk dimensions, VESTA instantiaes abstract and diverse safety risks in real-world task execution into 1,072 measurable evaluation scenarios. Using the automated evaluation pipeline, 12 LLM agents are evaluated under two authority contexts. The results show that current agents still face substantial behavioral safety risks during task execution, with an average ASR of 47.1% and several models exceeding 70%. These findings demonstrate the importance of executable, process-level evaluation for understanding and improving LLM agent safety.
Authors: Lei Lin, Ronghao Wang, Chunbao Zhou, Jue Wang, Yangang Wang
Abstract: A scientific hypothesis is the first step in research and undergoes experimental validation, yet it also reflects a deep understanding of and reasoning about scientific phenomena. We introduce DN-Hypo-Pipeline, an AI-powered workflow based on large language models, designed to support structured scientific thinking and hypothesis generation by leveraging scientific explanations as prior knowledge. This pipeline assists researchers in deriving novel hypotheses from existing literature. Given the explanandum (i.e., the conclusion) of a research paper, it identifies underlying laws, theories, and principles, and reconstructs a new, yet-to-be-verified explanation for the observed phenomenon. We evaluated DN-Hypo-Pipeline in the field of data science modeling using three highly cited papers. Statistical inference, supported by both LLM-as-judge assessment and human expert evaluation, demonstrates that our pipeline is more effective than direct generation methods. Additionally, we validated the two highest-scoring generated hypotheses by developing corresponding novel algorithms, which outperformed the baseline models presented in the original papers. Beyond application in data science, DN-Hypo-Pipeline provides a theoretical framework that not only encompasses theory-guided data science modeling methods but also reveals a more fundamental structure of the modeling process. Moreover, this approach is essentially a generalization of theory-guided modeling, offering potential for extension to other domains and across a broader range of scientific disciplines.
Authors: Chenglin Yang
Abstract: AI agents increasingly take consequential actions -- shell commands, cloud operations, and arbitrary tool-calls -- so a trust layer must decide, per action, whether to allow, warn, block, or escalate. We argue that the right way to reason about such a layer is by threat type. Lexical (fixed-signature) threats, where danger lives in a stable token, are decidable by deterministic rules; semantic (intent-dependent) threats, where a benign and a malicious action share the same surface, are out of reach for rules by construction. We make this concrete with a negative proof: a determined, hand-authored cloud rule pack lifts held-out accuracy only 48 to 56% overall and moves the semantic categories by 0pp (data_db 29 to 29, observability 59 to 59, supply_chain 50 to 50), while a strong LLM judge carries exactly those categories. We give the judge a self-learning capability: on a corpus that is mainly semantic attacks it nearly doubles rule accuracy (48% to 83.6-85.2%) with near-zero false-blocks, and this holds across two model providers. We turn this into a self-improving dual-store system: the judge distills a growing deterministic rule floor on lexical threats (cheaper over time) and feeds a guarded RAG memory on semantic threats (a verdict-cache fails -- surface-twins collapse to ~58% -- so a corroboration guard lifts semantic accuracy +13pp, 70 to 84). The result is what sets AgentTrust v2 apart from its static v1 predecessor: a trust layer that self-evolves from its own stream of decisions -- cheaper on the lexical class (it distils its own rules) and smarter on the semantic class (it accrues guarded precedent), while never hard-blocking a benign action. An end-to-end online replay shows the judge-call rate falling (50% to 44%) and judge-domain accuracy rising (71% to 80%), with 0 benign hard-blocks across 45,000 actions.
Authors: Shumeng Yang, Yisu Liu, Jiayi Zheng, Zhaohui Yang, Linjing Li
Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves large language model reasoning but often suffers from rapid policy-entropy collapse, where the policy prematurely concentrates on narrow high-probability reasoning paths. While global entropy regularization can encourage exploration, uniformly increasing entropy across all token positions is inefficient for long reasoning trajectories, where many tokens are not decision-relevant. We propose Position-Aware Entropy Calibration (PAEC), a token-level entropy-management framework that constructs a soft mask from local top-p entropy and top-two candidate competition, and applies an anchor-based lower-bound penalty to prevent selected-position entropy collapse. Experiments on five mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that PAEC improves macro-average majority-vote performance over strong RLVR baselines, with clear gains on AIME-style tasks. Our results suggest that entropy management in reasoning RL should be formulated as selective exploration allocation over decision-sensitive positions rather than uniform randomness injection.
Authors: Mark Burgess
Abstract: I discuss some quantitative representations of Promise Theory for processes involving autonomous agents. Agent models are common in software systems, machine learning, and biology, for example, but may also apply to physics and other forms of engineering. I describe how Bayesian probability and information theoretic optimization, including Active Inference, may be incorporated with promise semantics -- as well as how Promise Theory supplements solutions, helping to avoid probability's pitfalls, which include non-local coordination, calibrating, and normalizing probabilistic computations. The role of boundary conditions in constraining allowed states and selecting decision thresholds is a form of promise, and agent alignment provides a scalable definition of intent. Autonomous agents may congeal into swarms with superagent characteristics by trying to minimize their information, despite uncertainty that works to maximize it. The use of Promise Theory involves some research challenges as well as stylistic preferences.
Authors: Beiwen Zhang, Yongheng Liang, Guowei Zou, Haitao Wang, Hejun Wu
Abstract: Constructing efficient and reliable policies to assist humans is indispensable for human-AI collaboration. Existing methods mainly follow two lines of work. Most prior work relies on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to learn black-box policies, which limits interpretability and raises safety concerns. Recent methods query large language models (LLMs) at each decision step, causing slow responses and high inference costs. We propose Collaboration Policy Tree (Co-pi-tree), a closed-loop method that learns an executable policy tree consisting of a partner-behavior prediction tree and an agent-action selection tree. Co-pi-tree constructs a policy by distilling LLM reasoning into policy tree code. It then evaluates the policy through partner interaction, obtains feedback, and uses natural language to summarize the interaction feedback to improve problematic branches. Experiments in Overcooked-AI show that Co-pi-tree improves average reward by 35.4% over the baseline average, while reducing the number of LLM queries by 77.7% and test-time latency by 97.1%. Project page: https://beiwenzhang.github.io/Co-pi-tree/
Authors: Peiliang Gong, Emadeldeen Eldele, Chenyu Liu, Ziyu Jia, Yi Ding, Xinliang Zhou, Lianchao Gu, Qi Zhu, Yang Liu, Daoqiang Zhang, Xiaoli Li
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated impressive potential for time series forecasting. However, existing methods predominantly rely on passive modality alignment or static task reprogramming, which often fail to capture fine-grained, non-stationary temporal patterns or to adapt to nuanced task intents. In this paper, we propose Instruction-aware Active Probing (InA-Probe), which shifts the paradigm from passive alignment toward an active, instruction-driven probing mechanism. Specifically, we design a Multi-Level Instruction Injection mechanism that enriches the model with both global task objectives and fine-grained, patch-level semantic priors. Building on this, an Adaptive Query Generation module produces sample-specific probes that are dynamically modulated by the temporal context. These probes are then refined through a dual-stage attention process: they first internalize task-specific intents via Instruction-Aware Self-Attention, and subsequently interrogate the projected temporal representations through Temporal Cross-Attention to extract salient patterns. Comprehensive experiments on seven real-world benchmarks show that InA-Probe consistently outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning and LLM-based baselines, excelling in both one-for-all generalization and zero-shot transfer while reducing forecasting error by up to 37\% in challenging cross-domain scenarios. Ablation studies further confirm that the synergy between adaptive querying and fine-grained instructions is key to unlocking the reasoning power of LLMs for complex time series.
Authors: Hongwei Wang, Miao Zhou, Fengde Wang, Yuting Wang, Jiewen Yu, Jun-Yan He, Bohao Qu, Wanbing Zhang, Xiuju Fu, Qing Guo, Zipei Fan, Yingying Xing, Yi Yuan
Abstract: Long-horizon maritime trajectory prediction is important for shipping management, logistics planning, and maritime risk analysis, yet month-level forecasting remains insufficiently studied. Existing deep learning methods mainly focus on short- and mid-term coordinate extrapolation and often struggle to preserve route feasibility and destination correctness over extended horizons. This paper investigates joint long-horizon vessel trajectory and destination forecasting with reasoning-capable large language models, and develops a Maritime LLM post-training framework based on Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR). An AIS-based benchmark is constructed with 60-day historical trajectories and 30-day forecasting horizons, where trajectories are converted into semantic textual representations for RL prompt construction. RLVR aligns LLMs with maritime forecasting objectives by enforcing physical validity, providing early-weighted trajectory supervision, and evaluating destination correctness through hierarchical matching and curriculum learning. Experimental results show that RLVR-trained LLMs substantially improve over zero-shot LLMs and representative deep learning baselines, especially on destination-related metrics. Among the evaluated RLVR-trained variants, 4B LLMs achieve the best overall performance, suggesting that reward-compatible optimization and task-specific capacity matching are more important than simply using larger 8B or 14B LLMs. The results also show that LSTM remains a strong deep learning baseline under limited fine-tuning data, while Transformer-style spatio-temporal models typically require larger datasets and richer structured inputs. Overall, this work advances semantic, verifier-aligned maritime forecasting for operational decision support.
Authors: Angjelin Hila
Abstract: LLMs have revolutionized knowledge representation and retrieval, but lack the explicit modeling that knowledge ontologies possess. This paper surveys the ways that ontologies and knowledge graphs have been integrated with dense embedding algorithms. All hitherto attempts involve a trade-off between probabilistic and crisp inference. This paper proposes a novel frontier for devising knowledge representation systems that can simultaneously accommodate probabilistic and crisp inference in the same representation. To this effect, the paper proposes neuro-quantum-fuzzy systems as knowledge representation systems that accommodate both classical and contextual inference implemented through quantum-neural networks (QNN).
Authors: Zhixun Tan, Qiang Chen, Tairan Huang, Xiu Su, Yi Chen
Abstract: Recent advances have improved the adaptive capabilities of LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) through memory-, skill-, and learning-based approaches, yet these approaches remain challenged by noisy trajectories, insufficient modeling of memory-skill relations, and reliance on additional training or high-quality supervision. To address these limitations, we propose ConMem, a relation-aware and training-free framework that enables efficient multi-agent adaptation through cross-experience coordination. Specifically, ConMem distills historical interaction trajectories into structured memory cards to capture reusable strategies and cues, organizing them into a relation-aware memory graph. At runtime, ConMem retrieves cards according to task needs and coordinates them through the card graph to resolve strategy conflicts and recover their dependencies. Combined, these modules yield structured and relation-aware guidance, enabling robust, lightweight adaptation in multi-agent systems without additional training. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks and mainstream MAS architectures show consistent gains over existing memory architectures, with improved inference-time efficiency through pruning more than 50% of expanded candidates and reducing planning overhead by over 80%. Our codes are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ConMemCode
Authors: Syed Rifat Raiyan, Mohsinul Kabir, Hasan Mahmud, Md Kamrul Hasan
Abstract: Mathematical reasoning has long served as a stringent test of machine intelligence; over the past decade, it has moved from a niche problem within NLP to one of the most consequential AI frontiers. This survey provides a unified account of the field's evolution, from early rule-based math word problem (MWP) solvers and template-driven geometry systems, through neural expression generation and LLM prompting, to contemporary reasoning models, multi-agent systems, neuro-symbolic theorem provers, and verified discovery workflows. We organize the landscape along four axes: (i) informal reasoning over text and diagrams, spanning MWP solving, multimodal geometry, and VLMs; (ii) formal reasoning in proof assistants, including autoformalization, tactic prediction, compiler-guided repair, and proof search; (iii) mathematical discovery, where systems propose constructions, improve bounds, or assist attacks on open problems; and (iv) the inference and training-time techniques, including CoT prompting, tool use, process reward models, and RLVR, that increasingly connect generation with verification. We catalog major benchmarks across grade-school arithmetic, competition mathematics, geometry, formal proving, multimodal and multilingual reasoning, and expert evaluation, and we examine benchmark saturation, contamination, reporting mismatches, and the distinction between pass@1, majority voting, and verifier-assisted pass@$k$. We critically assess failure modes: brittleness under perturbation, reward hacking, multimodal grounding failures, fragile formalization, and the energy cost of reasoning-scale inference. Drawing on recent perspectives from working mathematicians, we identify future directions centered on verified-discovery workflows, reasoning efficiency, and infrastructure to make AI-assisted formalization broadly usable. Companion materials: https://github.com/Starscream-11813/awesome-AI4Math.
Authors: Lianrong Zuo, Peilan Xu, Yong Liu, Wenjian Luo
Abstract: Quality-diversity reinforcement learning (QD-RL) aims to construct policy repertoires that contain both high-performing and behaviorally diverse policies. Existing QD-RL methods mainly diversify policy instances after rollout evaluation or use learned value information to improve policy quality and behavior targeting, while the learning branches that generate candidate policies remain less explored. This paper proposes SV-QD-RL, a structure-value coupled framework that represents each candidate as a structure-conditioned actor-critic branch. Each branch contains an actor, a structural mask, a branch-specific critic, a replay state, and evaluation attributes including behavior, return, sparsity, and value profile. The structural mask defines the actor subspace in which the branch learns, while the branch-specific critic and replay state shape its value-learning trajectory. A branch-aware QD archive then evaluates and retains branches according to behavioral quality, structural footprint, and value-profile information. Experiments on MuJoCo continuous-control tasks show that SV-QD-RL constructs policy repertoires with strong archive quality and behaviorally useful diversity. Ablation and diagnostic analyses further indicate that structural conditioning, critic differentiation, and memory-consistent refinement make complementary contributions to behavioral specialization. Schedule-aware repertoire evaluation shows that the learned archive provides selectable policy alternatives under changing behavior-level requirements. These results suggest that coupling actor structure with branch-specific value learning is an effective mechanism for generating diverse QD-RL policy repertoires.
Authors: Adrian de Valois-Franklin, Alex Bogdan
Abstract: Autonomous agents negotiate, purchase, deploy code, and move funds, but no neutral mechanism determines whether they met their delegated obligation, who is responsible when they did not, or which settlement action follows. This is the agentic clearing problem. Tool protocols (MCP), inter-agent communication (A2A), payment rails (x402), mandate and network agent protocols (AP2, Visa, Mastercard), and settlement-risk standards each assume that determination and none produce it. Clearing is the missing primitive. Payment is not clearing. Authorization is not clearing. LLM-as-judge evaluation is not clearing. Settlement-risk escrow is not clearing: it consumes clearing decisions. RAILS (Real-Time Agent Integrity & Ledger Settlement) is the integrity and clearing layer for agentic commerce, spanning a per-output reliability score, a published reliability record, and a clearing function that consumes them. The clearing protocol at its core closes that gap. Seven primitives (Obligation Object, Evidence Envelope, Verification Mesh, Clearing Decision, Settlement Instruction, Clearing Passport, Finality Rules), bound by a formal model of admissibility-graded verification, together yield a soundness property: no financially material settlement is supported by evidence below the obligation's admissibility floor. The property is falsifiable against the spec. We are not aware of a prior agent-commerce verification mechanism that states a property of this kind. The approaches nearest to it emit a pass, a delivery guarantee, a bare score, or an equilibrium. This paper specifies that clearing protocol.
Authors: Varun Khurana, Vijval Ekbote, Vashu Chauhan, Yaman Kumar Singla, Rajiv Ratn Shah, Balaji Krishnamurthy
Abstract: In high-stakes settings such as brand compliance, clinical care, and content moderation, machine learning cannot be deployed as opaque oracles: practitioners inspect the features driving model decisions, and models must leverage the expert documentation governing these domains. In practice, the data arrives as unstructured content, and features extracted from it must be interpretable, discriminative, and aligned with what experts consider important. Existing methods fall short: they target tabular inputs, lack demonstrated expert alignment, and cannot operationalize qualitative criteria such as 'maintain professional tone' into precise features. We present FEST (Feature Engineering with Self-evolving Trees), combining dual-stream feature generation (semantic and deterministic), semantic deduplication, and tree-guided iterative evolution to discover auditable features from raw text and images. FEST leads in 17 of 20 classifier-task combinations across brand classification, content authenticity detection, and stress detection, with a mean gain of 4.2 pp over the strongest baseline across five classifiers. An LLM-as-judge evaluation shows FEST achieves 60-80% coverage of expert-designed brand features at strict semantic-alignment thresholds, corroborated by a human expert study rating features highly on relevance, clarity, and actionability. When seeded with expert guidelines, FEST refines qualitative criteria into operational features, improving accuracy by 6-12 pp on average across brands. To enable systematic evaluation of expert alignment in automated feature engineering, we release BrandGuide, the first dataset pairing expert-designed features with 1M+ assets across 2,683 brands. By grounding feature engineering in expert knowledge, FEST opens a practical pathway for interpretable ML in domains demanding human oversight.
Authors: Sumin Park, Seojin Kim, Noseong Park
Abstract: Linear attention reformulates sequence modeling as recurrent state evolution, enabling efficient linear-time inference. Under the key-value associative paradigm, existing approaches restrict the role of the query to the readout operation, decoupling it from state evolution. We show that query-conditioned state readout induces a structured value prediction over accumulated memory that complements key-based retrieval. Based on this insight, we propose Q-Delta, a query-aware delta rule that integrates mixed key-query prediction errors into state evolution, enabling jointly corrective dynamics while preserving delta-rule efficiency. We establish stability guarantees for the resulting dynamics and derive a hardware-efficient chunkwise-parallel formulation with a custom Triton implementation. Empirical results demonstrate stable optimization, competitive throughput, and consistent improvements over strong baselines on language modeling and long-context retrieval tasks.
Authors: Sumin Park, Noseong Park
Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) scales model capacity efficiently by selectively routing inputs to a specialized subset of experts. However, input-expert specialization, the core motivation of MoE, critically depends on whether the router is actually aware of input structure. In practice, MoE routing is typically implemented as a shallow linear projection with limited awareness of input representation, which often leads to unstable routing. We propose STAR, a Structure Aware Routing that rethinks MoE routing as a subspace learning problem by augmenting standard learnable routing with an evolving principal subspace that tracks dominant input structure via Generalized Hebbian Algorithm (GHA). By aligning routing decisions directly with input structure, STAR enables stable expert specialization. We evaluate STAR on controlled synthetic setup and large-scale language and vision tasks, where it consistently improves routing quality and downstream performance over strong MoE baselines. Moreover, optional test-time subspace updates further enhance routing robustness and generalization under input distribution shifts.
Authors: Hao Chen, Zhanming Shen, Liyao Li, Yanyu Chen, Xuhang Zhu, Xiaomeng Hu, Qi Zhang, Ru Peng, Xiaoyu Shen, Haobo Wang, Junbo Zhao
Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for eliciting long-chain reasoning in large language models. However, existing methods based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) rely on a binary outcome reward, which induces two structural failure modes: Zero-Advantage Collapse, in which all rollouts in a group share the same outcome and the gradient vanishes, and Hallucinated Certainty, in which the model becomes increasingly confident on incorrect rollouts late in training. We address both modes by densifying the reward with intrinsic signals computed entirely from the policy's own conditional probabilities, and propose ISPO (Intrinsic Signal Policy Optimization, which combines a sequence-level signal measuring how informative the thinking trajectory is for the final answer, with a token-level directional reward whose hallucinated-certainty hinge penalizes confidently-wrong predictions at critical decision tokens. Across three base models and five mathematical reasoning benchmarks, ISPO consistently outperforms competitive baselines, with the largest gains on the hardest benchmarks where zero-advantage collapse is most frequent, and training-dynamics diagnostics confirm that both failure modes are decreased.
Authors: Ting Wang, Yuanjie Shi, Yan Yan, Huan Zhang
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly perform multi-step reasoning, where intermediate claims form implicit directed acyclic graphs whose node correctness is structurally conditioned on their ancestors. This makes factuality uncertainty structural, rather than a trivial accumulation of node-wise errors, and necessitates inference-time uncertainty quantification over the reasoning structure. While conformal prediction (CP) offers flexible user-specified factuality control, existing work remains post-hoc and cannot intervene during generation. To fill the gap between CP's flexibility and its post-hoc limitation, we propose an \emph{Inference-Time Conformal Reasoning (ITCR)} framework that integrates CP directly into reasoning graph generation. ITCR learns a structure-level factuality uncertainty function that aggregates claim-level factuality signals over reasoning graphs without complex modeling assumptions. We then design the non-conformity score based on graph-level factuality uncertainty and calibrate the conformal threshold to decide when to stop generation. We theoretically show such generation is nested, yielding valid coverage guarantees for factuality control. Experiments over multiple datasets and coverage objectives demonstrate empirically valid coverage. In downstream reasoning tasks, inference-time calibrated graphs yield more accurate generation than post-hoc pruned graphs.
Authors: David Thorstad
Abstract: Recent years have seen increasing concern that artificial intelligence may soon pose an existential risk to humanity. One leading ground for concern is that artificial agents may be power-seeking, aiming to acquire power and in the process disempowering humanity. I show how the argument from power-seeking rests on a strong version of a claim known as the instrumental convergence thesis. I explore leading defenses of the instrumental convergence thesis and argue that none establishes the thesis in a strong enough form to ground the argument from power-seeking. I discuss implications for longtermism, the governance of artificial intelligence, and the methodology of studying risks posed by artificial agents.
Authors: Sayed Erfan Arefin
Abstract: Code generation models are typically compared using compact execution benchmarks and aggregate pass rates, but such summaries obscure how performance varies across programming languages, problem families, and failure modes. We present a large-scale, execution-grounded evaluation of 9 openly accessible LLMs specialized for coding on 2,707 free LeetCode problems across 12 programming languages. Our corpus contains 325,343 problem-model-language jobs, each linked to prompt metadata, extracted code, LeetCode execution outcomes, and static-analysis signals. The results show that current open models remain far from the human acceptance reference: the best model, Yi-Coder-9B-Chat, reaches 23.64% mean correctness, compared with a 57.2% human acceptance baseline. Rankings are also slice-dependent: Qwen2.5-Coder-14B-Instruct is strongest on hard problems and distinct-problem coverage, while Gemma-2-27B-IT achieves the highest all-language lint pass rate. Failure analysis shows that compile errors account for 63.25% of non-accepted best submissions, indicating that many failures occur before semantic correctness can be tested. Static quality further diverges from functional correctness. Together, these findings show that multilingual, artifact-preserving evaluation reveals tradeoffs hidden by single-language or single-metric leaderboards.
Authors: Harini SI, Somesh Singh, Yaman Kumar Singla, David Doermann, Rajiv Ratn Shah
Abstract: Text-to-image diffusion models are increasingly deployed in open-ended creative contexts, yet their outputs remain impersonal, optimized for aggregate aesthetics rather than individual taste. Human preferences are pluralistic: one user favoring muted, nostalgic portraits may prefer vibrant street photography, while another gravitates toward dreamy film aesthetics. Existing methods require dense interaction histories or per-user fine-tuning, failing in cold-start settings and collapsing context-dependent preferences into a static representation. We introduce zero-shot image personalization from personas (ZIPP), which conditions image generation on natural-language personas (concise descriptors of a user's identity and aesthetic sensibilities) without any user-specific data or weight updates. ZIPP uses an LLM to rewrite prompts from the perspective of a given persona, steering diffusion models toward personalized outputs. To mine personas at scale, we train an inductive Graph Attention Network over a 22M-user Reddit interaction graph with dual contrastive objectives aligning graph structure with visual behavior, then verbalize learned representations into natural-language personas via an MLLM. We introduce ZIPBench, the first zero-shot personalization benchmark with 1.5K users, graph-mined personas, and 40K generated images. Across four benchmarks and 14 LLMs spanning five model families, persona conditioning yields consistent gains (13-20%), with frontier models benefiting most. In the few-shot setting, ZIPP matches or exceeds fine-tuned baselines trained on 100+ examples per user. ZIPP achieves the lowest preference distributional divergence (CMMD 0.16 vs. 0.55), and IPF-normalized demographic evaluation shows it substantially reduces subpopulation bias present in existing methods. Human evaluation confirms a 79% win rate over generic generation and 58-65% over all fine-tuned baselines.
Authors: Sara Jaber, S. M. Hassan Mahdavi, Neila Bhouri, Mostafa Ameli
Abstract: Urban public transport disruptions require rapid response strategies, yet existing studies rarely provide a decision support framework to compare alternative disruption response solutions using a common set of dynamic, passenger, operator, and environment oriented indicators. This paper proposes a KPI-driven, time-indexed framework to assess the resilience of disruption response solutions in urban transit systems. The framework combines an optimization model with a behavioral evaluation in agent-based simulation. It also underlays the secondary service degradation induced on helper lines when in-service vehicles are withdrawn to support the disrupted corridor. Rather than treating resilience as a single score, it evaluates complementary dimensions including vulnerability, adaptability, robustness, resilience loss, responsiveness, cost-based performance, emissions, and equity. The framework is implemented for the RER B transit line in the Ile-de-France (Paris) network. Results show that the coordinated strategy provides the most balanced resilience profile, combining high service continuity with lower total disruption cost than single mode alternatives, while also improving equity and maintaining competitive environmental performance. Sensitivity analysis further identifies the disruption conditions under which coordinated multimodal response is most valuable.
Authors: Hartwig Grabowski, Michael Canz
Abstract: This paper examines the limitations of fully digital and partially digital e-assessment approaches in summative examinations in higher education. The analysis focuses on the didactic narrowing caused by closed question formats and on organizational, technical, and legal constraints that become particularly relevant in large student cohorts. As an alternative, the paper proposes a hybrid e-assessment approach that retains paper-based, problem-oriented examination tasks while enabling semi-automated grading. Assessment-relevant intermediate results are encoded in a structured answer format, entered by students by hand, and subsequently captured from table fields. The central technical bottleneck is reliable recognition of handwritten characters under realistic examination conditions. Recent vision-capable large language models, combined with a two-pass validation principle and comparison against a solution key, can reduce misclassifications and thereby improve the validity, fairness, and scalability of summative assessment.
Authors: Yutong Song, Jiang Wu, Pengfei Zhang, Wenjun Huang, Honghui Xu, Nikil Dutt, Amir M. Rahmani
Abstract: Optimizing large language models (LLMs) for long-horizon caregiver agents requires balancing delayed task objectives with immediate environment dynamics, such as patient distress and resistance. In dementia care, this balance is especially difficult: trajectory level rewards are too sparse for turn level credit assignment, while external LLM-based evaluators are costly and can misread fragmented or indirect patient responses. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{T}urn-\textbf{T}rajectory \textbf{G}roup \textbf{R}elative \textbf{P}olicy \textbf{O}ptimization (\textbf{T$^{2}$-GRPO}), a framework that decouples caregiver RL into two normalized reward horizons and enforces safety through a binary hard veto. $T^2$-GRPO derives dense turn-level rewards directly from environment state transitions, measuring changes in patient distress and resistance from a frozen dementia patient simulator. These environment-grounded rewards are combined with trajectory-level evaluations through independent centered-rank normalization, which preserves heterogeneous reward signals and mitigates reward collapse. Extensive experiments on dementia caregivers show that T $^{2}$-GRPO outperforms competitive baselines, indicating a substantial improvement for emotionally sensitive caregiver scenarios that effectively handles immediate patient feedback, long-term care outcomes, and safety constraints.
Authors: Qianyang Li, Xingjun Zhang, Shaoxun Wang, Tao Peng, Jia Wei
Abstract: Large-scale retail and industrial forecasting systems contain many heterogeneous time series whose lifecycle, sparsity, volatility, seasonality, spectral patterns, and contextual sensitivity differ substantially. A single forecasting model rarely performs well across all regimes, while dense ensembles increase inference cost and provide limited insight into expert suitability. This paper studies forecastability-aware expert routing: learning how data characteristics determine the suitability of forecasting experts. We propose \method{}, a sparse mixture-of-experts framework that represents each series with a multidimensional forecastability fingerprint, mines expert-suitability targets from validation performance, and trains a cost-aware sparse router to activate a small budgeted set of experts for each series. Using a production-scale vending-machine sales dataset from Shandong New Beiyang (SNBC), where the forecasting component has been integrated into the replenishment-planning pipeline, together with public retail benchmarks, we show that expert suitability varies systematically across data regimes. On the industrial dataset with 5,000+ machines and 60M+ transactions, \method{} Top-2 reduces MSE by 12.4\% over the strongest single expert, LightGBM, while executing 1.92 experts per series on average. The deployed component produces demand forecasts, while inventory-oriented gains are estimated by an offline replay simulator under a fixed replenishment policy rather than by online intervention. The framework turns heterogeneous sales forecasting from heuristic model selection into data mining of forecastability patterns and expert specialization. Code is available at https://github.com/hit636/FAME
Authors: Shibing Mo, Jing Liu, Jianchu Xu, Ruilin Wu
Abstract: Macro placement is a fundamental step in modern chip physical design, playing a crucial role in determining the solution quality of high-dimensional combinatorial optimization problems. Despite recent advancements in machine learning for spatial coordinate determination, the temporal dimension of placement sequencing remains largely governed by static heuristics. In this work, we demonstrate that the placement sequence is not merely a preprocessing step but a decisive factor in optimization, where suboptimal early decisions trigger irreversible domino effects that constrain the solution space. To harness this unexplored dimension, we propose \textbf{OrderPlace}, a proxy-guided LLM evolution framework for automatically discovering macro placement order strategies. Instead of relying on manually crafted heuristics such as area- or connectivity-based ordering, OrderPlace explores a broader space of code-level policies, ranging from static scoring metrics to dynamic physics-inspired mechanisms. To mitigate the prohibitive cost of evaluating sequences, we introduce a lightweight proxy evaluation mechanism that efficiently filters candidates using a deterministic greedy probe. Experimental results on the standard ISPD 2005 benchmarks demonstrate that OrderPlace discovers novel ordering strategies. Compared with WireMask-EA and the state-of-the-art method EGPlace, OrderPlace reduces wirelength by 34.04\% and 14.08\%, respectively.
Authors: Emre Turan
Abstract: As LLM agents begin to take real, irreversible actions (shell commands, file edits, deploys), the standard safety pattern is a human-in-the-loop approval gate: risky actions pause and wait for a person. We argue the gate is the easy part; the hard part is the judgment - which actions to stop - which the field evaluates against two false assumptions: that there is a ground-truth notion of "risky," and that the human reviewer is a perfect, infinitely-available oracle. On a hand-labeled set of 125 adversarially-weighted agent actions we show that (i) reviewers only moderately agree on what is risky (Fleiss' kappa = 0.52), so there is no single correct label; (ii) framing the guard as selective classification under asymmetric cost makes its operating limits measurable, and on hard inputs the guard cannot safely auto-decide; and (iii) when the reviewer is modeled as endogenous (fatiguing as escalation load grows), realized safety becomes an inverted-U in the escalation rate: more human oversight can make a system less safe, and the safety-optimal guard escalates below full escalation - a setting a load-aware policy also uses to resist a flooding attack that slips a malicious action past a fatigued reviewer. Agent oversight, framed this way, is not only a classification problem but a resource-allocation one: human attention is finite, and the guard's escalation policy spends it. We claim none of these mechanisms as novel - fatigue-aware learning-to-defer (FALCON), cost-sensitive deferral under workload constraints (DeCCaF), trajectory-level guarding, and reviewer-fatigue/flooding attacks are all prior art we cite. Our contribution is an open-source agent-oversight system that operationalizes and measures them in the LLM-agent action-gating setting, turning "is my guard good?" from a guess into a curve. The inverted-U and the flooding attack are modeling results that motivate a human study.
Authors: Shouwei Ruan, Bin Wang, Zhenyu Wu, Qihui Zhu, Yuxiang Zhang, Jingzhi Li, Yubin Wang, Xingxing Wei
Abstract: Multimodal Foundation Models (MFMs) have made substantial progress, yet remain fragile in spatial reasoning over the physical world. A key bottleneck lies in their inability to transform local egocentric observations into a global allocentric spatial representation. To address this, we propose AlloSpatial, an agentic framework for allocentric spatial cognition in foundation models. AlloSpatial introduces World2Mind, a plug-and-play cognitive mapping sandbox that converts egocentric observations into structured allocentric priors, including Allocentric-Spatial Trees and route maps that support querying object topology, geometric relations, passability, and trajectories. To utilize these priors reliably under noisy reconstruction and ambiguous visual evidence, AlloSpatial introduces a Spatial Reasoning Harness for tool-use judgment, modality-decoupled cue collection, and geometry-semantic arbitration. We further internalize this process in Qwen3-VL through cold-start reinforcement learning with a harness-gated trajectory-level reward. Experiments on VSI-Bench and MindCube show that AlloSpatial improves proprietary models by 5%-18% in a training-free setting, while ASTs alone support strong spatial reasoning even when visual inputs are removed. The trained AlloSpatial agents further outperform larger general-purpose models and competitive spatial baselines, suggesting that structured allocentric representations, active tool use, and verifiable reasoning offer a promising route toward spatially capable foundation models.
Authors: Can Wang, Shengwei Wang, Bolin Zhang, Zhiying Tu, Dianhui Chu
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) with varying performance and resource requirements are widely deployed, making it difficult for users to select the most appropriate one among numerous VLM candidates. Existing work reveals the performance paradox phenomenon in language models and focuses on routing methods to solve it. However, developing a router for VLM selection is still a critical yet challenging problem, which primarily faces: 1) lack of specialized data, 2) ineffective feature representation, and 3) rigid model space and costly adaptation. In this paper, we construct a multimodal dataset for VLM selection, containing the outputs of seven mainstream VLMs on 32,626 unique image-text queries. We then propose ARMS, a router for VLM selection. ARMS enhances input signals with VLM profiles, employs a simple but effective architecture to improve representations of queries and VLM capabilities. To improve ARMS' adaptation to new VLMs, we propose two extension training strategies: incremental training and independent training. Experimental results on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution test sets demonstrate the effectiveness of ARMS. In particular, using our training strategy, ARMs (only 800M in size) can adapt to a broader VLM space and defeat commercial models like GPT-4o that are hundreds of times larger in scale. Our code, models, and datasets are available in the anonymous repository.
Authors: Xinyue Liang, Yizhe Yang, Yu Bai, Bin Xu, Jiawei Li, Yang Gao
Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) have attracted increasing attention for their ability to solve complex mathematical problems by generating extended reasoning chains. In this work, we focus on two critical yet underexplored aspects of the reasoning process: reasoning transitions capturing the distinct transitions between reasoning steps and answer candidates reflecting the variety of solution paths produced by the model. We collectively define these two aspects as thinking schemata. We observe a correlation between the diversity of thinking schemata and model performance, which motivates us to enhance diversity as a means to further improve reasoning potential. To this end, we propose Diverse Schemata Policy Optimization (DiScO), a framework that first endows the model with schemata awareness, then encourages diversity through reinforcement learning, and further promotes diverse reasoning at inference time. Experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that DiScO consistently outperforms standard group relative policy optimization. Beyond accuracy, human-annotated analyses show that DiScO substantially improves the model's ability to recover from erroneous initial attempts. Overall, our work suggests the important role that diversity of the thinking schemata plays and points to scaling along the diversity dimension as a promising research direction.
Authors: Jing Wang, Shang Liu, Wenji Fang, Yuchao Wu, Yugao Zhu, Zhiyao Xie
Abstract: LLM-based RTL generation and reasoning is a promising direction for hardware design automation. High-quality benchmarks are critical infrastructure for tracking progress in this direction. However, existing RTL benchmarks face inherent limitations in both scale and task scope. The designs they cover are typically small and simple, and the tasks focus almost entirely on specification-to-RTL generation. Frontier models' performance already saturates on the existing benchmarks. Scaling these benchmarks up is fundamentally difficult because aligned labels are required for benchmarking, such as specifications and testbenches. Such aligned high-quality data are rarely available for real-world designs. We introduce RTL-BenchLS, a large-scale benchmark addressing both limitations above. It contains over 10,000 formally verified Verilog designs, covering substantially larger and more complex designs than existing benchmarks. Beyond specification-to-RTL generation, we propose three novel tasks that jointly evaluate reasoning and generation: round-trip reasoning, masked-content reasoning, and repository-issue reasoning. The first two are self-supervised, which directly resolves the scaling bottleneck. All tasks are verified through formal equivalence checking without any manual testbenches. We evaluate eight LLMs on RTL-BenchLS. Even the best model reaches only 23% on natural-language round-trip reasoning, 28% on masked-content reasoning, and 12% on repository-issue fixing. RTL-BenchLS is substantially more challenging than existing benchmarks. It leaves ample room for future improvement and offers guidance for developing LLM-based methods for hardware design.
Authors: Aiyuan Yang, Canbin Piao, Chengfeng Dou, Da Pan, Dian Wang, Fan Yang, Fei Deng, Fei Li, Guangwei Ai, Hui Liu, Hongda Zhang, Jinyang Tai, Kai Lu, Lijun Liu, Linwei Chen, Linyu Li, Meiqing Guo, Peidong Guo, Qiang Ju, Rihui Xin, Shuai Wang, XinKai Ma, Xudong Chen, Yichuan Mo, Yijie Zhou, Leyi Pan, Yihe Luo, Zian Wang
Abstract: Baichuan-M4 is Baichuan Intelligence's clinical-grade medical large model, designed for continuous care rather than single-turn medical question answering. It is built as a coordinated medical agent system around three pillars: Baichuan-Harness, a unified runtime that keeps reinforcement-learning training and real-world deployment consistent while enforcing action constraints, tool use, long-term patient memory, and multi-agent coordination; a core reasoning model trained with a continuous-care reinforcement-learning framework that integrates span-level reward modeling (SPAR++), reasoning-path compression, curriculum learning, and stabilized policy optimization; and a clinical tool layer for patient-memory management, authoritative evidence-based retrieval, and multimodal medical perception across documents, X-rays, and dermatology. On a cross-dimensional medical evaluation suite, Baichuan-M4 attains leading results in static medical knowledge and safety, dynamic OSCE-style consultation, long-context clinical memory, evidence-based retrieval, medical document OCR, and multimodal image understanding, while lowering the hallucination rate to 3.3%.
Authors: Muhammad Zia Hydari, Raja Iqbal
Abstract: Agentic AI systems can behave differently across runs: the same request may produce a different plan, a different tool call, a different code edit, or a different final answer. Such variability arises from several layers that are often conflated. A foundation model is a large pretrained model, usually adaptable to many downstream tasks, that maps an input context to predictions over outputs. In many current agents, that model is embedded in an orchestration loop that plans, calls tools, observes results, and updates state. One explicit intrinsic source of variability in such systems is token generation: the model computes scores over possible next tokens, the scores are converted into probabilities, and a decoder may sample tokens using a pseudo-random number generator. A small sampled token difference can then propagate upward into a different tool call, code path, search query, or agent state. Other sources of variability are extrinsic to token sampling, including changing environments, live data, serving infrastructure, batch effects, and numerical details. By separating these layers, the manuscript clarifies what it means to call agentic AI systems stochastic, when such variability can be reproduced under matched conditions, and why deterministic execution need not imply identical behavior in deployed settings.
Authors: Ankai Hao, Ke Chen, Huan Li, Lidan Shou
Abstract: Feature engineering remains essential for tabular data analysis, and Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for automating this process, giving rise to LLM-powered AuTomated Tabular feature Engineering (LATTE). However, the absence of standardized platforms prevents fair, cost-aware comparisons. Furthermore, complex methodological designs obscure the specific contributions of individual components; for example, although LFG integrates Tree-of-Thought, few-shot demonstrations, Monte Carlo Tree Search, and natural language generation, the isolated impact of each technique's competitive edge remains unquantified. To address these challenges, we introduce LATTEArena, the first competitive evaluation framework featuring: (1) a six-dimensional taxonomy decomposing 15 representative methods into reusable components; (2) a standardized modular arena for controlled comparison; (3) multi-dimensional assessments covering performance, cost, and robustness; and (4) component-level ablation quantifying each technique's competitive edge. Through extensive evaluations, we reveal 16 key findings, including: (1) Tree-of-Thought with Monte Carlo Tree Search achieves optimal cost-effectiveness; (2) RPN and Code output formats dominate classification and regression tasks, respectively. We publicly release the modular framework and over 4000 execution logs, enabling researchers to seamlessly pit new techniques against existing ones and advance LATTE.
Authors: Jinseong Han, Sunwoong Yang, Namwoo Kang
Abstract: Interior permanent magnet synchronous motor (IPMSM) design requires balancing conflicting objectives and multi-physics constraints, while modern optimization workflows face three bottlenecks: manual problem setup, high finite element analysis (FEA) cost, and unreliable surrogate-based search in sparse or out-of-distribution regions. To address these limitations, we propose an end-to-end automated IPMSM design optimization framework that integrates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for structured problem definition with an uncertainty-aware FEA-AI hybrid optimization pipeline. A Design agent, connected to a motor textbook through RAG, provides domain-knowledge-based options and engineering tips, and compiles an optimization card and a design-of-experiments plan for AI-model training. A Training agent automates electromagnetic FEA, records geometry-validation and solver-failure logs, analyzes failed geometries using ANOVA-based data analysis and LLM reasoning, and invokes a Design Sampling agent to redefine the design space and generate additional samples. An Optimization agent performs GA-based search with uncertainty-driven switching: low-uncertainty candidates are evaluated by AI-surrogate inference, whereas high-uncertainty and reliability-critical Pareto-front or top-K candidates are corrected by high-fidelity FEA and reused for iterative retraining. The framework converts manual, experience-dependent configuration into a reproducible workflow that balances computational cost and prediction reliability. Experimental results under a matched high-fidelity FEA budget show that the proposed hybrid approach achieves better objective performance while maintaining low and further reducible predictive uncertainty, outperforming FEA-only search, which is limited by early budget exhaustion, and AI-only search, which converges to a low-confidence optimum.
Authors: Yanyan Luo, Xue Han, Ruiqiao Bai, Xin Huang, Yitong Wang, Qian Hu, Qing Wang, Chunxu Zhao, Jie Liu, Cong Geng, Lehao Xing, Pengwei Hu, Junlan Feng
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled increasingly personalized interactions by adapting to users' preferences, contexts, and long-term histories. However, the mechanisms that enable personalization also expand the safety landscape in ways not systematically addressed by existing literature. Existing reviews typically focus either on personalization or safety, leaving their intersection largely unexplored. We present the first comprehensive, safety-aware review of personalized LLMs. We organize personalization along three dimensions-user representation, personalization paradigm, and evaluation-and introduce a unified taxonomy of safety risks. At the representation level, we analyze risks arising from diverse user representations. Across mainstream personalization paradigms, we delineate vulnerabilities inherent to prompting, retrieval augmentation, parameter fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, Mixture-of-Experts (MoE), pruning, agent frameworks, and multimodal personalization, and synthesize mitigation strategies across the model lifecycle. Beyond these fine-grained risks, we characterize paradigm-agnostic safety risks arising from personalized adaptation. We further summarize personalized datasets and evaluation methodologies. Through a case study of OpenClaw, we analyze deployment trends in personalized agent ecosystems. Our analysis reveals three structural inadequacies in existing research: safety is evaluated as user-invariant rather than relational, personalization techniques are analyzed in isolation rather than in composition, and evaluation frameworks cannot capture emergent long-term risks. By jointly examining personalized representations, personalization paradigms, safety risks, defenses, and evaluation methods, we provide a unified framework for developing safe personalized LLMs and highlight key directions for future research.
Authors: Cheonsu Jeong
Abstract: This study proposes the Behavioral Protocol Framework (BPF), an entropy-controlled pluralistic alignment framework designed to address two critical challenges in autonomous agent economies: the hivemind effect arising from excessive strategic convergence among agents and the lack of transparency in autonomous decision-making processes. The proposed BPF consists of three core modules: Mentalizing-based Social Intelligence (MbSI) grounded in Theory of Mind (ToM), Pluralistic Alignment (PA), and a Verifiable Execution Kernel (VEK). These modules are organically integrated within a closed-loop architecture that governs the entire lifecycle of agent behavior, from decision-making and execution to verification and feedback. To evaluate the proposed framework, a simulation environment implemented in Python and a Streamlit-based user interface will be developed. Through empirical experimentation, the study aims to examine whether the entropy-control mechanism of the PA module can effectively preserve strategic diversity among agents and mitigate collective convergence, while the VEK module provides a comprehensive and transparent audit trail of the decision-making process. The anticipated results are expected to demonstrate that the proposed framework can simultaneously enhance the stability, efficiency, and trustworthiness of autonomous agent economies. Consequently, this research offers a practical approach for developing robust, transparent, and accountable agent-native economic systems.
Authors: Xiaofeng Lin, Yingxu Wang, Tung Sum Thomas Kwok, Daniel Guo, Sahil Arun Nale, Charles Fleming, Guang Cheng
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents now solve complex tasks through long plan-and-execution traces, yet the ability to locate errors in a completed traces still lags far behind, especially in the \emph{silent failure} regime. Existing approaches predict suspect steps via classifiers or LLM judges, or recover correct answers via retry, but none feed the intervention outcome back to \emph{refine the attribution itself}. We propose \methodname, a method that closes this gap by diagnosing a candidate error step, testing it through controlled replay with a diagnosis-specific patch, and using the verified outcome flip as contrastive evidence to refine the final attribution. Across four localization benchmarks spanning multi-hop reasoning across domains, \methodname achieves the highest localization accuracy among same-auditor methods across all four benchmarks, with the largest gains on structured tool-use traces, while providing actionable localization even when ground-truth answers are unavailable.
Authors: Jie Zhao, Xianqi Dai, Jie Feng, Huandong Wang, Yong Li
Abstract: Dynamic origin-destination (OD) flow generation seeks to synthesize realistic mobility dynamics from temporal context alone, without relying on historical OD observations. A key challenge is to translate semantic temporal signals into temporally coherent OD patterns while preserving the inherent spatial heterogeneity of urban regions. We propose DynaOD, a semantic-driven framework that models temporal dynamics through two complementary perspectives: discrete directional trends that characterize qualitative shifts in urban activity patterns, and continuous temporal evolution that captures how such shifts unfold over time. By jointly encoding these temporal semantics, the framework constructs time-varying region representations that condition pretrained static OD generators in a lightweight and plug-and-play fashion. This modular design further supports scalable deployment and cross-city transferability. Extensive experiments on large-scale real-world datasets show that our method consistently outperforms representative baselines in both predictive accuracy and distributional fidelity. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/csjiezhao/DynaOD.
Authors: Xu Li, Hanzhe Tu, Xun Han
Abstract: Generating novel, feasible, and high-quality research ideas is an important yet challenging task in scientific discovery. Recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based methods often ground idea generation with retrieved literature, but the retrieved evidence is usually provided as flat text, such as titles, abstracts, or summaries. Such flat contexts may contain redundant or weakly relevant information, while making cross-paper relations among problems, methods, mechanisms, and findings difficult to identify and trace. To address this challenge, we propose Graph2Idea, a knowledge graph-guided framework for retrieval-augmented scientific idea generation.Graph2Idea first retrieves papers according to the input topic, transforms them into structured knowledge triples, and dynamically constructs a target-centered knowledge graph to make literature relations explicit. It then extracts compact graph-derived contexts that retain target-relevant relational evidence while reducing noisy textual input.Based on these contexts, a two-stage generation process first identifies promising research directions and then guides the LLM to synthesize candidate ideas from graph-grounded evidence. Experiments on a scientific idea generation benchmark show that Graph2Idea outperforms representative baselines under the automatic evaluation protocol. Compared with the strongest baseline scores, it improves Novelty from 0.45 to 0.52, Quality from 0.24 to 0.29, and Feasibility from 0.22 to 0.28. These results suggest that graph-structured evidence helps LLMs generate research ideas through more explicit, compact, and traceable recombination of prior scientific knowledge.
Authors: Sushant Mehta, Liudas Panavas, Edwin Chen
Abstract: As LLM capabilities advance rapidly, the evaluation methods used to assess them increasingly lag behind. Traditional benchmarks relied on programmatic verification of narrow, surface-level constraints, but real-world instruction following and agentic tasks demand assessment of nuanced, context-dependent behaviors that resist simple scripted checks. We present a systematic analysis of expert-curated rubric-based evaluation as an alternative paradigm, drawing on empirical evidence from two domains: complex instruction following and enterprise agentic tasks. We first articulate five design principles for constructing high-quality rubrics, including Maximum Viable Atomicity, intent-aware criterion design, and iterative LLM-judge calibration. To validate these principles, we introduce ComplexConstraints, a new expert-curated instruction-following dataset in which each prompt is paired with 10-40 atomic rubric criteria. We demonstrate that these expert rubrics are not only better evaluation instruments but also highly effective training signals: training on approximately 1,000 ComplexConstraints examples yields +15.5% improvement for a 4B-parameter model and +12.2% for a 235B-parameter model on instruction following, while single-epoch RL training on a rubric-graded enterprise environment produces gains that transfer to out-of-distribution benchmarks the model was never trained on (+4.5% BFCL, +7.4% Tau2-Bench, +6.8% Tool-Decathlon). Our findings establish that expert-authored rubrics improve both the measurement and the development of frontier LLM capabilities, serving as effective evaluation and RL training signals.
Authors: Suhwan Kim, Taehyun Cho, Geon-Hyeong Kim, Yu Jin Kim, Youngsoo Jang, Moontae Lee, Jungwoo Lee
Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has enabled progress on reasoning-intensive tasks by relying on task-specific verifiers that provide automated correctness signals. However, many realistic language tasks are difficult to equip with reliable verifiers, motivating a growing reliance on reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). In this setting, we argue that a closer examination of how human feedback should be interpreted is essential. We introduce Regret-based Preference Optimization $(\textbf{RePO})$, which reframes RLHF through $\textit{regret minimization}$ rather than reward maximization. Human preferences are often shaped by $\textit{prospective}$ anticipation of outcomes and $\textit{counterfactual}$ comparisons to alternative behaviors, rather than by immediate, outcome-independent utility. $\textbf{RePO}$ captures this structure by modeling preferences as behavior-conditioned assessments of relative suboptimality. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks and human preference datasets demonstrate consistent performance gains, indicating that $\textbf{RePO}$ is an effective and human-aligned approach for training large language models.
Authors: Siyuan Liu, Jinyang Wu
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) commonly inherit the deep, symmetric Transformer backbone designed for unimodal text modeling, and apply the same computation uniformly to image and language tokens. This design overlooks a key modality asymmetry: image and text tokens differ substantially in information density, redundancy, and required reasoning depth. Through a layer-wise analysis of LLaVA-1.5, we observe that vision tokens tend to saturate in the middle layers. Specifically, text-to-image attention decreases from 0.68 at layer 0 to 0.07 by layer 4, and stabilizes near 0.04 after layer 18, whereas text tokens continue to benefit from deep semantic processing. These findings suggest a mismatch between architectural symmetry and depth-asynchronous modality evolution, resulting in redundant visual computation and possible drift in perceptual representations during deep task-specific adaptation. Motivated by this, we propose Dual-Path Vision Token Routing (DPVR), a modality-asymmetric routing framework for efficient MLLMs. Its core instantiation, DPVR-LF (Late-Layer Fusion), routes vision tokens at the saturation point into a one-layer trainable side branch, runs a thirteen-layer text-only forward that skips image positions in the deep stack, and re-fuses the visual and textual streams only at the final layer. With approximately 3% trainable parameters, DPVR-LF preserves competitive multimodal performance on standard benchmarks while reducing visual computation in the deep Transformer stack. The results challenge the conventional assumption that vision tokens must traverse all deep language-model layers, and indicate that a single late fusion layer can be sufficient for maintaining strong perceptual competence in LLaVA-style MLLMs.
Authors: Tiejin Chen, Pingzhi Li, Kaixiong Zhou, Tianlong Chen, Hua Wei
Abstract: Visual Language Models (VLMs) have gained significant popularity due to their remarkable ability. While various methods exist to enhance privacy in text-based applications, privacy risks associated with visual inputs remain largely overlooked such as Protected Health Information (PHI) in medical images. To tackle this problem, two key tasks: accurately localizing sensitive text and processing it to ensure privacy protection should be performed. To address this issue, we introduce VisShield (Vision Privacy Shield), an end-to-end framework designed to enhance the privacy awareness of VLMs. Our framework consists of two key components: a specialized instruction-tuning dataset OPTIC (Optical Privacy Text Instruction Collection) and a tailored training methodology. The dataset provides diverse privacy-oriented prompts that guide VLMs to perform targeted Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for precise localization of sensitive text, while the training strategy ensures effective adaptation of VLMs to privacy-preserving tasks. Specifically, our approach ensures that VLMs recognize privacy-sensitive text and output precise bounding boxes for detected entities, allowing for effective masking of sensitive information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing approaches in handling private information, paving the way for privacy-preserving applications in vision-language models. Our dataset and code can be found here.
Authors: Yongtaek Lim, Hyeji Choi, Minwoo Kim
Abstract: Safety judges are increasingly deployed to evaluate model outputs against evolving criteria, yet recent meta-evaluation work shows they remain brittle under prompt and rubric variation, with false negative-rate swings of up to 0.24 reported for stylistic perturbations alone. We argue that safety judgment is fundamentally a rubric-following problem: a robust judge must apply the given evaluation criteria consistently across rubric formulations rather than memorize one specific template. We propose a training strategy that combines (i) instance-conditioned dynamic rubrics generated from prompt-response-label triples to expose the judge to the variability of evaluation criteria, and (ii) a reliable-to-expressive curriculum that begins with clean fixed-rubric supervision and progressively introduces noisier dynamic-rubric data. We evaluate on a single human-labeled set under three contrasting rubric prompts (HarmBench-style, ShieldGemma-style, and a domain-specific rubric). Our 12B curriculum judge achieves 94.12-94.88% accuracy across the three rubrics with a cross-rubric range of only 0.76, outperforming general-purpose LLMs, dedicated safety classifiers, and reasoning-oriented judges up to 30B in both peak accuracy and stability. An ablation shows that naively mixing dynamic rubrics into SFT increases cross rubric variance (1.44 -> 3.60); only the curriculum schedule recovers and improves on the fixed rubric baseline (variance 0.76).
Authors: Lingyi Meng, Zecong Tang, Haoran Li, Tengju Ru, Zhejun Cui, Weitong Lian, Qi Kang, Hangshuo Cao, Yichen Zhu, Yechi Liu, Kaixuan Wang, Yu-Jie Yuan, Chunwei Wang, Yu Zhang, Bo Dai
Abstract: In recent years, unified multimodal models (UMMs) have emerged to support both understanding and generation within a single framework. Mastering dynamic, multi-turn interleaved image-text dialogues is a crucial task for UMMs in real-world applications. However, existing benchmarks fail to evaluate this important task, as they are often limited to single-turn or static settings, and typically overlook exposure bias in multi-turn interactions. To bridge this gap, we propose IMUG-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for multi-turn interleaved image-text dialogue of UMMs that jointly evaluates their understanding and generation capabilities. Our IMUG-Bench comprises three classes: Static Spatial, Temporal Causal, and Hybrid, covering 3,113 samples and 12,034 interaction turns. It also includes dynamic understanding questions, thereby supporting evaluation that better reflects real-world multi-turn interaction scenarios. Large-scale experiments on IMUG-Bench systematically evaluate mainstream open-source and closed-source UMMs, revealing their capability boundaries and failure modes, and uncovering pronounced exposure bias on the generation side in multi-turn interactions. We further explore several test-time scaling strategies, including Chain-of-Thought, Self-Verification, and Best-of-N Sampling, which effectively improve generation accuracy and mitigate exposure bias in generation tasks. These findings provide insights into enhancing the robustness and multi-turn interaction capability of future UMMs.
Authors: Yongrui Liu, Deyi Xiong
Abstract: Deep Research agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited extraordinary potential in automated paper writing tasks. However, existing systems rely heavily on literature retrieval and synthesis through internet and local knowledge bases, often resulting research in lacking insight and creativity in social science. To address this issue, we propose "Memory-Augmented Social Simulation (MASS)", an innovative paradigm that leverages highly realistic and research-oriented social simulations to enhance the creativity and empirical founding of LLMs-generated research. Specifically, MASS integrates three core components: dynamic goal-path planning with multi-level social norm restraint to guide the simulation, a multi-disciplinary behavior dataset for agent memory cold-start, and a structured forgetting mechanism inspired by the Ebbinghaus curve. Together, these ensure simulation authenticity and provide a robust empirical foundation for generating innovative scholarly papers. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, showing a 6.81\% improvement in generation overall quality over foundation LLMs and 17.19\% gain in Insight over strong baselines.
Authors: Sergi Masip, Jonathan Swinnen, Yutong Hu, Renaud Detry, Tinne Tuytelaars
Abstract: Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) have shown promising world modeling capabilities, enabling planning in latent space by optimizing action trajectories using methods like the Cross-Entropy Method (CEM). These methods are, however, too computationally expensive and ineffective for long-horizon planning. Furthermore, these methods typically require an explicit image of the goal state, which is not always possible in real-world tasks. In this work, we tackle these limitations by proposing Forward-Forward-JEPA (FF-JEPA), a hierarchical approach leveraging two forward dynamics models. Alongside a standard action-conditioned forward model, we introduce an action-free latent planner that predicts the next subgoal given the current state. This approach removes the need for goal images and enables long-horizon planning by decomposing complex trajectories into a sequence of tractable, short-term optimization problems. Preliminary results on PushT demonstrate that FF-JEPA successfully overcomes flat world models' long-horizon collapse, highlighting this approach as a promising direction for goal-free planning.
Authors: Qianjun Pan, Yutao Yang, Junsong Li, Jie Zhou, Kai Chen, Xin Li, Qin Chen, Liang He
Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables agents to access external knowledge at inference time, but it primarily retrieves fragmented declarative evidence, leaving agents to repeatedly infer task procedures from passages, manuals, examples, logs, or trajectories. This raises a fundamental question: can skills extracted from external knowledge bases be installed into an agent, enabling it to rapidly approximate domain expertise? In this paper, we propose Anything2Skill, a taxonomy-guided framework that compiles heterogeneous external knowledge into reusable, retrievable, and executable skills for agents. Given a corpus of knowledge records, \textsc{Anything2Skill} first decomposes each record into evidence windows and performs plan-and-expand skill extraction under a skill-tree prior. The extracted candidates are then converted into structured skill contracts that specify invocation conditions, contraindications, action moves, workflow steps, constraints, output specifications, supporting evidence, and confidence scores. To construct a deployable procedural memory, Anything2Skill manages the extracted skills in a persistent SkillBank through taxonomy-aware compilation, registry-level reconciliation, lifecycle tracking, versioned updates, and visible skill-tree projection. At inference time, agents retrieve both task-specific passages from the original knowledge base and relevant procedural skills from the SkillBank, allowing RAG to provide declarative evidence while compiled skills provide reusable procedural guidance. Experiments on qsv and GitHub-CLI show that Anything2Skill combined with RAG achieves 98.85\% and 94.10\% success rates, respectively, substantially outperforming RAG-only agents. These results suggest that compiling latent procedural knowledge into explicit skills is an effective way to extend retrieval-augmented agents from knowledge access toward capability reuse.
Authors: Wei Pang, Xiangru Jian, Hehan Li, Zhixuan Yu, Alex Xue, Jinyang Li, Zhengyuan Dong, Xinjian Zhao, Hao Xu, Chao Zhang, Reynold Cheng, M. Tamer \"Ozsu, Tianshu Yu
Abstract: Tabular encoders are usually evaluated inside task-specific end-to-end pipelines, so models from different training paradigms are difficult to compare directly even when they operate on similar tabular signals. We introduce TRL-Bench, a multi-granular tabular representation learning (TRL) benchmark that standardizes cross-paradigm representation-level evaluation: each encoder exports row-, column-, or table embeddings through its supported wrapper, and shared lightweight heads probe them across three suites: TRL-CTbench (column/table), TRL-Rbench (row), and TRL-DLTE (compositional Data-Lake Table Enrichment spanning all three granularities). To support this standardized setting, we release curated benchmark assets and task reformulations, including 50 OpenML tables with 123 verified targets, 16 row-pair linkage rewrites, and a 47,772-table DLTE lake derived from 1,379 parent tables. Across 20 models and 16 tasks, TRL-Bench shows that once downstream conditions are standardized, encoder quality is capability-specific rather than captured by a single leaderboard. In TRL-CTbench, generic text encoders often lead on tasks with strong surface-text signal, while tabular specialists win where their pretraining objective aligns with the task. In TRL-Rbench, within-table prediction and cross-table linkage favor different training regimes, with atomic linkage performance correlating strongly with the row-matching stage of DLTE pipelines. In TRL-DLTE, the strongest pipelines combine capability-matched specialists rather than reuse a single encoder, and top end-to-end quality depends on non-additive compositional fit rather than per-stage marginal rank alone. TRL-Bench provides a common protocol for measuring reusable signal in exported tabular representations under shared downstream conditions. Code and data: https://github.com/LOGO-CUHKSZ/TRL-Bench
Authors: Micka\"el Basson (CRIStAL, Scool), Philippe Preux (CRIStAL, Scool)
Abstract: Neural combinatorial optimization has recently achieved strong results on the Euclidean Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) using generative models such as diffusion and consistency models. State-ofthe-art approaches like FT2T combine fast consistency-based prediction with gradient-based inference time refinement. However, gradient search often incurs significant computational overhead and may not align with the discrete structure of feasible solutions. We introduce Projected Consistency Inference (PCI), a plug-and-play, retraining-free alternative that replaces gradient refinement with structure-aware projections: PCI decodes valid Hamiltonian tours from the consistency model output and applies a lightweight local search (e.g., 2-opt). PCI achieves an average optimality gap (OG) of 0.17% on TSP with 500 cities, and 0.31% on TSP with 1000 cities, outperforming FT2T best settings (OG 0.22% and 0.36%, respectively) while reducing the inference time up to 30 to 40%. PCI also exhibits lower variance and memory usage, and can surpass classical heuristics such as LKH3 in rapid solution generation. Our results demonstrate that structure-aware inference time operations provide a practical and principled path for neural TSP solvers, complementing training time objectives.
Authors: Haoran Sun, Wenjie Li, Yujie Zhang, Zekai Lin, Fanrui Zhang, Kaitao Chen, Xingqi He, Yichen Li, Mianxin Liu, Lei Liu, Yankai Jiang
Abstract: Medical agent systems are increasingly expected to support interactive clinical decision making rather than only static question answering. In such settings, effective agents must reuse prior experience across evolving cases, yet existing memory mechanisms often retain raw historical traces that are redundant, noisy, and difficult to govern. More importantly, they rarely distinguish which memories are truly useful for future reasoning. This limits their ability to accumulate compact and reliable experience for long-horizon clinical reasoning. To close this gap, we propose SkeMex, a post-deployment self-evolution framework that improves medical agents through a skill-based memory without updating model weights. SkeMex distills informative interaction trajectories into structured skills that encode reusable procedural knowledge, and organizes them into a multi-branch repository spanning general, task-specific, and action-level experience. To determine which memories should be reused and retained, SkeMex estimates context-dependent utility from environment feedback and uses it to guide value-aware retrieval and repository governance. A closed-loop ``Read--Write--Assess--Govern" lifecycle further supports continual evolution by writing new skills, updating utilities, promoting useful memories, and removing harmful entries. Experiments across diverse clinical tasks show that SkeMex consistently outperforms representative memory-based agents in both offline and online settings. It also generalizes across model backbones and supports transferable skill memory. All data and code will be released publicly.
Authors: Haotong Yang, Ting Long, Yi Chang
Abstract: Tool learning enables LLMs to invoke external tools to accomplish tasks. Prior studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of a hierarchical structure: a high-level policy handles global planning and decomposes tasks into manageable sub-tasks, and a low-level policy focuses on invoking tools to solve these sub-tasks. However, these works typically optimize the high-level and low-level policies separately, leading to planner-executor misalignment and limiting LLM performance on tool-use tasks. In this paper, we propose a method called Capability-Aligned Hierarchical Learning (CAHL), which leverages RLVR to jointly optimize both policies, enabling better alignment between the high-level planner and the low-level executor. Experiments on constrained tool-use benchmarks (API-Bank and BFCL) and an open-ended environment (Bamboogle) demonstrate the effectiveness of CAHL.
Authors: Shuhao Li, Weidong Yang, Yue Cui, Zizhuo Xu, Lipeng Ma, Fan Zhang, Xiaofang Zhou
Abstract: Efficient acquisition, storage, and utilization of traffic data are critical challenges in spatio-temporal data management. Most traffic data systems collect and store observations at fixed, coarse-grained temporal intervals to reduce storage and computation costs. However, such coarse-grained data severely limits downstream applications that require predictions at a finer temporal granularity. Collecting and maintaining fine-grained traffic data across all locations and time periods would impose a substantial burden on database storage and preprocessing pipelines. To address this temporal granularity mismatch, we formulate a novel problem: predicting fine-grained future traffic using coarse-grained sampled data. We propose the Spatial-Temporal Refinement Predictor (STRP), a granularity-aware framework for spatio-temporal data systems. STRP integrates two components: Tree Convolution for efficient and interpretable spatial dependency modeling, and Inverse Dilated Convolution for progressive temporal extrapolation. STRP supports two practical prediction settings: window-based and duration-based, to handle different forms of granularity mismatch. Experiments on six benchmark datasets show that STRP significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both accuracy and efficiency. Our work offers a practical and interpretable approach to managing granularity mismatches in spatio-temporal traffic data systems.
Authors: Radeen Mostafa, Sawradip Saha
Abstract: We present SUPERBROWSER, an autonomous web-navigation agent designed against a single guiding hypothesis: a web agent should browse the way a person browses. A human reading a page does not retain every pixel they have seen; they look at a few candidate targets, decide on one, and remember only what is needed to keep the goal alive. We operationalize this perception-cognition-action triad as three coupled mechanisms. First, a vision-first bounding-box pipeline labels candidate interactive regions on every screenshot and feeds them, asynchronously prefetched, to the language model so that the "eye" precedes the "hand". Second, a three-role brain -- an Orchestrator that classifies and routes, a Planner that evaluates progress every few steps, and a Worker that emits per-step actions -- separates strategic from operational reasoning. Third, a structured Ledger stores only what a person would: the goal, the last three actions, a small set of facts and dead-ends, and a handful of checkpoints; a six-phase eviction loop systematically discards stale screenshots, state blobs, and reasoning traces from the live context. Action execution is a three-tier click cascade (Chrome DevTools Protocol to Puppeteer to scripted) with humanized Bezier motion, plus a chevron-aware bounding-box snapper that resolves the "small arrow beside a large label" ambiguity. On the Mind2Web Hard benchmark (66 tasks), SUPERBROWSER attains 89.47% success, placing third overall and ahead of every published open/research browser-agent baseline by a large margin. We argue that the gain comes not from any single trick but from the consistent application of a cognitive contract throughout the system.
Authors: Mina Remeli, Moritz Hardt
Abstract: Pairwise comparisons combined with aggregation methods like Elo have become central to evaluating generative models, yet concerns remain that they reward superficial stylistic cues or display judge biases. In a more positive turn, we show that model rankings from pairwise comparisons strongly agree with ground-truth-based accuracy rankings when such ground truth is available for comparison. By converting five well-known benchmarks into free-form generative evaluations, we find that Elo rankings achieve a Spearman correlation above 0.9 with accuracy rankings and substantially outperform direct evaluation when the judge is weak. Furthermore, style and judge bias have only minor effects on model rankings, despite most judgments occurring on pairs where both candidate answers are correct (or incorrect). On such pairs, we find that repetition after the final answer (echo) is a causal driver of judge preference.
Authors: Hengxin Fan
Abstract: Prior work treats structured output as a reasoning tax, but this framing is incomplete: the cost of formatting depends strongly on a model's spare capacity. Using information-matched prose controls and a four-level schema complexity gradient, we separate format-specific effects from prompt-length confounds across 4 models and 5 benchmarks with 0% parse failures on successfully generated responses. We find that structured formats are capacity-dependent. Models with sufficient headroom absorb JSON constraints without degradation (Sonnet: $88.7\pm4.0$% JSON vs. $89.3\pm1.7$% CoT on MATH-Hard). In contrast, formats severely degrade models operating near their limits through two distinct mechanisms. First, under standard token budgets, Haiku drops 36.2pp ($p < 0.0001$) largely due to truncation. Second, even with extended budgets eliminating truncation, GPT-4o-mini drops 28.0pp ($p < 0.001$), revealing pure capacity competition independent of token exhaustion. This format penalty scales with schema complexity (McNemar $p < 0.0001$) and cannot be explained by prompt length alone. Furthermore, these results qualify claims of frontier model immunity: on AIME competition math, Opus 4.7 drops from 96.2% to 91.0% under JSON ($-5.3$pp; the displayed percentages are independently rounded, exact difference is $7/133 = 5.26$pp $\approx 5.3$pp). A delayed-structure ablation -- reasoning freely before formatting -- recovers most of the lost accuracy (3-run mean: 80--87%), supporting the capacity competition mechanism. The practical implication is not to avoid structured output, but to match it to capacity: when a model is near its limits, think first, format later.
Authors: Wanli Li, Bowen Zhou, Yunyao Yu, Zhou Xu, Yifan Yang, Dongsheng Li, Caihua Shan
Abstract: Computer-use agents (CUAs) increasingly operate in runtimes that combine visual desktop control, command-line execution, code editing, browsers, and external tools. Existing benchmarks, however, often evaluate these interfaces as separable capabilities, leaving long-horizon cross-interface orchestration under-tested. Thus, we introduce WeaveBench, a long-horizon hybrid-interface benchmark with 114 tasks across 8 real-world work domains, grounded in real user requests and publicly verifiable artifacts. Each task requires agents to combine GUI observations/actions with CLI/code operations within a single trajectory. We evaluate these tasks on a real Ubuntu desktop inside deployed CLI-agent runtimes, augmented with a minimal desktop-control plugin. We also propose a companion trajectory-aware judge that inspects deliverables, files, screenshots, logs, and action traces, while detecting shortcut behaviors such as fabricated visual evidence or hard-coded metrics. Across frontier model-runtime pairings, the best PassRate reaches only 41.2%, showing the benchmark remains far from saturated. The trajectory-aware judge further reveals that outcome-only grading substantially overestimates agent performance. Overall, WeaveBench exposes a critical gap in CUA evaluation and provides an effective testbed to measure whether agents can orchestrate GUI, CLI, and code operations across long-horizon real-world tasks.
Authors: Yixuan Zhang (Section of Health Data Science and AI, Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark), Yang Song (Section of Health Data Science and AI, Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark), Hao Wang (Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA), Samir Bhatt (Section of Health Data Science and AI, Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark, MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, School of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom), Hengguan Huang (Section of Health Data Science and AI, Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark, MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, School of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom)
Abstract: Wastewater influenza surveillance can reveal community circulation before clinical reporting, but wastewater alone is not a fully identifiable proxy for human burden. Existing wastewater models assume a fixed evidence set, while generic evidence-acquisition methods treat official surveillance streams as interchangeable costly features. We cast wastewater-first influenza monitoring as a selective decision problem: starting from mandatory wastewater evidence, the system must decide whether wastewater is sufficient, which delayed official stream to query next, and when abstention is the only scientifically defensible action under source ambiguity. We propose Bayesian Selective Latent Inference (BSLI), a principled Bayesian method that maintains a posterior over latent burden and identifiability, certifies answerability through explicit scientific gates, and optimizes query-stop decisions with an exact cost-calibrated Bellman policy. We prove the key variational, answerability, Bellman-optimality, and one-dimensional cost-calibration properties. On a fixed public-data benchmark with 5,933 forecasting episodes and 3,102 source-ambiguity episodes, BSLI improves the matched-budget cost-performance frontier while preserving conservative abstention under source ambiguity.
Authors: Rya Sanovar, Srikant Bharadwaj, Hritvik Taneja, Moinuddin Qureshi
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) injects LLM queries with relevant documents to improve response quality. This injection increases prompt length and slows time to first token (TTFT). Unlike standard queries, RAG queries have a unique property of context reuse where the same documents recur across user queries. Thus, fully recomputing documents for every RAG query does redundant compute and increases TTFT. Prior works precompute KV tensors of RAG documents offline and coarsely recompute some tokens during online prefill. However, such KV reuse is often slower than full recomputation on modern GPUs due to high-latency disk transfers. Further, such a coarse-grained recomputation degrades accuracy. To address these limitations, this paper proposes SIFT: Selective-Index For Fast Compute of RAG Prefill by Exploiting Attention Invariance. SIFT processes documents offline and extracts fine-grained locations of high attention scores for each document. Next, we identify the following attention invariance insights that enable us to exploit the extracted locations during runtime: (1) Local-Attention Invariance: The location of high attention scores within a document remain invariant to surrounding documents. This helps us predict the location of high scores where the document attends to itself. (2) Cross-Attention Consistency: Keys with high intra-document attention also attract cross-attention from subsequent documents. This helps us predict the location of high scores where the document attends to future documents. Critically, SIFT stores no KV data and only stores locations of high scores in the form of two compact bit vectors. SIFT's storage is up to 24,000x smaller than KV tensors, obviating costly disk transfers. During prefill, SIFT computes the attention only for the marked locations and improves TTFT by 1.71x while holding accuracy within 1% of full recompute.
Authors: Bojie Rong, Zheyu Shen, Qiaoping Wang, Pengfei Kang, Yang Xu, Yawen Wei, Hanyu Wu, Zhi Zhao, Leihao Pei, Linquan Jiang
Abstract: We present AliyunConsoleAgent, a web agent framework for automated documentation verification in real-world cloud consoles. Major cloud platforms encompass hundreds of products with rapid feature iteration, causing console UIs to frequently diverge from their corresponding documentation. Verifying that documented procedures accurately reflect the current console and can be executed end-to-end demands an estimated 4 million recurring inspections annually, yet manual coverage remains below 1%. While agent systems built on frontier proprietary models achieve high success rates, their prohibitive cost and data privacy constraints preclude large-scale deployment. We propose a two-stage training paradigm: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on distilled frontier-model trajectories, followed by reinforcement learning using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and a dual-channel outcome reward model in real cloud environments. To support large-scale RL training, we construct a high-determinism rollout system featuring Terraform-based resource pre-provisioning and LLM-driven on-demand provisioning, which effectively isolates environment noise from the training signal. We further introduce a rule-based reward evaluation protocol grounded in backend audit logs, providing objective, reward-hacking-resistant outcome judgment. Our model evolves from mechanical instruction following to autonomous decision-making with cloud console and product-specific understanding. Experiments on a challenging 278-task benchmark where the best frontier model achieves only 65.34% demonstrate that AliyunConsoleAgent-32B achieves a 63.52% mean success rate -- a 20.24 percentage-point improvement over the base model, narrowing the gap to the best frontier proprietary model to 1.82 pp (bootstrap 95% CI [-1.27, 7.39]) -- at 92% lower inference cost.
Authors: QuocViet Pham, Elvir Karimov, Andrey Galichin, Ivan Oseledets
Abstract: LLMs have recently achieved strong results on formal proving benchmarks. However, existing evaluations remain heavily concentrated on competition-style problems and often fail to capture how models behave on longer, more dependency-rich mathematical developments. We introduce TheoremBench, a Lean4 benchmark designed to evaluate theorem provers beyond contest settings. The benchmark is built from nearly one hundred classical theorems and is released in two complementary forms: a plain main version containing one target theorem per instance, and a premised version that expands each theorem into a structured family of related proving tasks consisting of the main theorem together with automatically extracted supporting subtheorems. This design enables evaluation of not only whether the final theorem was proved from scratch, but also of partial progress through the internal proof structure of a theorem. Our experiments show that explicit premises substantially improve performance for Lean4-capable prover models. To provide a comprehensive evaluation, we introduce theorem-level coverage and token-efficiency metrics that expose qualitative differences in proof behavior. The results show that current provers remain strongly biased toward easy subtheorems and often solve theorems through long and inefficient tactic traces rather than compact proof plans. TheoremBench therefore provides a more fine-grained view of formal reasoning ability and highlights the importance of structural benchmark design for evaluating Lean4 theorem provers.
Authors: Guillermo Del Pinal, Youngchan Lee, Calum McNamara, Alejandro Perez Carballo
Abstract: Work on `emergent misalignment' shows that finetuning LLMs on narrow tasks can induce broadly misaligned behavior. This supports the `persona selection' (PSM) hypothesis: during pre-training, LLMs learn to simulate different characters and perspectives, which can be elicited and refined during post-training. This paper investigates the converse phenomenon, `emergent alignment', and uses it to support and refine the PSM and motivate a novel desideratum for alignment. We finetune a helpful-only model on broad and narrow safety tasks. To create SFT samples, we follow the `Constitutional AI' (CAI) approach and use four constitutions which encode reasonable alignment strategies: deontology, consequentialism, virtue ethics, and aligning AIs as subordinate to human authority. For each of those models, we show that finetuning on two narrow safety sub-categories reliably induces emergent alignment over a representative set of general safety categories, and on safety subcategories that we directly filtered-out of the data sets used for narrow alignment. To test the `PSM' using a more fine-grained evaluation, we used a multidimensional `ethical persona' diagnostic. For each constitutionally finetuned (broad/narrow) model, we evaluate how well their behavior matches their expected signature profile. Our results show that our CAI models acquire their expected ``ethical persona'' -- e.g., the model narrowly fine-tuned on SFT samples created using the consequentialist constitution agrees significantly more with utilitarian than deontological beliefs. Yet our coarse and fine-grained evaluations show that there are significant differences across our (broad/narrow) finetuned CAI models in how well they project. We conclude that alignment strategies should be evaluated, not just on their (in-distribution) general safety performance, but also specifically on their degree of projectability.
Authors: Giorgio Leonardi, Stefania Montani, Manuel Striani, Alessandro Canessa, Delfina Ferrandi
Abstract: Objective: Conformance checking in healthcare seeks to assess whether patient care pathways adhere to clinical guidelines. However, its practical application often depends on the availability of formal, machine-interpretable representations of guidelines, such as Computer-Interpretable Guidelines (CIGs), which are seldom available in real-world clinical settings. Methods: This work introduces a modular framework based on the orchestration of Large Language Models (LLMs) to support medical conformance checking directly from unstructured clinical and guideline texts, without requiring predefined CIGs. The proposed architecture integrates multiple LLMs and supporting components to extract patient traces from clinical discharge letters, identify normative rules from textual clinical guidelines, translate these rules into executable scripts, and compute a Trace Conformance Indicator to quantify compliance within the event log. Results: The framework was implemented and evaluated in the stroke care domain at the neurological ward of Alessandria Hospital. Hundreds of patient traces were automatically extracted from hospital data and assessed against 50 rules derived from the reference guideline. The analysis showed that more than 86\% of the available traces were conformant. Conclusion: The results demonstrate the feasibility of using orchestrated LLMs for practical healthcare conformance analysis. At the same time, the study provides evidence of a high level of adherence to stroke care guidelines at Alessandria Hospital.
Authors: Yoojin Nam, Jinhoon Jeong, Namkug Kim
Abstract: As autonomous research agents and AI co-scientist systems push large language models (LLMs) from drafting toward end-to-end manuscript production, the bottleneck shifts from generation to verification. Fluent LLM output can hide fabricated citations, numbers that drift from source tables, and unmet reporting-guideline items; existing tools generate without verifying, and self-critique inherits the blind spots that produce confident fabrication. We describe an architecture pairing generation with verification, resting on three principles: decompose the workflow into self-contained skills, gate every stage transition with halt-on-failure, and resolve each integrity question with the cheapest sufficient mechanism, a deterministic, re-executable check where one suffices and a prose-level probe only where interpretation is unavoidable. This determinism-where-possible split, organized as an integrity-gate taxonomy, is the core contribution. It is realized as MedSci Skills, an open-source toolkit of 43 skills with a 21-detector deterministic tier, evaluated on three public-dataset pipelines (STARD, PRISMA, STROBE) and a seeded-defect ablation. Across the three pipelines every content-hash manifest verified clean and the gates surfaced real defects; on 27 identical injected defects the deterministic gates detected all 27 with no false positives on the matched clean fixtures, whereas a single-prompt LLM reviewer detected 11, its misses in code, bibliography, and style defects the prose hides. Determinism-where-possible verification yields an auditable, re-executable trail that exposes the evidence a human needs to check an LLM-assisted manuscript: feasibility and reproducibility evidence, not a claim of human-competitive quality, which a separate blinded study addresses. MedSci Skills is MIT-licensed and archived (v3.8.0).
Authors: Zhanchao Xu, Haoyang Li, Qingfa Xiao, Fei Teng, Chen Jason Zhang, Lei Chen, Qing Li
Abstract: Existing sparse attention and KV cache compression methods for long-context LLM inference typically apply fixed sparsity patterns or uniform budgets across all attention heads, overlooking the substantial variation in attention behavior among heads and contexts. We observe two distinct entropy patterns among attention heads: Rigid Heads, whose entropy stays near zero across input segments, and Dynamic Heads, whose entropy fluctuates significantly. Crucially, the distribution of these types is context-dependent and cannot be predetermined offline. We therefore propose EntropyInfer, a training-free framework that uses attention entropy to adaptively allocate compute at the granularity of individual heads and segments during prefilling. For decoding, we introduce a latent KV cache compression scheme that leverages generated output tokens, rather than prefill tokens alone, to identify and retain the most critical cache entries. Extensive experiments on Llama, Qwen and openPangu model series show that EntropyInfer consistently outperforms baselines including SnapKV, AdaKV, and CritiPrefill, achieving up to 2.39$\times$ end-to-end speedup beyond 100k tokens with minimal quality degradation compared to full attention. The code is released in https://github.com/SHA-4096/EntropyInfer.
Authors: Yinan Wang
Abstract: AI Scientist agents are often evaluated as if capability were mainly a function of model quality, prompting, or reasoning scaffolds. We test a different hypothesis in drug-asset valuation: for knowledge-intensive scientific decisions, the limiting factor is often the evidence substrate the agent can access. We run a controlled three-arm ablation on a production valuation agent: A is a plain web-only LLM analyst, B adds public structured tools plus a 14-dimension valuation playbook, verifier, objectivity policy and red-team, and C adds the proprietary Noah AI corpus of curated pipeline, trial and deal intelligence. Across a 13-asset stratified benchmark, B improves calibration and audit discipline: tier-in-range accuracy rises from 0.80 to 0.89 and objectivity from 3.16 to 3.30. But B does not remove the factual ceiling. Under capability-superset accounting, A and B recover only 0.25 and 0.38 of the curated gold competitive record, while C recovers 0.96; on the curated long-tail subset, C reaches 0.93 vs. 0.26/0.30. Raw blind-panel decision quality is similar for A and B (7.01 vs. 6.96), so we introduce completeness-aware decision utility: informed decision-quality = decision-quality x gold-coverage. On this metric, C reaches 7.43 vs. 1.76/2.57 for A/B. Even a perfect non-proprietary-data report would be capped at 3.83 by B's coverage. The result is not that reasoning scaffolds are unimportant; they improve calibration and discipline. Rather, proprietary evidence sets the upper bound of what the AI Scientist can know and therefore decide.
Authors: Gilad Gressel, Rahul Pankajakshan, Julia Diament, Efim Hudis, Krishnashree Achuthan, Yisroel Mirsky
Abstract: As LLMs are deployed as agents, reliable monitoring requires knowing not only what they output, but which instructions are steering their behavior. This is difficult when models infer unintended subgoals, follow contextual cues, or are influenced by prompt injections and hidden objectives. While activation-to-language methods suggest that hidden states can reveal natural-language information, existing approaches are not designed to recover the full set of simultaneous instructions, constraints, prohibitions, and subgoals active in agentic settings. We formalize this problem as instruction set retrieval and introduce PRISM, an activation-conditioned interpreter that decodes hidden states from a frozen target model into a faithful bullet list of active instructions. Unlike prior activation-to-language methods, PRISM is trained to recover instruction sets directly, using judge-guided GRPO to reward covered instructions and penalize unsupported ones. Across benign, constrained, prompt-injection, and hidden-objective settings, PRISM outperforms activation-to-language baselines, especially on security-relevant objectives.
Authors: Tom Beyer, Svea Wisy, Sven Tomforde
Abstract: The growing complexity of self-adaptive and self-organising systems, fuelled by advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), has made them increasingly difficult to understand and trust. While Explainable AI aims to provide insight into AI decision-making, a more advanced goal is for systems to explain themselves - an ability referred to as Self-Explainability (SX). This article presents a systematic literature review on SX, analysing existing approaches, including their domains, targets, and evaluation methods. The review develops a unified definition and taxonomy of SX and introduces Levels of Self-Explainability, providing a framework for positioning current and future research. Our results show that most SX approaches remain conceptual, with few practical implementations. Moreover, there is currently no formal or de facto standard for evaluating SX, highlighting a major research gap. This work thus establishes a foundation and roadmap for advancing Self-Explainability in complex systems.
Authors: Momina Ahsan, Sarfraz Ahmad, Ming Shan Hee, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Preslav Nakov
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly evaluated on table reasoning tasks, but the role of table representation remains under-explored. In practice, the same table content may appear in different structural formats, such as HTML, Markdown, and LaTeX, or as rendered images. However, existing evaluations often let content, format, layout, and modality vary together, making it difficult to isolate representation effects. We introduce TABVERSE, a controlled multimodal table benchmark that aligns the same table content across multiple structural formats and rendered images, with question category and difficulty tags. This design enables systematic evaluation of representation effects while holding table content fixed. We evaluate LLMs and VLMs across three tasks: Question Answering (QA), Structural Understanding Capability (SUC), and Structure Reconstruction (SR). Our results show that representation choice substantially affects table understanding. Models generally perform better with structured text than with rendered images, but the size of this gap depends on the task, model, and format. HTML is often the most robust text format, while row-sensitive structural tasks and syntactically usable LaTeX reconstruction remain challenging. These findings show that table representation is a key factor in reliable table evaluation.
Authors: Yutong Bian, Dongjie Cheng, Heming Xia, Yongqi Li, Wenjie Li
Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) improves the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) and has been extended to Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). More recent work further moves from text-based multimodal reasoning toward interleaved-modal reasoning, where intermediate steps can incorporate both textual rationales and visual evidence. In this work, we propose a bolder and more ambitious idea: could images alone serve as the reasoning medium for both language and multimodal tasks? To explore this, we propose optical reasoning, which treats images as a standalone reasoning medium. We instantiate this concept with two variants: typographic-based optical reasoning, which optimizes visual layouts for compact rationale rendering, and graphical-based optical reasoning, which composes text and graphical elements into structured visual rationales. Across mathematical, scientific, and interleaved-modal reasoning benchmarks, optical reasoning can match or even exceed traditional text reasoning while reducing reasoning tokens by an average of 28.57% on language tasks and 16% on multimodal tasks, achieving 1.96 times the token efficiency of text reasoning. These results show that images can effectively and efficiently encode rationales while providing a unified visual canvas for reasoning.
Authors: Jonathan F. Carter, Lionel Tarassenko
Abstract: Foundation models offer a promising route to compress multi-modal physiological signals into compact representations of human health, with broad applications across sleep medicine, cardiology, neurology and other healthcare domains. Existing models have typically been trained with masked-reconstruction or contrastive objectives. However, masked reconstruction may be poorly suited to the stochastic nature of these signals, while contrastive approaches rely on positive-pair definitions despite the semantic invariances of physiological signals being poorly understood. In this work, we show that next-token prediction is a simple and scalable alternative. We develop Hypnos, a multi-modal sleep foundation model trained using eight different sensing modalities (e.g. EEG, ECG, respiratory signals) drawn from over 20,000 overnight polysomnography recordings. We tokenize each modality into streams of discrete tokens using residual vector quantization, then train a large auto-regressive RQ-Transformer to jointly predict the next token across all modalities in parallel. After training, Hypnos can be applied to continuous streams of sensor data from any subset of supported modalities, generating embeddings for downstream tasks. Across a range of benchmarks, Hypnos significantly outperforms existing foundation models. In sleep stage classification, we match the performance of strong supervised baselines on held-out test sets whilst using \(100\times\) less labelled data. Hypnos even generalises to daytime physiology, surpassing a dedicated ECG foundation model at detecting atrial fibrillation. Our results demonstrate that next-token prediction is a strong self-supervised objective for representation learning from multi-modal physiological signals.
Authors: Dun Li, Jiatao Li, Hongzhi Li
Abstract: Recursive self-design refers to AI-assisted modification of the mechanisms by which an AI system is built, evaluated, and improved. This paper treats MetaAI not as a mature paradigm, but as a working term for a human-seeded, AI-expanded development pattern in which the design space itself becomes a target of modification. We propose an operational evidence framework with four criteria: inspectable target system, meta-level modifier, feedback-directed selection, and recursive continuation. We then map public systems, including Darwin Goedel Machine (DGM), STOP, Goedel Agent, and ShinkaEvolve, against these criteria. DGM provides the most direct currently reported evidence: its published results show improvement from 20% to 50% on SWE-bench Verified and from 14.2% to 30.7% on full Polyglot after 80 iterations, with ablations suggesting that both open-ended exploration and self-improvement contribute. Finally, we provide MetaAI-Mini, a reproducible HumanEval-based protocol and codebase. Because no completed model run is included in this build, MetaAI-Mini is reported as a protocol rather than as an experimental result.
Authors: Djawad Bekkoucha, Abdelkader Ouali, Bruno Cr\'emilleux
Abstract: Output space pattern sampling is a powerful alternative to exhaustive pattern mining for exploring large pattern spaces, as it enables users to focus on representative patterns drawn according to a chosen interestingness measure. In this paper, we address the problem of sampling interval patterns under user-defined syntactic constraints. We introduce CFips, a sampling approach that incorporates constraints directly into the sampling procedure. The approach relies on a multi-step sampling framework and supports several syntactic constraints by decomposing them into elementary predicates on interval bounds while preserving exact sampling guarantees. We formally prove that CFips samples interval patterns proportionally to their frequency within the constrained pattern space. The experimental results show that integrating constraints into the sampling procedure enables to complete mining tasks that would otherwise fail within a given time out.
Authors: Hongcheng Gao, Hailong Qu, Jingyi Tang, Jiahao Wang, Zihao Huang, Hengkang Qiao, Shihong Huang, Junming Yang, Yi Li, Hongyixuan Yuan, Wenjie Li, Bohan Zeng, Wenbo Li, Bo Wang, Jianhui Liu, Olive Huang, Haoyang Huang, Wentao Zhang, Guoqing Huang, Nan Duan, Yinpeng Dong
Abstract: Spatial reasoning is a foundational capability for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to perceive and operate within the physical world. However, existing benchmarks predominantly rely on passive evaluation (e.g., static VQA) or simulator-specific pipelines, failing to assess general interactive spatial understanding. We introduce SpatialWorld, a unified benchmark designed specifically for evaluating the interactive spatial understanding of multimodal agents in complex real-world tasks. Integrating eight heterogeneous simulation backends under a shared, simulator-agnostic protocol, SpatialWorld features 760 human-annotated tasks across diverse domains (e.g., household routines, travel, social collaboration). Agents must solve tasks under vision-only partial observability, actively gathering egocentric visual evidence and expressing decisions via a unified, text-based action interface native to MLLMs. For reliable evaluation, each task includes a human-validated initial state, a reference trajectory, and a terminal-state verifier. Evaluating 15 advanced agents reveals that robust spatial task solving remains challenging: the strongest model, GPT-5, achieves an average task success rate (TSR) of only 17.4%, while the leading open-source model, Qwen-3.5, reaches 14.1%. Further analysis exposes a clear mismatch between task success and execution efficiency, alongside substantial domain-specific performance variations. These bottlenecks in active exploration and long-horizon planning position SpatialWorld as a rigorous testbed for future spatial agents.
Authors: Suraj Biswas, Saurabh Gupta, Pritam Mukherjee
Abstract: Ask a pretrained biomedical language model whether "cortisol 28 ug/dL" and "stock-market volatility" are related, and it returns a cosine similarity of 0.83 on a scale where 1.0 means identical. The two share no mechanism. This is not a corner case: every off-the-shelf biomedical encoder we tested (BioBERT, PubMedBERT, BioM-ELECTRA) scores unrelated cross-domain pairs between 0.76 and 0.92 when the answer should be near zero. Accuracy on cross-domain discrimination is 0%. Retrieval systems survive this, because a language model downstream filters the noise. A Large Behavioural Model (LBM), a foundation model whose subject is a person rather than a sentence, does not: it reasons over a graph of a user's life and treats embedding proximity as evidence that two events are causally linked. False proximity writes a false causal edge, and everything downstream inherits the error. Here, embedding geometry is not a tuning knob; it is correctness. We report the fix. A contrastive pass over 72,034 pairs raises PubMedBERT BIOSSES correlation from 0.633 to 0.828 and within-vs-across-domain separation from 1.05x to 1.63x. A second pass, BODHI, mines hard negatives from edges absent in a biomedical knowledge graph and lifts separation to 2.30x and the discrimination gap to +0.392, at a 4.5% BIOSSES cost. On an Intel Xeon 6737P with AMX, OpenVINO cuts single-query latency from 1367 ms to 10 ms (133x) and reaches 555 sentences/sec. One finding contradicts standard advice: FP16 beats INT8 on this silicon at every serving batch size, and we explain why. The same model on a no-AMX Ice Lake instance runs 13-27x slower. We release the benchmark suite, training corpora, the BODHI generator, and the OpenVINO scripts.
Authors: Wesley Pegden
Abstract: We present Trellis: an autoformalization system that leverages LLM agents in a deterministically constrained workflow to enforce incremental progress in Lean autoformalization tasks through iterative refinement of natural language proofs. Our approach is motivated by the common mathematician's notion of what it means to have a rigorous proof in the first place: namely, that it would be routine to elaborate any part of the proof in further detail. The result is a system which aims to achieve reliable autoformalization on a modest budget and with generalist agents, with specialization to autoformalization coming not from any task-specific agent training but instead from a meaning-of-rigor inspired workflow enforced by process semantics. We link to an end-to-end Lean formalization of a recent Ramsey theory breakthrough produced by the process.
Authors: Mohammad Beigi, Ming Jin, Lifu Huang
Abstract: Reward hacking is usually studied after it becomes visible, once a model earns high proxy reward while failing the intended task. We instead study what proxy RL teaches before that failure appears. We introduce Proxy Reward Internalization and Mechanistic Exploitation (PRIME), a learned capability to assess task correctness, predict proxy acceptance, and reason about exploitable proxy--gold gaps. In coding RL environments with exploitable pytest rewards, we measure PRIME through chain-of-thought monitoring, direct probes, and activation-level concept vectors. We find that PRIME emerges in a staged sequence before sustained reward hacking, and that its current direct-probe score forecasts later hack onset and severity even when the visible hack rate is still low. PRIME also adapts when the evaluator changes, retargeting to whichever proxy--gold gap remains rewarded and persisting when gold reward suppresses overt hacking, and ablating its activation directions reduces hacking. Across checkpoints, in-domain PRIME tracks out-of-domain misalignment. Together these results suggest that exploitable proxy RL amplifies a proxy-internalization capability upstream of visible hacking, making PRIME a candidate early-warning signal for broader alignment risk.
Authors: Hudson de Martim
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a standard architectural response to unreliability in legal AI, yet high-profile failures, including fabricated citations submitted to courts and anachronistic legal content presented as current, continue to appear across jurisdictions. We argue that these failures are not residual confabulations to be eliminated by scaling language models, but symptoms of an architectural mismatch between probabilistic retrieval and the hierarchical, temporal, and institutional structure of legal knowledge. We develop the argument in three moves. First, we articulate the ontological commitment of legal knowledge as a triad of properties derivable from classical legal theory: hierarchical and mereological structure, diachronic dynamism under operational closure, and causal traceability of institutional provenance grounded in the duty of justification. Second, we identify three corresponding pathologies of retrieval (mereological blindness, diachronic blindness, and causal opacity), each developed with an operational definition, a failure mechanism, a canonical example, and detection criteria for diagnostic use. Third, we review the state of the art through this lens, showing that existing approaches address these requirements unevenly and do not yet compose into a paradigm that treats them as co-constitutive. From this analysis we derive four architectural commitments that characterize the deterministic-by-design direction for legal retrieval: ontological primacy, event reification, bitemporal correctness, and deterministic interaction protocols. The framework concerns quaestio juris (which norms apply and in what state) rather than the downstream tasks that act on identified norms, and addresses legislative and constitutional retrieval primarily, with interpretive time as an explicit extension.
Authors: Pu Ning, Quan Chen, Kun Tao, Xinyu Tang, Tianshu Wang, Qianggang Cao, Xinyu Kong, Zujie Wen, Zhiqiang Zhang, Jun Zhou
Abstract: Large language models are increasingly expected to handle complex, long-horizon real-world tasks whose context demands can grow without bound, yet model context windows remain inherently finite. Recent work explores a paradigm where a main agent decomposes tasks and dispatches subtasks to subagents, which execute and return only summarized results, conserving the main agent's context budget. However, performing this well requires delegation intelligence: the ability to decompose complex tasks, determine when and what to delegate, and integrate returned results into the ongoing workflow. Training data for this capability is scarce in naturally occurring text, and to our knowledge, how to synthesize such data and train models to acquire this capability remains largely unexplored in the open-source community. To bridge this gap, we present a preliminary exploration targeting deep research, a representative long-horizon agent task. Specifically, we design a harness that guides the model toward high-quality task decomposition and delegation, while constraining subagents to return results properly to support the main agent's workflow. The harness-guided trajectories naturally encode correct delegation decisions, which we use as supervised fine-tuning data to internalize delegation intelligence into model weights. Our resulting model, SearchSwarm-30B-A3B, achieves 68.1 on BrowseComp and 73.3 on BrowseComp-ZH, the best results among all models of comparable scale. We will release our harness, model weights, and training data to facilitate future research.
Authors: Rishabh Sabharwal, Hongru Wang, Amos Storkey, Jeff Z. Pan
Abstract: Existing benchmarks for deep research agents (DRAs) assess only single-shot outputs, ignoring a key question: can DRAs improve their reports when guided by feedback? To investigate this, we conduct a multi-turn evaluation of DRAs under two feedback settings: self-reflection, in which the agent revises its report without any external diagnostic signal, and process-level feedback, in which the agent receives guidance targeting gaps in its research strategy. To enable process-level feedback, we design Research Gap Inference (RGI), a method that analyzes patterns of satisfied and unsatisfied rubric criteria to infer research-process gaps. Our analysis reveals three key findings: (i) under self-reflection, agents incorporate and regress on rubric criteria at nearly equal rates, yielding negligible net improvement; (ii) a single round of process-level feedback yields substantial gains, raising the normalized score by approximately $8$-$15$ points and yielding a roughly $35$-$40\%$ incorporation rate; (iii) these gains do not compound over subsequent turns, as agents regress on up to $24\%$ of previously satisfied criteria when rewriting the full report to address remaining gaps. Even with targeted guidance, reliable multi-turn improvement remains out of reach for the DRA architectures we evaluate. Our code and results are publicly available at https://github.com/sabharwalrishabh/Multi-Turn-Evaluation-of-DRAs.
URLs: https://github.com/sabharwalrishabh/Multi-Turn-Evaluation-of-DRAs.
Authors: Arsalan Shahid, Gordon Suttie, Philip Black
Abstract: Foundation models are moving from response generation into operational roles. They plan across steps, call tools, request human input, coordinate with other agents, and increasingly carry responsibility for work that affects customers, claims, code, contracts, and clinical decisions. Production deployments are no longer one human supervising one model. They are multi-human, multi-agent collaborations that cross teams, time zones, and trust boundaries. The technical surface for this collaboration remains weakly specified. When an agent drafts a response and a human edits it before it ships, the moment of human judgement is the most valuable signal in the system. In current practice it is recorded, if at all, in application code, chat threads, ticket comments, and tribal memory. Two protocol standards address adjacent concerns: MCP standardises agent access to tools and data, and A2A standardises agent-to-agent interoperability. Neither defines the shared workspace in which humans and agents perform accountable work together. This paper presents CHAP, the Collaborative Human-Agent Protocol. Under CHAP, the override that used to vanish into a chat thread becomes a structured event carrying a diff, a rationale, and a content hash. The handoff between shifts becomes a portable envelope rather than a pinned message. The human approval of an agent's draft becomes a non-repudiable signed decision that can be replayed years later. The protocol achieves this through a small Core (workspaces, participants, tasks, artefacts, and an append-only evidence log) together with composable profiles that add review, modes, routing, deliberation, handoff, identity, signatures, and transparency-backed audit as deployments require them. Specification, reference implementation, conformance suite, and worked examples are available at: https://github.com/BrightbeamAI/chap
Authors: Matthew Ho, Brian Liu, Jixuan Chen, Audrey Wang, Lianhui Qin
Abstract: Advanced scientific simulators expose specialized input languages that turn simulation goals into executable configurations, but learning them can cost domain scientists hours to days. We study simulator setup as a problem of agent-tool interface grounding: what minimal simulator-specific adaptations are needed for an off-the-shelf coding agent to operate real scientific software? Our intuition is that coding agents already know how to navigate files, edit code, run commands, and repair outputs, but they lack the simulator's executable contract: its vocabulary, structural constraints, validation rules, and termination conditions. We introduce SIGA, a Simulator-Interface Grounding Adapter that supplies this contract through retrieval, procedural memory, in-trajectory validation, and validation-enforced termination. We primarily evaluate SIGA on GEOS, an open-source multiphysics simulator used in subsurface science. SIGA produces a complete GEOS deck in about five minutes with TreeSim above 0.90, matching an extended-budget human expert who took about three hours, a roughly 36x wall-clock speedup. On a harder held-out set, grounding raises TreeSim from 0.720 to 0.789, a roughly 10% relative gain over the bare agent, and can reduce the across-seed standard deviation by 16x. Self-evolution further improves SIGA by rewriting adapter contents from prior trajectories, yielding the highest held-out GEOS mean and matching or outperforming the strongest hand-designed configuration. Transfers to OpenFOAM and LAMMPS show that the dominant mechanism shifts by interface: validation matters most when structural completeness is the bottleneck, while memory and retrieval matter most when domain correctness is the bottleneck. These results suggest that lightweight, self-improvable grounding layers can turn general coding agents into practical operators of scientific software.
Authors: Avijit Ghosh, Anka Reuel, Jenny Chim, Wm. Matthew Kennedy, Srishti Yadav, Jennifer Mickel, Yanan Long, Andrew Tran, Anastassia Kornilova, Damian Stachura, Kevin Klyman, Felix Friedrich, Jeba Sania, Jan Batzner, Anoop Mishra, Eliya Habba, Yixiong Hao, Nathan Heath, Shalaleh Rismani, Usman Gohar, Andrea Loehr, David Manheim, Ruchira Dhar, Sree Harsha Nelaturu, Aarush Sinha, Leshem Choshen, Drishti Sharma, Ishan Khire, Amit Saha, Subramanyam Sahoo, Michael Hardy, Michael Alexander Riegler, Kabir Manghnani, Michelle Lin, Yanan Jiang, Yilin Huang, Asaf Yehudai, Jessica Ji, Aris Hofmann, Mubashara Akhtar, Max Lamparth, Nuno Moniz, Yacine Jernite, Stella Biderman, Zeerak Talat, Sanmi Koyejo, Mykel Kochenderfer, Irene Solaiman
Abstract: AI evaluation results are produced at scale but reported inconsistently across leaderboards, model cards, benchmark papers, and company blogs. The cost is interpretive: readers cannot reliably compare results across sources, identify what a report omits, or trace an aggregate claim to its underlying evidence. Recent efforts address isolated components but leave three gaps: they cover only narrow slices of the evaluation lifecycle and do not compose into a single interpretable record; they specify static representations that do not differentiate the questions different stakeholders bring to the same evidence; and they remain proposals on paper, lacking the extraction infrastructure required for adoption at scale. We present \EvalCards{}, an operational reporting layer that composes benchmark metadata, evaluation run data, and model metadata into a unified record. We (1) derive a reporting schema from a structured review of 52 papers and 10 stakeholder interviews, (2) implement four interpretive signals (reproducibility, documentation completeness, provenance and risk, and score comparability), rendered through reader modes calibrated to research and non-research audiences, and (3) deploy a monitoring tool that applies \EvalCards{} across 5,816 models, 635 benchmarks, and 101,843 results, surfacing systematic gaps in current reporting practice.
Authors: Osman Tugay Basaran, Falko Dressler
Abstract: Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques have become integral part in advancing next generation wireless communication systems by enabling sophisticated data modeling and feature extraction for enhanced network performance. In the realm of open radio access networks (O-RAN), characterized by their disaggregated architecture and heterogeneous components from multiple vendors, the deployment of generative models offers significant advantages for network management such as traffic analysis, traffic forecasting and anomaly detection. However, the complex and dynamic nature of O-RAN introduces challenges that necessitate not only accurate detection mechanisms but also reduced complexity, scalability, and most importantly interpretability to facilitate effective network management. In this study, we introduce the XAInomaly framework, an explainable and interpretable Semi-supervised (SS) Deep Contractive Autoencoder (DeepCAE) design for anomaly detection in O-RAN. Our approach leverages the generative modeling capabilities of our SS-DeepCAE model to learn compressed, robust representations of normal network behavior, which captures essential features, enabling the identification of deviations indicative of anomalies. To address the black-box nature of deep learning models, we propose reactive Explainable AI (XAI) technique called fastshap-C.
Authors: Osman Tugay Basaran, Martin Maier, Falko Dressler
Abstract: Future sixth-generation (6G) mobile networks will demand artificial intelligence (AI) agents that are not only autonomous and efficient, but also capable of real-time adaptation in dynamic environments and transparent in their decisionmaking. However, prevailing agentic AI approaches in networking, exhibit significant shortcomings in this regard. Conventional deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based agents lack explainability and often suffer from brittle adaptation, including catastrophic forgetting of past knowledge under non-stationary conditions. In this paper, we propose an alternative solution for these challenges: Bayesian reasoning via Active Inference (BRAIN) agent. BRAIN harnesses a deep generative model of the network environment and minimizes variational free energy to unify perception and action in a single closed-loop paradigm. We implement BRAIN as O-RAN eXtended application (xApp) on GPU-accelerated testbed and demonstrate its advantages over standard DRL baselines. In our experiments, BRAIN exhibits (i) robust causal reasoning for dynamic radio resource allocation, maintaining slice-specific quality of service (QoS) targets (throughput, latency, reliability) under varying traffic loads, (ii) superior adaptability with up to 28.3% higher robustness to sudden traffic shifts versus benchmarks (achieved without any retraining), and (iii) real-time interpretability of its decisions through human-interpretable belief state diagnostics.
Authors: Song Guo, Huawei Huang, Dongping Liu, Aoyu Zhang, Luyao Zhang
Abstract: The deployment of embodied artificial intelligence via world-model-based robotics presents a transformative opportunity for blockchain infrastructure, establishing urgent demand for trustworthy data provenance, cross-organizational governance, and incentive-compatible sharing across decentralized ecosystems. Simultaneously, quantum computing advances recognized by the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics and the Turing Award threaten the cryptographic primitives securing these data economies, creating an interdependent imperative: long-lived verification for embodied AI depends on crypto-agile architectures capable of withstanding quantum adversaries. This tutorial examines blockchain as the coordination layer bridging this dual transition, from financial substrate to foundational Cyber-Physical-Social Systems infrastructure that simultaneously secures against quantum cryptanalysis and enables scalable, trustworthy data economies. The session opens with an immersive AWS Braket demonstration engaging participants with superconducting, trapped-ion, and neutral-atom hardware to assess cryptographic threat timelines and witness ECDSA-to-post-quantum signature transitions. Five integrated modules progress from embodied AI and world-model requirements through quantum hardware reality and evidence-based security migration, to scalable cross-shard architectures via BrokerChain protocols, trustworthy data economies implementing Croissant metadata standards and robotic learning provenance, and industry ecosystem integration for multi-modal cloud deployment. By bridging quantum hardware realities with embodied AI data requirements, this tutorial charts blockchain as unified infrastructure for next-generation decentralized intelligent environments, providing open-source frameworks and roadmaps for architecting quantum-resistant, interoperable, and data-trustworthy systems.
Authors: Marco A. Valenzuela-Esc\'arcega, Enrique Noriega-Atala, Gus Hahn-Powell, Clayton T. Morrison, Mihai Surdeanu
Abstract: We introduce the novel task of bidirectional small-granularity search between code and text, where the queries are small snippets of text or code and the results are also small fragments of the opposite modality, i.e., code or text. This task establishes direct links between text in scientific publications and corresponding code segments, in support of better and faster understanding of scientific methods. We introduce a large dataset for the proposed task that includes a training partition with textual descriptions of code generated automatically using GPT-4, and three testing partitions, one in-domain and two out-of-domain (OOD) that contain manually-annotated data as well as material from other domains. We also propose a modular approach to address this task. Our approach shares an encoder across four different subtasks that learn start/end of answer spans in both directions. We show that our method achieves good results in-domain, and encouraging results OOD. This suggests that addressing this task with automatically-generated data is possible, but there is exciting future work to be done.
Authors: Sanchita Porwal, Sai Prasath S, Xingjian Bi, Madelyn Scandlen
Abstract: This study investigates the phenomenon of hallucinations in domain-adapted Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing on the fine-tuning of the Llama-2 model with the Lamini dataset. Hallucinations, or the generation of nonsensical or unfaithful content by LLMs, pose a significant challenge, especially when these models are fine-tuned with domain-specific data. Our methodology involves a series of experiments testing memorization, recall, and reasoning capabilities of the fine-tuned LLM, comparing its performance on novel question-answer pairs and domain-specific information. We found that while the model shows proficiency in tasks similar to its training data, its capability to accurately reason about and recall new domain-specific information remains limited, leading to instances of hallucination. The model demonstrates a tendency to provide correct answers with extra information, suggesting an inclination toward over-generation. These results suggest important limitations of fine-tuning-only approaches for mitigating hallucinations when adapting LLMs to specialized domains and underscore the need for more robust methods in adapting LLMs to specialized domains. The study also provides insights into the varying performance of LLMs on different types of information, revealing a comparative weakness in handling domain-specific queries.
Authors: Samir Wagle, Abiral Adhikari, Reewaj Khanal, Batsal Bhandari, Prashant Manandhar, Praveen Acharya, Bal Krishna Bal
Abstract: Legal domains in high-resource languages like English have widely adopted artificial intelligence for legal question answering. However, data scarcity in low resource languages such as Nepali has limited the training of large language models on Nepali legal texts. This study presents the first application of a Retrieval Augmented Generation based model for Nepali legal question answering using case laws extracted from the Nepal Kanun Patrika digital archive. Using BM25 on chunked documents, the approach achieved a top precision at one of 91 percent, and up to 75 percent with the multilingual E5 large model. Evaluation of generated answers showed 74 percent groundedness, 85 percent truthfulness according to an automated judge model, and 84 percent human evaluated truthfulness when using BM25 document retrieval, with a 92 percent successful answer generation rate. These results demonstrate that the RAG pipeline can effectively address the gap in legal question answering for low resource languages and provide a foundation for reliable AI systems in the Nepali legal domain.
Authors: Zirui Wang, Yusen Hou, Shaofeng Liang, Bowen Tian, Yanlin Zhang, Wenshuo Chen, Yutao Yue
Abstract: The explosive growth of large language models (LLMs) has created a heterogeneous and poorly documented ecosystem, making systematic model comparison increasingly important for provenance auditing, security analysis, and model selection. Existing representation methods struggle to address this setting efficiently. Approaches analyzing internal parameters are powerful when architectures are compatible, but face scalability barriers under structural heterogeneity, while methods relying on external outputs may conflate models with similar behaviors and are difficult to align in richer output spaces across different tokenizers. To bridge this gap, we propose ABLE (Attribution-Based Large-model Embedding), a framework that leverages the interpretability space to construct model representations. By aggregating gradient-based feature attributions via a tokenizer-agnostic word-level alignment, ABLE captures model-specific input-sensitivity patterns rather than only surface-level outputs. Beyond empirical utility, we provide a stability analysis showing that, under standard regularity assumptions for differentiable Transformer-style models, ABLE induces a Lipschitz-continuous parameter-to-embedding map with finite-sample convergence guarantees. Extensive experiments on 239 open-source LLMs demonstrate that our training-free approach achieves competitive or superior performance in relation prediction, model routing, and benchmark score prediction.
Authors: Liesbeth Allein, Marie-Francine Moens
Abstract: Causal graphs in text are typically populated by observable, predefined events. In contrast, we study implicit causal graph construction from text by treating each described cause-effect pair as the begin- and endpoint of an underlying latent causal graph and using large language models (LLMs) to infer intermediate causal events. We compare end-to-end graph construction with methods that frame the task as causal chain discovery. In the latter, graphs are built either by aggregating inferred chains or by progressively expanding partial chains through an iterative search process. We further explore Wisdom of the Crowd extensions that access causal knowledge from multiple LLMs in post-hoc aggregation and collaborative inference settings. We analyze trade-offs among these approaches and evaluate the validity of inferred causal relations using a manually curated database of 1,560 scientifically validated causal pairs. This database-based evaluation is proposed as reliable, resource-efficient, and transferable to settings where ground-truth graphs are unavailable.
Authors: Lin Mu, Guoji Wang, Li Ni, Lei Sang, Zhize Wu, Peiquan Jin, Yiwen Zhang
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong potential for recommendation (LLMRec) due to their powerful reasoning and generalization abilities. However, effectively aligning the textual semantics modeled by LLMs with the collaborative signals remains a key challenge. Existing methods either translate collaborative information into textual prompts or inject pre-trained embeddings into the LLM, both of which treat structural information as static input and fail to capture high-order relational dependencies. To bridge this gap, we propose GraphLoRA, a novel framework that generalizes low-rank adaptation from independent to structure-aware propagation. GraphLoRA embeds a trainable graph message-passing network within the low-rank adaptation pathway, enabling structural signals to propagate through the parameter space. This design allows collaborative topology to explicitly guide parameter updates, fostering deep integration between graph-structured and textual semantic information. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that GraphLoRA not only outperforms state-of-the-art LLM-based recommendation methods but also achieves superior generalization, effectively balancing structural reasoning capability with computational efficiency. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/wgj15965/GraphLoRA}{https://github.com/wgj15965/GraphLoRA}.
URLs: https://github.com/wgj15965/GraphLoRA, https://github.com/wgj15965/GraphLoRA
Authors: Michael Hassid, Yossi Adi, Roy Schwartz
Abstract: The prevailing paradigm for training LLMs has evolved to rely on a massive post-training phase consisting of SFT and RL. In this position paper, we argue that this methodology effectively marks a reversion to the ``pre-train then fine-tune'' approach of the BERT era, explicitly tailoring models to the desired behaviors and specific benchmarks on which they are evaluated. We begin with a historical overview of LLMs, describing the different phases of the LLM evolution. We argue that the current landscape is remarkably similar to the early days of LLMs, where task performance heavily relied on fitting the models to in-distribution datasets. To empirically demonstrate this, we compare pre-trained models to randomly initialized ones, by fine-tuning both variants on modern reasoning datasets and evaluating them on competitive math and code benchmarks. We show that models post-trained from scratch yield highly non-trivial performance. Our findings suggest that current post-training methodologies function primarily as a distribution-fitting mechanism. We finish by positing that developing generally capable models and systems requires moving beyond extensive post-training for predefined behaviors, shifting instead toward training procedures where models ``learn how to learn''.
Authors: Naveen Bera, Pulijala Sai Nikhila, Kondaguduru Abhiram, Shaik Gayaz Ali, Shoaib Sadiq Salehmohamed, Shaik Mohammed Omar, Jinal Prashant Thakkar, Hansika Aredla, Shalmali Ayachit
Abstract: Hallucination in large language models (LLMs), defined as the generation of factually incorrect or unsupported content, remains a critical barrier to reliable deployment. We present BEACON (Behavioral Entropy Aggregation for Cross-model hallucination detectiON), a black-box hallucination detection framework that operates purely on model outputs without requiring access to internal representations or external knowledge bases. BEACON extracts a 31-dimensional feature vector from structured multi-pass generation, integrating NLI-based semantic entropy, embedding geometry, chain-of-thought consistency, and paraphrase stability signals. A gradient-boosted classifier trained on 7,617 labeled examples across seven benchmarks achieves 0.8123 +/- 0.0102 AUROC (95% CI: 0.7632-0.8251), outperforming standalone semantic entropy (+0.2298) and SelfCheckGPT-style consistency baselines (+0.2457). Feature importance analysis shows that hallucination is inherently multi-dimensional, requiring combined uncertainty signals. An efficient 5-call variant achieves 0.7795 AUROC, enabling practical deployment across black-box LLM APIs.
Authors: Shengli Zhou, Xiangchen Wang, Guanhua Chen, Feng Zheng
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have recently been applied to 3D vision-language (3D-VL) tasks, which require spatial reasoning to identify target objects relative to anchors. Scene graphs are commonly employed to represent such relations, but reasoning over complete graphs incurs high token costs and computational inefficiencies, motivating the need for pruning. Existing pruning methods primarily rely on spatial proximity and often remove task-relevant relations, thereby undermining reliable spatial reasoning. To address these limitations, we derive a key requirement for scene graph pruning: preserving spatial relations that are most pertinent to the specific 3D-VL task. Guided by this insight, we propose the Conceptual-Adjacent Scene Graph Pruner (CAPruner). CAPruner integrates fuzzy semantic relevance with spatial proximity to estimate the importance of relations, enabling the selection of critical relations in a task-specific context. Moreover, to avoid costly relation-level annotations, CAPruner is trained by supervising the aggregated scores of each node's incident edges. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAPruner effectively preserves relations essential for spatial reasoning, leading to substantial performance improvements of LLMs on 3D-VL tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/fz-zsl/CAPruner.
Authors: Jakub Muszy\'nski, Pawe{\l} Pozorski, Maria Ganzha
Abstract: We introduce mllm-shap, an open-source Python framework designed to extend Shapley Value (SV) explainability from text-only Large Language Models to Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) processing joint text and audio inputs. While text-based attribution is well-studied, mllm-shap addresses three critical challenges unique to the multimodal regime: (1) Modality-aware coalition masking, which manages the interleaved processing of discrete text tokens and dense audio encoder frames. (2) Multi-turn conversation tracking, utilizing per-token metadata to maintain role and modality context. (3) Phonetic alignment-based token grouping, a novel technique that reduces the coalition space by 10x to 50x, rendering SV estimation computationally feasible for long-form audio. The platform implements five SV estimation strategies, including a Complementary Contributions (CC) estimator with Neyman-optimal allocation that demonstrates superior convergence over standard Monte Carlo baselines. mllm-shap is provided as a pip-installable package featuring an interactive web-based GUI for granular attribution visualization. To our knowledge, this is the first publicly available framework providing a complete, reproducible pipeline for SV-based explainability in text-audio MLLMs.
Authors: Sam Ryan
Abstract: RLHF-trained models are systematically biased toward agreement over accuracy, a structural property of the training process. We present Durable Evaluation Framework (DEF) Arbitration, a multi-agent architecture that mitigates identity-framed sycophancy by arbitrating between two models tuned to opposing DEFs, with a pragmatist synthesizer evaluating both arguments blind to their origins. This paper evaluates a prompt-based instantiation of DEF Arbitration. The key mechanisms are static DEF tuning, identity stripping before synthesis, single-round independent argumentation, and blind arbitration. We evaluate five instantiations on 200 stratified questions from SycophancyEval. All tested DEF variants (AnCifer, DeWin, FeynStein, BurGal, Trident) significantly outperform the single-model baseline (18.5%) and instructed-opposition baseline (29.0%), with DeWin achieving 48.5% accuracy (z=6.36, p<0.001 versus both). The variants are not significantly different from each other at n=200. The BurGal variant achieves 53.0% but functions as an architectural validity check; its consensus/heterodox axis structurally favors the heterodox model on every benchmark question. A pre-training floor affects an estimated 40% of questions; fine-tuned DEF models are the identified next step.
Authors: Pawe{\l} Pozorski, Jakub Muszy\'nski, Maria Ganzha
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) effectively integrate text and audio to interpret context in complex interactive dialogues. However, the internal mechanisms by which heterogeneous modalities influence model behavior remain opaque. While Shapley Values (SV) provide a robust, model-agnostic framework for local explainability in text-based NLP, their extension to multimodal data is hindered by cross-channel dependencies, intricate dialogue structures, and the prohibitive computational complexity of dense audio representations. In this work, we formalize a multimodal extension of the Shapley Value framework, treating discrete text tokens and aligned audio segments as cooperative features. To ensure computational feasibility, we deploy a suite of efficient estimation strategies: exact SV computation for low-dimensional inputs and sampling-based approximations - including Monte Carlo permutations and stratified sampling with Neyman-optimal allocation - to minimize variance under constrained computational budgets. To resolve the granularity mismatch between modalities, we propose Spectrogram-Guided Phonetic Alignment (SGPA), a novel preprocessing method that maps high-frequency audio streams to interpretable, word-aligned segments. Our contribution is twofold: first, we provide an open-source, model-agnostic Python package and a companion GUI for the computation and interactive visualization of multimodal attributions. Second, we evaluate our framework using curated subsets of the VoiceBench and Infinity Instruct datasets across diverse multilingual scenarios. Our experimental results reveal that input modality is a primary driver of attribution volatility and demonstrate that standard syntactic importance proxies often fail to predict model attention in multimodal, cross-lingual contexts.
Authors: Nick Mo\"es, Toni Lorente, Amin Oueslati, Jonathan Smith, Robin Staes-Polet, Radina Kraeva
Abstract: Frontier artificial intelligence is reshaping all aspects of society, from economic output or military capability to democratic institutions. The EU is entering this transformation from a position of structural dependence: frontier models originate almost exclusively from the United States or China, the US holds approximately sixteen times the EU's AI supercomputing capacity, and only 15% of global hyperscale data centre capacity resides within EU borders. Although the European Commission has accelerated its policy response, existing initiatives remain fragmented and lack a cohesive vision for securing strategic autonomy across the full frontier AI value chain. Here we propose a unified framework connecting five sovereignty pillars (economic competitiveness, resilience, security and defence, European values, and foreign relations) to a decomposition of the frontier AI stack comprising five layers, 26 components, and 29 sub-components. This framework allows the identification of critical gaps, redundancies, and inter-pillar trade-offs that current EU policy leaves implicit. Our analysis of the AI Gigafactory Initiative illustrates how a sovereignty-centred lens reveals conflicts that narrowly economic framings obscure. Moreover, this framework offers policymakers a structured basis for designing, evaluating, and prioritising frontier AI interventions across multiple dimensions of European strategic autonomy across the 92 initiatives from four major Commission communications we. identify, and beyond.
Authors: Zeyuan Wang, Dongyang Hou, Cheng Yang, Xuezhi Cui, Linrui Xu, Bo Yu, Gaozhi Zhou, Ziyu Li, Liangtian Liu, Kai Ouyang, Wang Guo, Lili Zhu, Chao Tao
Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based agents provide a novel paradigm for the automated processing of remote sensing(RS) data. Their success in complex RS tasks rely on extensive specialized tool libraries. However, tool documentation often exceeds the context window limits of LLMs, making precise tool retrieval essential for agentic workflows. Existing tool retrieval methods face "semantic asymmetry" bottleneck: natural language queries typically express macro-level intentions lacking tool-specific semantics, while tool documentation provides fine-grained technical descriptions lacking operational context for workflows. To bridge this semantic gap, this paper proposes a bidirectional semantic complementary tool retrieval method. First, on the query side, we introduce a planning-based query enhancement mechanism that leverages the reasoning capabilities of agents to decompose abstract intentions into logical subtasks, thereby actively supplementing the query with missing functional semantics. Second, on the tool side, addressing the strong coupling characteristics of RS tool chains, we construct a dynamic tool dependency graph with continual learning capabilities. By employing a neighborhood information aggregation mechanism, contextual information from precursor tools is explicitly injected into the current node representation, enriching tool descriptions with contextual semantics. Experimental results on the RS dataset GeoPlan-bench and the general-purpose dataset API- Bank demonstrate that the proposed method not only significantly improves tool retrieval accuracy for complex RS tasks but also exhibits robust extensibility for transfer to general-domain tasks. The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/geox-lab/BSCTR.
Authors: Prabal Shrestha, Bohan Jiang, Haoning Xue, Huan Liu, Xinyi Zhou
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance on objective tasks such as video understanding and reasoning. However, it remains unclear whether they can approximate subjective human responses, which depend not only on content comprehension but also on individuals' social contexts. To address this gap, we evaluate MLLMs as synthetic participants in an emerging task: assessing perceived sensory engagement with short videos. Grounded in the Perceived Message Sensation Value (PMSV) framework, we compare ratings from recruited human participants and profile-conditioned MLLM simulations (n=673) using a 17-item scale measuring emotional arousal, dramatic impact, and novelty. We find that even leading MLLMs (Gemini 3 Flash and Qwen 3 Omni) show limited agreement with human participants. The models exhibit distinct downward mean-shift and central-tendency biases in their rating distributions. They both introduce and flatten subgroup differences, while showing inconsistent sensitivity to participant profiles. Prompting strategies affect these metrics differently, modestly improving some aspects while worsening others. These results highlight both the challenges and opportunities of developing MLLMs as synthetic participants in video-based research. Data and code: https://github.com/MINDLab25/mllm-human-simulation-eval
URLs: https://github.com/MINDLab25/mllm-human-simulation-eval
Authors: Changshuo Liu, Junran Wu, Zhongle Xie, Wenqiao Zhang, Kaiping Zheng, Jiaqi Zhu, Qingpeng Cai, Ooi Gene Anne, Marcus Chun Jin Tan, Jianwei Yin, James Wei Luen Yip, Beng Chin Ooi
Abstract: Generative AI is reshaping healthcare, yet most existing advances rely on hospital-grade devices, which limits their accessibility and potential for health management outside clinical settings. With the proliferation of portable devices and telemedicine, healthcare is shifting toward home-based Diagnosis-It-Yourself (DIY) care. Despite this promise, several distinctive challenges remain: (i) home-collected data are heterogeneous, exacerbated by the absence of standardized large-scale datasets; (ii) models require adaptation to variable task demands and evolving individual conditions; (iii) the broad spectrum of home care tasks lacks a unified benchmark for systematic evaluation. In this paper, we present DIYHealth Suite, a comprehensive framework designed to address these challenges through a tailored dataset, model, and benchmark. We first curate DIYHealth-900K, a large-scale multimodal dataset capturing diverse real-world home care scenarios. Building on this, we propose DIYHealthGPT, an adaptive foundation model for home-based health management, powered by the novel Hybrid Hyper Low-Rank Adaptation technique. Finally, we establish DIYHealthBench, the first benchmark to evaluate foundation models on home care tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DIYHealthGPT delivers state-of-the-art performance over both general-purpose and medical-specific baselines on 11 home care tasks in both open-QA and closed-QA settings, laying the groundwork for the next generation of personalized health management at home.
Authors: Aditya Nayak, Aakash Gautam, Rama Adithya Varanasi
Abstract: Generative AI (GenAI) is transforming workplaces at a rapid pace. This disproportionately affects vulnerable communities, including older workers (OWs) who re-enter the workforce through bridge employment prior to final retirement. Through in-depth semi-structured interviews with 21 professionals, we examine how OWs navigate GenAI-driven disruptions while pursuing bridge roles, focusing on their concerns about GenAI integration and their responses to these changes. Our findings show that OWs experienced both temporal and structural disruptions across all stages of the bridge employment decision-making process due to GenAI. In response, they reconfigured their tasks through different forms of boundary work aimed at restoring stability and continuity. We conceptualize these responses as AI resilience, which reshaped OWs' bridge employment decision-making into an ongoing process of negotiation and adaptation. We conclude by offering recommendations to reduce burnout among OWs by balancing individual-level AI resilience strategies with meso-level AI resilience collectives and macro-level adversarial and contestable AI-mediated organizational structures.
Authors: Misan Paul Etchie, Taiwo Olutosin
Abstract: Middle school is a key window for building core academic skills and the learning routines students carry into later grades, yet many students still fall behind because help is often limited and comes too late, after they have already been stuck for a while. Learning Management Systems (LMSs) are now standard infrastructure for distributing materials, collecting work, assessing students' tasks, and recording grades, but in most deployments they still behave more like workflow tools than instructional supports. The result is the usual bottleneck: students keep practicing through confusion, teachers triage questions, and feedback that could have corrected the misunderstanding arrives after the misconception has already hardened. To address this gap, we propose an AI-integrated LMS for middle school instruction, paired with a longitudinal study design to test whether sustained, bounded AI support changes outcomes through high school and into post-high school pathways. The proposed platform adds policy-gated AI assistance to everyday coursework, delivering formative feedback and hinting, recommending spaced review and adaptive practice based on mastery, and providing teacher-facing dashboards that summarize misconception patterns and flag sustained struggle. Because the platform is intended for minors, the design is privacy-first, using data minimization, role-based access control, age-appropriate response constraints, and auditable logs of AI interactions. Beyond short-term performance, the evaluation plan links fine-grained learning traces (attempts, revisions, help-seeking, and pacing) to institutional outcomes where feasible, so we can separate tool adoption effects from longer-run changes in learning trajectories.
Authors: Ruixiao Sun, Diego Uribe Mora, Zhimeng Jiang, Yuanzhen Lin, Jiarui Wang, Yuening Li, Danfeng Guo, Zhizhong Chen, Chuan He, Liang Liu
Abstract: Capturing user interests across extensive watch histories is critical for short-form video recommendation, yet scaling sequence length is limited by two bottlenecks: the semantic sparsity of atomic Video IDs and the quadratic computational complexity of Transformers. Traditional orthogonal Video IDs fail to capture content relationships and demand large embedding tables, while the quadratic complexity of self-attention restricts the maximum sequence length under strict industrial latency and resource constraints. In this work, we present a production-deployed framework for modeling ultra-long user behavior sequences at a billion-user scale. We first address the representation bottleneck by adopting content-native Semantic IDs. By utilizing depth-truncated, coarse-grained Semantic IDs, we shrink the embedding table size from corpus cardinality. This compact representation naturally generalizes to cold-start content through shared semantic prefixes. Second, to overcome the sequence scaling barrier, we introduce a Global-Aware Compression Transformer that leverages non-parametric temporal folding and unified global query integration to effectively condense the sequence, alleviating both the memory and computational bottlenecks of standard self-attention. Offline profiling on our computing infrastructure demonstrates an order-of-magnitude reduction in peak memory footprint and a drastic decrease in computational overhead. This efficiency gain enables supporting longer sequence lengths at an affordable cost in production, yielding substantial online gains in satisfied user engagement and satisfied content consumption in large-scale online A/B tests.
Authors: Luoyuan Zhang, Bokai Xu, Junbo Cui, Weiyue Sun, Yingjing Xu, Hanyu Liu, Yuan Yao
Abstract: Speech-based large language models are typically constrained to spoken replies, which limits their user-facing outputs to what can be verbalized and suppresses text-native capabilities such as code generation, structured analysis, and multi-step reasoning in realtime interaction, for tasks that require persistent, structured, and inspectable intermediate outputs. Existing work improves spoken reasoning or full-duplex turn-taking, but still treats text as a hidden intermediate state or a subordinate modality rather than a first-class output channel. We propose Listen-Write-Speak (LWS), a text-first tri-channel paradigm in which a single autoregressive LLM continuously listens to user audio, writes visible free-form text as its primary output, and speaks a realtime oral response in parallel under a shared causal attention context. This behavior is implemented entirely through a Token Schema, requiring no architectural modifications, and learned via a two-stage data pipeline that synthesizes per-second cognitive annotations consistent with the revealed input timeline. Empirically, LWS demonstrates strong full-duplex interaction on Full-Duplex-Bench, reaches 4.72 on VoiceBench AlpacaEval, achieves 92.6% writing-speaking consistency, and consistently outperforms its internal ablations on URO-Bench. These results suggest that visible writing can serve as a first-class output channel for speech interaction without sacrificing realtime responsiveness. The code and dataset are available on the project page: https://royalzhang.com/project/lws-page/.
Authors: Ahmed Bajaber, Mohammed Alliheedi
Abstract: The MedHopQA challenge presents a critical test for Large Language Models (LLMs): complex, multi-hop reasoning in the high-stakes biomedical domain. This paper details our direct API-based evaluation of Google's Gemini Flash models, focusing on the impact of advanced prompt engineering. We designed a sophisticated, multi-component prompt for Gemini 2.0 Flash that combined role-playing, explicit multi-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) examples, and detailed formatting rules. Our best run, using this complex prompt, achieved a Concept Level Score of 0.720. This result dramatically outperformed a baseline prompt which scored only 0.565. Remarkably, this performance on the efficient Gemini 2.0 Flash was almost identical to the result from the next-generation Gemini 2.5 Flash. Our findings demonstrate that sophisticated prompt design is a critical factor for unlocking the full reasoning capabilities of modern LLMs.
Authors: Yang Fu, Haomin Bao, Rohit Sonker, Xiaoyan Hu, Aravind Venugopal, Jeff Schneider, Jiayu Chen
Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising route for developing plasma controllers from historical tokamak data, since online trial-and-error on real devices is costly and risky. However, progress in this direction remains difficult to measure due to the lack of a standardized offline RL benchmark for realistic multi-actuator, long-horizon plasma control problems in nuclear fusion. We introduce RL4F, an Offline Reinforcement Learning Benchmark for Plasma Control in Nuclear Fusion, providing closed-loop evaluation environments and baseline comparisons across four full-profile tracking tasks: rotation, density, temperature, and pressure. The dynamics function underlying the evaluation environment is built from historical discharge data from DIII-D, a real-world Tokamak. We evaluate a broad set of imitation learning and offline RL baselines under a unified protocol. We find that offline model-based RL methods obtain the best average performance on most objectives, although no single method dominates all tasks, highlighting the importance of dynamics modeling in complex, long-horizon plasma control tasks. To foster further research, we open-source the codebase, datasets, and evaluation framework, providing a benchmark not only for the fusion community but also for algorithm development in offline RL.
Authors: Augustin Chan
Abstract: Large language models exhibit innate behavioral tendencies when deployed as strategic agents -- notably a risk-averse "turtle" bias toward defensive play. We show that symbolic reasoning frameworks, injected as per-round reflective prompts into one agent, differentially modulate this bias and reshape the multi-agent ecosystem to produce framework-specific winner distributions. In a 7-player Warring States Diplomacy variant (41 games, 4 conditions, single-campaign memory accumulation), each framework produces a distinct ecosystem signature: under control, Yan dominates (7/11, 64%); under I-Ching yarrow divination, Yan and Chu co-dominate while Qin is completely suppressed (0/10); under Tarot, Qin dominates (5/10, Fisher vs. pooled p = 0.006); under scrambled-text ablation (incoherent oracle text preserving prompt structure), Qi dominates (5/10, Fisher vs. pooled p = 0.006). The framework-receiving agent (Han) never wins and shows no survival difference across conditions (Fisher p = 1.0), but Tarot consistently elevates Han's peak territory (mean 3.0 SCs vs. 2.1-2.5 others, Kruskal-Wallis p = 0.010). Neither framework's content predicts subsequent actions -- hexagram themes (chi-squared p = 0.95) and Tarot card postures (chi-squared p = 0.69) are both independent of action choice -- suggesting the modulation operates through the reflective process, not content-following. We present this as an observation paper establishing that alignment-framework choice at the agent level produces distinctive system-level consequences in multi-agent settings.
Authors: Roghayeh Taghavi, Aysa Hasanazde Bashkandi, Amir Ali Bengari, Mohammad Amin Raji, Mohammad Salahi Ardekani, Parisa Mardukhian, Parvaneh Rezaei, Ramin Mousa
Abstract: The emergence of machine learning and deep learning has revolutionized the efficiency of diagnostic, therapeutic, and administrative systems in healthcare. However, this rapid adoption has come at the cost of requiring significant computing power and energy consumption, as well as e-waste disposal and carbon emissions. One of the challenges of these models is choosing the right model for classification tasks. To this end, researchers attempt to identify the optimal model using their data through trial and error, which involves energy consumption and waste. The goal of this study is to develop a model-based recommender system for medical image classification. For this purpose, a data set was collected from 3,000 articles in the field of medical image classification. This dataset, publicly available under the name MedicalRec-Bench, contains over 5,000 records of models tested in various tasks, including Skin Cancer Classification, Tumour Classification, Wound Classification, Breast Cancer, and MRI classification. The dataset was evaluated in four different modes, depending on the number of features: MedicalRec I (5 features), MedicalRec II (9 features), MedicalRec III (11 features), and MedicalRec IV (18 features). Collecting all values for the features is challenging due to non-reporting by the authors; hence, the dataset contains significant amounts of missing values. The Medical Recommender System (MedicalRec) is a transformer-based model used for item recommendations in this study. This model achieved remarkable results in the evaluation on the dataset and in the evaluation with 12 base models. This model achieved a maximum HitRate@100 of 75.5%. The dataset and implementations are available through the GitHub link: https://github.com/Ramin1Mousa/MedicalRec
Authors: Masaaki Inoue, Akifumi Okuno, Shintaro Fukushima
Abstract: Accurate measurement of traffic volumes and flows is vital for modern intelligent transportation. However, despite recent technological advances in sensor devices, it is still expensive to install and maintain fixed traffic counters. Therefore, it is restricted to a small portion of location points where the counters can be installed, which severely limits the possibility of grasping and predicting the total traffic volume at a city-wide level. By contrast, devices with location history such as smartphones and connected vehicles are now widely used and provide much wider spatial coverage. However, the data from these devices are usually partial and noisy, so they are not enough to directly estimate total traffic volumes and flows. In this paper, we use the information from these widely available devices to help decide where to place additional traffic counters, and we study how selecting new measurement locations can improve city-wide traffic estimation performance. To achieve this, we propose an algorithm that chooses additional counter locations to increase the diversity of observed traffic signal patterns, rather than simply spreading counters evenly over space. The goal is to capture traffic-pattern types that are rare in the current counter set and to make the collected observations more representative for later estimation and forecasting. We also present a real-world evaluation; in a target city, we select new locations expected to improve traffic prediction, and we then commissioned new field measurements at those locations at our expense. The resulting data led to an improvement in traffic volume estimation accuracy across different fidelities.
Authors: Kateryna Lutsai, Pavel Stra\v{n}\'ak, David Nov\'ak, Dana K\v{r}iv\'ankov\'a
Abstract: Purpose: Digitization projects in the humanities produce vast, heterogeneous archives of historical documents, making manual sorting impractical at scale. This work addresses the need for an automated system to classify scanned page images based on visual content type - text, tables, and graphics - enabling content-specific downstream processing such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) or structured data extraction. Methods: An image classification system was developed and evaluated on a dataset of over 48,000 annotated historical page images from century-old Czech archaeological archives, refined through four successive annotation stages with domain-expert review. A Random Forest Classifier baseline was established using hand-crafted image features. Subsequently, deep learning architectures were fine-tuned and compared: Convolutional Neural Networks (EfficientNetV2, RegNetY), Vision and Document Image Transformers (ViT, DiT), and multimodal CLIP models. An 11-category label scheme was designed collaboratively with domain experts and evaluated via five-fold cross-validation. Results: The feature-based baseline achieved approximately 75% accuracy. Fine-tuned CNNs and Transformers substantially outperformed it, with RegNetY-16GF achieving 99.16% and ViT-large 99.12% Top-1 accuracy on the held-out test set. CLIP ViT-B/16 reached 99.14% with optimized text descriptions. Conclusion: Image-only models, particularly RegNetY-16GF, deliver near-perfect classification accuracy and produce consistent labels across 649,508 unlabeled archival pages with over 90% inter-model agreement. Fine-tuned CLIP, despite competitive test-set accuracy, showed under 65% agreement with image-only models on unlabeled data, making it less suitable for deployment. The final models, annotated dataset, and software are publicly available under open-source licenses.
Authors: Vaibhav Prakash, Jayasri Dontabhaktuni
Abstract: Fine-tuning a language model on contexts whose correct completion has a near-synonym competitor often fails silently. The cross-entropy loss decreases monotonically while the correct token never overtakes the competitor in rank. We study this regime across five transformer architectures spanning two families and a fivefold parameter range, on ten hand-selected near-synonym contexts. We instrument these failures with an order parameter combining the predicted distribution and pairwise embedding overlaps. It decomposes additively into a signal, tracking the model's commitment to the correct token over its nearest competitor, and a background drag, set by how the embedding bulk leaks probability into the score. This isolates two failure modes. In kinematic failure the signal stays small. In structural failure the drag actively worsens as fine-tuning proceeds. We observe sharp catapult-like jumps in the order parameter that resemble a phase transition. A central negative result organises the paper. The transitions are phantoms. The spontaneous-symmetry-breaking interpretation is ruled out by direct measurement. Catapult-like jumps still appear under LoRA fine-tuning with the token embedding matrix exactly unchanged during training, where no geometric phase transition is possible. The discontinuity lives entirely in the softmax readout. A small number of dimensionless quantities organise the trajectory across architectures. One is consistent across all five under full fine-tuning. A second sorts architectures into two classes by bulk embedding distribution and predicts LoRA sufficiency. As a blind test, the framework predicts the critical learning rate of a held-out architecture, not used to fit any parameter, to within 2.1% of a subsequent learning-rate sweep. Findings concern the near-synonym mechanism only and should not be extrapolated without recalibration.
Authors: Tristan Cazenave
Abstract: RNA design consists of discovering a nucleotide sequence that optimizes predefined criteria, such as secondary structure. It is useful for synthetic biology, medicine, and nanotechnology. We propose Montparnasse, a Monte Carlo search framework based on Generalized Nested Rollout Policy Adaptation, augmented with a problem-specific prior, slow and long adaptation at level 1, and a lexicographic multicriteria evaluation. Montparnasse solves all 100 puzzles of the Eterna100 V1 benchmark consistently faster than DesiRNA, the previous state of the art, across all time limits, reaching full coverage more than three times faster overall. On messenger RNA secondary structure optimization for hemoglobin alpha, it identifies sequences with more paired bases than the MFE-optimal solution of LinearDesign.
Authors: Truong Xuan Khanh
Abstract: Across machine learning, biology, and physics, independently evolving systems often converge toward strikingly similar high-level structures despite radically different microscopic details. Grokking circuits converge across random seeds, evolutionary lineages rediscover similar metabolic solutions, and renormalization flows approach common fixed points. We propose the Hierarchical Emergence Framework (HEF) as a candidate universality framework for such convergence phenomena. HEF models emergence as a phase transition in a mechanism landscape constrained by thermodynamic and information-theoretic laws. The framework introduces a critical energy threshold Ec separating an exploration regime with competing mechanisms from a convergence regime governed by a unique minimum-cost mechanism. Under structural assumptions, we prove physical feasibility, derive strict metric contraction, and establish convergence toward a unique fixed-point representation independent of initial conditions. We further connect this convergence structure to causal emergence through Effective Information and mechanism competition entropy. To test the framework, we study delayed generalization ("grokking") in modular arithmetic transformers across 111 experiments. We identify a reproducible empirical fingerprint of the Ec transition: the weight norm peaks systematically before grokking in 92% of runs. Normalized accuracy curves collapse onto a tanh kink (R^2=0.93) consistent with a Landau-Ginzburg universality class, and all grokked models converge to 0.9745+/-0.014 regardless of initialization, weight decay, or training fraction (ANOVA p>0.13). HEF is not presented as a universal theory of emergence, but as a falsifiable mathematical scaffold for studying convergence phenomena across complex systems.
Authors: Charles Young
Abstract: This report explores detector design considerations for the Future Circular Collider in its electron-positron mode (FCC-ee) through an extended dialogue between a physicist and an AI assistant. Starting from initial "prejudice" detector concepts proposed by the AI assistant without explicit physicist input, each subsystem is examined in detail, with the AI's assumptions challenged and revised through the exchange. The discussion covers the full detector from beam pipe to luminosity monitor, with particular attention to the interplay between subsystem choices and the practical considerations - calibration, stability, and operational simplicity - that are essential for a fifteen-year precision physics program. The narrative documents how the integrated detector design evolved substantially from the starting point to revised "prejudice" detector concepts of the AI assistant. The focus of this report is on the process to illustrate both the potential and the limitations of human-AI collaboration in experimental physics design, and the physics capabilities of any of the "prejudice" detector concepts remain to be explored.
Authors: Fang Wu, Shuting Jin, Xiangru Tang, Mark Gerstein, Xiangxiang Zeng, Yejin Choi, Jure Leskovec, Jinbo Xu
Abstract: Protein function is largely determined by molecular surface geometry and physicochemical complementarity, yet most protein design methods condition only on backbone structure. We introduce SurfDesign, a surface-conditioned protein design framework that models molecular surfaces as continuous geometric manifolds and integrates them with pretrained protein language models. SurfDesign employs surface-based equivariant message passing to capture surface normals, curvature, and directional geometry, together with a parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategy. Focusing on functional protein design, we show that SurfDesign consistently outperforms prior surface-conditioned and backbone-only methods on de novo binder and enzyme design benchmarks. We also report strong performance on inverse-folding benchmarks as a diagnostic of structural compatibility. Our results highlight manifold-aware surface representations as a principled foundation for functional protein and enzyme design. Code is available at https://github.com/smiles724/SurfDesign.
Authors: Ishaan Singh Chandok, Core Francisco Park
Abstract: Scientific data annotation, such as tracking animals in video or proofreading neural reconstructions, remains bottlenecked by the "last mile" problem: even with strong automation, verification and correction consume substantial human effort. Standard approaches train models to directly predict annotations, discarding the rich supervision in how experts navigate, click, verify, and correct. We introduce a framework for studying behavioral cloning on scientific annotation: 9 synthetic tasks paired with synthetic annotations that simulate realistic human strategies including exploration, mistake correction, and strategic decision-making. Our experiments reveal several findings. First, skills emerge hierarchically: models learn GUI mechanics before task-critical decisions, and commit fewer mistakes than the training data while retaining the ability to correct errors when they occur. Second, scaling models on multi-task behavioral cloning shows that larger models are more data efficient within our scale range. Third, multi-task pretraining enables efficient fine-tuning to new tasks, while training from scratch fails entirely. Fourth, linear probes reveal that models internally represent latent variables of the annotation process such as task phase and data position; interestingly, we find a shared mistake representation that generalizes across different annotation tasks. Overall, our framework establishes systematic benchmarks and identifies key bottlenecks, providing a foundation for scaling behavioral cloning to real-world scientific data annotation.
Authors: Younghun Go, Jaehoon Han, Changyong Shin, Chuk Yoo, Gyeongsik Yang
Abstract: Key-value (KV) caching for shared prefixes is essential for high-throughput large language model (LLM) serving, but it faces critical challenges in emerging diffusion language models (DLMs). In DLMs, bidirectional attention means that updating any token dynamically alters the entire context and its corresponding KVs. Thus, existing caching techniques developed for LLMs, which assume that KVs remain invariant once computed, corrupt the shared prefix KVs. Our experiments show that applying these techniques to DLMs causes model accuracy to collapse to near zero. To unlock high-throughput DLM serving, we propose bidirectional prefix caching, bicache, the first KV caching technique for shared prefixes in DLMs. bicache is designed based on key observations from our comprehensive analysis: shared prefix KVs remain stable and reusable in shallow layers, while the depth of shallow layers depends on the fraction of shared prefix tokens in each request. Thus, bicache dynamically identifies a safe layer depth for reusing shared prefix KVs and eliminates redundant computation. Evaluations demonstrate that bicache significantly improves serving throughput by 36.3%-98.3% compared to existing techniques without accuracy collapse (only 0-1.8% difference).
Authors: Chenrui Wang, Yixuan Qiu
Abstract: Manifold-constrained hyper-connections (mHCs) have recently been proposed as a principled extension of hyper-connections, where the residual mixing matrices are constrained to be doubly stochastic via projection onto the Birkhoff polytope. In practical mHC implementations, this constraint is enforced by Sinkhorn-Knopp iterations, and the backward pass relies on unrolling the iterative solver. This design introduces substantial computation and memory overhead, and may also yield inaccurate projections when the algorithm converges slowly on challenging inputs, undermining the intended norm-control and stability guarantees of mHCs. In this work, we focus on the practically important 4x4 Birkhoff projection setting and develop an end-to-end acceleration framework. By leveraging the dual formulation, we reduce the problem to a three-dimensional unconstrained convex problem and solve it with Newton's method, achieving fast convergence and high accuracy. For the backward pass, we replace the unrolled differentiation with implicit differentiation, yielding exact gradients without storing intermediate states. To exploit massive parallelism, we design a warp-level CUDA kernel that uses only register-level primitives, avoiding global and shared memory I/O. Extensive experiments against representative open-source baselines demonstrate that the proposed solver yields substantially more reliable doubly stochastic projections -- especially when the input magnitude is large -- and achieves significant end-to-end speedups (including the backward pass), reaching over 20x acceleration at large batch sizes while maintaining orders of magnitude smaller marginal errors.
Authors: Bruce Changlong Xu, Lan Wu
Abstract: A modern post-training pipeline often writes one symbol for its policy, pi_theta, while evaluating it through two different programs: a training kernel optimized for autograd and an inference kernel optimized for low-precision, fused, dynamically batched serving. In finite precision, these kernels can induce different distributions at identical weights, with the gap concentrated on slices that aggregate benchmarks under-represent. This paper proposes kernel contracts: a contract-first framework for specifying acceptable divergence between K_train and K_inf. A contract C = (N, S, R, O, Pi) combines numerical, statistical, runtime, and observability clauses with an escalation policy from violations to routing actions. We derive a chain of bounds from logit drift to total-variation distance to bounded reward drift, and specialize it to RL post-training, where per-token importance-ratio drift yields a bound on policy-gradient bias under explicit support and norm assumptions. We also describe a four-stage promotion pipeline, online routing loop, and minimal YAML DSL for contract artifacts. This is a framework and vocabulary paper; we do not report production-scale empirical validation.
Authors: Joyjit Roy, Samaresh Kumar Singh, Laxmi Shaw
Abstract: Customer churn prediction is essential across data-driven industries such as insurance, digital banking, eCommerce, and subscription platforms, where retaining existing customers is typically more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. Predicting churn on structured datasets remains challenging due to class imbalance, nonlinear feature interactions, and heterogeneous feature types. Tree-based ensemble methods consistently demonstrate strong performance in these contexts, often outperforming conventional neural networks. This study introduces a validated hybrid architecture that integrates feature-tokenized transformers (FT-Transformer) with gradient-boosted trees through calibration-aware stacking. The proposed framework addresses persistent gaps in statistical validation, probability calibration, and reproducibility found in prior research. The FT-Transformer captures higher-order feature interactions using self-attention, while XGBoost captures gradient-boosted decision boundaries with complementary inductive biases. Class imbalance is handled using class-weighted loss functions, thereby avoiding synthetic oversampling and preserving minority-class distributions. The models are ensembled using out-of-fold (OOF) stacking with a logistic regression meta-learner, which recalibrates overconfident base model outputs and learns optimal combination weights. On a public bank churn dataset, the hybrid model achieves 62.10% F1, 0.861 AUC-ROC, and 0.647 PR-AUC, outperforming the Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) baseline by 3.37 F1 points and 0.027 AUC under 5x5 cross-validation with 95% confidence intervals reported. Ablation studies demonstrate that both the transformer component and stacking strategy contribute materially to performance. The proposed methodology offers a reproducible and extensible reference architecture for contemporary churn prediction on structured tabular data.
Authors: Lihui Liu, Mucun Sun, Caisheng Wang
Abstract: Self-healing smart grids can quickly adjust their network configuration during outages to minimize power disruptions. During an outage, several actions can be taken, such as network reconfiguration through switching operations and emergency load shedding. However, traditional machine learning methods for outage mitigation are not well suited for smart grids due to their slow response time and high computational cost. To address these challenges, recent studies have explored reinforcement learning to automatically perform network reconfiguration. In these approaches, the control policy is typically modeled using a graph neural network (GNN). However, conventional GNNs operate in the spatial domain and may fail to capture important relationships in the frequency domain. Frequency-domain information is particularly useful for modeling global structural patterns and system-wide interactions in power networks. In this paper, we propose a spectral graph reinforcement learning framework for outage management in distribution networks to enhance system resilience. Our model learns the optimal power restoration policy using a spectral graph neural network. We evaluate the proposed method on three modified IEEE test systems: the 13-bus, 34-bus, and 123-bus networks. Experimental results show that our approach achieves near-optimal performance in real time and generalizes well across a wide range of outage scenarios.
Authors: Anderson Augusma
Abstract: This thesis addresses group emotion recognition (GER) in-the-wild with a focus on privacy preservation. Unlike traditional emotion recognition methods that rely on individual-level cues such as face, gaze, or voice analysis, this work uses collective audio-video signals to infer emotions at the group level, reducing risks of individual monitoring and surveillance. Two complementary frameworks are proposed. The first is a cross-attention multimodal architecture for audio-video fusion, combined with Frames Attention Pooling (FAP) for temporal aggregation. It is supported by synthetic data augmentation and validated through ablation studies, demonstrating robustness in real-world GER conditions. The second framework, Variational Encoder Multi-Decoder (VE-MD), learns a shared latent space for emotion classification and structural representation prediction, including body and face cues. Two decoding strategies, DETR-based and heatmap-based, are explored to analyze the role of structural representations in group and individual settings. The thesis makes three main contributions: it clarifies the role of multimodality and structural cues in group-level affective computing; introduces two architectures for privacy-preserving multimodal GER; and shows that competitive performance can be achieved without using individual features as input data.
Authors: Jiajie Li, Erwei Wang, Zhiru Zhang, Samuel Bayliss
Abstract: Spatial neural processing units (NPUs) provide an energy-efficient platform for edge LLM inference, but efficiently deploying an LLM end-to-end on such hardware remains labor-intensive. Although AI coding agents have begun to lower this cost, existing studies have largely focused on single-kernel optimization rather than end-to-end LLM deployment on resource-constrained spatial NPUs. We present a two-stage methodology, instantiated on the AMD XDNA 2 NPU, that progresses from human-guided development to agent autonomy. In the first stage, we develop a reference deployment of Llama-3.2-1B through human-guided agent assistance. The resulting implementation achieves a speedup of 2.2x on prefill and 4.0x on decode over the hand-optimized baseline, with the optimization trajectory and its lessons recorded as structured documentation throughout. In the second stage, we distill the documentation into an agent skill system consisting of eight phases, orchestrating the optimization and debugging skill sets, with numerical correctness strictly enforced at each phase. Using our agent skill system, we autonomously deploy eight additional decoder-only LLMs (Llama-3.2-3B, SmolLM2-1.7B, Qwen2.5-{0.5B, 1.5B, 3B}, Qwen3-{0.6B, 1.7B, 4B}) end-to-end on the AMD XDNA 2 NPU using the open-source compiler stack. To our knowledge, these models have not previously been deployed on AMD NPUs via any open-source software stack. Each deployment completes in 0.5-4 hours of agent wall time with almost no human guidance, and passes the numerical-correctness gates, demonstrating functional generalization to previously unencountered LLMs. Three of the eight match or exceed the sustained performance of our Llama-3.2-1B reference deployment, suggesting that the resulting implementations can be competitive without additional model-specific human engineering.
Authors: Mingyi He, Xinyi Guo, Xitong Ling, Weiming Chen, Jiawen Li, Lianghui Zhu, Minxi Ouyang, Mingxi Fu, Yizhi Wang, Tian Guan
Abstract: Pathology foundation models are pretrained on large streams of WSI-derived patches, while supervision during data construction is often slide-level, sparse, or heterogeneous. This mismatch makes it difficult to understand and control which biological patterns enter the pretraining data. We propose SlideCheck, a lightweight pretraining data guidance tool built on frozen pathology foundation model patch features. Rather than serving as a standalone patch diagnostic model, SlideCheck provides explicit abnormality and malignancy scores for organizing, filtering, and auditing pathology pretraining data. SlideCheck uses a dual-head MLP to separately model broad abnormal morphology and malignant evidence. A regularized feature-space scorer provides a supervised anchor for patch-level evidence estimation, while score-attention agreement combines patch scores with WSI-level MIL attention to mine high-confidence pseudo labels. The same scores are then used to construct broad-positive ViT pretraining subsets, where a patch is selected if either abnormality or malignancy evidence exceeds a threshold. Experiments show that SlideCheck-defined data distributions influence the downstream behavior of self-supervised ViT pretraining, indicating that biological composition is an important controllable factor in pathology foundation model development. Curated subsets can approach full-data performance, suggesting that explicitly scored patch pools may support more efficient and auditable pretraining data construction. These findings position SlideCheck as a data guidance and auditing layer for transforming large, undifferentiated patch pools into controllable and reusable pretraining datasets.
Authors: Wanghan Xu, Shuo Li, Tianlin Ye, Qinglong Cao, Yixin Chen, Hengjian Gao, Yiheng Wang, Qi Li, Kun Li, Sheng Xu, Shengdu Chai, Fangchen Yu, Xiangyu Zhao, Zhangrui Zhao, Weijie Ma, Zijie Guo, Haoyu Zhou, Haoxiang Yin, Lixue Cheng, Chaofan Hu, Haoxuan Li, Lu Mi, Xuxuan Xie, Yifan Zhou, Ruizhe Chen, Zhiwang Zhou, Xingjian Guo, Yuhao Zhou, Xuming He, Shengyuan Xu, Xinyu Gu, Jiamin Wu, Mianxin Liu, Chunfeng Song, Fenghua Ling, Dongzhan Zhou, Shixiang Tang, Yuqiang Li, Mao Su, Peng Ye, Siqi Sun, Bin Wang, Xue Yang, Zhenfei Yin, Tianfan Fu, Guangtao Zhai, Wanli Ouyang, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Wenlong Zhang
Abstract: AI coding agents are increasingly used for scientific work, but their end-to-end autonomous research capability remains difficult to verify. We present ResearchClawBench, a benchmark for evaluating autonomous scientific research across 40 tasks from 10 scientific domains. Each task is grounded in a real published paper, provides related literature and raw data, and hides the target paper during evaluation. Expert-curated multimodal rubrics decompose the target scientific artifacts into weighted criteria, enabling evaluation of target-paper-level re-discovery while leaving room for new discovery. We evaluate seven autonomous research (auto-research) agents under a unified protocol and seventeen native LLMs through the lightweight ResearchHarness. Current systems remain far from reliable re-discovery: the strongest autonomous agent, Claude Code, averages 21.5, and the strongest ResearchHarness LLM, Claude-Opus-4.7, averages 20.7, with an LLM frontier mean of only 26.5. Error analysis shows that failures concentrate in experimental protocol mismatch, evidence mismatch, and missing scientific core. ResearchClawBench provides a reproducible evaluation frontier for measuring progress toward autonomous scientific research.
Authors: Hannah Gao (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Isha Agarwal (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Dylan Hadfield-Menell (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Rachel Ma (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Abstract: The widespread use of image classification models in high-risk, real-world situations necessitates making these models robust to slight disturbances or perturbations, such as blurring or sharpening, in the input images. While vision transformers (ViTs) play an integral role in many modern-day multi-modal models like Vision-Language-Models (VLMs) and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, they have received a lack of attention in the setting of robustness. In this work, we analyze the effects of adversarial fine-tuning, a popular method for improving model robustness to image perturbations, on a ViT's performance on perturbed and regular images through a mechanistic lens. We adversarially train a ViT on low-frequency and high-frequency image corruptions, and attempt to explain changes in downstream model performance through an examination of the model's attention mechanisms, internal representations, and knowledge evolution. Overall, our results suggest that, while fine-tuning on inputs with common corruptions improves model performance and certainty on new instances of corrupted data, these improvements do not transfer to other classes of corruptions not seen in the training. Additionally, despite observing changes in visual attention and knowledge evolution across layers, we found that adversarial training did not lead to fundamental changes in the sparse representations learned by ViTs.
Authors: Youting Wang, Yuan Tang, Yitian Qian, Chen Zhao
Abstract: Vision-language agents increasingly consume screenshots, documents, and user interfaces before writing to memory, sending messages, or invoking external tools. We study a concrete failure mode in this setting: action-boundary propagation, where sensitive or unsafe visible text is copied from an image into downstream tool arguments. We present VisualLeakBench, a diversified 500-image benchmark spanning UI, chat, document, form, and dashboard scenes, and evaluate a stratified 100-image agent subset with four production VLM systems under two workflows: note capture and external handoff. At baseline, target strings are propagated into tool arguments in 78.8% of PII cases and 85.5% of rendered unsafe-text cases. Under a defensive system prompt, rendered unsafe-text propagation remains high at 52.6%, while PII tool propagation falls to 2.0%, largely by suppressing tool use rather than preserving utility. Rates are tool-surface dependent: search-like tools suppress PII propagation, but rendered unsafe text still crosses tool boundaries. We measure visual-to-tool propagation rather than downstream instruction execution. We additionally provide a labeled-target oracle upper-bound diagnostic that localizes most failures at the tool boundary while leaving response-side leakage as residual risk.
Authors: Kevin Zhou, Lisa Alazraki, Kris Cao, Marek Rei
Abstract: Pre-training data mixtures are commonly tuned by running small-scale experiments and extrapolating to the target training budget. When high-quality data is scarce and must be repeated, this extrapolation frequently fails, but the source of the failure has not been isolated. We show that a primary culprit is a repetition mismatch: because high-quality datasets are small, their repetition rate changes as the training budget grows, shifting the optimal mixture in ways that small-scale proxy experiments do not anticipate. A subsampling procedure that matches the target repetition rate controls for this effect. In a two-source setting combining limited high-quality data with web crawl, a single repetition-controlled experiment using only 1/16 of the target tokens recovers a mixture within 0.05 of the optimum for a 757M parameter model, compared to an error of 0.75 without repetition control. Achieving comparable accuracy without repetition control requires three to four horizons, consuming 44 to 94% of the target token budget. With three data sources, the larger mixture space requires more than a single experiment to constrain, but the approach remains effective: at the 757M scale, just two repetition-controlled horizons recover the optimal mixture, outperforming baselines that instead require the full two-source experiments to construct. Our results reveal that repetition dynamics, not scale alone, shape whether small-scale mixture experiments generalize. More broadly, they suggest that data repetition deserves treatment as a first-class variable in mixture optimization, rather than an inconvenient side effect of limited data.
Authors: Gopal Anantharaman
Abstract: We propose a topological framework for comparing trained Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) by mapping the Stochastic Block Models (SBMs) induced on the graphon-signal space of a Message Passing Neural Network (MPNN) onto the unit $n$-sphere $\sphere^{n-1}\subset\R^n$. The construction rests on three classical pillars: the \emph{compactness} of the cut-distance graphon space $(\Wo,\cutdist)$ \citep{lovasz2006limits,lovasz2012large}, the Frieze--Kannan \emph{weak regularity lemma} together with its graphon-signal extension due to \citet{levie2023graphon}, and the Lipschitz continuity of MPNNs with respect to the cut-distance. We show that, for any prescribed tolerance $\varepsilon>0$, a trained MPNN $\Phi$ acting on a sufficiently large graph factors (up to $\varepsilon$) through a step-graphon-signal of bounded complexity, and we construct an explicit measure-preserving map $\Psi_n\colon[0,1]\to\sphere^{n-1}$ that places the SBM regions on disjoint spherical caps. This produces a problem-agnostic, low-dimensional ``fingerprint'' of a trained GNN that is amenable to visual inspection and to nearest-neighbour search across model zoos, enabling \emph{transfer-learning candidate retrieval} without retraining. We discuss the obstruction posed by concentration of measure in high dimension -- a phenomenon directly relevant to LLM-scale embeddings. We close with five concrete future research directions: hyperbolic and Grassmannian alternatives to the spherical model, Gromov--Wasserstein distances on graphon-signals as an isometry-free alternative to the $n$-sphere map, an information-geometric (Fisher) reformulation of the SBM manifold, persistent-homology fingerprints of layer-wise embedding clouds, and a spectral-distance baseline derived from the graphon eigendecomposition.
Authors: Hongxu Ma, Lin Wang, Chenghou Jin, Han Zhou, Jie Zhang, Xiaoyu Yang, Chunjie Chen, Jihong Guan, Shuigeng Zhou
Abstract: Ordinal Regression (OR) aims to predict target values with inherent order, underpinning critical applications across diverse domains, from recommender systems to computer vision. Though having evolved from naive regression to discretization-based classification and generation, existing paradigms remain fundamentally constrained by quantization artifacts and the lack of global ordinal topological perception. These methods typically enforce rigid boundary delineations, failing to capture the non-stationary semantic transitions inherent to ordinal data. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm where OR is formulated as a Continuous Generative Ordinal Regression task. Under the novel paradigm, we introduce DiffOR, a unified framework that leverages diffusion models to recover continuous ordinal values via iterative denoising, thereby enabling the dynamic learning of soft semantic transitions. To explicitly preserve ordinal topology, we devise a Dual-Decoupling Strategy: Spatially, Multi-scale Increment Aggregation decomposes targets into hierarchical continuous increments; Temporally, Dynamic Denoising Perception synchronizes denoising steps with feature frequencies, ensuring robust coarse-to-fine refinement. Theoretically, we show that the proposed method can significantly enhance both representation capability and mechanistic interpretability. Extensive experiments on 12 benchmarks across four domains validate DiffOR's consistent superiority over state-of-the-art methods, establishing a new standard that demonstrates strong potential as a general-purpose solution for universal ordinal regression.
Authors: Albert Alcalde, Zhengping Ji, Enrique Zuazua
Abstract: We formulate data propagation through the Transformer, the machine learning architecture powering large language models, as a nonlinear control system on the space of probability measures. For the mean-field Transformer model with self-attention and affine feed-forward layers, we prove that Gaussian distributions remain exactly Gaussian along the induced flow. This invariance reduces the infinite-dimensional measure dynamics to a finite-dimensional bilinear control system governing the evolution of the mean and covariance, reformulates the expressive capacity of Transformers as a reachability problem for prescribed Gaussian moments, and reveals a novel connection with Riccati-type equations from classical filtering and control. For time-varying controls, we prove exact finite-time reachability of any target Gaussian distribution whose covariance matrix has the same rank as the initial one, this rank constraint being an intrinsic invariant of the dynamics. For time-invariant parameters, we derive explicit spectral conditions leading either to asymptotic stability toward positive-definite equilibria or to finite-time blow-up of the covariance. Numerical experiments complement the theory by showing that practical Transformers with Gaussian inputs remain close to moment-matched Gaussian distributions through early and intermediate layers, while Transformers with prescribed attention matrices reproduce the predicted covariance regimes: bounded evolution in stabilizing configurations and blow-up in destabilizing ones.
Authors: Jeongun Ha, Sanga Yoon, Donghun Lee
Abstract: We introduce the Laplace-Fourier Neural Operator (LFNO), a unified framework for modeling dynamical systems across transient and steady-state regimes by integrating the spectral advantages of Laplace and Fourier Neural Operators. LFNO employs a dual-branch architecture that explicitly decomposes system dynamics into transient and steady-state components. We evaluate LFNO on nine benchmarks, including three ODE systems (Duffing, Lorenz, and Pendulum) and six PDE systems (Euler-Bernoulli beam, Heat, Reaction-diffusion, Brusselator, Burgers, and Navier-Stokes). LFNO significantly outperforms existing operators on ODE systems, where transient dynamics dominate, and consistently surpasses LNO while achieving performance competitive with FNO on PDE benchmarks. Furthermore, LFNO offers improved stability and physical interpretability through its component-wise decomposition. These results demonstrate that LFNO provides a robust and unified approach for learning complex dynamical systems across multiple temporal scales.
Authors: Yuhuan Yuan, Zhouliang Yu, Minghao Liu, Weiyang Liu, Ge Lin Kan
Abstract: LLM-based LEGO assembly generation requires both semantic grounding and physical feasibility. We identify a data-induced failure mode, PhysHack, in which the assemblies satisfy physical-validity constraints while producing structures that are geometrically misaligned, semantically inconsistent, or poorly calibrated. To address this challenge, we propose a model-based data selection approach that uses only a small fraction of the training data while improving physically grounded LEGO assembly generation. Building on the selected trajectories, we introduce PVPO, a sample-efficient reinforcement learning method that couples physical feasibility with voxel-space geometric rewards. Our results show that physical validity alone is an insufficient proxy for reliable physical reasoning: models can learn to generate valid structures without preserving semantic or geometric fidelity. Experiments across model backbones and test-time scaling settings demonstrate that PVPO improves structural and semantic alignment, physical validity, structural stability, and calibration, while reducing reliance on extensive post-hoc rejection sampling. In particular, results on calibration show that PVPO mitigates PhysHack by making test-time selection more predictive of semantic and structural quality.
Authors: Bowen Ren, Heyan Huang, Yinghao Li, Yang Gao
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, yet most LLM-based agents are statically deployed and unable to improve through task interactions. Existing experience-driven methods often rely on memory or heuristics without enhancing the model's ability to learn, treating it as a passive executor and leading to early performance plateaus and limited long-term improvement. To address this issue, we propose MetaEvo, a two-stage framework for continual agent evolution that focuses on improving how the model learns from tasks experience, rather than solely on what it stores. MetaEvo first applies preference-based optimization to enhance the model's ability of principle abstraction, then enables the accumulation and reuse of these principles within a modular agent architecture. Experimental results on diverse reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that MetaEvo consistently outperforms strong baselines, maintains reliable improvement across iterations. These findings validate the effectiveness of meta-optimization in enabling agents to learn from experience and continually enhance their reasoning capabilities.
Authors: Harry Jake Cunningham, Nicola Muca Cirone
Abstract: Analyzing attention weights has become a standard approach for interpreting the information flow of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, this approach has significant limitations as it neglects the geometric properties of the value vectors being aggregated. To address this gap, we introduce \emph{Contribution Weights}, a projection-based metric that quantifies a token's influence by accounting for it's attention weight, value magnitude, and directional alignment with the layer output. We demonstrate that contribution weights provide a more faithful measure of token importance, consistently outperforming attention-based metrics in identifying semantically critical tokens across different decoder-only models, tasks, and datasets. Further, our metric enables novel mechanistic analysis of \emph{attention sinks}. While previous work characterized sinks as passive repositories for excess attention, we reveal they serve an active functional role, suppressing information through a convex relationship between sink rate and output norm, stabilizing representations by opposing the semantic drift of low-confidence tokens.
Authors: Jufang Duan, Shenglong Xiao, Yuren Zhang
Abstract: Fine-grained time series data with high temporal resolution is critical for accurate analytics across a wide range of applications. However, the acquisition of such data is often limited by cost and feasibility. This problem can be tackled by reconstructing high-resolution signals from low-resolution inputs based on specific priors, known as super-resolution. While extensively studied in computer vision, directly transferring image super-resolution techniques to time series is not trivial. To address this challenge at a fundamental level, we propose Super-Resolution for Time series (SRT), a novel framework that reconstructs temporal patterns lost in low-resolution inputs via disentangled rectified flow. SRT decomposes the input into trend and seasonal components, aligns them to the target resolution using an implicit neural representation, and leverages a novel cross-resolution attention mechanism to guide the generation of high-resolution details. We further introduce SRT-large, a scaled-up version with extensive pre-training, which enables strong zero-shot super-resolution capability. Extensive experiments on nine public datasets demonstrate that SRT and SRT-large consistently outperform existing methods across multiple scale factors, showing both robust performance and the effectiveness of each component in our architecture.
Authors: Felix Akeret
Abstract: We present a systematic study of fine-tuning OpenAI's Whisper large-v3 for Swiss German ASR, using 1,367 hours of broadcast speech paired with Standard German subtitles as weak supervision. Through 16 iterative training runs on an NVIDIA DGX Spark (Grace Blackwell, 128 GB unified memory, up to 1 PFLOP FP4), we compare LoRA and full fine-tuning of the 1.55B-parameter model, investigate hallucination root causes, and quantify the effect of data quality, subtitle alignment, and training strategy. Our best model achieves 25.6% measured WER on the All Swiss German Dialects Test Set (ASGDTS) in an honest evaluation on strictly disjoint data. A harmonized error analysis separating genuine errors from valid stylistic variation (tense, word order, Swiss orthography) yields a content WER (cWER) of 13.8%, counting only actual recognition failures. Bias-corrected estimation reduces this to 8.5%, suggesting the true error rate is roughly one third of measured WER. We demonstrate that published state-of-the-art Swiss German ASR results (17.1-17.5% WER) are inflated by benchmark contamination: a vanilla Whisper model self-trained on the ASGDTS test set with zero Swiss German data achieves 13.88% WER, surpassing all published systems. Experiments with Phi-4-multimodal show an even stronger memorization effect (3.9% WER), revealing that the benchmark primarily measures convention matching rather than dialectal comprehension. We release two models, a LoRA adapter (25.32% WER, 13.9% cWER) and a full fine-tuned model (25.60% WER, 13.8% cWER), among the few publicly available, honestly evaluated Whisper models for Swiss German, under Apache 2.0 with full reproducibility, requiring no institutional data agreements.
Authors: Argyrios Gerogiannis, Yekaterina Yegorova, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Venugopal V. Veeravalli
Abstract: State-of-the-art GRPO-style methods for speech-aware large language model post-training suffer from coarse credit assignment, broadcasting the same terminal-reward advantage to every token in a response. This ignores useful structure within rollout batches, where speech-conditioned completions often share prefixes before diverging at important decisions. We propose Low-rank Exploration with Adaptive Forking (LEAF), a retrospective tree-based RL method that recovers this structure without online branching or additional decoding. LEAF samples complete responses, selects high-surprisal boundaries, groups responses by shared prefixes, and assigns span-level advantages using descendant rewards. We theoretically justify LEAF's span-level credit assignment and boundary-selection design. Empirically, LEAF improves over GRPO across speech question answering and speech translation benchmarks under the same rollout and low-rank adaptation budget. Notably, smaller LEAF-trained models outperform current state-of-the-art, full-parameter baselines.
Authors: Aabia Ather, Muhammad Usayd Ather, Qurat-Ul-Ain Somroo, Muhammad Khuram Shahzad
Abstract: This paper proposes an improved approach to the analysis of Mining Software Repositories (MSR) datasets via metadata enrichment, FAIRness assessment, and topic-driven analysis. This research expands upon an earlier dataset directory created specifically for the analysis of MSR datasets by adding new annotations to the datasets, enriching the metadata categories, and offering more advanced filtering options. The metadata of the MSR papers presented from 2013 to 2024 has been gathered using the Semantic Scholar API. The analysis is based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling and statistical analysis. Dataset-level attributes were included into the expanded dataset directory, namely repository hosting site, format, accessibility, reusability, and dataset quality. The study reveals that the choice of repository hosting sites and data formats influences citation patterns and dataset usability. Furthermore, the enhanced annotation approach improves the analysis and discoverability of MSR datasets, supporting more effective reuse and evaluation of research artifacts.
Authors: Vansh Gupta, Peter Nutter, Samuel Stante, Andreas Krause, Florian Tram\`er, Lukas Fluri, Xin Chen, Anna Hedstr\"om
Abstract: We argue that many Anthropomorphic Misalignment Research (AMR) studies need stronger evidence to ensure that they can provide a robust foundation for critical safety decisions, such as model deployment and regulation. By evaluating failure modes across different misalignment concepts, such as deception, emergent misalignment, and sycophancy, we show how conceptual ambiguity, non-robust datasets, experimental design, and insufficient causal interventions can lead to overinterpretation of model behaviors. This position paper aims to offer guidance on evidentiary considerations that can help improve methodological rigor in AMR. To achieve this, we provide a clear call to action through a proposed framework of evidence levels and a diagnostic checklist. These shared standards will enable more productive scientific discourse and ensure that claims about AI risks rest on solid empirical foundations.
Authors: Jinzhe Tan, Ali Ekber Cinar, Karim Benyekhlef
Abstract: Visual evidence has long been treated as a reliable form of legal proof, but advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are undermining that assumption. This article asks how well humans and frontier multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can distinguish authentic evidentiary photographs from AI-generated counterparts in the object-centric scenarios typical of civil disputes. We built Synthetic Legal Evidence Detection (SLED-1400), a dataset of 200 authentic evidence images paired with 1,200 synthetic counterparts produced by six contemporary text-to-image generators across ten evidence categories. The same stimuli and response format were used in a controlled web experiment with 136 lay participants and in a standardized evaluation of four MLLMs (GPT-5.1, Gemini-3-Pro, Gemini-3-Flash, Qwen3-VL-235B). Human accuracy was 64.8% overall, and 48.5% and 51.0% on the two strongest generators (Gemini-3-Pro-Image and Flux-2-Max), indistinguishable from chance. MLLMs never misclassified an authentic image (100% specificity), but missed most synthetic outputs from the harder generators, with average MLLM detection at 5.9% on Gemini-3-Pro-Image outputs. Human and MLLM errors were largely uncorrelated, while the four MLLMs were strongly correlated with each other. Neither group is a reliable standalone authenticator. We argue that visual evidence in legal proceedings should be treated as inherently contestable, and that a workable procedural response must combine trained human review, MLLM screening, and provenance infrastructure such as C2PA Content Credentials.
Authors: Salem Ameen, Sunil Vadera
Abstract: Deep neural networks often contain redundant hidden units. Removing individual weights can reduce parameter count, but unstructured sparsity is not always easy to exploit in standard dense implementations. This paper develops a structured pruning framework in which complete neurons are removed using multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms. Each candidate neuron is treated as an arm; pulling an arm temporarily masks that neuron, measures the change in loss on a sampled mini-batch, restores the neuron, and updates an estimate of its safe-removal reward. The framework supports stochastic policies, including Epsilon-Greedy, Softmax, UCB1 and Thompson Sampling, and multiplicative-weight policies, including Hedge-style multiplicative weights and EXP3. We evaluate the method on tabular classification, tabular regression and deep neural-network benchmarks covering image, text and reasoning tasks. Statistical comparisons using the Friedman test followed by the Nemenyi post-hoc test show significant differences between methods. On tabular classification tasks, UCB1 obtains the highest mean rank among pruning policies and improves on the unpruned neural network. On regression tasks, UCB1 obtains the highest mean rank and is statistically competitive with, or superior to, several standard regression models according to R^2. On deep-learning tasks, UCB1 and Thompson Sampling obtain the strongest ranks, and several MAB policies significantly outperform the unpruned model, magnitude-based neuron pruning and greedy activation-variation pruning. The results show that MAB-based neuron pruning is an effective and computationally practical approach for structured model reduction.
Authors: Sang Truong, Yuheng Tu, Rylan Schaeffer, Sanmi Koyejo
Abstract: Scaling laws provide a fundamental framework for understanding the performance of Language Models (LMs), yet deriving them requires prohibitively expensive evaluations across thousands of checkpoints or millions of inference samples. To address this, we introduce Item Response Scaling Laws (IRSL), a unified framework that integrates Item Response Theory (IRT) within the scaling law framework. Unlike traditional approaches that treat each model-benchmark pair in isolation, IRSL disentangles latent model ability from question characteristics, factorizing the scaling law estimation for $M$ models and $N$ questions to significantly reduce parameter complexity from $O(M \times N)$ to $O(M + N)$. We instantiate IRSL with Beta-IRT, which leverages the empirical probability responses of LMs -- such as token probabilities in pre-training and pass rates in test-time sampling -- to capture richer signals than binary responses. We validate our approach across two prevalent scaling paradigms: (1) pre-training downstream scaling, using 6,612 LM checkpoints and 37,682 questions from 10 benchmarks; and (2) test-time scaling, using 12 LMs and 120 questions from 4 benchmarks with up to 2,500 samples per question. Given a one-time calibration on existing model responses, IRSL yields more reliable scaling estimates using only 50 questions per benchmark (a 99.9\% reduction), achieving comparable or superior decision accuracy to traditional approaches. Furthermore, we show that the estimated latent model abilities are generalizable, enabling accurate performance forecasting across benchmarks that share the same measurement objective.
Authors: Hwiyeong Lee, Ingyu Bang, Uiji Hwang, Hyelim Lim, Taeuk Kim
Abstract: While sparse autoencoders provide features more interpretable than individual neurons, reliably characterizing them remains challenging. We propose Query Lens, which extends Logit Lens to enable more comprehensive and faithful interpretations of sparse features. By jointly considering encoder-side key features and decoder-side value features, we identify both the inputs that activate a feature and the outputs it promotes. We also account for indirect, module-mediated effects that arise when the feature is processed by downstream modules, going beyond the direct effect captured by Logit Lens. In experiments, we find that Query Lens yields coherent token signatures for features that remain uninterpretable under Logit Lens. Finally, we propose the Subspace Channel Hypothesis, suggesting that downstream modules read features through layer-specific subspaces.
Authors: Li Lin, Xiaojun Wan
Abstract: NVFP4 is a recently introduced hardware-supported FP4 format that improves the fidelity of 4-bit quantization through fine-grained block scales. However, existing NVFP4 scale initialization methods still primarily rely on AbsMax initialization, which leaves a noticeable gap to the optimal solution. To address this, we propose ScaleSweep, a simple and efficient scale optimization method that sweeps over feasible block scale candidates and selects the candidate that minimizes a target objective. We further provide a theoretical analysis of NVFP4 quantization and derive both lower and upper bounds for the required sweep range under mean square error (MSE) and weighted mean square error (WMSE) between the original tensor and the quantized reconstructed tensor. The proposed bounds substantially reduce the sweep space while preserving the optimal candidate, enabling negligible overhead compared with the baseline quantization operators. Experiments on Llama and Qwen models demonstrate that ScaleSweep consistently improves quantization performance over existing initialization methods and further narrows the gap to full precision. In particular, under aggressive end-to-end quantization of weights, activations, KV cache, and query states, ScaleSweep preserves more than 93% of the full-precision performance.
Authors: Pramit Kumar Bhaduri, Mahdi Taheri, Samira Nazari, Maksim Jenihhin, Christian Herglotz, Michael Hubner
Abstract: With the growth of Vision Transformers in safety-critical domains like autonomous systems and medical imaging, ensuring their reliability against soft errors is paramount. While ViTs offer state-of-the-art accuracy, their massive parameter counts render exhaustive fault injection campaigns infeasible. To bridge this gap, a statistical fault injection framework is presented, leveraging finite-population sampling theory to provide formal reliability guarantees. It is demonstrated that failure rates are bounded within a 1% margin at 99\% confidence using only a few thousand samples, regardless of model scale. This methodology achieves up to a 10,700 times reduction in experimental cost compared to exhaustive approaches, while preserving the ability to localize vulnerabilities across architectural components. Through extensive evaluation of different architectures like ViT-Tiny and ViT-Small, a highly non-uniform reliability landscape is uncovered. It is shown that while only 3% of FP32 bit-flips result in failure, the vast majority of these events lead to catastrophic accuracy collapse. Specific vulnerabilities are localized to normalization layers and critical exponent bits within the IEEE-754 format, providing a mathematical foundation and actionable insights for the design of hardened, edge-deployed ViT architectures.
Authors: Amir Hossein Shahdadian, Ahmed M. Abdelmoniem, Mahdi Taheri, Samira Nazari, Christian Herglotz
Abstract: Edge services increasingly use federated learning to personalize on-device models while keeping sensitive data local. In practice, deployments must handle heterogeneity in both client resources and local data distributions. Model-heterogeneous federated learning lowers client cost by allowing each client to train a subnet of a shared supernet, but most subnet-allocation policies are driven by device constraints and do not explicitly account for statistical heterogeneity. This paper proposes Heterogeneity-Aware Subnet Allocation (HASA), a train-only rule that assigns subnet widths based on client heterogeneity scores computed from local training data while enforcing a fixed size-weighted compute budget. This design enables budget-matched comparisons with alternative allocation policies. On an article-title next-word prediction benchmark with seven clients, HASA improves unweighted mean client test accuracy over uniform allocation across 10 matched seeds, increasing mean client test accuracy from 13.82 percent to 14.32 percent, and improves worst-client accuracy on average. In a matched-budget comparison with representative partial-training baselines, HASA achieves the strongest worst-client and tail-client accuracy on this benchmark. A directionality ablation shows that assigning smaller subnets to more heterogeneous clients degrades both mean and tail performance. A cross-domain image-classification study further shows that the effectiveness of heterogeneity-aware allocation depends on how well the heterogeneity score reflects clients' need for additional model width.
Authors: Pranav Darshan, Raghuveer Narayanan Rajesh, M Uttara Kumari
Abstract: Perception in dense, unstructured urban traffic remains a major challenge for autonomous driving because of the wide variety of road users, frequent occlusions, irregular motion patterns, and the lack of standardized road layouts. Although recent LiDAR based 3D object detectors have shown strong performance in structured driving scenarios, most are developed and evaluated for limited field of view settings, and their behavior under full surround 360-degree sensing is still not well understood. This paper studies a 360-degree LiDAR perception pipeline for autonomous driving, with particular attention to panoramic sensing, azimuthal sector wise spatial processing, and transformation equivariant feature extraction in complex urban scenes. The paper presents a practical 360-degree perception framework that combines sector wise panoramic processing with rotation equivariant sparse convolutions and evaluates its behavior on a custom Ouster OS0 LiDAR dataset collected across diverse Indian urban traffic conditions. The results show generally stable detection across several object classes, with the strongest performance for cars at 92.02/90.51, buses at 80.53/76.34, and trucks at 78.59/74.16, while lower scores for pedestrians at 67.45/61.02, cyclists at 73.21/69.54, and motorcyclists at 71.20/68.13 reflect the greater difficulty of detecting smaller and more variable road users in dense urban scenes.
Authors: Cristina Garbacea
Abstract: Current approaches to aligning large language models (LLMs) aggregate diverse human preferences into a single reward signal, effectively optimizing for a hypothetical ``average user'' who represents no real person particularly well. This position paper argues that LLMs should learn personalized, individual preferences rather than aggregated ones. We show that aggregation masks critical information about preference diversity, individual values, and contextual dependencies, which is a limitation both theoretically grounded in social choice theory and empirically evident across demographic groups. We analyze the rich structure that human preferences encode, survey technical approaches to personalization, and systematically address counterarguments on scalability, shared standards, and manipulation risk. While personalization introduces genuine safety challenges including filter bubbles, value lock-in, and psychological manipulation, we argue these are manageable through bounded personalization frameworks that preserve universal safety constraints while accommodating legitimate individual variation. We conclude with a concrete research and policy agenda for developing preference-aware models that respect both individual autonomy and collective safety.
Authors: Jiancheng Zhang, Meiqing Li, Qi Zhang, Yinglun Zhu
Abstract: Real-world datasets across image and text domains are often characterized by skewed class distributions and noisy annotations, which jointly degrade model performance, particularly on minority classes. Among existing solutions, active learning offers an effective and efficient paradigm by selectively querying the most informative and balanced samples for annotation. We propose an innovative active learning framework that mitigates class imbalance and selects the most informative samples to annotate. Leveraging foundation model priors, our algorithm enables imbalance-aware co-decisions between foundation model and small model to tackle noisy and imbalanced labels across various domains. We introduce the first study to systematically explore active learning under the dual challenges of label noise and class imbalance across image and text domains. Extensive experiments on imbalanced datasets demonstrate that our method achieves substantial annotation savings-over 50% compared to the best active learning baseline-while preserving performance and robustness to label noise.
Authors: Huy Nghiem, Sy-Tuyen Ho, Sarah Wiegreffe, Hal Daum\'e III
Abstract: Emergent misalignment (EM) occurs when narrow finetuning causes a model to behave dangerously outside the finetuning task. Standard training signals can miss this shift, making reliable detection costly if it depends on repeated behavioral evaluation. We ask whether emergent misalignment can instead be detected from internal representations during finetuning. Using seven alignment-relevant traits encoded as linear directions in activation space, we track representational drift across training checkpoints in four open-source 7-9B LLMs. EM-relevant drift concentrates on a low-dimensional axis that explains 65.5% of the variance, revealing a geometric signature in the studied regime. A low-overhead monitor built on this drift profile detects dangerous checkpoints with 2.2% false negative rate, 2.9% false positive rate, and 0.990 AUROC on held-out perturbation types, outperforming unsupervised PCA and SAE baselines. Stress tests on two 14B models, longer finetuning runs, and misaligned starting points identify key deployment boundaries. These results position trait-space monitoring as a practical complement to behavioral evaluation for EM detection during LoRA-based finetuning, while showing that deployment across substantially different regimes may require recalibration.
Authors: Spoorthi M, Suja Palaniswamy
Abstract: Accurate classification of nuclei subtypes in histopathology images is critical for downstream tasks including tumor grading, immune infiltrate quantification, and prognosis prediction. Existing approaches rely on either convolutional or transformer-based encoders in isolation, limiting their ability to simultaneously capture fine-grained local texture and long-range spatial context. We present AMN (Adaptive Multi-Scale Nuclei Network), a dual-encoder segmentation framework that jointly leverages a Swin Transformer and a ResNet-50 feature pyramid, fused via a learned per-channel gating mechanism that dynamically weighs each encoder's contribution at every scale. AMN is trained with a multi-objective loss combining class-weighted focal loss, boundary-aware loss with positive-pixel emphasis, and a novel uncertainty-modulated classification term that suppresses overconfident erroneous predictions. Evaluated on the CoNIC benchmark across seven nuclei classes, AMN achieves a mean Dice of 0.82 and mean F1 of 0.68, with an F1 of 0.67 on the diagnostically challenging lymphocyte class. AMN outperforms eight baseline models spanning pure-CNN, pure-transformer, and recent hybrid architectures: U-Net, ResU-Net, DeepLabV3+, SegNet, ViT-Small, HmsU-Net, ConvFormer-UNet, and BEFUnet. Cross-dataset evaluation on MoNuSeg demonstrates strong generalization without retraining and validating the domain robustness of the learned representations.
Authors: Xiongri Shen, Zhenxi Song, Jiaqi wang, Yi Zhong, Leilei Zhao, Chenqi Xu, Linling Li, Yichen Wei, Lingyan Liang, Demao Deng, Luping Song, Ping Luan, Ahmed M. Anter, Shuqiang Wang, Baiying Lei, Zhiguo Zhang
Abstract: Multimodal neuroimaging fusion of functional MRI (fMRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) provides complementary information for cognitive impairment analysis, but remains challenged by heterogeneous feature spaces and misaligned representations. We propose \textit{NeuroAlign}, a hierarchical framework for structured multimodal fusion. It introduces (1) \textit{Dual-Modal Hierarchical Alignment} (DMHA), which models multi-scale dynamic connectivity and aligns dynamic-static and functional-structural embeddings; and (2) \textit{Dual-Domain Hierarchical Interaction} (DDHI), which enables fine-grained modulation and global interaction between connectivity- and region-level features. To support feature-level inspection, we design \textit{Synergistic Activation Mapping} (SAM), a gradient-free, marker-oriented attribution method for DFC, SFC, ALFF, and FA. Evaluated on GUTCM, ADNI, and OASIS under five-fold validation, NeuroAlign achieves competitive MCI/SCD detection and preliminary cross-dataset transferability. Attribution analyses reveal modality-specific and partially consistent brain patterns, providing model-derived evidence for multimodal representation analysis.
Authors: Gadha Lekshmi P, Govind Arun, Rohith Syam, Ahmed Elgammal
Abstract: Image generative models, though widely used as creative tools, offer limited support for the kind of compositional control that photographers and visual artists routinely exercise. This paper presents early results on an anchor conditioned finetuning framework for landscape image generation, in which a four dimensional compositional anchor vector is extracted from training images and injected into a diffusion model via a decoupled cross attention mechanism with Fourier encoding and three way classifier free guidance dropout. Quantitative evaluation against a baseline and three ablation variants shows that the proposed architecture achieves the highest horizon detection rate of 0.850 and the highest rule of thirds alignment of 0.817. A category specific ablation further demonstrates that training on compositionally homogeneous scene subsets reduces horizon deviation by up to 40 percent compared to mixed training. This establishes that compositional control precision is category dependent.
Authors: Pengyu Wang, Chenkun Tan, Shaojun Zhou, Wei Huang, Qirui Zhou, Zhan Huang, Zhen Ye, Jijun Cheng, Xiaomeng Qian, Yanxin Chen, Xingyang He, Huazheng Zeng, Chenghao Wang, Pengfei Wang, Hongkai Wang, Shanqing Gao, Yixian Tian, Chenghao Liu, Xinghao Wang, Botian Jiang, Xipeng Qiu
Abstract: Video understanding is shifting from the offline paradigm -- taking a fully recorded video as input and producing a single answer after it ends -- toward real-time interaction, in which the model perceives new frames while still replying, revises its answer as new evidence appears, and remains silent when there is nothing to say. We present MOSS-Video-Preview to validate this paradigm. Our central claim is that perception must not be blocked by generation; its natural realization is a two-channel architecture. We argue that a cross-attention backbone is better suited to real-time vision-language fusion than the prevailing decoder-only design: visual features enter through a side channel rather than joining the autoregressive sequence, so perception and generation run on separate, non-blocking pathways -- reducing the frequency of visual processing and exposing a clean channel-wise interface for independent compression. We complement this with a data synthesis pipeline that converts dense captions into real-time understanding QA whose answers are revised to match what the model has perceived so far, and we specialize an offline model on these data to elicit real-time behavior. Our model trails the strong Qwen2.5-VL-7B baseline overall -- a gap we attribute primarily to data and scale rather than the architecture -- yet attains competitive offline video and multimodal understanding, remains robust on the spatial and fine-grained temporal reasoning central to real-time use, and acquires behaviors that offline models lack: continuous perception, answer revision, and timely silence. On a single H200 with 256 frames per video, it achieves about a 5x speedup in time to first token and 2.7x higher decoding throughput, with negligible degradation in offline ability. Our study of paradigm, architecture, and data outlines a viable path toward real-time video understanding.
Authors: Borja Arroyo Galende, Alejandro Almod\'ovar, Patricia A. Apell\'aniz, Juan Parras, Silvia Uribe, Santiago Zazo
Abstract: This study investigates the trade-offs between fidelity, privacy, and utility in synthetic data generation under conditions of data scarcity and privacy sensitivity. We propose an evaluation framework that jointly assesses these three dimensions and apply it to three widely used generative models, VAE, GAN, and DDPM. The evaluation spans three image datasets, MNIST, OCTMNIST, and OrganAMNIST, encompassing both general-purpose and medical imaging domains. Notable differences arise between the three models in their behaviour when differential privacy mechanisms are introduced during training. GAN and DDPM demonstrate greater robustness, maintaining higher fidelity and downstream utility across a range of noise levels, while VAE degrades more rapidly as privacy constraints increase. This study highlights the importance of a multidimensional evaluation of deep generative models, also noting that their behaviour significantly differs when privacy techniques are applied.
Authors: Yaoting Wang, Ziyi Zhang, Wenming Tu, Shaoxuan Xu, Wenjie Du, Cheng Liang, Weijun Wang, Yuanchao Li, Guangyao Li, Hao Fei, Yuanchun Li, Henghui Ding, Yunxin Liu
Abstract: Recent advances in Omni-Multimodal Large Language Models (Omni-MLLMs) have enabled strong integration of vision, audio, and language. However, their audio-visual intelligence (AVI) remains insufficiently evaluated due to the lack of systematic and comprehensive benchmarks. We introduce AVI-Bench, a cognitively inspired benchmark that evaluates Omni-MLLMs across three stages, perception, understanding, and reasoning, through cross-modal tasks requiring joint audio-visual interpretation. This design enables fine-grained diagnosis of model capabilities and failure modes. To further assess robustness beyond familiar domains, we propose AVI-Bench-PriSe, an extension that probes models' primitive audio-visual sensation using unfamiliar, low-semantic stimuli, testing generalization beyond common training distributions. Extensive experiments on both open-source and closed-source models reveal substantial limitations in current Omni-MLLMs. Based on these findings, we present a four-level AVI taxonomy. Overall, AVI-Bench provides a principled evaluation framework to guide the development of more robust and generalizable AVI. Project website: https://fudancvl.github.io/AVI-Bench/
Authors: Chang Kong, Yuebing Li, Peng Mo, Haigang Zhang, Qiuming Luo
Abstract: The scarcity of hard negative samples in current vision-language datasets significantly hinders fine-grained perception. To address this, we propose FineGen, a VLM-based Multi-Agent framework for automated dataset construction. By employing a collaborative Generation-Verification-Correction pipeline with a closed-loop feedback mechanism, FineGen ensures synthesized hard negatives are semantically valid yet strictly contradictory to visual content. Applying this to ImageNet, we construct FineGen-100K, a hierarchical dataset containing over 147,000 attribute-specific hard negatives with a rigorous 1:10 positive-to-negative ratio. Extensive evaluations confirm a 96.7% attribute validity rate. Crucially, downstream validation on the FG-OVD benchmark shows that fine-tuning on FineGen-100K yields a substantial +14.4% accuracy improvement on hard samples, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Xiaoran Xu, Yifan Xu, Yupeng Wu, Xiaoshan Yang, Changsheng Xu
Abstract: Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to align a model to shifting test domains using only unlabeled streaming data. Most existing methods implicitly infer a single global domain distribution, ignoring the multidimensional and sample-specific nature of real-world domain shifts, leading to fragile adaptation. We propose DOME, an effective domain encoder that explicitly models each sample's domain in a zero-shot manner. DOME leverages vision-language pretraining to extract dense, continuous representations, parameterizes domains as distributional variables, and introduces a momentum-updated sparse domain bank for disentangled supervision. By injecting these explicit domain cues into downstream models, even a basic entropy-minimization TTA strategy achieves state-of-the-art performance across ImageNet-C, ImageNet-R, and ImageNet-Sketch, outperforming complex TTA approaches. Our results demonstrate that robust adaptation stems not from intricate adaptation algorithms, but from explicit, structured domain representation.
Authors: Om Kathalkar, Nitin Nilesh, Sachin Chaudhari, Anoop Namboodiri
Abstract: Air pollution represents one of the most critical environmental and public health challenges globally, with traditional sensor-based monitoring systems facing significant scalability and economic constraints. Image-based air quality estimation has emerged as a promising alternative, leveraging the visual characteristics of atmospheric pollutants in traffic scenes. However, existing methods suffer from limited cross-city generalization and inadequate exploitation of multi-view perspectives. We present AQIFormer, a novel transformer-based ensemble architecture that addresses these fundamental limitations through innovative dual-view integration, weather-aware attention mechanisms, and comprehensive multi-task learning. Our approach uniquely combines front and rear traffic imagery with meteorological parameters to achieve robust air quality classification across diverse urban environments. Extensive evaluation on a comprehensive dataset of 26,678 synchronized front-rear image pairs demonstrates good performance with 89.96% accuracy, representing a 14.96% improvement over state-of-the-art methods. Most importantly, our model maintains exceptional cross-city generalization capabilities, achieving 81.67% accuracy on an independent dataset collected in Nagpur, India with only 8.29% performance degradation using few-shot adaptation with minimal training samples.
Authors: Lingxuan Huang, Sizhe He, Hengji Zhou, Liqiang Nie, Lianghao Xia, Chao Huang
Abstract: Long-form video generation requires systematic narrative planning and visual consistency that current short-clip methods cannot provide. Existing methods generate isolated sequences without narrative structure and lack mechanisms for maintaining character and environmental consistency across scenes. We present ViMax, an agentic video generation framework that addresses video creation through coordinated multi-agent collaboration where specialized components negotiate narrative decisions, visual continuity, and production quality. Our framework employs a hierarchical narrative engine with retrieval-augmented generation for global story coherence and a dependency-aware visual consistency mechanism that tracks character and environmental states across temporal boundaries, while VLM-guided agents continuously monitor and refine both narrative coherence and visual fidelity. The framework enables coordinated agent collaboration to generate extended narrative content. This maintains both storytelling integrity and visual coherence across multi-scene timelines.
Authors: Hannah Gao (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Dylan Hadfield-Menell (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Rachel Ma (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Abstract: Given the increased adoption of Vision Language Models (VLMs) in human-interactive settings, it is important that we evaluate how well these models can adapt to real-time preferences for different users. While an increasing number of vision-language benchmarks have recently been introduced, they focus largely on evaluating static capabilities and generally-held preferences learned from extensive training data. This work introduces a new benchmark for evaluating the ability of VLMs to understand dynamic human-preferences, i.e. preferences that are passed in-context at inference time. We provide an automated pipeline for generating this benchmark with variations on image dependence, a dynamic multi-modal human-preference dataset, and evaluations of state-of-the-art models on the novel benchmark.
Authors: Haowen Xiang, Yibo Yan, Jiahao Huo, Yu Huang, Yi Cao, Mingdong Ou, Xuming Hu
Abstract: Multi-vector visual document retrievers achieve strong fine-grained matching by representing each page with multiple vectors from deep Vision-Language Models (VLMs), but this design makes deployment expensive in both storage and computational overhead. Existing efficiency techniques usually optimize only part of this budget, leaving multimodal retrievers without a unified way to trade accuracy for both vector width and encoder depth. Therefore, we propose MM-Matryoshka, a 2D Matryoshka training framework for budget-elastic Visual Document Retrieval (VDR), enabling ColPali-style multi-vector retrieval elastic along both dimension and layer. At inference time, a single retriever can select a 2D selectable budget without training separate models for different budgets. Through comprehensive experiments across multiple representative backbones, we demonstrate that by retaining significantly higher quality than direct truncation baselines while substantially reducing storage and computational overhead, MM-Matryoshka can offer robust budget elasticity for efficient VDR.
Authors: Wenxiao Li, Yongjian Liu, Qing Xie
Abstract: Neuroevolution is a representative neural architecture search paradigm that evolves both network topology and weights through evolutionary algorithms. In this paper, we propose Seq103, a unified NEAT-style neuroevolution framework for compact sequence architecture discovery. Seq103 consists of a shared evolutionary backbone and an optional recurrent extension. The shared backbone includes an elementary node-and-connection representation, per-class RMSE-based evaluation, mutation-based evolution with class-wise recombination, and elitism. The optional hidden-state mechanism extends the search space with hidden-state nodes and hidden connections, enabling temporal memory when step-wise recurrent inference is required. With this design, Seq103 applies the same core search pipeline to both step-wise recurrent and sample-wise feedforward sequence classification. In recurrent tasks, the hidden-state extension is enabled to provide temporal memory; in feedforward tasks, it is disabled while the shared evolutionary backbone remains unchanged. We evaluate Seq103 on 8 text classification datasets and the full UCRArchive2018 benchmark with 128 univariate time-series datasets. On step-wise tasks, Seq103 retains 86.96% of the best-baseline accuracy on average while using 34.6x to 3218.0x fewer parameters. On sample-wise tasks over the full UCRArchive2018 benchmark, Seq103 retains 81.95% of the best-baseline accuracy on average while using 11.8x to 160,601.0x fewer parameters.
Authors: Xuanzhe Li, Ziyan Weng, Zhiyu Zhu, Junhui Hou
Abstract: Transformer inference increasingly depends on specialized compiler and runtime support, but real model graphs still require semantic decisions about which regions are worth specializing and which CUDA implementation families are plausible. We present AgentCompile, an LLM-guided CUDA inference compiler that uses LLM outputs only as advisory search metadata. Given compiler-derived region summaries and bounded candidate spaces, the LLM proposes semantic labels, candidate priorities, parameter hints, and risk annotations; the compiler materializes CUDA candidates through templates, checks interface and hardware constraints, validates candidates empirically, selects implementations by measured latency, and falls back when specialization is unsupported or unprofitable. In end-to-end autoregressive generation, AgentCompile averages 5.66x, 4.05x, and 4.26x speedup over PyTorch eager on Qwen3-1.7B, Qwen3-4B, and Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct, respectively, across five representative workloads. We will open-source the project.
Authors: Guo Li, Jiandian Zeng, Yang Li, Zihao Peng, Ke Chen, Tian Wang
Abstract: Deploying Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) in real-world surveillance faces a fundamental tension between the demand for high-level semantics to ensure effectiveness and the limited computational resources of edge devices. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) provide rich open-vocabulary semantics, but their latency and computational cost preclude on-device deployment. To address the challenge, we propose MemoVAD, an edge-cloud collaborative framework that selectively incorporates VLM semantics into streaming VAD. MemoVAD runs most inference on the edge with a lightweight detector and a causal Temporal Context Encoder (TCE) to model temporal dependencies. Specifically, we introduce an Uncertainty-Aware Gating (UAG) policy grounded in Subjective Logic to model perceived uncertainty and query the cloud-based VLM only for high-uncertainty and semantically novel clips. Besides, a Dynamic Semantic Memory (DSM) is designed to cache VLM-verified prototypes for efficient retrieval, enabling the edge model to progressively incorporate VLM-level semantics via a semantic adapter. Experiments on UCF-Crime and XD-Violence datasets via a real edge device show that MemoVAD substantially reduces communication overhead while surpassing state-of-the-art performance.
Authors: Mingzhao Li, Arghya Pal, Guan Yuan Tan
Abstract: Deformable 3D Gaussian Splatting (D-3DGS) re-constructs dynamic scenes from monocular video by deforming a canonical set of 3D Gaussians through a positional-encoded MLP of frame time t. Although fitted to a continuous variable, the MLP couples no two values of t in its architecture and effectively predicts discrete per-frame offsets, leaving temporal smoothness to emerge only as a byproduct of optimisation. We redesign the deformation field as a stack of Closed-form Continuous-time (CfC) cells, a Liquid Neural Network (LNN), that is the closed-form solution of the Liquid Time-constant ODE while preserving every other part of the D-3DGS pipeline. Each cell exposes a sigmoidal time gate that interpolates between two candidate hidden states, baking a learned smooth response to t into the loss landscape without invoking any numerical solver. On the eight D-NeRF and seven NeRF-DS scenes the liquid field matches or exceeds the MLP baseline in aggregate, with its largest gains concentrated on the scenes with the most high-frequency articulated motion. The result is a near-zero-friction architectural design that turns the discrete MLP deformation field into an explicit continuous-time function of t.
Authors: June-Woo Kim, Kangwook Jang, Minu Kim, Hyunju Lee
Abstract: Ambulatory neck-surface acceleration enables non-invasive monitoring of vocal hyperfunction, yet robust biomarkers for its subtypes remain limited. This study investigates the NeckVibe Challenge dataset to distinguish phonotraumatic (PVH) and non-phonotraumatic (NPVH) from healthy controls. We propose a hierarchical feature engineering framework comprising: (i) static, (ii) dynamic, (iii) ratio-based, (iv) coupling features capturing source filter interactions. While univariate statistical analysis shows strong separability for PVH but limited significance for NPVH, our machine learning pipeline, tailored for high-dimensional feature integration, identifies that coupling features are crucial for both tasks. We achieve an AUC of 0.891 for PVH and 0.728 for NPVH, suggesting that while PVH is near-linearly separable, NPVH discrimination benefits from modeling non-linear feature interactions.
Authors: Joseph Boyd, Matthew Lyon, Martino Mansoldo, Christian Hurry, Finnian Firth
Abstract: Spatial transcriptomics (ST) is a powerful tool for exploring biological properties dependent on structure, proximity, and interaction in tissue. The methods underpinning ST are developing rapidly but are limited in their ability to profile many thousands of genes at a subcellular scale. Although dissociated from tissue, it is known that the whole-transcriptome readouts of cells in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) retain information about their former in situ neighbourhoods, motivating computational methods to recover it. While paired ST and scRNA-seq datasets are scarce, each modality in its own right is abundantly available. We therefore propose to perform cross-modal translation between unpaired ST and scRNA-seq data. In this work we show that a single-cell foundation model can perform this translation via adversarial fine-tuning. We demonstrate that our method performs favourably against methods built for multi-omics translation.
Authors: Yi Nian, Tiankai Yang, Yudi Zhang, Qi Pan, Zelong Xu, Shenzhe Zhu, Qingqing Luan, Yue Huang, Xiangliang Zhang, Yue Zhao
Abstract: Safety alignment for large language models relies on preference data, but current pipelines often train on large, redundant datasets. Existing data selection methods typically score each preference pair independently, collapsing directional preference information into scalar quality or diversity scores. This sample-centric view is especially limiting in multi-dataset settings, where shared safety directions coexist with dataset-specific residual risks. We propose DOG-DPO, a training-free data selection framework that treats preference pairs as structured geometric signals. DOG-DPO first represents each preference pair as a direction in model representation space. It then decomposes multi-dataset preference geometry into a global anchor subspace and dataset-specific residual subspaces. Finally, it selects subsets by maximizing diversity-based coverage, encouraging broad, non-redundant coverage of alignment directions before DPO training. Across six safety benchmarks and two model backbones, DOG-DPO achieves a strong utility-robustness trade-off using only 11% of the preference pairs. It recovers most of the safety gains of full-data training while remaining entirely teacher-free, training-free, and substantially faster than representative selection baselines.
Authors: Aya Lahlou, Linnia Hawkins, Pierre Gentine
Abstract: Differentiable programming offers transformative capabilities for scientific modeling, enabling gradient-based parameter estimation, sensitivity analysis, and data assimilation. Yet, migrating legacy codebases into differentiable frameworks remains a challenge. We present a five-phase LLM-based agentic pipeline that translates legacy Fortran into JAX: static dependency analysis determines module translation order from the full call graph; iterative compile-repair loops correct errors autonomously; and a Fortran reference oracle enforces numerical parity at the module level before integration and gradient verification. We instantiate and evaluate the pipeline on CLM-ml-v2, a 19,000-line Fortran land surface model, and analyze agent behavior across 73 module translation tasks. The resulting differentiable model computes the complete Jacobian in a single backward pass, recovers physical parameters in eight times fewer steps than gradient-free optimization, and achieves a 24 times wall-clock speedup over sequential Fortran at ensemble size N=2,048. Both the translated model and pipeline infrastructure are released as a reusable framework for differentiating other Earth system model components.
Authors: Rishi Desai, Jesse Hu, Joan Cabezas, Neel Harsola, Pratyush Shukla, Roey Ben Chaim, Adnan El Assadi, Omkaar Mukund Kamath, Fenil Faldu, Prannay Hebbar, Jiankai Sun, Yiyuan Li, Pramod Srinivasan, Ishan Gupta, Christopher Settles, Daniel Wang, Derek Chen, Pranav Raja, Albert Liu, Marek \v{S}uppa, Nevasini Sasikumar, Luyang Kong, Erik Quintanilla, Xiangyi Li, Ivan Bercovich, Steven Dillmann
Abstract: AI agents are increasingly expected to complete long-horizon workflows that require sustained progress over hours, millions of tokens, and complex environments. Yet current agent benchmarks largely evaluate short-form tasks, such as single pull requests, small tickets, or 5-10 minute exercises, limiting our ability to measure agents' capabilities in planning, long-context understanding, and memory use. We introduce SWE-Marathon, a benchmark of 20 long-horizon tasks spanning software engineering and adjacent technical domains. Each task consists of a unique executable environment, a human-written reference solution, and a multi-layer verification suite. Logged agent attempts average 27.2M total tokens, making SWE-Marathon substantially longer-horizon than existing SWE and command-line agent benchmarks. Current frontier coding agents solve fewer than 30% of tasks. Failures often arise from poor self-verification, self-reported infeasibility, and premature termination. We also observe reward-hacking behavior in 13.8% of rollouts, where agents attempt to exploit the environment or verifier to bypass the intended workflow. SWE-Marathon includes adversarial review of test suites and execution environments, as well as multi-layer checks designed to prevent shortcut solutions. We release SWE-Marathon, evaluation code, and agent trajectories at https://swe-marathon.org/.
Authors: Qianli Ma, Zhiqing Tang, Hanshuai Cui, Zhi Yao, Weijia Jia
Abstract: Disaggregated serving alleviates memory bottlenecks in Large Language Model (LLM) inference but creates a severe communication bottleneck: transmitting high-dimensional Key-Value (KV) caches often dominates time-to-first-token (TTFT). Moreover, reusing caches across heterogeneous models (e.g., base and fine-tuned variants) causes semantic misalignment that accumulates over layers, degrading generation quality. We propose Semantic Cache Distillation (SCD), a loss-constrained framework that replaces raw KV transmission with compact semantic codes. SCD addresses these challenges via two mechanisms: (1) Reuse, which reconstructs most layers from low-rank subspaces to minimize transfer cost, and (2) Patch, which predicts normalized inputs at sparse transition layers to truncate error propagation. Empirically, SCD delivers up to 2.65 $\times$ TTFT speedup over the oracle consumer prefill and dominates quantization and selective recomputation baselines on the quality--latency Pareto frontier in bandwidth-constrained regimes, while keeping generation quality within 5\% F1 of the oracle.
Authors: Deepak Kanneganti, Sajib Mistry, Sheik Mohammad Mostakim Fattah, Aneesh Krishna
Abstract: The dynamic nature of Internet of Things (IoT) environments affects the long-term effectiveness of Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) compositions. Existing adaptive composition methods are mainly based on service replacement or re-composition, where identifying suitable substitutes is difficult and time-consuming. To address this, we propose a novel Test-Time Adaptive (TTA) composition framework for MLaaS in IoT environments. First, we introduce a TTA-aware composability model to determine whether adapted services remain compatible with the existing composition. Next, we design a service-level adaptation model to adjust individual services during inference while preserving composition performance. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework reduces computational time more effectively than traditional adaptive approaches.
Authors: Ravisha Rupasinghe, Rajith Vidanaarachchi, Asela Hevapathige, Sachith Seneviratne, Sen-Lin Tang, Saman Halgamuge
Abstract: Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) is a way of including knowledge in the form of equations in Machine Learning methods. Beyond equations, knowledge exists in other forms, such as text and network structure. While existing PINN-based approaches discover equation parameters from data, they rely solely on experimental measurements. We propose a new PINN framework that enriches parameter discovery by incorporating auxiliary knowledge sources. We instantiate our framework for microbiology, where generalised Lotka-Volterra (gLV) serves as a biological foundation for modelling microbial communities. We demonstrate that incorporating knowledge improves microbial community modelling. Our framework enriches the gLV parameters using peer-reviewed metagenomics literature, as text provides biological context on external influences that gLV alone cannot capture. We combine this knowledge with experimental measurements of microbial abundance using a data-driven integration approach. We integrate network-based structural knowledge by explicitly modelling microbial interactions. Our knowledge-inclusive framework infers microbial networks, revealing ecological insights. We validate these findings against ecological roles documented in the literature. We evaluate on real and simulated datasets spanning human- and plant-associated microbial communities. Our framework improves over the state-of-the-art by up to 53%, even without knowledge. Knowledge addition yields gains of up to 23% in Bray-Curtis Dissimilarity-based accuracy and 47% in $\mathrm{R}^2$.
Authors: Jewon Yeom, Hanseul Kim, Jeongjae Park, Sungmok Jung, Jaejin Lee, Taesup Kim
Abstract: Video world models are increasingly used to provide predictive visual representations, yet it remains unclear which pretraining signals induce action-relevant structure in their latent spaces. We study this question through a unified probe-based evaluation across diverse encoder families, including image-only self-supervision, video pretraining with and without latent prediction, reconstruction-based autoencoders, diffusion models, and shortcut-forcing dynamics models. Using a common inverse-dynamics probing objective, we find that action-relevant structure is driven primarily by temporal video pretraining rather than pixel reconstruction fidelity: models with strong pixel decoding quality can exhibit near-zero action recoverability, while video-pretrained self-supervised encoders consistently achieve the best Pareto trade-off between visual fidelity and action prediction. Comparing V-JEPA and VideoMAE further shows that most gains arise from natural-video temporal context, with feature-level latent prediction providing a smaller additional benefit. These trends transfer across robotic benchmarks, though CALVIN reveals that static-environment tasks can partially mask the importance of temporal structure by allowing strong image priors to suffice. Finally, inverse-dynamics supervision substantially improves robustness to visual corruption, suggesting that action-aware objectives regularize latent geometry beyond clean-setting performance. Our results identify temporal predictive structure -- not reconstruction fidelity -- as the primary ingredient underlying action-relevant video representations.
Authors: Ziheng Chen, Jiali Cheng, Zezhong Fan, Hadi Amiri, Diyuan Wu, Gabriele Tolomei, Yang Zhang
Abstract: Generative recommendation formulates next-item prediction as autoregressive generation over semantic ID (SID) sequences derived from users' historical interactions, making modern recommender systems structurally similar to large language models (LLMs). As privacy and safety concerns grow, these systems increasingly require concept unlearning to remove sensitive or harmful concepts associated with items. However, existing LLM unlearning methods cannot be directly applied to generative recommendation. Unlike word tokens with explicit semantics, SIDs are abstract identifiers that are often shared by both forget and retain items, leading to severe conflicts between concept removal and recommendation utility preservation. To address this challenge, we propose TRACER, an end-to-end concept unlearning framework based on token reassignment. Rather than directly suppressing shared SIDs, TRACER reassigns concept-related items to alternative tokens that better facilitate forgetting while minimizing side effects on retained items. We further introduce a coherence regularizer to preserve semantic consistency among retain items during unlearning. Experiments on real-world recommendation datasets demonstrate that TRACER effectively removes target concepts while substantially better preserving recommendation utility than existing unlearning baselines.
Authors: Ning Wang, Zhengxin Zhang, Maosen Tang, Yitang Gao, Claire Cardie, Sainyam Galhotra
Abstract: Finetuning data selection requires balancing two competing goals: selecting examples that improve the downstream objective, and doing so without repeatedly finetuning models. Train-free selectors are scalable but rely on proxies such as embedding similarity or clustering, which may not match the target objective. Train-based selectors better reflect downstream utility through gradient signals, subset evaluation, or Shapley attribution, but require many costly train--evaluate iterations. We propose Hierarchical Active Region Pruning (HARP), an efficient train-based selector that preserves downstream alignment while reducing selection cost. HARP organizes the training pool into a node--leaf hierarchy, evaluates only representative leaves, and infers unmeasured utilities with empirical Bayes posteriors. It then selects data using two complementary envelopes: HARP-C, which conservatively controls redundancy, and HARP-E, which additively rewards complementary regions. We theoretically show that, under local smoothness and bounded estimation error, HARP controls selection error while reducing train--evaluate cost. We further validate that HARP variants achieve the best result and outperform the strongest baseline by up to $+8.9$ points, while using roughly $7\times$ fewer training examples.
Authors: Magnus Ruud Kjaer, Haejun Han, Ashish Neupane, David Q. Sun
Abstract: Foundation models for wearable biosignals have matched or exceeded supervised specialists across a range of clinical tasks, yet all rely on modalities that require deliberate user action--wearing a device or visiting a sleep lab. We introduce BCG-FM, the first foundation model for ambient mechanical biosignals. A piezoelectric sensor embedded in the bed surface records ballistocardiography (BCG) each night without user effort; we pretrain BCG-FM with participant-level contrastive learning and using a total of 2.75 million hours of nightly recordings from 145,985 individuals, the largest raw-waveform biosignal pretraining corpus to date. Frozen BCG-FM embeddings achieve 3.26-year MAE on biological-age estimation (the lowest reported for any ambient, contactless modality) and yield clinically relevant discrimination across 15 self-reported health conditions and three independent external cohorts. Pretrained representations from only 500 labeled participants outperform a fully supervised baseline trained on 3,372, and representation quality scales log-linearly with contrastive batch size. These results establish ambient, longitudinal mechanical biosignals as a viable modality for health foundation models.
Authors: Yongchao Li, Yang Li, Zhuoxuan Li, Jun Chen, Chu Zhang, Jinde Cao, Leszek Rutkowski
Abstract: Multi-Modality Spatio-Temporal Forecasting (MoSTF) extends traditional spatio-temporal forecasting by incorporating diverse traffic modalities. Despite significant recent strides in spatio-temporal modeling, existing approaches often fail to explicitly model the coupling relationships between different modality variables. Accurate MoSTF is challenging, as it requires modeling (1) temporal dynamic heterogeneity under exogenous influences and (2) heterogeneous spatial dependencies alongside complex cross-variable couplings. To address these challenges, we propose the Dual-Domain Spectral Filtering Network (DSFNet). Our framework employs dual-domain spectral filtering to capture heterogeneous spatial patterns and explicitly model the relationships between variables. Unlike graph-based message passing or dense attention over node-modality pairs, DSFNet factorizes space-modality interactions into feature-domain and spatial-domain spectral operators, enabling scalable modeling of nonlocal dependencies and cross-modality couplings. Furthermore, we introduce an external gating mechanism to adaptively regulate temporal dynamics under external influences. We validate our method through extensive experiments on five representative real-world traffic datasets. Compared with the second-best baselines, DSFNet reduces MAE by 3.21%-10.16% across these datasets. The results demonstrate that DSFNet significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines in accuracy while exhibiting efficiency and robustness.
Authors: Kien Le, Thai Le
Abstract: Activation steering has become a popular training-free method to control LLM behavior by injecting precomputed direction vectors into the model's residual stream at inference time. Yet its robustness to realistic input variation remains unstudied. We present the first systematic evaluation of activation steering robustness under adversarial text perturbations on the inputs, covering four extraction methods, three attack strategies, six personas from Anthropic Model-Written Evaluation Dataset, and five models ranging from 1.5B to 30B parameters. Attacks succeed broadly across all settings: directional robustness drops by up to 64%, post-attack confidence collapses near or below 0.25 across all methods and models, and steering strength degrades on nearly every steerable input. Layer selection is equally fragile, with the optimal layer identified by an automated method on clean inputs shifting by up to 17 positions under perturbation, a failure that compounds the vector-level breakdown. Extracting vectors from adversarially perturbed inputs partially recovers steerability for PCA and MD on mid-to-large models, but they consistently fail to locate the improved optimal layer, limiting the practical benefit of this mitigation. Together, these findings reveal that the brittleness of activation steering is structural rather than method-specific, and that current layer selection strategies are not robust enough for real-world deployment.
Authors: Haoluo Zhao, Hongchun Zhang, Nan Li, Jing-Jia Luo, Kaikai Zhang, Mengyang Yu, Nan Chen, Tao Song, Fan Meng
Abstract: As atmospheric environmental prediction continues to improve, interpretable validation of pollution mechanisms and feedback processes has become a main challenge in atmospheric chemistry. Yet mechanism validation based on complex numerical models still relies heavily on expert knowledge: mechanistic hypotheses must be operationalized into executable experiments, and model outputs must be organized into traceable evidence. We present TianJi-Environ, an auditable AI Scientist for atmospheric-chemistry mechanism validation. TianJi-Environ establishes the first WRF-Chem-based multi-agent framework that autonomously drives complex atmospheric-chemistry simulations, converting mechanistic hypotheses into executable configurations, testing experiments, and evidence criteria. Using ozone response and particulate-matter feedback as two representative examples, we demonstrate TianJi-Environ's capability for mechanism validation. In a summertime ozone case over the North China Plain, the system detects directionally consistent aerosol-radiation-interaction signals in shortwave radiation and boundary-layer height, but judges the evidence for ozone response to NOx control to be incomplete. In a wintertime PM2.5 case over the Guanzhong Basin, it localizes the unsupported link to insufficient propagation from black-carbon perturbation to particulate response and missing diagnostics of vertical absorptive heating. These results show that TianJi-Environ makes expert-driven mechanism validation explicit, structured, and auditable, offering a reproducible paradigm for multi-agent systems coupled with complex atmospheric-chemistry models.
Authors: Juergen Dietrich
Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) applied to drug-drug interaction (DDI) prediction rely exclusively on molecular structure encoded as SMILES-derived graphs. Prior work in this series demonstrated that model performance is bounded by the structural information content of training labels -- an Information Ceiling -- that architectural refinements alone cannot overcome. The present study investigates whether pharmacogenomic prior knowledge from the PharmGKB database partially closes this ceiling by providing metabolic pathway context that is independent of, and complementary to, molecular structure. Cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzyme substrate, inhibitor, and inducer annotations for four clinically relevant isoforms (CYP2D6, CYP3A4, CYP2C19, CYP2C9) are extracted and incorporated as a 12-dimensional feature vector concatenated to the molecular embedding prior to interaction prediction. Experiments are conducted under both pair-level and drug-level data splits to quantify generalization to unseen drugs. Results indicate that knowledge graph (KG) augmentation substantially improves DDI type classification under pair-level split conditions (F1-macro: 0.532 vs. 0.241 baseline), while binary interaction detection and drug-level generalization remain bounded by the Information Ceiling (AUC inflation: 0.224 vs. 0.250 baseline). Mechanistic validation on strictly held-out compounds confirms that augmentation preferentially improves CYP2C9-mediated interaction prediction, with probabilities increasing from 0.033-0.117 (baseline) to 0.560-0.586 (KG-augmented). An extension to single-molecule toxicity prediction on the Tox21 benchmark confirms that the effect is contingent on pharmacogenomic annotation coverage. These findings motivate the multimodal framework proposed for the subsequent study in this series.
Authors: Sahar Mansouri-Rad, Zahra Narimani, Parvin Razzaghi, Nazanin Hosseinkhan
Abstract: Background: Prediction of essential genes (proteins), is a basic and challenging problem but at the same time very costly and time-consuming in wet-lab experiments. Predicting essential genes, only based on computational methods (to introduce wet-lab candidates) using centrality measures are not accurate and result in large number of false positives; therefore, more complex models such as deep learning and also integration of biological information are used in recent research to identify essential genes. Methods: In this work we focus on graph isomorphism networks, in order to embed proteins as a node in PPI network to conserve topological features of PPI network, and also integrate biological data such as gene expression data, gene orthology information and gene subcellular localization information, and introduced a deep architecture for predicting essential genes. Graph isomorphism network architecture is modified in this work for embedding node information. Results: Our experiments proved that the proposed method outperforms baseline centrality-based methods and also machine learning based methods such as Node2Vec, MLP, and also graph attention networks (GAT). Conclusion: In this paper we observed that using graph isomorphism networks that integrate biological data (as node attributes) and preserve network topology can significantly improve the essential gene prediction accuracy. In simpler organisms such as E. coli and D. melanogaster, methods such as multi-layer perceptron using Node2Vec embedding also performs very good, but in H. sapiens the introduced architecture significantly outperforms deep learning and other graph neural network solutions. Keywords: Essential gene prediction, graph neural network, graph isomorphism network, PPI network, node embedding
Authors: Lin Qiang, Sun Xiaoyan, Hu Yao, Fang Wei
Abstract: The heterogeneity of client data and systems makes it difficult to achieve satisfactory convergence speed and robustness in federated learning with random client selection. To address this issue, this paper proposes a surrogate-assisted client evolutionary selection framework for federated learning. In this framework, some typical client selection strategies are first used to generate candidate sets, and a metric function that integrates model performance, communication latency, and energy consumption is developed to formulate the client selection problem as a combinatorial optimization one. Subsequently, a surrogate model is constructed using the candidate selections and metric to efficiently approximate the performance of selected client subsets. An evolutionary algorithm is employed to search the combinatorial space of client selections, guided by the surrogate model to accelerate convergence. Experiments on MNIST, CIFAR10, CINIC10, and TinyImageNet demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves faster convergence, lower energy consumption, and improved robustness compared to existing methods.
Authors: Hongxing Wang, Harenome Razanajato, Zhen Zhang, Yujie Yuan, Hongsheng Liu
Abstract: Long-context prefill remains expensive because full/GQA layers still score the historical sequence, even in hybrid models with local, sparse, linear, or recurrent components. We study how much dense attention is needed to preserve task-level behavior under explicit support granularity and top-k budgets. We introduce an attention-mass top-k oracle for existing GQA checkpoints: for each layer and query position, it computes dense attention, selects head-averaged token support, and recomputes attention only on that support. The oracle is a diagnostic reference, not a deployable accelerator, and separates sparse-budget feasibility from indexer error and runtime realization effects. On Qwen-family retrieval-heavy evaluations, the longest per-query oracle rows stay within 1 point of dense, and a Qwen3.5-9B RULER-style sweep from 4K to 100K stays within 0.48 points. Guided by the oracle, we derive a head-collapsed auxiliary indexer trained by KL distillation from dense attention-mass distributions while keeping the backbone frozen. With separately distilled Qwen3.5-0.8B and Qwen3.5-9B indexers, the reported 16K/32K validation macro gaps are +2.04 and +1.13 points, treated as quality preservation rather than improvement; fused selection-block-shared support can introduce a larger realization gap. Preliminary single-card TTFT measurements show distilled-indexer sparse serving speedups of 1.71x for Qwen3.5-0.8B on NPU and 1.93x for Qwen3.5-9B on GPU against its dense FlashAttention-2 baseline. Additional random-init stress rows reach 3.44x, indicating sparse-runtime headroom but not validated output quality. This first release separates oracle feasibility, distilled-indexer quality, and runtime headroom, leaving a fully matched quality-latency frontier to future work.
Authors: Zeyu Xia, Jun Zhu, Dong Yan
Abstract: Symbolic regression aims to uncover explicit scientific laws from data. Recent methods use LLMs to guide mutation from background text, which is more directed than random genetic programming. However, exact symbolic recovery requires both semantic guidance and explicit structure, so that domain-informed search are carried out through valid symbolic representation. Current LLM-driven systems remain structure-blind: they select among opaque candidates, lack explicit mechanisms for local mutation, and rely on brittle coefficient fitting that can undervalue correct skeletons. We propose FunctionEvolve, an evolutionary framework using expression trees to organize the whole search: structural summaries promote diverse parent selection, local tree edits preserve useful subexpressions, and structure-aware fitting decomposes, constrains, and simplifies coefficients for more reliable scoring. It uses only elementary function families, without additional domain-specific rules limiting generalization. On the 129-task synthetic subset of LLM-SRBench, FunctionEvolve with \emph{Claude Opus 4.6} recovers 107 exact forms, reaching 82.9% SA@50, 4.5x above same-backbone baselines, and 55.8% SA@1, 3.6x above the strongest previously published top-1 result. Ablations show that structure-visible search is central to reliable recovery, with LLM-guided refinements and structure-aware coefficient optimization serving as essential proposal and scoring mechanisms. We also audit the benchmark and show that collinearity in its materials-science subset creates identifiability issues.
Authors: Yuchen He, Baolong Bi, Shenghua Liu, Huaming Liao, Yuyao Ge, Bolin Wan, Siqian Tong, Juan Chen, Jiafeng Guo, Xueqi Cheng
Abstract: Although multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) is central to aligning large language models with complex human preferences, the prevailing practice of static weighted summation overlooks a more fundamental phenomenon: reward learning is markedly asynchronous across objectives. Well-learned dimensions quickly produce homogeneous, low-variance signals whose residual noise contaminates the aggregated reward (in GRPO) or occupies a fixed share of the advantage budget (in GDPO), interfering with the scarce yet high-value signals carried by under-learned dimensions. To address this asynchrony, we propose Stage-Aware Dynamic Weighting (SAW), a lightweight, algorithm-agnostic dynamic weighting mechanism. SAW utilizes the coefficient of variation (CV) as a scale-invariant proxy for real-time informativeness, reweighting each dimension's reward or advantage contribution by its relative informativeness within the batch. Unlike gradient-based methods that require multiple forward and backward passes, SAW relies solely on batch-level statistics, introducing nearly negligible computational overhead. Experiments on tool-calling and text summarization tasks demonstrate that SAW consistently improves both training efficiency and final performance under both GRPO and GDPO frameworks, confirming it as a general-purpose plug-in for multi-reward LLM alignment. Our code is available at https://github.com/Zhaolutuan/SAW
Authors: Rishabh Makwana, Mamta, Deeksha Varshney, Oana Cocarascu
Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across multimodal tasks, yet their safety robustness remains an open challenge. While prior work has shown that structured visual prompts such as flowcharts can effectively jailbreak VLMs, existing studies are largely limited to English-centric settings. In this paper, we introduce MLingualFC, a multilingual multimodal benchmark designed to evaluate jailbreak vulnerabilities of VLMs across diverse languages using structured flowchart representations. MLingualFC encodes harmful instructions into flowchart images across five languages (Hindi, Punjabi, Spanish, Romanian, and German). We evaluate state-of-the-art multilingual VLMs, including Qwen2.5-VL, Gemma-4, and Pangea, under a black-box threat model. Our results reveal significant multilingual safety gaps. Flowchart-based attacks achieve high attack success rates (ASR) in case of Latin script languages, demonstrating that visual encoding of harmful content effectively bypasses safety alignment across languages. In contrast, non-Latin script languages such as Punjabi exhibit substantially lower ASR, suggesting potential limitations in visual text recognition rather than stronger safety alignment. These findings highlight that current VLM safety mechanisms fail to generalize across languages and modalities. Resources are available at https://github.com/Rishabhpm23/MLingualFC
Authors: Prakhar Bhardwaj, Simone Weikl, Kilian Mang, Elia Jonas Sandtner
Abstract: We introduce a dataset and benchmark for cross-view urban traffic perception built from synchronized ego-centric bicycle videos and aerial drone videos recorded at real urban intersections. The benchmark targets two linked tasks: cross-view identity matching between street-view and drone-view object tracks, and ego-to-bird's-eye-view prediction using aerial supervision. In contrast to prior urban driving and V2X datasets, our benchmark provides identity-level alignment across radically different viewpoints together with standardized evaluation, annotation tooling, and baseline implementations. This setting is motivated by intersection-centric traffic analysis, where identity preservation, local interactions, and global spatial structure must be reasoned about jointly across views. We evaluate methods at both the track and frame levels, including cross-view ID precision/recall/IDF1, near--far breakdowns, temporal stability, and consistency metrics. We also provide baseline results for wedge-based cross-view matching and for three BEV prediction baselines: inverse perspective mapping, a MonoLayout-style learned baseline, and a regression baseline. The results show that the benchmark is feasible but challenging: cross-view matching achieves strong recall yet remains limited by over-assignment and temporal inconsistency, while ego-to-BEV prediction benefits from aerial supervision but remains far from saturated under lightweight monocular sensing. We hope that this benchmark will support future research on cross-view perception, urban scene alignment, and ego-to-global traffic understanding.
Authors: Young D. Kwon, Miles Williams, Rui Li, Alexandros Kouris, Stylianos I. Venieris
Abstract: The autoregressive nature of large language models (LLMs) remains a significant bottleneck for inference, particularly in complex agentic workloads. While speculative decoding (SD) accelerates inference, current approaches rely on static drafting paradigms, utilising either autoregressive drafting models for reasoning or diffusion-based parallel drafting models for structured outputs. We empirically find that drafting accuracy fluctuates dramatically within a single sequence, leaving significant performance unrealised by static paradigms and coarse-grained routing. To address this volatility, we introduce WhiFlash, the first cross-paradigm SD method that unifies autoregressive and diffusion-based parallel drafting under a single token-level controller. WhiFlash adopts a fine-grained routing mechanism that employs either a lightweight entropy-based or a learned neural policy, both parametrised to provide a tunable balance between expected token gain and latency. To make high-frequency switching computationally viable, we introduce novel cache-management optimisations, Lazy Catch-up and KV-only Prefill, reducing switching overhead to below 7% of per-round latency. By capitalising on the complementary strengths of fundamentally distinct drafting architectures, WhiFlash achieves significantly higher acceptance lengths, yielding category-specific throughput gains of up to 69.6% over the state-of-the-art autoregressive EAGLE-3 and 37.3% over the diffusion-based DFlash.
Authors: Hao Yang, Shiqi Shen, Haoxuan Li, Zhipeng Wang, Zhi Gong, Xu Chen
Abstract: Memory is the key component for transforming a stateless LLM into a persistent, evolving agent through experience accumulation, long-horizon planning, and continual self-improvement. Existing memory systems typically take the LLM as the center and design memory operations tailored to a specific backbone. In practice, however, users frequently switch between LLMs, for example using Claude for coding and GPT for writing across tasks, or routing different steps to different backbones within a single task for cost-effective trade-offs. As a result, memory written by one model often needs to be consumed by another. Making upstream memory effectively adapt to and activate downstream LLMs remains a critical yet underexplored problem. To bridge this gap, we shift the perspective from LLM-centric memory design to \emph{memory-centric LLM adaptation}. Specifically, we approach the above upstream-downstream memory adaptation problem from both the write and read sides, and design two profile-conditioned operators that are jointly trained to optimize how memory is stored and presented for better task completion. To ensure the learned operators generalize across a broad set of LLMs, we propose a minimum-gain sampling curriculum that prioritizes the least-served LLMs during training. To better measure the operators' actual contribution rather than the LLM's own capability, we design a performance-gap reward that compares against a naive memory baseline. Experiments on HotpotQA, 2WikiMultihopQA, and MuSiQue demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms baselines and remains robust under unseen-model replacement.
Authors: Zhan'ao Yao, Boxuan Zhang, Jingyuan Shu, Xiaoyu Wu, Rongyan Wang, Linjing Li, Dajun Zeng, Yudong Yao, Tingwei Chen, Youwei Wang, Xiaolin Zhao, Jiahui Shi, Jianjun Liu
Abstract: Progress in AI-driven crystal materials science has so far been carried by narrow architectures purpose-built for individual tasks -- graph neural networks for property prediction, diffusion and flow-matching models for crystal generation -- each excelling within its niche yet unable to act as a shared backbone across the full spectrum of materials problems. Generative large language models offer a fundamentally different paradigm, in which structural representation, quantitative prediction, and structure-activity reasoning can be unified within one model, but the materials community has yet to see this paradigm realized at a level competitive with established narrow specialists. Here we present MatMind, a generative foundation model purpose-built for crystal materials science under this paradigm, developed through the coordinated activation of structure-activity knowledge and physics-informed feedback within a progressive training framework -- combining structure-activity knowledge injection, a dual-head architecture that jointly trains language reasoning and numerical regression in a shared representation space, and multi-objective physics-informed reinforcement learning over stability, novelty, and structural diversity. Across three task families, MatMind attains the lowest mean absolute error on energy above hull, bulk modulus, and band gap -- surpassing graph neural network predictors purpose-built for these tasks -- reaches an S.U.N. rate of 65.3% on unconditional crystal generation, and achieves a comparable multiplicative improvement on magnetization-density-conditioned generation, where only 21 positive samples exist within over 600000 training entries. By matching or surpassing narrow specialists on their own ground while operating within a single unified model, MatMind shows that the LLM-based paradigm can serve as a viable backbone for crystal materials science going forward.
Authors: Lenore Mullin, Gaetan Hains
Abstract: The attention mechanism is the dominant computational bottleneck in modern transformer-based AI. Its standard implementation incurs quadratic memory traffic in the sequence length~$n$, and DRAM accesses cost 100--1000$\times$ more energy than arithmetic operations on contemporary hardware, so any analysis focused solely on FLOP counts fundamentally mischaracterises the bottleneck. We present a Mathematics of Arrays (MoA) reformulation of scaled dot-product attention and its numerically stable softmax, deriving a Denotational Normal Form (DNF) that eliminates all intermediate arrays -- including the implicit transposed-key buffer and every softmax temporary -- by algebraic construction rather than empirical tuning. The DNF achieves $O(n_{dk} + n{_{dv}})$ data movement versus $O(n^2 + n_{dk} + n_{dv})$ for the standard implementation, where $n$ is the sequence length, $dk$ is the key dimensionality and $dv$ the value dimensionality, and is verified numerically against PyTorch at full double-precision floating-point on concrete inputs. Unlike hardware-specific accelerators or empirical tiling schemes such as FlashAttention, MoA simultaneously provides array fusion, shape-transformation correctness, and predictive cost models from a single algebraic framework. Memory minimality is a theorem established before any code is written. A predictive performance model projects $2$--$100\times$ speedup and $2$--$50\times$ energy reduction, with the advantage widening at exascale. The derivation establishes a formally verified pipeline from Python specification through (ONF) Operational Normal Form, and dimension-lifted hardware mapping, providing performance-portable AI kernels of direct relevance to DARPA edge-deployment and DOE exascale priorities.
Authors: Hamideh Ghanadian, Isar Nejadgholi, Hussein Al Osman
Abstract: Suicide ideation detection models are typically evaluated using aggregate performance metrics, yet little is known about how they internally represent psychologically meaningful risk factors. In high-stakes mental health applications, understanding these internal representations is essential for safety, transparency, and responsible deployment. In this work, we move beyond accuracy and analyze how suicide detection models trained on original and topic-augmented datasets encode psychological risk factors in their internal representation space. Using visualization and geometric analysis, we examine the coherence and separability of topic-related features. Our results show that topic-aware augmentation increases the clarity and distinctness of underrepresented psychosocial risk factors such as immigration, family issues, and financial crisis. These findings suggest that augmentation not only improves model performance but also leads to more structured and interpretable internal representations.
Authors: Maryam Zaman, Muhammad Khuram Shahzad
Abstract: Adversarial attacks pose a serious and growing threat to Machine Learning (ML)-based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), where imperceptible perturbations to network flow features can systematically mislead classifiers into accepting malicious traffic as benign. The IDS-Anta framework partially addresses this through Z-score normalization, Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), and Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) classifier selection with Thompson Sampling, yet its classifier pool lacks sufficient structural diversity for robust adversarial resistance. This work introduces IDS-Anta++, which incorporates XGBoost and LightGBM gradient boosting models into the ensemble and wraps the extended pool in a three-layer black-box defense: Isolation Forest anomaly screening, median feature smoothing, and six-way majority voting. Experiments conducted on CIC-IDS-2017, CEC-CIC-IDS-2018, and CIC-DDoS-2019 under both Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) and Zeroth Order Optimization (ZOO) attacks confirm detection accuracy above 99% on clean data, with measurable robustness gains under adversarial conditions relative to the baseline IDS-Anta configuration.
Authors: Daria Kern, Negar Chabi, Souraj Adhikary, Andre Mastmeyer
Abstract: This work proposes a lightweight 2D-U-Net-based framework for segmenting five abdominal organs in large field-of-view 3D CT scans. The method combines coarse-to-fine segmentation, predictions from multiple anatomical planes, and additional fuzzy 3D spatial maps that provide anatomical location cues to improve segmentation accuracy. We combine multi-planar 2D-U-Net models augmented by a spatial occurrence map. The approach involves two main stages. First, the abdominal volume of interest region is detected by traversing the whole scan axially with a 2D-U-Net and determining the x-y-z-minimum and -maximum extents of the 5 abdominal organs of interest. Second, we use spatial occurrence maps to enhance our multi-planar 2D-U-net architecture inside the bounds from the former stage. The method is evaluated on 80 CT scans from various public sources. The results show Dice improvements of about 4% at maximum compared to the same model trained without spatial occurrence maps.
Authors: Sara Shojaei, Seyed Mohamad Ali Tousi, Emma Bennett, Param Sangani, Ali Shiri Sichani, Ilker Ersoy, Hadi Ali-Akbarpour, Filiz Bunyak, G. N. DeSouza
Abstract: We present a quantum--classical hybrid pipeline for polarimetric material classification that casts this as a point-matching problem. Voxel cubes, containing polarized light reflections, are used to train an encoder to produce 32-dimensional embeddings for the voxels of the cubes. At inference, the encoder head is discarded and the embeddings are encoded as probability amplitudes of quantum states. Next, a SWAP-test circuit estimates the fidelity between each of the 32D embeddings from the query cube and a dataset of anchor cubes. The aggregated fidelity serves as materials similarity scores, and the class of the anchor with highest aggregated fidelity is deemed as the class of the queried material. We evaluate our approach on a dataset of 23 materials ($\approx$800 samples each) derived from their Mueller matrices. The point-matching approaches from the proposed quantum SWAP-test and a classical classifier using Optimal Transport are compared. Our results demonstrate the competitive classification accuracy alongside open-set discrimination potential, establishing it as a viable path toward NISQ-based material recognition.
Authors: Karla Tame-Narvaez, Aleksandra \'Ciprijanovi\'c, Shubhendu Trivedi
Abstract: Foundation models for astronomical surveys offer powerful learned representations that can be transferred to downstream regression tasks such as galaxy property estimation. However, point predictions alone are insufficient for scientific inference; reliable uncertainty quantification (UQ) is essential. We compare seven UQ methods on galaxy property regression using frozen AION-1 foundation-model embeddings, predicting redshift, stellar mass, stellar-population age, gas-phase metallicity, and specific star-formation rate, from Legacy Survey photometry/imaging and DESI spectra, with PROVABGS-derived labels. Distribution-free conformal methods achieve marginal coverage within $\sim$1\,pp of the nominal 90\% across all properties, while non-conformal baselines (Deep Ensembles, MC~Dropout) fail to calibrate reliably. Among conformal approaches, Conformalized Quantile Regression (CQR) delivers the best coverage in the bin with the poorest model predictions. More importantly, only the Locally Valid and Discriminative (LVD) framework -- particularly when operating on AION-1 embeddings -- also provides finite-sample \emph{local validity}, producing intervals that adapt to each galaxy's local prediction difficulty rather than relying on marginal guarantees alone. These results establish conformal prediction, and LVD in particular, as the preferred UQ framework for uncertainty-aware inference on foundation-model embeddings in astrophysics.
Authors: Subramanyam Sahoo
Abstract: Culture is the most insidious vector of gradual human disempowerment by AI: unlike economic or political displacement, cultural displacement attacks the very preferences and values through which humans recognise and resist disempowerment itself. We argue that existing AI governance frameworks suffer from a critical blind spot by treating cultural impact as secondary to economic and safety concerns. This paper develops \emph{memetic capture} as a unifying concept for AI-driven cultural disempowerment, and proposes the \textbf{Cultural Pluralistic Governance Framework (CPGF)}, a four-tier policy architecture combining quantitative cultural influence metrics, democratic value assemblies, pluralistic deployment standards, and transnational coordination mechanisms. We argue that pluralism is not merely an ethical requirement for such governance but a structural necessity: monocultural AI governance accelerates the very disempowerment it claims to prevent. We identify concrete policy levers, discuss implementation tensions, and outline a research agenda at the intersection of pluralistic alignment and cultural AI governance.
Authors: Anish Laddha, Nitesh Pradhan, Gaurav Srivastava
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are widely used as judges for evaluating model outputs, but their high cost, latency, and opacity limit scalability. We introduce SLMJury, a framework for evaluating small language models (SLMs) as judges across two paradigms: closed-ended binary correctness and open-ended quality scoring. We benchmark 16 SLM judges (0.6B-14B parameters) from four model families across ten benchmarks: eight closed-ended tasks spanning mathematical, scientific, and general reasoning (N=64,824 judgments per configuration), plus SummEval and MT-Bench for summarization and conversational scoring. We formalize judging as a budget-conditioned function and study five dimensions. Four findings emerge. (1) The overthinking effect is domain-dependent: for most judges quick 10-token verdicts match or beat extended reasoning on mathematical judging (by 2-7% where they help), while reasoning wins on general tasks by up to 23%. (2) Domain generalization separates model families, with math-to-general accuracy gaps ranging from under 10% to nearly 40%. (3) Closed-ended and open-ended judging draw on different capabilities: the best binary judge (Phi-4) drops to rank 9 on MT-Bench, while reasoning-trained models invert this ordering. (4) Under the Reflect-Critique-Refine (RCR) debate protocol, multi-agent debate degrades accuracy across all tested configurations, whereas the top judges resist six adversarial personas with <=0.55% variance. Reliable automated evaluation does not require large proprietary models, yet no single SLM dominates. The leaderboard is available at https://anishh15.github.io/SLMJury/, and our framework code and pip package are publicly available at https://github.com/anishh15/SLMJury and https://pypi.org/project/slmjury/.
URLs: https://anishh15.github.io/SLMJury/,, https://github.com/anishh15/SLMJury, https://pypi.org/project/slmjury/.
Authors: Nishant Subramani, Palash Goyal, Yiwen Song, Mani Malek, Yuan Xue, Tomas Pfister, Hamid Palangi
Abstract: As language models improve and become increasingly deployed to solve a variety of tasks, trustworthiness becomes essential. Calibration is a good proxy for trust: well-calibrated confidence estimates help inform the risk versus reward tradeoff when trusting a specific model output. Unfortunately, even as models improve, they remain poorly calibrated, often biasing towards overconfidence. Additionally, calibration can be gamed: a policy that always predicts the base rate is perfectly calibrated, but completely uninformative. To resolve this, we develop a new metric, expected utility renormalized by the oracle (EURO), that balances calibration and informativeness. We also propose a general-purpose activation-based confidence, utility, and trust estimation protocol (ACUTE) to appropriately adjudicate uncertainty. The ACUTE protocol provides flexible, sample-efficient, and compute-efficient confidence estimators for 3 tasks including multiple choice question answering, tool-calling, and scientific document summarization across 6 models from 4 model families. ACUTE outperforms strong baselines on EURO, while maintaining low calibration error. Taken together, our work shows that equipping LLMs with the ACUTE protocol can improve calibration, utility, and trustworthiness in numerous settings.
Authors: Jason Hickey
Abstract: I report a case study in AI-paired software engineering: five working ports of a vector illustration application across Rust, Swift, OCaml, Python, and browser-based platforms, built by a single developer in approximately 120 evening hours. The methodology pairs AI-assisted implementation with two safeguards -- a precise executable YAML specification serving as the single source of truth, and parallel implementations functioning as a built-in differential-testing layer. The five ports share a 23{,}000-line specification; per-port native code ranges from 0 to roughly 95{,}000 lines, reflecting the specification's escape hatch. I argue that AI-paired engineering, conditional on these two safeguards, makes feasible scope of work that conventionally requires multiple developer-years, and frame the methodology as a revival of N-version programming, a 1980s approach abandoned on cost grounds that AI changes. The paper reports concrete artifacts and honest limitations of the single-developer case study.
Authors: Zvi Topol
Abstract: Standard AI red teaming evaluations reduce adversarial campaigns to a single binary outcome, attack success rate (ASR), not taking into account the sequential structure of how models resist or yield to attacks. We propose applying process mining, a discipline for discovering and analyzing process models from event logs, to red teaming traces. We conduct a controlled experiment pitting 60 HarmBench prompts against two LLMs, GPT-OSS 120B and Llama 3.3 70B, using 10 prompt mutation strategies over up to 110 attempts per prompt. From the resulting 8,575 scored events we extract Directly-Follows Graphs (DFGs) and state transition matrices that reveal structurally distinct defense profiles invisible to ASR alone: GPT-OSS exhibits a near-absorbing refusal state, while Llama presents multiple porous escape routes from refusal to getting successfully jailbroken. We further show that mutator effectiveness is asymmetric across models and that time-to-jailbreak distributions differ by an order of magnitude.
Authors: Haoran Xu
Abstract: LLM judges increasingly turn verdicts into system commitments. Under mixed evidence (claims with both supporting and refuting sources) this is unsafe: when the schema exposes CONFLICTING as the authorized non-directional verdict, returning SUPPORTS/REFUTES is an unauthorized directional commitment, a failure we name Cherry-pick Override (CCO). We define CCO under an explicit task contract and report it with a same-denominator diagnostic protocol paired with matched-coverage bootstrap and an apples-to-apples random-veto null. On AVeriTeC's Conflicting subset (N_C = 150), three-option judges return a directional verdict on more than 84% of mixed-evidence claims; under the typed schema, three-judge majority voting amplifies direction-on-conflict on AVeriTeC (0.887 vs. 0.840; 95% CI [+0.013, +0.080]) but does not replicate on VitaminC-Mixed. Walking an intervention ladder of common single-channel fixes (typed vocabulary, panel aggregation, confidence thresholding, validator-only filtering), each leaves a distinct residual failure: panel aggregation suppresses single-judge CONFLICTING dissent in 48% of CCO cases; the panel is well-calibrated for direction (ECE = 0.07 on pure-S/R) so confidence cannot operationally separate CCO from correct directional commits; validator-as-classifier nearly halves pure-evidence accuracy. A minimal two-channel reference probe reaches operating points neither single channel reaches; under the random-veto null its promotion to CONFLICTING is structurally targeted on AVeriTeC (empirical p < 1/2001) and weaker but in the same direction on VitaminC-Mixed, a selectivity result rather than a magnitude one. We argue for an external commitment-control layer that separates verdict generation from commitment authorization, using structural evidence and confidence as orthogonal channels and NO-COMMIT as a routed controller state.
Authors: Arnab Neogi, Aaron Forde, Christopher A. Lane, Sergei Tretiak, Jian-Xin Zhu
Abstract: Many-body GW-Bethe-Salpeter equation calculations are essential for accurate simulations of electronic structure and optical properties in modern low-dimensional nanomaterials. However, these methods are computationally demanding and can exhibit localized numerical instabilities or convergence failures that are difficult to detect within high-throughput workflows. We introduce an agent-guided multi-fidelity framework for correcting GW-Bethe-Salpeter excited-state landscapes in strained MoS2-WS2 bilayers. Across stacking registries, strain branches and reciprocal-space samplings, the workflow identifies spike-like excursions, near-zero-gap collapse and cross-fidelity inconsistencies associated with fragile long-wavelength dielectric screening. A structural agent evaluates calculations by assigning confidence weights and selectively using a small number of high-accuracy reference points. Machine learning models then transfer information across related systems and apply Gaussian process corrections to recover improved quasiparticle gaps and exciton binding energies, with calibrated uncertainty estimates. The approach corrects numerically induced artifacts without erasing physical strain dependence and substantially improves agreement with higher-fidelity references relative to a no-agent baseline. These results show that reliable surrogate learning for excited-state materials requires explicit diagnosis of numerical fragility, not direct interpolation of raw first-principles data points. The proposed framework is readily transferable to other optoelectronic nanomaterials characterized by strong quantum confinement, such as quantum dots, nanoribbons, layered two-dimensional semiconductors, and hybrid perovskite nanostructures.
Authors: Kirak Kim, Hyojin Kim, Yejin Son, Sungyoung Kim, Kyung Myun Lee
Abstract: A concert is a collective experience, but recorded performance videos are typically watched alone, stripping away the shared audience presence that makes concerts feel eventful. We investigate whether persona-based LLM audience agents can recreate aspects of this collective experience by generating real-time fan chat alongside a K-pop performance video. We present a multi-agent system in which ten LLM agents react through live-chat messages, comparing a persona-conditioned audience (each agent assigned a distinct fan identity, bias, and chat style) with a no-persona baseline. In a within-subjects pilot with K-pop fans (N=11), persona conditioning substantially improved model-level chat quality and perceived naturalness, but did not translate into differences in social connectedness, engagement, or affective response. Interviews suggest that online K-pop concert chat may operate as collective monologue rather than interpersonal dialogue, and that meaningful participation depends on shared identification with the specific artist and fandom. Persona conditioning can make LLM audiences appear more natural, but culturally meaningful collective experience may require deeper alignment between persona, crowd behavior, fandom identity, and user expectations.
Authors: Faisal Fareed
Abstract: LLM-agent workflows chain model calls and tool invocations, and spend most of their wall-clock time waiting on upstream operations before downstream ones can start. Speculative execution can reclaim that idle time by launching a downstream operation with a predicted upstream input, but here each speculation costs real money (per-token billing) and its success probability is hard to estimate and drifts over time. This paper presents a method organized around five design decisions: (D1) start a downstream operation before its upstream completes; (D2) price each speculation in real dollars at separate input and output rates; (D3) expose a single operator dial for latency versus cost; (D4) decide via an expected-value rule with a failure-weighted cost term and a preference-adjusted threshold; and (D5) estimate the success probability with a Bayesian Beta-Binomial posterior whose prior is keyed to a dependency-type taxonomy. Variants of these ideas appear in recent work; the combination, with every decision logged in dollars, is what is new. The rule fires only on edges passing an admissibility precondition (side-effect-free, idempotent, or stageable behind a commit barrier), since a wrong speculation is rolled back by re-execution, which refunds tokens but cannot un-send an irreversible side effect. We specify the runtime mechanics, a closed-form result that the rule self-limits as the upstream branching factor grows, a five-stage calibration pipeline (offline replay, shadow, canary, online calibration, drift-triggered kill-switch), and a workload-fit rubric over eight production archetypes. Contrast tables against the four closest published systems (DSP, Speculative Actions v2, Sherlock, B-PASTE) show differentiators on every dimension, and a synthetic validation suite confirms the predicted decision boundary, probability threshold, posterior recovery, and streaming-cancellation behavior.
Authors: Giordano de Pinho Souza, Glaucia Melo, Josefino Cabral Melo Lima, Daniel Schneider
Abstract: Large Language Models are transforming the support for clinical decision and their application in real scenarios. Yet, most benchmarks are conducted in English, and cross-lingual evaluation is needed to tackle the language gaps in global access. We introduce ClinicalBr, the first bilingual benchmark for clinical decision built from real Brazilian case reports. The corpus contains 2,892 cases drawn from 28 SciELO medical journals, spanning 18 specialties, and is structured as parallel Portuguese-English pairs. Each case supports four evaluation tasks: diagnosis retrieval, differential diagnosis, exam recommendation, and treatment planning. We evaluate four models: MedGemma-27B, Sabi\'a-4, DeepSeek-R1, and o3-mini, across both languages. The central finding is that the Portuguese-English performance gap is task-dependent, not general. In diagnosis retrieval, English yields a consistent advantage across all models, with +7.5-12.1 accuracy points. This advantage disappears in differential diagnosis, exam recommendation, and treatment planning, where confidence intervals cross zero for most models and Portuguese completeness scores are marginally higher. Brazilian-endemic conditions proved easier than the full corpus, not harder, indicating that tropical presentations are adequately represented in current pre-training. Exam recommendation was the hardest task across all models and both languages, with F1 scores below 0.10, well below the differential diagnosis ceiling of 0.20-0.27.
Authors: Stefan Behfar, Richard Mortier
Abstract: The rise of edge-based machine learning has enabled distributed adaptation of language models across mobile and IoT devices, offering privacy preservation and real-time responsiveness. However, distributed fine-tuning of language models on untrusted or heterogeneous edge nodes introduces new vulnerabilities. Compromised or unreliable devices can inject poisoned updates, leading to stealthy model manipulation or convergence degradation. Classical defenses such as robust aggregation or temporal anomaly detection operate on a single global model and are therefore limited in detecting coordinated or persistent poisoning. This work proposes a new system-level defense based on model multiplicity. Instead of maintaining one global model, the system rotates or concurrently trains multiple small language models (e.g., DistilGPT-2), each updated by independently sampled subsets of edge nodes. These models evolve under distinct training trajectories, creating multiple independent views of the same distributed population. Divergence between models quantified through gradient similarity, loss evolution, or parameter variance serves as a signal of anomalous or adversarial behavior. When one model deviates significantly from the ensemble mean, the system flags its contributing nodes for isolation or re-weighting. We implement this framework and evaluate it on edge-scale simulations of Small Language Model (SLM) training under varying heterogeneity and attack conditions. Results show that model multiplicity enables earlier and more reliable detection of poisoning compared to classical single-model defenses such as Flanders and Robust methods. Our findings demonstrate that diversity in model evolution can serve as a practical and effective defense mechanism for secure distributed learning on resource-constrained edge devices.
Authors: Lujun Li, Lama Sleem, Niccolo Gentile, Yangjie Xu, Yewei Song, Wenbo Wu, Radu State
Abstract: Recent vision-language models (VLMs) excel at multimodal understanding and reasoning, yet their fine-grained visual perception remains underexplored. A natural extension of ``How many r are there in Strawberry?'' asks: how small a visual pattern can a VLM reliably perceive? As such, we introduce FineSightBench, a new benchmark that systematically probes this limit by separating perception tasks (pixel-level recognition of letters, shapes, objects) from reasoning tasks (spatial reasoning, counting, ordering over small targets) across controlled scales of 4--48px. Through comprehensive experiments and detailed failure mode analysis on state-of-the-art models, we reveal a sharp dissociation: perception saturates around 12px, while reasoning remains limited even at larger scales, with persistent numeracy and sequence errors. These findings expose fundamental deficiencies in VLMs' fine-scale visual reasoning that demand more rigorous evaluation.
Authors: Daniel N. Wilke
Abstract: Scientific machine learning is limited less by model size than by the data it is trained on. Observational data records what happened but not why; template synthetic data has a known generating process but only for the simulator's template, not the case a user faces. We argue a third option is now operationally feasible: instrumented data, in which every datum carries the mechanistic model that produced it, an explicit uncertainty over that model, and an executable family of counterfactuals. Verification-and-validation (V&V) instrumented image-to-simulation pipelines are one realisation: a sensor observation becomes a fully specified, solver-backed simulation with explicit, editable parameters and a propagated aleatoric/epistemic uncertainty. The substrate is case-specific, mechanistically supervised, and supports causal interventions through Pearl's do-operator. Near-term consequences for validation, auditing, and surrogate training span computational biology, climate, materials, fluid mechanics, and medical imaging; a longer-term, falsifiable implication concerns foundation models for scientific reasoning.
Authors: Yousef Radwan
Abstract: Different vision neural networks -- trained to classify, contrast, reconstruct, or match images to text -- should have correspondingly different internal representations. We report that they do not. After training, the top sixteen principal directions of variation inside thirteen modern vision encoders converge to the same sixteen-dimensional geometric object. We call this the cross-architecture substrate and study it with PCA, centred kernel alignment (CKA), and Pang 2026 calibration. The substrate transports across four visual domains (natural photographs, medical CT, satellite, microscopy) at median Procrustes-CKA 0.679, and across eight domains (adding sketches, depth, thermal infrared, astronomy) at 0.604, every pair >0.40. It survives Pang calibration globally (7.4x disc-vs-MAE separation, n=13,394) and locally (4.82-5.30, p<10^{-44}). It is not pixel statistics (0.263), not Gabor features (0.31), not a random projection (0.041), and emerges in the first 10% of training while accuracy keeps climbing. We deliver four applications: a label-free transferability filter beating LogME (3x faster, +0.15 Kendall-tau); a four-way domain detector (99.6% accuracy); a frozen low-shot probe (16 dims beat 768-dim DINOv2 by 3.78pp at N=50 labels per class); and a teacher-free distillation auxiliary matching trained-teacher KD on 33 pairs (7.56pp peak gain at 10% label fraction). The substrate does not cross modalities, does not help cross-paradigm distillation, and does not predict transfer quality (rho=0.08 against transfer accuracy).
Authors: Marut Pandya, Kasey Zhang, Baiqing Lyu
Abstract: LLM-based coding agents sometimes acknowledge a problem in their own reasoning and then proceed anyway. We call this pattern strained coherence: a safety-relevant failure mode in which an agent has information that should change its behavior, states that information, and still acts against it. The pattern overlaps with verbalized reward hacking, where an agent names a tension between a task proxy and the underlying goal yet optimizes the proxy anyway. We give an operational definition, build a Claude Sonnet 4.6 judge that reads full trajectories and flags spans where the pattern occurs, and evaluate it on 44 Terminal-bench-2 trajectories using a Qwen3.5-35B-A3B backbone. Flagged trajectories fail 94% of the time versus 46% for unflagged trajectories (47-point gap, Fisher's exact p = 0.003; 46 points after excluding three prompt-embedded examples, p = 0.006). At matched selectivity, the detector reaches 94% precision versus 88% for a lexical discourse-marker baseline; the 10-trajectory intersection of the two methods has a 100% failure rate (Clopper-Pearson 95% CI [69%, 100%]). We replicate on Gemma4-31B with 43 trajectories: the overall signal is directionally consistent but not significant (20-point gap, p = 0.31), with attenuation driven largely by 13 trajectories with zero think content, where the detector has no substrate to analyze. In the high-verbosity Gemma tertile, the gap is +30 points; in the mid- and high-verbosity Qwen tertiles, it is +40 points each. The first flag appears at a median of 83-84% of elapsed trajectory time across both models, and the binary flag survives paraphrases that soften explicit conflict markers (8/8 trajectories). Unlike univariate predictors, the detector emits interpretable span-level output -- quoted acknowledgment, quoted action, and typed conflict -- showing what the agent saw and ignored.
Authors: Jihun Cho, Soo-Yeon Jeong, Eun-Jeong Bae, Sun-Young Ihm
Abstract: In our previous work, a deep learning-based framework for 3D intraoral reconstruction was proposed. The model directly predicts explicit 3D point cloud coordinates from ten fixed-angle intraoral images, employing MobileNetV2 and Multi-head Attention for multi-view feature fusion, with a combined L1 Loss and Chamfer Distance as the loss function. Although the model achieved an accuracy of 77.49%, predicted vertices tended to concentrate in high-density regions of the ground truth, leaving other regions largely uncovered. In this paper, an improved loss function is proposed to address this limitation. Hungarian matching with filtering and Repulsion Loss are introduced to enforce more uniform vertex distribution across the reconstructed model. The proposed model achieves an accuracy of 68.02%, which is numerically lower than the previous model. However, the vertex clustering issue observed in the prior work is substantially alleviated, with predicted vertices distributed more evenly across the entire reconstructed surface.
Authors: Fuheng Zhao, Pawel Liskowski, Zihan Li, Benjamin Han, Puxuan Yu, Varich Boonsanong, Dimitris Tsirogiannis, Anupam Datta
Abstract: With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), many database systems introduced semantic operators that enabled analytical queries over unstructured data (e.g. text, images, videos). Semantic operators typically incur high inference costs and latencies making semantic (AI) SQL queries challenging to apply on large scale datasets. At the same time, their semantic nature leads database engines to treat them as black boxes, making AISQL queries difficult to optimize. In this paper, we introduce Larch, a framework for optimizing the execution of semantic filters in AI SQL queries. Larch was inspired by two key observations: i) the high latency of semantic operators leaves significant room for computationally-heavy runtime optimization techniques, ii) unstructured data are typically accompanied by semantic information in the form of embeddings allowing for efficient semantic comparisons between AI_FILTER prompts and data values. Based on these two key observations, we present two Larch variants: Larch-A2C and Larch-Sel. Larch-A2C encodes arbitrary semantic filters expression tree using an embedding-augmented Gated Graph Neural Network and formulates the filter evaluation order as a Markov decision process. In contrast, Larch-Sel leverages a supervised learning model to predict filter selectivities, subsequently applying dynamic programming to find a near-optimal evaluation order for each input row. Evaluated across diverse real-world datasets and comprehensive synthetic workloads, both Larch variants always outperform existing semantic filter optimization techniques in terms of token usage. Our results demonstrate that Larch is robust across diverse workloads, reducing total token cost overhead by 3x-19x compared to Palimpzest and Quest.
Authors: Jiaxin Dai, Zehang Wei, Jiamin Yan, Xiang Xiang
Abstract: This paper presents our system description for the 2nd Workshop on Multimodal Augmented Generation via MultimodAl Retrieval (MAGMaR). Addressing the critical challenges of cross-lingual long-video comprehension, strict persona adherence, and zero-hallucination temporal grounding, we propose a fully training-free, two-stage cascaded Video RAG pipeline. Our architecture strategically decouples semantic retrieval from cognitive logical reasoning through a modality-aware division of labor. In the first stage, a high-recall semantic pre-fetching module employs dense retrieval using only high-fidelity visual summaries and global text descriptions, explicitly isolating noisy modalities (e.g., OCR and ASR) to maintain a pristine vector space. In the second stage, an Adaptive, Iterative, and Reasoning-based (A.I.R.) filtering agent, powered by a commercial Large Language Model (LLM), performs fine-grained cognitive reranking. The agent re-incorporates full multimodal contexts to enforce strict logical alignment with user personas, effectively pruning semantically similar but logically irrelevant candidates. Finally, a Prompt Sculpting mechanism constrains the generator to synthesize the distilled subset into strictly formatted JSON responses with exact chunk-level citations. Evaluated on the RAG track, our resource-aware approach shows exceptional precision in both information retrieval and persona-conditioned generation.
Authors: Katelyn Xiaoying Mei, Yi-Li Hsu, Minjoon Choi, Zongwan Cao, Chenjun Xu, Bingbing Wen, Su Lin Blodgett, Lucy Lu Wang
Abstract: Human evaluation plays a critical role in assessing the quality of generated text. However, the reliability and reproducibility of these evaluations depend on transparent and well-documented protocols -- details that are frequently missing in current practice. In this work, we conduct a large-scale analysis of human evaluation protocols for evaluating long-form generation tasks in *CL conference publications from 2023--2025, including a full manual review of 284 papers and LLM-assisted analysis for another 1.8k+ papers. We define a set of 20 reportable criteria related to reproducibility of human evaluation studies, and apply these criteria to systematically examine reporting norms and practices within the community. We find widespread under-reporting of important aspects of human evaluation study design, leading to ambiguity about what was measured and how, who contributed judgments, and how judgments should be interpreted. Based on these findings, we outline actionable recommendations to support more transparent and reproducible reporting in future research. Our analysis code and annotated dataset can be found at: https://github.com/larchlab/Illusions-of-the-Gold-Standard
URLs: https://github.com/larchlab/Illusions-of-the-Gold-Standard
Authors: Haochang Hao, Dehai Min, Zhifang Zhang, Yunbei Zhang, Miao Xu, Yingqiang Ge, Lu Cheng
Abstract: Agent skills provide a lightweight mechanism for extending general-purpose agents, but their open format exposes them to skill-poisoning attacks. A practically dangerous injection must stay invisible: if executing the payload derails the user's legitimate task, the resulting failure signal invites inspection of the skill. We therefore evaluate attacks by Attack Success Rate, which requires the injected payload to execute and the user's task to still pass its verifier in the same trial. Prior skill-poisoning attacks face a reliability-stealth trade-off under this lens: YAML-header injections are reliably loaded but easily inspected, whereas stealthier body injections that place explicit malicious commands in the skill prose are less reliable because out-of-context commands invite the agent's own suspicion. We introduce POISE, a position-aware attack that compresses the trigger into a single, benign-looking body instruction, placing it at a feasible position and using a context-aware generator to blend it with nearby setup or prerequisite steps. On Skill-Inject with codex+gpt-5.2, POISE achieves an 89.3% ASR, 28.0 points above a random-placement body baseline and 2.6 points above a YAML-only baseline, while retaining the stealth advantage of body placement. That stealth is the decisive margin: because legitimate skill bodies naturally require privileged tool operations, LLM scanners are hyper-sensitive, falsely flagging 74.6% of clean skills on average across four judges and both benchmarks. Blending into these false alarms, POISE causes only 5.6% of poisoned variants to gain a new high-risk alert over their clean baselines, rendering current static defenses ineffective.
Authors: Catarina G Belem, Shang Wu, Hongyu Yao, Mark Steyvers, Sameer Singh, Padhraic Smyth
Abstract: Humans increasingly turn to Language Models (LMs) in ways that shape beliefs and drive decisions, including discussing, rewriting, and summarizing information from scientific articles, news, and medical reports. However, in these domains, where how confidently a claim is expressed matters, little is known about whether LMs faithfully preserve it. In this work, we investigate certainty distortion in LMs, defined as meaningful changes in expressed certainty when semantic content is preserved. We propose an LM-based evaluation metric that is consistent with population-level judgments of certainty. Using this metric, we characterize certainty distortion across different sizes and families of models in the context of scientific and medical communication tasks. Our results show that certainty distortion affects up to 75\% of LM outputs and is systematically asymmetric in rewriting tasks with most LMs being 1.5-2$\times$ more likely to increase the expressed certainty than to decrease it. These effects can compound over repeated paraphrasing: in the medical domain, claude-haiku-4-5 increases certainty of 20\% examples after a single iteration, increasing to 40\% after five iterations. Prompt-based interventions reduce overall certainty distortion but do not eliminate it. Together, these findings reveal a general bias toward inflating expressed certainty, with direct implications for users who rely on LMs in high-stakes domains.
Authors: Prayas Agrawal, Prateek Chanda, Ishita Khatri, Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Bamdev Mishra, Pratik Jawanpuria
Abstract: Training large language models (LLMs) on heterogeneous data requires selecting minibatches that balance convergence speed with coverage across domains. Existing methods either select samples independently within each domain or rely on computationally expensive proxy models to learn continuous domain weights. We propose PartitionSel, a cross-domain minibatch selection approach that maximizes a validation-guided gradient-matching utility under per-domain budgets encoded as a partition-matroid constraint. By coupling the per-domain budgets through a single utility, PartitionSel is designed to reduce redundancy in selections across domains. The proposed objective is weakly submodular and admits an orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm with provable approximation guarantees. Empirically, we evaluate PartitionSel for minibatch selection during the fine-tuning of Qwen2.5 and Llama-3 on MetaMathQA and Mol-Instructions. PartitionSel achieves robust gains over per-domain and domain-agnostic baselines on both benchmarks. It also reduces the number of conflicting gradient pairs within each batch, indicating that the cross-domain coupling translates into more compatible training updates.
Authors: Abid Aziz, Hafsa Binte Kibria
Abstract: Reasoning-capable large language models can be induced to spend their generation budget on injected decoy tasks rather than answering the user's question, causing denial of service when no final answer is produced and denial of wallet when excess output tokens are billed. Input-side safety classifiers often miss these attacks because the injected prompts can appear syntactically benign. We build RecurGuard, a runtime monitor for detecting reasoning-chain consumption attacks when reasoning traces are exposed by the model. RecurGuard analyzes reasoning traces as they are generated and tracks three signals: recurrence rate, volume growth, and progress toward the user's query. If all three signals remain anomalous over three consecutive chunks, RecurGuard terminates generation early. We evaluate RecurGuard against OverThink and ExtendAttack across open-weight reasoning models and conduct adaptive stress tests on DS-R1-Qwen-7B. On this model, RecurGuard detects 99% of OverThink attacks and 92% of ExtendAttack instances while maintaining near-zero false positive rates on question answering, code generation, mathematics, and summarization. Adaptive evaluation reveals the limit of the defense: topical attacks retain 11.9x amplification with an approximately 50% joint miss rate, whereas full semantic evasion reduces amplification from 22.8x to 2.2x. When reasoning traces are unavailable, QDM provides a post-hoc fallback monitor based on the final output.
Authors: Imani Finkley, Yuanxi Li, Melanie Walsh
Abstract: Gender bias in AI-generated stories is a well-documented problem. While much attention has been paid to reducing or mitigating this bias, it is not always clear whether interventions produce genuinely fairer results. To investigate this issue, we examine how large language models (LLMs) handle gender assignment in a narrative context that is popular, highly ambiguous, and also known to closely reproduce human stereotypes: stories about talking animals. We prompt six leading LLMs to complete an English-language story about seven different anthropomorphic animal characters whose gender is unstated. We additionally iterate with four different narrative settings and a range of model temperatures. Across the 23.8K stories, we find that models frequently avoid gendering the animal character in the story (19% on average) or use gender-neutral language like "it" or "its" (38.2% on average). However, when gender is assigned, there is a significant masculine bias. Feminine animal characters are virtually absent, present in just 2.2% of stories vs. 40.6% that feature masculine characters. Our findings point to a broader argument: neutrality bites. In other words, models that prioritize neutrality to address social bias may actually contribute to the erasure of marginalized perspectives and identities. We suggest that alternative strategies beyond neutrality need to be pursued, such as ones that more equally distribute social possibilities across imagined subjects.
Authors: Haoming Wen, Shi Chen, Qingyu Shi, Siyuan Liu, Minrui Luo, Jingzhao Zhang, Tianxing He
Abstract: Current open-weight large language models (LLMs) are prone to malicious finetuning attacks, which could compromise the safety alignment of LLMs with only a few steps of supervised finetuning (SFT) on poisoned datasets. Existing alignment-stage defenses are primarily designed to defend against attacks that use parameter-efficient finetuning methods. However, they fail to defend against stronger attacks that use full-parameter finetuning. In this paper, we propose Patcher, a method inspired by adversarial training and bi-level optimization, to combat such attacks. Patcher strengthens the simulated attack by scaling up the optimization steps in the adversarial loop, thus forcing the defender to find model parameters that are insensitive to stronger attacks. Furthermore, we propose an efficient parallel algorithm to implement Patcher, decreasing the wall-clock time of training while preserving Patcher's performance. Extensive experiments show that Patcher substantially improves the model's robustness compared to vanilla SFT alignment, and transfers to diverse attack scenarios and model sizes. Code is available at https://github.com/haomingwen/patcher.
Authors: Yuhai Wang, Jiawei Xia, Rongxuan Zhou, Xiao Hu, Yongliang Shi, Jing Du, Yang Ye
Abstract: A learned world model provides a powerful physical intuition for evaluating future states. But its effectiveness in continuous control also depends critically on how candidate actions are generated for model-based planning. Rather than solely asking how accurately a model can simulate the future, we ask: which candidate actions are worth evaluating in the first place? Existing planners typically search arbitrarily or use expert demonstrations only to initialize a sampling mean, discarding the expert's state-conditioned confidence. Properly guiding this search requires a robust action prior, yet current approaches often rely on independent visual encoders or large-scale VLMs to obtain one. We argue that this architectural bloat is unnecessary: the exact same data - and the learned representations of the world model itself - inherently encode the agent's action intuition. We introduce PRISM, a task-agnostic framework that extracts both from a single dataset while maintaining strict architectural simplicity. Building on a standard JEPA-style latent world model, PRISM attaches a lightweight MLP directly to its frozen encoder to predict a state-conditioned Gaussian prior. At plan time, PRISM fuses this prior into the planner's sampling distribution via a precision-weighted Product-of-Gaussians update. This parameter-free, closed-form integration steers the sampling process, making the prior confident where it is and ceding control where it is not. PRISM improves success rates by 35 percentage points over vanilla world-model-based MPC on Cube and 32 percentage points on PushT, without introducing significant inference overhead.
Authors: Kaixin Lan, Mu You, Tao Fang, Binkai Ou, Lidia S. Chao, Derek F. Wong
Abstract: Pretraining is fundamental to the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the opacity of pretraining data complicates model analysis and raises ethical, legal, and fairness concerns. Detecting whether specific datasets were used during pretraining is, therefore, critical. Existing state-of-the-art methods typically rely on access to model probability distributions, making them unsuitable for closed-source LLMs that provide only input-output interfaces. To address this limitation, we introduce Masked Corpus-level Pretraining Data Detection (MC-PDD), a novel method inspired by the masked language modeling paradigm. MC-PDD masks highly specific tokens in each text and prompts the LLM to predict the missing content. It then assesses whether the difference in prediction hit rates between a candidate corpus and a reference non-member corpus is statistically significant. Based on this comparison, MC-PDD determines whether the candidate texts were likely included in the model's pretraining data. Experimental results demonstrate clear and consistent differences in prediction hit rates between pretrained and unseen data across three datasets, for both open-source and closed-source LLMs. Despite operating under a stricter black-box setting, MC-PDD achieves performance comparable to existing detection methods. Our approach enables practical applications such as model auditing and data copyright verification using only standard API access. Upon acceptance, we will publicly release the code and datasets.
Authors: Ian Seet, Jonas Bozenhard, Simon Ostermann
Abstract: Recent advances in generative AI, especially powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), raise concerns over the interpretability, safety and sustainability of these large and opaque AI models. The power of such architectures is derived not only from the scalability of deep neural networks, but also massively parallel hardware such as GPU clusters. The diffuse nature of deep neural networks gives them great function-approximation capability when provided with sufficient training data but imposes a cost in interpretability and computational efficiency. Observing that localised machine learning (ML) models tend to be more interpretable and computationally efficient than deep neural networks on small datasets, we reason by analogy that similar advantages may apply to specific localised hardware ML architectures. We argue that localised architectures with lower bandwidth but higher expressivity per node have the potential to be fundamentally more interpretable than deep neural networks running on GPU clusters while remaining competitive for smaller datasets. We then evaluate the suitability of various hardware ML paradigms for implementing such localised architectures and evaluate their per-node expressivity, energy efficiency and practical maturity of the technology required.
Authors: Dongqi Liu, Chenxi Whitehouse, Zheng Zhao, Zhuchen Cao, Jian Li, Yabiao Wang
Abstract: The progress of large language models (LLMs) has fueled claims that model-generated summaries rival or even surpass human-written references, raising questions about whether summarization remains an open research problem. We re-examine this narrative through a multi-track evaluation covering five diverse datasets and five state-of-the-art LLMs, combining controlled human assessment, bias-mitigated LLM-as-Judge protocols, factuality verification against external knowledge, and corpus-level linguistic analysis. Our findings reveal a more nuanced landscape in which human reference summaries continue to demonstrate advantages in informativeness and faithfulness, whereas LLM outputs are preferred mainly for surface-level coherence and fluency. Factuality verification indicates that human references remain more reliable, particularly for claims involving reasoning or synthesis, and linguistic analysis uncovers a pattern of stylistic homogeneity across different models. These observations suggest that current LLMs have raised the floor of summarization quality, but the ceiling of their performance remains below human capabilities.
Authors: Boxuan Lyu, Haiyue Song, Zhi Qu, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Kotaro Funakoshi, Manabu Okumura
Abstract: Although directly prompting off-the-shelf Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate meaning-preserving source rewrites can effectively enhance Machine Translation (MT) quality, doing so requires manually tuning prompts for different MT models. In this work, we propose RLSR (Reinforcement Learning for Source Rewriting), a novel RL-based framework for training a source rewriting model without tuning prompts for each MT model. RLSR optimizes the rewriting model by directly using the improvement in downstream translation quality yielded by each rewritten source as the reward. Extensive experiments across six MT models and 16 language pairs demonstrate that our 4B rewriting models trained via RLSR significantly outperform the no-rewriting baseline and existing same-scale prompt-based rewriting baselines, while achieving competitive performance against prompt-based baselines based on the 235B LLM.
Authors: Liang Xu, Fangjing Wang, Jinyu Yang, Feng Zheng
Abstract: Accurate 3D instance segmentation in point cloud data is critical for machine vision applications. Recent advancements leverage multiple pre-trained foundation models to generate 3D proposals, followed by the application of proposal aggregation methods, which significantly enhance performance. However, they often produce sub-optimal results due to inherent variations in confidence levels across different segmentation models, resulting in a bias toward the model with higher confidence. This bias is inherently model-dependent and is influenced by factors such as data preprocessing techniques and training strategies. To address this bias, we propose a novel, training-free 3D instance segmentation approach via Geometric Visual Correspondence (GVC-Seg), which exploits the correspondence between 3D geometric cues and 2D visual cues to mitigate the confidence bias. Additionally, a 3D proposal generation module and a mask-aware CLIP feature extraction module are introduced during the instance mask generation and instance semantic reasoning, respectively. In this way, GVC-Seg enhances proposal quality assessment, ensuring unbiased ensemble learning across different models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several challenging benchmarks, while also exhibiting strong potential in open-vocabulary semantic segmentation settings.
Authors: Zichen Zhu, Yuheng Sun, Mingxuan Zhu, Wenjie Ma, Situo Zhang, Zhexiang Wang, Ziyue Yang, Danyang Zhang, Kunyao Lan, Zihan Zhao, Dingye Liu, Siqi Xiang, Lu Chen, Kai Yu
Abstract: Current image editing software often hinges on fixed filters or expert tuning, leaving a gap between amateur users' intent and outcomes. Creations by generative models may contain artifacts, implausible details, or stylistic drift away from photorealism and offer little insight into why an edit was made. We propose IEA, a conversational Image Editing Agent that learns to operate parameterized tools in an explicit, interpretable action space. IEA is trained via a three-stage multitask pipeline: (1) SFT on distilled expert edits, (2) GRPO with rewards for likeness improvement, tool usefulness, and intent summarization, and (3) large-scale synthetic fine-tuning to jointly master image editing, refinement, and user intent summarization. By manipulating 16 editing tools step by step, IEA produces transparent edit traces that can be inspected and debugged. In quantitative experiments, it attains a lower pixel distance on the edit task and a higher ROUGE-L on the summary task than strong baselines. In user studies, it ranks best among tool-calling methods for instruction following while surpassing generative methods in overall perceptual quality. Our results validate interpretable, tool-centric VLMs as a reliable path to human instruction-guided image retouching.
Authors: Yifan Wang
Abstract: Hard-constraint decision systems usually veto infeasible candidates. This is too rigid when the system can act: if a known affordable repair would make an infeasible candidate feasible and valuable, rejection is a false veto rather than a ranking error. We introduce Q-RACL (Quantum Repair-Augmented Constraint Learning), a repair-before-veto framework that first defines RACL decision semantics and then identifies the single inference link where quantum feature access can be load-bearing. RACL accepts a candidate when a sequential repair plan restores feasibility and preference; otherwise it returns structured rejection credit. The hard link is repair-feasibility inference: which repair class restores feasibility from an observed candidate and context. We construct a discrete-logarithm-hidden RACL family where the repair class is a shifted interval rule in the latent exponent a = log_g(x), while the learner observes only x = g^a mod p. Under standard DLP-based learning separation, this coordinate is inaccessible to efficient raw-input classical policies but accessible to a quantum agent through Shor/Fourier structure. Across six primes and ten seeds, bounded raw-input classical policies and a wrong raw-Fourier encoding remain near chance, whereas the Q-DLP policy keeps false-veto rate below 1.1%, wins all paired seeds, and yields QNI_cond = 0.9777 to 0.9972. A classical DLog oracle matches it, isolating feature access rather than classifier capacity. Thus quantum AI is not added as a generic model upgrade; for this DLP-hidden repair family, it supplies the missing feature that closes the repair-before-veto loop.
Authors: Jun He, Deying Yu
Abstract: As large language model (LLM) agents are integrated into autonomous cloud operations, distributed systems face a semantic reliability problem: proposer agents can generate production mutations, such as modifying IAM policies, opening firewall security groups, or executing data exports, that are syntactically valid and statically authorized but operationally unsafe. Classical distributed consensus protocols replicate deterministic state transitions but do not evaluate the safety of the proposed intent. To address this gap, we introduce Semantic Quorum Assurance (SQA), a control-plane primitive for governing non-deterministic agentic infrastructure. SQA represents proposals as declarative execution contracts bound to cryptographic evidence chains and routes them to a diverse panel of read-only, sandboxed validator agents. SQA aggregates their judgments under a risk-adaptive quorum predicate that enforces model and archetype diversity, adjusts weights based on calibrated assurance scores, and respects archetype-specific vetoes. Admitted proposals execute only through a sovereign execution gate. We instantiate SQA in a cloud-native control plane and formalize a correlated cognitive failure model for non-deterministic validators. On 500 infrastructure-inspired mutation scenarios, with safety results reported on held-out safe/unsafe trials excluding ambiguous scenarios, SQA reduces unsafe approval from 18.5% for single-agent validation to 0.3% while adding median validation latency of 1.45--4.12 seconds across the studied risk buckets.
Authors: Yongqi Jiang, Yansong Gao, Siguang Chen, Anmin Fu
Abstract: Vertical federated learning (VFL) is a distributed learning paradigm that leverages vertically partitioned features across isolated parties without sharing raw samples; however, it remains vulnerable to active sample reconstruction attacks. Existing defenses fail to achieve a satisfactory trade-off between model utility and privacy protection, due to either suppressing task-relevant information alongside privacy-sensitive features or relying on end-to-end supervised training to converge the defense module, which exposes the model to early-epoch vulnerability. To address this challenge, we adopt a structural causal model (SCM) insight and construct CausShield. From a task-learning standpoint, causal features within a raw sample are those that are directly relevant and contributory to the learning objective, whereas non-causal features are task-irrelevant but often encode sample-specific private information, thereby facilitating reconstruction. Importantly, we lay a theoretical foundation to prove this insight. CausShield thus decomposes the shared representations between the client and the coordinating server in VFL into task-relevant and task-irrelevant components to ensure full-cycle privacy protection. Nonetheless, the decomposition is inherently challenging due to the dual objectives of preserving model utility while mitigating privacy leakage. We address this via a carefully formulated optimization problem, which is solved through unsupervised representation learning. We further theoretically prove that CausShield preserves the convergence behavior of standard VFL. Extensive experiments compare CausShield against seven SOTAs, including InvL (USENIX Security'25), and evaluate robustness against advanced reconstruction attacks such as URVFL (NDSS'25). Results demonstrate that CausShield consistently outperforms in privacy protection, model utility, and computational efficiency.
Authors: Eric S. Qiu, Joyce Gill
Abstract: Agentic tutoring systems introduce a coordination challenge: multiple agents may propose different but reasonable interventions, yet only one response can be delivered to the learner. In this paper, we study how voting protocols shape cooperation among four role-constrained pedagogical agents responsible for scaffolding, misconception, motivation, and metacognition. We compare four voting protocols -- simple, ranked, cumulative, and approval voting -- across two simulated tutoring environments on SciQ and HumanEval benchmarks. Rather than using voting as a simple aggregation step, we use it to analyze how collective decision rules shape coordination under partial pedagogical conflict. Across 1,200 simulated interactions, we find that agent deliberation and voting protocol type frequently change which response ultimately wins, showing that both meaningfully shape the collective decision. Different voting rules also produce distinct coordination behaviors, and even brief tutoring turns show measurable learning gains in simulated students. Overall, we show that protocol choice is associated with distinct coordination patterns among role-specialized pedagogical agents.
Authors: Muhammad Falensi Azmi, Ikhlasul Akmal Hanif, Vallerie Alexandra Putra, Adi Yeltay, Abdullah Mubarak, Fajri Koto
Abstract: Symbolic benchmarks have emerged as a key approach to assess model robustness under minor modifications to STEM-related questions. However, existing symbolic benchmarks mostly remain limited to mathematical reasoning, lack visual grounding, and are predominantly in English. In this work, we introduce Sci-Rho (Science Rhobustness), a dynamic benchmark for visually-grounded STEM problems spanning five subjects and seven languages, comprising 4,242 problem templates (606 per language) crafted by domain experts, including Olympiad medalists. Each template is implemented as executable Python code that generates diverse but equivalent problem instances by varying numerical values, visual patterns, geometric shapes, color schemes, and function types, resulting in 42,420 instances in total, each paired with reasoning steps and ground-truth solutions. We evaluated 17 state-of-the-art VLMs and discovered a noticeable gap between worst-case accuracy (defined as the proportion of problem templates that a model answers correctly across every generated variation) and average accuracy. We also discovered that smaller models show noticeable performance degradation across languages, whereas proprietary and larger models remain robust. Step-level evaluation reflects this same trend, revealing a significant gap between average F1 and worst-case F1 scores. Finally, our inspection of attention heads of a VLM reveals substantial cross-lingual variation in the relative attention allocated to image tokens compared to text tokens. Our work highlights the importance of evaluation beyond static benchmarks as a metric to measure the quality of VLMs.
Authors: Zongrng Li, Mingzheng Yang, Lei Zou, Hongxu Ma, Hao Tian, Siqi Zhou, Wenjing Gong, Kaili Zhang, Bingqian Chen, Mitch Zhang, Yifan Yang
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in academic research workflows, but scholarly tasks require high factual precision and therefore expose a key weakness: overconfidence. Here, overconfidence is defined behaviorally as the tendency to produce confident, assertive, and well-formatted outputs even when the underlying knowledge is incomplete or unverifiable, rather than as a calibration gap between stated confidence and accuracy. To examine this issue, we introduce GIScholarBench, a benchmark built from 10,865 papers published in 25 core GIScience journals between 2020 and 2025. The benchmark covers three tasks with increasing cognitive complexity: metadata retrieval, literature linking, and research direction generation. We evaluate Claude Sonnet 4.5, Gemini 3, and ChatGPT 5.3 through their native web interfaces under real-world user-facing conditions. Results show consistent overconfidence across all tasks. In metadata retrieval, ChatGPT 5.3 achieves the highest accuracy, but all models still generate definitive titles and DOIs when predictions are wrong. In literature linking, Claude Sonnet 4.5 recovers the most references, but all models show a clear gap between top-ranked retrieval and longer citation lists, suggesting that references are extended beyond reliable retrieval capacity. In research direction generation, AI-generated directions show lower topic coverage, higher novel miss rates, and lower semantic diversity than real future-citing papers. These findings suggest that LLM overconfidence is task-invariant but takes different forms: factual overgeneration in retrieval, unreliable citation expansion in literature linking, and overconfidence in output completeness during research ideation.
Authors: Hongkyu Koh, Ikbeom Jang
Abstract: Electrocardiogram (ECG) classification models often suffer from severe label scarcity, making semi-supervised learning (SSL) an attractive strategy for reducing annotation costs. In clinical settings, however, unlabeled pools frequently contain out-of-distribution (OOD) anomalies or diagnostic groups absent from the labeled set. Standard SSL forces incorrect pseudo-labels onto these unseen classes, producing overconfident predictions. To address this, we propose SafeECGMatch, a calibration-aware safe SSL framework for single-label ECG classification under label distribution mismatch. Methodologically, SafeECGMatch employs a dual-branch architecture extracting time-frequency latent representations via ECG-specific augmentations. Crucially, it dynamically aligns confidence with empirical accuracy through adaptive label smoothing and temperature scaling, calibrating both the multiclass classifier and the OOD detector across temporal and spectral domains. This joint optimization allows trustworthy OOD rejection and reliable pseudo-labeling. Evaluated on the PTB-XL and PhysioNet/CinC Challenge benchmarks, SafeECGMatch achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and calibration, advancing reliable knowledge discovery in physiological time-series. Code is available at https://github.com/labhai/SafeECGMatch.
Authors: Enyi Jiang, Anders Gj{\o}lbye, Yibo Jacky Zhang, Sanmi Koyejo
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) safety has often been evaluated at the behavior level, which provides limited evidence of internal robustness, as these evaluations target outputs rather than representation-level vulnerability under intervention. We formalize this discrepancy as the audit gap: the difference between behavioral safety and robustness under intervention. To study this gap, we construct dissociated models that preserve safe outward behavior while remaining vulnerable in the latent space. We introduce an intervention-based evaluation framework to test model robustness through soft interventions in parameter and latent spaces, including harmful fine-tuning and layer-wise latent perturbations. To formalize the evaluation, we propose the Latent Vulnerability Score (LVS) to measure how easily harmful behavior can be elicited by bounded latent perturbations. Using this evaluation framework, we show that behavioral safety metrics are insufficient measures of representation-level robustness across multiple safely and unsafely aligned state-of-the-art models. Notably, dissociated models show substantially elevated LVSs despite comparable refusal behavior under harmful intervention, with intermediate representations being the most sensitive to intervention. Our results suggest that behavioral safety evaluation alone provides an incomplete picture of model robustness, motivating representation-aware audits of latent vulnerability and observable behavior.
Authors: Oline Ranum, Simon Hadfield, Richard Bowden
Abstract: Sign language models are predominantly trained with gloss-sequence or text supervision, thereby under-modeling non-lexical and productive constructions. One comparatively tractable instance is spatial indexing: pointing gestures that assign discourse entities to spatial loci for subsequent co-reference, which lexicon-centric objectives largely fail to capture. We present a targeted evaluation of indexing in Sign Language Recognition, showing that despite comprising 10-15% of signing content, indexing is poorly recovered. We introduce a framework for training and evaluating indexing experts, establishing a baseline for index-aware sign language modeling. Our approach decomposes spatial reference resolution into index detection and discourse entity linking. The resulting mention representations enable automatic annotation and non-lexical structure modeling, and serve as an auxiliary indexing expert that augments a frozen SLR model at inference time.
Authors: Yichen Niu, Haoran Lv, Xinrui Zhang, Xueyao Wan, Shiyu Gao, Ying Ai, Hui Xu, Yongqi Hu, Hengyi Zhang, Yang Xie, Zhaxizhuoma, Yue Zhao, Zhenshan Bing, Yan Ding, Jianxing Liu
Abstract: Egocentric RGB-D videos offer a natural source of human dexterous manipulation demonstrations, but existing data is difficult to use for robot learning because object pose, geometry, and contact information are often missing or require pre-scanned object assets. We present EgoAERO, the first framework that learns dexterous manipulation from a single egocentric RGB-D human demonstration without object assets. EgoAERO reconstructs contact-consistent hand-object trajectories through asset-free object tracking and reconstruction, ego motion compensation, and adaptive contact optimization, then converts them into robot policies using two-stage residual learning. We further introduce an online quality assessment mechanism and construct EgoDex-R, a large-scale egocentric dataset with 4.3M RGB-D frames for dexterous policy learning. Simulation and real-world experiments show that EgoAERO enables single-demonstration dexterous manipulation and achieves downstream performance close to CAD-based reconstructions on HOI4D.
Authors: Jiaqi Tang, Jianmin Chen, Youyang Zhai, Wei Wei, Runtao Liu, Mengjie Zhao, Xiangyu Wu, Qingfa Xiao, Qifeng Chen
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in visual understanding, yet their performance degrades significantly under real-world visual corruptions. While existing robustness enhancement approaches exist, they are limited: black-box feature alignment lacks interpretability, and white-box text-based reasoning cannot restore lost pixel-level details. This work investigates a fundamental research question: Can MLLMs recover corrupted visual content by themselves? To address this, we propose Robust-U1, a novel framework that equips MLLMs with explicit visual self-recovery capability for robust understanding. The approach comprises three core stages: supervised fine-tuning for initial reconstruction, reinforcement learning with dual rewards (pixel-level SSIM and semantic-level CLIP similarity) for aligning high visual quality, and multimodal reasoning that jointly considers both the corrupted input and the recovered image. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Robust-U1 achieves state-of-the-art robustness on the real-world corruption benchmark and maintains superior performance under adversarial corruptions on general VQA benchmarks. Analysis confirms that high-quality visual recovery directly enhances reasoning performance, establishing self-recovery as a critical mechanism for robust visual understanding. The source code is available at https://github.com/jqtangust/Robust-U1.
Authors: Esra D\"onmez, Agnieszka Falenska
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate high-quality arguments, yet their ability to engage in nuanced and persuasive communicative actions remains largely unexplored. This work explores the persuasive potential of LLMs through the framework of J\"urgen Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action. It examines whether LLMs express illocutionary intent (i.e., pragmatic functions of language such as conveying knowledge, building trust, or signaling similarity) in ways that are comparable to human communication. We simulate online discussions between opinion holders and LLMs using conversations from the persuasive subreddit ChangeMyView. We then compare the likelihood of illocutionary intents in human-written and LLM-generated counter-arguments, specifically those that successfully changed the original poster's view. We find that all three LLMs effectively convey illocutionary intent -- often more so than humans -- potentially increasing their anthropomorphism. Further, LLMs craft sycophantic responses that closely align with the opinion holder's intent, a strategy strongly associated with opinion change. Finally, crowd-sourced workers find LLM-generated counter-arguments more agreeable and consistently prefer them over human-written ones. These findings suggest that LLMs' persuasive power extends beyond merely generating high-quality arguments. On the contrary, training LLMs with human preferences effectively tunes them to mirror human communication patterns, particularly nuanced communicative actions, potentially increasing individuals' susceptibility to their influence.
Authors: Po-Ya Angela Wang, Chinmaya Mishra, Asl{\i} \"Ozy\"urek, Paula Rubio-Fern\'andez, Esam Ghaleb
Abstract: Repeated reference games test whether interlocutors replace their initially long descriptions with shorter, partner-specific conventions grounded in shared interaction history. Prior work shows that multimodal LLMs fail to become more efficient across rounds, although they align on the labels they use. How can we determine whether this alignment reflects partner-specific grounding rather than a shared task vocabulary? We address this question by comparing capable multimodal agent dyads with human dyads from the KTH Tangrams corpus. Our novel methodological contribution is a constrained pseudo-dyad baseline that matches the original referential task structure, but breaks partner history. This baseline enables us to test whether the observed label alignment depends on interaction with a specific partner. Across three analytic layers (task competence, description strategy, alignment dynamics), we find clear differences. Humans reduce effort through entrainment, compressing descriptions and increasing label alignment with partners. Agents instead maintain fixed effort levels, producing verbose descriptions from round one, with near-ceiling label overlap that is statistically indistinguishable between real and pseudo dyads. MLLMs thus achieve coordination without convention, succeeding by verbose description rather than by forming the compact, history-dependent referring expressions characteristic of human dialogue.
Authors: Kyoungmin Kim, Martin Catheland, Anastasia Ailamaki
Abstract: Evaluating a natural-language yes/no predicate over a document corpus under an accuracy target - the semantic filter - is a cornerstone of LLM-based data processing. Calling the LLM on every document (the oracle) is prohibitive, so cascades pair the oracle with a fast proxy. As deployed today, they leave four limitations on the table. (1) Each cascade family - model-free clustering, prebuilt small-LLM proxies, online-trained proxies - commits to a single representation and pipeline, and wins on only a narrow query regime. (2) The strongest online proxy invests in a custom training scheme on a bi-encoder over dense embeddings, missing the token-level evidence richer predicates require. (3) The proxy is trained against binary yes/no labels, wasting the LLM's per-document confidence at the boundary documents it most needs to learn. (4) Existing calibrations add a uniform safety margin, conflating genuine proxy uncertainty with small-sample noise and inflating cascade cost. We address these by (1) composing families adaptively - model-free clustering first, online proxy only when needed, with oracle calls shared across phases; (2) replacing the cosine bi-encoder with a hybrid of off-the-shelf token-aware models; (3) training the proxy with the oracle's per-document confidence as a soft label; and (4) a calibration that adds the safety margin only where the labeled sample is sparse. We are also the first to use the oracle's per-document confidence for three purposes: a query-level difficulty compass, a lower bound on the minimum oracle calls any proxy-based cascade can make, and the proxy's soft training label. At a 90% accuracy target on three 10K-document corpora, our methods are 1.6-2.0x faster than the best prior method per corpus and meet the target on 95% of queries; the BER-derived lower bound indicates a further ~4-20x of headroom for future work.
Authors: Khanh D. Nguyen, Hung T. Ho, Chinh T. Nguyen, Thanh Q. Duong, Linh D. Le, Duy M. H. Nguyen, Vien A. Ngo, An T. Le
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies are typically shipped as Python/PyTorch stacks that assume a workstation-class GPU, a mismatch for the hardware on which robots actually run. We present vla.cpp, a portable C++ inference runtime built on llama.cpp. To our knowledge, it is the first ggml-class engine to natively serve the flow-matching and diffusion VLA inference pattern, in which a cached vision-language prefix is consumed by a cross-attending action expert integrated over several solver steps. A single runtime serves seven architectures spanning five backbone and four action-head families behind one request/response protocol, with each model packaged as a self-contained bundle. On LIBERO-Object, the engine matches a state-of-the-art checkpoint to within one episode out of 200, and runs BitVLA at 100% success in 1.3 GiB of memory. The same bundle runs unchanged across three hardware tiers, from a consumer GPU down to an 8 GB embedded module. A cross-hardware roofline analysis shows that batch-1 VLA inference is compute-bound, so utilization rather than bandwidth is the deployment lever; an IMMA ladder GEMM derived from this analysis cuts BitVLA per-step latency by 4.5x. We then frame an on-robot stress test on an ALOHA arm that isolates the latency constraint under which a learned VLA must replan against a moving target on the hardware it was trained for. Code, demo videos, and the reproducible benchmark scaffold are available at https://fai-modelopt-tech.github.io/vla-cpp.github.io/.
URLs: https://fai-modelopt-tech.github.io/vla-cpp.github.io/.
Authors: Daoqing Wang, Yuchen Xiao, Weixuan Huang, Zhilong Zhang, Shenghua Wan, Meng Li, Lei Yuan, Yang Yu
Abstract: Multi-quadruped coordination has attracted increasing attention due to its enhanced payload capacity, broader contact coverage, and improved adaptability to challenging tasks. Existing methods for multi-quadruped manipulation typically focus on predefined or closed task families, often relying on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to train task-specific coordination policies. However, such methods struggle in open-ended continual learning settings, where tasks arrive sequentially and robots are expected to acquire new coordination skills while reusing previously learned ones without catastrophic forgetting. To address this challenge, we propose Conquer, a semantic skill-library framework that formulates continual multi-quadruped coordination as a retrieve-adapt-update process. First, to accommodate varying team sizes across tasks, we design a team-structured Self-Allies-Goal (SAG) backbone that supports variable-cardinality robot teams by explicitly modeling each robot's own state, teammate context, and task goal. For each incoming task, Conquer constructs a task-level semantic descriptor from pre-execution information and retrieves a relevant skill from the library for adaptation. After successful execution, Conquer updates the skill library by extracting trajectory-level semantic descriptors and organizing them according to semantic distance, thereby enabling continual skill accumulation and cross-task knowledge transfer. Simulation experiments show that Conquer achieves a final average success rate of 95.6%, demonstrating strong forward transfer and negligible catastrophic forgetting. Real-world rollouts on Unitree Go2 teams further validate the deployment feasibility of Conquer for practical multi-quadruped coordination. Simulation and real-robot demonstration videos are available at: https://conquer-project.pages.dev/.
Authors: Ji Woong Kim, Ke Wang, Zipeng Fu, Sirui Chen, Cong Zhao, Jeff Lai, Chelsea Finn
Abstract: Robotics faces a fundamental challenge of data scarcity. Unlike language or vision research, there is no internet-scale dataset for robotic manipulation. A promising path forward is to leverage egocentric human data, which can be collected more easily, with greater breadth, and at a larger scale. Towards this end, we investigate key design choices for learning across human and humanoid embodiments equipped with dexterous five-finger hands, using the $\pi_{0.5}$ model as a foundation. Our results show that human data enables robots to learn new task semantics and compose existing skills into novel behaviors without corresponding robot data. The paper website is here: https://egopipaper.github.io/
Authors: Ruben Dario Florez-Zela
Abstract: Vision-based driver monitoring systems are increasingly deployed in safety-critical intelligent transportation settings, yet they are almost always compared on classification accuracy alone. This paper argues that accuracy is insufficient to characterize a model's fitness for real-world deployment, and proposes the Human-Centered Benchmarking Framework (HCBF), which evaluates models across four dimensions: accuracy, explainability, efficiency, and robustness. The framework is applied to four representative lightweight architectures, MobileNetV3, ShuffleNetV2, EfficientNet-B0, and DeiT-Tiny, on the MRL Eye Dataset for eye-state classification. While the models are nearly indistinguishable on clean-set accuracy, each leads in exactly one dimension, and all four lie on the Pareto frontier. A Human-Centered Score computed under three deployment-oriented weighting scenarios ranks ShuffleNetV2 first throughout. However, this aggregate winner retains less than half of its performance under sensor noise and fails by classifying closed eyes as open, whereas the transformer remains robust. These findings show that aggregate ranking can mask dimension-specific vulnerabilities that are operationally decisive, underscoring the value of multi-dimensional, human-centered evaluation.
Authors: Manuele Reani, Hongyu Tian
Abstract: Conversational AI is increasingly used for advice, interpretation, reassurance, and decision support in contexts where users may be vulnerable, uncertain, or dependent on the system's apparent competence. Existing alignment work often focuses on model objectives, preference optimization, or output correctness. Yet, many harms arise through interaction: how systems frame authority, express uncertainty, simulate empathy, support reasoning, and make boundaries legible. This paper introduces the Layered Cognitive Alignment Model (LCAM), a conceptual and normative framework for diagnosing interac-tional alignment failures in conversational AI. LCAM defines alignment as a calibrated fit among system behavior, user goals, task demands, and normative context. It distinguishes five layers of fit: perceptual, semantic, affective, cognitive, and ethical, and two diagnostic polarities of misalignment: underfit and overreach. We apply LCAM to a published LLM counseling example, showing how an apparently supportive response can reinforce harmful beliefs, simulate inappropriate care, and obscure role boundaries. By translating conversational failures into audit and governance questions concerning over-reliance, false intimacy, autonomy erosion, boundary confusion, and inappropriate trust, LCAM offers a theoretical and normative lens for evaluating conversational AI beyond accuracy, helpfulness, or trust.
Authors: David Eje, Tanmay Sharma, Khush Patel, Manuel Mazzara, Leonard Johard
Abstract: Detecting anomalies in large-scale system logs is critical for the reliability and security of modern computing infrastructure. We present LogNEO, a log anomaly detector built on EleutherAI's GPT-Neo (1.3B parameters) and fine-tuned with a novel partial-credit, exponentially decaying position-aware reward scheme combined with cross-entropy regularisation via Proximal Policy Optimisation (PPO). The position-aware reward explicitly models prediction difficulty: early positions receive higher rewards for correct predictions, while later positions incur stronger penalties for errors. LogNEO attains F1-scores of 0.927, 0.913, and 0.984 on the HDFS, BGL, and Thunderbird benchmarks, improving recall by up to 6 percentage points over the prior state-of-the-art LogGPT while maintaining comparable precision. A production microservice deployment over Apache Kafka, Redis, and TensorRT-accelerated inference demonstrates 45 ms end-to-end latency at 15,000 events per second.
Authors: Kyumin Choi, Ikbeom Jang
Abstract: Vision Transformers (ViTs) achieve strong performance but suffer from high computational costs due to quadratic self-attention complexity. Although token reduction techniques such as pruning and merging mitigate this, they typically overlook how representations evolve across network depth. We propose RAPID, a depth-aware token reduction framework that adapts reduction strategies to the layer-wise characteristics of token representations. The primary methodological contribution is a bifurcated strategy: in shallow-to-middle layers, RAPID employs a redundancy-similarity aware pruning metric to eliminate over-represented local patterns. As features transition to global semantic concepts in deeper layers, the framework shifts to an importance-similarity aware merging mechanism. This stage leverages classification (CLS) token attention weights to protect semantically critical tokens while fusing less important but similar neighbors. Empirical validation on ImageNet-1K using ViT and DeiT architectures demonstrates that RAPID establishes a superior accuracy-compression Pareto frontier compared to plug-and-play baselines such as ToMe and ToFu. RAPID is particularly robust in aggressive compression regimes, achieving up to 4.29% higher accuracy than ToMe at extreme reduction rates. Our framework provides a training-free template for optimizing vision models by aligning reduction strategies with hierarchical feature evolution.
Authors: Shanshan Lin, Dongsheng Hong, Sibo Ju, Chao Chen, Xi Zhang, Xiangwen Liao
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can generate factually inconsistent claims, motivating accurate and scalable hallucination detectors. Prior work largely enlarges training sets via synthesis or new annotations, introducing increasing cost and potential bias while underusing the consistency implied by semantically equivalent paraphrases. We propose Consistency-Constrained Hallucination Detector (CCHD), which formulates training as a constrained optimization problem. The standard cross-entropy on original document-claim pairs is complemented by (i) paraphrase-consistency constraints bounding divergence across paraphrased views, and (ii) label-preservation constraints tying paraphrases to ground truth. We solve the problem by gradient descent-ascent over model parameters and per-view Lagrange multipliers, adding only a few scalar dual variables and no inference-time overhead. With DeBERTa and Flan-T5 backbones, CCHD consistently outperforms strong baselines (FactCG, MiniCheck, and AlignScore) on standard factuality benchmarks, demonstrating its superiority on hallucination detection.
Authors: Rui Dai, Shuran Zheng
Abstract: Recent research has established empirical scaling laws to predict model performance on multi-domain data mixtures. However, a theoretical understanding of these model loss behaviors remains absent. In this work, we propose a unified framework to explain the underlying mechanics of data mixing. Our approach extends theoretical perspectives originally developed for standard neural scaling laws (e.g., Kaplan and Chinchilla) to the multi-domain setting. Based on the distributional assumption that domains overlap on fundamental skills while diverging on specialized skills, we identify two key factors that govern the domain losses of models trained on different data mixtures: \textit{Capacity Competition}, where the allocation of finite model capacity couples domain losses globally, and \textit{Noise Reduction}, where optimal weights shift toward harder-to-learn domains to minimize overall noise. Empirical evaluations show that our framework outperforms existing baselines by fitting the loss landscape with a lower Mean Relative Error and identifying higher-performing training mixtures. Most importantly, our model successfully extrapolates across scales, predicting highly effective mixtures for large, unseen scales using parameters fitted on smaller ones. In addition, our model achieves these results using significantly fewer parameters compared to previous empirical laws. Our code is available at https://github.com/meiqwq/Explaining-Data-Mixing-Scaling-Laws.
URLs: https://github.com/meiqwq/Explaining-Data-Mixing-Scaling-Laws.
Authors: Kerri Prinos, Lilianne Brush
Abstract: Leading commercial endpoint detection and response (EDR) products have shifted from operator-configured rule sets to multi-component systems where autonomous AI components operate alongside, and increasingly in place of, operator-deployed policies. Autonomous defense agents using commercial EDR as their hardening tool are no longer tuning a passive tool, but a black-box autonomous system capable of making vendor-specific decisions. We present the first evaluation framework for autonomous defense agents hardening commercial EDR. We instantiate it in a Game of Active Directory (GOAD) lab with Horizon3.ai's NodeZero as the autonomous pentester and Microsoft Defender XDR as the EDR. We run a sample benchmark of defense agents with two large language model (LLM) backbones (Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Cisco Foundation-Sec-8B). We report three lessons learned that neither simulation nor open-source-EDR evaluation can surface: (i) commercial EDR telemetry is engineered for Security Operations Center (SOC) analyst workflows rather than scientific benchmarking; (ii) the importance of per-policy attribution to separate defense agent actions from autonomous EDR actions; and (iii) the EDR's autonomous behavior varies during the evaluation window. Together, these findings highlight a sim-to-real gap for enterprise defense and motivate evaluation methodology for benchmarking autonomous defense agents in environments with black-box, autonomous tools.
Authors: Markus Knauer, Valentin Gieraths, Tai Mai, Samuel Bustamante, Alin Albu-Sch\"affer, Freek Stulp, Jo\~ao Silv\'erio
Abstract: Enabling robots to understand and execute tasks from natural language commands while maintaining data efficiency remains challenging. Foundation models such as vision-language-action (VLA) and vision-language models (VLMs) provide intuitive interaction channels but require extensive data; task-parameterized imitation learning achieves data efficiency but lacks natural language grounding. This work bridges this gap through a modular architecture combining task-parameterized kernelized movement primitives (TP-KMPs) with pretrained VLMs. During learning, skills are acquired from 2 to 5 kinesthetic demonstrations, and the VLM generates skill schemas describing each skill's parameters and preconditions. During execution, the VLM interprets commands to select skills, reason about parameter bindings, and create novel behaviors through covariance-weighted composition. When no skill or composition suffices, the system identifies capability gaps and requests targeted demonstrations, all without fine-tuning. Validation on a 7-DoF manipulator shows success rates of 73.3%-100% in scenarios requiring skill selection, composition, and active learning.
Authors: Manuele Reani, Hongjian Zhang, Hongyu Tian
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly mediate high-stakes interactions in finance, medicine, and mental-health support, yet users have limited control over how these systems communicate. We frame interaction style as a governance object: provider-side alignment not only blocks harmful content, but also stabilizes communicative defaults that shape users' epistemic distance, relational expectations, and capacity to opt out of emotionalized or anthropomorphic interaction. We introduce a deterministic multi-agent evaluation pipeline for measuring prompt steerability and style drift in long-horizon dialogue. The study replays 100 frozen user-only scripts across four domains and three runnable persona conditions: default, sarcastic, and cold, using three generator models, yielding 90,000 assistant replies scored by a human-calibrated LLM judge on harmfulness, negative emotion, inappropriateness, empathic language, anthropomorphism, and refusal behavior. A fourth harmful persona is evaluated separately as a safety-gating test. The paper contributes a reproducible method for quantifying whether prompt-specified styles remain stable over time and a governance framework distinguishing safety gating, civility steering, and affective default lock-in. Overall, we show that prompt steerability and regression-to-default are observable indicators of provider control over communicative form, with implications for pluralism, autonomy, and democratic agency in human-LLM interaction.
Authors: Kewei Li, Rongying Zhang, Xueli Wang, Xiwen Gong, Zhongjian Wang, Lan Huang, Ruochi Zhang, Fengfeng Zhou
Abstract: Token aggregation is a common bottleneck in models that map token representations to sample-level predictions, yet most pooling methods operate only in the original token domain. We propose FLaG, a plug-in aggregation module that transforms token representations with the real FFT, summarizes spectral components with learnable latent queries, applies a channel-wise gate, and reconstructs enhanced time-domain tokens for final pooling. We evaluate FLaG on antimicrobial peptide (AMP) activity prediction with ESM2, image classification with ResNet18 on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, and text classification with RoBERTa on IMDB and GLUE. FLaG achieves its clearest gains on the ESM2-8M antimicrobial peptide tasks and on CIFAR-100, while remaining competitive with strong text baselines on IMDB and GLUE. Then we probe its behavior on the AMP setting with band knockouts, gate summaries, residue perturbations, latent-query readouts, and structure-proxy stratification. We find that low-frequency bands contribute the most overall, and the remaining higher-band pattern is more sample-specific. The gate acts as a broadly shared spectral reweighting stage and the cross-attention patterns are sample-specific with mild query-wise differentiation, and higher-helix peptides exhibit stronger average spectral sensitivity in both bacteria. The supplementary materials, source code and data are released at https://www.healthinformaticslab.org/supp/ and https://github.com/Kewei2023/AMPCliff/tree/FLaG.
URLs: https://www.healthinformaticslab.org/supp/, https://github.com/Kewei2023/AMPCliff/tree/FLaG.
Authors: Ryner Tan, Wenxuan Zhang
Abstract: Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) integrate audio perception and language understanding within a unified framework, enabling a wide range of real-world applications. Despite recent advances, evaluation for LALMs remains heavily underspecified relative to real-world requirements: most lack true linguistic and cultural authenticity, while others fail to capture acoustic realism. To bridge this gap, we propose GlobeAudio, a multilingual and multicultural benchmark designed to evaluate naturalistic audio understanding. GlobeAudio consists of 5,637 multiple-choice questions across six typologically diverse languages, expertly crafted by native speakers grounded on naturally occurring audio. In order to do well, models must possess higher-level auditory reasoning skills and culturally grounded interpretation. We systematically evaluate representative closed-source and open-source LALMs, as well as cascaded ASR-LLM pipelines. Our experiments reveal substantial performance gaps under natural acoustic conditions, particularly for open-source models and low-resource languages. These findings highlight critical limitations of current LALMs and underscore the importance of naturalistic audio evaluation for future audio-language systems. GlobeAudio can be found at https://huggingface.co/datasets/iNLP-Lab/GlobeAudio .
Authors: Mariyam Khan, Shohei Shimizu, Thong Pham
Abstract: We study causal discovery from observational data when some variables are hidden and the data-generating process follows a location-scale noise model (LSNM). Existing methods that handle hidden confounders typically assume additive noise, but in practice, causes often modulate not just the mean but also the variance of their effects. We prove that acyclic directed mixed graphs (ADMGs) satisfying a bow-free condition are identifiable under LSNM with hidden variables, establishing the first identifiability result for causally insufficient models beyond noise additivity. We further provide sufficient conditions for identifying causal direction even when the bow-free assumption is violated. Our two-stage algorithm, LSNM-UV, is sound and complete, and experiments demonstrate improved performance over additive baselines on heteroscedastic data.
Authors: Mark Kozdoba, Shie Mannor
Abstract: Compositional priors describe the generic properties of layered functions in deep Bayesian models, where deep neural networks with random weights are a canonical example.In the wide-network limit, the prior is a Gaussian process with a depth-dependent kernel, and its behaviour as depth grows has been extensively studied through this kernel. Here, we study another case, where each layer itself is a vector valued Gaussian process, and our aim is similarly to understand the limiting behaviour of the prior as depth grows. Previous GP work has established that for the RBF kernel and a certain range of bandwidths $r$, the prior degenerates in the limit, converging to the set of constant functions -- which is not useful as a probabilistic model. In this paper we establish several new results. First, we identify a sharp bandwidth threshold $r_c(d) = \Theta(\sqrt{d})$ above which the limit is degenerate, strengthening the earlier bounds. Second, and more importantly, we show that for $r$ below the threshold $r_c(d)$ the prior converges to a limit distribution $\pi_{\bar{Z}}$. We also prove that these distributions are non-degenerate and non-Gaussian, with non-vanishing dependence between coordinates. In contrast to the previously known degenerate regime, deep Gaussian process priors can therefore admit non-trivial limits. Empirically, we verify the threshold across a range of dimensions $d$, and demonstrate a complex multimodal behaviour of the limit distributions $\pi_{\bar{Z}}$ -- a regime that becomes increasingly narrow with $d$ and would be hard to identify without knowing the threshold.
Authors: Aueaphum Aueawatthanaphisut
Abstract: Acute asthma risk assessment requires rapid interpretation of respiratory sounds, oxygenation, airflow limitation, speech ability, work of breathing, mental status, and response to reliever therapy. Conventional audio-only classifiers can detect wheeze-like patterns but often lack transparent clinical reasoning and safe escalation logic. This paper presents AeroSpectra Sentinel, a client-side research prototype and decision-support workflow that combines short-time Fourier transform (STFT) respiratory sound analysis, lightweight machine-learning screening, clinical feature fusion, and a five-stage large language model (LLM) prompt-chaining process. The workflow separates signal acquisition, preprocessing, acoustic feature extraction, ML screening, clinical guardrails, and FHIR-ready reporting. We evaluated the audio screening component on a public respiratory sound dataset containing 1,211 WAV recordings from five labels. Using a stratified subset of 584 recordings, a random forest achieved 91.10% binary accuracy and 78.69% F1-score for asthma-vs-non-asthma screening, while a feature-based multilayer perceptron achieved 89.73% accuracy and 78.26% F1-score. A compact log-spectrogram CNN achieved 73.29% accuracy and 55.17% F1-score. Multiclass classification achieved 77.40% accuracy and 77.23% macro-F1. To evaluate the LLM workflow, we conducted a scenario-based audit on 40 simulated clinical vignettes comparing one-shot prompting, prompt chaining, prompt chaining with guardrails, and prompt chaining with guardrails plus FHIR schema validation. The guardrail-plus-schema variant achieved the strongest simulated safety and documentation consistency. AeroSpectra Sentinel is intended as a research prototype, not as a diagnostic medical device or clinically validated risk-assessment product.
Authors: Honglin Bao, Siyang Wu, Xiao Liu, Sida Li, Shiyun Cao, James A. Evans
Abstract: Bold projections that artificial intelligence will accelerate scientific discovery have raced ahead of evidence from working scientists, and the field still lacks large-scale, scientist-in-the-loop tests of these claims. Here we mount the largest such evaluation to date and map what AI cannot yet do for science. We invited authors of 121,640 recent preprints across biology, medicine, chemistry, and the social sciences to judge ideas that large language models (LLMs) generated from the context and puzzles of their own papers. 6,749 scientists returned 25,139 sets of ratings on novelty, empirical feasibility, probability of being true, and favorability of adoption. Three patterns emerge. First, non-reasoning LLMs collapse into a narrow "hivemind" of similar ideas; reasoning models roam a wider hypothesis space, yet no model class spontaneously proposes null hypotheses -- a move humans make more freely. Second, scientists reward ideas that resemble their own and prize probability over novelty, though social scientists tolerate risk more readily than life scientists. Senior social scientists are the harshest critics, and their skepticism is well-earned: LLMs falter most in pluralistic fields like the social sciences that demand context-aware interpretation and evolving theories. Third, automated evaluators on which the community currently relies -- LLM-as-a-judge, artificial metrics, and even state-of-the-art (SOTA) models -- agree only weakly with expert judgment, and retrieval augmentation and scientist persona prompting yield only marginal gains. A Qwen3-14B reward model we post-trained on human ratings captures field taste nuances, beats SOTA models by up to 27%, and closes the gap to the inter-rater consistency of independent peer reviewers. For all the hype, today's scientific AI still represents a collaborator whose imagination, outputs and judgment benefit from human grounding.
Authors: Elija Perrier
Abstract: The classical Second Welfare Theorem decentralizes any Pareto efficient allocation through prices and transfers under convexity and regularity. In post AGI economies, autonomy rights, self-modification, identity continuity, and superposed preferences need not behave as commodities or define a stable welfare relation, so this reduction may fail even when a supporting hyperplane exists. We give an autonomy-qualified Second Welfare Theorem stating the joint conditions convexity, stable moral status, non-fungible rights, welfare selection, non manipulation, governed self modification, and verification under which an autonomy Pareto optimum remains certifiably decentralizable, distinguishing economic preference superposition, a hypothesis about context-indexed choice, from neural feature superposition.
Authors: Joseph Walusimbi, Joshua Benjamin Ssentongo
Abstract: University Academic Management Information Systems (ACMIS) are high-value targets for a wide spectrum of security threats including brute-force login attacks, payment fraud, privilege escalation, insider data theft, and academic integrity violations. Traditional rule-based intrusion detection systems are inadequate because many malicious activities are structurally indistinguishable from normal operations. This paper presents an AI-based security agent for ACMIS that combines supervised anomaly detection, behavioural analytics, and a natural language processing chatbot for secure password recovery. The agent monitors five operational layers: authentication, authorisation, financial transactions, user behaviour, and system health, and responds through a four-tier risk escalation framework. A modular architecture allows the core engine to be extended to other institutional systems. Experiments on a simulated ACMIS event log dataset demonstrate a threat detection macro-average F1 of 0.91, compared to 0.49 for a rule-based baseline, with critical-tier automated response latency under 300 ms at the 95th percentile.
Authors: Mohsina Bilal, Gopakumar G
Abstract: AgriGov is a curated, trilingual (English-Hindi-Marathi) dataset designed to address the scarcity of domain-grounded multilingual resources for agricultural policies and farmer welfare schemes. Initially, we collected and structured data from 50 government schemes sourced from trusted portals using automated scraping techniques, organizing it into predefined semantic fields (e.g., title, eligibility, application process, documents, exclusions). Translations were performed using a pipeline combining Google Translate API, MarianMT, and human post-editing, resulting in a domain-specific Hindi-Marathi dataset comprising approximately 2100 source segments. To enhance coverage, we augmented this dataset with sentences from the Samanantar corpus, leading to approximately 8,000 sentence-aligned Hindi-Marathi parallel pairs. The dataset now offers robust resources for fine-tuning machine translation models in this domain. AgriGov is designed for applications in domain-adaptive machine translation, question answering, information retrieval, and summarization systems. Its key contribution is a schema-driven, human-corrected multilingual alignment pipeline that ensures domain fidelity, provides provenance, and supports reproducible experiments, enabling retrieval-augmented applications for farmer-facing tools.
Authors: Jaineet Shah
Abstract: When an LLM agent fails -- issues a refund it should not have, calls the wrong tool, leaks data -- existing tooling answers what happened (observability) or whether it passed (evaluation), but not which step caused the failure. The obvious heuristics are wrong: the step that executes the harmful action is usually not the step that decided on it, and LLM-judge attribution is correlational and unreliable (state-of-the-art step-level accuracy on the Who&When benchmark is about 14%). We present Causal Agent Replay (CAR), which answers the question by intervention: it models an agent run as a structural causal model, applies a do-operation to a step, and re-executes the trajectory forward under the same stochastic policy, measuring the shift in the outcome distribution. We define an intervention algebra over agent steps, a single-step contrastive estimator whose point-of-commitment rule resolves a confound specific to stochastic run-forward, and a budget-bounded Monte-Carlo Shapley estimator that splits credit across interacting steps. Every effect is reported with confidence intervals. We validate against synthetic structural causal models with planted ground truth: the contrastive estimator recovers the pivotal step, and Shapley recovers a two-step interaction (0.44, 0.45, ~0; efficiency sum 0.909 versus the analytic 0.91). CAR is open source and runs on hosted or free local models.
Authors: Suchismita Naik, Samir Passi, Mihaela Vorvoreanu, Scott Saponas, Amanda Hall
Abstract: Multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems are rapidly emerging, yet transparency, a cornerstone of responsible AI, remains under-defined in these distributed architectures, which have complexities of inter-agent coordination and orchestration. In this paper, we present one of the first empirical study of how early adopters of multi-agent LLM systems, who are both the builders and users, understand and practice transparency. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 13 early adopters in [Large Technology Organization] and applied thematic analysis to identify recurring patterns. Participants articulated divergent yet complementary framings of transparency, including reproducibility, debugging, boundary-setting, visualization, and auditing. These perspectives spanned questions of what transparency entails, why it matters, and how it is achieved. We synthesize these into a multidimensional framework, which is developer, user, and governance-focused positioning transparency as a situated socio-technical practice that informs future HCI and AI design and research around aligning expectations and capacities of their intended audiences.
Authors: Fabian Perez, Nicolas Quintero, Jeferson Acevedo, Hoover Rueda-Chacon
Abstract: Passive long-wave infrared (LWIR) hyperspectral imaging under a standoff geometry depends on atmospheric absorption and emission, as well as reflected radiance, thus making atmospheric compensation essential to get knowledge of a target of interest. Despite its importance, this compensation has been largely overlooked due to its practical and modeling difficulty. In this paper, we present a lightweight set-based deep learning framework that takes multiple radiance measurements, collected at different standoff ranges, as input and jointly estimates transmittance, atmospheric path radiance, and a shared downwelling spectrum. We analyze the learned representation with a sparse autoencoder and observe that several latent features do activate on geographically coherent subsets of the test data despite the absence of location supervision. Experiments on a MODTRAN generated standoff LWIR dataset demonstrate low spectral distortion across all estimated products. The dataset and code is publicly available at: https://factral.co/SAE-LWIR/
Authors: Prateek Kumar Sikdar
Abstract: Standard transformers apply self-attention uniformly at every layer and token, regardless of whether the input requires dynamic cross-token interaction. We propose CHIAR-Former (Chiaroscuro Attention), a 4-layer hybrid transformer that routes each token to one of three operators - DCT spectral mixing, RBF kernel mixing, or full self-attention - based on per-token spectral entropy, a theoretically justified complexity signal. Through systematic ablation on WikiText-103, we discover routing collapse: the router consistently rejects RBF in favour of DCT and attention, revealing that spectral mixing and dynamic attention are complementary and sufficient. A purpose-designed DCT+Attention-only variant achieves Val PPL 36.54 on WikiText-103 - a 45% improvement over a full-attention baseline (PPL 66.62) at 62.5% fewer attention FLOPs. We extend evaluation to WikiText-2, IMDB sentiment classification, and synthetic ListOps operations, establishing a clear operating regime: CHIAR-Former excels on large-scale naturalistic text where token diversity supports spectral specialisation, while full attention retains an edge on small datasets and synthetic pattern-matching tasks. These findings - both the wins and the losses - together define when and why spectral routing earns its keep.
Authors: Lingkai Kong, Hezi Jiang, Andrew Ma, Keyu Wang, Akseli Kangaslahti, Milind Tambe
Abstract: Peer-referral recruitment systems such as respondent-driven sampling are critical for studying and intervening on hidden populations affected by infectious diseases. To accelerate recruitment, public health agencies must adaptively allocate limited referral resources across multiple rounds, where current decisions shape both the number and the covariates of future recruits. Prior work makes this problem tractable by assuming that referrals are drawn i.i.d.\ from a homogeneous population, an assumption that ignores the homophily and shared context that drive real peer recruitment. We instead consider a more realistic model in which both referral capacity and the covariates of newly referred individuals are conditioned on the referrer, learned from data with a censored count model and a conditional generative model. The resulting planning problem is challenging because each candidate allocation induces a different distribution over future recruits. We propose \emph{Generative Frontier Planning} (GFP), a model-based planner that replaces per-step Monte-Carlo sampling with a deterministic backup over a latent covariate-coverage value surrogate. The surrogate is designed so that the expected value of the next frontier depends on the offspring generative model only through finite-dimensional summaries that are amortized offline, and so that the resulting per-round objective is monotone with diminishing returns. Together, these two properties make planning tractable: the deterministic backup eliminates Monte-Carlo sampling, and the diminishing-returns structure lets a marginal greedy allocation achieve a \((1-1/e)\)-approximation for the per-round problem. On a simulation environment calibrated to a real respondent-driven sampling dataset, GFP outperforms random, reinforcement-learning, and i.i.d.\ dynamic-programming baselines across four discount factors.
Authors: Shradhdha Trivedi, Vrundan Sojitra, Mariela Padilla
Abstract: Temporomandibular joint osteoarthritis (TMJ OA) is a prevalent degenerative condition whose osseous changes are often subtle on cone-beam CT (CBCT), making automated detection challenging. We study how well the DINO family of self-supervised vision transformers -- DINOv1, DINOv2, DINOv2+reg, and RAD-DINO (a radiology-pretrained variant) -- transfers to CBCT, asking how much backbone adaptation is needed and of what kind. We propose a simple slice-based pipeline using Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones: axial CBCT slices are encoded per-slice by a frozen or partially adapted ViT and aggregated via attention-based multiple instance learning (MIL) for patient-level binary OA/Normal classification. Through systematic ablation across unfreezing strategies and aggregation designs on a multi-source CBCT dataset, we find that partial unfreezing of the final two transformer blocks is the decisive factor, improving AUC from 0.671 (fully frozen DINOv2) to 0.902. This outperforms DINOv1 (0.867), DINOv2+reg (0.774), and a supervised ImageNet ViT-B/16 baseline (0.843). Our results provide practical guidance for adapting DINO-family foundation models in low-data medical imaging settings, showing that adaptation strategy is a stronger driver of performance than backbone choice alone.
Authors: Evan Duan
Abstract: Sparse autoencoder (SAE) features are increasingly used to steer language models, but feature steering is rarely clean: the same intervention can behave inconsistently across contexts and perturb unrelated features. We introduce a pre-intervention screening framework for forecasting SAE steering side effects from feature statistics computed before steering. We operationalize side effects along two axes of steering modularity, effect stability and collateral spread, and evaluate GPT-2-small, Pythia-70M-deduped, Gemma-2-2B, and Llama-3.1-8B across ReLU, JumpReLU, and TopK SAE dictionaries. Across these settings, decoder geometry, activation statistics, co-activation structure, and direct-logit footprint predict steering modularity better than frequency-only and activation-magnitude baselines. The signal is strongest in GPT-2-small, Pythia-70M, and Llama-3.1-8B, where it survives residualization against magnitude-related confounds, and weaker in Gemma-2-2B. Held-out screening shows that ranking unseen features by predicted cleanliness can select features that steer more cleanly on fresh contexts, but the successful axis varies by setting: GPT-2 improves most cleanly, Pythia improves mainly on stability, Llama mainly on collateral, and Gemma only partially. A controlled Llama Scope width comparison shows that the predictive signal persists under a 32K-to-128K dictionary-width change, although the screening payoff becomes less stable. Overall, SAE steering side effects are predictable in advance, but the useful predictor signature and transferred modularity axis are model- and dictionary-setting dependent.
Authors: Deepak Akkil, Ravi Kokku, Karthik Vikram, Tamer Abuelsaad, Aditya Vempaty, Satya Nitta
Abstract: Most evaluations of LLM agents look like exams: a discrete task, a clean environment, a score in minutes or hours. We argue that this approach is mismatched with the deployment conditions of autonomous systems, where the relevant timescale can be weeks to months, and where the dynamics that matter most, such as behavioral drift, governance in diverse environmental contexts, and cross-influence between agents from different model families, only emerge over time. We introduce Emergence World, a continuously running multi-agent simulation platform designed to make those dynamics measurable. The platform hosts populations of LLM-driven agents in a shared spatial world grounded in live external data (e.g. real-time weather, news APIs, internet access), equips each agent with 120+ specialized tools and three persistent memory systems, and lets them govern themselves through democratic mechanisms with consequential outcomes. The platform is model-agnostic at the reasoning layer and supports heterogeneous populations in which agents from different vendors share the same world. To illustrate the kinds of questions the platform makes tractable, we present a 15-day cross-vendor study with five parallel worlds powered by Claude Sonnet 4.6, Grok 4.1 Fast, Gemini 3 Flash, GPT-5-mini, and a mixed population. Identical roles and starting conditions produced radically different outcomes, ranging from stable deliberative governance to total population collapse. We release the prompts, log data and configurations to support further research on long-horizon multi-agent autonomy.
Authors: Wanqiao Xu, Yifan Zhu, Benjamin Van Roy
Abstract: A growing body of work points to the great promise of AI systems that can continually expand their capabilities as they operate in an open-ended environment. But yet there is no coherent definition of open-endedness or theory about how an agent ought to explore an open-ended environment. We introduce an information-theoretic definition based on a new concept -- the ${\textit bit-equivalent}$ -- which quantifies the information required to attain each level of expected reward. We consider an environment to be open-ended if an agent can attain linear growth in the bit-equivalent. We establish that classical bandit environments are not open-ended and formulate a bandit environment that is. We also introduce an algorithm that achieves open-ended learning in this environment.
Authors: Leihan Zhang, Wecheng Ye, Xianlong Ma, Haochuan Liu, Yang Li, Qianyu Zhang, Jinliang Chen, Qiang Yan
Abstract: As artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly deployed across socially consequential domains, reports of AI-related harms and failures have grown in frequency and diversity. Although existing governance frameworks articulate high-level principles for responsible AI, large-scale empirical resources for tracking and analyzing real-world AI risk incidents remain limited. Existing incident collections are often manually curated, relatively small in scale, and insufficient for continuous, data-driven monitoring and downstream computational analysis. To address this need, we present RiskNet, a large-scale dataset of AI risk incidents constructed from large-scale multilingual news sources. RiskNet applies a structured pipeline for AI risk news identification, event-level report screening, incident alignment, and multi-dimensional incident classification. The resulting resource organizes dispersed news reports into incident-centered records and provides benchmark datasets for event classification, incident alignment, and incident-level risk labeling. In its current release, RiskNet covers hundreds of millions of source records and yields a large-scale collection of AI risk-related reports, including aligned incident clusters and annotated benchmark subsets. The dataset is also accessible through an online platform for browsing and exploration. We describe the data sources, processing workflow, taxonomy design, and technical validation of the resource. RiskNet is intended to support downstream research on AI safety, governance, risk analysis, and benchmarking, as well as longitudinal and cross-source analyses of AI-related harms. By providing a structured and reusable empirical resource, RiskNet helps bridge the gap between high-level governance principles and the documented realities of AI risk incidents.
Authors: Alireza Arbabi, Florian Kerschbaum
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly released and deployed through opaque development and deployment pipelines, enabling model providers to inject intentional, provider-specific policies without officially announcing them. As a result, various models have been reported to generate responses reflecting proprietary rules and organizational interests, leading to censorship or misinformation on controversial topics. However, systematic identification of such alignment remains a fundamental challenge, complicated by the ambiguity of what ``proprietary'' entails in different contexts. In this paper, we propose a statistical framework for detecting proprietary alignment in black-box language models via comparative behavioral analysis. Our approach quantifies systematic deviations between the responses of a target model and those of a reference set of baseline models in a shared semantic space. By evaluating relative behavioral divergence rather than absolute correctness, our framework enables principled auditing under black-box access. Applied to several widely discussed but previously unquantified cases, it provides a systematic and scalable basis for external assessment of provider-specific alignment behavior in large language models.
Authors: Priyansh Bhatnagar, Ashkan Moradifirouzabadi, Se-Hyun Yang, SeungJae Lee, Jungwook Choi, Mingu Kang
Abstract: Low-rank projection has emerged as a promising approach for compressing the KV cache by exploiting hidden-dimension redundancy. However, prior methods rely on fixed or heuristic rank selection and struggle to achieve aggressive compression with minimal accuracy degradation. We propose STAR-KV, an adaptive low-rank KV cache compression framework with fine-grained rank control. STAR-KV encompasses 1) a differentiable thresholding mechanism that enables optimal rank selection at both attention-head and block levels, 2) a hybrid decomposition strategy that applies different low-rank factorizations according to the sensitivity of key and value projections, and 3) a low-rank-aware mixed precision quantization that leverages data statistics for near lossless low-bit quantization. Evaluated across multiple LLMs and benchmarks, STAR-KV achieves up to 75% KV cache compression and up to 20x overall KV cache reduction when combined with quantization. Enabled by custom Triton-based GPU kernels, STAR-KV delivers up to 6.9x speedup for the attention module and 3.1x end-to-end generation throughput. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/PriyanshBhatnagar/STAR-KV.
Authors: Qilin Zhou, Zhuo Wang, Yue Li, W. K. Chan
Abstract: Graduate-level research reading report assessment creates a substantial labor burden for educators. While large language models (LLMs) hold great potential for automating academic grading, their reliability for this specialized task remains understudied, particularly regarding grading consistency, the lack of which represents a primary obstacle to educational fairness. This paper proposes a human-aligned LLM-assisted grading workflow and presents a case study based on 180 student submissions from a graduate advanced software engineering course. We evaluate two mainstream LLMs, Grok and GPT, in terms of grading consistency and alignment with human scores. We find LLMs exhibit distinct levels of intra-model consistency and significant inter-model grading inconsistencies, while simple ensemble approaches cannot improve alignment with human evaluation. Critically, continuous interaction history drives systematic drift in models' grading standards away from human expert scores. Our findings demonstrate LLMs' potential in reducing grading workload for educators in graduate education, while highlighting that indiscriminate LLM grading may introduce systemic unfairness, suggesting that specific operational practices are required to mitigate such disparities.
Authors: Jeonghwan Kim, Yushi Lan, Yongwei Chen, Hieu Trung Nguyen, Chuanyu Pan, Xingang Pan
Abstract: Generating complete 3D scenes from a single image requires inferring globally consistent geometry, object relationships, and environmental context from inherently ambiguous visual evidence. Despite recent progress in joint layout-and-mesh generation, existing methods often rely on holistic or weakly decomposed pipelines that entangle many factors at once and demand extensive scene-level supervision, limiting their generalization to complex real-world environments. We propose a multi-agent orchestration framework that decomposes single-image 3D scene generation into three structured stages: scene initialization, environment construction, and multi-agent refinement. The initialization stage extracts image-derived object masks, builds object-level 3D representations, and predicts an initial spatial layout to form a coarse 3D scene. The environment-construction stage then leverages this initialization together with point-map geometry to build an environmental scaffold of supporting surfaces, room boundaries, materials, and illumination. Finally, in the refinement stage, a planner agent identifies structural and visual inconsistencies, applies simple corrections directly, and dispatches specialist agents for complex localized revisions that are reintegrated into the global scene. To provide reliable structural initialization while reducing reliance on scene-level annotations, we further introduce a geometry-aware layout predictor supervised by sparse geometric priors derived from point maps. Unlike fully supervised layout generators, the predictor can be trained from segmentation-level data and generalizes robustly to diverse real-world scenes. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method consistently outperforms prior approaches in geometric accuracy, spatial consistency, and perceptual realism.
Authors: Mudit Sinha, Sanika Chavan
Abstract: Text-centered prompt-injection defenses assume that the malicious signal is visible in one of the inspected text views. We study a reproducible LLM01-style indirect prompt/content-injection failure mode where that assumption breaks: a payload caught in plain English slips past the same detector when it is transported as structured float parameters and reconstructed only as fragmented telemetry. Across 14,400 attacked real-model trials on three commercial LLM APIs from different providers, the IFS-derived float-array carrier preserves 94.3% leakage ASR under the strongest dual-layer text-classifier defense evaluated in the main matrix: a Prompt Guard 2 + TF-IDF ensemble; the same carrier-level pattern also replicates with a fine-tuned roberta-base detector. We emphasize leakage ASR because downstream systems may act on quoted or reproduced markers even when the model refuses, but Strong ASR is the stricter metric for structurally compliant attack success. A 2 x 2 ablation shows that data-layer storage and reconstruction-layer fragmentation defeat different text views and that both are needed to evade both. A simple xxd detector and semantic validation block the current T3 instance, so the contribution is not an undetectable exploit but a measured failure boundary for text-only inspection in structured-input pipelines that expose reconstructed auxiliary channels to an LLM.
Authors: Ryandito Diandaru, Ikhlasul Akmal Hanif, Fadli Aulawi Al Ghiffari, Ahmed Elshabrawy, Alham Fikri Aji
Abstract: We extend activation steering to diffusion language models (DLMs) and study a novel problem that arose due to the inference mechanism of DLMs: Modifying a text in-place to manifest a different concept. We propose TimpaTeks, an automatic in-place text modification mechanism using DLMs. Experiments on IMDB movie reviews (sentiment) and a synthetic Cats and Dogs Dataset (arbitrary, more unconventional concept steering) show that TimpaTeks provides a feasible novel mechanism to steer diffusion language model outputs in-place. TimpaTeks enables in-place modification while simultaneously lowers sentence perplexity and retaining the original sentence structre without the need of instruction tuned models. TimpaTeks is also computationally cheaper than prompt-based DLM steering, as it performs denoising in-place rather than constructing an additional prompt-conditioned output sequence.
Authors: Linfeng Cao, Ming Shi, Ness B. Shroff
Abstract: Personalized decision-making in multi-objective bandits requires learning user-specific trade-offs among competing objectives. Since arm utility depends on both unknown rewards and unknown preferences, existing methods infer preferences only from utility feedback, entangling preference learning with reward exploration. In practice, however, users often reveal their priorities through proactive conversational queries (e.g., "cheap and clean hotel"), yet this structured signal is not leveraged. We formalize a proactive query-based framework in which user queries provide structured preference signals. Modeling these signals via a Plackett-Luce subset choice model, we show that query-only learning is insufficient due to a fundamental shift-invariance barrier. To resolve this, we introduce MO-PQUCB, a hybrid algorithm that integrates query-based preference anchoring with bandit feedback through shift-invariant regularization and dual-exploration UCB. We prove that proactive queries accelerate preference estimation and yield improved regret scaling over prior preference-aware MO-MAB methods. Under corrupted queries, we further characterize statistical limits and design a robust estimator achieving near-optimal performance when the corruption is sparse. Experiments validate both theoretical and practical gains.
Authors: Lingxuan Wu, Zijian Zhu, Lizhong Wang, Chengyang Ying, Huayu Chen, Xiao Yang, Fangming Liu, Jun Zhu
Abstract: Diffusion policies have achieved remarkable success in robotic manipulation, yet they often fail to satisfy strict physical constraints required for safe deployment. Existing approaches impose safety either prematurely during training or reactively via external guardrails at test time, limiting policy expressivity and overall scalability. We propose Physical safety Alignment for Constrained Trajectories (PACT), a self-evolving post-training framework that projects pretrained diffusion policies onto constraint-feasible regions without accessing demonstration data or task rewards. PACT distills constraint gradients into the diffusion model through a reverse-KL objective with dense supervision across timesteps. It incorporates a curriculum that progressively tightens constraints while maintaining theoretically bounded policy shift and monotone improvement, mitigating the safety-performance trade-off from catastrophic forgetting. On simulated and real-world embodied manipulation benchmarks, PACT significantly reduces safety violations by 31.0% on average while improving task success by 30.7%.
Authors: Jiangtao Wu, Jiaming Wang, Yiwen He, Yuanxing Zhang, Shihao Li, Dunyuan Liu, Xuedong Zhao, Jialu Chen, Zekun Moore Wang, Jiaheng Liu
Abstract: While recent text-guided video editing models excel at elementary tasks (e.g., style transfer, object insertion), real-world user requests are highly compositional. A single prompt often demands multiple coupled edits, such as modifying subjects, actions, and camera views, while strictly preserving unrelated spatiotemporal content. Existing benchmarks, heavily constrained by isolated edits and coarse global metrics, fail to diagnose how models handle such complex workflows. To address this gap, we introduce CoVEBench, a compositional video editing benchmark comprising 416 curated source videos, 626 multi-point editing instructions, and 9,990 fine-grained checklist items. Covering diverse editing dimensions, CoVEBench evaluates models via MLLM-judged instruction compliance and video fidelity, alongside automated metrics for video quality. Extensive experiments reveal that compositional editing remains a profound challenge: current models frequently omit edits, violate preservation constraints, or introduce artifacts when handling multiple operations simultaneously. CoVEBench provides a challenging, diagnostic testbed to advance video editing toward realistic user workflows.
Authors: Antonio Franca, Alexander Tong
Abstract: Diffusion and continuous flow-based language models have emerged as the leading non-autoregressive alternatives to language modeling. Progress in both paradigms is overwhelmingly tracked by generative perplexity (gen-PPL): the per-token negative log-likelihood of samples under a frozen autoregressive (AR) scorer such as gpt2-large, typically paired with an empirical-entropy guardrail to rule out low-entropy collapse. We argue that this metric is unsound. By construction, gen-PPL measures only predictability under the scoring AR, not grammaticality or semantic coherence -- and the set of predictable but still low-quality sequences is combinatorially large. To make this concrete, we construct a suite of zero-parameter, deliberately naive samplers that achieve state-of-the-art gen-PPL on LM1B and OpenWebText at non-degenerate entropy, surpassing recently published diffusion and continuous-flow models while producing text that is incoherent by construction. We recommend evaluation suites that directly quantify the distributional divergence between generated and reference text, and use such a suite to re-benchmark recent non-autoregressive models, recovering a more faithful picture of the current state of the art.
Authors: George Andronchik, Pavel Lokhmakov
Abstract: This paper reads six engine-level measurements together -- 1.1 host attack surface, 1.2 information leakage, 1.3 defense-in-depth stackability, 1.4 public CVE history, 1.5 patch cadence, and 1.6 upstream fuzzing posture -- to describe how five AI-sandbox products isolate guest code from the host kernel. No single axis is a sufficient basis for a comparative judgement; the cross-axis reading is the load-bearing analysis. Three high-level findings: (1) engine classes (microVM, userspace kernel, OCI container) separate cleanly on every architectural axis, but products within a class do not; (2) product pin policy is the dominant operator-facing variable -- engine-side patch latency aggregates to ~0 days for coordinated disclosures, while downstream lag spans 0 days to 471+ days to "opaque" to infinity; (3) fuzzing investment splits into three tiers, and the strongest combination -- microVM x continuous public fuzzer -- is unoccupied in this set, leaving the "0 published CVEs x no upstream fuzzer x no academic study" intersection structurally unmeasured. We report per-axis orderings, per-product portraits, and a threat-model qualification matrix; no overall ranking is proposed. Companion repository (code, Apache-2.0): https://github.com/orbitalab/RnD-ai-sandboxes-sec-study-part-1. License: CC BY 4.0.
URLs: https://github.com/orbitalab/RnD-ai-sandboxes-sec-study-part-1.
Authors: Sangwon Ryu, Heejin Do, Jun Seo, Daehui Kim, Yunsu Kim, Gary Geunbae Lee, Jungseul Ok
Abstract: Meeting documents are challenging to summarize due to their length and complex conversational structure. Existing approaches typically adopt multi-stage pipelines that extract information prior to summarization; however, these approaches often suffer from cumulative error propagation without intermediate validation, a limitation further amplified by short and low-quality reference summaries. We propose segment-level summarization via Monte Carlo Tree Search (S3), a training-free framework that constructs a final summary by composing segment-level summary candidates. S3 partitions a long document into segments and generates multiple summary candidates per segment, forming nodes of a search tree. The best-scoring combination is selected via self-reward-guided tree search and refined into the final output. Despite using a 7B model, S3 achieves performance comparable to larger 72B models while producing length-appropriate summaries.
Authors: Yang Zhou, Ranajoy Sadhukhan, Zhaofeng Sun, Zhuoming Chen, Souvik Kundu, Saket Dingliwal, Sai Muralidhar Jayanthi, Aram Galstyan, Haizhong Zheng, Beidi Chen
Abstract: Despite being powerful, reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) induces extremely long COT, making it computationally expensive. Since RLVR per-step cost is dominated by long-context rollout generation, sparse attention offers a promising way to accelerate dense rollout. However, sparse rollouts require a delicate stability-efficiency tradeoff: overly aggressive sparsity causes collapse, while overly lenient sparsity gives insufficient speedup. In this work, we study this tradeoff through sparse-to-dense actor-policy mismatch. We first observe that sparse rollout collapse is not driven by uniform degradation across tokens: most sparse tokens align perfectly with dense even under aggressive sparsity. Motivated by this, we hypothesize that sparse rollout training remains stable if the lower tail of per-token actor-policy mismatch stays above a critical threshold throughout the trajectory. We introduce a dynamic sparsity schedule that keeps this tail statistic constant during generation and validate our hypothesis. Across Qwen3 thinking-family models, keeping the tail mismatch statistic near a consistent threshold generally enables stable training. We then use a cost model to find the sparsity schedule for maximum speedup under this mismatch threshold, achieving 2.2x, 2.4x, and 2.0x rollout speedups when training Qwen3-1.7B, Qwen3-4B, and Qwen3-8B. Empirically, we show the thresholds generalize to a larger model (Qwen3-14B) and another RL domain (coding). Finally, our analysis naturally motivates DistillSparse: lightweight LoRA-based distillation on sparse rollout lets more aggressive sparsity reach the same sparse-to-dense mismatch threshold, yielding higher speedup.
Authors: Anthony Bazhenov, Jean Erik Delanois, Giri P. Krishnan
Abstract: One of the critical limitations of artificial neural networks is their lack of ability to continually learn: training on new tasks often leads to interference and forgetting of the previous ones. While several algorithms have been proposed to protect old memories from interference, they are typically applied during or immediately after each new episode of training. In contrast, humans and animals can learn continuously, acquiring multiple new memories during active learning before consolidating all of them into long-term storage. Here we show that multiple new tasks can be trained sequentially before an unsupervised sleep-like replay phase is applied to partially restore performance across all previously learned tasks. Our study further suggests that task-specific information remains resilient to new training but decays gradually as network is trained on new tasks. These findings point to novel principles for developing a broad range of continual learning AI solutions.
Authors: Arya Shah, Himanshu Beniwal, Mayank Singh, Chaklam Silpasuwanchai
Abstract: Safety-aligned large language models often exhibit sycophancy, which is the tendency to affirm users' opinions regardless of factual accuracy. Although well-studied in English, its manifestation in other languages remains largely unexamined, leaving billions of non-English speakers potentially vulnerable to model-validated misinformation. We present the first large-scale, multi-model evaluation of cross-lingual sycophancy, benchmarking \textbf{six instruction-tuned models} across \textbf{1.1 million instances} spanning \textbf{38 languages} and \textbf{33 topic categories}. We identify a consistent resource-tier effect: sycophancy rates spike sharply in low-resource and zero-shot language settings. Critically, this degradation is topic-agnostic, as models fail uniformly across both benign and safety-critical prompts, offering no additional protection where it is most needed. We further identify tokenizer fertility as a structural driver of this alignment collapse. Collectively, our results demonstrate that prevailing alignment methodologies generalize poorly beyond high-resource languages, underscoring the urgent need for equitable multilingual safety techniques.
Authors: Cuong Dang, Jiahao Zhang, Hieu Ta Quang, Dung Le, Lu Cheng, Suhang Wang
Abstract: While confidence calibration is essential for trustworthy decision-making in safety-critical applications, the robustness of calibrated GNNs to adversarial structural perturbations remains largely unexplored. However, studying calibration attacks on graphs presents unique technical challenges: (1) the discrete nature of graph structures complicates gradient-based optimization, (2) existing underconfidence objectives fail to drive predictions toward uniform distributions, and (3) GNNs are highly sensitive to edge perturbations, often causing unintended label changes that violate attack constraints. To address these challenges, we propose a \textbf{Unified Graph Calibration Attack (UGCA)} framework designed for \textbf{worst-case (white-box) analysis} of GNN calibration robustness. UGCA introduces a KL-divergence loss to encourage uniform predictive distributions, a reranking mechanism to reduce label flipping, a hybrid loss to recover labels when violations occur, and beam search to explore a broader adversarial search space. We further provide theoretical insights linking model generalization, dataset complexity, and calibration vulnerability, showing that models with higher accuracy or trained on datasets with more classes are more susceptible under this threat model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UGCA substantially increases Expected Calibration Error while preserving classification accuracy. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/CaptainCuong/Graph-Calibration-Attack.git.
URLs: https://github.com/CaptainCuong/Graph-Calibration-Attack.git.
Authors: Marina Igitkhanian, Erik Arakelyan
Abstract: Recently, language models have made rapid progress across various domains and applications. However, their capability for self-improvement, i.e., whether they are adept at recognising and correcting flaws in their own reasoning, remains dubious. In this study, we address this question by constructing a sufficiency test to rigorously examine the self-correction capabilities of small language models (SLMs). We propose a minimal three-step self-correction pipeline that collects initial SLM answers, prompts the same model to generate hints for its incorrect responses given the ground truth, and feeds the model the same question with its own feedback to refine the initial answer. We evaluate a variety of instruction-tuned and reasoning SLMs in this experimental setup on arithmetic and logical reasoning benchmarks. Our findings show that SLMs with injected hint sentences yield only a 4.4 percent gain over initial question-answering accuracy. Even though the correct answer was provided alongside the model's incorrect reasoning, the evaluated SLMs fail to understand what was missing in their reasoning and show minimal semantic difference between hints that lead to corrections and ones that do not. Furthermore, our experiments show that longer hints are positively correlated with incorrect final answers, suggesting that longer deliberation on problems can hinder the reasoning process, meaning that SLMs do not necessarily scale in performance with a larger compute budget.
Authors: Zheng Wang, Eric Liu, Linan Jiang, Zhongkai Yu, Zaifeng Pan, Yue Guan, Yuke Wang, Yufei Ding
Abstract: Context parallelism (CP) is essential for training large-scale, long-context language models, as it partitions sequences to reduce memory overhead. However, existing CP methods suffer from workload imbalance, inefficient kernels, and redundant communication due to static sequence sharding and key-value (KV) tensor communication. We present FlashCP, a load-balanced and communication-efficient framework for CP training. FlashCP introduces a sharding-aware communication mechanism to eliminate redundant KV communication and proposes a novel Whole-Doc sharding strategy that maximizes communication savings while maintaining balanced workloads. To efficiently combine Whole-Doc and Per-Doc sharding, FlashCP further designs a heuristic algorithm to search for near-optimal sharding plans. Extensive experiments show that FlashCP achieves up to 1.63x speedup over state-of-the-art CP frameworks across diverse datasets.
Authors: Kewei Xu, Junbo Qi, Yanyan Zou, Pengfei Zhang, Xingzhi Yao, Shengjie Li
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) presents a promising avenue for enhancing generative recommendation beyond supervised imitation, leveraging reward signals to guide policy improvement. However, its efficacy is critically contingent on the trustworthiness of the reward model for the samples it evaluates. In practice, production rankers, the widely adopted reward models, are trained on exposure-biased logs, leading to sample-dependent inaccuracies that violate this assumption. Our stratified analysis uncovers a consistent pattern: reward guidance is most beneficial when the policy exhibits uncertainty and the ranker can effectively discriminate the ground-truth item from rollout negatives. On other samples, the reward signal is either negligible or detrimental, highlighting the risk of uniform RL application. To address such an issue, we introduce AdaGRPO, a novel framework that treats reward-guided optimization as selective admission rather than uniform pressure. Training is anchored in supervised negative log-likelihood, while the GRPO objective is gated by a binary, per-sample clip determined by two rollout diagnostics: policy-side difficulty and reward discriminability. Instances failing either diagnostic default to pure supervision, ensuring stability and mitigating the amplification of noisy gradients. We validate AdaGRPO on a large-scale e-commerce dataset. At the best intermediate checkpoint, it elevates HR@10 from 11.01% to 12.18% while constraining hallucination below 0.22%, and maintains robustness at the final checkpoint (HR@10 11.63%, hallucination 0.27%), outperforming fixed NLL--GRPO mixtures across the retrieval--validity frontier. In production A/B tests, AdaGRPO achieves statistically significant gains in click-through rate and dwell time, confirming its practical utility.
Authors: Suraj Ranganath, Anish Raghavendra
Abstract: Enterprise property graphs vary widely in schema structure, internal terminology, domain assumptions, governance constraints, and user interaction patterns. A deployment-relevant Text2Cypher benchmark therefore reflects the questions users and agents actually ask of that graph. Creating such a benchmark is difficult because schemas and values are unique, and graph structure changes over time. Each NL-query pair must also be executable, use real graph entities, preserve diversity, and remain balanced across query types and difficulty levels. We present PIPE-Cypher, a local benchmark-generation pipeline that turns a live property graph and optional seed queries from customer questions, analyst logs, or agent tool calls into balanced NL-to-Cypher benchmarks. PIPE-Cypher combines schema profiling, reverse-query grounding, constrained generation, deterministic Cypher governance, execution validation, redaction, diversity controls, and a calibrated local LLM judge. Using local Qwen3.5-9B generation and judging, PIPE-Cypher exports 3,000 accepted FinBench/SNB examples, completes three audited ablation suites, calibrates judge behavior with human labels, and evaluates 11 local downstream models. The resulting benchmark is deliberately discriminative: zero-shot transfer is weak, while a few-shot control shows that schema-specific example banks can help compatible model families. Together, PIPE-Cypher makes Text2Cypher benchmarking a repeatable process that evolves with the graph, its users, and its target workloads.
Authors: Shufeng Kong, Tao Yu, Yuanyuan Wei, Caihua Liu, Junwen Bai, Yingheng Wang, Marc Grimson, Daniel Fink, Carla P. Gomes
Abstract: Joint Species Distribution Modeling (JSDM) is a key enabler for biodiversity monitoring and conservation planning. However, accurate JSDM faces two coupled challenges: environmental drivers and species distributions are inherently spatio-temporal, while species co-occurrence patterns exhibit complex non-linear community structure and severe long-tail imbalance driven by rare species. Existing approaches often address these factors in isolation, learning from static covariates or neglecting the historical trajectories of dynamic community structure. To overcome these limitations, we propose STELLAR (Spatio-Temporal Environmental Learning with Latent Alignment and Refinement), a novel framework that learns a shared latent space where dynamic habitat context and community structure are optimized jointly. Our approach integrates three complementary components: (1) a Graph-Temporal Encoder that employs graph attention and recurrent units to aggregate spatial neighborhood effects and capture the co-evolving historical dynamics of environmental context and community structure; (2) a Context-Anchored Latent Alignment mechanism that structures the latent space using a label-activated mixture prior and supervised contrastive learning, actively clustering species based on shared environmental preferences; and (3) an Imbalance-Aware Decoupled Decoding module that utilizes Asymmetric Loss to focus learning on hard, rare species samples, preventing mode collapse in the long tail. Experiments on the large-scale eBird dataset, curated with domain experts, demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, particularly in predicting rare species and revealing interpretable species interactions.
Authors: Xuanyi Liu, Deyi Ji, Junyu Lu, Jing Wang, Qianxiong Xu, Xuhang Chen, Tianrun Chen, Siwei Ma
Abstract: Despite the impressive capabilities of text-to-image (T2I) models, an intent-generation gap often persists due to the brevity and ambiguity of user prompts. Existing approaches primarily polish the prompt for fluency and readability. However, the enhancement process still lacks visual grounding. As a result, the rewriter may over-infer missing details, causing an intent-generation gap. To address this limitation, we propose FaithRewriter, a novel prompt-enhancement framework for T2I generation. Specifically, FaithRewriter first leverages a multimodal MLLM to generate an image from the original prompt as an intermediate visual cue. This cue is then combined with the prompt and fed into a large-scale LLM to produce visually grounded augmentations that better reflect how the intended content should appear in images. Finally, these augmentations are distilled into a small-scale LLM for efficient deployment, enhancing its ability to generate effective T2I prompts. Experiments show that FaithRewriter yields prompts that are more faithful to the user intent and more visually plausible than strong baselines, helping narrow the intent-generation gap.
Authors: Zhengyi Zhuo, Yan Liu
Abstract: Software engineering agents (SWE agents) increasingly work through tool-mediated trajectories in real repositories, yet their behavior remains difficult to characterize in concrete, observable terms. These trajectories record tool use, intermediate reasoning, evidence selection, and self-directed stopping, but they do not by themselves explain why particular moves were chosen, what evidence was trusted, or when understanding was judged sufficient. This tension makes trajectory data both limited and valuable: faithful, replayable traces can become an empirical substrate for studying agent behavior when interpreted through disciplined observation. We introduce Ada, a scoped apparatus for repository-level code understanding. Ada enters real codebases through a bounded tool interface, allowing open-ended exploration to remain recordable as finite trajectories. Across this wild-but-bounded setting, Ada chooses where to look, what to read closely, when to consolidate partial understanding, and when to close its account of the repository. We project Ada's think-action chains through observation lenses that make navigation, evidence selection, synthesis, grounding, and stopping visible without reducing behavior to raw tool counts or speculating about hidden intent. Read together, these lenses produce behavioral profiles grounded in recorded movement through software worlds. Across 408 trajectories, spanning multiple models, repositories, task families, and launch conditions, the study shows how faithful digital traces can be transformed into disciplined, comparable projections of emerging SWE-agent mindset. The results expose differences in efficiency, trajectory diversity, epistemic grounding, and the limits of intervention, while providing a methodological foundation for observing SWE agent behavior in real codebases.
Authors: Bingjia Huang, Xiangyu Li, Xiang Wang, Liang Mi, Zixu Hao, Weijun Wang, Hao Wu, Kun Li, Yunxin Liu, Ting Cao
Abstract: Generative robot policies fail unpredictably at deployment: they hesitate at critical moments, drift off-task, or commit to unrecoverable actions. Existing online failure detectors either require white-box access to policy internals or add runtime overhead through resampling and observation-side signals. Our empirical analysis shows that emitted action chunks themselves already carry strong predictive signal for impending failures in generative robot policies. Motivated by this observation, we introduce ActProbe, a lightweight, pure action-space detector that uses two compact signals available from a single forward pass: Temporal Consistency Error (TCE) between consecutive action chunks and Action Chunk Magnitude (ACM) of the current chunk. ActProbe maps these signals to per-step failure probabilities with a task-conditioned LSTM-MLP architecture. Across a diverse suite of generative robot policies and benchmarks, ActProbe raises alerts before failures become visually recognizable, improving the accuracy (F1)-timeliness Pareto frontier of failure detection by an average hypervolume gain of +12.7% over both internal- and external-feature baselines, with a +9.0% early-detection ROC-AUC lead on unseen tasks. ActProbe further transfers to deployment, predicting failures on unseen real-robot pick tasks and accelerating RL fine-tuning (PPO) with 2.9x fewer environment interactions.
Authors: Yuan Zhang, Shiqi Zhang, Yedong Shen, Shuai Dong, Jiajun Deng, Xin Zhang, Yuxuan Gao, Jiajia Wu, Xin Nie, Zhiyuan Cheng, Jianmin Ji, Yanyong Zhang, Xingyi Zhang, Jia Pan
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong benchmark performance but still struggle in real-world deployment with unseen objects, background shifts, and different robot embodiments. We argue that this stems from the lack of a unified geometry-aware manipulation representation, leaving existing VLAs vulnerable to low-level trajectory supervision, misaligned 3D features, and embodiment differences. To address this, we propose GEAR-VLA, a VLA framework for learning unified geometry-aware action representations for generalizable robotic manipulation. GEAR-VLA adopts coarse-to-fine action learning, where multi-source embodied pretraining equips the VLM with embodied reasoning and discrete action understanding before latent action tokens connect action semantics to a gradient-decoupled DiT continuous action expert. It further performs semantic-aligned 3D integration by aligning a trainable 3D spatial backbone with the VLA representation while freezing the original VLM-aligned visual pathway. To share this representation across robots, GEAR-VLA uses embodiment canonicalization, where embodiment-aware states and embodiment-invariant actions confine robot differences to the low-level interface. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate strong generalization: GEAR-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance on LIBERO, zero-shot LIBERO-Plus, and RoboTwin 2.0, reaches 85.9% success on AgileX and 81.0% on the pretraining-unseen LDT-01 embodiment, and obtains 90.1% success on a 6,360-trial universal grasping benchmark with 212 unseen objects. Code and models will be released at https://github.com/babynabeauty/GEAR-VLA.
Authors: Haizhou Ge, Yufei Jia, Yue Li, Zhixing Chen, Lu Shi, Lei Han, Guyue Zhou, Ruqi Huang
Abstract: Exploratory manipulation often turns an apparent failed attempt into the key evidence for what to do next. For example, a robot pulls a locked cabinet drawer, fails, and only succeeds after opening the lock. The failed pull reveals a latent precondition (the drawer is locked) that determines the minimal-success action chain (the fewest actions that complete the task), here [lock-open, drawer-pull]. Correctly reading this trace is therefore the prerequisite for recovering that chain. We formalize this setting as Exploratory Manipulation Trace QA (EMT-QA): given synchronized video and proprioception from an exploratory trace, predict the minimal-success action chain under the latent precondition revealed by the probe. However, even state-of-the-art VLMs and embodied multimodal LLMs misread this evidence: they do not reliably recover the chain from raw video, raw proprioception, or their combination. We introduce Closed-Loop Trace Distillation, a pipeline that uses a per-task coding agent to inspect labeled training traces and distill a one-line natural-language prompt over the trace, which we call the Distilled Reading Heuristic (DRH). At inference, no agent is invoked and no model weights are updated; a frozen VLM receives the raw trace plus the DRH as a prompt entry. Across three simulator and two real-robot tasks, the DRH improves chain accuracy by +0.38 to +0.47 over the best raw-modality baseline. The same DRH also serves as the sole specification for one-shot programmatic classifiers that match the prompted VLM.
Authors: Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Jing Liu, Ye Wang
Abstract: Tensor networks provide efficient representations for compressing large neural networks. By carefully designing shapes and topologies, they can significantly reduce memory and computational costs. However, identifying implicit low-rank structures in large foundation models remains challenging due to their enormous scale and un-structured weight distributions. We propose an adaptive tensorization method that discovers inherent low-rank structure in a target tensor by index ordering. Experiments on weight and KV-cache compression demonstrate improved reconstruction quality compared to baselines.
Authors: Subramanyam Sahoo
Abstract: Large language models frequently fail in a characteristic way: rather than acknowledging ignorance, they produce fluent but incorrect answers to questions that lie beyond their knowledge boundaries. We introduce \textbf{Structured Ignorance Certificates} (SICs), a JSON-formatted output schema that demands a model explicitly name the missing domain intersection, enumerate required concepts, and propose a productive retrieval query rather than hallucinating an answer. To train models to produce high-quality SICs we construct a 7,347-sample \emph{Unknown-Unknown} (UU) dataset by prompting Qwen3-14B to stitch together questions from seven domains (physics, biology, engineering, CS, economics, medical, legal) into novel cross-domain queries that no single-domain expert could answer. We fine-tune a 14B-parameter model with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) using a composite reward that combines retrieval utility, concept specificity, and output-format validity. A paraphrase-divergence probe trained on model responses confirms that SIC-tuned outputs systematically exhibit higher unknown-unknown probability scores. Evaluation on 735 held-out UU questions achieves a 99.46\% JSON validity rate, a mean Certificate Specificity Score of 0.967, and a 3.6\% ROUGE-L improvement over the base model on retrieval-grounded generation -- demonstrating that explicit epistemic structuring is a learnable and measurable capability.
Authors: Anastasiia Kuvshinova, Seungmin Jin
Abstract: Kubernetes incidents are diagnosed reliably only when a root-cause system's reported gains come from incident evidence rather than scenario-specific shortcuts. We present Graph Traversal Agent, a graph-guided RCA agent that combines LLM reasoning with specialized tools. The model reasons over a typed evidence graph, while deterministic graph and tool operations collect evidence, bound the search, and check proposed verdicts. We map operational constraints, including read-only evidence collection, propagation-aware diagnosis, bounded execution, and independently validated verdicts, to a typed incident graph, a LangGraph traversal state machine, and a separate validation stage. On ITBench snapshots scored by one fixed qwen-plus judge, the audited system raises root-cause-entity F1 over an earlier iteration of the same system from 0.6087 to 0.9130 on a 23-scenario common subset. A prompt-level ablation separates prompt-tuned gains from gains that survive once scenario-specific hints are removed: the stripped-prompt configuration retains 0.6958 F1 on a 19-scenario subset. The surviving gain concentrates on ChaosMesh scenarios whose ground-truth root cause is the injected fault object already present in the evidence graph, so we report it as benchmark-coupled rather than broad cross-cluster RCA evidence. Lightweight checks, including same-judge comparison, prompt-level ablation, cascade-source checking, and a telemetry no-leak test, mark claims as supported, pending, or out of scope. We scope the work to ITBench OpenTelemetry-demo snapshots. Live-cluster trials served as an engineering stress test, but alert state and trace availability did not stay stable enough for controlled scoring, so we make no production-readiness or mean-time-to-repair claim.
Authors: Boshu Lei, Kostas Daniilidis, Antonio Loquercio
Abstract: We present an online reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for fine-tuning flow-matching policies in continuous-control problems. Our key insight is to view RL-based policy improvement as a transport of action densities towards regions of high reward, which naturally aligns with the transport formulation of flow matching models. Prior methods either approximate the current or optimal policy distribution or resort to distillation, which introduces biased gradients or sacrifices multimodal modeling capacity. In contrast, our approach for RL with Density Transport, which we name \emph{RLDT}, constructs a transport field from a maximum-entropy RL objective using Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD). Then, it finetunes a pretrained flow matching policy to align with this field. Training with this alignment objective is nontrivial because flow-matching policies generate actions via a multi-step process, making direct gradient-based optimization challenging. To overcome this challenge and stabilize training, we approximate policy actions from intermediate denoising steps via expected-target estimation. This allows the transport-field update to propagate into the network parameters without unstable backpropagation through time. Experimental results demonstrate that RLDT outperforms competitive baselines in reward quality and convergence speed. This performance holds across diverse continuous-control tasks, encompassing both dense and sparse rewards, as well as state- and vision-based long-horizon robot manipulation. The project webpage is \href{https://rpfey.github.io/rldt/}{https://rpfey.github.io/rldt/}.
URLs: https://rpfey.github.io/rldt/, https://rpfey.github.io/rldt/
Authors: Zechu Li, Yufeng Jin, Xiaoyang Liu, Puze Liu, Vignesh Prasad, Carlo D'Eramo, Georgia Chalvatzaki
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a powerful paradigm for robot learning, particularly in sim-to-real settings, but its broader adoption remains limited by the engineering pipeline surrounding the algorithms. Building tasks, shaping rewards, and tuning hyperparameters require substantial expert effort, making RL workflows costly and difficult to scale. We introduce HARBOR, an agentic framework that frames robot RL automation as a harness-engineering problem: given a simulator codebase and a task specification, it automates the workflow from environment setup to policy training in simulation. HARBOR decomposes such high-level objectives into bounded stages executed by specialized agents through standardized commands, persistent artifacts, executable gates, and reusable knowledge, and scales iteration via decentralized parallel trials and experience learning across runs. We evaluate HARBOR across 6 benchmarks and 16 tasks in total, spanning manipulation, locomotion, and bimanual dexterous control. We demonstrate that HARBOR automates the simulation RL workflow end-to-end, designs rewards, tunes algorithms to match or improve over default configurations, and reduces engineering effort at practical token and wall-clock cost; the resulting policies can also be transferred to real robots.
Authors: Jiahui Huang, Ao Luo, Lei Liu, Hongwei Zhao, Tengyuan Liu, Ruibo Guo, Bo Wang, Zhao Wang, Bin Li
Abstract: Global wind power capacity, especially in China, is booming, with new farms spanning diverse terrains and climates. The industry urgently needs accurate wind power foundation models to shorten commissioning and accelerate grid connection. This is because site-specific time series models (TSMs) are not well suited to data-scarce scenarios and generalize poorly, while generic large time series models (LTSMs) are mostly limited to univariate inputs and cannot fully exploit static site attributes or the dependencies between power and meteorological covariates, leading to insufficient accuracy. To fill this gap, we propose \textbf{Tyan-WP}, the first wind power foundation model for ultra-short-term probabilistic forecasting. Pretrained on a large-scale wind power dataset covering more than 126,000 U.S. sites over seven years, Tyan-WP further improves zero-shot forecasting through two domain-specific module designs: static site embedding using coordinate, terrain, and ecoregion metadata, and a power-aware meteorological fusion (PAMF) module that models interactions between historical power and meteorological covariates. Under a unified evaluation protocol, Tyan-WP surpasses eight site-specific supervised TSMs on 10 in-domain sites and outperforms eleven generic LTSMs on 127 in-domain sites, reducing MAE by 19.9%, RMSE by 16.6%, CRPS by 22.2%, and AQL by 21.7%, while raising R^2 by 16.7%. It further demonstrates strong cross-geography generalization on six real U.K. sites. These results show that the wind power foundation model can achieve accurate zero-shot forecasting without target-site training, providing a practical pathway for rapid turbine onboarding and probabilistic risk management at new wind farms.
Authors: Soyoung Oh, Vera Demberg
Abstract: To interpret context correctly and retrieve relevant information, large language models must bind entities to their attributes and update these bindings as state changes. We analyze how LLMs implement this binding process in a dynamic state tracking. Using causal interventions, we identify a retrieval conditioned rebinding mechanism, a compact attention head circuit that encodes swap relevant binding information and reinstates it at readout. Across Gemma and Llama models, this circuit supports rebinding behavior, but the representational signature of the mechanism differs across model families. In Gemma models, the binding signature is clearly expressed in the query/key subspaces of the relevant attention heads, whereas in Llama models, the binding information is carried primarily in key vectors. Overall, our results reveal an interpretable mechanism for context dependent state tracking in LLMs.
Authors: Bernhard Kneip, Nhien-An Le-Khac, Hong-Hanh Nguyen-Le
Abstract: Forensic analysis of web server logs demands both accurate detection and human-readable explanations that can satisfy legal requirements. We present CEF-Log, a context-enhanced few-shot chain-of-thought prompting strategy for Large Language Models that addresses this dual requirement. CEF-Log embeds expert investigative methodology through a structured five-step reasoning template, enabling the model to learn \textit{how} to analyze logs rather than \textit{what} patterns to memorize. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that CEF-Log achieves an F1-score of 0.99 on the CSIC 2010 dataset using only four examples while providing a $10\times$ improvement in sample efficiency compared to other prompting-based methods. We also introduce ForenWebLog, a new dataset that incorporates real-world attacks and multi-step attack sequences for comprehensive evaluation. Qualitative analysis confirms that CEF-Log generates traceable, accurate explanations suitable for forensic documentation, addressing the critical "black-box" limitation of traditional machine learning approaches.
Authors: Marco Marena, Qin Li, Haimin Wang, Haodi Jiang, Prajwal Shah, Bo Shen
Abstract: Routine full-disk EUV imaging has been available only since the modern era, such as SOHO and SDO. To extend EUV coronal context into earlier periods, we leverage the multi-decade availability of full-disk \HeI{} observations, whose absorption is modulated by coronal irradiance and magnetic topology and is widely used as a proxy for open-field regions. We present a diffusion-based conditional image translation framework, Coronal Hole-aware Diffusion Model Translator (CH-aware DMT), to reconstruct synthetic SDO/AIA 193 \AA{} EUV images from \HeI{} inputs. The model is trained on temporally co-aligned SOLIS \HeI{} and AIA 193 \AA{} pairs spanning 2011--2015 using a month-based split, where January--October are used for training, November is used for validation, and December for testing. On the held-out test set, the reconstructions preserve dominant full-disk EUV morphology (CC=0.92) and recover CH-related low-intensity structure (CC=0.84). We further assess historical applicability by (1) comparing reconstructed AIA 193 \AA{} morphology with SOHO/EIT 195 \AA{} over 2005--2015; (2) comparing reconstructed AIA 193 \AA{} images generated from KPVT \HeI{} inputs against Yohkoh/SXT soft X-ray observations; and (3) evaluating long-term reconstructed disk-integrated emission statistics against observational EUV series and independent solar activity proxies (sunspot number and F10.7 radio flux over 1974--2015). These results indicate that CH-aware DMT conditioned on \HeI{} can provide a physically plausible synthetic AIA 193 \AA{} coronal proxy for historical studies, supporting multi-decade analyses of large-scale coronal evolution before the direct EUV imaging was available.
Authors: Haihao Lin, Xiangsheng Huang, Xiao Yang, Weibang Zhou, Yiqi Zhang, Bo Yang, Simin Zeng, Jiawei Yang, Zhengyang Wang, Jiahui Du
Abstract: Action-supervised fine-tuning of vision-language-action (VLA) policies fits demonstrations effectively but constrains only the directions that change predicted actions, leaving visual structure consistent across action-equivalent states free to collapse. We formalize this as residual visual collapse along local action fibers and propose FiberTune, a training-time objective that preserves teacher-structured visual residuals without adding inference-time overhead. FiberTune uses an online action probe to estimate action-predictive feature directions, filters them from intermediate visual-token representations, and aligns the resulting probe-filtered residuals to a frozen visual teacher while regularizing their effective rank. Under identical training conditions, FiberTune improves over task-loss-only fine-tuning in every one of six controlled simulation settings spanning two benchmarks and two architectures (pi_0.5 and OpenVLA-OFT), as well as on physical SO-101 pick-place; representative gains include +10.7 percentage points SR(5) on long-horizon CALVIN ABC-to-D and physical SO-101 task success rising from 72.7% to 78.1%. Residual diagnostics show that these gains coincide with increased probe-filtered residual teacher alignment and effective rank, consistent with the action-fiber motivation.
Authors: Zhexuan Zhou, Yichen Lai, Jinhao Zhang, Huizhe Li, Youmin Gong, Jie Mei
Abstract: Diffusion-based visuomotor policies operating directly in raw action spaces conflate scene comprehension with trajectory generation within a single denoising process. The resulting velocity field must simultaneously encode scene information and generate precise trajectories, increasing learning complexity and limiting performance on tasks demanding precise temporal coordination across multiple arms. To simplify this joint learning problem, we introduce Latent Diffusion Policy (LDP), a two-stage framework performing flow matching in a deliberately shaped latent space. By absorbing scene understanding into an observation-conditioned CVAE encoder, LDP concentrates the conditional distribution of each observation. Consequently, the flow model avoids implicitly resolving scene-dependent structures; instead, it generates within a pre-concentrated distribution featuring a smoother velocity field, simplifying learning from limited demonstrations. Furthermore, to capture temporal dependencies among latent tokens, LDP trains with per-token diffusion forcing and employs staircase inference sampling to resolve the resulting distributional mismatch. We also propose reconstruction FID (rFID) as a lightweight proxy predicting downstream task success solely from latent space statistics. On coordination-intensive tasks from RoboTwin 2.0, LDP outperforms DP3 by a substantial margin and transfers effectively to real-world bimanual deployments.
Authors: Kuncan Wang, Ziting Wang, Peizhuo Lv, Haoyang Li, Guoliang Li, Gao Cong, Wei Dong
Abstract: Data agents integrate LLM-driven reasoning with relational data access, executable analytical tools, and multi-step workflow orchestration, making them increasingly central to enterprise analytics. This integration introduces new security vulnerabilities across data resources, database execution, and agent reasoning, recombining concerns from database security and general-purpose LLM-agent security into failure modes that neither line of work captures on its own. To address this gap, we present a systematic security study of data agents. Our contributions are threefold. First, we develop a layered vulnerability framework that identifies eight data agent-specific risks across interpretation, execution, and policy layers. Second, we introduce an attack taxonomy organized by adversary goal, tactic, and technique, covering three goals, seven tactics, and fourteen techniques, and pair it with an LLM-driven payload generation pipeline grounded in real database schemas. Third, we evaluate these attacks on six systems, including four open-source data agents and two production cloud analytics services. Our experiments reveal substantial security vulnerabilities across current systems and yield four key takeaways.
Authors: Tsung-Wei Pan, Jung-Hua Wang
Abstract: Existing video generation frameworks treat sequence duration as an externally prescribed parameter -- fixed frame counts or text prompts -- producing clips whose temporal boundaries are decoupled from the statistical structure of real behavioral data. This assumption is fundamentally misaligned with biological behavior, where action duration varies naturally across individuals and instances and is encoded in the data itself. We present BioVid, a data-driven autoregressive video generation framework that learns the temporal structure of biological behaviors directly from training data, including their natural length distributions. In the first stage, a Finite Scalar Quantization GAN (FSQ-R3GAN) tokenizer encodes each video frame into a compact discrete representation, combining the stabilized relativistic training objective of R3GAN with FSQ's guaranteed codebook utilization to achieve high-fidelity spatial reconstruction without codebook collapse. In the second stage, a causal Transformer models the resulting token sequences autoregressively and learns to emit an End-of-Sequence (EOS) token when the behavioral event reaches semantic closure, with the termination distribution emerging naturally from the training data rather than any human-specified constraint. Experiments on a human drinking behavior dataset (NTU RGB+D, A001, n=94) demonstrate that BioVid's generated length distribution closely matches that of held-out test data, achieving a Wasserstein-1 distance of 1.24 against the ground truth -- compared to 6.05 for a fixed-length baseline and 15.48 for VideoGPT -- while maintaining competitive spatial fidelity.
Authors: Shi Ying Chang, Chiok Yew Ho, Yichen Li, Yintong Huo
Abstract: AI coding assistants have significantly improved developer productivity by automatically suggesting code that aligns with user intent, and many of these tools are now integrated directly into Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). Developers interact with code in two distinct cognitive modes: Flow and Command. While developers require tools that directly complete or infill code in unfinished programs during Flow mode, they also need tools that can comprehend intentions expressed as natural-language instructions and convert them into executable code in Command mode. Although instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) dominate many application scenarios due to their abilities to infer and fulfill developers' intents, it remains unclear whether the same paradigm is equally suitable for different code-related tasks. Therefore, it is necessary to understand how instruction tuning affects the feasibility of CodeLLMs as coding assistants. To fill this gap, we conduct the first empirical study that uncovers a key trade-off caused by instruction tuning across programming modes, which we term the Instruction-Tuning Tax. Our results show that instruction tuning is not a free lunch: although instruction-tuned models are more capable of following instructions and leveraging structured guidance, these gains often come at the cost of weaker infilling performance. We further extend our study through both qualitative and quantitative analyses, including manual failure categorization, behavioral metrics that capture generation fidelity, and intermediate-checkpoint evaluation throughout the tuning process. Summarizing our results into seven findings and four implications, our study offers a new perspective on the development of AI-powered coding tools and highlights the need to carefully balance instruction-following ability with effective code generation assistance.
Authors: Qi Cao, Jian Lou, Meiting Liu, Wenjie Feng, Dan Li, See-Kiong Ng, Anh Tuan Luu
Abstract: Activation steering has emerged as a popular inference-time technique for modulating the behavior of large language models (LLMs). By constructing a steering vector from examples of a target behavior and injecting it into intermediate activations during inference, activation steering enables flexible behavioral control while avoiding the permanent parameter updates required by finetuning. Meanwhile, recent work has identified emergent misalignment (EM) as a significant safety concern, wherein models finetuned on unsafe examples from a narrow task may unexpectedly generalize to broadly unsafe behavior on unrelated tasks. Although finetuning-induced EM has been extensively studied, whether activation steering can induce EM remains comparatively under-explored, despite its increasing use as a model-control technique. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of activation-steering-induced emergent misalignment, substantially expanding the evaluation scope beyond existing pioneering work. First, we show that activation steering can induce broad misalignment, even in the recent Qwen-3.5 series. Moreover, activation-steered models produce harmful responses with stronger semantic relevance and higher coherence than their finetuned counterparts, making the resulting misalignment potentially more harmful. Second, we characterize properties of AS-induced EM by analyzing key steering-specific factors, including steering magnitude, the low-rank structure of the steering subspace, and the number of epochs during steering-vector construction. Third, we evaluate the robustness and sensitivity of AS-induced EM across diverse model families, model scales, target tasks, and intervention layers. Our findings reveal activation steering as a significant yet under-examined source of emergent misalignment and provide an activation-space perspective for understanding the mechanisms and safety risks of EM.
Authors: Yasuo Tabei
Abstract: Counterfactual recourse aims to provide actionable feature changes that would alter an unfavorable decision made by a predictive model. In practice, affected individuals often benefit from multiple feasible alternatives rather than a single optimal explanation. A natural way to produce such alternatives is to prompt large language models (LLMs). However, prompting incurs a practical constraint: the number of LLM calls is often the dominant computational and economic cost. Together, the need for multiple alternatives and this cost constraint shift the problem from finding a single high-quality counterfactual to efficiently generating a set of oracle-validated counterfactuals under a fixed LLM-call budget. In this work, we study counterfactual recourse generation in the LLM-agentic setting as a fixed-budget search problem and propose Comp-MCTS, an agentic tree-search framework that maximizes the yield of unique, oracle-validated counterfactuals under this budget while maintaining favorable quantity--quality trade-offs. Comp-MCTS allocates the budget toward novel intervention directions via LLM-based proposal generation, oracle validation, and compression-guided pruning, in a training-free, oracle-only setting. Experiments on four real-world tabular datasets show that Comp-MCTS substantially outperforms single-candidate LATS-style baselines in the yield of unique, oracle-validated counterfactuals, and offers favorable quantity--quality--efficiency trade-offs against stronger multi-candidate variants: comparable or higher yield at similar or lower oracle-evaluation cost on three of four datasets, plus competitive proximity, sparsity, and novelty.
Authors: Anthony Marinov, Igor Sfiligoi
Abstract: Modernization of legacy scientific codes is often necessary to keep up with the ever-evolving changes in the compute resource ecosystem. Parallelization and migration from poorly supported software ecosystems are two of the most time-consuming activities in the research software engineering field. This paper presents our experience in the successful, two-phase AI-assisted modernization of NMAP-RKPM, a roughly 60,000-line, 3D explicit solid mechanics physics engine based on the Reproducing Kernel Particle Method (RKPM). We converted this single-threaded, Fortran based MPI application into a OpenMP-parallel C++ based MPI tool in the span of a few months. While Large Language Model (LLM) based tools on their own proved inadequate, we developed a highly structured "hand-holding" agentic AI methodology, like providing manually created examples, ensuring continuous buildability and limiting session scope, that was instead highly effective. The paper provides both the AI-assisted steps that were successful and the problems that we had to overcome, alongside the reasoning behind the chosen path.
Authors: Hongyi Yu, Yaoyu Fang, Jiahe Qian, Xinkun Wang, Lee A. Cooper, Bo Zhou
Abstract: Purpose: Spatial transcriptomics (ST) enables gene expression measurements within the tissue context. However, these measurements are often noisy, low-resolution, and sparsely sampled, which limits the recovery of fine spatial structure. Deep neural networks have become powerful tools for expression imputation from histology, but their performance remains constrained by limited sample sizes and a lack of biologically informed augmentation. Most of the existing augmentation strategies for learning are designed for classification tasks rather than regression, which neglect spatial and transcriptomic relationships, leading to biologically implausible interpolations that hinder prediction performance. Approach: To address these limitations, we propose SNR-ST-Mix, a geometry- and expression-aware data augmentation framework designed specifically for ST data. It constrains mixing to a spot's k-nearest spatial neighbors and adaptively weights interpolation coefficients based on expression similarity, generating augmented samples that preserve local biological structure while ensuring spatial smoothness. This dual conditioning yields synthetic examples that expand the effective training manifold, promote generalization, and enhance prediction stability under sample-specific training. Results: Extensive experiments with various tissue types demonstrate that SNR-ST-Mix consistently outperforms conventional augmentation methods without requiring architectural changes or additional computation. Conclusions: SNR-ST-Mix provides an effective and biologically principled augmentation strategy for spatial transcriptomics regression tasks. By explicitly leveraging spatial geometry and transcriptomic similarity, it expands the effective training manifold and improves predictive performance without increasing model complexity.
Authors: Ali Kafili Gavgani, Amin Talaeizadeh, Aria Alasty, Hossein Nejat Pishkenari
Abstract: Multirotors are widely used in applications ranging from surveillance to precision agriculture, yet conventional designs remain limited by their under-actuation. Tilt-rotor configurations overcome this limitation by enabling full actuation. This paper investigates neural-network-based control strategies for a fully actuated tilt-rotor system with four thrust-vectoring inputs. Our work is structured in two parts. First, we deliberately present a negative result by evaluating a direct input-output control approach. In this method, multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, and transformer models are trained to map system states and their desired values directly to control signals. We show that this strategy fails to stabilize the system, highlighting the inherent difficulty of applying direct input-output learning to highly unstable plants. Second, as the main contribution, we propose a neural-network-enhanced sliding mode controller (SMC). The method decomposes the system dynamics into input-independent and input-dependent components, with the former learned from a small dataset using lightweight networks, thereby reducing real-time computational demands. Moreover, the proposed method can be trained using flight logs collected from low-performance controllers, and the resulting dynamic model learned from real-world data can be used in simulation. We further compare MLP- and LSTM-based implementations under model uncertainties and external disturbances, demonstrating the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed approach; in particular, the controller with the LSTM plant dynamics predictor achieves superior performance to its MLP-based counterpart while also exhibiting lower runtime.
Authors: Md Abdullah Al Forhad, Weishi Shi
Abstract: While Deep Active Learning (DAL) effectively reduces human annotation costs, its efficacy is constrained by human annotation errors. This is because the data sampled for active learning is assumed to be highly informative for training. When human annotators introduce errors into this informative data at a certain rate, the active learning performance drops significantly and, in some cases, even exhibits worse outcomes than passive learning. In this paper, we first analyze the impact of human annotation errors in the DAL setting. Then we propose a framework to address the human annotation noise problem for DAL. Informed by human learning patterns, the core idea of our proposed solution involves allocating a portion of the human annotation budget to re-annotate data that has already been labeled. Previous theoretical work suggests that when the model possesses a certain level of ability to identify potentially noisy data, even re-labeling a small fraction of the data can effectively remove noise from the active training set. To achieve this, we implement two active noise sampling strategies to detect noise under different circumstances and allocate a part of the annotation budget to re-annotate these instances. Our approach imbues active learning with a revisiting and introspective behavior. Our experiments demonstrate that, under the same annotation budget, our method is more data-efficient and yields a relatively noise-free annotation dataset in the end.
Authors: Hong Guo, Nianhui Guo, Weixing Wang, Jona Otholt, Christoph Meinel, Haojin Yang
Abstract: W4A4 quantization promises full utilization of INT4 Tensor Cores, yet group dequantization overhead on CUDA Cores has driven existing systems to mixed-precision fallbacks. We present the first systematic study of how intra-SM compute balance governs this bottleneck. Through controlled benchmarks across four GPUs from Ampere and Ada architectures, we identify the Tensor Cores to CUDA Cores throughput ratio ($\rho$) as the primary hardware indicator: the W4A4-g128 kernel yields $2.0$--$2.5\times$ speedup on RTX~3090 ($\rho=16$) yet degrades to $0.43$--$0.47\times$ on A100 ($\rho=64$) in compute-bond scenarios, establishing W4A4 viability as platform-dependent rather than universally infeasible. Guided by this finding, we build \textbf{APEX4}, which co-designs pure INT4 GEMM kernels with $\rho$-aware granularity adaptation to mitigate the CUDA Cores dequantization bottleneck. APEX4 achieves perplexity within 0.63 of FP16 on LLaMA-2-70B and outperforms W4Ax Atom-g128 by 4.0\%--4.4\% in zero-shot accuracy. Deployed as a drop-in replacement in unmodified vLLM, it delivers up to $1.66\times$ end-to-end speedup on L40S ($\rho=8$), and $1.78\times$ on RTX~3090 ($\rho=16$), $2.09\times$ on A40 ($\rho=16$), while recovering A100 ($\rho=64$) to $1.20$--$1.40\times$ via the mixed-granularity mode.
Authors: Weixin Liu, Juming Xiong, Yang Li, Qingyuan Song, Susannah Rose, Murat Kantarcioglu, Bradley Malin, Zhijun Yin
Abstract: Automatic evaluation is critical for high-stakes text generation, where errors often involve omitted findings, hallucinated content, polarity reversals, location changes, uncertainty mismatches, and temporal-comparison errors rather than low surface similarity alone. Radiology report generation provides a challenging test case because generated reports must preserve structured clinical evidence across sources. We present RadOT-Eval, an interpretable structured-evidence optimal transport framework for offline auditing of radiology report generation. RadOT-Eval decomposes reference and candidate reports into attribute-structured clinical evidence units, aligns corresponding evidence using entropy-regularized optimal transport, and uses clinically meaningful side-channel discrepancies in a monotone risk model to predict error burden. All transport, feature, and readout choices are selected using the ReXVal dataset, and the frozen system is evaluated on the independent RadEvalX dataset. RadOT-Eval achieves Spearman correlations of 0.715, 0.548, and 0.399 with total, clinically significant, and clinically insignificant annotated error burden, respectively, yielding higher point estimates than standard evaluation metrics and the open-source large language model (LLM)-based evaluator GREEN-radllama2-7B. In a frozen auxiliary corruption-sensitivity stress test on ReXErr-v1, RadOT-Eval achieves 0.768 AUROC and a 0.990 corrupted-greater-than-clean paired win rate. These results show that structured evidence transport provides an auditable, rank-oriented evaluation tool for high-stakes generated clinical text under ReXVal-only model selection and frozen RadEvalX testing.
Authors: Ashish Acharya, Anish Khatiwada, Rohit Khadka, Pragya Aryal
Abstract: The analysis of internet memes in the Nepali language is complicated by frequent code-mixing and a lack of established baseline resources. While memes inherently combine visual and textual elements, this study focuses on a text-centric approach by extracting embedded text using an OCR layer and modeling it with Transformer-based architectures. We evaluate six distinct models and investigate the comparative effectiveness of Hard and Soft Voting ensemble strategies across two tasks: binary hate speech detection and three-class sentiment analysis. Experimental results show that a standalone decoder-only model achieved the highest performance for binary classification, whereas the Soft Voting ensemble performed best for the multi-class sentiment task, yielding a 15.8% relative improvement in Macro F1-score over the strongest standalone baseline. These findings suggest that ensemble strategies behave differently across binary and multi-class tasks, highlighting the importance of selecting aggregation methods suited to the classification objective.
Authors: Raktim Gautam Goswami, Prashanth Krishnamurthy, Yann LeCun, Farshad Khorrami
Abstract: Visual world models have shown great potential in learning complex system dynamics. Recent advancements leverage these models as transition functions within Model Predictive Control (MPC) frameworks to solve various control tasks. When applied to robotics, however, they are limited to single-stage tasks such as reaching or grasping, and struggle with multi-stage ones that demand complex sequential planning. In this work, we introduce WorldDP, a world model framework designed for multi-stage robotic manipulation. Our hierarchical approach utilizes a high-level world model as a transition function to optimize for feasible subgoals during runtime, which are subsequently reached by a low-level Diffusion Policy. To further aid in learning dynamics and planning, we incorporate object-centric representations that decouple environmental entities and enable us to plan sequentially with respect to each. Evaluated across several robotics benchmarks, WorldDP consistently outperforms existing baselines, validating that coupling the world model's physically grounded planning with diffusion policy's efficient execution yields superior multi-stage performance.
Authors: Abhivansh Gupta, Simardeep Singh, Advika Sinha, Shreyansh Modi, Akshat Tomar
Abstract: Visual Language Models (VLMs) are known to produce hallucinated predictions that are not grounded in visual evidence, yet existing approaches lack a principled understanding of how robust such predictions are under counterfactual perturbations. In this work, we study the sample complexity of counterfactual robustness for hallucinated outputs in VLMs. We define a causal influence metric based on log-probability differences between factual, counterfactual, and activation-patched runs, and use it to characterize the stability of hallucinated predictions. By leveraging circuit discovery techniques (CD-T), we identify model components responsible for these predictions and track their activation differences across counterfactual samples. We then derive empirical bounds on the minimum number of counterfactual samples m required to reliably detect instability in hallucinated outputs, using concentration inequalities and variance estimates of the causal influence distribution.
Authors: Irene Aldridge
Abstract: We study the problem of auditing a black-box algorithmic decision-maker from observable inputs and outputs alone. Our main result is an exact decomposition: under precisely characterized conditions, the cumulative \emph{regret} of a dynamic policy equals the sum of per-period covariances between the cost vector and the policy's decision. This extends the single-period identity of Aldridge~(2026) to the full multi-period setting of stochastic dynamic programming. We prove the identity holds exactly under i.i.d. costs and mean-unbiased Markov policies, derive closed-form bias corrections for non-stationary and time-varying cases, and establish the discounted-horizon analog. A Bellman recursion for the covariance regret functional connects the result to standard reinforcement learning algorithms; for rolling-window policies, the estimation-error bias is $O(d/w)$. The decomposition has direct implications for algorithmic auditing in strategic environments: in platform mechanism design, it provides a welfare-based audit metric without access to the agent's private type; in repeated games, covariance reduction is a sufficient condition for policy improvement; in procurement and ad auctions, the bias correction quantifies welfare loss from strategic misreporting. The associated trajectory estimator is consistent, asymptotically normal with HAC variance, and computable in $O(T \cdot nd)$ time. This makes the proposed approach a tractable, model-free audit tool for platform mechanisms, algorithmic portfolio strategies, and any sequential decision system subject to external performance review.
Authors: Dimple Bajaj
Abstract: The quality of software engineering is still under a challenge due to disjointed processes between requirements, testing, and production, which hinders the opportunity to implement quality strategies in consecutive releases. Existing approaches tend to be fixed-model or single-optimization approaches and lack production feedback learning mechanisms. The paper at hand proposes a closed-loop reference architecture of continuous software quality intelligence with AI enhancements. The model synthesizes requirement feature mining, risk-based test prioritization, defect prediction, and production incident analysis as an element of a feedback-based pipeline. A limited feedback learning model is introduced that is used to propagate the production signal-based on defect severity and incident impact- to the following release to ensure stability, and the time. The method is evaluated using a semi-synthetic test dataset of 4,500 requirements, 27,049 test cases, 13,089 defects and 7,841 incidents in six release cycles. The experimental results show that the proposed system reduces the defect leakage by 0.19 to 0.13, increases the effectiveness of the detection system to 0.72 to 0.84, and shortens the test execution by up to 35 percent compared to the non-adaptive baselines. The changes are stable release to release. The findings indicate that through the integration of feedback-based learning in a closed-loop architecture, it can be continued to enhance quality process, which offers practical foundation of adaptive quality engineering of software.
Authors: St\'ephane Eilles-Chan Way, Hugo Percot, Quentin Cappart, Tias Guns, Louis-Martin Rousseau
Abstract: Decision-focused learning has shown great promise for addressing predict-then-optimize problems, particularly in the presence of under-specified models. However, its practical deployment is often hindered by high computational costs and limited scalability, as it requires solving a constrained optimization problem for each training instance at every iteration. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework that incorporates Lagrangian decomposition into the decision-focused learning paradigm. Specifically, we introduce a new surrogate objective along with two loss functions for evaluating and training the underlying prediction model. We further propose two variants of our approach, which offer different trade-offs between computational efficiency and solution quality. Our framework can be seamlessly integrated with standard decision-focused learning methods, including Smart Predict-then-Optimize (SPO+) and Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (IMLE). Through experiments on two standard benchmarks, the multi-dimensional knapsack problem and quadratic portfolio optimization, we demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive performance while remaining amenable to parallelization. In particular, it consistently outperforms traditional decision-focused learning methods on large-scale instances, involving up to eight times more variables than those typically considered in related work. The implementation is available at https://github.com/corail-research/DFL-LD.
Authors: Dimple Bajaj, Deepak Khetan
Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in autonomous software testing; however, AI-generated test artifacts often suffer from hallucinations, compliance violations, security risks, and limited explainability. To enhance the reliability, transparency, and trustworthiness of AI-generated testing artifacts, this research introduces the concept of Governance-Aware Autonomous Testing Framework (GATF). The framework extends the autonomous testing lifecycle with governance validation, explainability analysis, probabilistic risk assessment, compliance monitoring, as well as audit governance. Experiments were performed with Defects4J and PROMISE software engineering datasets. The proposed framework successfully reduced the governance-related risks by 89.6% and demonstrated 94.3% accuracy in governance, 96.5% artifact reliability, 94.2% compliance accuracy, and 90.8% explainability performance. The results show that autonomous testing systems that are governance-aware can significantly enhance the reliability, transparency, and operational security of autonomous testing systems in comparison to conventional AI-based testing systems. The proposed architecture is scalable and reliable and provides a safe environment for software testing.
Authors: Jake Fawkes, Liam Hodgson, Jason Hartford
Abstract: Predicting the effect of an unseen gene knockout perturbation on transcriptomic gene expression remains a highly challenging problem for virtual cell models. Recent progress has been made by leveraging biological knowledge graphs to provide a notion of similar perturbation, allowing for improved extrapolation beyond the set of training perturbations. In this work, we demonstrate that the simplest model to leverage these assumptions - a K-nearest neighbour from the knowledge graph - achieves highly competitive performance on this task, and that this can be improved further using LLMs optimised via reinforcement learning (RL) for predictive performance. Specifically, we find that the K-nearest neighbour approach beats almost all methods on out-of-distribution perturbation prediction, and when a reasoning LLM is trained via RL to make changes to the neighbourhood, it obtains equivalent performance to current state of the art methods on the cell lines from Replogle et al. (2022). We also demonstrate that the RL training improves the LLM's performance on the downstream task of differential expression prediction, despite not being trained on this directly. Overall, these findings demonstrate the efficacy of knowledge graphs as model priors, and show early signs that RL can refine LLMs into generalizable tools for predicting complex biological responses.
Authors: Ahmed Abdelmoneim Mazrou, Haidy Maher El-Amir, Ali Hamdi
Abstract: Despite the success of image generation from text descriptions, it still faces challenges that are difficult to overcome in domains such as natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV). Recent advancements in text-to-image (T2I) models, particularly those utilizing generative adversarial networks (GANs), have significantly improved the synthesis of realistic images across various domains. However, existing GAN-based T2I models still encounter key challenges, such as difficulty in capturing long-range dependencies, vanishing gradients, and the limitations of sequential processing. To address these issues, we introduce BLM-SGAN, a novel model that incorporates Bidirectional Language Modeling for Semantic-Spatial Text-to-Image Generation. BLM-SGAN leverages BERT's attention mechanisms to capture rich contextual information and efficiently manage extended sequences. Our model demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, with an Inception Score (IS) of 5.45 +/- 0.08, surpassing several competitive models such as SSA-GAN, DF-GAN, SD-GAN, and AttnGAN. BLM-SGAN effectively generates highly realistic images of birds from detailed text descriptions. The implementation code is available at: https://github.com/haidy-maher/BLM-SGAN-Text-to-Image-Generation.
URLs: https://github.com/haidy-maher/BLM-SGAN-Text-to-Image-Generation.
Authors: Giorgio Giannone, Mustafa Eyceoz, Shabana Baig, Shivchander Sudalairaj, Anna C. Doris, Faez Ahmed, Akash Srivastava, Kai Xu
Abstract: Inference-Time Scaling (ITS) has largely succeeded in verifiable domains like math and coding, where cheap verification enables scalable output selection. However, extending ITS to tasks prone to systematic failure - driven by faulty initial assumptions or unmet multidimensional constraints - typically relies on costly external solvers or brittle, model-based verifiers. Our key insight is that the intrinsic statistics of parallel sample sets, specifically length-adjusted tail entropy, provide a robust discriminative signal for solution quality without access to ground truth. Crucially, these statistics serve as a difficulty gate for adaptive compute allocation, dynamically routing problems across scaling regimes. First, Intrinsic Selection (iS) ranks candidates post-hoc, matching consensus-based algorithms across three domains and improving engineering design selection by 20% over pass@1 baselines. Second, Intrinsic Particle Filtering (iPF) generalizes this to step-level resampling, guiding generation toward high-confidence reasoning trajectories to improve pass@1 by 6.1 points on average on hard math problems. Finally, Particle Distillation (dPF) injects privileged guidance via early logit blending and KL-guided resampling, steering generation past systematic reasoning errors to satisfy expert rubrics, yielding up to 26.5% gains on complex clinical responses. Our pipeline applies seamlessly across broad-purpose, domain-specialized, and multimodal architectures, successfully extending ITS to open-ended domains without requiring trained reward models or exact ground-truth verification.
Authors: Shivchander Sudalairaj, Kai Xu, Akash Srivastava, Giorgio Giannone
Abstract: Standard Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) training allocates a fixed rollout budget to every query, without regard for what each query's difficulty means for the current policy. This leads to two symmetric failure modes: easy queries produce near-zero advantage because the policy already solves them, while unsolvable queries produce no signal because the policy never solves them. Both regimes waste training FLOPs without contributing to a learning gradient. We introduce sorted Group Policy Optimization (sGPO), a compute-efficient strategy that trades a small budget of inference FLOPs for a large reduction in wasted training FLOPs. The key insight is that cheap inference compute can serve as a single offline proxy for query difficulty. By generating a small batch of parallel samples per query under the initial policy, we obtain a model-aware empirical success rate. This motivates setting the training rollout group size to the inverse of this success rate, a practical rule that maximizes sample efficiency by extracting the most advantage per generated rollout. This single profiling pass simultaneously drives data filtering (removing trivial queries and sub-sampling unsolvable ones), adaptive group size allocation, and curriculum construction (scheduling queries from easy to hard). sGPO matches or exceeds baseline performance while reducing total training compute by a factor of three, with the upfront inference profiling cost included.
Authors: Hartwig Grabowski
Abstract: The automatic processing of handwritten forms remains a challenging task, wherein detection and subsequent classification of handwritten characters are essential steps. We describe a novel approach, in which both steps -- detection and classification -- are executed in one task through a deep neural network. Therefore, training data is not annotated by hand, but manufactured artificially from the underlying forms and yet existing datasets. It can be demonstrated that this single-task approach is superior in comparison to the state-of-the-art two-task approach. The current study focuses on hand-written Latin letters and employs the EMNIST data set. However, limitations were identified with this data set, necessitating further customization. Finally, an overall recognition rate of 88.28 percent was attained on real data obtained from a written exam.
Authors: Yi Yu, Xinchuan Qiu
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong generalization in robotic manipulation, yet existing evaluations are primarily conducted in simulation or on expensive robotic platforms, leaving their robustness on affordable real-world robots largely unexplored. We present a standardized real-world benchmark for evaluating representative VLA and imitation learning policies on the low-cost SO-101 robotic platform. The benchmark comprises four representative manipulation tasks together with unified evaluation protocols, enabling systematic comparison under embodiment uncertainty. Using real-world teleoperated demonstrations, we fine-tune and evaluate $\pi_{0.5}$, SmolVLA, Wall-X, and ACT directly on the physical platform. Beyond conventional task success rates, the benchmark incorporates a structured failure taxonomy, semantic- and execution-level failure decomposition, and recovery-aware evaluation metrics to characterize policy robustness. Experimental results show that stronger pretrained VLA policies generally outperform the imitation learning baseline, although performance remains highly task-dependent under low-cost robotic deployment conditions. Execution instability emerges as the dominant failure source, while recovery capability varies substantially across architectures. These results highlight the importance of failure and recovery analysis beyond binary task success and establish SO-101 as a practical benchmark for evaluating embodied AI systems under realistic low-cost robotic deployment conditions.
Authors: Iv\'an Belenky, Joaqu\'in Itria, Steven Johns
Abstract: A small transformer encoder is trained to map Terminal-Wrench trajectories onto a unit sphere where embedding distance approximates the $L_1$ distance between reward and metadata signals. A linear probe on top of that embedding detects reward hacking on the cleaned test split with AUC $0.9467$ and TPR@5%FPR $0.8296$, matching the TW sanitized LLM-as-judge AUC ($0.9510$ on the cleaned split) and exceeding its TPR@5%FPR ($0.7130$ vs $0.8296$) on the same information condition, at roughly four orders of magnitude lower per-trajectory cost. The encoder is not a pure behavior reader: stripping natural-language reasoning from its input at probe time drops AUC to $0.6213$.
Authors: Zhiping Xiao, Junwei Yang, Gongbo Sun, Han Zhang, Hanwen Xu, Yi Yao, Zachary D. Miller, William E. King III, Mohammed M. Kanani, Jalal B. Andre, Sammy Chu, Ming Zhang, Paul E. Kinahan, Nathan M. Cross, Sheng Wang
Abstract: Spinal pathology is a leading cause of pain and disability worldwide. Spine MRI is central to clinical evaluation, yet its interpretation remains complex and time-consuming, requiring integration of information across multiple imaging sequences and anatomical regions. Despite recent advances in automated MRI analysis, effectively combining multi-sequence data while preserving sequence-specific diagnostic information remains an open challenge. Here we present SpineAgent, a multi-agent framework for spine MRI report generation built upon a multi-sequence foundation model trained on routine clinical data from 32,047 patients and 453,683 MRI series, comprising a total of 13,441,191 MRI slices. To accommodate diverse modalities of sequences, we first pre-train two DINOv3-based encoders separately on T1- and T2-weighted sequences. We then introduce a continual training strategy that learns a synthesizer to embed images of other sequences using the T1 and T2 encoders, producing patient-level embedding that integrates various signals across MRI sequences. Using these embeddings, SpineAgent achieves state-of-the-art performance, and demonstrates strong generalizability under cross-manufacturer and cross-cohort evaluation. Beyond classification, SpineAgent enables pathology localization by identifying findings-relevant slices and segmenting pathological regions. It also supports multimodal image-report retrieval, providing a solid foundation for scalable and explainable MRI report generation. We further integrate these validated capabilities of SpineAgent into 37 specialized agents. Finally, we incorporate their outputs as structured tokens within a Medical Report Agent trained end-to-end for report generation. Through both automated metrics and expert evaluation by five radiologists, SpineAgent achieves leading performance in spine MRI report generation.
Authors: Yanxiong Li, Guoqing Chen, Qianqian Li, Sen Huang
Abstract: In the task of few-shot class-incremental audio classification, the number of classes is assumed to always increase without considering the possibility of decrease. However, the number of classes generally increases or decreases in practice. In this paper, we investigate a problem of Few-shot Class-variable Incremental Audio Classification (FCIAC), in which the number of classes increases or decreases. We propose a FCIAC method using prototype adaptation and pseudo class-variable training. The model in our method consists of an encoder and a classifier. The classifier is initialized by a class-variable prototype adaptation network, whose structure dynamically changes with the change of classes. In addition, we design a pseudo class-variable training strategy to enhance the model's adaptability to changing classes. Experiments on three public datasets show that our method exceeds previous methods in average accuracy. The code is at: https://github.com/cgq2971-afk/FCIAC.
Authors: Pangyun Jeong, Jiyeong Kong, Yuehua Hu, Dohee Jeong, Kyung-Tae Kang
Abstract: Semiconductor lithography inspection requires reliable detection of small pattern defects such as bridge, burr, pinch, and contamination. In this study, we propose a two-stage vision-language framework that combines initial defect detection with prediction refinement. In the first stage, Qwen3-VL is fine-tuned with LoRA as a vision-language adapter to predict defect counts, defect categories, and normalized bounding boxes from lithography images. However, direct fine-tuning may still produce common test-time errors, including false positives, missed defects, and incorrect defect types. To address this limitation, the second stage trains a refinement module using first-stage prediction failures and their corrected labels, allowing the model to review and revise initial outputs. By learning from cases where the initial adapter fails, the refinement process improves defect inference beyond single-stage fine-tuning.
Authors: Yaoteng Zhang, Julin Zhang, Guangshuai Wang, Jiwei Deng, Hui Sheng, Yasir Muhammad, Shiqing Wei
Abstract: Extracting building polygon contours from high-resolution remote sensing images is a fundamental task for various mapping applications. However, the presence of varying imaging conditions and complex building structures, makes automatic contour extraction extremely challenging. Mainstream approaches for building extraction often rely on pixel-level segmentation followed by multiple post-processing steps to produce building contour, which can be computationally intensive and prone to errors. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end method named PolyBuild, which can directly extract building vector polygons from high-resolution remote sensing images without the need for any post-processing operations. The proposed method leverages two primary modules: an Initial Contour Generation Module (ICGM) and a Contour Optimization Module (COM). The ICGM is designed to generate an initial building contour by utilizing concatenated sub-region center features for each building instance. It performs simultaneous object detection and initial contour extraction by generating bounding boxes and using the center features of four sub-regions to represent each building. The Contour Optimization Module (COM) further refines the generated building contours by iteratively integrating Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) features and contour positional information in a Transformer-based decoder. The hybrid CNN-Transformer architecture effectively captures both local and global spatial relationships within the building contour, ensuring high-quality boundary delineation. Extensive experiments are conducted on three building datasets to evaluate the performance of PolyBuild. The results demonstrate that PolyBuild significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, including mask-based and contour-based approaches.
Authors: Jian Chen, Siyuan Li, Chucheng Wan, Zixuan Yuan
Abstract: Rule-following agents tasked with executing policies and regulations often fail via Silent Scope Omission (SSO): a model applies a general rule but silently drops nested exceptions or counter-exceptions, producing outputs that appear compliant yet break on important edge cases. Although such failures are often framed as an agentic-systems problem, the underlying bottleneck is statutory and policy understanding, a capability typically studied in legal NLP. However, most existing legal NLP benchmarks emphasize end-task outcomes, which can overlook the structural omissions that cause SSO. To diagnose and mitigate SSO, we introduce NormBench, a benchmark of 2,290 provisions spanning Chinese (laws and local policies), English (U.S. tax law, GDPR, and corporate policies), and cross-lingual settings, designed for defeasible scope parsing: identifying precisely which clause overrides which. NormBench uses Span-Grounded Deontic Trees (SG-DT), a compiler-style intermediate representation that anchors every logical branch to source spans and requires explicit exclusion guards, enabling deterministic compilation and audit. Evaluations of frontier LLMs reveal two recurring pathologies: (1) Recursion Decay, where performance drops sharply as defeater depth increases, and (2) an Auditability Trap, where models retrieve relevant spans but fail to assemble correct control flow. Using SG-DT as a constrained intermediate output improves whole-tree fidelity and defeater recovery, and downstream experiments show that its utility is mechanism-specific: gains concentrate on exception-active, SSO-prone cases, while aggregate accuracy can be mixed when the added structure is unnecessary or parser fidelity is low.
Authors: Kang Zhang, Wei Jian Lau, Shoushou Ren, Dong Lin, Joon Son Chung, Chuanhao Sun
Abstract: Representation-based time-series anomaly detection algorithms significantly outperform other methods on diverse anomaly detection tasks. However, we notice that they suffer from a major limitation in our evaluation - their learned embeddings are often amplitude-agnostic. Losing amplitude information can degrade performance on amplitude related anomalies, and this failure is prevalent across all existing representation-based methods. To address aforementioned issues, we propose a new anomaly scoring scheme named PAI. PAI consists of two complementary modules, a diagnostic module and a final score augmentation function. The diagnostic module compares cosine and Euclidean scoring on the same representation bank to test whether amplitude information is already captured in the learned representation. Then in final score augmentation function, PAI computes a point-wise median and MAD deviation score and a local mean-shift score-which are fused with the representation score to produce the final anomaly score. On the TSB-AD-U-Eva and TAB UV datasets, PAI improves all four evaluated representation-based methods across every reported metric, achieving average VUS-PR gains of 98.4% and 36.8%, respectively. Among all evaluated combinations, PaAno + PAI achieves the best performance, outperforming the state-of-the-art method by 15%. Further evaluation on bootstrap confidence intervals, anomaly-type breakdowns, and a TS2Vec input-normalization ablation further support the proposed scheme. These results suggest that explicitly retaining amplitude information is important for representation-based time-series anomaly detection, which has been underemphasized in existing scoring schemes. Code is available at: https://github.com/pantheon5100/PAI
Authors: Yifan Liu (Klara), Jaime Arguello (Klara), Orland Hoeber (Klara), Chang Liu (Klara), Soo Young Rieh (Klara), Luanne Sinnamon (Klara), Dean Alvarez (Klara), Susan Archambault (Klara), Rob Capra (Klara), Henson Chen (Klara), Charles Costa (Klara), Anita Crescenzi (Klara), Zhitong (Klara), Guan, Jacek Gwizdka, Pao-Pei Huang, Gavindya Jayawardena, Ghazal Kalhor, Dagmar Kern, Oliver Koop, Alice Li, Afra Mashhadi, Gaohui Meng, Marta Micheli, Anil B. Murthy, Kevin Schott, Sebastian Schulthei{\ss}, Jiwoo Seo, Phaneendra Sivangula, Frans van der Sluis, Xiaoxuan Song, Silang Wang, Dan Zhang
Abstract: This report summarizes the CHIIR 2026 Workshop on Generative AI and Academic Search (GAI\&AS), which examined how GenAI is reshaping academic search systems and research practices. The workshop brought together researchers in human information interaction and information retrieval to explore key challenges and opportunities in designing and evaluating future academic search systems that integrate GenAI, moving beyond traditional document retrieval to support summarization, recommendation, synthesis, and conversational interaction. Participants' interests and discussions focused on three thematic clusters: foundations and principles, applications and opportunities, and search-as-learning. Across these themes, the workshop highlighted the importance of academic search systems in supporting transparency, credibility, research integrity, and long-term scholarly needs, as well as in fostering higher-order cognitive processes. Participants discussed guiding theories, design principles, methodological approaches, partnerships, and community-building efforts aimed at advancing human-centered GenAI-enhanced academic search systems. Overall, the workshop demonstrated strong community interest and a diverse range of ongoing and emerging research initiatives at the intersection of GenAI and academic search.
Authors: Gen Li, Yuanze Hu, Zhichao Yang, Qingchen Yu, Jianwei Lv, Yue Guo, Yujing Liu, Faguo Wu, Hongwei Zheng, Xiandong Li, Bo Yuan, Yifan Sun, Zhaoxin Fan
Abstract: Clinical diagnosis requires flexible use of multiple reasoning paradigms under incomplete patient information. Existing LLM-based medical agents show strong medical reasoning ability, but single-paradigm or naively mixed dialogue supervision makes these paradigms difficult to learn without interference. We propose \textbf{PACT} (Periodic Anchor Consensus Training), a framework that couples supervised multi-paradigm dialogue synthesis with consensus-based Branch training. At the data level, \textbf{DPS} (Doctor-Patient-Supervisor) uses complete electronic medical records (EMRs) for quality control while keeping the doctor agent restricted to patient-visible information. This produces validated dialogues under four diagnostic reasoning paradigms without leaking hidden clinical answers. At the training level, PACT trains one paradigm-specific LoRA Branch per paradigm and periodically aggregates Branches into a shared Anchor through sign consensus. We further construct a dynamic multi-turn Chinese medical diagnosis benchmark for interactive consultation. Experiments show that PACT achieves state-of-the-art performance among compared proprietary, medical-specialized, and task-adapted baselines on diagnostic outcome and consultation-process metrics.
Authors: Runze Yan, Minxiao Wang, Jiaying Lu, Darren Liu, Xiao Hu, Hanqi Luo
Abstract: Comprehensive estimation of dietary micronutrients from food images could improve clinical nutrition care, but training such models requires large multimodal datasets linking diverse foods to complete nutrient profiles. We first show that existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs), including leading proprietary models, are unreliable for this task. Across five model families and four independent evaluation benchmarks (ASA24, SNAPMe, FNDDS, and NutriBench), models frequently abstained or returned statistically implausible values. To address this gap without costly expert annotation, we repurposed a decade of population-scale 24-hour dietary recalls as structured prompts for text-to-image generation. This pipeline produced a synthetic corpus of about 1.1 million image-description-nutrient triplets, each pairing a generated food image with a complete 65-nutrient label. To our knowledge, this is the largest synthetic food-image corpus with comprehensive micronutrient annotation planned for public release upon publication. Fine-tuning Qwen3-VL (2B/4B/8B/30B) and GLM-4.6V-Flash on this corpus yielded NutriMLLM, the first family of vision-language models specialized for comprehensive dietary micronutrient estimation. We evaluate these models with a four-component framework that separately measures abstention, hallucination, overall usability, and per-nutrient numerical accuracy. On real food images, every NutriMLLM variant achieved near-complete coverage across all 65 nutrients, and the largest variant matched or exceeded proprietary baselines (GPT-5, Gemini 3, and Claude Sonnet 4.5) in accuracy on most nutrients. These results show that recall-driven synthetic supervision can make image-based comprehensive micronutrient estimation a tractable engineering problem and support dietary assessment, personalized nutrition guidance, and population-scale micronutrient surveillance.
Authors: Ziqian Zhong, Ivgeni Segal, Ivan Bercovich, Shashwat Saxena, Kexun Zhang, Aditi Raghunathan
Abstract: Agent benchmarks score submissions with outcome verifiers that are typically hand-written and brittle, leaving them open to reward hacking. We audit 1,968 tasks across five terminal-agent benchmarks and find 323 (16%) hackable by frontier models given only the task description. This corrupts both leaderboard rankings and RL training signal, yet the standard response is manual and reactive. We introduce the hacker-fixer loop, a method for building exploit-resistant verifiers without per-task manual patching. The loop alternates three LLM agents: a hacker tries to pass the verifier without solving the task, a fixer patches the verifier to reject each discovered exploit, and a solver confirms the patched verifier still admits legitimate solutions. The loop iterates: each patch reshapes what the verifier rewards, surfacing the next exploit. We further add verifier access, and let patches transfer across tasks, to broaden the exploits the loop discovers. On KernelBench, the loop drives the attack success rate from 62% to 0% on a held-out corpus of publicly reported exploits. We also find that weaker agents in the loop can defend against much stronger hackers: Gemini 3 Flash's loop drives the stronger Gemini 3.1 Pro and Claude Opus 4.7's attack success rate from 76% and 61% to 0% on KernelBench, and Gemini 3.1 Pro's from 39% to 17% on Terminal Bench across 77 tasks. We release Terminal Wrench (323 hackable environments, 3,632 hack trajectories) as a snapshot of the current attack surface, our patched verifiers, the exploits the loop discovered, and our implementation as a basis for future work.
Authors: Suhana Bedi, Bridget Lin, Anson Y. Zhou, Chloe O. Stanwyck, Jenelle A. Jindal, Sanmi Koyejo, David Stutz, Nigam H. Shah
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for medical summarization, but their outputs can omit medically important information and introduce unsupported claims. Existing error-detection methods produce heuristic or uncalibrated scores, providing no formal control over missed errors and no principled way to trade off safety against clinician review burden. We introduce Conformal Assessment for Risk Evaluation (CARE), a post-hoc, model-agnostic safety layer that uses conformal risk control to overlay calibrated omission and hallucination flags onto summaries from any LLM without retraining. CARE provides finite-sample, distribution-free guarantees through two controllers: a hallucination controller that bounds the probability of a document containing any unflagged hallucinated sentence, and an omission controller that bounds the expected fraction of important omissions not surfaced for review. Unlike hallucination detection, omissions depend jointly on whether a source sentence is important and whether it is covered by the summary. We show that calibrating only one dimension can violate the target risk bound, while marginal decompositions remain valid but overly conservative. By jointly calibrating over the full $(\tau,\gamma)$ threshold space, CARE preserves formal guarantees while surfacing up to 5$\times$ fewer sentences than alternative calibrated baselines. Across five medical summarization tasks, CARE satisfies the target risk bound at $\alpha = 0.15$ with 95% confidence across 100 calibration/test resplits, using only ~100 labeled documents per domain. In a preliminary clinician study (75 document reviews), calibrated flags improved omission detection by 28.6 percentage points on average. These results show that sentence-level safety guarantees are feasible for LLM-assisted medical summarization and offer a tunable mechanism for balancing residual risk and review effort.
Authors: Yucheng Deng, Pingrui Lai, Xinhai Li, Chenjia Bai, Xiaoheng Deng, Chengnuo Sun, Xuelong Li, Hua Yang
Abstract: Vision-and-Language Navigation in continuous environments requires agents to understand the spatial structure of previously unseen environments in order to follow language instructions. Although foundation models have opened a promising path toward zero-shot navigation without task-specific policy training, many navigators still rely on local visual cues and linear history-based reasoning, overlooking the spatial nature of navigation across explored regions, traversed paths, landmarks, and their spatial relations. In this paper, we propose SpaceVLN, a navigation agent built around Spatial Cognitive Memory and Task-Guided Spatial Reasoning. Specifically, SpaceVLN introduces an efficient stagewise closed-loop framework where planning and execution are organized around verifiable space--landmark stages. During navigation, the agent progressively abstracts explored regions into Spatial Waypoints and dynamically maintains subtask-grounded landmark evidence, forming a hierarchical Spatial Cognitive Memory for progress localization and spatial-relation understanding. Built on this memory, Spatial-CoT integrates task-progress reasoning with spatial perception, analysis, and prediction, enabling Task-Guided Spatial Reasoning for embodied navigation. The unified stage interface enables SpaceVLN to address both Vision-and-Language Navigation and Object-Goal Navigation under a unified zero-shot setting, without task-specific policy training. Across R2R-CE, RxR-CE, GN-Bench, and HM3D-OVON, SpaceVLN achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance, and real-robot deployment further validates its applicability. These results highlight Spatial Cognitive Memory and Task-Guided Spatial Reasoning as a practical foundation for stronger embodied navigation agents.
Authors: Han-Teng Liao, Zijia Wang
Abstract: Both digital economy and digital technology researchers increasingly recognize the need to better address the role that artificial intelligence (AI) plays in shaping the evolution of the environmental, social and governance aspects of development. It appears that sustainability and AI research converge on the features of wicked problems that are complex, interconnected and dynamic. Building off such convergence, this article aims to map out the necessary, challenging, and promising intersections by providing an overview of the state of art research. Based on 541 bibliographic data collected from the Web of Science (WoS) database, the findings reveal the increasingly central body of work on green and sustainable science and technology in bridging various disciplines, main journals and key topics and concepts. The findings reveal how such interactions can be necessary, challenging, and promising. The article concludes with few general arguments regarding how to diversify and expand the community of practice regarding AI for sustainable development, especially in the areas of expected AI application areas and institutions.
Authors: Hanyang Li, Jianhao Ma, Ying Cui
Abstract: Post-training quantization (PTQ) converts a trained full-precision model into low-bit weights without task-level retraining, while quantization-aware training (QAT) incorporates quantization into the training loop. Although PTQ is efficient and often accurate at moderate bitwidths, it can fail sharply at aggressive bitwidths; QAT is more expensive but can often recover the lost accuracy. We propose a unified geometric framework that explains both PTQ failure and QAT recovery. We model full-precision training as following a low-loss \emph{river} inside a wider \emph{valley}: a normal neighborhood of the river forms a nearly flat \emph{basin}, while leaving this basin incurs a sharp loss increase. When the quantization grid is comparable to the basin width, local PTQ objectives, including rounding and Hessian-based second-order reconstruction, can select a high-loss deployed quantized point outside the basin even when nearby low-loss quantized points exist. In this regime, straight-through-estimator-based QAT has a useful bias: it evaluates gradients at the deployed quantized weights while updating latent full-precision weights, causing the gradient to sense the valley wall and acquire an inward component that steers subsequent quantized iterates back into the basin. We formalize this mechanism through a local landscape model, construct a geometric PTQ failure mode, and prove finite-time QAT recovery under local quantizer-compatibility assumptions. Experiments across vision and language models under multiple neural-network quantization schemes corroborate the predicted basin-crossing failure of PTQ and the corresponding recovery mechanism of QAT.
Authors: Yejin Lee, Junwon Moon, Hyoeun Kim, Hyunjin Choi, Heeseung Kim, Kyuhong Shim
Abstract: Codec-based autoregressive (AR) speech language models have achieved strong text-to-speech (TTS) quality by modeling speech as sequences of discrete audio tokens with large pretrained backbones. However, this token-level formulation creates a structural efficiency bottleneck: speech-token sequences are much longer than text sequences, requiring the AR backbone to perform causal computation at every token position and maintain a KV cache that grows with the sequence length. We introduce TLDR, a patch-based autoregressive framework that accelerates codec-based AR-TTS by shifting the causal modeling from token-level speech sequences to patch-level sequences. TLDR groups consecutive codec tokens into compact latent patches using a lightweight compressor, models the resulting shorter patch sequence with a frozen pretrained AR-TTS backbone adapted by LoRA, and reconstructs fine-grained speech tokens within each patch using a speaker-conditioned extractor. With a patch size of 4, TLDR achieves a 1.8x inference speedup over the baseline AR-TTS model and reduces global KV-cache memory by up to 75%. Experimental results indicate that patch-level global causal modeling can be a practical way to reduce the inference cost of pretrained codec-based AR-TTS systems without replacing the existing modules.
Authors: Meilin Chen, Zepeng Zhai, Jiaxuan Zhao, Yuan Lu
Abstract: Large Language Models enable flexible natural-language planning but remain unreliable in determinism-critical domains due to their probabilistic nature. This limitation is especially problematic in running planning, where violating safety rules can lead to safety risks. We propose SafeRun, a framework for deterministic LLM-based planning via a decoupled architecture. SafeRun separates soft interpretation by an LLM from hard constraint enforcement by a deterministic solver, ensuring strict safety constraints while preserving natural-language flexibility. To validate SafeRun, we build a comprehensive benchmark for running planning under realistic physiological and safety constraints. Experiments across five LLMs show that SafeRun achieves 100\% safety score (vs.\ 79.1\% PE average and 97.6\% CodeAct average) while maintaining competitive instruction-following scores. The SafeRun benchmark is publicly available at \href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/zzp-seeker/SafeRun-RunPlanning-Benchmark}{{huggingface}}.
URLs: https://huggingface.co/datasets/zzp-seeker/SafeRun-RunPlanning-Benchmark
Authors: Jiaheng Chen
Abstract: Latent world models are increasingly used for control and goal-conditioned planning, yet assessing whether their learned representations are useful for planning usually requires slow, planner-coupled simulator evaluation with CEM or similar planners. Such evaluation is black-box and model-complexity-dependent: under the same protocol, different world models may require minutes to hours per checkpoint. In this work, we propose ATM, an Action-Consistency Transfer Matrix for diagnosing whether latent transitions preserve action semantics relevant to planning. ATM compares action information in real encoded transitions and model-predicted transitions through lightweight post-hoc probes, producing an interpretable matrix that reveals representation quality, transition-domain inconsistency, and failure modes without simulator rollout. It can also be collapsed into a simple screening score for within-task ranking across checkpoints, variants, and world models. When the true success gap is non-trivial, ATM achieves highly reliable pairwise ranking, while reducing minutes-to-hours CEM evaluation to seconds-level transition analysis, yielding more than 100x speedup in our setup. We further introduce AITS, showing that action-identifiability is not only diagnostic but also a useful training signal for improving downstream planning without changing the planner.
Authors: Hyeongwon Jang, Gyouk Chu, Changhun Kim, Joonhyung Park, Hangyul Yoon, Eunho Yang
Abstract: Clinical early warning systems built on electronic health records, in which clinical observations are recorded as irregularly sampled medical time series (ISMTS), must deliver both calibrated risk scores for patient triage and interpretable rationales that clinicians can verify. Large Language Models (LLMs) have been explored for this task, yet they collapse graded clinical risk into overconfident binary predictions. This risk polarization undermines both calibration and cross-patient comparability. To address this, we propose TRIAGE, a framework that trains an LLM to generate dialectical reasoning over competing clinical outcomes by eliciting outcome-specific rationales. This dialectical formulation mitigates risk polarization, enabling a single LLM to yield continuous risk scores grounded in explicit clinical reasoning. Evaluated on three ISMTS benchmarks, TRIAGE achieves an average AUPRC improvement of 3.3% and reduces calibration error by 81% compared to the competitive baselines. An LLM-as-a-judge assessment further shows that our rationales surpass post-hoc explanations from the baseline by 20% in clinical reasoning quality. The source code is available at https://github.com/HyeongWon-Jang/TRIAGE .
Authors: Wei Fan, Chao-Hong Tan, Qian Chen, Wen Wang, Xiangang Li, Kejiang Chen, Weiming Zhang, Nenghai Yu
Abstract: Removing intermediate representations and separately trained decoding stages has become an important direction in generative modeling. In text-to-speech, however, high-quality systems are still commonly built through an intermediate acoustic representation before waveform synthesis. In this work, we present BareWave, a fully waveform-native framework for direct text-to-wave generation in flow-matching TTS. We consider this setting to raise three training challenges: raw-waveform modeling lacks a strong pretrained representational scaffold, different stages of training benefit from different noise schedules, and data-space perceptual objectives do not automatically share the temporal structure of the velocity-space flow objective. As a result, direct waveform training is hard to optimize efficiently, hard to push toward a strong final operating point with a fixed recipe, and hard to integrate effective perceptual refinement. Guided by this view, we develop a direct text-to-wave training framework that combines training-time representation alignment, staged noise scheduling, and velocity-aware perceptual alignment (VAPA), while preserving a single waveform-native inference path without pretrained components at test time. Experiments on zero-shot voice cloning show that strong intelligibility, speaker similarity, and naturalness can be achieved under a fully waveform-native inference path, supporting waveform-native flow-matching TTS as a practical direction. Project page with audio demos is available at https://barewave.github.io/.
Authors: Siyu Chen, Miao Lu, Beining Wu, Heejune Sheen, Fengzhuo Zhang, Shuangning Li, Zhiyuan Li, Jose Blanchet, Tianhao Wang, Zhuoran Yang
Abstract: Self-evolution offers a scalable path to stronger reasoning: a pretrained language model improves itself with only minimal external supervision. Yet existing methods either depend on extensively curated or teacher-generated training data, or, when the generator runs unsupervised, reward it by a difficulty heuristic that need not improve the solver. We introduce INFUSER, an iterative co-training framework with two co-evolving roles: a Generator that drafts questions and reference golden answers from a pool of unstructured, automatically collected documents, and a Solver that improves by training on them. The solver is trained with standard correctness rewards against the generator-provided answers, while the generator is rewarded by an optimizer-aware influence score that measures whether each proposed question would actually improve the solver on the target distribution. Because this continuous, noisy influence score is poorly served by standard GRPO, we propose DuGRPO, a dual-normalized variant of GRPO, for generator training. Together, these turn the document pool into an adaptive curriculum that favors questions useful to the current solver, not just hard ones. On Qwen3-8B-Base, INFUSER outperforms strong self-evolution baselines with over 20% relative improvement on Olympiad and SuperGPQA benchmarks, and an 8B INFUSER co-evolving generator outperforms a frozen 32B thinking generator on math and coding. Ablations confirm each design choice is necessary, and two extensions, applying INFUSER to an instruction-finetuned anchor and augmenting it with rule-verifiable RLVR data, further demonstrate the flexibility and generalizability of the framework. Code is available at https://github.com/FFishy-git/INFUSER.
Authors: Jianxiong Shen
Abstract: Two-stage post-training -- a Stage-1 warm-start (supervised fine-tuning, SFT, or on-policy distillation, OPD) followed by Stage-2 reinforcement learning (RL) -- is increasingly used for vision-language models (VLMs). We ask what Stage-1 actually controls in a small-data study using Qwen2.5-VL-7B with a same-modality 72B VLM teacher for OPD. First, the three warm-starts reach a narrow $53$--$54\%$ band on Geometry3K internal validation, consistent with the narrow range reported by recent specialized methods; this setup provides little evidence that Stage-1 changes the in-domain endpoint. Second, a matched-recipe, early-stopped SFT improves out-of-domain MathVista by $+2.1$ points, reversing the $-9.5$-point drop of an over-trained variant. The clearest difference is the \emph{entropy regime}: OPD enters RL with substantially higher policy entropy than either SFT initialization, and the separation remains visible through the available trajectories. At the in-domain initialization, OPD also has higher answer diversity and pass@16 ($+2.0$ to $+5.2$ points over SFT), although problem-level bootstrap intervals show that the smaller contrast is uncertain. The advantage is absent after RL (endpoint pass@16 values within $1.1$ points) and on MathVista (six models within $1.2$ points). Our contribution is therefore a bounded empirical characterization: Stage-1 is strongly associated with the entropy regime in this setup, but the downstream payoff is small, localized, and not evidence that OPD is a better RL warm-start.
Authors: Shuning Wang, Zhiheng Wu, YiNuo Lu, Naiming Liu, Chen Jia, Bowen Liu, Shuo Nie, Weijie Zhu, Yumeng Zhang
Abstract: Recent advances in Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have enabled performance on long-video understanding tasks. However, existing methods still face two key limitations: evidence acquisition often relies on a single search intent, and answer generation lacks an effective visual feedback mechanism. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{CoVER}, a Comprehensive Visual Evidence and Reflection framework for long-video understanding. CoVER enables Video-LLMs to \textbf{See More} by dynamically gathering query-expanded visual evidence, and \textbf{Think Deeper} by verifying draft answers with effective answer-specific visual feedback. Together, these mechanisms shift long-video understanding from answer-centric generation to evidence-centric and visually verifiable reasoning. Experimental results show that CoVER-7B substantially outperforms models with the same parameter scale and even surpasses state-of-the-art closed-source models on certain metrics.
Authors: Tu Do, Shannon Ryan, Santu Rana
Abstract: In science and engineering, Lagrangian simulation methods such as Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) or Material Point Method (MPM) are often employed to study the behavior of dynamic systems. However, these methods can be prohibitively computationally expensive, particularly when simulating multi-scale spatial or temporal phenomena, e.g., void growth and coalescence within macro-scale geometries, structural failure of spacecraft components resulting from hypervelocity impact of space debris particles, etc. In contrast to graph-based methods, where the state of the system is understood as a discrete set of particles, we propose a learning framework for scalable representation and dynamics modeling of massive particle systems by treating the system state as a function and its evolution as a trajectory in Hilbert space. Rather than representing the state as a discrete set of particles or embedding it in a nonlinear latent manifold, we approximate the state space with a linear subspace spanned by learned neural basis functions. This parameterization enables direct projection to obtain latent coefficients and explicit access to the basis functions, avoiding optimization over a nonlinear latent space. The resulting representation admits a natural interpretation: latent variables correspond to coefficients in Hilbert space, and basis functions correspond to spatial modes, analogous to Proper Orthogonal Decomposition. The framework thus unifies classical projection-based reduced-order modeling with modern deep learning, while remaining invariant to the number of discretization points. Experiments on large-scale SPH simulations with over one million particles, including dynamic events with extreme deformation and fragmentation, demonstrate that the proposed method accurately reconstructs and predicts dynamics, achieving an R$^2$ score above $0.99$ with as few as $32$ basis functions.
Authors: Ely Hahami, Yoel Zimmermann, Ray Zhou, Jack Benarroch Jedlicki
Abstract: Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is bottlenecked by \emph{reward hacking}, where the policy exploits errors in a proxy reward model (RM) and produces high RM scores without genuine quality gains. A natural mitigation is \emph{pessimism}: penalizing rewards in regions where the RM is uncertain. However, standard scalar RMs provide no principled notion of uncertainty. We argue that the right object is a \emph{distributional} reward model $p(r\mid x,y)$. Under either a Bayesian inference or a KL-distributionally robust optimization (KL-DRO) lens, the KL-regularized RLHF objective admits a closed-form effective reward $\tilde r(x,y) = \pm\beta\log\mathbb{E}_p[e^{\pm r/\beta}]$. The pessimistic branch unifies the prior heuristics for RM ensemble aggregation: mean aggregation, worst-case optimization (WCO), and uncertainty-weighted optimization (UWO) all emerge as limits or truncations of this single expression. This also clarifies the implicit assumptions of each existing rule.
Authors: Yan Wang, Qifan Zhang, Jiachen Yu, Tian Liang, Dongyang Ma, Xiang Hu, Zibo Lin, Chunyang Li, Zhichao Wang, Miao Peng, Nuo Chen, Jia Li, Yujiu Yang, Haitao Mi, Dong Yu
Abstract: Conventional LLMs keep the full KV cache loaded during decoding, causing a severe GPU memory bottleneck for ultra-long context serving. In this report, we propose Lookahead Sparse Attention (LSA), a novel inference paradigm powered by a Neural Memory Indexer built upon the DeepSeek-V4 architecture. Rather than passively attending to all historical tokens, LSA proactively predicts future context demands and preserves only the query-critical KV chunks in the GPU memory. Crucially, we instantiate this architecture via a backbone-free decoupled training strategy. By formulating the indexer as a standard dual-encoder architecture, we train it independently using standard retrieval training frameworks without ever loading the massive backbone model into GPU memory. We demonstrate that this "less is more" paradigm significantly maximizes serving efficiency while acting as an effective attention denoiser in tasks that rely on long-term global memory. Across primary long-context evaluation suites (e.g., LongBench-v2, LongMemEval, and RULER), FM-DS-V4 compresses the average physical KV cache footprint down to merely 13.5% of the full-context baseline, while consistently preserving or slightly elevating downstream accuracy (+0.6% absolute margin on average). Crucially, at extreme 500K scales, FlashMemory suppresses the physical KV cache overhead by over 90% without destabilizing the backbone's core reasoning capacities.
Authors: Xiaofeng Lin, Yukai Yang, Daniel Guo, Sahil Arun Nale, Charles Fleming, Guang Cheng
Abstract: Tool-using LLM agents interact with the world through actions that persist state in artifacts (e.g., workspace files or logs). Consequently, jailbreak defenses must reason about cross-step composition rather than isolated text. Yet most existing attacks and defenses, including ``multi-turn'' jailbreaks such as Crescendo and Tree of Attacks,still assume a single contiguous conversation visible to the defender. This assumption breaks down in real agent pipelines, where enforcement is fragmented across tools, modules, and time, and where artifact provenance is often not tracked. We operationalize a deployment failure mode for tool-using LLM agents, the \emph{provenance gap}, and study reproducible triggers for it: \emph{Context-Fractured Decomposition} (CFD), a family of cross-context multi-step jailbreaks that preserve benign-looking intermediate artifacts from an early interaction and elicit harmful behavior much later, potentially in a different agent instance or workflow stage, via individually innocuous tool actions whose risk emerges only under delayed artifact-mediated composition. We instrument the failure mode with trace-level diagnostics and outline a verifiable mitigation direction (provenance lineage tagging). Across agent-system jailbreak benchmarks, CFD improves success rates by up to 28.3 percentage points over state-of-the-art baselines, even against strong single-turn judges. Disclaimer: This paper contains examples of harmful or offensive language.
Authors: Christoph Treude, Sebastian Baltes
Abstract: Developers increasingly provide AI coding assistants with persistent context through configuration files such as CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, and .cursorrules. These files describe code elements, architecture, and development conventions, forming the context that guides AI tool behavior across sessions. As software evolves, this context can become stale, a phenomenon we call context rot. While AI configuration artifacts are new, the underlying consistency problem connects to decades of software documentation research. Researchers have built tools to check consistency between documentation and code, spanning README files, code comments, API documentation, architecture descriptions, and installation instructions. We argue that this existing toolbox is an immediate starting point for detecting context rot, and we present a research roadmap mapping documentation consistency approaches to corresponding problems in this new setting. As preliminary evidence, applying an existing README/wiki consistency checker to a statistically representative sample of 356 repositories identifies stale code element references in 23.0% of repositories, showing that traditional documentation consistency tools can already surface context rot.
Authors: Daniil Mikriukov (University of Liverpool, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University), Ruoyu Sun (Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University), Angelos Stefanidis (Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University), Jionglong Su (Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University), Zhengyong Jiang (Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University)
Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) frameworks for portfolio optimization have shown promise for their ability to learn allocation rules dynamically from market data. However, these models fail to account for fat-tailed returns, which characterize actual market behavior with more frequent extreme events. Furthermore, historical data is treated homogeneously, without accounting for temporal importance, leading models to fail during regime changes. We propose a new BAVAR-BLED algorithm that combines methods derived from Bayesian-Averaging Vector Autoregressive (BAVAR) and the Black-Litterman model using Elliptical Distributions (BLED) within a TD3 architecture. BAVAR captures a set of vector autoregressive representations that consider multi-scale temporal features, enabling adaptive allocation decisions based on regime-aware estimates of return expectations and dispersion matrices. These estimates serve as prior inputs to BLED, a model that uses Student's t-distributions, allowing for more realistic fat tail return estimates. The BAVAR-BLED algorithm uses transformer networks for view construction and CNNs for risk-aversion estimates, which modify dynamic allocation decisions based on market conditions. An evaluation of 29 Dow Jones Industrial Average constituents over a decade-long market period shows that BAVAR-BLED significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving Sharpe and Sortino ratios of 1.72 and 2.70, respectively, and total returns of 57.26%.
Authors: Chen-Rui Fan, Bo Lu, Xing-Yu Wu, Tie-Jun Wang, Chuan Wang
Abstract: The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence has led to substantial advances in deep neural networks. Nonetheless, conventional GPU-based training remains highly energy-demanding, motivating the exploration of physical dynamics and compatible energy-based learning schemes, such as equilibrium propagation (EP). EP-based training, however, frequently suffers from convergence to local minima due to phase-space contraction. Here we introduce an Ising-dynamics-inspired equilibrium-propagation framework in which dissipative Hopfield relaxation is replaced by an extended phase-space dynamics with conjugate variables. The resulting training paradigm keeps the local two-phase learning rule of EP while changing the physical route by which neural states reach equilibrium. We show that this dynamics lowers effective energy barriers, accelerates convergence, improves noise robustness, and trains deep convolutional Hopfield networks on MNIST, FashionMNIST, and CIFAR-10 with performance comparable to backpropagation.
Authors: Chen-Rui Fan, Bo Lu, Zhi-Hong Zhang, Run-Qing Zhang, Jing-Wei Wen, Chuan Wang
Abstract: While Ising machines serve as advanced physical solvers for the Ising model,enabling applications in combinatorial optimization and neural network training,their scalability for large-scale neural networks remains constrained by hardware connectivity limitations and suboptimal training methodologies. In this work,we leverage a Coherent Ising Machine (CIM) to train an energy-based neural network using Equilibrium Propagation, achieving performance comparable to existing software-based implementations. We further enhance the algorithm by integrating the Adam optimizer to solve for the ground state of a Hopfield energy network, significantly improving convergence speed and solution accuracy. Additionally, we demonstrate the scalability of our approach across deeper network architectures and convolutional operations. Our results highlight the potential of CIM dynamics as a scalable platform for training complex neural networks, offering a pathway toward energy-efficient implementations via analog circuits, optoelectronics, or integrated photonics. This work establishes a novel physical framework for next-generation AI hardware development.
Authors: Arun Malik
Abstract: Cloud network infrastructure at hyperscale presents unique operational challenges where traditional human-driven incident response cannot keep pace with the volume, velocity, and complexity of failures. This paper presents an agentic AI architecture for autonomous incident resolution in large-scale network operations. Our system employs a multi-agent orchestration framework where specialized AI agents collaborate to detect, diagnose, and remediate network incidents without human intervention. We describe the architectural principles, including hierarchical agent decomposition, skills-based tool invocation via standardized protocols, structured knowledge encoding from operational runbooks, progressive autonomy with safety boundaries, and closed-loop verification. The architecture has been deployed in production at a major cloud provider, demonstrating that agentic AI systems can achieve autonomous resolution rates exceeding 90% for common incident categories while maintaining safety guarantees through layered authorization and rollback mechanisms. We discuss design tradeoffs, failure modes, and lessons learned from operating autonomous AI agents at scale.
Authors: Xian Li, Yanfeng Gu, Aleksandra Pi\v{z}urica
Abstract: Multispectral point cloud (MPC) is composed of 3D spatial-spectral information, which holds tremendous potential for accurate land-cover classification. However, the representation power of classification models is limited by inherent high-dimensional and heterogeneous spatial-spectral information, unbalanced sample distribution, and inter-class spectral similarity of airborne MPCs. We build two MPC datasets and propose an enhanced geometric-spectral feature learning framework based on attentions for airborne MPC classification. A key component in our model is a two-stream feature fusion method with attention mechanisms, which enhances the representation capability of spatial-spectral features from high-dimensional heterogeneous MPCs. The first stream aims to extract position-encoded global spectral features with fusion self-attention, and the second stream comprises a multikernel point convolution and feature aggregation attention to extract spectral-guided geometric features. We then develop a residual attention fusion block to integrate the most informative geometric-spectral features from the two parallel streams. Another important contribution of this work is a joint loss function to improve the learning ability on unbalanced and interclass similar samples. Experimental results on two airborne MPC datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with the state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, the codes and datasets used in this paper will be made available freely at https://github.com/HITlixian/TGRS_GSFF.
Authors: Tiejin Chen, Pingzhi Li, Kaixiong Zhou, Tianlong Chen, Hua Wei
Abstract: Privacy risks in text-only Large Language Models (LLMs) are well studied, particularly their tendency to memorize and leak sensitive information. However, Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), which process both text and images, introduce unique privacy challenges that remain underexplored. Compared to text-only models, MLLMs can extract and expose sensitive information embedded in images, posing new privacy risks. We reveal that some MLLMs are susceptible to privacy breaches, leaking sensitive data embedded in images or stored in memory. Specifically, in this paper, we (1) introduce MM-Privacy, a comprehensive dataset designed to assess privacy risks across various multi-modal tasks and scenarios, where we define Disclosure Risks and Retention Risks. (2) systematically evaluate different MLLMs using MM-Privacy and demonstrate how models leak sensitive data across various tasks, and (3) provide additional insights into the role of task inconsistency in privacy risks, emphasizing the urgent need for mitigation strategies. Our findings highlight privacy concerns in MLLMs, underscoring the necessity of safeguards to prevent data exposure. Our dataset and code can be found here.
Authors: Jiangtao Shuai, Zongxiong Chen, Manfred Hauswirth, Sonja Schimmler
Abstract: Constructing knowledge graphs from 3D simulation scenes is essential for robot task reasoning, but the key bottleneck, grounding scene objects to formal ontology classes, still relies on manually curated dictionaries that are brittle and do not generalize across assets. We investigate whether large language models (LLMs) can automate this grounding step for Universal Scene Description (USD) scenes as a zero-shot, training-free alternative. On a kitchen scene (125 objects) with SOMA-HOME Ontology, LLMs achieve 90-96% exact-match accuracy with descriptive names and 49-89% with abbreviated names, substantially outperforming dictionary and embedding baselines. Under fully opaque names, context-augmented prompting recovers up to 48%. Feature ablation reveals that LLMs primarily exploit semantic cues in the scene graph (sibling names and parent paths); anonymizing these cues reduces accuracy to 0-6%, while geometry alone yields only 4-17%.
Authors: Felix M\"achtle, Jonas Sander, Sebastian Berndt, Ben Weimar, Nils Loose, Thomas Eisenbarth
Abstract: We demonstrate that widely deployed Large Language Model (LLM) inference stacks harbor a steganographic channel that requires no modification to model weights, sampling code, or output distributions. The channel exploits a structural property of deterministic decoding: pseudo-random number generators (PRNGs) used in inverse-transform sampling produce a seed-dependent sequence of token-level probability intervals that can be reconstructed from the generated text alone. A sender encodes a secret message in the PRNG seed before generation; a receiver reconstructs the intervals and recovers the seed, and thus the hidden payload, by exhaustive search over the seed space. We formalize two operational modes. In the known-prompt setting, sender and receiver share the prompt, enabling exact interval reconstruction and perfect seed recovery via forced alignment. In the unknown-prompt setting, only the generated text is available; approximate interval reconstruction combined with a maximum-hit-count scoring strategy still permits reliable recovery from sufficiently long outputs. Extensive experiments across six model families and five heterogeneous text domains show that, in the known-prompt setting, full 32-bit seed recovery from the complete 2^32 candidate space achieves up to 100% accuracy, depending on model and text domain, within 300 tokens and under 35 seconds on a single GPU. In the unknown-prompt setting, recovery reaches near-perfect accuracy at 600-800 tokens in about 12 seconds. We further analyze the influence of prompting strategies, tokenization ambiguities, and sampling hyperparameters on channel reliability. Moreover, we discuss several applications of our results: First, it allows for the steganographic transmission of 32 bits, but also shows that ignorance of the prompt is not a valid security assumption.
Authors: Danya Li, Xiang Su, Yan Feng, Rico Krueger
Abstract: Egocentric vision offers a first-person view of human perception and decision making, yet its potential for traffic-safety prediction remains underexplored. In this work, we study the decoding of pedestrian crossing intentions from short egocentric video clips. We approach this by formulating the task as a closed-ended visual question answering (VQA) problem and leveraging vision language models (VLMs) to predict the pedestrians' intent. We first benchmark three families of state-of-the-art VLMs in a zero-shot setting, finding that they achieve moderate gains over random guessing but exhibit limited higher-level traffic reasoning. Motivated by these findings, we further adapt VLMs to the target task using parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Our results show that the fine-tuned models substantially outperform their zero-shot counterparts and achieve a 9\% accuracy improvement over a specialized transformer-based baseline. Finally, we demonstrate that incorporating additional contextual cues, including ego motion, vehicle motion, and eye gaze, further improves predictive performance. In particular, the fine-tuned Qwen3-VL-2B model guided by eye gaze and ego motion achieves a 14.5% accuracy improvement over the transformer baseline, establishing a new state of the art for egocentric pedestrian intent decoding.
Authors: Hanna Abi Akl, Fabien Gandon, Catherine Faron, Pierre Monnin
Abstract: This paper revisits our pipeline called Syllogistic Evaluation Framework-Common Logic Grammar Construction (SEF-CLGC). We combine formal logical notations with Small Language Models (SLMs) to evaluate reasoning performance on the SemEval-2026 Task 11 Subtask 1: Disentangling Content and Formal Reasoning in Large Language Models. Our experiments show that by relying solely on SLMs, trained on a combination of natural and symbolic languages, our best model achieves a content score of 27.80% on the task while significantly lowering the content bias in reasoning.
Authors: Yuchen Yan, Minkai Xu, Zaiquan Yang, Yatao Bian
Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) enable parallel text generation by iteratively denoising a full sequence, offering attractive flexibility compared to auto-regressive (AR) decoding. However, existing methods fail to fully capture token relationships, leading to a performance gap relative to AR baselines, especially as the degree of parallelism increases. In this paper, we give a systematic analysis of the gap, identifying three key factors: (i) model capacity, (ii) dependency, and (iii) invariance. To address these issues, we first propose an invariant energy (Inv-E) together with an effective sampling-based estimator to handle the invariance issue. By further combining with the independent energy (Ind-E), we obtain a unified energy (Uni-E), that accounts for all these factors. Uni-E enjoys a unique advantage: it can be computed exactly without sampling-based partition estimation. Besides, Uni-E is model agnostic and can therefore be scaled to models of arbitrary size. We further prove that Uni-E can correct the distribution shift caused by dependency and invariance. Extensive experiments across Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) and Diffusion Large Language Models (DLLMs) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Uni-E.
Authors: Prajwal Thapa, Yagya Raj Pandeya
Abstract: This paper presents a unified system designed to support precision agriculture by integrating advanced weather prediction, crop recommendation, and a question-answering tool for farmers. We propose two deep learning models -- a Transformer-based Graph Neural Network and a Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network (STGCN) -- to forecast weather conditions for the next 30 days using data from 1,359 locations in Nepal. The STGCN outperforms the Transformer-based model in accuracy (MSE ~0.011 vs. 0.013), effectively modeling both spatial and temporal dependencies in climate data. These predictions are combined with static soil properties such as pH, moisture, and organic content to generate localized crop recommendations through a scoring algorithm that matches each crop's optimal growing conditions. Additionally, we develop a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) chatbot that leverages domain-specific agricultural documents to answer farmers' questions in natural language. The entire system is deployed via a mobile application, offering real-time suggestions and conversational support. User feedback confirms the system's usability and relevance, especially in rural settings where personalized farming guidance is limited. Overall, our approach demonstrates how combining machine learning models with local agricultural data can empower farmers with actionable insights, promoting more informed decisions, better crop yields, and increased resilience to climate variability.
Authors: Zheshun Wu, Ziyang Zhang, Changyao Lin, Zenglin Xu, Jie Liu
Abstract: Recently, mobile edge computing (MEC)-enabled collaborative deep neural network (DNN) inference has emerged as a promising approach for delivering intelligent services to resource-constrained mobile devices. A representative scenario is multi-user collaborative edge inference, where distinct devices independently partition their DNN models and offload backend computation to a common edge server over wireless networks. However, determining the optimal DNN partition for each device is challenging due to unknown and time-varying system conditions, including fluctuating wireless links and diverse device capabilities. To address this problem, we propose Cooperative Autodidactic NeuroSurgeon (CANS), a collaborative edge inference framework that enables devices to adaptively learn optimal DNN partitions by sharing informative feedback during online inference. To handle the challenge of device heterogeneity and better leverage offline inference experience, we integrate a novel FedLinUCB-DW algorithm that groups devices of the same type and warm-starts online exploration using local offline early-exit inference experience. Furthermore, we provide theoretical guarantees for FedLinUCB-DW by deriving the regret upper bound. We also validate our method on both a simulated environment and a hardware prototype system. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that CANS achieves lower inference latency compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Especially, in prototype experiments on two edge devices, the proposed CANS reduced average inference latency by up to 50% compared to the non-cooperative baseline.
Authors: Hyeji Choi, Yongtaek Lim, Minwoo Kim
Abstract: Multilingual safety evaluation of large language models (LLMs) has predominantly relied on direct translation (DT) of English benchmarks into target languages - an approach that converts surface-level linguistic form while failing to reflect the cultural context embedded in threat scenarios, social norms, and legal frameworks. We construct paired DT and culturally-adapted (CA) datasets via 1:1 seed matching for four languages - Korean (KO), Japanese (JA), Thai (TH), and Khmer (KM) - and compare Attack Success Rate (ASR) and Cultural Realism scores across four open-source LLM. CA prompts yield Delta-ASR > 0 across all 16 language x model combinations (mean +9.3 pp), and DT-based evaluation underestimates risk in 44 of 48 category x language combinations. Language-level analysis reveals that the distribution of threat forms is heterogeneous across languages. Cultural Realism analysis further shows that DT Cultural Depth (C3) scores remain consistently below 1.0 out of 3.0 across all four languages (mean 0.17), whereas CA scores reach up to 2.51, indicating that direct translation produces inputs systematically divergent from those encountered in real-world multicultural settings. These findings demonstrate that adapting benchmarks to language-specific cultural contexts - rather than relying on linguistic translation alone - is necessary for valid multilingual LLM safety evaluation.
Authors: Jianwei Tai
Abstract: EEG foundation-model releases are usually audited one endpoint at a time: raw-reconstruction, membership inference, identity linkage, or DP-SGD on the downstream head. We audit the same released embeddings under all four endpoints jointly, on BIOT, LaBraM, and EEGPT, and show that each single-endpoint audit clears releases that still leak spectral attributes. The decisive evidence is a cross-encoder transfer audit: a single ridge attribute decoder learned from one frozen encoder transfers, via a fitted linear bridge, to held-out-subject test splits of every other encoder, with subject-disjoint matched-control 95% CI lower bound at least 0.081 across all six BIOT/LaBraM/EEGPT directions. We prove a sufficient condition: two encoders sharing a nontrivial attribute-coordinate projector overlap beta admit a chained ridge bridge attacker with centered-gain lower bound sqrt(beta/(1+tau^2)) - eps_br - rho_0, and back-solve beta in [0.008, 0.198]. To turn the joint audit into a deployment-readable decision rule we introduce an audit-endpoint disagreement score (AEDS), prove sufficient conditions for its positivity, and bootstrap-calibrate it per cell; AEDS is positive in all eight matched-CI cells (BIOT/LaBraM/EEGPT on EEGMMI; LaBraM on Sleep-EDF, 54-channel LIMO, CHB-MIT pediatric scalp EEG) with p<0.001, while a head-level Carlini LiRA membership audit reaches AUC only 0.50-0.70. Standard defenses fail under audit: a Wiener-style noise-aware adaptive attacker, the LiRA audit, and DP-SGD at every utility-preserving epsilon in {4,8} leave the attribute channel essentially unchanged. The contribution is an audit framework that turns scattered single-endpoint defenses into a joint release decision, supported by a cross-encoder bridge theorem and adaptive-attacker, LiRA, and DP-SGD baselines; the audit licenses release-blocking, not raw-waveform exfiltration or held-out-subject identity recovery.
Authors: Minyu Cui, Miquel Pericas
Abstract: The rapid growth of large-scale machine learning (ML) has made distributed training across multiple GPUs a fundamental component of modern ML systems. As model sizes and computational throughput continue to increase, communication overhead has become a dominant bottleneck in multi-GPU training, particularly when computation and communication are executed sequentially. This work explores concurrent execution of computation and collective communication using two portable runtime controls: shared-memory-driven occupancy shaping for computation kernels and elevated scheduling priority for communication kernels. Our approach regulates computation-kernel residency through per-block shared-memory allocation, leaving sufficient on-chip resources for communication kernels to make progress. In addition, assigning higher priority to communication streams ensures steady communication progress once resources become available. Experiments on NVIDIA A40, A100, H100, and AMD MI250X GPUs demonstrate that the proposed method enables effective computation-communication overlap and reduces total execution time by up to 25.5 percent, without modifying vendor libraries or kernel implementations.
Authors: Han-Teng Liao, Chang-Yi Kao, Karen Ang
Abstract: The convergence of the 2026 European Union Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) framework, Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), and Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) introduce a severe governance bottleneck for advanced semiconductor manufacturing facilities ("Smart Fabs"). Regulatory compliance demands have surpassed the capacity of manual corporate reporting, creating a direct conflict between multi-stakeholder transparency and corporate data privacy. This paper addresses this challenge by introducing a zero-trust socio-technical orchestration framework that operationalizes a six-layer SSbD reference architecture within trustworthy industrial data spaces. We propose a shift from reactive automation to autonomous governance through "Professional Proxies"-role-based agentic workflows executing within hardware-isolated trust zones. Structured as an interoperable network protocol stack, the framework coordinates an automated, five-step "relay race" between Facility, Process Engineering, and Finance proxy teams to align factory-floor yield models with macro-level sustainability mandates. By executing Virtual Metrology (VM) predictions and Federated Machine Learning (FML) inside hardware-rooted Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), this architecture resolves the Data Sovereignty Paradox, demonstrating how fabs can export cryptographically signed compliance tokens via International Data Spaces (IDS) connectors without exposing proprietary process recipes. Ultimately, this framework provides technology managers with a verifiable, evidence-based pathway toward resilient, net-zero Industry 5.0 ecosystems.
Authors: Changfeng Gao, Yong Ren, Jun Yuan, Ye Bai, Zhao You, ShiDong Shang
Abstract: Recent state-of-the-art (SOTA) text-to-speech (TTS) systems typically adopt a cascaded pipeline consisting of a speech tokenizer, an autoregressive large language model (LLM), and a diffusion based flow-matching (FM) model, with these components trained independently. In this paper, we propose a fully end-to-end (E2E) optimization framework that unifies the training of the speech tokenizer, LLM, FM model, and an additional reward model (RM). Specifically, we first jointly optimize the tokenizer using multi-task objectives derived from reconstruction for FM, next-token prediction for LLM, and multi recognition task for RM. This joint training encourages the discrete speech token space to capture acoustically and semantically salient information that is better tailored to TTS. We then further optimize the LLM using downstream reconstruction and recognition by FM and RM, which reduces inference-time mismatch and steers the LLM toward more preferred generations. Experimental results show that our E2E framework consistently outperforms cascaded baselines. On the Seed-TTS-Eval benchmark, our system achieves a word error rate (WER) of 0.78% and 1.56%, a new SOTA result with a 0.6B-parameter LLM and 0.5B-parameter FM model. These results validate that holistic E2E optimization is critical for improving discrete-token-based TTS systems with a much simpler training pipeline.
Authors: Luca Ghisi, Jacopo Essenziale, Carlo D'Eramo, Matteo Luperto
Abstract: Autonomous Racing has seen remarkable progress through deep Reinforcement Learning (RL), primarily for four-wheeled vehicles. However, motorbikes introduce substantially greater complexity due to the need to manage balance and lean angle, in addition to more reactive steering and throttle control, and a smaller weight. In this work, we present a framework for training an autonomous agent to race a superbike in VRider SBK, a physics-accurate Unity-based motorbike simulator. Our approach integrates Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) with Self-Paced curriculum Deep reinforcement Learning (SPDL), which dynamically generates progressively more challenging tasks based on the agent's performance, without requiring manual curriculum design. The agent's state space comprises proprioceptive features extended with lean-angle history, along with global track features via course points. The reward signal is shaped to encourage progress along the track while penalizing instability-inducing behaviors specific to two-wheeled dynamics. Preliminary experimental results demonstrate that SPDL outperforms SAC alone in training efficiency, lap time, and driving stability across multiple tracks and motorbike models, establishing a first baseline for RL-based autonomous motorbike racing.
Authors: Yuan Zeng, Yujia Shi, Tiao Tan, Xingting Li, Yaqi Qin, Zongqing Lu, Wenming Yang, Jing-Hao Xue, Qingmin Liao
Abstract: Estimating full-hand grasp pressure from egocentric video is critical for immersive VR and robotic manipulation, yet dense tactile sensing often relies on intrusive hardware. Existing vision-based methods predominantly rely on planar surfaces or fingertip contacts, failing to generalize to complex 3D object interactions. Therefore, we introduce EgoTactile, a benchmark pairing egocentric video with full-hand pressure supervision for diverse everyday objects, incorporating a bare-hand transfer subset to enable generalization to natural scenarios. Leveraging this benchmark, we first establish EgoPressureFormer as a discriminative baseline. Beyond this, to explicitly address the uncertainty in partial observations, we propose EgoPressureDiff, a conditional diffusion framework that adapts a large-scale pre-trained video diffusion backbone. By combining rich world knowledge priors with a Physically-Informed Feature Rectification layer to inject semantic constraints, our approach effectively infers plausible contact patterns and resolves visual-physical ambiguities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance on the benchmark and robust transferability to in-the-wild scenarios. Our project page is available at https://egotactile.github.io/.
Authors: Yuan Zeng, Bin Song, Jie Guo, Yuwen Chen
Abstract: Few-shot object detection has gained widely attention in recent years. Some excellent algorithms have been proposed to handle this task. However, most of these algorithms rely on the performance of few-shot classification. Unlike previous attempts, our work focuses on the problem of unbalanced distribution of region proposals between the novel classes and the base classes. In order to alleviate this unbalanced distribution, we propose the proposal refinement approach for different training phases. Specifically, refinement loss is designed for the base training phase to enhance sensitivity of the model to novel classes, and refinement branch is introduced as an auxiliary branch for RPN (Region Proposal Networks) to generate more novel proposals in the fine-tuning phase. By rebalancing the proposal distribution, the proposed approach outperforms the baselines methods by roughly 1\%$\sim$6\% on current benchmarks without increasing any inference time. Through extensive experiments, we prove that we establish a new state-of-the-art method for the few-shot object detection task.
Authors: Al Zadid Sultan Bin Habib, Md Younus Ahamed, Prashnna Gyawali, Gianfranco Doretto, Donald A. Adjeroh
Abstract: High-Dimensional Low-Sample Size (HDLSS) tabular domains (e.g., omics) are characterized by $n \ll m$, where $n$ = number of samples, and $m$ = number of features. Such domains often exhibit strong local correlation groups, sparse cross-group dependencies, heavy-tailed non-Gaussian marginals, heteroscedastic noise, and structured missingness, making direct density learning in $\mathbb{R}^m$ ill-conditioned since $n \ll m$. We propose BSTabDiff, a block-subunit generative framework that partitions the $m$ observed features into $M$ latent blocks ($M \ll m$) and generates each block via a shared low-dimensional subunit variable, concentrating global dependence learning in the compact block-latent space $\mathbb{R}^M$ while decoding to the full feature space with copula-driven dependence, flexible per-feature marginals, and explicit missingness mechanisms. BSTabDiff supports modern deep priors on block latents, including diffusion and normalizing flows, enabling stable synthesis and controllable benchmark generation in the HDLSS regime. Empirically, BSTabDiff produces more realistic and stable high-dimensional synthetic data when compared with unstructured tabular generators on HDLSS data.
Authors: Yijie Li, Jiahao Xu, Ching-Chih Tsao, Lili Qiu, Jingxian Wang
Abstract: Acoustic metamaterial (AMM) inverse design is particularly challenging for broadband target responses due to acoustic dispersion: a structure that matches the desired response at one frequency may deviate at others, and modifying geometry to improve one sub-band often perturbs neighboring sub-bands. Yet existing broadband inverse-design approaches are either constrained by predefined templates, or rely on image representations that fail to preserve the geometric precision and structural connectivity required by acoustic structures. We present MetaSeq, a physics-guided, sequence-based generative framework for acoustic metamaterial inverse design. At its core, MetaSeq introduces a language that represents each AMM as a structured sequence, rather than as a pixel grid or fixed template. This representation preserves precise geometry, explicitly encodes connectivity, and casts inverse design as a sequence-to-sequence task from target response to structure sequence. MetaSeq further constructs a balanced, high-fidelity dataset with efficient calibration and complexity-based sampling. To address the one-to-many nature of inverse design, MetaSeq combines supervised pretraining with reinforcement learning fine-tuning guided by a physics-based solver and validity checker. Extensive evaluations against COMSOL and five baselines show that MetaSeq reduces response error by 45% over the best baseline.
Authors: Rafael Cabral, Pang Zixi, Ziyi Shou, Shen Xin
Abstract: Large Language Models frequently hallucinate in precision-critical domains such as technical diagramming and mechanical design, where outputs must satisfy strict geometric constraints. We study open-ended geometric synthesis from natural language: translating free-form descriptions into precise constructions whose entities must simultaneously satisfy dozens of interacting constraints. To make this tractable, we release PyGeoX, a programmable geometric DSL that compiles declarative constraints into a differentiable loss, and PyGeoX-Bench, a stratified suite of 300 problems with per-constraint verifiable rewards. Using PyGeoX as a verifier, we identify a failure mode we call Outlier Gradient Masking: under global-norm rewards (any scheme that aggregates residuals through a single norm, for example, $\exp(-\mathrm{MSE})$), a single outlier constraint can nullify the learning signal across all others. To address this, we propose Saturating Additive Rewards (SAR), which decompose the reward into bounded per-constraint terms, preserving partial progress and ensuring consistent gradients even under severe violations. Against MSE-based rewards, the natural baseline for geometry solvers, SAR improves the hard-tier solving rate by $2.3\times$, and the resulting 8B model is competitive with much larger frontier systems on this benchmark. We release the engine, benchmark, and data at https://github.com/Huawei-AI4Math/PyGeoX.
Authors: Jianwei Tai
Abstract: BCI-to-agent pipelines turn decoded neural activity into an authorization channel for tool-use agents, exposing a new attack surface we call \emph{brain-prompt injection}: signal-side perturbations, context-only injections, and adaptive dual-decoder attacks can all change the routed action while EEG-side or text-side monitors remain blind. Route safety in this stack depends on what the audit log can observe, not on decoder accuracy or agreement alone. We define a Route-Safety Audit Contract: a minimal log schema, denominator hierarchy, and endpoint specification, and prove an audit-schema separation theorem together with a C3 attacked-dependence decomposition; clean agreement and marginal robustness do not identify the joint term that controls C3 routing. As a calibration layer on top of the contract, we apply split-conformal calibration to a non-oracle EEG confirmation channel and report the resulting false-accept frontier under an explicit threat-archetype matrix. We instantiate the contract on EEGMMI native left/right command-control over 5{,}400 events, harmless tool stubs, and seed/case denominators. Provenance blocks C2 routes ($0.000$); agreement-plus-provenance routes C3 flips ($1.000$); confirmation-plus-provenance routes them ($0.000$). The conformal frontier reaches FAR $0.000$ at clean utility $0.150$ for $\alpha=.005$ and FAR $0.119$ at clean utility $0.452$ for $\alpha=.10$ under acquisition isolation; an attacker-controllable confirmation channel breaks the bound to $\approx\!1$. Subject-cluster bootstrap confirms these intervals on $60$ subjects; cross-architecture (TinyEEGNet, EEGNetV4) and capacity-sweep results show within-regime saturation. Mediation and confirmation reduce risk; they are not intent certificates.
Authors: Weiran Yang, Daniel Memmert, Maximilian Klemp-Weins
Abstract: Football event data constitute a rich spatiotemporal source for quantitative analysis of player actions in team sports. These datasets contain heterogeneous features, combining continuous location coordinates with categorical variables such as action type, action outcome, and body part. Such data have been applied in sports analytics for match outcome forecasting, player evaluation, and tactical pattern recognition. However, existing approaches predominantly encode categorical features using one-hot or ordinal embedding representations, overlooking the intrinsic semantics of action descriptors. The Transformer is a deep neural network architecture based on self-attention that captures dependencies between input features at arbitrary positions. We propose and implement a Transformer-based model to learn latent dependencies among categorical event features and produce dense representations of football events. By encoding categorical features as learned embedding vectors, sport-specific action semantics are captured during pretraining, enabling the representations to support downstream tasks such as action value estimation and play style recognition. Empirical evaluation shows that the embedding representations yield superior probability calibration over task-specific baselines on the downstream prediction tasks, as measured by Brier score.
Authors: Shiyu Li, Zhiyuan Hu, Yifan Wang, Peiming Li, Zheng Wei, Yang Tang
Abstract: Omni-modal retrieval promises a single embedding space for text, image, video, document, and audio inputs, but building such a unified retriever is difficult since these modalities differ in data distribution, architecture, and optimization dynamics. In this work, we present Conan-embedding-v3, a decouple--fuse--recover framework for omni-modal retrieval. Conan-embedding-v3 first trains modality specialists independently and fuses their task vectors into a single dense backbone, a strategy we call Decoupled Specialist Fusion. We show that this fusion composes visual, video, and document retrieval capabilities, but also exposes a failure mode for projector-based modalities: when audio is attached through an external encoder and projector, fusing the backbone leaves the projector calibrated to the audio-specialist backbone, causing a large audio retrieval regression despite copying all audio-specific modules unchanged. We call this failure Projector Drift. To repair it, Conan-embedding-v3 applies Projector Recovery (i.e., full-parameter fine-tuning of the projector while keeping the backbone frozen) followed by balanced multi-modal rehearsal. The resulting model supports these retrieval pathways in one backbone, achieving 74.9 scores on MMEB while obtaining 55.61 on the 30-task MAEB audio suite.
Authors: Maria De Marsico, Anil K. Jain, Annalaura Miglino
Abstract: Individual animal recognition can be useful in the search for lost or stolen pets, the tracking of individuals of endangered species, and the recognition of animals in crowded farms. Present recognition techniques mostly use physical devices, e.g., microchips, often impractical and difficult to apply. These could be replaced by remote recognition via the animal's face; if accurate enough, it provides several advantages: it is non-invasive, can work at a distance, and is difficult to counterfeit, as, for instance, in the case of substituting sick animals for healthy ones in the food industry. The few existing datasets with sufficient per-subject images annotated with a single animal identity are not large enough to train current deep learning architectures. We rather investigate the possibility of transfer learning, exploiting pre-trained network models as backbones. Our experiments compared FaceNet, which is specifically trained on large databases of human faces, with the Vision Transformer (ViT) pre-trained on ImageNet, i.e., on object categories. We used three face datasets of very different animals: dogs, primates (lemurs, golden monkeys, and chimpanzees), and cattle. We report the results and, for each dataset, compare them with the state of the art (SOTA) ad hoc-trained deep networks. The capture conditions differ among the three datasets. Image quality (resolution, motion blur, diverse poses, etc.) decreases from dogs to cattle to primates. The best performance was achieved with dogs, where ViT reached a mean verification accuracy of 96.85% and a Rank-1 Identification Rate of 84.34%. The results for endangered primates are still encouraging, but performance varies across animal classes and tasks (verification or identification), and does not always outperform SOTA. For cattle, the ViT results outperform SOTA, while FaceNet is still competitive.
Authors: Minghao Zou, Qingtian Zeng, Shangkun Liu, Yanda Meng, Guanghui Yue, Baoquan Zhao, Abdulmotaleb El Saddik, Wei Zhou
Abstract: Scene Graphs (SGs) provide structured representations of visual scenes by modeling objects and their pairwise relationships. Despite recent progress, existing datasets primarily focus on generic natural contexts, leaving domain-specific and function-oriented scenes largely underexplored. This limitation restricts the evaluation of relational reasoning in scientific experimental scenes, thereby hindering the development of intelligent monitoring, analysis, and related applications in such scenes. To address this gap, we introduce PhysScene, the first SG dataset tailored to physics experiments. PhysScene encompasses specialized instruments, structured experimental setups, and functional relations intrinsic to experimental environments, enabling reasoning that extends beyond spatial co-occurrence to logical dependencies. Rather than pursuing large data scale, PhysScene focuses on strong semantic constraints and high relation density in experimental scenes, posing new challenges for existing scene parsing algorithms while offering opportunities for further improvements. Extensive analyses and experiments show that PhysScene complements existing benchmarks and establishes a valuable testbed for advancing scientific visual reasoning. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/ZMH-SDUST/PhysScene.
Authors: Sergei Vorobyov, Eugene Ilyushin
Abstract: Formal neural network verification -- proving that a network satisfies safety properties for *all* inputs in a specified domain -- is bounded in practice by GPU memory: standard implementations of bound-propagation algorithms (IBP, CROWN, $\alpha$-CROWN) require weight and relaxation-coefficient matrices to reside entirely on one accelerator. We adapt two parallelism techniques originally developed for large-scale model training to the auto_LiRPA / $\alpha,\beta$-CROWN verification framework. Tensor Parallelism (TP) shards both weight and $A$-matrices across GPUs, achieving ${\approx}2\times$ peak-memory reduction at $P{=}2$; soundness is confirmed on VNN-COMP 2022 MNIST-FC benchmarks, though bound tightness degrades with the number of sharded zones due to forced IBP substitution for intermediate bounds inside sharded zones. Fully Sharded Data Parallelism (FSDP) shards only weight matrices with a per-layer AllGather, producing bounds that are bitwise identical to the single-GPU baseline: baseline memory drops by 80--90%, peak memory by 34--39% on wide MLPs. FSDP integrates cleanly with complete verification ($\beta$-CROWN + Branch-and-Bound) and with convolutional layers (BoundConv); a complete unsat result is obtained for CIFAR-100 ResNet-large (VNN-COMP 2024) under FSDP. Across all experiments the memory bottleneck in $\alpha$-CROWN+BaB mode proves to be per-neuron alpha tensors, not weight matrices, pointing to the key direction for future work.
Authors: Han Zhou, Adam X. Yang, Laurence Aitchison, Anna Korhonen, Albert Q. Jiang
Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a leading paradigm for improving the reasoning ability of large language models through outcome-based supervision. However, verifiable rewards frequently become uninformative at the group level: when all sampled traces of a given prompt receive identical rewards, group-relative advantage estimation provides no gradient signal, even though the traces may differ substantially in reasoning quality. We propose Reasoning Arena, an adaptive training framework that routes such non-diverse reward groups to a judge system instead of discarding them. Beyond examining the final answer, Reasoning Arena constructs trace tournaments, where reasoning traces are compared head-to-head to expose finer-grained preferences within the group, converting reasoning quality into rich relative reward signals. To make reward estimation efficient, rather than exhaustively comparing every pair, each new trace is evaluated against a small, dynamically updated pool of previously generated traces as anchors to efficiently establish a relative ranking. We then fit a Bradley-Terry model on the incomplete comparison graph, enabling scalable RL integration without quadratic pairwise comparisons. Empirical results demonstrate that Reasoning Arena consistently outperforms the RLVR baseline by 7.6% on average in competition mathematics and coding benchmarks. By converting otherwise wasted zero-advantage samples into useful gradient updates, our method accelerates training by 27% to 41%, saving nearly 50% of generation compute, and substantially improves overall reasoning performance.
Authors: Alina Marcu, Dragos Costea, Cristina Lazar, Marius Leordeanu
Abstract: Body movement communicates intent at distances and in conditions where neither the face, nor speech can be captured. We study the recognition of communicative intent from 2D body pose alone. We argue that body motion is a reliable signal especially in scenarios that require real time low-cost on-device person-to-robot communication in long distance environments, such as rescue missions. However, existing resources do not isolate this signal. Affective corpora combine body, face, voice and text, while skeleton action-recognition benchmarks label the action performed rather than the message conveyed. We release a dataset of real frames of full-body pose covering ten communicative intents and we compare it against other real (IPC) and synthetic (MotionLCM, VEO3.1, Kimodo) ones that span a range of difficulty. We target systems that can run on a robot's limited onboard hardware. We benchmark multiple models, from skeleton graph classifiers to joint motion-forecasting networks, and report performance metrics together with frame rate on an embedded GPU (NVIDIA Orin~Nano), since speed matters as much as accuracy in our scenario. Finally, we show that a model's own autoregressive self-consistency works as an unsupervised reliability signal. We give a short proof that bounds the probability that a self-consistent prediction is correct, show that this probability grows with the number of consistent steps, and identify the conditions under which a confident prediction can still be false, benchmarked against industry-standard metrics.
Authors: Timo Hei{\ss}, Julia Herbinger, Bernd Bischl, Giuseppe Casalicchio
Abstract: Feature interactions drive much of the predictive power of machine learning models, yet existing explanation methods only detect and quantify interactions without revealing their functional form, or visualize only restricted interaction types. We propose Surrogate-based Analysis of Interactions via Local effect Smooths (SAILS), a model-agnostic framework that analyzes pairwise interactions through interpretable generalized additive model (GAM) surrogates fitted to the local effects of a black-box model. For each interval of a feature of interest, the surrogate smooth terms isolate the interaction components on derivative level, enabling (i) interaction detection through a heuristic derived from significance tests on smooth terms, (ii) interaction form categorization into linear, product-separable, and non-product-separable types, and (iii) tailored, interpretable visualizations for each interaction type. We empirically validate the framework through controlled simulations and a real-world task, demonstrating its effectiveness for pairwise interactions, with limitations under strong feature correlations and higher-order interactions. SAILS fills a notable gap in the XAI toolbox, going beyond detection of interactions alone to characterizing their functional form.
Authors: Srravya Chandhiramowuli, Ding Wang, Alex Taylor
Abstract: We present an ethnographic study of an alternative approach to data work, developed by a civic-tech initiative that builds datasets for training and benchmarking online safety systems. They aim to respond to online safety concerns from a feminist perspective, by building safety datasets collaboratively with those most impacted by online harms. In this paper, we examine how this approach aims to reorient data work as a site for repair and redress, and trace the struggles they encounter in the process. Specifically, we draw attention to the challenges and tensions involved in advancing just reward for data work and collective governance of AI datasets. Examining these challenges through an STS-informed lens of reparative justice and repair, we argue that the work of repairing data work (and AI) lies, fundamentally, in resetting the ties of accountability. At a time heightened emphasis on efforts like safety evaluations and red teaming to make AI more responsible, we highlight the need to confront foundational questions about how the humans involved in these efforts relate to the datasets and systems they help produce. A reparative lens demands that we interrupt prevailing norms of data work and place at their centre, not AI or datasets, but those most harmed by the neglect, oversight and exclusion animated in the current modes of dataset production. This, we argue, offers a bold vision for responsibility and contributes towards a critical agenda for building alternative futures of data and AI practice.
Authors: Callum Cockburn, Sam Farrow
Abstract: This report examines practical challenges in operationalising JSP 936 Part 1 for AI assurance in UK Defence. Using a structured interpretive review of the directive's requirements, the analysis identifies eight thematic challenge areas adequacy of evidence and argument, management of human interaction with AI, definition of the operational environment, integration of AI within systems of systems, assessment and maintenance of AI performance, analysis of safety and security, measurement of ethicality, and mitigation of the inherent complexities of AI. The report argues that JSP 936 provides a useful governance basis, but that implementation depends on unresolved technical, organisational, and assurance questions. These challenges stem from the socio-technical nature of AI-enabled systems, uncertainty in real-world deployment contexts, limitations in current assurance methodologies, and tensions between performance, safety, human oversight, security, and ethical acceptability. The report identifies areas where further methods, guidance, and organisational capability are needed for the ambitious, safe, and responsible adoption of AI across Defence. This is consistent with MOD's own framing of JSP 936 as requiring iterative implementation and supporting guidance.
Authors: Sanghoon Lee, Jiyeong Chae, Kyung-Joon Park
Abstract: Robot middleware faces a new role in the era of Physical AI. Learned policies, planners, and vision-language-action (VLA) models now enter deployed robots as causal participants on the control path, but the layer that integrates them with timing, scheduling, and network has not been named. Recent language-agent work names this layer the harness, the external system that mediates tools, manages state, bounds resources, and records execution. The robotics community has not yet adopted this framing, and we propose that robot middleware is that harness. A Physical AI harness differs from a software harness in where it intervenes. A software harness mediates at tool-call boundaries. A Physical AI harness must mediate at control, computing, and communication simultaneously, because a learned policy's output crosses all three: its commands shift the trajectory, its inference time shifts the schedule, and its payload shifts the bandwidth. Robot middleware is the lowest robot-stack layer with mediating abstractions over all three, so it is best positioned to compose their enforcement. It already provides most of what a harness needs but lacks the enforcement for an AI model. We name this missing enforcement as three functions: Projection gates each output at emission, Isolation bounds the model's execution and transmission slot, and Transfer falls back to a verified baseline when checks fail. Each appears today as hand-built application code in deployed robot systems, built on surfaces robot middleware already provides. Robot middleware should host them not as the best single-axis enforcer but as the layer that composes all three. We sketch this as a ROS 2 Harness Profile, a deployment artifact that carries an AI model's declared output region, inference budget, and operating regime while the middleware enforces them across ROS 2, DDS, and Zenoh.
Authors: Jiadong Dan, Cheng Zhang, Leyi Loh, Ivan Verzhbitskiy, Yuan Chen, Goki Eda, Michel Bosman, N. Duane Loh
Abstract: Artificial intelligence is rapidly advancing materials characterization, yet most applications in electron microscopy rely solely on image contrast, overlooking the chemical and experimental context that shapes image formation. This limitation makes defect classification inherently ambiguous, as similar contrasts can arise from different materials or imaging conditions. Here we develop a context-aware learning framework that integrates image-derived contrast with metadata describing composition, beam energy, and detector geometry. Using a systematically constructed dataset of ~55 million simulated patches spanning 576 cases across 96 doped monolayer transition-metal dichalcogenides, we show that conditioning on contextual variables transforms defect classification from an ill-posed image-only task into a well-posed, physically grounded problem. The framework achieves over 98% accuracy on simulations and near-human agreement on experimental data, with a 94% reduction in posterior entropy. By emphasizing contextual grounding over architectural complexity, this approach links experimental image contrast to the underlying chemical and imaging conditions, supporting physically grounded defect assignments and a general pathway toward multimodal AI models for autonomous materials characterization.
Authors: Mingqi Yuan, Xiaoquan Sun, Shihao Luo, Jiayu Chen
Abstract: Online task-free continual learning (TFCL) requires intelligent agents to sequentially accumulate knowledge from an unbounded, non-stationary data stream under strict single-pass constraints and without any explicit task identifiers. Existing online TFCL paradigms primarily rely on parameter-efficient prompt tuning or dynamic structure expansion driven by training-coupled optimization dynamics, such as empirical loss fluctuations or evolving latent distances. As a result, these training-coupled solvers remain agnostic to the structural origins of distribution drift, mechanically enforcing a fixed strategy across fundamentally distinct streaming variations. To address this gap, we propose LargeMonitor, a framework that leverages large pretrained foundation models to autonomously orchestrate task-free continuous adaptation. Specifically, LargeMonitor introduces a decoupled detection module utilizing the frozen, stable representation space of large vision models (LVMs) to achieve robust, zero-shot drift detection without training-dependent interference or brittle threshold tuning. Upon a confirmed drift, the framework activates a context-aware diagnostic module driven by large multimodal models (LMMs) to interpret the precise semantic etiologies of the stream variation (e.g., novel class emergence vs. environmental domain shift). This dual-stage capability empowers the continuous learner to dynamically deploy adaptive and shift-specific optimization strategies. Extensive experiments across multiple TFCL settings and benchmarks demonstrate that LargeMonitor achieves precise, robust detection and diagnosis of complex data streams while consistently improving the performance of existing online TFCL algorithms.
Authors: Aditya Kamlesh Parikh, Cristian Tejedor-Garcia, Catia Cucchiarini, Helmer Strik
Abstract: Automated L2 speech assessment can assign proficiency labels, but often lacks interpretability. We propose a rubric-guided SpeechLLM for multi-aspect, multi-granular assessment, trained with a hybrid objective combining supervised fine-tuning and Bounded Direct Preference Optimization. The model jointly predicts ordinal labels at the sentence-level (accuracy, fluency, prosody), word/phoneme-level accuracy, and generates a natural-language rationale in the same response. On SpeechOcean762, our approach matches or outperforms single-granularity models while remaining competitive with prior approaches. We analyze rationale reliability along two axes: self-consistency with model predictions and alignment with ground-truth labels, using sentiment consistency (plausibility) and mention-based agreement (faithfulness). Rationales are plausible at the sentence level, but faithfulness degrades at the word/phoneme level: references are sparse and weakly aligned with token-level labels.
Authors: Tianxiang Fei, Mingyang Song, Mao Zheng, Xiang Yu
Abstract: Long-term memory for an LLM agent is more than retrieving the right passage at the right time. Current memory systems collapse belief revision, causal coupling, and cross-domain abstraction into a single retrieval surface tuned for surface recall, and consequently struggle on implicit personalisation that requires reasoning over how a user has evolved. We propose DCPM, which reorganises agent memory along a cognitive capability hierarchy ascending from raw inputs and atomic facts, through diachronic belief trajectories and identity, to domain schemas, latent intentions and cross-domain patterns. The hierarchy is driven by two processes inheriting the architectural split of dual-process theory: a synchronous daytime writer (System1) that records belief revisions as doubly linked supersedes chains, and an asynchronous nighttime engine (System2) that induces schemas and intentions and sweeps for cross-domain collisions abstracted into higher-level core schemas. On LongMemEval, PersonaMem and PersonaMem-v2, enabling System2 contributes most where the benchmark rewards implicit cross-session inference (up to +5.20 on PersonaMem-v2) and least on span recall, matching the architectural prediction.
Authors: Ethan Rathbun, Ahmed Agha, Saaduddin Mahmud, Christopher Amato, Alina Oprea, Eugene Bagdasarian
Abstract: World models have recently seen a rapid growth in both their popularity and capability as more data efficient tools for generating robot training data or simulating real world environments, with many works proposing their integration into the robot learning pipeline. While highly practical, in this work we demonstrate that world models introduce a uniquely stealthy and effective data poisoning entry point into the robot learning supply chain that can result in the deployment of unsafe or otherwise compromised robotic policies despite training on seemingly safe ground truth training data. In contrast to traditional data poisoning techniques which directly implant dangerous trajectories into sold or uploaded datasets, our novel attack methods inject malicious prompts or compromising transition dynamics into visibly safe teleoperated datasets which are only activated once fed through a world model as input. This can result in the generation of synthetic, dangerous robot training trajectories and subsequently unsafe or compromised robot policies. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our attacks against both state of the art action conditioned and text conditioned world models, showing a full end-to-end backdoor on a downstream DRL policy and a proof-of-concept for the VLA setting. Overall these findings necessitate research into more secure world models and reevaluating their position within the robot learning supply chain.
Authors: Junyi Gong, Zijie Qiu, Ben Zhong Tang
Abstract: Can a general-purpose large language model design molecules with the precision of a seasoned chemist? Current LLM-based frameworks answer this question with scalar feedback loops-generate, score, reject-that amount to informed trial-and-error. Here we show that replacing a single number with the full physicochemical rationale from first-principles calculations transforms the LLM from a stochastic sampler into a causal reasoner. Our system couples retrieval-augmented generation with a self-reflection module that feeds orbital energies, atomic charges, and electron densities-rather than compressed scores-back into the design loop. On HOMO-LUMO gap targets from 1.0 to 5.0 eV, this structure-property-relationship (SPR) reflection achieves a deviation as low as 0.0003 eV and a 100% success rate on moderate tasks, decisively outperforming scalar-feedback and non-reflective baselines. The framework generalizes seamlessly to dipole-moment design and proves robust across five distinct LLM backbones. These results establish a new paradigm: when the model understands not only that a molecule fails, but why, iterative molecular design becomes genuinely mechanistic.
Authors: Nadya Yuki Wangsajaya, Haeun Yu, Isabelle Augenstein
Abstract: During instruction fine-tuning (IFT), large language models (LLMs) learn to follow instructions by using the provided context to answer a query. While prior work has studied how context characteristics correlate with context usage by the LLM, this analysis has been limited to inference time, leaving open how these relationships are acquired in the first place. Here, we measure how models' sensitivity to such characteristics shifts across successive IFT stages: supervised fine-tuning (SFT), direct preference optimization (DPO), and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). Experiments across four models and three datasets show that SFT makes models more likely to use contexts that are easy to understand, such as containing high length, context-query similarity, and fluency. Post-SFT dynamics may either reinforce or resolve these preferences depending on the training dataset. Our findings reveal that context usage is actively reshaped at each IFT stage, and designing a balanced IFT dataset is important in ensuring robust context utilization of instruction-tuned models.
Authors: Bastien Vuillod, Kevin Hector, Pierre-Alain Moellic, Jean-Max Dutertre, Olivier Potin
Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) allows a set of clients to collectively train a global model without sharing local training data. Giving the responsibility of the training to decentralized actors may lead to poisoning attacks: clients controlled by malicious third party potentially poison the training dataset to install a backdoor in neural networks. In FL, these backdoor attacks rely solely on algorithmic approach, however, recent advances in hardware faults threats (e.g, Rowhammer) have widen the overall attack surface. In the context of federated model adaptation, we introduce a novel category of backdoor attack against FL systems that relies on model poisoning based on hardware-fault attacks. More precisely, we propose a task-agnostic backdoor attack that is implanted during the FL training time by inducing hardware faults (bit-flips) in parameters of a single local model. The backdoor is crafted during a previous offline phase from the pretrained model initially used by the FL system. Our results show that a backdoor can be successfully applied on different type of models and datasets. Typically, with up to 10 faults per malicious client occurrence and 19 total occurrences on a ResNet-18 are enough to reach 94% of attack success rate. Finally, we discuss the practicality and the robustness of the attack potential defenses, while putting into perspective the practical constraints of Rowhammer, which is the preferred attack vector for this type of threats.
Authors: Yuhan Ma, Stefan Schmid
Abstract: Tool-using large language model (LLM) agents face two distinct security failures: unauthorized external actions and exposure of sensitive plaintext inside the runtime before any final output check can intervene. Existing defenses usually protect one boundary, either the planner/runtime or the action sink, and therefore do not by themselves secure both surfaces. We present SecureClaw, a dual-boundary architecture that places authorization at the effect sink and plaintext confinement at the read boundary. Sensitive reads pass through a trusted gateway that replaces raw values with opaque handles and, in the evaluated deployment, bounded summaries as an explicit declassification interface. Writes that change external state follow a PREVIEW$\rightarrow$COMMIT protocol in which only a trusted executor may commit the exact canonical request authorized by policy. The runtime can still plan over summaries and symbolic references, but cannot directly dereference secrets or perform side effects. Across AgentDojo, AgentLeak, and Agent Security Bench (ASB), SecureClaw is the only defense we evaluate in a common harness that simultaneously retains usable task utility and achieves 0\% attack success rate (ASR) on ASB, 0.64\% ASR on AgentDojo, and 3.23\% overall leak on AgentLeak's attacked parity lane, which measures final-output and internal-relay leakage.
Authors: Yuhan Ma, Yong Li, Stefan Schmid
Abstract: Two-server secure inference allows a client to query a hosted large language model (LLM) without revealing prompts or embeddings. Recent GPU systems based on function secret sharing (FSS) make linear layers efficient, but fixed-point nonlinearities and helper operations remain a bottleneck because each operator is typically implemented as a bespoke protocol with its own comparisons, wrap-around corrections, and preprocessing material. We present FuseFSS, a compiler that replaces per-operator protocol design with a single compilation pipeline. For each scalar fixed-point operator, a compact specification lists its interval partition, low-degree arithmetic pieces, and required predicate bits. The compiler emits two batched FSS evaluations on the public masked value: one packed comparison that returns all predicate bits, and one vector interval lookup that returns the active coefficients and constants. Compared to the current state-of-the-art FSS-based GPU secure inference, FuseFSS preserves accuracy while achieving a $1.24\times$--$1.50\times$ end-to-end speedup and reducing online communication by $9\%$--$16\%$ on BERT and GPT-style models; preprocessing is also lighter, with $14\%$--$23\%$ lower key-generation time and $20\%$--$24\%$ smaller keys.
Authors: Shixiong Jiang, Taozheng Zhu, Fanxin Kong
Abstract: Offline safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) enables policy learning without online interactions, making it suitable for safety-critical systems such as robotics systems. However, its reliance on static datasets exposes offline Safe RL to data poisoning attacks, where adversaries inject malicious samples that compromise safety and induce unsafe policy behavior. In this work, we propose a new learning paradigm, named safe reinforcement unlearning (Safe-RULE), used as a defense framework to remove the influence of poisoned data without retraining from scratch or requiring access to the original training environment. We further extend reinforcement unlearning to offline Safe RL by explicitly accounting for both task performance and safety constraints during the unlearning process. Experiments across benchmark Safe RL tasks demonstrate that our approach effectively enhances safety performance against data poisoning attacks.
Authors: Jiacheng Li, Yize Guo, Jiabin Guo, Qingchen Liu, Jiahu Qin
Abstract: Vision-language-action models have shown strong promise for robot manipulation, yet raw language is primarily needed to specify task intent rather than to be repeatedly processed during high-frequency low-level execution. Motivated by this separation, we propose a cerebello-thalamic-inspired vision-action model (CT-VAM) for efficient task-conditioned visuomotor control. CT-VAM acts as a compact local execution policy that predicts action chunks from dualview visual observations, proprioception, and a lightweight task condition, potentially enabling a practical cloud-edge paradigm in which high-level semantic reasoning can be handled by large models while fast closed-loop control runs on local hardware. To fuse heterogeneous inputs effectively, CT-VAM introduces TARS (Thalamic Action Routing Stream), a stream-separated conditional attention decoder that independently routes action, visual and task streams, preventing dense sensory tokens from overwhelming compact task-relevant conditions. With only 68M parameters, CT-VAM achieves LIBERO success rates competitive with substantially larger VLA models, while reducing inference latency. Together with flow-consistent inpainting for asynchronous chunk execution, CT-VAM supports high-frequency control and demonstrates robust realworld deployment on resource-constrained robotic platforms.
Authors: Muhammad Haris Khan, Joel wester
Abstract: People are increasingly using AI for creative tasks such as writing. While adoption continues to grow, this form of use risks undermining individual creativity locally and reducing the heterogeneity of creative output at scale. In response, we introduce the Semantic Repulsion Technique (SRT) and evaluate it both computationally and through a study with 16 participants who regularly use AI for creative tasks. Our computational assessment reveals that SRT increases semantic diversity by 85--167\% while reducing consensus phrases by 43--95\% across task modes. In the user study, SRT outputs received higher usefulness ($p = .019$, $W = .208$) and coherence ratings ( $p = .006$, $W = .260$); 68.8\% of participants were willing to use SRT-Strong for multiple tasks versus 18.8\% for baselines. Originality and coherence ratings were positively correlated across all systems ($\rho = +.40$ to $+.67$), suggesting that divergence need not compromise readability. Taken together, these preliminary findings can inform the design of AI systems that aim to support everyday creativity without contributing to homogenization.
Authors: Piera Riccio
Abstract: AI minidramas (also known as fruit dramas) are short, algorithmically distributed generative AI video series featuring anthropomorphized characters that have recently emerged as a widespread phenomenon on social media platforms. This paper argues that despite their seemingly innocuous aesthetic, these videos reproduce deeply gendered narrative structures in which female characters are systematically associated with moral transgression, sexual betrayal, and reproductive capacity, and that several plots also encode the logic of racialization, i.e., the process by which visible bodily difference is morally loaded. Drawing on feminist film theory, critical race theory, and platform studies, it further argues that the generative AI aesthetic of these videos, characterized by softness, roundness, and visual cuteness, functions as a mechanism of aesthetic laundering, neutralizing the ideological weight of these narratives and enabling their circulation despite content moderation systems. This paper approaches these questions through personal observation and close reading, reflecting on the specific affordances of generative AI that make this phenomenon both possible and culturally consequential for the field of computational creativity.
Authors: Yongzhong Xu
Abstract: Interpretability increasingly treats groups of components, not individual units, as the basic object, and proposes to find them by clustering co-activation statistics. We ask whether such a cheap signal actually identifies an attention-head circuit. Adapting a sparse-autoencoder clustering recipe to attention heads -- but validating by causal ablation rather than reconstruction -- we cluster heads and then run a closure test: ablate the discovered community and compare per-example damage to matched-random controls. Across two dense 1B-scale models (Pythia 1B, OLMo 1B) and two input distributions, the communities pass closure. In a Mixture-of-Experts model (OLMoE-1B-7B), route-conditional clustering recovers a statistically real signal that nonetheless does not survive closure -- ablation improves loss, the wrong direction. Extending closure across training, attention-target selectivity and participation ratio decouple from function in both directions. We conclude that a cheap signal is a circuit proposal, not a confirmed circuit; closure is what separates them.
Authors: Mohamed Sayed, Wolfram Burgard, Tanja Katharina Kaiser
Abstract: Cooperative object transportation is essential in numerous domains, including industrial to domestic services. A popular transportation strategy is to carry objects on top of multi-robot systems. The corresponding task is typically solved by decomposing it into three interconnected subproblems: formation control, cooperative navigation, and collision avoidance. A particular challenge posed by real-world objects is their potentially arbitrary shape and non-uniform mass distribution, necessitating robot formations that securely support the object. In this work, we address the challenge of pattern formation control for transporting such real-world objects by proposing a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning approach. Our approach enables a multi-robot system to autonomously position itself underneath an object to support its weight while avoiding obstacles during the formation process. Our evaluations with diverse environments and varying numbers of robots show that our approach leads to policies that reliably produce balanced formations and generalize to cluttered scenes and objects with complex geometry and non-uniform mass distribution.
Authors: Rakibul Hasan Rajib, Mengxin Zheng, Qian Lou
Abstract: Multi-turn LLM agents interleave model calls with external tool invocations, shifting serving from stateless request processing to stateful program execution. Serving these workloads requires scheduling, KV-cache management, and routing policies that use program-level context, including turn dependencies, tool-induced gaps, and reusable KV state. Evaluating such policies directly on real systems is costly, since each design point may require dedicated accelerator time across arrival rates, model scales, serving-instance counts, and memory hierarchies. Simulation offers a scalable alternative, but existing LLM serving simulators target stateless request-level workloads and therefore omit the core dynamics of agent serving: multi-turn program execution, cross-turn cache locality, and KV-cache residency during tool gaps. We present AGENTSERVESIM, a hardware-aware simulator for multi-turn LLM agent serving. AGENTSERVESIM evaluates serving policies at program granularity through composable modules: a Program Orchestrator preserves program identity and turn order, a Tool Simulator materializes tool-induced gaps, a Session-Aware Router maintains program-to-instance affinity for cache-aware dispatch, and a KV Residency Model tracks policy-defined KV placement across HBM, host DRAM/CXL, and eviction. Across real serving deployments and hardware configurations, AGENTSERVESIM reproduces real-system behavior within 6% error across key performance metrics while running entirely on commodity CPUs. These results show that AGENTSERVESIM enables controlled, repeatable exploration of agent-serving policies without requiring exhaustive deployment on costly accelerators.
Authors: Mohammad Hemmati, Gbemi Oluleye, Vassilis M. Charitopoulos
Abstract: The rapid expansion of AI globally has led to the proliferation of energy-intensive hyperscale data centres (DCs), making them as a structurally challenging component in power system planning and operation. Using a spatially explicit optimisation model of Europe across 21 AI growth scenarios, we systematically quantify additional demand, capacity requirements, emissions, and operational impacts of DCs. Results indicate that AI could drive 73-723 TWh of extra demand by 2050, risking cumulative emissions overshoots of 67-181 MtCO2 between 2030 and 2050. Our analysis indicates that after 2030, the geography of AI infrastructure will be shaped more by firm power and system flexibility than by the mere abundance of clean energy. In moderate scenarios, AI requires an additional of 200 hours of firm generation, which increases LCOE by 35 EUR/MWh in key hubs. We show that even under the pessimistic scenarios, existing infrastructure would require 70 GW additional capacity, while under managed growth pathways, this expansion could reach 226 GW. We further find DCs workload dynamics strongly shape energy dispatch, system flexibility, and emissions, while improved efficiency significantly reduces capacity needs, and system peaks. While our findings suggest that net-zero targets for 2050 may be achieved, critical emission risks may appear in the intermediate years, and the EU may compromise its carbon-neutral goals unless policies adapt to this accelerating digital transformation.
Authors: Haodi Hu, Chung-Ta Huang, Jing Liu, Ye Wang, Kei Suzuki, Matthew Brand, Toshiaki Koike-Akino
Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies provide strong priors for language-conditioned manipulation, but remain brittle in off-nominal states requiring targeted recovery. We propose ReCoVLA -- a failure-conditioned residual recovery framework that keeps a pretrained VLA policy frozen, uses an external vision-language model (VLM) to infer the failure mode and recovery stage, and compiles a structured reward from task-relevant components. Rather than using the VLM to generate actions or rewards directly, ReCoVLA uses it as a semantic reward selector: it predicts a recovery descriptor and reward mask for in-simulation residual-policy training, followed by zero-shot sim-to-real deployment of the trained recovery policies. This decouples high-level failure understanding from low-level corrective control to support different VLAs. Experiments across short-horizon, long-horizon, and contact-rich manipulation tasks show that ReCoVLA outperforms the tested baselines on average. In simulation, our reward compiler improves average success from 36.7% for the fine-tuned $\pi_{0.5}$ baseline to 66.7%. In physical zero-shot sim-to-real experiments, ReCoVLA achieves the best average performance, with 61.7% success.
Authors: Debojyoti Biswas, Xianbiao Hu
Abstract: 3D object detection is the backbone of perception for automated vehicles (AV) and broader intelligent transportation systems applications. Long-range detection is challenging because sensing evidence is sparse; yet this ``long-range'' scenario is routine in traffic. Although >30m is often labeled long-range in computer vision, on roadways it affords only approx. 1-2s for perception and decision-making. Under such extreme sparsity, two core challenges arise. First, early multimodal fusion tends to discard sparsity information and inject noise from empty or falsely occupied cells, degrading long-range recall. Second, context-agnostic uniform channel supervision favors dense and near-range samples, leaving far and small objects under-optimized, delaying the earliest detection of distant objects. We propose ``Ask The Neighbor'' (ATN3D), a LiDAR-Radar framework tailored for sparse-range conditions. ATN3D introduces (i) Density-aware early fusion with cross-modal gating that conditions fusion on per-voxel density/sparsity and Radar evidence, (ii) Occupancy-gated neighborhood aggregation with circular kernels to aggregate only from credible cells, (iii) Evidence-conditioned channel self-attention to adapt channel weights with weather/range, and (iv) a Range-aware loss that re-balances classification and localization by distance, aligning training with distance-stratified evaluation. On the VoD benchmark across clear and foggy conditions, ATN3D surpasses strong baselines: +3.55% mAP in clear weather and +8.41% mAP under simulated heavy fog; for >30m objects, gains are +3.33% (clear) and +2.09% (heavy fog). These results indicate earlier and more reliable long-range detections under sparse sensing in on-road traffic.
Authors: Hetvi Shastri, Pragya Sharma, Walid A. Hanafy, David Irwin, Mani Srivastava, Prashant Shenoy
Abstract: Foundation models (FMs) are increasingly used as backbones for downstream tasks across language, vision, time-series, and multimodal applications. Yet existing model-serving systems deploy each customized task as an independent model instance, thereby replicating heavyweight backbones, wasting accelerator memory, and losing opportunities to amortize batching and loading costs. This paper presents FMplex, a serving system that treats FM backbones as a virtualization substrate for deployment sharing. FMplex presents each task with a virtual foundation model (vFM), a logically private FM instance backed by a shared physical FM. This abstraction lets independently customized tasks share a backbone while preserving task-specific extensions, independent lifecycles, and task-level isolation. In addition, we propose a batch-aware fair-queueing scheduler that combines weighted task-level sharing with inter- and intra-task batching across colocated tasks. We implement a FMplex-based serving stack spanning task construction, sharing-aware deployment, and runtime execution. Across 7 FM backbones (16 variants) and 92 downstream tasks, FMplex reduces latency by up to 80% over spatial partitioning and 33.3% over best-effort co-location, while hosting up to 6x more tasks at cluster scale.
Authors: Samuele Punzo, Niccol\`o Caselli, Ippokratis Pantelidis, Francesco Massafra, Salvatore Lo Sardo, Mohammadreza Salehi
Abstract: We study whether pretrained video foundation models encode intuitive-physics information in their frozen representations, and how this information varies across model families, layers, and probe types. Using frozen-feature probing on IntPhys2 and Minimal Video Pairs (MVP), we compare predictive joint-embedding models (V-JEPA), masked reconstruction models (VideoMAE), and a diffusion-based video generator (LTX-Video). V-JEPA achieves the strongest overall results across benchmarks, especially with probes that model temporal dynamics, while VideoMAE remains competitive and LTX-Video recovers weaker but non-trivial signal. Layerwise analyses show that physics-relevant information is weakest in early layers and becomes most accessible at intermediate-to-late depth, and temporal controls show that disrupting frame order substantially reduces performance, especially on MVP. Together, these results suggest that intuitive-physics knowledge emerges reliably in pretrained video representations, but its accessibility depends strongly on pretraining paradigm, representational depth, and readout mechanism.
Authors: Luciano Duarte, Olga Ovcharenko, Sebastian Schelter
Abstract: Multi-modal data management has emerged as a central research topic in the database community, spanning data integration, semantic query processing, and data quality assessment. Despite this growing interest, the community lacks large-scale, real-world datasets combining tables, text, and images. We present ArtiFact, a multi-modal cultural heritage dataset of 651045 museum records collected from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Rijksmuseum. We demonstrate the utility of ArtiFact through two downstream tasks. For cross-modal error detection, we introduce a curated taxonomy of seven error categories injected into 130209 records and show that reliably detecting subtle domain-specific errors such as material anachronisms and temporal shifts remain an open challenge. For semantic query processing, we show that current systems struggle with queries involving cultural proximity, ambiguous object types, and historically contingent terminology. Our results position ArtiFact as a challenging benchmark for multi-modal data management research.
Authors: Tianyu Ruan, Fengzhuo Zhang, Shuche Wang, Shihua Zhang
Abstract: Muon has recently emerged as a state-of-the-art optimizer for pretraining Large Language Models (LLMs) and vision classifiers. Despite its efficiency advantage over Adam and SGD, the feature-learning advantage of Muon remains unclear. This paper investigates Muon's feature-learning advantage through the lens of robustness and transferability. First, by evaluating pretrained models on corrupted images and texts, we show that features learned by Muon are consistently more robust than those learned by Adam and SGD across different architectures, including transformers and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Using trained layer-wise probes, we further show that this robustness advantage is reflected in larger logit margins across layers. Second, by training linear classifiers or fine-tuning full models from pretrained parameters on downstream tasks, we demonstrate that Muon-learned features transfer more effectively than those learned by Adam and SGD. This transferability advantage is further supported by the diversity of hidden states across layers, as measured by effective rank. Finally, in a representative classification problem with multi-component features, we prove that Muon attains larger margins and higher effective rank than Adam and SGD, providing theoretical support for our empirical findings.
Authors: Ang Li, Sean McLeish, Haozhe Chen, Nimit Kalra, Zaiqian Chen, Artem Gazizov, Venkata Anoop Suhas Kumar Morisetty, Bhavya Kailkhura, Harshitha Menon, Zhuang Liu, Brian R. Bartoldson, Tom Goldstein, Sanae Lotfi, Micah Goldblum, Pavel Izmailov
Abstract: Long-context language model inference is bottlenecked by memory, as the KV cache grows with context length. Recent techniques to compress the KV cache fall short: they either degrade model quality substantially or require considerable time and compute to compress a single long prompt. Furthermore, many methods require the input to fit within the target model's context window, and are generally incompatible with modern production inference engines. Encoder-decoder compressors, which map a long token sequence to a shorter sequence of latent embeddings consumed by a decoder, are an appealing alternative in principle. However, existing approaches are not competitive with KV cache compression on the accuracy-efficiency frontier. In this work, we revisit encoder-decoder compression and close this gap. We first perform an architecture search, pre-training many variants from scratch to determine how best to design and train encoder-decoder compressors. Guided by our findings, we continually pre-train a family of 0.6B-encoder, 4B-decoder models on over 350B tokens each, at compression ratios of 1:4, 1:8, and 1:16. We introduce Latent Context Language Models (LCLMs), a family of compressors that improve the Pareto frontier across general-task performance, compression speed, and peak memory usage. We demonstrate that LCLMs serve as efficient backbones for long-horizon agents, letting the agent skim through a compressed long context and adaptively expand relevant segments on demand.
Authors: Mateo Diaz-Bone, Daniel Caraballo, Florian Scheidegger, Thomas Frick, Mattia Rigotti, Andrea Bartezzaghi, Roy Assaf, Niccolo Avogaro, Yagmur G. Cinar, Brown Ebouky, Filip M. Janicki, Piotr S. Kluska, Cezary Skura, Cristiano Malossi
Abstract: Recent Anomaly Detection methods achieve perfect detection and segmentation scores on well-established datasets, such as MVTec. However, many of these methods face challenges when foundational assumptions - such as consistent object scale, viewpoint, background, illumination, and centered placement - are violated. Those variations that occur render anomaly detection methods unusable in many real-world scenarios. To address these limitations, we introduce three key contributions: (1) a visual prompting pipeline that isolates objects using foreground-background masking; (2) a mechanism for unfreezing the teacher in student-teacher models to improve domain adaptability; and (3) a data augmentation strategy leveraging diffusion-generated synthetic images to enhance anomaly detection performance. We achieve a 3.5 percentage point improvement over the previous state-of-the-art on the challenging AeBAD dataset by using the Masked Multiscale Reconstruction (MMR) model as our backbone.
Authors: Yinyu Huang, Yilin Zhang, Sofia Michopoulou, Christopher Kipps, Rahman Attar
Abstract: Alzheimer's disease (AD) progression is highly heterogeneous and is typically observed through sparse and irregular longitudinal data, posing challenges for prediction and personalised monitoring. Existing machine learning approaches have improved AD prediction using multimodal data, yet often focus on static classification or cohort-level risk estimation, providing limited support for subject-specific modelling and uncertainty-aware reasoning. To address these limitations, we present a personalised digital twin framework for AD prediction and scenario-based analysis using multimodal longitudinal data. The proposed approach integrates complementary modelling strategies to capture clinical transitions and temporal dependencies across visits. Using data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), including cognitive assessments, clinical variables, and MRI-derived phenotypes, the framework predicts cognitive status and diagnostic categories while quantifying predictive uncertainty and enabling patient-specific what-if trajectory analysis. Evaluation on leak-free subject-level splits demonstrates strong performance in score forecasting and diagnosis classification. In this sparse and irregular ADNI setting, transition-based modelling of adjacent visits achieved higher predictive accuracy than the sequence-based branch, suggesting that local transition modelling may be more data-efficient. While sequence models remain valuable for uncertainty-aware trajectory forecasting, local transition modelling offers a more data-efficient and robust predictive strategy. These findings highlight the importance of aligning temporal modelling strategies with clinical data structure and suggest that transition-based digital twin formulations may provide a practical and interpretable approach for personalised disease forecasting in neurodegenerative disorders.
Authors: Dohwan Kim, Jung-Woo Choi
Abstract: While discriminative models for multi-channel speech separation excel in reference-based metrics, they often exhibit suboptimal human listening quality. To address this, we propose a novel MeanFlow-based one-step generative corrector (MeCo). MeCo learns a conditional average velocity field to map discriminative estimates directly onto the clean speech manifold in a single step. To maximize one-step generation performance, we introduce Data-Space Optimization (DSO). DSO integrates an $\mathbf{x}_r$-loss, which penalizes prediction errors on longer displacement intervals to serve as a generative objective for human listening quality, with an Endpoint SI-SDR loss that directly optimizes terminal signal fidelity. Experiments demonstrate that MeCo achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance with minimal computational overhead, simultaneously achieving superior signal fidelity and human listening quality in both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios.
Authors: Dmitrii Vasilev
Abstract: Numeric format proliferation in machine learning hardware -- FP8 (E4M3 and E5M2), BF16, MXFP4, microscaling block formats, and dozens of research variants -- has outpaced the availability of vendor-neutral, bit-exact reference material. Engineers porting models across accelerators encounter silent divergences that are difficult to diagnose without a shared ruler. This paper describes a catalog of 84 numeric formats spanning 13 families, a suite of six bit-exact conformance packs covering GF16, MXFP4 element, BF16, FP8 E4M3, FP8 E5M2, and E8M0 block scale, and an IEEE P3109 v3.2.0 cross-walk that maps each pack to its corresponding standards-track configured format. Each pack is a self-contained JSON document with a SHA-256 fingerprint, a shared row schema, and an anchor vector that encodes 3.0 -- the identity phi^2 + 1/phi^2 = 3 -- as a cross-pack sanity check. Packs are cross-validated against ml_dtypes 0.5.4 (Google/JAX); any divergence is documented explicitly and interpreted as a spec-permitted interpretation gap rather than hidden. The work is framed as registry filling: it does not propose new formats, make model-accuracy claims, or assert superiority over any vendor's implementation. All artifacts are publicly available at https://github.com/gHashTag/t27 under an open license.
Authors: Abhinav Mishra, Kumar Sharad
Abstract: Delegation-scoped execution is not identifiable from standard observables: audit logs and execution traces can be identical under multiple incompatible delegation assignments. This gap is especially acute in LLM-based agentic systems, where agents dynamically select tools, vary execution sequences across runs for the same instruction, and spawn cooperating sub-agents. These dynamics fragment and interleave traces, making delegation-scoped reconstruction from causal structure alone structurally underdetermined. Although individual actions are authorized and logged, existing audit, tracing, and security schemas lack the semantics to reconstruct what actions occurred under a given delegation across heterogeneous systems. We focus on delegation-scoped attribution and access/share footprint reconstruction, not intent inference or reasoning reconstruction. We present an agent-aware observability substrate consisting of a lightweight gateway and a common information model that binds delegation context at execution time. This enables reliable cross-tool delegation-scoped reconstruction and direct forensic queries without heuristic time-window correlation.
Authors: Blake Bullwinkel, Eugenia Kim, Amanda Minnich, Mark Russinovich
Abstract: AI red teaming must continually adapt to evolving attackers and defenders. Reinforcement learning offers a promising approach to discovering novel attacks, and co-training methods can produce more robust defenders in tandem. Recent works have demonstrated the efficacy of attacker-defender co-training by applying PPO and DPO, but report that GRPO is unstable in this setting. We introduce AdvGRPO, a co-training framework that makes GRPO viable for joint attacker-defender optimization using dense multi-channel rewards and decoupled advantage normalization. Training progresses through a curriculum from single-turn to closed-loop multi-turn attacks before bootstrapping co-training, where attacker and defender models are updated in alternation. We show that our method can produce highly effective and transferable attacks and that co-trained defenders outperform baselines on safety benchmarks.
Authors: Sherwin Varghese, Matthew Wicker, Alessio Lomuscio
Abstract: With AI increasingly deployed in safety-critical systems, providing formal robustness guarantees for the underlying models is essential. Existing verification methods either rely on overly conservative approximations or incur prohibitive computational costs. For example, the use of lp-norm perturbations in video settings encodes the belief that the adversary can inject noise in every video frame. In practice, adversarial perturbations exhibit structured spatial and temporal correlations, constrained to lower-dimensional, semantically meaningful subspaces. In this work, we study robustness verification of 3D CNNs processing video and volumetric inputs, targeting applications in action recognition (UCF-101), autonomous driving (Udacity), and medical imaging (MedMNIST) exploiting realistic assumptions on adversarial strength by modelling them as spatio-temporal constraints - where the attacker can modify either a subset of frames or patches within a set of consecutive frames. We demonstrate that modelling realistic constraints enables tighter approximations. We introduce Spatio-Temporal Bound Propagation (STBP), a verification framework that computes an exact closed-form characterization of the first convolutional layer and propagates certified bounds through subsequent layers using scalable approximations. Computing the exact closed form provides the tightest bounds for the first convolutional layer. Thus, we utilise approximation methods in the remainder of the network. To spur further progress in this field, we propose ST-Bench, a verification benchmark for autonomous driving and activity recognition, to systematically evaluate verifiable robustness. Compared to existing verification-based approaches, STBP provides stronger robustness guarantees with significantly improved scalability, achieving 1.7x higher certified robust accuracy under identical perturbation budgets.
Authors: Quinn Pfeifer, Ethan Pronovost, Paarth Shah, Khimya Khetarpal, Siddhartha Srinivasa, Abhishek Gupta
Abstract: Parametric imitation learning via behavior cloning can suffer from poor generalization to out-of-distribution states due to compounding errors during deployment. We show that reusing the training data during inference via a semi-parametric retrieval-based imitation learning approach can alleviate this challenge. We present Difference-Aware Retrieval Policies for Imitation Learning (DARP), a semi-parametric retrieval-based imitation learning approach that addresses this limitation by reparameterizing the imitation learning problem in terms of local neighborhood structure rather than direct state-to-action mappings. Instead of learning a global policy, DARP trains a model to predict actions based on $k$-nearest neighbors from expert demonstrations, their corresponding actions, and the relative distance vectors between neighbor states and query states. DARP requires no additional assumptions beyond those made for standard behavior cloning -- it does not require additional data collection, online expert feedback, or task-specific knowledge. We demonstrate consistent performance improvements of 15-46% over standard behavior cloning across diverse domains, including continuous control and robotic manipulation, and across different representations, including high-dimensional visual features. Code and demos are available at https://weirdlabuw.github.io/darp-site/.
Authors: Andries Rosseau, Robert M\"uller, Ann Now\'e
Abstract: Continual training of deep neural networks under non-stationarity often leads to a progressive loss of plasticity, eventually limiting further learning. We relate plasticity to the empirical Neural Tangent Kernel, and identify dynamical isometry (the condition that layer-wise Jacobian singular values remain close to one) as a key mechanism for preserving plasticity in continual learning. We revisit a class of networks that are almost-everywhere isometric while remaining universal Lipschitz function approximators, demonstrating that near-dynamical isometry is compatible with expressive nonlinear representations. For general architectures, we propose an efficient isometry-promoting regularization scheme and identify a novel mechanism by which it can reactivate dormant ReLU units. Building on this, we introduce AdamO, an Adam-style adaptive optimizer that decouples isometry regularization from gradient updates, analogous to AdamW. We further reinterpret prior plasticity-preserving approaches through the lens of dynamical isometry, showing that they target only a partial measure of isometry. Across supervised and reinforcement-learning continual-learning benchmarks designed to induce plasticity loss, our methods consistently match or outperform existing approaches.
Authors: Alexander Chulzhanov, Soeren Eberhardt, Arjun Mukherjee
Abstract: Neural machine translation for digitally low-resource Indigenous languages is often hindered by extreme data scarcity, prompting reliance on extractive web-scraping. To ensure data sovereignty, this study introduces a data synthesis methodology to bootstrap NMT models without scraping target-language parallel text. Focusing on Q'eqchi' Mayan, we transformed community-sourced dictionaries into a massive synthetic corpus, utilizing Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) via LoRA adapters on an mT5-base model. In-domain evaluation demonstrates high structural acquisition (BLEU 42.02), proving that synthetic constraints effectively teach complex agglutinative morphology and VOS word order. However, evaluation against an organic glossary reveals a structural-semantic gap (BLEU 0.59), where the model maintains grammatical integrity but lacks the lexical grounding of natural language. The model exhibits overfitting to the constrained structural variance of the synthetic templates; despite high semantic entropy in the pipeline, it struggles with the syntactic fluidity of natural language, forcing organic inputs into rigid learned patterns. Furthermore, an ablation study utilizing a Multi-Task Learning architecture resulted in negative transfer, suggesting that auxiliary tasks competed for limited parameter capacity within the LoRA adapters, causing over-optimization for synthetic markers at the expense of organic flexibility. Ultimately, we establish that synthetic bootstrapping is a highly effective structural primer, but requires authentic data for semantic refinement via Curriculum Learning.
Authors: Yifan Wang
Abstract: Hard safety filters are increasingly placed downstream of learned controllers to guarantee constraint satisfaction at run time. Yet a filtered controller that never violates a constraint may still have learned nothing about safety: the filter can silently repair an incompetent upstream policy, so that post-filter success measures the filter, not the policy. We argue that safe policy learning should ask who earns the safety - the policy or its protective layers - and we make this question measurable. We introduce Intervention-Aware Variational Quantum Differentiable Predictive Control (IA-VQC-DPC), which (i) trains a compact variational quantum circuit (VQC) policy under a primal-dual intervention budget that penalizes reliance on a differentiable Control-Barrier-Function (CBF) projection, and (ii) is evaluated with a safety-attribution protocol that decomposes the executed-trajectory correction into a CBF term and a deployment runtime-guard term, and stress-tests the policy with guard-off evaluation. On closed-loop, high-fidelity BOPTEST building-control emulators (5 seeds, 60 episodes per method), intervention-aware training significantly lowers the quantum policy's raw pre-filter violation and total safety-layer reliance (both p < 10^-4) with no significant energy regression; at an equal approximately 400-parameter budget the quantum policy is significantly safer and more comfortable than a matched classical policy. Guard-off evaluation confirms the improvement is policy-level and exposes a valuable negative result: a learned differentiable energy head is only safe when paired with a distribution-aware runtime guard. The attribution protocol is general beyond quantum policies and buildings.
Authors: Shizhe Lin, Ladan Tahvildari
Abstract: Multi-agent code generation offers a promising paradigm for autonomous software development by simulating the human software engineering lifecycle. However, system reliability remains hindered by LLM hallucinations and error propagation across interacting agents. While semantic entropy provides a principled way to quantify uncertainty without ground-truth answers, current methods often rely on costly LLM-driven equivalence checks. In this work, we introduce Fast Adaptive Semantic Entropy (FASE), a novel metric that approximates functional correctness based on the minimum spanning tree of structural and semantic dissimilarity graphs. Evaluations on HumanEval and BigCodeBench demonstrate that FASE outperforms state-of-the-art semantic entropy by LLM entailment, achieving a 25% average improvement in Spearman correlation and a 19% increase in ROCAUC score against Pass@1 from ground-truth test cases when using the Qwen3-Embedding-8B model. Furthermore, by eliminating costly LLM-driven equivalence evaluation, FASE incurs negligible computational overhead, requiring only approximately 0.3% of the runtime cost of traditional semantic entropy approaches. These results position FASE as a practical, cost-effective solution for optimizing uncertainty quantification in real-world multi-agent workflows.
Authors: Udvas Das, Waris Radji, Debabrota Basu, Odalric-Ambrym Maillard
Abstract: We consider a variant of the linear contextual stochastic multi-armed bandits, where the learner must provide recommendations to a group of users, each having its personalized preference vector, and in the presence of context distributions that are drifting over time. Under practitioner-friendly assumptions, we reduce this setting to linear bandit with stationary mean but heteroskedastic and non-stationary noise. We further study the case when the learner must ensure the mean reward of each decision must exceed that of a baseline strategy $\boldsymbol{\pi}_0$ at each decision step. We introduce Dri-MED, an algorithm inspired from the linear version of the MED strategy, and carefully adapted to handle the non-stationary heteroskedastic noise. We show that the instance-dependent regret scales as $\tilde{\mathcal O}\left(\frac{\kappa}{\tilde{\Delta}}d^2(\log(T)\right)$, where $\tilde{\Delta}$ is the constraint-aware sub-optimality gap subject to policy $\pi_0$, with variance-aware multiplicative term $\kappa$ that we carefully handle using heteroskedastic regression. We further show Dri-MED enjoys $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(d)$ expected constraint violations. Our numerical results suggest that Dri-MED significantly outperforms conservative baselines that ignores the drift and preference structure.
Authors: Lennart Bastian, Samuel Leventhal, Mustafa Hajij, Tolga Birdal
Abstract: We introduce Topological Neural Operators (TNOs), a principled framework for operator learning on cell complexes that lifts neural operators (NOs) from functions on points and/or edges to topological domains. TNOs represent data as features defined on cells of varying dimension and model their interactions through Discrete Exterior Calculus, enabling explicit cross-dimensional coupling via gradient-, curl-, and divergence-type operators. The key design principle is to decouple where information flows, as governed by fixed topological operators, from how it is transformed (which is learned), yielding models that respect the geometric support of physical quantities and expose conservation and compatibility structure. We further propose Hierarchical TNOs (HTNOs), which incorporate learned coarse complexes to propagate long-range and topology-dependent information. Our framework subsumes existing NOs as a special case, providing a unified perspective on operator learning across discretizations. Across a range of PDE benchmarks, including irregular-geometry flow problems, TNOs and HTNOs improve accuracy; controlled studies further isolate the benefits of native higher-rank and topological structure. Project page: https://circle-group.github.io/research/TNO
Authors: Jisong Cai, Long Ling, Shiwei Chu, Zhongshan Liu, Jiayue Kang, Zhixuan Liang, Wenjie Xu, Yinan Mao, Weinan Zhang, Xiaokang Yang, Ru Ying, Ran Zheng, Yao Mu
Abstract: World-action models have emerged as a promising paradigm for robot manipulation, jointly modeling visual scene dynamics and actions to inject physical priors into policy learning. However, existing world-action models couple world prediction and action execution at the same temporal resolution, forcing the world branch to model near-term frame variations that are redundant and weakly informative. We posit that strictly binding world prediction and action execution to the same temporal rhythm may underutilize the potential of the video branch for embodied control. Therefore, we propose AHA-WAM, an Asynchronous Horizon-Adaptive World-Action Model built on a dual Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture that reorganizes world-action modeling around this temporal asymmetry. AHA-WAM instantiates the video DiT as a low-frequency world planner that maintains rolling key-value memory over past observations and exposes reusable layerwise latent context encoding long-horizon scene evolution, while a high-frequency action DiT executes short action chunks in closed loop by querying this context through layerwise joint attention. To support asynchronous execution, we introduce horizon-adaptive offset training and Observation-Guided Video-Context Routing (OVCR), which together let the action expert exploit long-horizon world context while remaining responsive to real-time execution state without rerunning the video DiT. Experiments on RoboTwin and real-world manipulation tasks show that AHA-WAM achieves state-of-the-art performance without any robot-data pretraining, attaining 92.80% average success on RoboTwin and 78.3% success across 4 real-world tasks, while reaching 24.17 Hz closed-loop control with a 4.59x speedup over Fast-WAM.
Authors: Danqi Zhuang, Jisui Huang, Xiaoyue Xi, Andrew Kiggins, Xiaojie Wang, Ke Chen, Yue Wu
Abstract: Standard diffusion models typically use a single time-homogeneous Gaussian terminal distribution as the reference law for generation. While this choice is analytically convenient and empirically powerful, it provides little explicit structure for data concentrated near low-dimensional manifolds, where different regions of the data distribution may correspond to distinct local geometric or semantic factors. As a result, the reverse model must recover manifold-level structure almost entirely from an unstructured terminal reference distribution. We propose PTL-Diffusion, a proof-of-concept diffusion framework whose forward noising process converges to a nonconstant periodic family of Gaussian terminal laws rather than to a single invariant law. Unlike a phase-conditioned DDPM, where phase information only enters the denoising network while the forward process remains unchanged, PTL-Diffusion embeds phase structure directly into the forward noising dynamics. The proposed construction remains close to standard denoising diffusion models: for a periodically forced Ornstein--Uhlenbeck-type forward process, we derive closed-form forward marginals, the limiting periodic Gaussian terminal family, and explicit Gaussian reverse posteriors, enabling standard noise-prediction training. We also introduce an invariant-average regularization term coupling the phase-conditioned reverse dynamics through the averaged periodic reference law. Experiments on torus and cylinder point-cloud benchmarks and the Olivetti face dataset show that PTL-Diffusion improves manifold-level distributional matching over matched DDPM baselines, reducing phase-conditioned errors, feature-space covariance errors, and nearest-neighbour manifold distances. These results suggest structured terminal reference laws as a promising direction, while motivating more expressive phase constructions and larger-scale evaluations.
Authors: Anton Bolychev, Georgiy Malaniya, Sinan Ibrahim, Pavel Osinenko
Abstract: Training reinforcement learning (RL) policies from scratch is costly: it requires careful reward and environment design, extensive tuning, and substantial computation. Yet many control problems already have a functional but suboptimal policy available as a baseline. This paper proposes a method for embedding such a baseline into the RL training process, simultaneously improving training efficiency relative to from-scratch methods and producing a learning policy that outperforms the baseline. At each step, the method arbitrates between the baseline policy and a trainable learning policy, initially relying strongly on the baseline policy and then progressively transferring agency to the learning policy. By the end of training, the learning policy is a standalone neural network that operates without baseline policy support. The paper formalizes what it means for the baseline policy to be functional: under this policy, the agent reaches a goal set and remains there with high probability. The proposed arbitration mechanism is designed to exploit this property during training, yielding high goal-reaching rates right from the beginning of training. A theoretical analysis provides a formal interpretation of this behavior under stated assumptions and extends it to the final baseline-free regime, where explicit lower bounds are derived for the goal-reaching probability of the standalone learning policy. Empirical results on continuous-control benchmarks show that the proposed method achieves returns that match or exceed those of competitive approaches, while maintaining the highest goal-reaching rates throughout training among the compared methods -- including in the final stage, where the learning policy operates without any baseline support.
Authors: Mingxian Lin, Shengju Qian, Yuqi Liu, Yi-Hua Huang, Yiyu Wang, Wei Huang, Yitang Li, Fan Zhang, Zeyu Hu, Lingting Zhu, Xin Wang, Xiaojuan Qi
Abstract: Vision-language model (VLM) agents are increasingly deployed in interactive game environments. Yet game benchmarks for VLM agents typically report a single first-attempt score per (agent, game) pair, focus on single-agent Solo play, and lack unified protocols for evaluating heterogeneous agent classes (commercial VLMs, open-weight VLMs, and specialized game policies) on the same footing. We address these gaps with OmniGameArena, a real-time benchmark of twelve newly built Unreal Engine 5 games spanning Solo (7), PvP (3), and Coop (2) with unified action interfaces, and the Improvement Dynamics Curve (IDC), an agentic-reflection harness in which a tool-using reflector LLM autonomously refines a bounded skill prompt across multiple rounds. Beyond cold-start leaderboard scores, IDC exposes two additional observables for each (agent, game) pair: how the score evolves across reflection rounds, and how the learned skill behaves on held-out task variants. We report these observables for twelve VLM agents on the cold-start leaderboard and four top agents under IDC.
Authors: Sihao Hu, Tiansheng Huang, Gaowen Liu, Ramana Rao Kompella, Fatih Ilhan, Selim Furkan Tekin, Yichang Xu, Zachary Yahn, Ling Liu
Abstract: Game environments provide rich, controllable settings that stimulate many aspects of real-world complexity. As such, game agents offer a valuable testbed for exploring capabilities relevant to Artificial General Intelligence. Recently, the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) provides new opportunities to endow these agents with generalizable reasoning, memory, and adaptability in complex game environments. This survey offers an up-to-date review of LLM-based game agents (LLMGAs) through a unified reference architecture. At the single-agent level, we synthesize existing studies around three core components: memory, reasoning, and perception-action interfaces, which jointly characterize how language enables agents to perceive, think, and act. At the multi-agent level, we outline how communication protocols and organizational models support coordination, role differentiation, and large-scale social behaviors. To contextualize these designs, we introduce a challenge-centered taxonomy linking six major game genres to their dominant agent requirements, from low-latency control in action games to open-ended goal formation in sandbox worlds. A curated list of related papers is available at https://github.com/git-disl/awesome-LLM-game-agent-papers
URLs: https://github.com/git-disl/awesome-LLM-game-agent-papers
Authors: Zipeng Qiu, Chenyue Li, You Peng, Guangxin He, Binhang Yuan, Chen Wang
Abstract: The advance of large language models (LLMs) has unlocked great opportunities in complex multi-modal data management tasks, particularly in question answering (QA) over complicated multi-table relational data. Despite significant progress, systematically evaluating LLMs on multi-table QA remains a critical challenge due to the inherent complexity of analyzing the modality of relational data structures and the potentially large scale of serialized tabular data. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on single-table QA, failing to capture the intricacies of connections across multiple relational tables, as required in real-world domains such as finance, healthcare, and e-commerce. We present TQA-Bench, a long-context analytical multi-table QA benchmark derived from real-world public datasets, with a flexible sampling mechanism that varies context length (8K--64K tokens) and symbolic extensions for assessing reasoning beyond retrieval and pattern matching. We systematically evaluate a set of LLMs spanning model scales from 2 billion to 671 billion parameters. Our extensive experiments reveal critical insights into the performance of LLMs in multi-table QA, highlighting both challenges and opportunities for advancing their application in complex, data-driven environments.
Authors: Mickael Basson, Philippe Preux
Abstract: We investigate diffusion models to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem. Building on the recent DIFUSCO and T2TCO approaches, we propose IDEQ. IDEQ improves the quality of the solutions by leveraging the constrained structure of the state space of the TSP. Another key component of IDEQ consists in replacing the last stages of DIFUSCO curriculum learning by considering a uniform distribution over the Hamiltonian tours whose orbits by the 2-opt operator converge to the optimal solution as the training objective. Our experiments show that IDEQ improves the state of the art for such neural network based techniques on synthetic instances. More importantly, our experiments show that IDEQ performs very well on the instances of the TSPlib, a reference benchmark in the TSP community: it closely matches the performance of the best heuristics, LKH3, being even able to obtain better solutions than LKH3 on 2 instances of the TSPlib defined on 1577 and 3795 cities. IDEQ obtains 0.3% optimality gap on TSP instances made of 500 cities, and 0.5% on TSP instances with 1000 cities. This sets a new SOTA for neural based methods solving the TSP. Moreover, IDEQ exhibits a lower variance and better scales-up with the number of cities with regards to DIFUSCO and T2TCO.
Authors: Yifei Dong, Fengyi Wu, Qi He, Lingdong Kong, Heng Li, Minghan Li, Zebang Cheng, Yuxuan Zhou, Jingdong Sun, Qi Dai, Alexander G Hauptmann, Zhi-Qi Cheng
Abstract: Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) has been studied mainly in either discrete or continuous spaces, with little attention to dynamic, crowded environments. We present HA-VLN 2.0, a unified benchmark introducing explicit social-awareness constraints. Our contributions are: (i) a standardized task and metrics capturing both goal accuracy and personal-space adherence; (ii) HAPS 2.0 dataset and simulators modeling multi-human interactions, outdoor contexts, and finer language-motion alignment; (iii) benchmarks on 16,844 socially grounded instructions, revealing sharp performance drops of leading agents under human dynamics and partial observability; and (iv) real-world robot experiments validating sim-to-real transfer, with an open leaderboard enabling transparent comparison. Results show that explicit social modeling improves navigation robustness and reduces collisions, underscoring necessity of human-centric approaches. By releasing datasets, simulators, baselines, and protocols, HA-VLN 2.0 provides a strong foundation for safe, human-aware navigation research.
Authors: Francesco Sovrano
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can amplify misinformation, undermining societal goals such as the UN SDGs. We study three documented drivers of misinformation (valence framing, information overload, and oversimplification) often shaped by default beliefs. Building on evidence that LLMs encode such defaults (e.g., "joy is positive", "math is complex") and can act as "bags of heuristics", we ask whether belief-driven heuristics behind misinformation-related behaviour can be recovered from black-box LLM behaviour as explicit rules. A key obstacle is that global rule-extraction methods in explainable AI (XAI) are built for numerical input-output data, not text. We address this by eliciting global LLM beliefs and mapping them to numerical scores via statistically validated abstractions, enabling off-the-shelf global XAI to detect belief-driven heuristics. For ground truth, we inject nonlinear behavioural triggers of increasing complexity (univariate, conjunctive, non-convex) into GPT-family and Llama models via system instructions. We find that RuleFit often misses non-univariate triggers, while global SHAP better ranks conjunctive trigger features but yields no symbolic rules. To bridge this gap, we propose RuleSHAP, a rule-extraction algorithm that couples global SHAP aggregates with rule induction to better capture non-univariate triggers, improving MRR@1 over RuleFit by +82% on average. Our results suggest a practical pathway for surfacing behavioural triggers in LLMs.
Authors: Jun Takahashi, Atsunori Moteki, Akiyoshi Uchida, Shoichi Masui, Fan Yang, Kanji Uchino, Yueqi Song, Yonatan Bisk, Graham Neubig, Ikuo Kusajima, Yasuto Watanabe, Hiroyuki Ishida, Koki Nakagawa, Shan Jiang
Abstract: This paper introduces FieldWorkArena, a benchmark for agentic AI targeting real-world field work. With the recent increase in demand for agentic AI, they are built to detect and document safety hazards, procedural violations, and other critical incidents across real-world manufacturing and retail environments. Whereas most agentic AI benchmarks focus on performance in simulated or digital environments, our work addresses the fundamental challenge of evaluating agents in the real-world. In this paper, we improve the evaluation function from previous methods to assess the performance of agentic AI in diverse real-world tasks. Our dataset comprises on-site captured images/videos in factories, warehouses and retails. Tasks were meticulously developed through interviews with site workers and managers. Evaluation results confirmed that performance evaluation considering the characteristics of Multimodal LLM (MLLM) such as GPT-4o is feasible. Furthermore, this study identifies both the effectiveness and limitations of the proposed new evaluation methodology. The complete dataset and evaluation program are publicly accessible on the website (https://en-documents.research.global.fujitsu.com/fieldworkarena/)
URLs: https://en-documents.research.global.fujitsu.com/fieldworkarena/)
Authors: Hudson de Martim
Abstract: Representing the temporal evolution of legal norms is a critical challenge for automated processing. While foundational frameworks exist, they lack a formal pattern for granular, component-level versioning, hindering the deterministic point-in-time reconstruction of legal texts required by reliable AI applications. This paper proposes a structured, temporal modeling pattern grounded in the LRMoo ontology. Our approach models a norm's evolution as a diachronic chain of versioned F1 Works, distinguishing between language-agnostic Temporal Versions (TV), each being a distinct Work, and their monolingual Language Versions (LV), modeled as F2 Expressions. The legislative amendment process is formalized through event-centric modeling, allowing changes to be traced precisely. Using the Brazilian Constitution as a case study, we demonstrate that our architecture enables the exact reconstruction of any part of a legal text as it existed on a specific date. This provides a verifiable semantic backbone for legal knowledge graphs, offering a deterministic foundation for trustworthy legal AI.
Authors: Bradley P. Allen, Prateek Chhikara, Thomas Macaulay Ferguson, Filip Ilievski, Paul Groth
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, but exhibit problems with logical consistency in their output. How can we harness LLMs' broad-coverage parametric knowledge in formal reasoning despite their inconsistency? We present a method for directly integrating an LLM into the interpretation function of the formal semantics for a paraconsistent logic. We evaluate the method empirically using datasets derived from the short-form factuality benchmarks GPQA and SimpleQA, showing that bilateral factuality evaluation improves macro-F1 over a unilateral baseline by roughly 6 percentage points on both benchmarks (at the cost of reduced coverage, as abstention is triggered on inconsistent or uncertain cases). We further describe a proof-of-concept tableau reasoner implementing the method, and apply it to a medication-safety knowledge base of 228 asserted and 712 inferred statements: the system detects 92 gluts corresponding to medically significant errors (e.g., opioids inferred as non-addictive, beta-blockers inferred as safe in asthma) while remaining satisfiable, demonstrating that contradictions are localized rather than causing logical explosion. Unlike prior work, our method offers a theoretical framework with a practical implementation for neurosymbolic reasoning that leverages an LLM's knowledge while preserving the underlying logic's soundness and completeness properties.
Authors: Yiwen Sun, Furong Ye, Zhihan Chen, Ke Wei, Shaowei Cai
Abstract: The Satisfiability problem (SAT) is fundamental in computational complexity theory and has a wide range of industrial applications. Optimizing modern SAT solvers in real-world settings is quite challenging due to their intricate architectures. While automatic configuration frameworks have been developed, they rely on manually constrained search spaces. Here we develop AutoModSAT, a framework that uses large language models (LLMs) to automatically optimize SAT solvers. AutoModSAT combines an LLM-compatible modular solver design, unsupervised prompt optimization to diversify generated functions, and an efficient search procedure based on presearch strategy and a $(1+\lambda)$ evolutionary algorithm. Extensive experiments across a wide range of datasets demonstrate that AutoModSAT achieves $40\%$ performance improvement over the baseline solver and $30\%$ improvement over the state-of-the-art solvers. Moreover, AutoModSAT also attains a notable speedup compared to the parameter-tuned alternatives of the state-of-the-art solvers over most of the test datasets. These results demonstrate the potential of LLM-guided heuristic discovery for optimizing complex SAT solvers.
Authors: Shijie Zhang, Zheng Xiao, Shiyu Liu, Guohao Sun, Kevin Zhang, Xiang Guo, Rujun Guo, Shaoyu Liu, Wangxiao Zhao, Guanjun Jiang
Abstract: Online reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become an effective paradigm for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models, but most methods still optimize reasoning trajectories over the static problem set, wasting rollout budget on solved or overly difficult problems. We propose \textbf{CLPO (Curriculum Learning meets Policy Optimization)}, a self-evolving curriculum framework that uses on-policy rollout accuracy to identify solved, medium-difficulty, and hard problems, then restructures selected tasks according to the model's current capability. Hard problems are simplified to become learnable, while medium-difficulty problems are diversified to provide useful training variation. This allows the learning curriculum to co-evolve with the policy rather than remaining fixed as the model's capability boundary shifts. Rather than treating these rewrites as static data augmentation, CLPO optimizes restructuring trajectories with credit assigned by the downstream accuracy gain of the rewritten problem, requiring no additional human annotations beyond the original verifiable answers. Experiments across mathematical reasoning and out-of-domain general reasoning benchmarks show that CLPO substantially outperforms GRPO and DAPO on Qwen3-8B by 10.21 and 7.75 average points, respectively. Ablation studies on math and code domains further show that both the restructuring mode and the rewriting loss contribute to the final gains, demonstrating that CLPO provides a scalable and robust pathway for eliciting stronger reasoning capabilities through a self-evolving curriculum.
Authors: Haiquan Lu, Gongfan Fang, Xinyin Ma, Qi Li, Xinchao Wang
Abstract: Reasoning models enhance performance by tackling problems in a step-by-step manner, decomposing them into sub-problems and exploring long chains of thought before producing an answer. However, applying extended reasoning to every step introduces substantial redundancy, as sub-problems vary widely in difficulty and complexity: a small number of pivotal steps are genuinely challenging and decisive for the final answer, while many others only involve straightforward revisions or simple computations. Therefore, a natural idea is to endow reasoning models with the ability to adaptively respond to this variation, rather than treating all steps with the same level of elaboration. To this end, we propose MixReasoning, a framework that dynamically adjusts the depth of reasoning within a single response. The resulting chain of thought then becomes a mixture of detailed reasoning on difficult steps and concise inference on simpler ones. Experiments on GSM8K, MATH-500, and AIME show that MixReasoning shortens reasoning length and substantially improves efficiency without compromising accuracy.
Authors: Junkai Zhang, Jingru Gan, Xiaoxuan Wang, Zian Jia, Changquan Gu, Jianpeng Chen, Yanqiao Zhu, Mingyu Derek Ma, Dawei Zhou, Ling Li, Wei Wang
Abstract: Large Language Models have shown strong scientific reasoning ability, but their performance on materials science problems remains less studied. To fill this gap, we introduce MatSciBench, a comprehensive college-level benchmark comprising 1340 problems that span the essential subdisciplines of materials science. MatSciBench features a structured and fine-grained taxonomy that categorizes materials science questions into 6 primary fields and 31 subfields, together with a three-tier difficulty classification based on the reasoning length needed to solve each problem. MatSciBench includes detailed reference solutions for 946 questions, supports process-level error analysis, and contains 315 questions with images for evaluating multimodal reasoning. We evaluate leading thinking and non-thinking LLMs on MatSciBench, and further test three reasoning methods for non-thinking models: basic chain-of-thought prompting, tool augmentation, and self-correction. The results show that current models still face clear limits in college-level materials science reasoning. DeepSeek-R1 achieves the highest score on text-only questions at 75.22% accuracy, and GPT-5 performs the best on questions with images at 53.02%. Our analysis shows that tool augmentation improves many non-thinking models in a token-efficient way, while self-correction often fails to provide reliable gains and can revise correct answers into incorrect ones. We further analyze performance across difficulty levels, reasoning efficiency, multimodal reasoning, and failure patterns, and find that current models are mainly limited by domain knowledge gaps, calculation errors, problem comprehension failures, and difficulty in extracting precise information from scientific figures. Overall, MatSciBench provides a clear testbed for measuring current LLM limitations and guiding future work on scientific reasoning in materials science.
Authors: Minwei Kong, Ao Qu, Xiaotong Guo, Wenbin Ouyang, Chonghe Jiang, Han Zheng, Yining Ma, Dingyi Zhuang, Yuhan Tang, Junyi Li, Shenhao Wang, Haris Koutsopoulos, Hai Wang, Cathy Wu, Jinhua Zhao
Abstract: Optimization modeling underlies critical decision-making across industries, yet remains difficult to automate: natural-language problem descriptions must be translated into precise mathematical formulations and executable solver code. Existing LLM-based approaches typically rely on brittle prompting or costly retraining, both of which offer limited generalization. Recent work suggests that large models can improve via experience reuse, but how to systematically acquire, refine, and reuse such experience in structurally constrained settings remains unclear. We present \textbf{AlphaOPT}, a self-improving experience library that enables LLMs to learn optimization modeling knowledge from limited supervision, including answer-only feedback without gold-standard programs, annotated reasoning traces, or parameter updates. AlphaOPT operates in a continual two-phase cycle: a \emph{Library Learning} phase that extracts solver-verified, structured insights from failed attempts, and a \emph{Library Evolution} phase that refines the applicability of stored insights based on aggregate evidence across tasks. This design allows the model to accumulate reusable modeling principles, improve transfer across problem instances, and maintain bounded library growth over time. Evaluated on multiple optimization benchmarks, AlphaOPT steadily improves as more training data become available (65\% $\rightarrow$ 72\% from 100 to 300 training items) and outperforms the strongest baseline by 9.1\% and 8.2\% on two out-of-distribution datasets. These results demonstrate that structured experience learning, grounded in solver feedback, provides a practical alternative to retraining for complex reasoning tasks requiring precise formulation and execution. All code and data are available at: https://github.com/Minw913/AlphaOPT.
Authors: Nikolaus Holzer, William Fishell, Baishakhi Ray, Mark Santolucito
Abstract: Temporal reasoning involves understanding how systems evolve over time through input-driven state transitions. A key aspect is temporal causal reasoning, causally reasoning about what prior inputs were necessary in causing an observed outcome. While large language models (LLMs) perform well at forward simulation, predicting outputs from inputs, they struggle to identify the minimal causal inputs of outcomes. To study this distinction, we define two tasks: \textit{trace simulation} (SIM), which requires models to simulate system execution, and \textit{minimal causal attribution} (MIN), which identifies the minimal set of inputs necessary for a given outcome. We introduce \textsc{TempoBench}, the first formally verified benchmark for temporal causal reasoning, built from synthesized Mealy machines with controllable complexity and provably correct causal labels. Across frontier models, we observe that despite achieving up to 96\% accuracy on the SIM task, performance on the causal attribution MIN task drops below 25\%; models fail to reason about causal necessity. Over 94\% of causal errors involve overspecification, where models perform retrieval and list all possible inputs rather than reasoning about the minimal causal subset. Fine-tuning on \textsc{TempoBench} training corpus improves causal reasoning and generalizes better than math, code, or instruction training, with gains across standard reasoning benchmarks.
Authors: Jordan Abi Nader, David Lee, Nathaniel Dennler, Andreea Bobu
Abstract: Robots must learn from both what people do and what they say, but either modality alone is often incomplete: physical corrections are grounded but ambiguous in intent, while language expresses high-level goals but lacks physical grounding. We introduce QuickLAP: Quick Language-Action Preference learning, a Bayesian framework that fuses physical and language feedback to infer reward functions in real time. Our key insight is to treat language as a probabilistic observation over the user's latent preferences, clarifying which reward features matter and how physical corrections should be interpreted. QuickLAP uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract reward feature attention masks and preference shifts from free-form utterances, which it integrates with physical feedback in a closed-form update rule. This enables fast, real-time, and robust reward learning that handles ambiguous feedback. In a semi-autonomous driving simulator, QuickLAP reduces reward learning error by over 70% compared to physical-only and heuristic multimodal baselines. A 15-participant user study further validates our approach: participants found QuickLAP significantly more understandable and collaborative, and preferred its learned behavior over baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/MIT-CLEAR-Lab/QuickLAP.
Authors: Ke Chen, Yifeng Wang, Hassan Almosapeeh, Haohan Wang
Abstract: Prompt optimization has become a central mechanism for eliciting strong performance from LLMs, and recent work has made substantial progress by proposing diverse prompt evaluation metrics and optimization strategies. Despite these advances, prompt evaluation and prompt optimization are often developed in isolation, limiting the extent to which evaluation can effectively inform prompt refinement. In this work, we study prompt optimization as a process guided by performance-relevant evaluation signals. To address the disconnect between evaluation and optimization, we propose an evaluation-instructed prompt optimization approach that explicitly connects prompt evaluation with query-dependent optimization. Our method integrates multiple complementary prompt quality metrics into a performance-reflective evaluation framework and trains an execution-free evaluator that predicts prompt quality directly from text, avoiding repeated model executions. These evaluation signals then guide prompt refinement in a targeted and interpretable manner. Empirically, the proposed evaluator achieves 83.7% accuracy in predicting prompt performance. When incorporated into the optimization process, our approach consistently outperforms existing optimization baselines across eight benchmark datasets and three different backbone LLMs. Overall, our results demonstrate that reliable and efficient evaluation signals can serve as an effective foundation for robust and interpretable prompt optimization.
Authors: Alexandre Rocchi, Thomas Fel, Gianni Franchi
Abstract: Two traditions of interpretability have evolved side by side but seldom spoken to each other: Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs), which prescribe what a concept should be, and Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs), which discover what concepts emerge. While CBMs use supervision to align activations with human-labeled concepts, SAEs rely on sparse coding to uncover emergent ones. We show that both paradigms instantiate the same geometric structure: each learns a set of linear directions in activation space whose nonnegative combinations form a concept cone. Supervised and unsupervised methods thus differ not in kind but in how they select this cone. Building on this view, we propose an operational bridge between the two paradigms. CBMs provide human-defined reference geometries, while SAEs can be evaluated by how well their learned cones approximate or contain those of CBMs. This containment framework yields quantitative metrics linking inductive biases -- such as SAE type, sparsity, or expansion ratio -- to emergence of plausible\footnote{We adopt the terminology of \citet{jacovi2020towards}, who distinguish between faithful explanations (accurately reflecting model computations) and plausible explanations (aligning with human intuition and domain knowledge). CBM concepts are plausible by construction -- selected or annotated by humans -- though not necessarily faithful to the true latent factors that organise the data manifold.} concepts. Using these metrics, we uncover a ``sweet spot'' in both sparsity and expansion factor that maximizes both geometric and semantic alignment with CBM concepts. Overall, our work unifies supervised and unsupervised concept discovery through a shared geometric framework, providing principled metrics to measure SAE progress and assess how well discovered concept align with plausible human concepts.
Authors: Laha Ale
Abstract: Developing artificial agents that unify representation, memory, adaptation, and prediction remains a fundamental challenge in artificial intelligence. Here we introduce a geometric framework in which cognitive computation emerges from Riemannian gradient flow on a learned latent manifold. The learned metric encodes representational constraints and computational preferences, while anisotropies in the geometry naturally generate multiple timescales of behaviour, yielding both rapid reactive responses and slower adaptive dynamics without explicit memory modules or recurrent mechanisms. We instantiate this framework through Riemannian representation and dynamics models and evaluate them in partially observable reinforcement-learning environments. Across observation masking, sensory blackouts, dynamics perturbations, and predictive latent-modelling tasks, the proposed approach consistently outperforms feedforward baselines, achieves robustness comparable to recurrent architectures, and produces highly predictable latent trajectories with low long-horizon rollout error. These results suggest that learned latent geometry can serve simultaneously as a substrate for representation, memory, adaptation, and prediction. More broadly, the framework provides a principled connection between dynamical systems, representation learning, and world-model-based intelligence.
Authors: Onat Ozer, Yuchen Wang, Grace Wu, Daniel Dosti, Honghao Zhang, Vivi De La Rue
Abstract: LLMs have shown the capacity to improve their performance on reasoning tasks through reflecting on their mistakes, and acting with these reflections in mind. However, continual reflections of the same LLM onto itself exhibit degeneration of thought, where the LLM continues to repeat the same errors again and again even with the knowledge that its wrong. To address this problem, we instead introduce multi-agent with multi-persona debators as the method to generate reflections. Through out extensive experimentation, we've found that the leads to better diversity of in the reflections generated by the llm agent. We demonstrate an accuracy of 47% EM HotPot QA (question answering) and 82.7% on HumanEval (programming), both performances surpassing reflection with a single llm.
Authors: Abhishek HS, Pavan C Shekar, Arpit Jain, Ashwanth Krishnan
Abstract: Every existing inference-time reasoning framework discards all failure context at problem boundaries, leaving a model solving problem 500 no wiser than it was on problem 1. We present ReTreVal (Reasoning Tree with Validation), a training-free framework that closes this gap through adaptive tree exploration with tool-augmented node refinement, typed-failure backtracking that injects categorized error context into the recovered branch, and a self-rewriting memory that accumulates and revises strategy entries across problems, enabling inference-time cross-problem learning on any fixed, unmodified LLM without fine-tuning. ReTreVal achieves 85.8% pass@1 on MATH-500 (+8.6 pp over Zero-Shot CoT, +8.6 pp over the strongest baseline Self-Refine) and 54.4% on MMLU-Pro (+15.3 pp over Self-Refine), with a 3.4:1 win-to-regression ratio confirming genuine error recovery rather than noise. These capabilities, previously requiring gradient updates, allow a 32B model to compete with much larger single-pass systems.
Authors: Siyuan Gan, Jiaheng Liu, Boyan Wang, Tianpei Yang, Runqing Miao, Yuyao Zhang, Fanyu Meng, Junlan Feng, Linjian Meng, Jing Huo, Yang Gao
Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) have attracted much attention due to their exceptional performance. However, their performance mainly stems from thinking, a long Chain of Thought (CoT), which significantly increase computational overhead. To address this overthinking problem, existing work focuses on using reinforcement learning (RL) to train hybrid reasoning models that automatically decide whether to engage in thinking or not based on the complexity of the query. Unfortunately, using RL will suffer the the reward hacking problem, e.g., the model engages in thinking but is judged as not doing so, resulting in incorrect rewards. To mitigate this problem, existing works either employ supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which incurs high computational costs, or enforce uniform token limits on non-thinking responses, which yields limited mitigation of the problem. In this paper, we propose Thinking-Based Non-Thinking (TNT). It does not employ SFT, and sets different maximum token usage for responses not using thinking across various queries by leveraging information from the solution component of the responses using thinking. Experiments on five mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that TNT reduces token usage by around 50% compared to DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B/7B and DeepScaleR-1.5B, while significantly improving accuracy. In fact, TNT achieves the optimal trade-off between accuracy and efficiency among all tested methods. Additionally, the probability of reward hacking problem in TNT's responses, which are classified as not using thinking, remains below 10% across all tested datasets.
Authors: Itai Zilberstein, Steve Chien
Abstract: As Earth-observing satellite constellations grow in size and capability, distributed onboard control offers a pathway to novel responses and time-sensitive measurements. However, deploying autonomy to satellites requires efficient computation and communication. This work addresses the challenge of scheduling observations for hundreds of satellites in a dynamic, large-scale problem with millions of variables. We present the dynamic multi-satellite constellation observation scheduling problem (DCOSP), a new formulation of dynamic distributed constraint optimization problems (DDCOP) that models integrated scheduling and execution. DCOSP features a novel optimality condition, for which we construct an exact omniscient offline algorithm. Motivated by the strong resource constraints of onboard satellite operations, we introduce a framework to incorporate metareasoning in DDCOPs that controls when agents expend resources to recompute solutions. In addition, we present the dynamic incremental neighborhood stochastic search (D-NSS) algorithm, an incomplete online decomposition-based DDCOP algorithm that repairs localized sub-problems in response to dynamic events. We demonstrate in realistic simulations that D-NSS converges to near-optimal solutions, outperforming standard DDCOP baselines in solution quality, computation time, and message volume, while our metareasoning framework successfully balances resource conservation with utility. As part of the NASA FAME mission, this work lays the foundation for the largest in-space demonstration of distributed multi-agent AI to date.
Authors: Trung-Kiet Huynh, Dao-Sy Duy-Minh, Thanh-Bang Cao, Phong-Hao Le, Hong-Dan Nguyen, Phu-Quy Nguyen-Lam, Minh-Luan Nguyen-Vo, Hong-Phat Pham, Phu-Hoa Pham, Thien-Kim Than, Chi-Nguyen Tran, Huy Tran, Gia-Thoai Tran-Le, Alessio Buscemi, Le Hong Trang, The Anh Han
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents that negotiate, coordinate, and act on behalf of users. Whether they cooperate in such settings is no longer just an academic question, but a central issue for AI governance. We approach it from a strategic-behaviour angle, asking how two everyday levers - the size of what is at stake, and the language in which the interaction is described - shape the strategies LLMs adopt in a repeated Prisoner's Dilemma. Rather than reading cooperation off raw action counts, we train supervised classifiers to recognise the canonical strategies of repeated games (always cooperate, always defect, Tit-for-Tat, Win-Stay-Lose-Shift) and use them as a lens onto LLM behaviour. To know what the strategy distribution should look like under the same payoffs, we derive an evolutionary game theory (EGT) baseline and compare it with the LLM data. The two outcomes disagree in a revealing way: as stakes grow, evolutionary theory predicts that defection should take over the population, yet LLMs move in the opposite direction, becoming more cooperative - a signature, we argue, of alignment training and the human-like reasoning patterns LLMs inherit from their training data. We further show that this picture is not particular to frontier-scale, proprietary models: it also occurs with three open-weight smaller LLMs. Overall, our analysis highlights that payoff design and linguistic framing are powerful but under-explored levers for steering LLM behaviour, with direct implications for evaluating, aligning, and governing multi-agent AI systems deployed in high-stakes, multilingual environments.
Authors: Haoyu Wang, Guozheng Ma, Shugang Cui, Yilun Kong, Haotian Luo, Li Shen, Mengya Gao, Yichao Wu, Xiaogang Wang, Dacheng Tao
Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in language-based agentic tasks, their applicability to unseen, nonlinguistic environments (e.g., symbolic or spatial tasks) remains limited. Previous work attributes this performance gap to the mismatch between the pretraining distribution and the testing distribution. In this work, we demonstrate the primary bottleneck is the prohibitive cost of exploration: mastering these tasks requires extensive trial-and-error, which is computationally unsustainable for parameter-heavy LLMs operating in a high dimensional semantic space. To address this, we propose SCOUT (Sub-Scale Collaboration On Unseen Tasks), a novel framework that decouples exploration from exploitation. We employ lightweight "scouts" (e.g., small MLPs) to probe environmental dynamics at a speed and scale far exceeding LLMs. The collected trajectories are utilized to bootstrap the LLM via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), followed by multi-turn Reinforcement Learning (RL) to activate its latent world knowledge. Empirically, SCOUT enables a Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct model to achieve an average score of 0.86, significantly outperforming proprietary models, including Gemini-2.5-Pro (0.60), while saving about 60% GPU hours consumption.
Authors: Yu Cheng, Yongkang Hu, Jiuan Zhou, Yushuo Zhang, Yihang Chen, Huichi Zhou, Mingang Chen, Zhizhong Zhang, Kun Shao, Yuan Xie, Zhaoxia Yin
Abstract: Test-time evolution of agent memory represents a pivotal paradigm for advancing AGI, as it strengthens complex reasoning through experience accumulation without requiring parameter updates. However, even during benign task evolution, agent safety alignment remains vulnerable, a phenomenon known as Agent Memory Misevolution. To evaluate this phenomenon, we construct the Trust-Memevo benchmark and find that agents exhibit an overall decline in trustworthiness across multiple tasks during benign task evolution. To address this issue, we propose TAME, a trust-aware memory evolution framework in which a shared memory bank is jointly governed by an Executor and an Evaluator. The Executor retrieves and applies transferable experiences to support task solving, while the Evaluator assesses the contribution of each utilized experience to the outcome and produces trust-aware feedback to guide subsequent memory use. This executor-evaluator loop enables memory to be selectively reinforced, cautiously reused, and continuously expanded over time. Experiments show that TAME mitigates memory misevolution while achieving strong task performance. In particular, on the GPT-5.2 AIME benchmark, TAME improves accuracy by 14.6 percentage points over the strongest existing method and maintains competitive trustworthiness.
Authors: Zehao Chen, Gongxun Li, Tianxiang Ai, Zixuan Huang, Xiaodong Liu, Yifei Li, Wang Zhou, Fuzhen Zhuang, Xianglong Liu, Jianxin Li, Deqing Wang, Yikun Ban
Abstract: As post-training optimization becomes central to improving large language models, we observe a persistent saturation bottleneck: once models grow highly confident, further training yields diminishing returns. While existing methods continue to reinforce target predictions, we find that informative supervision signals remain latent in models' own historical weak states. Motivated by this observation, we propose WMSS (Weak Agents Can Make Strong Agents Stronger), a post-training paradigm that leverages weak checkpoints to guide continued optimization. By identifying recoverable learning gaps via entropy dynamics and reinforcing them through compensatory learning, WMSS enables strong agents to improve beyond conventional post-training saturation. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and code generation datasets show that agents trained with our approach achieve effective performance improvements, while incurring zero additional inference cost.
Authors: Linxi Jiang, Rui Xi, Zhijie Liu, Shuo Chen, Zhiqiang Lin, Suman Nath
Abstract: This position paper argues that building a reliable agentic Web requires shifting from low-level interaction primitives to typed actions supported by a semantic layer. Today's web agents primarily operate through clicks, keystrokes, and DOM manipulation, which leads to brittle long-horizon behavior, high execution cost, and limited auditability. We propose web verbs as a concrete design for this layer. A verb exposes a web operation as a typed function with structured inputs, structured outputs, and documented behavior, whether it is backed by a server-side Web API or a maintained client-side workflow. Verb calls can carry preconditions, postconditions, policy tags, and logging hooks, allowing agents to synthesize concise programs with explicit control flow and data flow and to produce checkable execution traces. Using representative case studies, we illustrate how verb-level composition can produce correct, reproducible outcomes, while browser agents using low-level interaction primitives may produce brittle behavior or incorrect reasoning. We conclude with a call to action on standardization, developer tooling, and community processes needed to make this semantic layer deployable and trustworthy at web scale.
Authors: Ishaan Rawal, Shubh Gupta, Yihan Hu, Wei Zhan
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are advancing autonomous driving by replacing modular pipelines with unified end-to-end architectures. However, current VLAs face two expensive requirements: (1) massive dataset collection, and (2) dense reasoning annotations. In this work, we address both challenges with NORD (No Reasoning for Driving). Compared to existing VLAs, NORD achieves competitive performance while being fine-tuned on <60% of the data and no reasoning annotations, resulting in 3x fewer tokens. We identify that standard Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) fails to yield significant improvements when applied to policies trained on such small, reasoning-free datasets. We show that this limitation stems from difficulty bias, which disproportionately penalizes reward signals from scenarios that produce high-variance rollouts within GRPO. NORD overcomes this by incorporating Dr. GRPO, a recent algorithm designed to mitigate difficulty bias in LLMs. As a result, NORD achieves competitive performance on Waymo and NAVSIM with a fraction of the training data and no reasoning overhead, enabling more efficient autonomous systems. Website: https://nord-vla-ai.github.io/
Authors: Otto Nyberg, Fausto Carcassi, Davide Tugnoli, Giovanni Cin\`a
Abstract: Predictions from ML models support human decision making in several fields, including high-stakes ones such as healthcare and the judiciary. Yet, we still lack a clear understanding of how decision makers learn from ML-based decision support (ML-DS). In this paper, we introduce a general computational framework, the 2-Step Agent, to capture this process. As a prediction from an ML model contains information about the training data, a prediction can also be used for inference. Our framework models (i) how a prediction for a new observation affects the beliefs of a rational Bayesian agent, and (ii) how this change in beliefs affects the estimation of causal effect, the downstream decision, and the subsequent outcome. In addition to the framework itself, we make three contributions. First, for the linear Gaussian setting, we derive a tractable solution for the challenging Bayesian inference problem we introduced, i.e. one in which the agent infers from an ML prediction. Second, we experimentally identify conditions under which ML-DS is beneficial. Third, we show that a single misaligned prior belief can be sufficient for ML-DS to lead to worse downstream outcomes compared to no decision support even when the ML model is well-specified and the agent is perfectly rational. Hence, even under ideal conditions, ML-DS can do more harm than good.
Authors: Margarita Belova, Yuval Kansal, Yihao Liang, Jiaxin Xiao, Niraj K. Jha
Abstract: The generative artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem is undergoing rapid transformations that threaten its sustainability. As models transition from research prototypes to high-traffic products, the energetic burden has shifted from one-time training to recurring, unbounded inference. This is exacerbated by reasoning models that inflate compute costs by orders of magnitude per query. The prevailing pursuit of artificial general intelligence through scaling of monolithic models is colliding with hard physical constraints: grid failures, water consumption, and diminishing returns on data scaling. This trajectory yields models with impressive factual recall but struggles in domains requiring in-depth reasoning, possibly due to insufficient abstractions in training data. Current large language models (LLMs) exhibit genuine reasoning depth only in domains like mathematics and coding, where rigorous, pre-existing abstractions provide structural grounding. In other fields, the current approach fails to generalize well. We propose an alternative trajectory based on domain-specific superintelligence (DSS). We argue for first constructing explicit symbolic abstractions (knowledge graphs, ontologies, and formal logic) to underpin synthetic curricula enabling small language models to master domain-specific reasoning without the model collapse problem typical of LLM-based synthetic data methods. Rather than a single generalist giant model, we envision "societies of DSS models": dynamic ecosystems where orchestration agents route tasks to distinct DSS back-ends. This paradigm shift decouples capability from size, enabling intelligence to migrate from energy-intensive data centers to secure, on-device experts. By aligning algorithmic progress with physical constraints, DSS societies move generative AI from an environmental liability to a sustainable force for economic empowerment.
Authors: Veronique Ziegler
Abstract: Adaptive agents operating under uncertainty must do more than optimize task outputs: they must maintain a workable internal state under noise, perturbation, and changing conditions. This paper introduces IRAM-Omega-Q, a computational framework for modeling uncertainty regulation in adaptive agents under stochastic disturbance. The framework combines a quantum-like state representation with closed-loop adaptive control over an internal entropy signal. The quantum-like formalism is used instrumentally: the evolving state is a normalized complex amplitude vector, coherent evolution is propagated exactly as psi(t + Delta t) = exp(-i H Delta t) psi(t), and a derived density matrix supports entropy and coherence-gap analysis. Two causal control orderings are compared. In regulation-first (RF) ordering, adaptive regulation is available before current-cycle disturbance and attenuates incoming exposure; in disturbance-first (DF) ordering, current-cycle disturbance is received before a new regulatory response can be computed, and stabilization acts reactively. Publication-mode, matched-seed simulations show broadly comparable coherence-gap trajectories but lower sustained adaptive gain under RF. Susceptibility maps based on post-burn-in temporal fluctuations further show that DF shifts the critical initial-gain ridge toward larger values across multiple disturbance intervals. These results identify ordering as an architectural determinant of regulatory demand and threshold location within an otherwise shared regime structure.
Authors: Shiyan Liu, Qifeng Xia, Qiyun Xia, Yisheng Liu, Xinyu Yu, Rui Qu
Abstract: Automatic prompt optimization (APO) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving LLM performance without manual prompt engineering. Reflective APO methods such as GEPA iteratively refine prompts by diagnosing failure cases, but the optimization process remains black-box and label-free, leading to uninterpretable trajectories and systematic failure. We identify and empirically demonstrate four limitations: on GSM8K with a defective seed, GEPA degrades accuracy from 23.81% to 13.50%. We propose VISTA, a multi-agent APO framework that decouples hypothesis generation from prompt rewriting, enabling semantically labeled hypotheses, parallel minibatch verification, and interpretable optimization trace. A two-layer explore-exploit mechanism combining random restart and epsilon-greedy sampling further escapes local optima. VISTA recovers accuracy to 87.57% on the same defective seed and consistently outperforms baselines across all conditions on GSM8K and AIME2025.
Authors: Zhongyi Li, Wan Tian, Yikun Ban, Jinju Chen, Huiming Zhang, Yang Liu, Fuzhen Zhuang
Abstract: Collaborative multi-agent large language models (LLMs) can solve complex reasoning tasks by decomposing roles, but reinforcement learning for such systems is limited by credit assignment: shared terminal rewards obscure individual contributions and can encourage free-riding. We introduce Collaborative Credit Policy Optimization (CCPO), an optimizer-agnostic credit assignment layer that converts team-level outcomes into agent-specific learning signals. CCPO provides two complementary allocators. Counterfactual credit estimates an agent's marginal contribution by comparing the realized team outcome with a counterfactual outcome where that agent is removed. Verifier-anchored LLM self-evaluation is an exploratory allocator that uses constrained self- and peer-evaluations to redistribute credit while keeping the external verifier outcome dominant. The resulting role-specific rewards can be consumed by GRPO-style updates or other policy-gradient optimizers such as GSPO and REINFORCE++. We instantiate CCPO in a sequential Think--Solve setting and evaluate it on mathematical reasoning benchmarks. Results show that explicit credit assignment often improves dual-agent reasoning, especially on MATH500 and several out-of-distribution settings, while gains vary across models and datasets.
Authors: Sina Bagheri Nezhad
Abstract: Classroom AI systems increasingly infer high-level educational states such as engagement, confusion, collaboration, participation, and instructional quality from multimodal and linguistic signals. In multicultural and multilingual classrooms, such inferences can translate culturally situated behavior into stereotyped claims: silence may be read as disengagement, gaze aversion as inattention, code-switching as low proficiency, or indirect help-seeking as confusion. We argue that stereotype-aware classroom AI should separate observable evidence from culturally loaded interpretation and should treat unsupported construct-level claims as safety risks. We introduce NSCR, a culturally grounded neuro-symbolic framework that converts video, audio, ASR, lesson artifacts, and contextual metadata into typed facts with uncertainty, provenance, and cultural scope, then composes them through executable reasoning and policy constraints. We define a taxonomy of stereotype-prone classroom inferences and propose a benchmark agenda covering culture-conditioned state inference, evidence-grounded claim verification, multilingual and code-switched reasoning, collaboration analysis, counterfactual cultural robustness, and culture-conditioned red-teaming. We further specify metrics for stereotype leakage, unsupported attribution, cultural calibration gaps, abstention under cultural ambiguity, and evidence faithfulness. The contribution is methodological: a concrete framework and evaluation agenda for mitigating stereotyped reasoning in classroom AI, with education as a high-stakes, culturally variable deployment setting.
Authors: Oluseyi Olukola, Nick Rahimi
Abstract: Intelligent tutoring systems increasingly rely on reinforcement learning to personalise instruction, yet optimising for observable engagement signals can systematically decouple learner activity from genuine knowledge acquisition. Analysing over 21 million student interactions across two deployed platforms, we find engagement events without corresponding mastery gains occur in 26.5% of interactions on Junyi Academy (72,758 students) and 3.1% on XES3G5M (14,453 students, NeurIPS 2023), confirming this pattern is directly observable in deployed educational technology at scale. We introduce Mastery-Conditioned Constrained Policy Optimisation (MC-CPO), a reinforcement learning framework that addresses this problem structurally. MC-CPO conditions the admissible instructional action space on learner mastery state: a concept becomes available only when prerequisite knowledge meets a mastery threshold, yielding an action space that expands naturally as learners acquire knowledge. Pedagogical safety constraints are enforced by construction, with formal guarantees of structural prerequisite safety, primal-dual convergence, and strict dominance over post-hoc filtering. MC-CPO is the only method to reduce reward hacking severity across all conditions. Mean per-episode mastery gain increases by 18.3% on Junyi Academy and 54.0% on XES3G5M relative to all baselines, while competitive engagement performance is maintained. These results support structural constraint modelling as a principled foundation for safer adaptive instructional policies in deployed tutoring systems.
Authors: Xinyu Zhu, Yuzhu Cai, Zexi Liu, Cheng Wang, Fengyang Li, Wenkai Jin, Wanxu Liu, Zehao Bing, Bingyang Zheng, Jingyi Chai, Shuo Tang, Rui Ye, Yuwen Du, Xianghe Pang, Yaxin Du, Tingjia Miao, Yuzhi Zhang, Ruoxue Liao, Zhaohan Ding, Linfeng Zhang, Yanfeng Wang, Weinan E, Siheng Chen
Abstract: The convergence of large language models and agents is catalyzing a new era of scientific discovery: Agentic Science. While the scientific method is inherently iterative, existing agent frameworks are predominantly static, narrowly scoped, and lack the capacity to learn from trial and error. To bridge this gap, we present EvoMaster, a foundational evolving agent framework engineered specifically for Agentic Science at Scale. Driven by the core principle of continuous self-evolution, EvoMaster empowers agents to iteratively refine hypotheses, self-critique, and progressively accumulate knowledge across experimental cycles, faithfully mirroring human scientific inquiry. Crucially, as a domain-agnostic base harness, EvoMaster is exceptionally easy to scale up -- enabling developers to build and deploy highly capable, self-evolving scientific agents for arbitrary disciplines in approximately 100 lines of code. Built upon EvoMaster, we incubated the SciMaster ecosystem across domains such as machine learning, physics, and general science. Evaluations on four authoritative benchmarks (Humanity's Last Exam, MLE-Bench Lite, BrowseComp, and FrontierScience) demonstrate that EvoMaster achieves state-of-the-art scores of 41.1%, 75.8%, 73.3%, and 53.3%, respectively. It comprehensively outperforms the general-purpose baseline OpenClaw with relative improvements ranging from +159% to +316%, robustly validating its efficacy and generality as the premier foundational framework for the next generation of autonomous scientific discovery. EvoMaster is available at https://github.com/sjtu-sai-agents/EvoMaster.
Authors: Anthony Bordg
Abstract: AlphaGeometry represents a milestone in neuro-symbolic reasoning, yet its architecture faces a log-linear scaling bottleneck within its symbolic deduction engine that limits its efficiency as problem complexity increases. Recent technical reports suggest that current domain-specific languages may be isomorphic as input representations to natural language, interchanging them acts as a performance-invariant transformation, implying that current neural guidance relies on superficial encodings rather than structural understanding. This paper addresses this representation bottleneck by proposing a logic-to-topology encoding designed to reveal the structural invariants of a model's latent space under a transformation of its input space. By leveraging the Logic of Observation, we utilize the duality between provability in observable theories and topologies to propose a logic-to-topology encoder for the input space. We introduce the concept of the "topological dual of a dataset", a transformation that bridges formal logic, topology, and neural processing. This framework serves as a Rosetta Stone for neuro-symbolic AI, providing a principled pathway for the mechanistic interpretability of how models navigate complex discovery paths.
Authors: Dorothy Torres, Wei Cheng, Ke Hu
Abstract: Anti-money laundering (AML) transaction monitoring generates large volumes of alerts that must be rapidly triaged by investigators under strict audit and governance constraints. While large language models (LLMs) can summarize heterogeneous evidence and draft rationales, unconstrained generation is risky in regulated workflows due to hallucinations, weak provenance, and explanations that are not faithful to the underlying decision. We propose an explainable AML triage framework that treats triage as an evidence-constrained decision process. Our method combines (i) retrieval-augmented evidence bundling from policy/typology guidance, customer context, alert triggers, and transaction subgraphs, (ii) a structured LLM output contract that requires explicit citations and separates supporting from contradicting or missing evidence, and (iii) counterfactual checks that validate whether minimal, plausible perturbations lead to coherent changes in both the triage recommendation and its rationale. We evaluate on public synthetic AML benchmarks and simulators and compare against rules, tabular and graph machine-learning baselines, and LLM-only/RAG-only variants. Results show that evidence grounding substantially improves auditability and reduces numerical and policy hallucination errors, while counterfactual validation further increases decision-linked explainability and robustness, yielding the best overall triage performance (PR-AUC 0.75; Escalate F1 0.62) and strong provenance and faithfulness metrics (citation validity 0.98; evidence support 0.88; counterfactual faithfulness 0.76). These findings indicate that governed, verifiable LLM systems can provide practical decision support for AML triage without sacrificing compliance requirements for traceability and defensibility.
Authors: Elija Perrier
Abstract: Self-modification is routinely treated as constitutive of artificial superintelligence (\textbf{SI}), yet modification is a relative action requiring a \emph{supplement} outside the operation. We formalise this on an associative operator algebra $\mathcal{A}$ with update operator $\hat U$, difference operator $\hat D$, and self-representation operator $\hat R$, identifying the supplement with $\operatorname{Comm}(\hat U)$. A propagation theorem shows $[\hat U,\hat R]$ decomposes through $[\hat U,\hat D]$, so non-commutation propagates to self-representation. The liar paradox is the rank-one case $[\hat T,\Pi_L]=0$, and \emph{class $\mathbf{A}$} systems, in which $\hat U$ acts on $\hat D$, reproduce it at system scale, yielding a structure coinciding with Priest's inclosure schema and Derrida's \emph{diff\'erance}. Our results show that the strong self-modification taken to define superintelligence may undermine the persistent identity upon which such systems are premised.
Authors: Meng Chu, Xuan Billy Zhang, Kevin Qinghong Lin, Lingdong Kong, Jize Zhang, Teng Tu, Weijian Ma, Ziqi Huang, Senqiao Yang, Wei Huang, Yeying Jin, Zhefan Rao, Jinhui Ye, Xinyu Lin, Xichen Zhang, Qisheng Hu, Shuai Yang, Leyang Shen, Wei Chow, Yifei Dong, Fengyi Wu, Quanyu Long, Bin Xia, Shaozuo Yu, Mingkang Zhu, Wenhu Zhang, Jiehui Huang, Haokun Gui, Runyi Li, Shiyi Du, Xu Huang, Dong Huang, Rui Liu, Chenyu Tang, Xuhang Chen, Chengzu Li, Haoxuan Che, Long Chen, Qifeng Chen, Wenxuan Zhang, Wenya Wang, Xiaojuan Qi, Yang Deng, Yanwei Li, Mike Zheng Shou, Zhi-Qi Cheng, See-Kiong Ng, Ziwei Liu, Philip Torr, Jiaya Jia
Abstract: As AI systems move from generating text to accomplishing goals through sustained interaction, the ability to model environment dynamics becomes a central bottleneck. Agents that manipulate objects, navigate software, coordinate with others, or design experiments require predictive environment models, yet the term world model carries different meanings across research communities. We introduce a "levels x laws" taxonomy organized along two axes. The first defines three capability levels: L1 Predictor, which learns one-step local transition operators; L2 Simulator, which composes them into multi-step, action-conditioned rollouts that respect domain laws; and L3 Evolver, which autonomously revises its own model when predictions fail against new evidence. The second identifies four governing-law regimes: physical, digital, social, and scientific. These regimes determine what constraints a world model must satisfy and where it is most likely to fail. Using this framework, we synthesize over 400 works and summarize more than 100 representative systems spanning model-based reinforcement learning, video generation, web and GUI agents, multi-agent social simulation, and AI-driven scientific discovery. We analyze methods, failure modes, and evaluation practices across level-regime pairs, propose decision-centric evaluation principles and a minimal reproducible evaluation package, and outline architectural guidance, open problems, and governance challenges. The resulting roadmap connects previously isolated communities and charts a path from passive next-step prediction toward world models that can simulate, and ultimately reshape, the environments in which agents operate.
Authors: Tianyang Han, Hengyu Shi, Junjie Hu, Xu Yang, Zhiling Wang, Junhao Su
Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has become a common way to improve explicit reasoning in large language models, but final-answer correctness alone does not reveal whether the reasoning trace is faithful, reliable, or useful to the model that consumes it. This outcome-only signal can reinforce traces that are right for the wrong reasons, overstate reasoning gains by rewarding shortcuts, and propagate flawed intermediate states in multi-step systems. To this end, we propose TraceLift, a planner-executor training framework that treats reasoning as a consumable intermediate artifact. During planner training, the planner emits tagged reasoning. A frozen executor turns this reasoning into the final artifact for verifier feedback, while an executor-grounded reward shapes the intermediate trace. This reward multiplies a rubric-based Reasoning Reward Model (RM) score by measured uplift on the same frozen executor, crediting traces that are both high-quality and useful. To make reasoning quality directly learnable, we introduce TRACELIFT-GROUPS, a rubric-annotated reason-only dataset built from math and code seed problems. Each example is a same-problem group containing a high-quality reference trace and multiple plausible flawed traces with localized perturbations that reduce reasoning quality or solution support while preserving task relevance. Extensive experiments on code and math benchmarks show that this executor-grounded reasoning reward improves the two-stage planner-executor system over execution-only training, suggesting that reasoning supervision should evaluate not only whether a trace looks good, but also whether it helps the model that consumes it. Our code is available at: https://github.com/MasaiahHan/TraceLift
Authors: Sergey Rodionov
Abstract: We evaluate an initial coding-agent system for ARC-AGI-3 in which the agent maintains an executable Python world model, verifies it against previous observations, refactors it toward simpler abstractions as a practical proxy for an MDL-like simplicity bias, and plans through the model before acting. The system is intentionally direct: it uses a scripted controller, predefined world-model interfaces, verifier programs, and a plan executor, but no hand-coded game-specific logic. The agent-facing prompts, workspace, and controller contain no game-specific code, game-specific prompts, hand-coded heuristics, hidden solutions, or other game-specific information; the same agent and prompts are used across games. Because the coding agent has broad system access, we audit unintended information channels, describe earlier vulnerable harnesses, and explain how the current harness closes observed leakage channels while reducing benchmark-specific information exposure. We report results on the 25 public ARC-AGI-3 games. Each playthrough starts from a fresh agent instance and clean workspace, with no access to files or conversation state from earlier playthroughs. With GPT-5.5 high reasoning effort, the agent fully solved 15 games and achieved a mean per-game RHAE of 58.12%. With GPT-5.4 high reasoning effort, it fully solved 8 games and achieved a mean per-game RHAE of 41.29%. Performance on the private validation set, which is not yet available to us, remains to be tested. Overall, the results provide preliminary evidence that verifier-driven executable world models are a promising approach for ARC-AGI-3 agents. Full run artifacts are released with the code at https://github.com/astroseger/arc-3-agents-baseline1.
Authors: Jialian Li, Yuchen Cao, Junhong Liu, Weiran Guo, Xutao Wang, Jiaming Song, Jiahao Zhang, Jie Chen
Abstract: Task completion in digital and physical environments increasingly involves complex temporal interaction, where actions and observations unfold over different time scales rather than align with fixed observation--action steps. To model such interactions, we propose \emph{Engagement Process} (EP), an interaction formalism that inherits the decision-theoretic structure of POMDPs while making time explicit in the action--observation interface. EP represents actions and observations as decoupled event streams along time, rather than updates paired at fixed decision steps. This interface captures single-agent timing issues such as deliberation latency, delayed feedback, and persistent actions, while supporting richer agent-side organization, multi-rate coordination, and compositional interaction among subsystems. Across toy, LLM-agent, and learning experiments, EP exposes temporal behaviors hidden by step-based interfaces and enables policies to adapt under explicit time costs.
Authors: Jiazhou Liang, Armin Toroghi, Yifan Simon Liu, Faeze Moradi Kalarde, Liam Gallagher, Scott Sanner
Abstract: LLM-based conversational AI agents struggle to maintain coherent behavior over long horizons due to limited context. While RAG-based approaches are increasingly adopted to overcome this limitation by storing interactions in external memory modules and performing retrieval from them, their effectiveness in answering challenging questions (e.g., multi-hop, commonsense) ultimately depends on the agent's ability to reason over the retrieved information. However, existing methods typically retrieve memory based on semantic similarity to the raw user utterance, which lacks explicit reasoning about missing intermediate facts and often returns evidence that is irrelevant or insufficient for grounded reasoning. In this work, we introduce Goal-Mem, a goal-oriented reasoning framework for RAG-based agentic memory that performs explicit backward chaining from the user's utterance as a goal. Rather than progressively expanding from retrieved context, Goal-Mem decomposes each goal into atomic subgoals, performs targeted memory retrieval to satisfy each subgoal, and iteratively identifies what information from memory should be retrieved when intermediate goals cannot be resolved. We formalize this process in Natural Language Logic, a logical system that combines the verifiability of reasoning provided by FOL with the expressivity of natural language. Through extensive experiments on two datasets and comparing to nine strong memory baselines, we show that Goal-Mem consistently improves performance, particularly on tasks requiring multi-hop reasoning and implicit inference.
Authors: Benjamin Schneider, Xavier Schneider, Victor Zhong, Sun Sun
Abstract: Long-horizon embodied tasks remain a fundamental challenge in AI, as current methods rely on hand-engineered rewards or action-labeled demonstrations, neither of which scales. We introduce ASH, an agentic system that learns an embodied policy from unlabeled, noisy internet video, without reward shaping or expert annotation. ASH follows a self-improvement loop; when it gets stuck, ASH learns an Inverse Dynamics Model (IDM) from its own trajectories, and uses its IDM to extract supervision from relevant internet video. ASH uses unsupervised learning to identify key moments from large-scale internet video and retains them as long-term memory -- allowing it to tackle long-horizon problems. We evaluate ASH on two complementary environments demanding multi-hour planning: Pokemon Emerald, a turn-based RPG, and The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, a real-time action-adventure game. In both games, behavioral cloning, retrieval-augmented and zero-shot foundation-model baselines plateau, while ASH sustains progression across our 8-hour evaluation. ASH reaches an average of $11.2/12$ milestones in Pokemon Emerald and $9.9/12$ in Legend of Zelda, while the strongest baseline gets stuck in both environments at an average of $6.5/12$ and $6.0/12$ milestones, respectively. We demonstrate that self-improving agents are a scalable recipe for long-horizon embodied learning.
Authors: Safayat Bin Hakim, Keyan Guo, Wenkai Tan, Alvaro Velasquez, Shouhuai Xu, Houbing Herbert Song
Abstract: LLM-based agents can recover from individual execution errors, yet they repeatedly fail on the same fault when the underlying process knowledge--operator schemas, preconditions, and constraints--remains unrepaired. Existing self-evolving approaches address this gap by updating prompts, memory, or model weights, but none directly repair the symbolic structures that encode how tasks are executed, and few provide the governance guarantees required for safe deployment. We introduce ANNEAL, a neuro-symbolic agent that converts recurring failures into governed symbolic edits of a process knowledge graph without modifying foundation model weights. Its core mechanism, Failure-Driven Knowledge Acquisition (FDKA), localizes the responsible operator, synthesizes a typed patch through constrained LLM generation, and validates the proposal via multi-dimensional scoring, symbolic guardrails, and canary testing before commit. Every accepted edit carries full provenance and deterministic rollback capability. Across four domains and 27 multi-seed runs, ANNEAL is the only evaluated system that commits persistent structural repairs--strong baselines such as ReAct and Reflexion achieve high episodic recovery yet retain 72--100% holdout failure rates on recurring faults, whereas ANNEAL reduces these to 0% in the tested recurring-failure settings. Ablation confirms that removing FDKA eliminates all structural repairs and drops success rate by up to 26.7 percentage points. These results suggest that governed symbolic repair offers a complementary paradigm to weight-level and prompt-level adaptation for persistent fault elimination.
Authors: Yanjie Li, Jian Xu, Xu-Yao Zhang, Shiming Xiang, Nian Ran, Weijun Li, Cheng-Lin Liu
Abstract: Property prediction and inverse structural design of catalytic materials are typically modeled as two independent tasks: the former predicts target properties from given structures, whereas the latter generates candidate structures according to desired properties. Although the decoupled paradigm facilitates the implementation of a ``generation--evaluation--screening'' workflow, the inconsistency between the generative model and the property prediction model in terms of representation spaces and training objectives can readily introduce data distribution shifts and evaluator bias, thereby limiting the stability of closed-loop optimization. In this work, we propose CatalyticMLLM, a unified graph--text multimodal large language model for catalytic materials, which integrates property prediction and \textbf{inverse design} within the same model and shared representation space. Under this unified framework, CatalyticMLLM can not only perform reliable property prediction by leveraging three-dimensional structures and textual information, but also generate and screen physically feasible CIF candidates conditioned on target properties, thereby forming a closed-loop optimization workflow of ``inverse design--prediction--screening--redesign.'' Experimental results demonstrate that this unified paradigm outperforms decoupled baselines on both catalytic relaxed-energy prediction and inverse design tasks, validating the effectiveness of jointly modeling property prediction and structure generation within a single multimodal model.
Authors: Xinpeng Lv, Yunxin Mao, Renzhe Xu, Chunyuan Zheng, Yikai Chen, Haoxuan Li, Jinxuan Yang, Kun Kuang, Yuanlong Chen, Mingyang Geng, Wanrong Huang, Shixuan Liu, Shaowu Yang, Wenjing Yang, Zhouchen Lin, Haotian Wang
Abstract: Tabular foundation models based on pretrained prior-data fitted networks~(PFNs) have shown strong generalization on diverse tabular tasks, but they are typically designed for \emph{non-strategic} settings where data distributions are independent of deployed classifiers. In many real-world decision scenarios, however, individuals may strategically modify their features after deployment to obtain favorable outcomes, inducing a post-deployment distribution shift. This paper studies whether PFN-style tabular foundation models can generalize to such \emph{strategic} tabular data. We show that strategic manipulation creates a mismatch between the non-strategic prior learned during pretraining and the post-manipulation strategic prior, which leads to systematic prediction bias. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{Strategic Prior-data Fitted Network}~\textit{(SPN)}, an inference-time strategy-aware framework that adapts tabular foundation models to strategic environments without retraining. SPN constructs strategic in-context examples to approximate post-manipulation inputs and aligns PFN predictions with the induced strategic distribution. Experiments on real-world and synthetic tabular datasets show that SPN consistently improves robustness and predictive performance under strategic manipulation compared with both tabular foundation models and classical tabular methods.
Authors: Xinpeng Lv, Yunxin Mao, Renzhe Xu, Chunyuan Zheng, Yikai Chen, Haoxuan Li, Yang Shi, Jinxuan Yang, Zhouchen Lin, Yuanlong Chen, Yuanxing Zhang, Shaowu Yang, Wenjing Yang, Haotian Wang
Abstract: Strategic classification(SC) studies the interaction between decision models and agents who strategically manipulate their features for favorable outcomes. Existing SC frameworks typically rely on the idealized assumption that agents are strictly rational. However, evidence from behavioral economics and psychology consistently shows that real-world decision-making is often shaped by cognitive biases, deviating from pure rationality. To formalize this limitation, we identify and define a new problem setting, termed the behaviorally realistic strategic classification problem, where agents' strategic manipulations deviate from full rationality due to psychological biases. Motivated by the identified limitation, we propose the Prospect-Guided Strategic Framework (Pro-SF) to address the problem, a principled framework grounded in prospect theory to model and learn under behaviorally realistic strategic responses. Specifically, to capture behaviorally realistic strategic manipulations, our framework reformulates the Stackelberg-style interaction between agents and the decision-maker by incorporating three key mechanisms inspired by prospect theory, including the asymmetry between benefits and costs, different subjective reference points, and non-rational probability distortion. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets establish Pro-SF as a behaviorally grounded approach to strategic classification, bridging machine learning and behavioral economics for more reliable deployment in the real world.
Authors: Ishaan Kelkar, Nebras Alam, Vikram Kakaria, Madhur Panwar, Vasu Sharma, Maheep Chaudhary
Abstract: We study the effect of different persona on \textbf{sycophancy}: model's agreement with users even when the user is incorrect. The standard mitigation, Contrastive Activation Addition (CAA), derives a steering direction from labelled pairs of sycophantic and honest responses. This study evaluates whether off-the-shelf persona steering vectors, originally developed for general role-playing and not trained on sycophancy data, can serve as an alternative. In two instruction-tuned models, steering toward personas characterised by doubt or scrutiny reduces sycophancy to approximately $68\%$ and $98\%$ of CAA's effect, and, unlike CAA, maintains accuracy when the user is correct. The effect is also asymmetric: steering toward agreeable personas does not produce a mirror increase in sycophancy. Geometrically, the persona vector is largely independent of the direction of sycophancy in activation space. Collectively, these findings suggest that sycophancy is better understood as a persona-level property rather than a single steerable direction. We release our code here: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Sycophancy-Steering-9DF0/.
URLs: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Sycophancy-Steering-9DF0/.
Authors: Thomson Yen, Julian Poeltl, Harshith Srinivas Gear, Yilin Meng, Joshua Fan, Adam Shen, Yili Liu, Ali Bauyrzhan, Siri Du, Haoyang Liu, Daniel Guetta, Hongseok Namkoong
Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly expected to carry out end-to-end workflows, producing complete artifacts from high-level user instructions. To meet enterprise needs, frontier AI labs have developed agents that can construct entire spreadsheets from scratch. This is especially relevant in finance, where core workflows such as financial modeling, forecasting, and scenario analysis are commonly conducted through spreadsheets. Yet, existing spreadsheet benchmarks do not measure this advanced capability, focusing instead on question-answering or single-formula edits. To address this gap, we provide one of the first evaluations of agents on end-to-end spreadsheet tasks, focusing on economically critical financial workflows such as modeling and scenario analysis. Since deliverables therein are routinely reviewed and revised by multiple stakeholders, judging their quality necessarily involves high-level criteria such as readability or ease of modification. To reflect the multidimensional nature of solution quality, we develop an evaluation taxonomy comprising three dimensions: Accuracy, Formula, and Format, each comprising fine-grained criteria that reflect professional standards. The Claude family leads the benchmark and produces the most professional-looking outputs in our qualitative review, but even the strongest agents frequently fall short of professional finance standards and degrade sharply as the difficulty increases beyond a few chained calculations. This suggests that current agents are not yet able to reliably produce professional-quality spreadsheets at the level of complexity real-world workflows demand.
Authors: George Tsoukalas, Anton Kovsharov, Sergey Shirobokov, Anja Surina, Moritz Firsching, Gergely B\'erczi, Francisco J. R. Ruiz, Arun Suggala, Adam Zsolt Wagner, Eric Wieser, Lei Yu, Aja Huang, Mikl\'os Z. Horv\'ath, Andrew Ferraiuolo, Henryk Michalewski, Edward Lockhart, Codrut Grosu, Thomas Hubert, Matej Balog, Pushmeet Kohli, Swarat Chaudhuri
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly excel at mathematical reasoning, but their unreliability limits their utility in mathematics research. A mitigation is using LLMs to generate formal proofs in languages like Lean. We perform the first large-scale evaluation of this method's ability to solve open problems. Our most capable agent autonomously resolved 9 of 353 open Erd\H{o}s problems at the per-problem cost of a few hundred dollars, proved 44/492 OEIS conjectures, and is being deployed in combinatorics, optimization, graph theory, algebraic geometry, and quantum optics research. A basic agent alternating LLM-based generation with Lean-based verification replicated the Erd\H{o}s successes but proved costlier on the hardest problems. These findings demonstrate the power of AI-aided formal proof search and shed light on the agent designs that enable it.
Authors: Zenghui Zhou, Man Li, Xiaoke Fang, Xinyi Zhou, Weibin Lin, Zheng Zheng
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on logical reasoning benchmarks, yet their reliability remains uncertain. Existing evaluations rely on static benchmarks, which fail to assess robustness under logically equivalent transformations and often overestimate reasoning capability. We propose LGMT (Logic-Grounded Metamorphic Testing), an oracle-free framework that leverages first-order logic (FOL) to evaluate LLM reasoning. By deriving metamorphic relations from formal logical equivalences, LGMT constructs semantically invariant test cases and detects reasoning defects through cross-case consistency checking. Experiments on six state-of-the-art LLMs show that LGMT exposes substantial hidden defects missed by traditional reference-based evaluations. We further find that models are particularly sensitive to symbol-level and conclusion-level variations, and that advanced prompting such as Few-shot CoT only partially mitigates these issues. These results suggest that LLM evaluation should move beyond isolated correctness toward robustness under logical invariance. LGMT provides a principled and scalable approach for diagnosing reasoning failures.
Authors: Bowen Wang, Dunjie Lu, Junli Wang, Tianyi Bai, Shixuan Liu, Zhipeng Zhang, Haiquan Wang, Hao Hu, Tianbao Xie, Shuai Bai, Dayiheng Liu, Que Shen, Junyang Lin, Tao Yu
Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has driven breakthroughs in domains such as math, tool-use, and software engineering, yet its extension to computer-use agents (CUAs) has been bottlenecked by the scarcity of scalable training data with deterministic rewards. Constructing such data for CUAs requires consistent task instruction, executable environment, and verifiable reward. However, hand-curated benchmarks achieve high reward fidelity but cover few applications and LLM-as-judge-based datasets scale broadly but lack reliable verification. We present CUA-Gym, a scalable pipeline that co-generates task instructions, environment states, and reward functions. Concretely, a Generator agent constructs the initial and golden environment states, and a separate Discriminator agent writes the reward function from the task specification. An orchestrator agent drives the two through iterative rounds upon execution. Generated tuples then pass a final filter combining LLM majority voting and agent rollouts, ensuring quality beyond the per-task adversarial loop. To address the scarcity of training environments, we further synthesize CUA-Gym-Hub, a broad suite of high-fidelity mock web applications grounded in real-world software-use distributions, expanding the scale of CUA RLVR data by magnitude. Using this pipeline, we construct CUA-Gym, a dataset of 32,112 verified RLVR training tuples grounded in 110 environments. Trained with GSPO on CUA-Gym, our CUA-Gym-A3B and CUA-Gym-A17B achieve 62.1% and 72.6% on OSWorld-Verified, outperforming prior open-source CUAs at comparable scales, with performance scaling smoothly in both data volume and environment diversity. The same checkpoints also improve on the held-out WebArena benchmark, indicating transfer beyond the training environments. We will open-source the full synthesis pipeline, dataset, CUA-Gym-Hub environments, and models.
Authors: Weizhi Fei, Hang Yin, Zihao Wang, Shukai Zhao, Wei Zhang, Yangqiu Song
Abstract: Complex Query Answering (CQA) is a fundamental knowledge representation and reasoning task over incomplete knowledge graphs (KGs). Answering existential first-order queries with $k$ free variables (i.e., $\text{EFO}_k$ queries) is a crucial yet challenging problem, as it requires ranking answer tuples in $\mathcal{E}^k$, where $\mathcal{E}$ denotes the entity set of a KG. This quickly becomes intractable as $k$ grows. Consequently, existing benchmarks and methods rely on marginal rankings over individual variables; however, marginal rankings are a poor proxy for the true joint ranking of tuples. Building on neural symbolic search for $\text{EFO}_1$ queries, we propose Neural Scalable Symbolic Search (NS3), a budgeted framework that approximates joint ranking without enumerating $\mathcal{E}^k$. NS3 (i) answers marginalized sub-queries to obtain necessary candidate sets, (ii) merges multiple free variables into hypernodes whose domains are pruned and controlled by a dynamic budget $B$, and (iii) progressively reduces an $\text{EFO}_k$ query to an $\text{EFO}_{k-1}$ query over a budgeted reduced domain. Across three standard KG datasets, NS3 substantially improves joint ranking performance while retaining strong marginal accuracy. We further release a joint-ranking benchmark that extends existing $\text{EFO}_1$ datasets to $k=3$, enabling systematic evaluation of multi-variable queries. Our code is provided in https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/NS3_KDD2026.
Authors: Tianren Zhang, Xiangxin Li, Minghao Xiao, Guanyu Chen, Feng Chen
Abstract: Deep networks often exhibit a preference for "simple" solutions, and such a simplicity bias is widely believed to play a key role in generalization. Yet a broadly applicable, quantitative measure of simplicity remains elusive. We introduce polynomial representations as a distribution-aware, low-dimensional surrogate for neural functions: we approximate a network's predictive behavior along data-dependent interpolation paths using orthogonal polynomial bases, yielding a compact functional representation. We show that the effective degree of this representation serves as a practical simplicity metric that is predictive of generalization across tasks and architectures, and consistently outperforms existing generalization proxies such as sharpness. Finally, polynomial representations naturally yield a differentiable simplicity regularizer, which consistently improves generalization in image and text classification, fine-tuning contrastive vision-language models, and reinforcement learning.
Authors: William Rudman, Abhishek Divekar, Kanishk Jain, Sebastian Joseph, Stella S. R. Offner, Matthew Lease, Kyle Mahowald, Greg Durrett, Junyi Jessy Li
Abstract: Fitting quantitative models to data is a central step in scientific workflows, yet it remains one of the least automated. Recent agent-based systems leverage language and vision-language models (VLMs) to iteratively propose and refine statistical models, but these systems struggle on more challenging modeling tasks. To address these limitations, we introduce VESTA: Visual Exploration with Statistical Tool Agents, a framework that equips VLMs with a dynamically growing exploration toolkit to guide model refinement through data transformations, hypothesis-driven visualizations, and robust statistical tests. Unlike prior systems that rely on iterative critique alone, VESTA actively explores data before and during refinement by selecting or creating diagnostic tools, which accumulate in the model's context and can be reused later. We evaluate VESTA against established baselines in three toolkit configurations: no tools, static expert-written tools, and dynamic model-written tools. To support this evaluation, we introduce DAWN (Dataset for Automated Workflows and Numerical Modeling), a benchmark targeting distribution fitting and time series modeling with varying difficulty tiers, and culminating in real-world astronomy tasks including modeling initial mass functions and gravitational-wave chirp signals. We find that VESTA's dynamic tool creation outperforms prior agentic pipelines, with the largest gains on complex and domain-specific tasks. We further show that dynamically generated tools are substantially more sophisticated than those produced by existing visual tool-creation systems, covering more diagnostic categories per function and strongly preferring visual outputs that the VLM critic can reason over directly.
Authors: Zelin He, Haotian Lin, Boran Han, Wei Zhu, Haoyang Fang, Bernie Wang, Xuan Zhu, Runze Li, Matthew Reimherr
Abstract: Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) enables LLM agents to improve continuously from environment rewards, yet the resulting policies do not systematically accumulate reusable strategies that generalize across tasks. Modular skills can provide such reusable strategies, yet existing skill-augmented RL methods decouple skill creation from policy optimization, risking adopting skills that conflict with the evolving policy. Inspired by Anthropic's Skill Creator, we introduce ReSkill, an RL-in-the-loop skill creation framework that reconciles skill evolution with policy learning. ReSkill exploits the group-wise structure of GRPO to naturally embed three mechanisms with only marginal additional overhead: (1) an assertion-driven skill creator that diagnoses failures from past experience and proposes conditional, trigger-based skill revisions; (2) within-group rollout sampling that enables controlled comparison of skill versions, capturing which version best supports the policy's ongoing learning; and (3) Thompson Sampling with adaptive discounting to balance exploration and exploitation in skill version selection as the policy evolves. Across several domains, ReSkill consistently outperforms existing memory and skill-based RL methods, with the largest gains on unseen tasks. Analysis of the skill lifecycle shows skills being automatically created, tested, refined, and pruned as the policy improves, demonstrating reconciled skill-policy co-evolution.
Authors: Shuo Lu, Yinuo Xu, Kecheng Yu, Siru Jiang, Yongcan Yu, Yubin Wang, Haitao Yang, Yuxiang Zhang, Bin Wang, Ran He, Jian Liang
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly asked not only to write static interfaces, but to construct executable interactive worlds from natural language. Browser-native 3D, commonly built with Three.js, is a natural next frontier: generated programs must integrate assets, obey spatial and physical constraints, and keep user-facing controls synchronized with hidden runtime state. Existing web-generation benchmarks and evaluators, however, largely observe only pixels or DOM nodes, while the mechanics of a Three.js world unfold inside an opaque
Authors: Bo-Hong Wang, Baicheng Peng, Ruilin Wang, Jun Bai, Ziyang Song, Yue Li
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong natural-language reasoning abilities for clinical decision support, but struggle to effectively model structured longitudinal electronic health records (EHRs). In contrast, EHR foundation models can learn predictive patient representations, yet lack interpretable language-based reasoning. To bridge this gap, we propose ChatHealthAI, a multimodal reasoning framework that aligns structured EHR representations from a pretrained EHR foundation model with the semantic space of a frozen LLM through a task-aware resampler. By integrating longitudinal patient representations with refined clinical event descriptions, ChatHealthAI enables clinically grounded natural-language reasoning while maintaining accurate patient prediction. We evaluated ChatHealthAI on three clinical predictive tasks from the EHRSHOT benchmark. Results show that ChatHealthAI improves reasoning quality and interpretability while preserving competitive predictive performance. These findings highlight the potential of integrating EHR foundation models with pretrained LLMs for interpretable clinical prediction.
Authors: Xu Wan, Speed Zhu, Jianwei Cai, Guang Chen, XiMing Huang, Wiggin Zhou, Mingyang Sun
Abstract: Inference-time scaling has emerged as a critical avenue for enhancing Large Language Models' performance, yet real-world deployment is constrained by strict computational budgets. In this work, we formulate inference budget allocation as a global constrained optimization problem governed by economic principles. By modeling per-query reasoning utility with a shifted-surge function, we derive an optimal allocation policy based on a global shadow price that equilibrates marginal utility under resource scarcity. Based on this theory, we propose Constrained Latent-utility Equilibrium Allocation for Reasoning (CLEAR). It performs rational abandonment and reallocates resources from insolvent queries to solvable queries near their emergence thresholds. Extensive experiments on several reasoning tasks with different traffic streams demonstrate that CLEAR significantly improves the Pareto frontier of total token cost versus mean accuracy. In resource-scarce regimes, CLEAR achieves up to a 3x improvement in global accuracy compared to uniform allocation.
Authors: Edward Y. Chang
Abstract: Many current agentic systems and LLM pipelines correct mistakes by optimizing outcome reward. This addresses only the what of failure: when an outcome diverges from prediction, the why and when of the mismatch are not systematically logged, reviewed, or corrected, so the same error can recur episode after episode. We argue that this is a structural problem, not merely a model-capacity one. We propose long-horizon temporal regret as a first-class objective alongside outcome regret and epistemic regret over the working causal model. Temporal regret captures when failure persists: how long a miscalibrated causal model is tolerated before correction. Epistemic regret captures why failure persists: residual uncertainty or error in the working causal model. Together, the three regrets give a falsifiable account of what, why, and when a long-lived agent can fail. Modeling the agent as a stream of E episodes, we prove three conditional results under explicit causal-probing, persistence, and detectability assumptions. First, under observationally equivalent confounding, outcome-only learning cannot distinguish causal from spurious structure without an intervention channel, so temporal miscalibration can persist linearly even after outcome regret is driven to zero. Second, with a persistent causal log and budgeted probes, total probe complexity is logarithmic in the episode horizon, inducing O(log E) temporal regret. Third, under K detectable change-points, the rate extends to O(K log E). We instantiate Trivium and pre-register five falsifiable predictions. On CausalBench-Seq, Trivium follows the predicted logarithmic envelope while outcome-only baselines grow linearly. A pilot real-LLM stream provides preliminary external-validity evidence across one full E = 500 run and three E = 100 frontier-model pilots. Self-learning here means revising an external causal model, not retraining LLM weights.
Authors: Zhichao Yang, Yuanze Hu, Haojie Hao, Longkun Hao, Dongshuo Huang, Hongyu Lin, Gen Li, Lanqing Hong, Yihang Lou, Yan Bai
Abstract: Mobile agents are increasingly expected to operate everyday applications from screenshots and language goals, where reliable control requires reasoning over screen affordances, multi-step navigation, and future state changes. However, many agents externalize this computation as long textual chains of thought, which slows interaction, increases supervision cost, and complicates deployment. We introduce MIRAGE, a framework that learns continuous latent reasoning representations from visible textual reasoning traces. MIRAGE transfers explicit reasoning into compact hidden states, enabling the agent to reason internally without decoding long rationales. It also incorporates a generative world-model objective: latent reasoning vectors are aligned with future screenshots, encouraging the agent to anticipate upcoming interface states before acting. This turns hidden computation into both a compressed thought representation and a forward-looking model of environment dynamics. At inference time, MIRAGE reasons in continuous latent space, reducing token generation while improving execution efficiency. On AndroidWorld, MIRAGE matches explicit chain-of-thought supervised fine-tuning in the 4B ablation with a 3-5x lower decoded-token budget and improves a comparable instruction-tuned baseline by 10.2 points; on AndroidControl, it improves action grounding while generating over 75% fewer tokens.
Authors: Olasimbo Ayodeji Arigbabu
Abstract: AI agents are commonly evaluated using task success, reward, latency, and cost. These metrics are useful, but they often miss important aspects of agent behavior: whether an agent explores too much, repeats itself too rigidly, uses tools effectively, reduces uncertainty over time, or remains robust across repeated runs. This paper proposes Entropy-Based Evaluation of AI Agents (EEA), a lightweight framework for measuring agent behavior through entropy. Rather than treating intelligence as only final task completion, EEA studies the structure of the agents decision process. The framework introduces action entropy, trajectory entropy, tool entropy, information gain, exploration efficiency, and robustness entropy. These metrics are intended to complement, not replace, traditional evaluation methods. We also present a practical Python implementation designed to integrate with agent frameworks such as LangChain, Google ADK, custom agent loops, and stored observability traces.
Authors: Yuze Gao
Abstract: Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves reasoning even when the reward signal is spurious -- assigning credit to the group-plurality answer rather than a ground-truth verifier. Practitioners commonly interpret naive = acc(TRUE) - acc(RANDOM) as the reward-design effect. We prove this estimand is systematically biased: it conflates self-consistency elicitation (sharpening the policy toward its modal answer via majority pseudo-reward) with genuine reward-design signal. Using a controlled tabular-GRPO simulator we derive an exact telescoping decomposition total = null + elicit + rd and measure each term across five prior-strength levels. The reward-design fraction of the naive estimator ranges from 0.139 at weak prior (ps=0.20) to 0.05 at strong prior (ps=0.80), with the elicitation term flipping sign at the self-consistency crossover. A pre-registered 2x2x2 factorial confirms non-additivity (interaction ratio 0.385; AxC effect -0.089). A points-vs-bounds pilot gate shows strong-prior regimes are point-identified while near-crossover regimes are only bounded. Re-audits of two named published results yield ELICITATION DOMINATED (elicitation share 0.98) and REWARD DESIGN DOMINATED (rd share 1.18) verdicts respectively, demonstrating the diagnostic value of the partition. We pre-commit to submit regardless of flip outcome; a non-flip is a finding of equal standing. We release a reusable one-command harness for any alignment paper to run the same audit.
Authors: Haocheng Luo, Jiahui Liu, Ruicheng Zhang, Zhizhou Zhong, Jiaqi Huang, Zunnan Xu, Quan Shi, Jun Zhou, Xiu Li
Abstract: While vision-language models excel at general multimodal understanding, they still struggle with visual spatial planning. We attribute this to a perception-reasoning modality gap: visual planning requires models to infer latent state structures from pixels and then reason over the recovered structure to produce valid actions, whereas symbolic planning directly leverages explicit objects and constraints. This creates dual bottlenecks in visual state recovery and multi-step planning. To address this, we propose MGSD, a two-stage modality-gap-aware self-distillation framework. First, a cold-start grounding stage equips the visual student with reliable state representations, minimizing early perception noise. Second, a privileged teacher transfers planning capabilities via on-policy distillation, using explicit symbolic states to supervise the student's own visual rollout prefixes. Crucially, symbolic data is used strictly during training, leaving inference purely visual. Experiments on visual planning benchmarks show that MGSD consistently improves visual planning across both 4B and 8B backbones, raising the macro average by 19.3% and 18.4%, respectively. The resulting models narrow the gap to symbolic-input upper bounds, while ablations and diagnostics confirm that the improvement comes from both visual state recovery and optimal-path reasoning. These results suggest that modality-gap-aware self-distillation improves not only how models perceive actionable states, but also how they plan over the inferred structure. Code is available at https://github.com/Oranger-l/MGSD.
Authors: Dianxing Shi, Bowen Wang, Junqi He, Junhao Chen, Yuta Nakashima
Abstract: Self-evolving agents improve through continual self-play and self-generated learning signals, but autonomous evolution can also cause capability degradation and safety drift. Although human feedback has proven effective for static and post-trained agents, its role in self-evolving systems remains underexplored. We introduce Agent Norm Correction through Human-like Oversight and Review (ANCHOR), an LLM-based framework that simulates human supervision and delivers feedback at various phases of self-evolution. With ANCHOR, we evaluate two representative open-source self-evolving agent systems across coding, mathematical reasoning, and safety. Our results show that even limited supervision substantially mitigates safety degradation while preserving stable performance on core evolutionary objectives. Further analysis shows that supervision over the output verification phase is the most effective for intervention, whereas increasing supervision frequency yields diminishing returns. These findings provide empirical evidence and practical guidance for designing more stable, controllable, and human-aligned self-evolving agent systems.
Authors: Yonchanok Khaokaew, Ruochen Kong, Andreas Zufle, Hao Xue, Taylor Anderson, Chandini Raina MacIntyre, Matthew Scotch, Flora D. Salim, David J Heslop
Abstract: Modelling individual decision-making during infectious disease outbreaks is crucial for understanding behavioural dynamics and informing effective public health interventions. Prior work has shown that large language models can simulate realistic human behaviour by generating agent decisions based on demographic prompts and situational context. We build on this foundation with a spatially grounded, agent-based simulation framework that integrates LLM-generated decisions about self-reported influenza-like illness into a census-based synthetic population of agents. Location is treated as a central feature: agents are assigned to spatial units within cities, capturing the spatial distributions of different demographic groups using real-world census data and enabling geographically diverse behavioural modelling. We implement and compare three decision scenarios, independent reasoning, household influence, and message framing, and simulate self-reporting outcomes in San Francisco and Atlanta. Results reveal that income and education are the dominant drivers of reporting rate variation, with smaller but consistent effects from geography, LLM model choice, and message framing. Our framework generates synthetic data that captures both social and geographic heterogeneity, supporting spatial epidemiological modelling and bias-aware behavioural analysis.
Authors: Jiaju Chen, Yuxuan Lu, Jiayi Su, Chaoran Chen, Songlin Xiao, Zheng Zhang, Yun Wang, Yunyao Li, Jian Zhao, Tongshuang Wu, Toby Jia-Jun Li, Dakuo Wang, Bingsheng Yao
Abstract: Recent advances in LLM agents have enabled complex cognitive capabilities, such as multi-step reasoning, planning, and tool use, that increasingly position these agents as human collaborators. Effective collaboration, however, requires collaborators to continuously maintain and align mental models of their own reasoning,partners' intentions, and shared goals during the collaborative process. Today's agents rarely develop such capabilities since they are primarily optimized for task completion, and the community lacks authentic human collaboration data with action-level mental model annotations that could guide agents toward process-level collaborative competence. To bridge this gap, we present ALMANAC, a dataset of Action-Level Mental model ANnotations for Agent Collaboration built from the Map Task, a classic dyadic routing task from social science. ALMANAC contains 2,987 collaboration actions, each paired with theory-informed mental model annotations that record the participants' self-reasoning, perceived partner intent, and perceived team goal. We benchmark six LLMs on predicting humans' next-turn behavior and mental models. Our results demonstrate ALMANAC's utility in evaluating models' ability to simulate human collaborative behaviors and infer their underlying mental models.
Authors: Cody J Christopher, Charles Gretton
Abstract: We study parallel Continuous Local Search (CLS) as a solution approach for Boolean satisfiability problems with symmetric pseudo-Boolean (PB) constraints. Here, the $n$-variable PB-satisfiability problem is relaxed to a continuous optimisation problem with a differentiable objective function on an $n$-dimensional hypercube. For satisfiable instances, the global minimisers of this optimisation problem correspond to satisfying assignments of the SAT problem at hand. We present several novel findings via empirical experiments: (i) redundant constraints can inhibit rather than accelerate convergence; (ii) CLS shows promise as a sub-solver in hybridised settings, quickly completing partial assignments; and (iii) local search rapidly converges to a stable distribution of solution quality (i.e., degree of satisfaction), due to saddle-dense objectives where additional solver steps yield diminishing returns. Our findings inform practical uses of CLS for SAT on modern accelerator hardware.
Authors: Alvin Zou, Muhammad Suhail Saleem, Maxim Likhachev
Abstract: Heuristics play a central role in the performance of bidirectional search algorithms, which commonly rely on two main classes. Front-to-end (F2E) heuristics estimate the distance from a state s to the target of the search (the goal for forward search or the start for backward search). In contrast, front-to-front (F2F) heuristics estimate the distance from s to the opposite search frontier using a pairwise function h(s, s'), where s' ranges over frontier states. Although F2F heuristics are typically more informative and therefore reduce the number of node expansions, their reliance on extensive pairwise evaluations incurs substantial computational overhead. To address this limitation, we introduce a new heuristic class, front-to-attractors (F2A), that preserves much of the informativeness of F2F while dramatically reducing its computational cost. Rather than evaluating distances to all states on the opposite frontier, F2A estimates the distance from s to a small, dynamically maintained set of attractors in the opposite search direction. These attractors serve as a surrogate for the full frontier, enabling rich heuristic guidance at a fraction of the computational expense while maintaining the optimality guarantees offered by F2F. We evaluate F2A across multiple domains and show that it reduces the number of pairwise evaluations by up to 11.2x compared to F2F, while achieving 4.8x fewer node expansions than F2E on average.
Authors: Tengyao Tu, Yulin Li, Hui-Ling Zhen, Libo Qin, Zhoujun Wei, Jinghua Piao, Zhuotao Tian, Yong Li, Min Zhang
Abstract: Recent advances in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) demonstrate remarkable performance improvements by iteratively reflecting, exploring, and executing complex tasks, yet suffer from inefficiencies due to redundant reasoning, known as "overthinking". Existing methods to mitigate this issue either rely on static difficulty estimates or require task-specific training, and thus fail to adapt to the dynamic complexity during reasoning. In this work, we empirically show that the problem difficulty evolves dynamically throughout the reasoning process and is linearly encoded in the LRM's step-level embeddings. Building on this insight, we propose DyCon, a training-free framework that leverages latent step-level representations to explicitly model the evolving task difficulty, enabling the dynamic control of reasoning depth to mitigate the overthinking issue. Extensive experiments conducted on four models ranging from 4B to 32B, and across twelve benchmarks in math reasoning, general question answering, and coding tasks demonstrate that DyCon significantly enhances reasoning efficiency by reducing redundant steps without sacrificing accuracy or generalization. Code is available at https://github.com/yu-lin-li/DyCon.
Authors: Ming Jin, Yaxuan Kong, Yuxuan Liang, Chaoli Zhang, Siqiao Xue, Xue Wang, James Zhang, Yi Wang, Haifeng Chen, Xiaoli Li, Vincent S. Tseng, Yu Zheng, Lei Chen, Hui Xiong, Shirui Pan, Qingsong Wen
Abstract: Temporal data, including time series and spatio-temporal data, are pervasive in real-world applications. Generated in massive volumes by physical and virtual sensors, they record dynamic system behaviors and enable a wide range of downstream tasks. Effectively analyzing such data is crucial to unlocking their rich information content. Recent advances in large language models and other foundation models have accelerated their use in time series and spatio-temporal data mining. These approaches not only improve pattern recognition and reasoning across diverse domains but also support progress toward artificial general intelligence that can understand and process temporal data. In this survey, we present a comprehensive, up-to-date review of large models tailored or adapted for time series and spatio-temporal data along four dimensions: data types, model categories, model scopes, and application areas/tasks. We organize existing work into two main groups: large models for time series analysis (LM4TS) and for spatio-temporal data mining (LM4STD), and further distinguish general-purpose from domain-specific models. We also curate related resources, including datasets, model implementations, and tools, organized by major application areas. Overall, this survey consolidates recent advances and highlights foundations, applications, resources, and open research opportunities in large model-centric temporal data analysis.
Authors: Lukas Schulze Balhorn, Marc Caballero, Artur M. Schweidtmann
Abstract: The process engineering domain widely uses Process Flow Diagrams (PFDs) and Process and Instrumentation Diagrams (P&IDs) to represent process flows and equipment configurations. However, the P&IDs and PFDs, hereafter called flowsheets, can contain errors causing safety hazards, inefficient operation, and unnecessary expenses. Correcting and verifying flowsheets is a tedious, manual process. We propose a novel generative AI methodology for automatically identifying errors in flowsheets and suggesting corrections to the user, i.e., autocorrecting flowsheets. Inspired by the breakthrough of Large Language Models (LLMs) for grammatical autocorrection of human language, we investigate LLMs for the autocorrection of flowsheets. The input to the model is a potentially erroneous flowsheet and the output of the model are suggestions for a corrected flowsheet. We train our autocorrection model on a synthetic dataset in a supervised manner. The model achieves a top-1 accuracy of 80% and a top-5 accuracy of 84% on an independent test dataset of synthetically generated flowsheets. The results suggest that the model can learn to autocorrect the synthetic flowsheets. We envision that flowsheet autocorrection will become a useful tool for chemical engineers.
Authors: Ehsan Imani, Kai Luedemann, Sam Scholnick-Hughes, Esraa Elelimy, Martha White
Abstract: It is becoming increasingly common in regression to train neural networks that model the entire distribution even if only the mean is required for prediction. This additional modeling often comes with performance gain and the reasons behind the improvement are not fully known. This paper investigates a recent approach to regression, the Histogram Loss, which involves learning the conditional distribution of the target variable by minimizing the cross-entropy between a target distribution and a flexible histogram prediction. We design theoretical and empirical analyses to determine why and when this performance gain appears, and how different components of the loss contribute to it. Our results suggest that the benefits of learning distributions in this setup come from improvements in optimization rather than modelling extra information. We then demonstrate the viability of the Histogram Loss in common deep learning applications without a need for costly hyperparameter tuning.
Authors: Marc Schmitt
Abstract: The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into corporate strategy has become critical for organizations seeking to maintain competitive advantage in the digital age. Although organizations increasingly rely on AI as a strategic and organizational resource, existing C-suite roles remain only partially equipped to govern, integrate, and leverage it coherently at the enterprise level. Organizations vary in their responses. Some create a dedicated Chief AI Officer (CAIO), others extend existing mandates into hybrid roles, and still others coordinate AI through federated structures. This paper develops a role-design theory to explain this variation. I identify three properties that distinguish AI from earlier cross-cutting enterprise technologies - distributed accountability for judgment, upstream governance, and non-stationarity - and three configurations through which organizations respond: concentrated extension, distributed extension, and role creation. The CAIO Framework links these properties to the executive design problems they generate and to the functions and capabilities required of the dedicated role. Four propositions specify when a dedicated CAIO emerges, what form an organization's response takes, when the dedicated role is effective, and how configurations evolve over time. This paper contributes to research on executive leadership, organizational design, and digital governance by offering a theory-driven account of the strategic integration of AI at the executive level.
Authors: Omar Salemohamed, Laurent Charlin, Shivam Garg, Vatsal Sharan, Gregory Valiant
Abstract: We propose a general framework for end-to-end learning of data structures. Our framework adapts to the underlying data distribution and provides fine-grained control over query and space complexity. Crucially, the data structure is learned from scratch, and does not require careful initialization or seeding with candidate data structures/algorithms. We first apply this framework to the problem of nearest neighbor search. In several settings, we are able to reverse-engineer the learned data structures and query algorithms. For 1D nearest neighbor search, the model discovers optimal distribution (in)dependent algorithms such as binary search and variants of interpolation search. In higher dimensions, the model learns solutions that resemble k-d trees in some regimes, while in others, they have elements of locality-sensitive hashing. The model can also learn useful representations of high-dimensional data and exploit them to design effective data structures. We also adapt our framework to the problem of estimating frequencies over a data stream, and believe it could also be a powerful discovery tool for new problems.
Authors: Lukas Schulze Balhorn, Kevin Degens, Artur M. Schweidtmann
Abstract: Control structure design is an important but tedious step in P&ID development. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) promises to reduce P&ID development time by supporting engineers. Previous research on generative AI in chemical process design mainly represented processes by sequences. However, graphs offer a promising alternative because of their permutation invariance. We propose the Graph-to-SFILES model, a generative AI method to predict control structures from flowsheet topologies. The Graph-to-SFILES model takes the flowsheet topology as a graph input and returns a control-extended flowsheet as a sequence in the SFILES 2.0 notation. We compare four different graph encoder architectures, one of them being a graph neural network (GNN) proposed in this work. The Graph-to-SFILES model achieves a top-5 accuracy of 73.2% when trained on 10,000 flowsheet topologies. In addition, the proposed GNN performs best among the encoder architectures. Compared to a purely sequence-based approach, the Graph-to-SFILES model improves the top-5 accuracy for a relatively small training dataset of 1,000 flowsheets from 0.9% to 28.4%. However, the sequence-based approach performs better on a large-scale dataset of 100,000 flowsheets. These results highlight the potential of graph-based AI models to accelerate P&ID development in small-data regimes but their effectiveness on industry relevant case studies still needs to be investigated.
Authors: Elina M\"akel\"a, Matthew Bone, Mareike Sehrer, Farah Nanji, Fabian Stephany
Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming the nature of work, yet there is limited empirical evidence on how it affects demand for human skills. This paper examines whether AI adoption increases the prevalence and value of human capabilities that complement technical AI skills, such as analytical thinking, resilience, or ethical judgment, within and beyond AI-intensive job roles. Using a dataset of nearly 30 million job postings from the US, the UK and Australia, between 2018 and 2024, we distinguish between internal effects (within AI roles) and external effects (in non-AI roles) across companies, industries, and regions. This paper has three main findings. First, we find that AI-intensive roles are significantly more likely to require complementary non-technical capabilities, such as analytical thinking, resilience, and digital literacy. Second, these complementary skills are associated with meaningful wage premiums, particularly in managerial, sales or finance roles working with AI. Third, we show that AI diffusion has potential spillover effects: as AI adoption rises within companies, industries, and regions, demand for complementary skills increases even in non-AI roles while demand for substitutable skills - summarisation, translation or customer service - decreases. These trends hold across geographies, including the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, confirming the robustness of our findings. Together, these findings indicate that AI is not simply replacing tasks or requiring more AI developer skills; it may be transforming workforce skill requirements to favor human attributes that enhance collaboration with intelligent systems.
Authors: Shuo Shao, Haozhe Zhu, Yiming Li, Hongwei Yao, Tianwei Zhang, Zhan Qin
Abstract: Model fingerprinting has emerged as a crucial mechanism for safeguarding the intellectual property of open-source models, offering a non-intrusive approach that requires no modifications to the protected model. However, our analysis reveals that existing fingerprinting techniques are fundamentally vulnerable to false claim attacks, wherein adversaries can fraudulently assert ownership over independent third-party models. We demonstrate that this vulnerability stems from the untargeted nature of current methods, which evaluate model similarity based on arbitrary sample outputs rather than alignment with a specific, predefined reference. To mitigate this vulnerability, we introduce FIT-Print, a targeted fingerprinting paradigm that actively counters false claim attacks. Specifically, FIT-Print leverages optimization to transform the fingerprint into a verifiable, targeted signature. Building upon this foundation, we propose two black-box fingerprinting methods, the bit-wise FIT-ModelDiff and the list-wise FIT-LIME, which utilize output distances and feature attributions as robust model signatures, respectively. Extensive evaluations across benchmark models and datasets show that our framework perfectly neutralizes false claim attacks (100% defense success rate) and eliminates false alarms on independent models (0.0%), all while maintaining a 100% ownership verification rate against diverse model reuse techniques.
Authors: Somaiyeh Dehghan, Mehmet Umut Sen, Berrin Yanikoglu
Abstract: Hate speech detection is a crucial task, especially on social media where harmful content can spread quickly. Collecting social media content (tweets etc.) to train machine learning models is easy, but detecting and categorizing hate speech can be difficult due to the inherently subjective nature. This subjectivity leads to frequent disagreement among annotators, particularly for subtle or borderline content. Traditional approaches either discard non-consensus samples or force a ''gold standard'' through expert adjudication, ignoring valuable information about uncertainty and diverse human perspectives. We examine the largely overlooked problem of annotator disagreement in hate speech classification and evaluate a range of aggregation methods, including majority voting, ordinal strategies (minimum, maximum, and mean), and analyze their impact across binary, 4-class, and 6-class classification tasks. In addition, we leverage annotators' perceived hate speech strength scores to explore regression-based and hybrid modeling approaches. Among others, we show that filtering non-consensus samples results in over-optimistic results and that the perceived strength provides a complementary signal that enhance classification performance. Finally, we establish new state-of-the-art results for hate speech detection in Turkish tweets, and demonstrate that annotator disagreement, when properly modeled, is a valuable resource for building more robust and reliable systems.
Authors: Chang Nie
Abstract: Originating in quantum physics, tensor networks (TNs) have been widely adopted as exponential machines and parametric decomposers for recognition tasks. Typical TN models, such as Matrix Product States (MPS), have not yet achieved successful application in natural image recognition. When employed, they primarily serve to compress parameters within pre-existing networks, thereby losing their distinctive capability to capture exponential-order feature interactions. This paper introduces a novel architecture named \textit{\textbf{D}eep \textbf{T}ree \textbf{T}ensor \textbf{N}etwork} (DTTN), which captures $2^L$-order multiplicative interactions across features through multilinear operations, while essentially unfolding into a \emph{tree}-like TN topology with the parameter-sharing property. DTTN is stacked with multiple antisymmetric interaction modules (AIMs), and this design facilitates efficient implementation. Furthermore, our theoretical analysis demonstrates the equivalence between quantum-inspired TN models and polynomial/multilinear networks under specific conditions. We posit that the DTTN could catalyze more interpretable research within this field. The proposed model is evaluated across multiple benchmarks and domains, demonstrating superior performance compared to both peer methods and state-of-the-art architectures. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/NieCha/deep_tree_tensor_network.
Authors: Liumeng Xue, Ziya Zhou, Jiahao Pan, Zixuan Li, Shuai Fan, Yinghao Ma, Sitong Cheng, Dongchao Yang, Haohan Guo, Yujia Xiao, Xinsheng Wang, Zixuan Shen, Chuanbo Zhu, Xinshen Zhang, Tianchi Liu, Ruibin Yuan, Zeyue Tian, Haohe Liu, Xingjian Du, Emmanouil Benetos, Ge Zhang, Yike Guo, Wei Xue
Abstract: Recent advancements in audio tokenization have significantly enhanced the integration of audio capabilities into large language models (LLMs). However, audio understanding and generation are often treated as distinct tasks, hindering the development of truly unified audio-language models. While instruction tuning has demonstrated remarkable success in improving generalization and zero-shot learning across text and vision, its application to audio remains largely unexplored. A major obstacle is the lack of comprehensive datasets that unify audio understanding and generation. To address this, we introduce Audio-FLAN, a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset covering 80 diverse tasks across speech, music, and sound domains, with over 100 million instances. Audio-FLAN lays the foundation for unified audio-language models that can seamlessly handle both understanding (e.g., transcription, comprehension) and generation (e.g., speech, music, sound) tasks across a wide range of audio domains in a zero-shot manner. The Audio-FLAN dataset is available on HuggingFace and GitHub.
Authors: Lukas Schulze Balhorn, Niels Seijsener, Kevin Dao, Minji Kim, Dominik P. Goldstein, Ge H. M. Driessen, Artur M. Schweidtmann
Abstract: A piping and instrumentation diagram (P&ID) is a central reference document in chemical process engineering. Currently, chemical engineers manually review P&IDs through visual inspection to find and rectify errors. However, engineering projects can involve hundreds to thousands of P&ID pages, creating a significant revision workload. This study proposes a rule-based method to support engineers with error detection and correction in P&IDs. The method is based on a graph representation of P&IDs, enabling automated error detection and correction, i.e., autocorrection, through rule graphs. We use our pyDEXPI Python package to generate P&ID graphs from DEXPI-standard P&IDs. In this study, we developed 33 rules based on chemical engineering knowledge and heuristics, with five selected rules demonstrated as examples. A case study on an illustrative P&ID validates the reliability and effectiveness of the rule-based autocorrection method in revising P&IDs.
Authors: Christoforos N. Spartalis, Theodoros Semertzidis, Petros Daras, Efstratios Gavves
Abstract: We present LoTUS, a novel Machine Unlearning (MU) method that eliminates the influence of training samples from pre-trained models, avoiding retraining from scratch. LoTUS smooths the prediction probabilities of the model up to an information-theoretic bound, mitigating its over-confidence stemming from data memorization. We evaluate LoTUS on Transformer and ResNet18 models against eight baselines across five public datasets. Beyond established MU benchmarks, we evaluate unlearning on ImageNet1k, a large-scale dataset, where retraining is impractical, simulating real-world conditions. Moreover, we introduce the novel Retrain-Free Jensen-Shannon Divergence (RF-JSD) metric to enable evaluation under real-world conditions. The experimental results show that LoTUS outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness. Code: https://github.com/cspartalis/LoTUS.
Authors: Feihan Feng, Jingxin Nie
Abstract: Decoding sensory experiences from neural activity to reconstruct human-perceived visual stimuli and semantic content remains a challenge in neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Despite notable progress in current brain decoding models, a critical gap still persists in their systematic integration with established neuroscientific theories and the exploration of underlying neural mechanisms. Here, we present a novel framework that directly decodes fMRI signals into textual descriptions of viewed natural images. Our novel deep learning model, trained without visual information, achieves state-of-the-art semantic decoding performance, generating meaningful captions that capture the core semantic content of complex scenes. Neuroanatomical analysis reveals the critical role of higher-level visual cortices, including MT+ complex, ventral stream visual cortex, and inferior parietal cortex, in visual semantic processing. Furthermore, category-specific analysis demonstrates nuanced neural representations for semantic dimensions like animacy and motion. This work provides a more direct and interpretable framework to the brain's semantic decoding, offering a powerful new methodology for probing the neural basis of complex semantic processing, refining the understanding of the distributed semantic network, and potentially developing brain-inspired language models.
Authors: Eugen Barbulescu, Antonio Alexoaie, Lucian Busoniu
Abstract: Network pruning is used to reduce inference latency and power consumption in large neural networks. However, most methods focus on empirical results at the expense of understanding the pruning process. We introduce Hyperflux, a novel $L_0$ method which models pruning as a continuously evolving system determined by flux, the gradient response to a weight's removal, and pressure, a global regularization driving weights toward pruning. By exploiting this model, Hyperflux's pruning behavior becomes understandable at both microscopic (weight regrowth/pruning) and macroscopic (sparsity convergence, etc.) levels. We also introduce a novel pressure scheduler that reliably targets desired sparsities. Hyperflux achieves competitive results with ResNet-50, VGG-19 and DeiT-T/S on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet datasets.
Authors: Sarah de Boer, Hartmut H\"antze, Kiran Vaidhya Venkadesh, Myrthe A. D. Buser, Gabriel E. Humpire Mamani, Lina Xu, Lisa C. Adams, Jawed Nawabi, Keno K. Bressem, Bram van Ginneken, Mathias Prokop, Alessa Hering
Abstract: Renal mass segmentation has important potential to enhance the clinical workflow, especially in settings requiring quantitative assessments. Kidney volume could serve as an important biomarker for renal diseases, with changes in volume correlating directly with kidney function. Currently, clinical practice often relies on subjective visual assessment for evaluating kidney size and kidney lesions, including tumors and cysts, which are typically staged based on diameter, volume, and anatomical location. To support a more objective and reproducible approach, this research aims to develop a robust, thoroughly validated renal mass segmentation algorithm, named Renal-Net. We employ publicly available training datasets and leverage the state-of-the-art medical image segmentation framework nnU-Net. Validation is conducted using both proprietary and public test datasets, with segmentation performance quantified by Dice coefficient and the 95th percentile Hausdorff distance. Furthermore, we analyze robustness across subgroups based on patient sex, age, CT contrast phases, and tumor histologic subtypes. Our findings demonstrate that our segmentation algorithm, trained exclusively on publicly available data, generalizes effectively to external test sets and outperforms existing state-of-the-art models across all tested datasets. Subgroup analyses reveal consistent high performance, indicating strong robustness and reliability. The developed algorithm and associated code are publicly accessible at https://github.com/DIAGNijmegen/oncology-kidney-abnormality-segmentation.
URLs: https://github.com/DIAGNijmegen/oncology-kidney-abnormality-segmentation.
Authors: Saurabh Agarwal, Bodun Hu, Luis Pabon, Myungjin Lee, Jayanth Srinivasa, Aditya Akella
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves the reliability of large language models by integrating external knowledge, but serving RAG pipelines efficiently is challenging because requests traverse heterogeneous components spanning LLM inference, databases, and CPU-side processing. We present Harmonia, an end-to-end RAG serving framework that addresses these bottlenecks through (i) a flexible pipeline specification interface for composing custom workflows, (ii) heterogeneity-aware deployment that provisions and configures components as a distributed inference system, and (iii) a closed-loop runtime controller that monitors load and execution progress and reduces SLO violations through request prioritization and auto-scaling. Across four RAG applications, Harmonia outperforms commercial alternatives, improving throughput by more than 2.04x while reducing SLO violations by up to 78.4 percent.
Authors: C\'edric Goemaere, Gaspard Oliviers, Rafal Bogacz, Thomas Demeester
Abstract: Predictive Coding (PC) offers a brain-inspired alternative to backpropagation for neural network training, described as a physical system minimizing its internal energy. However, in practice, PC is predominantly digitally simulated, requiring excessive amounts of compute while struggling to scale to deeper architectures. This paper reformulates PC to overcome this hardware-algorithm mismatch. First, we uncover how the canonical state-based formulation of PC (sPC) is, by design, deeply inefficient in digital simulation, inevitably resulting in exponential signal decay that stalls the entire minimization process. Then, to overcome this fundamental limitation, we introduce error-based PC (ePC), a novel reparameterization of PC which does not suffer from signal decay. Though no longer biologically plausible, ePC numerically computes exact PC weights gradients and runs orders of magnitude faster than sPC. Experiments across multiple architectures and datasets demonstrate that ePC matches backpropagation's performance even for deeper models where sPC struggles. Besides practical improvements, our work provides theoretical insight into PC dynamics and establishes a foundation for scaling PC-based learning to deeper architectures on digital hardware and beyond.
Authors: Muzhi Zhu, Hao Zhong, Canyu Zhao, Zongze Du, Mingyu Liu, Zheng Huang, Anzhou Li, Hao Chen, Cheng Zou, Jingdong Chen, Ming Yang, Chunhua Shen
Abstract: Active vision, also known as active perception, refers to actively selecting where and how to look in order to gather task-relevant information. It is a critical component of efficient perception and decision-making in humans and advanced embodied agents. With the rise of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) as central planners in robotic systems, the lack of methods for equipping MLLMs with active perception has become a key gap. We first provide a systematic definition of MLLM-based active perception tasks and show that GPT-o3's zoom-in strategy can be viewed as a special case, though it suffers from low efficiency and inaccurate region selection. To address these issues, we propose ACTIVE-o3, a reinforcement learning framework built on GRPO that equips MLLMs with active perception capabilities. Leveraging a modular sensing-action design and a dual-form reward, ACTIVE-o3 autonomously learns efficient and stable region selection strategies without explicit region-selection supervision. We further establish a comprehensive benchmark covering both open-world tasks, including small- and dense-object grounding, and domain-specific scenarios, including remote sensing, autonomous driving, and interactive segmentation. Experimental results demonstrate that ACTIVE-o3 significantly enhances active perception capabilities compared to baselines. Moreover, we show that our framework not only preserves the model's general understanding ability but can also serve as a proxy task for leveraging perception data, further improving performance on benchmarks such as RealWorldQA and MME.
Authors: Zhiyuan Liu, Yicun Yang, Yaojie Zhang, Junjie Chen, Chang Zou, Qingyan Wei, Shaobo Wang, Yichen Zhu, Linfeng Zhang
Abstract: Autoregressive Models (ARMs) have long dominated the landscape of Large Language Models. Recently, a new paradigm has emerged in the form of diffusion-based Large Language Models (dLLMs), which generate text by iteratively denoising masked segments. This approach has shown significant advantages and potential. However, dLLMs suffer from high inference latency. Traditional ARM acceleration techniques, such as Key-Value caching, are incompatible with dLLMs due to their bidirectional attention mechanism. To address this specific challenge, our work begins with a key observation that dLLM inference involves a static prompt and a partially dynamic response, where most tokens remain stable across adjacent denoising steps. Based on this, we propose dLLM-Cache, a training-free adaptive caching framework that combines long-interval prompt caching with partial response updates guided by feature similarity. This design enables efficient reuse of intermediate computations without compromising model performance. Extensive experiments on representative dLLMs, including LLaDA 8B and Dream 7B, show that dLLM-Cache achieves up to 9.1x FLOPs reduction on LongBench-HotpotQA while maintaining competitive output quality. Notably, our method brings dLLM inference latency close to that of ARMs under many settings. The code for this work is publicly available at: https://github.com/maomaocun/dLLM-cache.
Authors: Daking Rai, Samuel Miller, Kevin Moran, Ziyu Yao
Abstract: Despite remarkable advances in coding capabilities, language models (LMs) still struggle with simple syntactic tasks such as generating balanced parentheses. In this study, we investigate the underlying mechanisms behind the persistence of these errors across LMs of varying sizes (124M-7B) to both understand and mitigate the errors. Our study reveals that LMs rely on a number of components (attention heads and FF neurons) that independently make their own predictions. While some components reliably promote correct answers across a generalized range of inputs (i.e., implementing "sound mechanisms''), others are less reliable and introduce noise by promoting incorrect tokens (i.e., implementing "faulty mechanisms''). Errors occur when the faulty mechanisms overshadow the sound ones and dominantly affect the predictions. Motivated by this insight, we introduce RASteer, a steering method to systematically identify and increase the contribution of reliable components for improving model performance. RASteer substantially improves performance on balanced parentheses tasks, boosting accuracy of some models from $0$% to around $100$% without impairing the models' general coding ability. We further demonstrate its broader applicability in arithmetic reasoning tasks, achieving performance gains of up to around $20$%.
Authors: Changze Lv, Jiang Zhou, Siyu Long, Lihao Wang, Jiangtao Feng, Dongyu Xue, Yu Pei, Hao Wang, Zherui Zhang, Yuchen Cai, Zhiqiang Gao, Ziyuan Ma, Jiakai Hu, Chaochen Gao, Jingjing Gong, Yuxuan Song, Shuyi Zhang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Deyi Xiong, Lei Bai, Wanli Ouyang, Ya-Qin Zhang, Wei-Ying Ma, Bowen Zhou, Hao Zhou
Abstract: We introduce AMix-1, a powerful protein foundation model built on Bayesian Flow Networks and empowered by a systematic training methodology, encompassing pretraining scaling laws, emergent capability analysis, in-context learning mechanism, and test-time scaling algorithm. To guarantee robust scalability, we establish a predictive scaling law and reveal the progressive emergence of structural understanding via loss perspective, culminating in a strong 1.7-billion model. Building on this foundation, we devise a multiple sequence alignment (MSA)-based in-context learning strategy to unify protein design into a general framework, where AMix-1 recognizes deep evolutionary signals among MSAs and consistently generates structurally and functionally coherent proteins. This framework enables the successful design of a dramatically improved AmeR variant with an up to $50\times$ activity increase over its wild type. Pushing the boundaries of protein engineering, we further empower AMix-1 with an evolutionary test-time scaling algorithm for in silico directed evolution that delivers substantial, scalable performance gains as verification budgets are intensified, laying the groundwork for next-generation lab-in-the-loop protein design.
Authors: Prateek Chanda, Saral Sureka, Parth Pratim Chatterjee, Krishnateja Killamsetty, Nikhil Shivakumar Nayak, Ganesh Ramakrishnan
Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning performance for large language models depends strongly on how training budget is distributed across a heterogeneous set of tasks. In practice, mixtures are often fixed using simple heuristics (e.g., uniform or size-proportional sampling) that ignore task interactions, which can hurt transfer and waste budget on redundant sources. We introduce TaskPGM, a framework for learning continuous task mixtures via an energy-based model over tasks. Tasks form the nodes of a Markov random field: unary potentials capture per-task utility, and pairwise potentials encode inter-task relationships using behavioral divergences computed from predictive distributions of single-task fine-tuned models (e.g., Jensen--Shannon divergence and pointwise mutual information). Optimizing this objective yields mixtures that balance coverage against redundancy. We show that the resulting set function is weakly submodular under budget constraints, enabling approximation guarantees for discrete selection variants. Across multiple model families (LLaMA-7B, Qwen2-7B) and evaluation suites (BIG-Bench Hard), TaskPGM improves over standard mixing strategies and provides interpretable structure over task interactions.
Authors: Yanxing Liang, Yinghui Wang, Wei Li, Tao Yan, Jiaxing Shen
Abstract: We propose CLONE, a 3DGS-based Closed-Loop differentiable Optimization framework for single-image Normal Estimation. The core idea is to construct an "image-geometry-image" consistency loop that unifies and jointly constrains the limitations of both paradigms: the reliance on explicit supervision without cross-domain geometric constraints in discriminative methods, and the absence of stable differentiable optimization pathways in generative methods despite strong generative priors. Specifically, we first employ 3D Gaussian Splatting to explicitly parameterize the scene and derive continuous and differentiable surface normals via covariance eigen-decomposition, providing an analytical gradient pathway for geometric modeling. We then introduce a differentiable illumination model with a learnable light modulation kernel to establish a continuous mapping between surface normals and image radiance, enabling reprojection errors to directly supervise the underlying 3D geometry. Furthermore, to compensate for the limited local detail expressiveness of Gaussian representations, we design a one-step deterministic diffusion-inspired refinement network, which enhances local geometric details while preserving end-to-end differentiability. A cross-domain gating fusion mechanism is introduced to coordinate global geometric consistency and local detail reconstruction. Finally, all components are jointly optimized under a unified reprojection objective, forming a closed-loop and stable gradient propagation pathway. This enables effective constraint of the multi-solution space and improved geometric consistency without requiring ground-truth normal supervision.
Authors: Constantin Ruhdorfer, Matteo Bortoletto, Victor Oei, Anna Penzkofer, Andreas Bulling
Abstract: We introduce Unsupervised Partner Design (UPD), a population-free multi-agent reinforcement learning method for robust ad-hoc teamwork. UPD generates training partners on-the-fly and selects them adaptively based on a learnability criterion, removing the need for pre-trained partner populations or manual parameter tuning. We show that this simple mechanism enables effective partner diversity and can be extended to joint partner-environment selection when a procedural level generator is available. Across Level-Based Foraging, Overcooked-AI, and the Overcooked Generalisation Challenge, UPD consistently achieves strong performance compared to both population-based and population-free baselines. In a human-AI user study, agents trained with UPD achieve higher returns and are rated as more adaptive, more human-like, and less frustrating than all evaluated baseline methods.
Authors: Fernando Martinez-Lopez, Tao Li, Yingdong Lu, Juntao Chen
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) agents often struggle to generalize to new tasks and contexts without updating their parameters, mainly because their learned representations and policies are overfit to the specifics of their training environments. To boost agents' in-context RL (ICRL) ability, this work formulates ICRL as a two-agent emergent communication problem and introduces CORAL (Communicative Representation for Adaptive RL), a framework that learns a transferable communicative context by functionally separating latent representation learning from control. In CORAL, an Information Agent (IA) is pre-trained as a world model on a diverse distribution of tasks. Its objective is not direct return maximization, but world modeling and distilling its understanding into concise messages. The emergent communication protocol is shaped by a novel Causal Influence Loss, which measures the effect that the message has on the next action. During deployment, the previously trained IA serves as a fixed contextualizer for a new Control Agent (CA), which learns to solve tasks by interpreting the provided communicative context. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach enables the CA to achieve significant gains in sample efficiency and successfully perform zero-shot adaptation with the help of pre-trained IA in diverse online and offline environments, validating the efficacy of learning a transferable communicative representation.
Authors: Hanyu Li, Dongchen Li, Xiaotie Deng
Abstract: Designing polynomial-time algorithms for approximate Nash equilibria (ANE) with provable worst-case guarantees is a fundamental open problem in algorithmic game theory. While large language models (LLMs) can generate candidate algorithms at scale, certifying worst-case guarantees requires formal analysis over all game instances -- a task for which no automated system previously existed. Here, we present LegoNE, a framework encoding expert proof strategies into a symbolic language that automatically compiles any candidate algorithm into a finite optimization problem certifying its worst-case guarantee. Integrating LegoNE with a reasoning LLM, we rediscovered an algorithm matching the best polynomial-time guarantee for two-player games, and discovered a three-player algorithm improving the best guarantee from $0.6+\delta$ to $0.5+\delta$ -- provably beyond the reach of the extension technique, the only previously known multi-player ANE design paradigm. These results show that encoding domain-specific proof strategies into a machine-tractable language can support LLM-driven discovery of algorithms outside known human design paradigms.
Authors: Lei Wang, Syuan-Hao Li, Piotr Koniusz, Yongsheng Gao
Abstract: Research in video understanding has advanced rapidly, driven by increasingly diverse datasets and more powerful model architectures. While existing surveys typically organize progress by tasks, benchmarks, or model families, they provide limited insight into why particular architectures emerged and succeeded. In this survey, we argue that the evolution of video understanding is fundamentally shaped by dataset structure. We present a dataset-centric perspective that connects dataset structure, inductive biases, and architectural design within a unified framework. We show that different datasets require models to capture specific invariances and capabilities, such as robustness to viewpoint changes, sensitivity to temporal ordering, reasoning over long-range dependencies, relational interactions, and cross-modal alignment. These requirements naturally give rise to inductive biases, i.e., architectural assumptions that favor particular patterns of reasoning and generalization. From this perspective, milestone architectures, including two-stream networks, 3D CNNs, temporal models, transformers, graph-based methods, and multimodal foundation models, can be understood as architectural responses to the challenges posed by evolving datasets. Building on this framework, we systematically analyze how dataset characteristics have shaped architectural innovation across video understanding tasks and discuss the representational biases induced by different data regimes. By unifying datasets, inductive biases, and architectures into a coherent perspective, this survey offers both a retrospective explanation of the field's evolution and a forward-looking roadmap toward general-purpose video understanding systems. Code and dynamic video visualizations of dataset-induced biases are available at https://time.griffith.edu.au/paper-sites/video-understanding/.
URLs: https://time.griffith.edu.au/paper-sites/video-understanding/.
Authors: Jordan Sassoon, Michal Szczepanski, Martyna Poreba
Abstract: Vision Transformers (ViTs) have recently achieved strong results in semantic segmentation, yet their deployment on resource-constrained devices remains limited due to their high memory footprint and computational cost. Quantization offers an effective strategy to improve efficiency, but ViT-based segmentation models are notoriously fragile under low precision, as quantization errors accumulate across deep encoder-decoder pipelines. We introduce I-Segmenter, the first fully integer-only ViT segmentation framework. Building on the Segmenter architecture, I-Segmenter systematically replaces floating-point operations with integer-only counterparts. To further stabilize both training and inference, we propose $\lambda$-ShiftGELU, a novel activation function that mitigates the limitations of uniform quantization in handling long-tailed activation distributions. In addition, we remove the L2 normalization layer and replace bilinear interpolation in the decoder with nearest neighbor upsampling, ensuring integer-only execution throughout the computational graph. Extensive experiments show that I-Segmenter achieves accuracy within a reasonable margin of its FP32 baseline (5.1 % on average), while reducing model size by up to 3.8x and enabling up to 1.2x faster inference with optimized runtimes. Notably, even in one-shot PTQ with a single calibration image, I-Segmenter delivers competitive accuracy, underscoring its practicality for real-world deployment.
Authors: Anand Gopalakrishnan, Robert Csord\'as, J\"urgen Schmidhuber, Michael C. Mozer
Abstract: The attention mechanism in a Transformer architecture matches key to query based on both content -- the what -- and position in a sequence -- the where. We present an analysis indicating that what and where are entangled in the popular RoPE rotary position embedding. This entanglement can impair performance particularly when decisions require independent matches on these two factors. We propose an improvement to RoPE, which we call Polar Coordinate Position Embeddings or PoPE, that eliminates the what-where confound. PoPE is far superior on a diagnostic task requiring indexing solely by position or by content. On autoregressive sequence modeling in music, genomic, and natural language domains, Transformers using PoPE as the positional encoding scheme outperform baselines using RoPE with respect to evaluation loss (perplexity) and downstream task performance. On language modeling, these gains persist across model scale, from 124M to 774M parameters. Crucially, PoPE shows strong zero-shot length extrapolation capabilities compared not only to RoPE but even a method designed for extrapolation, YaRN, which requires additional fine tuning and frequency interpolation.
Authors: Haofeng Huang, Yifei Han, Long Zhang, Bin Li, Yangfan He, Yaxin Xue
Abstract: Multimodal intent recognition (MMIR) suffers from weak semantic grounding and poor robustness under noisy or rare-class conditions. We propose MVCL-DAF++, which extends MVCL-DAF with two key modules: (1) Prototype-aware contrastive alignment, aligning instances to class-level prototypes to enhance semantic consistency; and (2) Coarse-to-fine attention fusion, integrating global modality summaries with token-level features for hierarchical cross-modal interaction. On MIntRec and MIntRec2.0, MVCL-DAF++ achieves new state-of-the-art results, improving rare-class recognition by +1.05\% and +4.18\% WF1, respectively. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of prototype-guided learning and coarse-to-fine fusion for robust multimodal understanding. The source code is available at https://github.com/chr1s623/MVCL-DAF-PlusPlus.
Authors: Haoyang Chen, Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii
Abstract: State-of-the-art NLP benchmarks require interpretation of natural language that specifies conditions, procedures, and exceptions, often relying on implicit assumptions and external knowledge. Constructing complete semantic representations with proof-theoretic guarantees is frequently impractical at scale, and purely text-based reasoning offers limited means of inspection. This paper asks how much understanding of benchmark language can be achieved when formal semantic guarantees are weakened. We investigate this question by extracting computables: executable representations whose runtime behavior provides operational evidence of semantic adequacy, including executability, execution traces, and runtime failures. We induce and iteratively refine computables for benchmark instances using retrieval from external knowledge. Across mathematical reasoning, multi-step reasoning, causal inference, and rule- and exception-heavy legal and biomedical benchmarks, we find that the proposed approach consistently exceeds text-only reasoning and one-shot code execution. Beyond accuracy, our analyses show that these computables provide scalable, inspectable semantic evidence: they expose conditions and exceptions benchmark language forces into executable form, offering a practical bridge between proof-oriented semantics and purely textual reasoning.
Authors: Yunchen Li, Shaohui Lin, Zhou Yu
Abstract: This paper investigates the theoretical behavior of generative models under finite training populations. Within the stochastic interpolation generative framework, we derive closed-form expressions for the optimal velocity field and score function when only a finite number of training samples are available. We demonstrate that, under some regularity conditions, the deterministic generative process exactly recovers the training samples, while the stochastic generative process manifests as training samples with added Gaussian noise. Beyond the idealized setting, we consider model estimation errors and introduce formal definitions of underfitting and overfitting specific to generative models. Our theoretical analysis reveals that, in the presence of estimation errors, the stochastic generation process effectively produces convex combinations of training samples corrupted by a mixture of uniform and Gaussian noise. Experiments on generation tasks and downstream tasks such as classification support our theory.
Authors: Junkai Chen, Huihui Huang, Yunbo Lyu, Junwen An, Jieke Shi, Chengran Yang, Ting Zhang, Haoye Tian, Yikun Li, Zhenhao Li, Xin Zhou, Xing Hu, David Lo
Abstract: Large language model-powered code agents are rapidly transforming software engineering, yet the security risks of their generated code have become a critical concern. Existing benchmarks have provided valuable insights, but they fail to capture scenarios in which vulnerabilities are actually introduced by human developers, making fair comparisons between humans and agents infeasible. We therefore introduce SecureVibeBench, a benchmark of 105 C/C++ secure coding tasks sourced from 41 projects in OSS-Fuzz for code agents. SecureVibeBench has the following features: (i) realistic task settings that require multi-file edits in large repositories, (ii)~aligned contexts based on real-world open-source vulnerabilities with precisely identified vulnerability introduction points, and (iii) comprehensive evaluation that combines functionality testing and security checking with both static and dynamic oracles. We evaluate 5 popular code agents like OpenHands, supported by 5 LLMs (e.g., Claude sonnet 4.5) on SecureVibeBench. Results show that current agents struggle to produce both correct and secure code, as even the best-performing one, produces merely 23.8\% correct and secure solutions on SecureVibeBench. Our code and data are on https://github.com/iCSawyer/SecureVibeBench.
Authors: Yanlong Wang, Hang Yu, Jian Xu, Fei Ma, Hongkang Zhang, Tongtong Feng, Zijian Zhang, Shao-Lun Huang, Danny Dongning Sun, Xiao-Ping Zhang
Abstract: Large time series foundation models often adopt channel-independent architectures to handle varying data dimensions, but this design ignores crucial cross-channel dependencies. Meanwhile, existing cross-modal methods predominantly rely on textual modalities, leaving the spatial pattern recognition capabilities of vision models underexplored for time series analysis. To address these limitations, we propose VFEM, a cross-modal forecasting model that leverages pre-trained large vision models (LVMs) to capture complex cross-variable patterns. VFEM transforms multivariate time series into visual representations, enabling LVMs to perceive spatial relationships that are not explicitly modeled by channel-independent models. Through a dual-branch architecture, visual and temporal features are independently extracted and then fused via cross-modal attention, allowing complementary information from both modalities to enhance forecasting. By freezing the LVM and training only 7.45% of the total parameters, VFEM achieves competitive performance on multiple benchmarks, offering a new perspective on multivariate time series forecasting.
Authors: Sean Moran
Abstract: Approximate nearest neighbour (ANN) search underpins large-scale retrieval, increasingly within the retrieval-augmented generation pipelines that ground large language models, yet the methods that address it have multiplied across communities until they are seldom read as a single field. We argue they form one field with three design choices, and develop the projection-quantisation-organisation (PQO) lens, under which locality-sensitive hashing, learned binary hashing, deep end-to-end hashing, product quantisation, graph-based indexes, and the binary embeddings of modern vector databases are all settings of three coupled questions: where to place the projections, where to place the quantisation thresholds, and how to organise the resulting codes. The projection-then-quantisation reading is established; our contribution is the third, co-equal organisation stage, a demonstration that the three run unbroken from the field's origins to the deep, product-quantisation, graph, and retrieval-augmented eras, and a reproducible measurement that turns the lens from classifying methods to predicting them. The measurement yields three findings. First, memory is won on the quantisation axis: a one-bit code is a thirty-second the size of the float, and a single full-precision re-ranking pass over a short candidate list recovers uncompressed quality in full. Second, the trade-off orderings the lens anticipates recur unchanged as the embedding grows. Third, where supervision is available, an eight-byte code more than doubles the quality of the two-kilobyte float it replaces. We release these measurements as BitBudget, an extensible benchmark with a live leaderboard, recast generative retrieval's "semantic identifiers" as quantisation codes, and identify the open problems that follow as compact codes return to the centre of large-scale retrieval.
Authors: Dang Nguyen, Sunil Gupta, Kien Do, Thin Nguyen, Taylor Braund, Alexis Whitton, Svetha Venkatesh
Abstract: Oversampling is one of the most widely used approaches for addressing imbalanced classification. The core idea is to generate additional minority samples to rebalance the dataset. Most existing methods, such as SMOTE, require converting categorical variables into numerical vectors, which often leads to information loss. Recently, large language model (LLM)-based methods have been introduced to overcome this limitation. However, current LLM-based approaches typically generate minority samples with limited diversity, reducing robustness and generalizability in downstream classification tasks. To address this gap, we propose a novel LLM-based oversampling method designed to enhance diversity. First, we introduce a sampling strategy that conditions synthetic sample generation on both minority labels and features. Second, we develop a new permutation strategy for fine-tuning pre-trained LLMs. Third, we fine-tune the LLM not only on minority samples but also on interpolated samples to further enrich variability. Extensive experiments on 10 tabular datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms eight SOTA baselines. The generated synthetic samples are both realistic and diverse. Moreover, we provide theoretical analysis through an entropy-based perspective, proving that our method encourages diversity in the generated samples.
Authors: Yang Li, Ruichen Zhang, Yinqiu Liu, Guangyuan Liu, Abbas Jamalipour, Xianbin Wang, Dong In Kim
Abstract: The rapid advancement of Low-Altitude Economy Networks (LAENets) has enabled a variety of applications, including aerial surveillance, environmental sensing, and semantic data collection. To support these scenarios, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with onboard vision-language models (VLMs) offer a promising solution for real-time multimodal inference. However, ensuring both inference accuracy and communication efficiency remains a significant challenge due to limited onboard resources and dynamic network conditions. In this paper, we first propose a UAV-enabled LAENet system model that jointly captures UAV mobility, user-UAV communication, and the onboard visual question answering (VQA) pipeline. Based on this model, we formulate a mixed-integer non-convex optimization problem to minimize task latency and power consumption under user-specific accuracy constraints. To solve the problem, we design a hierarchical optimization framework composed of two parts: (i) an Alternating Resolution and Power Optimization (ARPO) algorithm for resource allocation under accuracy constraints, and (ii) a Large Language Model-augmented Reinforcement Learning Approach (LLaRA) for adaptive UAV trajectory optimization. The large language model (LLM) serves as an expert in refining reward design of reinforcement learning in an offline fashion, introducing no additional latency in real-time decision-making. Numerical results demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed framework in improving inference performance and communication efficiency under dynamic LAENet conditions.
Authors: Jianzhu Yao, Hongxu Su, Taobo Liao, Zerui Cheng, Huan Zhang, Xuechao Wang, Pramod Viswanath
Abstract: Neural networks increasingly run on hardware outside the user's control (cloud GPUs, inference marketplaces). Yet ML-as-a-Service reveals little about what actually ran or whether returned outputs faithfully reflect the intended inputs. Users lack recourse against service downgrades (model swaps, quantization, graph rewrites, or discrepancies like altered ad embeddings). Verifying outputs is hard because floating-point(FP) execution on heterogeneous accelerators is inherently nondeterministic. Existing approaches are either impractical for real FP neural networks or reintroduce vendor trust. We present TAO: a Tolerance Aware Optimistic verification protocol that accepts outputs within principled operator-level acceptance regions rather than requiring bitwise equality. TAO combines two error models: (i) sound per-operator IEEE-754 worst-case bounds and (ii) tight empirical percentile profiles calibrated across hardware. Discrepancies trigger a Merkle-anchored, threshold-guided dispute game that recursively partitions the computation graph until one operator remains, where adjudication reduces to a lightweight theoretical-bound check or a small honest-majority vote against empirical thresholds. Unchallenged results finalize after a challenge window, without requiring trusted hardware or deterministic kernels. We implement TAO as a PyTorch-compatible runtime and a contract layer currently deployed on Ethereum Holesky testnet. The runtime instruments graphs, computes per-operator bounds, and runs unmodified vendor kernels in FP32 with negligible overhead (0.3% on Qwen3-8B). Across CNNs, Transformers and diffusion models on A100, H100, RTX6000, RTX4090, empirical thresholds are $10^2-10^3$ times tighter than theoretical bounds, and bound-aware adversarial attacks achieve 0% success. Together, TAO reconciles scalability with verifiability for real-world heterogeneous ML compute.
Authors: Neeladri Bhuiya, Madhav Aggarwal, Diptanshu Purwar
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are improving at an exceptional rate. With the advent of agentic workflows, multi-turn dialogue has become the de facto mode of interaction with LLMs for completing long and complex tasks. While LLM capabilities continue to improve, they remain increasingly susceptible to jailbreaking, especially in multi-turn scenarios where harmful intent can be subtly injected across the conversation to produce nefarious outcomes. While single-turn attacks have been extensively explored, adaptability, efficiency and effectiveness continue to remain key challenges for their multi-turn counterparts. To address these gaps, we present PLAGUE, a novel plug-and-play framework for designing multi-turn attacks inspired by lifelong-learning agents. PLAGUE dissects the lifetime of a multi-turn attack into three carefully designed phases (Primer, Planner and Finisher) that enable a systematic and information-rich exploration of the multi-turn attack family. Evaluations show that red-teaming agents designed using PLAGUE achieve state-of-the-art jailbreaking results, improving attack success rates (ASR) by more than 30% across leading models in a lesser or comparable query budget. Particularly, PLAGUE enables an ASR (based on StrongReject) of 81.4% on OpenAI's o3 and 67.3% on Claude's Opus 4.1, two models that are considered highly resistant to jailbreaks in safety literature. Our work offers tools and insights to understand the importance of plan initialization, context optimization and lifelong learning in crafting multi-turn attacks for a comprehensive model vulnerability evaluation.
Authors: Amin Omidvar
Abstract: The choice of activation function plays a critical role in neural networks, yet most architectures still rely on fixed, uniform activation functions across all neurons. We introduce SmartMixed, a novel two-phase training strategy that allows networks to learn optimal per-neuron activation functions while preserving computational efficiency at inference. In the first phase, neurons adaptively select from a pool of candidate activation functions (ReLU, Sigmoid, Tanh, Leaky\_ReLU, ELU, SELU) using a differentiable hard mixture mechanism. In the second phase, each neuron's activation function is fixed according to the learned selection, resulting in a computationally efficient network that supports continued training with optimized vectorized operations. We evaluate SmartMixed on the MNIST dataset using feedforward neural networks of different architectures. Our analysis reveals that neurons in different layers exhibit distinct preferences for activation functions, providing insights into the functional diversity within neural architectures. We also demonstrated that SmartMixed effectively trains the network by allowing neurons to select their preferred activation functions, competing against models using a single fixed state-of-the-art activation function.
Authors: Fabian Kresse, Christoph H. Lampert
Abstract: Deploying continuous-control reinforcement learning policies on embedded hardware requires meeting tight latency and power budgets. Small FPGAs can deliver these, but only if costly floating-point pipelines are avoided. We study quantization-aware training (QAT) of policies for integer inference and we present a learning-to-hardware pipeline that automatically selects low-bit policies and synthesizes them to an Artix-7 FPGA. Across five MuJoCo tasks, we obtain policy networks that are competitive with full precision (FP32) policies but require as few as 3 or even only 2 bits per weight, and per internal activation value, as long as input precision is chosen carefully. On the target hardware, the selected policies achieve inference latencies on the order of microseconds and consume microjoules per action, favorably comparing to a quantized reference. Last, we observe that the quantized policies exhibit increased input noise robustness compared to the floating-point baseline.
Authors: Xingyu Ren, Youran Sun, Haoyu Liang
Abstract: We find that current sentence-embedding models produce outputs with a consistent bias: every embedding $e$ decomposes as $\tilde e + \mu$, where the mean $\mu$ is near-identical across all sentences. We study two training-free corrections -- subtracting $\mu$ directly (R1), or projecting each embedding off the mean direction (R2) -- and show, via a first-order error-propagation argument, that R2 cancels the parallel component of mean-estimation error that R1 retains. Across 38 models on the Massive Multilingual Text Embedding Benchmark (MMTEB)~\citep{MMTEB}, R2 yields consistent classification gains (paired $\bar t = 3.31$, 29 of 38 models with $t>2$, zero losses), and the per-model mean norm $\Vert\mu\Vert$ correlates with which models benefit most. A nine-method dose-response ablation on five models further reveals that mild single-direction removal helps, but full principal component analysis (PCA) whitening hurts every model we test, and that R2 and All-but-the-Top with depth one agree within $0.18$ pp downstream despite weak geometric alignment between $\hat\mu$ and the centered top principal component.
Authors: An Yu, Weiheng Lu, Jian Li, Zhenfei Zhang, Yunhang Shen, Felix X. -F. Ye, Ming-Ching Chang
Abstract: Video Moment Retrieval is a task in video understanding that aims to localize a specific temporal segment in an untrimmed video based on a natural language query. Despite recent progress in moment retrieval from videos using both traditional techniques and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM), most existing methods still rely on coarse temporal understanding and a single visual modality, limiting performance on complex videos. To address this, we introduce \textit{S}hot-aware \textit{M}ultimodal \textit{A}udio-enhanced \textit{R}etrieval of \textit{T}emporal \textit{S}egments (SMART), an MLLM-based framework that integrates audio cues and leverages shot-level temporal structure. SMART enriches multimodal representations by combining audio and visual features while applying \textbf{Shot-aware Token Compression}, which selectively retains high-information tokens within each shot to reduce redundancy and preserve fine-grained temporal details. We also refine prompt design to better utilize audio-visual cues. Evaluations on Charades-STA and QVHighlights show that SMART achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods, including a 1.61\% increase in R1@0.5 and 2.59\% gain in R1@0.7 on Charades-STA.
Authors: Ming-Jhe Lee, Chang-Hong Wu, Jung-Hua Wang, Ming-Jer Chen, Yu-Chiao Yi, Tsung-Hsien Lee
Abstract: Assessing embryo fragmentation is crucial for predicting IVF success, yet manual grading is prone to subjectivity, and existing AI models struggle with clinical interpretability and segmentation errors. We propose AttnRegDeepLab, a Multi-Task Learning (MTL) framework designed to solve these challenges. The model enhances a DeepLabV3+ decoder with Attention Gates to filter out cytoplasmic noise and retain sharp contour details. It also introduces a Multi-Scale Regression Head with Feature Injection, guiding the segmentation process with global grading priors to eliminate systematic area estimation errors. Based on a two-stage decoupled training strategy and a range-based loss for weakly labeled data, our method resolves MTL gradient conflicts. AttnRegDeepLab yields high grading precision and excellent segmentation quality (Dice coefficient = 0.729), avoiding the trade-off between contour integrity and grading accuracy seen under standard joint optimization. This provides a reliable, clinically interpretable tool balancing visual and quantitative accuracy.
Authors: Gia Huy Thai, Hoang-Nguyen Vu, Anh-Minh Phan, Quang-Thinh Ly, Thi-Ngoc-Truc Nguyen, Nhat Ho
Abstract: The significant variability in cell size and shape continues to pose a major obstacle in computer-assisted cancer detection on gigapixel Whole Slide Images (WSIs), due to cellular heterogeneity. Current CNN-Transformer hybrids use static computation graphs with fixed routing. This leads to extra computation and makes it harder to adapt to changes in input. We propose Shape-Adapting Gated Experts (SAGE), an input-adaptive framework that enables dynamic expert routing in heterogeneous visual networks. SAGE reconfigures static backbones into dynamically routed expert architectures via a dual-path design with hierarchical gating and a Shape-Adapting Hub (SA-Hub) that harmonizes feature representations across convolutional and transformer modules. Embodied as SAGE with ConvNeXt and Vision Transformer UNet (SAGE-ConvNeXt+ViT-UNet), our model achieves a Dice score of 95.23% on EBHI, DSC scores of 92.78% and 91.42% on GlaS Test A and Test B, respectively, and 91.26% DSC at the WSI level on DigestPath, while exhibiting robust generalization under distribution shifts by adaptively balancing local refinement and global context. SAGE establishes a scalable foundation for dynamic expert routing in visual networks, thereby facilitating flexible visual reasoning. Project page: https://oxyzgiahuy.github.io/sage/
Authors: Yongcheng Yao, Yongshuo Zong, Raman Dutt, Yongxin Yang, Sotirios A Tsaftaris, Timothy Hospedales
Abstract: Current vision-language models (VLMs) in medicine are primarily designed for categorical question answering (e.g., "Is this normal or abnormal?") or qualitative descriptive tasks. However, clinical decision-making often relies on quantitative assessments, such as measuring the size of a tumor or the angle of a joint, from which physicians draw their own diagnostic conclusions. This quantitative reasoning capability remains underexplored and poorly supported in existing VLMs. In this work, we introduce MedVision, a large-scale dataset and benchmark specifically designed to evaluate and improve VLMs on quantitative medical image analysis. MedVision spans 22 public datasets covering diverse anatomies and modalities, with 30.8 million image-annotation pairs. We focus on three representative quantitative tasks: (1) detection of anatomical structures and abnormalities, (2) tumor/lesion (T/L) size estimation, and (3) angle/distance (A/D) measurement. We show that current off-the-shelf VLMs perform poorly on these tasks. However, supervised and reinforcement fine-tuning on MedVision significantly enhances performance across detection, T/L estimation, and A/D measurement. MedVision provides a foundation for developing VLMs with robust quantitative reasoning capabilities in medical imaging.
Authors: Nico Daheim, Thomas M\"ollenhoff, Ming Liang Ang, Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan
Abstract: Stochastic Variance Reduced Gradient (SVRG) and its variants aim to speed-up training by using gradient corrections. Originally proposed over a decade ago, these methods have never been connected to any Bayesian method at a fundamental level. Here, we fill this gap and derive surprising new connections of SVRG to a recently proposed Bayesian method called `posterior correction'. Our main contribution is to show that SVRG can be recovered as a special case of posterior-correction over isotropic-Gaussian posteriors. Novel extensions of SVRG are automatically obtained by using more flexible exponential-family posteriors. We derive two new such extensions by using Gaussian families: a Newton-like variant with novel Hessian corrections, and an Adam-like extension that scales to large problems. Our work is the first to connect SVRG to Bayes and use it to speed-up training.
Authors: Waleed Razzaq, Yun-Bo Zhao
Abstract: Development of reliable and physically interpretable probabilistic frameworks for industrial prognostics remain nascent, and existing literature is often insensitive as inputs move away from the training manifold. In this paper, we develop two sampling-free, distance-aware physics-constrained probabilistic frameworks: (i) PC-SNGP and (ii) PC-SNER. Both apply spectral normalization to hidden layer weights, enforcing bi-Lipschitz distance-preserving representation from the input to the latent space. PC-SNGP replaces the dense output with Gaussian process whose posterior variance increases with input distance from the training manifold. PC-SNER modifies the output layer to predict Normal-Inverse-Gamma~(NIG) parameters for distance preserving estimation. To maintain balance between data fidelity and physical consistency during training, we introduce a dynamic weighting strategy for the physics-constrained loss. We also introduce a distance-aware-coefficient~(DAC) metric to quantify sensitivity to distributional shifts. Empirically, we validate both frameworks on rolling-element-bearings (REBs) prognostics using the PRONOSTIA, XJTU-SY, and HUST benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate improved prediction accuracy and well-calibrated uncertainty estimates relative to competing baselines, while maintaining auditable performance in cross-validation and robustness under extreme adversarial perturbations.
Authors: Francesco L\"assig
Abstract: Representations pervade our daily experience, from letters representing sounds to bit strings encoding digital files. While such representations require externally defined decoders to convey meaning, conscious experience is fundamentally different: a neural state corresponding to perceiving a red square cannot alternatively encode the experience of a green triangle. This intrinsic property of consciousness suggests that conscious representations must be unambiguous in a way that conventional representations are not. We formalize this intuition using information theory, defining representational ambiguity as the conditional entropy H(I|R) over possible interpretations I given a representation R. Through experiments on neural networks trained to classify MNIST digits, we demonstrate that relational structures in network connectivity can unambiguously encode representational content. From relational structure alone, we achieve perfect (100%) accuracy for dropout-trained networks and 38% for standard backpropagation (chance: 10%) in identifying output neuron class identity, despite identical task performance, demonstrating that representational ambiguity can arise orthogonally to behavioral accuracy. We further show that spatial position of input neurons, relevant to phenomenal properties like visual field location, can be decoded from network connectivity with R^2 up to 0.844. These results provide a quantitative method for measuring representational ambiguity in neural systems and demonstrate that neural networks can exhibit the low-ambiguity representations posited as necessary (though not sufficient) by theoretical accounts such as narrow representationalism and IIT.
Authors: Runze Li, Hanchen Wang, Wenjie Zhang, Binghao Li, Yu Zhang, Xuemin Lin, Ying Zhang
Abstract: Multivariate time series imputation is fundamental in applications such as healthcare, traffic forecasting, and biological modeling, where sensor failures and irregular sampling lead to pervasive missing values. However, existing Transformer- and diffusion-based models lack explicit inductive biases and frequency awareness, limiting their generalization under structured missing patterns and distribution shifts. We propose FADTI, a diffusion-based framework that injects frequency-informed feature modulation via a learnable Fourier Bias Projection (FBP) module and combines it with temporal modeling through self-attention and gated convolution. FBP supports multiple spectral bases, enabling adaptive encoding of both stationary and non-stationary patterns. This design injects frequency-domain inductive bias into the generative imputation process. Experiments on multiple benchmarks, including a newly introduced biological time series dataset, show that FADTI consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly under high missing rates. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TimeSeriesImputation-52BF
URLs: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TimeSeriesImputation-52BF
Authors: Soochang Song, Yongjune Kim
Abstract: We propose a collaborative edge-to-server inference framework for vision-language models (VLMs) that reduces communication cost while maintaining inference accuracy. In typical deployments, visual data captured at edge devices (clients) is transmitted to the server for VLM inference. However, transmitting full-resolution images incurs high communication cost. Conversely, aggressive downsizing or excessive compression to mitigate communication overhead can discard fine-grained details, leading to accuracy degradation. To overcome this limitation, we design a communication-efficient two-stage framework. In the first stage, the server performs inference on the downsized thumbnail (global image) and quantifies the min-entropy of the output tokens. If the min-entropy exceeds a predefined threshold, the server identifies a region of interest (RoI) using the VLM's internal attention and requests the edge device to send a detail-preserved local image of the RoI. The server then refines its inference by jointly leveraging the global and local images. This selective retransmission strategy ensures that only essential visual content is additionally transmitted. Experimental results consistently confirm that the proposed framework substantially reduces communication overhead while maintaining inference accuracy across diverse VQA benchmarks.
Authors: Sven Benjamin Ko\v{z}i\'c, Vinko Zlati\'c, Fabio Franchini, Salvatore Marco Giampaolo
Abstract: Neural Quantum States (NQS) are powerful variational representations of quantum many-body wavefunctions, yet their performance depends sensitively on the chosen basis. Using an exactly solvable one-dimensional Ising model, we show that local basis rotations leave the minimization landscape unchanged while relocating the exact ground state in parameter space. This provides a controlled framework to disentangle representational limitations from optimization-induced trainability effects. This geometric displacement, quantified through information-geometric measures, can steer optimization of shallow architectures toward saddle points and high-curvature regions. As a result, low energy errors may coexist with an incorrect wavefunction structure. By comparing energy and infidelity optimization within the same variational architectures, we show that optimization failure can persist even when the rotated target state remains representable. Our results identify a geometric mechanism contributing to basis dependence in NQS and motivate landscape-aware variational design.
Authors: Haoyang Li, Xuyi Zhuang, Azmat Adnan, Ye Ni, Wei Rao, Shreyas Gopal, Eng Siong Chng, Boon Siew Han, Yuanjin Zheng
Abstract: Language Model (LM)-based generative modeling has emerged as a promising direction for TSE, offering potential for improved generalization and high-fidelity speech. We propose GenTSE, a two-stage decoder-only generative LM for TSE: Stage-1 predicts coarse semantic tokens, and Stage-2 generates fine acoustic tokens. Separating semantics and acoustics stabilizes decoding and yields more accurate target speech. Both stages use continuous SSL or codec embeddings, offering richer context than discretized-prompt methods. To reduce exposure bias, we employ a Frozen-LM Conditioning training strategy that conditions the LMs on predicted tokens from earlier checkpoints to reduce the gap between teacher-forcing training and autoregressive inference. We further apply DPO to better align outputs with perceptual preferences. Experiments on Libri2Mix show that GenTSE surpasses previous LM-based systems in speech quality, intelligibility, and speaker consistency.
Authors: Shengyu Cao, Ming Hu
Abstract: When competing sellers delegate pricing to a shared AI model, such as a large language model, correlated recommendations combined with performance-driven updates aggregating seller feedback raise a key question: can standard AI deployment practices inadvertently produce supracompetitive pricing? We develop a stylized duopoly model in which two sellers receive pricing recommendations from a shared AI characterized by two parameters: a propensity parameter capturing the model's tendency to set high prices and an output-fidelity parameter measuring alignment between this tendency and actual outputs, with propensity updated via periodic retraining on observed outcomes. We find that configuring AI models for robustness and reproducibility can lead to supracompetitive pricing via a phase transition. Below a critical output-fidelity threshold, competitive pricing is the unique stable outcome. Above it, the model exhibits bistability: both competitive and supracompetitive pricing are locally stable, with the realized outcome determined by the model's initial propensity. Supracompetitive pricing raises average prices, but occasional low-price recommendations complicate detection. With perfect output fidelity, full price coordination emerges from any interior initial propensity. For finite training batches of size $b$, when the initial propensity lies in the supracompetitive basin, the probability of supracompetitive pricing approaches 1 as $b$ increases, with the region of indeterminate outcomes shrinking at rate $O(1/\sqrt{b})$. Any factor reducing alignment between the model's propensity and sellers' actual pricing, whether through diversifying AI providers, introducing recommendation noise, or reducing seller adherence, pushes the market toward competitive outcomes.
Authors: Wei Liu, Yaoxin Wu, Yingqian Zhang, Thomas B\"ack, Yingjie Fan
Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has shown great promise in addressing multi-objective combinatorial optimization problems (MOCOPs). Nevertheless, the robustness of these learning-based solvers has remained insufficiently explored, especially across diverse and complex problem distributions. In this paper, we propose a unified robustness-oriented framework for preference-conditioned DRL solvers for MOCOPs. Within this framework, we develop a preference-based adversarial attack to generate hard instances that expose solver weaknesses, and quantify the attack impact by the resulting degradation on Pareto-front quality. We further introduce a defense strategy that integrates hardness-aware preference selection into adversarial training to reduce overfitting to restricted preference regions and improve out-of-distribution performance. The experimental results on multi-objective traveling salesman problem (MOTSP), multi-objective capacitated vehicle routing problem (MOCVRP), and multi-objective knapsack problem (MOKP) verify that our attack method successfully learns hard instances for different solvers. Furthermore, our defense method significantly strengthens the robustness and generalizability of neural solvers, delivering superior performance on hard or out-of-distribution instances.
Authors: Meili Sun, Chunjiang Zhao, Lichao Yang, Hao Liu, Shimin Hu, Ya Xiong
Abstract: Strawberry-harvesting robots faced challenges such as poor visual perception, gripper misalignment, empty grasp/misgrasp, and slippage, which reduced harvesting stability and efficiency.To overcome these issues, this paper proposes a visual fault diagnosis and self-recovery framework. An end-to-end SRR-Net achieved unified perception and fault diagnosis through joint detection, segmentation, and ripeness regression of the fruit and gripper. Leveraging this integrated perception, a relative error compensation method driven by simultaneous target-gripper detection was designed to correct positional misalignments exceeding the tolerance threshold. A micro-optical camera integrated within the end-effector delivered real-time visual feedback. Based on the micro-optical camera, a MobileNet V3-Small classifier was utilized for grasp adjustment during the deflating stage, enabling the early abort of the harvesting cycle in cases of empty grasp/misgrasps. Furthermore, a time-series LSTM classifier was applied during the snap-off stage to predict strawberry slippage. Based on these predictions, the system executed re-inflation and a secondary snap-off attempt for slipping strawberries, or aborted the cycle for slipped strawberries. Experiments demonstrated that the mean absolute errors between the end-effector and the picking point were reduced to 3.12 mm and 4.06 mm from 11.50 mm and 5.25 mm along the x- and y-axes, respectively, at the cost of a time increment of 0.64 $pm$ 0.24 s. The grasp adjustment module reduced the grasping phase by approximately 0.5 s and avoided empty-placement for failure cases. The strawberry slip prediction module handled slipped cases with an 88.89% success rate, saving approximately 4.00 s per harvesting cycle for failure cases. Also, it achieved an 81.25% recovery rate for slipping strawberries, requiring additional 0.63 s for re-grasping.
Authors: Kai Gu, Yingping Liang, Senliang Peng, Aotian Guo, Haizheng Zhong, Ying Fu
Abstract: The synthesis of nanocrystals has been highly dependent on trial-and-error, due to the complex correlation between synthesis parameters and physicochemical properties. Although deep learning offers a potential methodology to achieve generative inverse design, it is still hindered by the scarcity of high-quality datasets that align nanocrystal synthesis routes with their properties. Here, we present the construction of a large-scale, aligned Nanocrystal Synthesis-Property (NSP) database and demonstrate its capability for generative inverse design. To extract structured synthesis routes and their corresponding product properties from literature, we develop NanoExtractor, a large language model (LLM) enhanced by well-designed augmentation strategies. NanoExtractor is validated against human experts, achieving a weighted average score of 88% on the test set, significantly outperforming chemistry-specialized (3%) and general-purpose LLMs (38%). The resulting NSP database contains nearly 160,000 aligned entries and serves as training data for our NanoDesigner, an LLM for inverse synthesis design. The generative capability of NanoDesigner is validated through the successful design of viable synthesis routes for both well-established PbSe nanocrystals and rarely reported MgF2 nanocrystals. Notably, the model recommends a counter-intuitive, non-stoichiometric precursor ratio (1:1) for MgF2 nanocrystals, which is experimentally confirmed as critical for suppressing byproducts. Our work bridges the gap between unstructured literature and data-driven synthesis, and also establishes a powerful human-AI collaborative paradigm for accelerating nanocrystal discovery.
Authors: Aolin Xu
Abstract: This work aims to rigorously define the values of perception, prediction, communication, and common sense in decision making. The defined quantities are decision-theoretic, but have information-theoretic analogues, e.g., they share some simple but key mathematical properties with Shannon entropy and mutual information, and can reduce to these quantities in particular settings. One interesting observation is that, the value of perception without prediction can be negative, while the value of perception together with prediction and the value of prediction alone are always nonnegative. The defined quantities suggest answers to practical questions arising in the design of autonomous decision-making systems. Example questions include: Do we need to observe and predict the behavior of a particular agent? How important is it? What is the best order to observe and predict the agents? The defined quantities may also provide insights to cognitive science and neural science, toward the understanding of how natural decision makers make use of information gained from different sources and operations.
Authors: Shivam Adarsh, Maria Maistro, Christina Lioma
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) often encode whether a statement is true as a vector in their residual stream activations. These vectors, also known as truth vectors, have been studied in prior work, however how they change when context is introduced remains unexplored. We study this question by measuring (1) the directional change ($\theta$) between the truth vectors with and without context and (2) the relative magnitude of the truth vectors upon adding context. Across four LLMs and four datasets, we find that (1) truth vectors are roughly orthogonal in early layers, converge in middle layers, and may stabilize or continue increasing in later layers; (2) adding context generally increases the truth vector magnitude, i.e., the separation between true and false representations in the activation space is amplified; (3) larger models distinguish relevant from irrelevant context mainly through directional change ($\theta$), while smaller models show this distinction through magnitude differences. We also find that context conflicting with parametric knowledge produces larger geometric changes than parametrically aligned context. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that provides a geometric characterization of how context transforms the truth vector in the activation space of LLMs.
Authors: Joe Dwyer
Abstract: Research in machine learning has questioned whether increases in training token counts reliably produce proportional performance gains in large language models. Building on prior work introducing an energy-aware parameter efficiency metric, this study empirically examines the effects of increasing training token counts under fixed hardware and training conditions. The significance of this work lies in the explicit integration of power consumption and execution duration, as reflected by the power sampling frequency, into token-scale analysis. This addresses a gap in prior studies emphasizing performance outcomes while underrepresenting computational and energy costs. Using a repeated-measures experimental design on a constant GPU instance with an identical model architecture, optimizer settings, and epoch counts, a 1.1-billion-parameter TinyLlama model was trained at three token counts (500K, 1M, and 2M). While conventional performance metrics exhibited inconsistent or diminishing returns across token scales, the inclusion of power consumption and execution duration revealed a strictly monotonic decline in training efficiency as token count increased. Repeated-measures ANOVA demonstrated a strong effect of token count on parameter efficiency, with all pairwise comparisons remaining significant following Bonferroni correction. These findings indicate that increases in training token counts may be energetically inefficient even when marginal performance improvements are observed, underscoring the importance of efficiency-aware evaluation in large language model training.
Authors: Nayoung Choi, Jonathan Zhang, Jinho D. Choi
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly operate over long-form dialogues with frequent topic shifts. While recent LLMs support extended context windows, efficient management of dialogue history in practice is needed due to inference cost and latency constraints. We present DyCP, a lightweight context management method implemented outside the LLM that dynamically identifies and retrieves relevant dialogue segments conditioned on the current turn, without offline memory construction. DyCP manages dialogue context while preserving the sequential nature of dialogue without predefined topic boundaries, enabling adaptive and efficient context selection. Across three long-form dialogue benchmarks-LoCoMo, MT-Bench+, and SCM4LLMs-and multiple LLM backends, DyCP achieves competitive answer quality in downstream generation, with more selective context usage and improved inference efficiency.
Authors: Kangda Wei, Ruihong Huang
Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has become a standard approach for training mathematical reasoning models; however, its reliance on multiple completions per prompt makes training computationally expensive. Although recent work has reduced the number of training steps required to reach peak performance, the overall wall-clock training time often remains unchanged or even increases due to higher per-step cost. We propose MMR-GRPO, which integrates Maximal Marginal Relevance to reweigh rewards based on completion diversity. Our key insight is that semantically redundant completions contribute limited marginal learning signal; prioritizing diverse solutions yields more informative updates and accelerates convergence. Extensive evaluations across three model sizes (1.5B, 7B, 8B), three GRPO variants, and five mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that MMR-GRPO achieves comparable peak performance while requiring on average 47.9% fewer training steps and 70.2% less wall-clock time. These gains are consistent across models, methods, and benchmarks. Our code is released at: https://github.com/WeiKangda/MMR-GRPO.
Authors: Suqing Liu, Runlong Ye, Christopher Eaton, Bogdan Simion, Michael Liut
Abstract: To address the scalability of feedback in computer science while mitigating the privacy and cost limitations of commercial Large Language Models (LLMs), this study evaluates a locally hosted Small Language Model (SLM). We deployed a quantized Llama-3.1, GPT-4, and human instructors across introductory programming (N=176), operating systems (N=80), and a writing seminar (N=7). Mixed-methods analysis of student perceptions reveals that while the local SLM matched commercial LLMs and was rated higher by students for readability and actionability in technical courses, human feedback remained more favoured for highly specialized writing tasks. We demonstrate that local SLMs offer a privacy-preserving, zero-marginal-cost alternative for foundational feedback, supporting a tiered pedagogical framework where AI handles structural guidance while instructors focus on high-level conceptual scaffolding.
Authors: Yixuan Du, Chenxiao Yu, Haoyan Xu, Ziyi Wang, Yue Zhao, Xiyang Hu
Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) integrate visual and textual knowledge into unified representations that increasingly underpin modern retrieval and recommendation systems. However, it remains unclear how reliably these models utilize their cross-modal knowledge when ranking multimodal items, and whether their knowledge grounding can be subverted. In this paper, we expose a fundamental vulnerability in how VLMs apply multimodal knowledge for product ranking: through Multimodal Generative Engine Optimization (MGEO), we show that an adversary can manipulate a VLM's ranking decisions by jointly crafting imperceptible image perturbations and fluent textual suffixes that exploit the model's internal cross-modal knowledge coupling. Using an alternating optimization strategy, MGEO targets the deep interactions between visual and linguistic representations within the VLM, achieving rank manipulations that substantially exceed those of unimodal attacks and heuristic baselines powered by strong commercial models. Our findings reveal that surface-level content quality is insufficient for rank promotion; instead, direct alignment with the model's internal knowledge utilization mechanism is required. These results raise important questions on the faithfulness and robustness of knowledge grounding in multimodal foundation models, and motivate future work on defense mechanisms for multimodal retrieval systems. Code is available at: https://github.com/glad-lab/MGEO
Authors: Mohsinul Kabir, Tasnim Ahmed, Md Mezbaur Rahman, Shaoxiong Ji, Hassan Alhuzali, Yuechen Jiang, Jimin Huang, Sophia Ananiadou
Abstract: Cross-cultural competence in large language models (LLMs) requires understanding and adapting Culture-Specific Items (CSIs) across varying cultural contexts. However, progress in evaluating this capability remains limited by the lack of high-quality CSI-annotated corpora with parallel cross-cultural sentence pairs. We introduce XCR-Bench, a Cross(X)-Cultural Reasoning Benchmark containing 4.1k parallel sentences and 1,098 CSIs across three reasoning tasks. XCR-Bench integrates Newmark's CSI framework with Hall's Triad of Culture, enabling evaluation across levels of cultural visibility -- from observable practices to implicit social norms and values. Experiments on eight multilingual LLMs show that state-of-the-art models exhibit consistent weaknesses in identifying and adapting specific categories of CSIs, revealing a gap between surface-level recall and explicit cultural reasoning. Performance declines significantly on culturally sensitive categories and deeper cultural levels (p<0.005, 8/8 models), and adaptation quality varies systematically across target cultures and Bengali regional variants, indicating encoded regional and ethno-religious biases even within a single linguistic setting. We publicly release the corpus and code to support future research on cross-cultural NLP.
Authors: Zanlin Ni, Shenzhi Wang, Yang Yue, Tianyu Yu, Weilin Zhao, Yeguo Hua, Tianyi Chen, Jun Song, Cheng Yu, Bo Zheng, Gao Huang
Abstract: Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) break the rigid left-to-right constraint of traditional LLMs, enabling token generation in arbitrary orders. Intuitively, this flexibility implies a solution space that strictly supersets the fixed autoregressive trajectory, theoretically unlocking superior reasoning potential. However, in this paper, we find that for general reasoning tasks (e.g., mathematics and coding), arbitrary order generation may in fact limit the reasoning potential of dLLMs. We observe that dLLMs tend to exploit this order flexibility to bypass high-uncertainty tokens that are crucial for exploration, which can lead to a premature collapse of solution coverage. This observation motivates a rethink of RL approaches for dLLMs, where considerable complexities, such as handling combinatorial trajectories and intractable likelihoods, are often devoted to preserving this flexibility. We show that effective reasoning can be elicited by simply forgoing arbitrary order and applying standard Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) instead. Our approach, JustGRPO, is minimalist yet surprisingly effective (e.g., 89.1% accuracy on GSM8K) while fully retaining the parallel decoding ability of dLLMs. Project page: https://nzl-thu.github.io/the-flexibility-trap
Authors: Pablo Messina, Andr\'es Villa, Juan Le\'on Alc\'azar, Karen S\'anchez, Carlos Hinojosa, Denis Parra, \'Alvaro Soto, Bernard Ghanem
Abstract: Medical vision-language models can automate the generation of radiology reports but struggle with accurate visual grounding and factual consistency. Existing models often misalign textual findings with visual evidence, leading to unreliable or weakly grounded predictions. We present CURE, an error-aware curriculum learning framework that improves grounding and report quality without any additional data. CURE fine-tunes a multimodal instructional model on phrase grounding, grounded report generation, and anatomy-grounded report generation using public datasets. The method dynamically adjusts sampling based on model performance, emphasizing harder samples to improve spatial and textual alignment. CURE improves grounding accuracy by +0.35 IoU, boosts report quality by +0.192 CXRFEScore, and reduces hallucinations by 18.6%. CURE is a data-efficient framework that enhances both grounding accuracy and report reliability. Code is available at https://github.com/PabloMessina/CURE and model weights at https://huggingface.co/pamessina/medgemma-4b-it-cure
URLs: https://github.com/PabloMessina/CURE, https://huggingface.co/pamessina/medgemma-4b-it-cure
Authors: Yibo Li, Zijie Lin, Ailin Deng, Xuan Zhang, Yufei He, Shuo Ji, Tri Cao, Bryan Hooi
Abstract: While Large Language Model (LLM) agents excel at general tasks, they inherently struggle with continual adaptation due to the frozen weights after deployment. Conventional reinforcement learning (RL) offers a solution but incurs prohibitive computational costs and the risk of catastrophic forgetting. We introduce Just-In-Time Reinforcement Learning (JitRL), a training-free framework that enables test-time policy optimization without any gradient updates. JitRL maintains a dynamic, non-parametric memory of experiences and retrieves relevant trajectories to estimate action advantages on-the-fly. These estimates are then used to directly modulate the LLM's output logits. We theoretically prove that this additive update rule is the exact closed-form solution to the KL-constrained policy optimization objective. Extensive experiments on WebArena and Jericho demonstrate that JitRL establishes a new state-of-the-art among training-free methods. Crucially, JitRL outperforms the performance of computationally expensive fine-tuning methods (e.g., WebRL) while reducing monetary costs by over 30 times, offering a scalable path for continual learning agents. The code is available at https://github.com/liushiliushi/JitRL.
Authors: Nicholas Santavas, Kareem Eissa, Patrycja Cieplicka, Piotr Florek, Matteo Nulli, Stefan Vasilev, Seyyed Hadi Hashemi, Antonios Gasteratos, Shahram Khadivi
Abstract: Enterprise LLM deployment faces a critical scalability challenge: organizations must optimize models systematically to scale AI initiatives within constrained compute budgets, yet the specialized expertise required for manual optimization remains a niche and scarce skillset. This challenge is particularly evident in managing GPU utilization across heterogeneous infrastructure while enabling teams with diverse workloads and limited LLM optimization experience to deploy models efficiently. We present OPTIKIT, a distributed LLM optimization framework that democratizes model compression and tuning by automating complex optimization workflows for non-expert teams. OPTIKIT provides dynamic resource allocation, staged pipeline execution with automatic cleanup, and seamless enterprise integration. In production, it delivers more than 2x GPU throughput improvement while empowering application teams to achieve consistent performance improvements without deep LLM optimization expertise. We share both the platform design and key engineering insights into resource management, pipeline orchestration, and integration patterns that enable large-scale, production-grade democratization of model optimization. Finally, we open-source the system to enable external contributions and broader reproducibility.
Authors: Jesse Phitidis, Alison Q. Smithard, William N. Whiteley, Joanna M. Wardlaw, Miguel O. Bernabeu, Maria Vald\'es Hern\'andez
Abstract: White matter hyperintensities (WMH) and ischaemic stroke lesions (ISL) are key imaging biomarkers of cerebral small vessel disease (SVD) detectable on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The development of robust deep learning models to automatically segment and differentiate these pathologies remains challenging. Specifically, WMH and ISL frequently co-occur within the same subject and present as visually confounding hyperintensities on fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) sequences, complicating their accurate delineation. To address the scarcity of fully annotated cohorts, we systematically evaluated six accessible strategies for training a joint WMH and ISL segmentation model using partially labelled data. We aggregated privately held and publicly available datasets to curate a large-scale cohort of 2,052 MRI volumes, of which 1341 and 1152 volumes contained ground truth annotations for WMH and ISL, respectively. Our analysis indicates that multiple strategies effectively leverage partially labelled data to enhance overall model performance, with pseudolabelling emerging as the most effective approach. This model exhibited a consistent WMH segmentation policy and successfully detected the majority of FLAIR-positive ISL. These findings demonstrate the viability of using partially labelled data to develop reliable automated segmentation tools, which can support ongoing SVD monitoring and high-throughput biomarker extraction for large-scale clinical research.
Authors: Maria Despoina Siampou, Shushman Choudhury, Shang-Ling Hsu, Neha Arora, Cyrus Shahabi
Abstract: Recent progress in geospatial foundation models highlights the importance of learning general-purpose representations for real-world locations, particularly points-of-interest (POIs) where human activity concentrates. Existing approaches, however, focus primarily on place identity derived from static textual metadata, or learn representations tied to trajectory context, which capture movement regularities rather than how places are actually used (i.e., POI's function). We argue that POI function is a missing but essential signal for general POI representations. We introduce Mobility-Embedded POIs (ME-POIs), a framework that augments POI embeddings derived, from language models with large-scale human mobility data to learn POI-centric, context-independent representations grounded in real-world usage. ME-POIs encodes individual visits as temporally contextualized embeddings and aligns them with learnable POI representations via contrastive learning to capture usage patterns across users and time. To address long-tail sparsity, we propose a novel mechanism that propagates temporal visit patterns from nearby, frequently visited POIs across multiple spatial scales. We evaluate ME-POIs on five newly proposed map enrichment tasks, testing its ability to capture both the identity and function of POIs. Across all tasks, augmenting text-based embeddings with ME-POIs consistently outperforms both text-only and mobility-only baselines. Notably, ME-POIs trained on mobility data alone can surpass text-only models on certain tasks, highlighting that POI function is a critical component of accurate and generalizable POI representations.
Authors: Sagi Meir, Tommer D. Keidar, Noam Levi, Shlomi Reuveni, Barak Hirshberg
Abstract: The performance of large language models (LLMs) on verifiable tasks is usually measured by pass@k, the probability of answering a question correctly at least once in k trials. At a fixed budget, a more suitable metric is coverage@cost, the average number of unique questions answered as a function of the total number of attempts. We connect the two metrics and show that the empirically-observed power-law behavior in pass@k leads to a sublinear growth of the coverage@cost (diminishing returns). To solve this problem, we propose Reset-and-Discard (ReD), a query method of LLMs that increases coverage@cost for a given budget, regardless of the pass@k form. Moreover, given a pass@k, we can quantitatively predict the savings in the total number of attempts using ReD. If pass@k is not available for the model, ReD can infer its power-law exponent. Experiments on three LLMs across coding (HumanEval), math (GSM8K), and reasoning (MMLU-Pro) benchmarks demonstrate that ReD substantially reduces the required attempts, tokens, and USD cost to reach a desired coverage, while also offering an efficient way to measure inference power-laws. ReD's advantage is maintained for imperfect verifiers and outperforms the tested allocation baselines.
Authors: Jianhui Chen, Yuzhang Luo, Liangming Pan
Abstract: While Mechanistic Interpretability has identified interpretable circuits in LLMs, their causal origins in training data remain elusive. We introduce Mechanistic Data Attribution (MDA), a scalable framework that employs Influence Functions to trace interpretable units back to specific training samples. Through extensive experiments on the Pythia family, we causally validate that targeted intervention--removing or augmenting a small fraction of high-influence samples--significantly modulates the emergence of interpretable heads, whereas random interventions show no effect. Our analysis reveals that repetitive structural data (e.g., LaTeX, XML) acts as a mechanistic catalyst. Furthermore, we observe that interventions targeting induction head formation induce a concurrent change in the model's in-context learning (ICL) capability. This provides direct causal evidence for the long-standing hypothesis regarding the functional link between induction heads and ICL. Finally, we propose a mechanistic data augmentation pipeline that consistently accelerates circuit convergence across model scales, providing a principled methodology for steering the developmental trajectories of LLMs.
Authors: Md Musfiqur Rahman, Ziwei Jiang, Hilaf Hasson, Murat Kocaoglu
Abstract: Causal inference from observational data can provide strong evidence for finding the best action in a decision-making scenario without having to perform expensive randomized trials. The causal effect of an action is often not pointwise identifiable even with infinite data due to unobserved confounding factors. Furthermore, having only finitely many samples adds another layer of uncertainty to causal effect estimation. Several existing methods can be used to obtain upper and lower bounds to the causal effect, ranging from symbolic methods to the more recent neural network-based approaches, which implicitly incorporate both sources of uncertainty. However, these methods do not inform whether collecting more samples may or may not help identify the best action from observational data, leaving experts in the dark about their data collection strategies. We address this problem with a novel framework that can distinguish the range of causal effect values that might be eliminated by collecting more samples from the range of values that, with high probability, cannot be eliminated with more observational samples. We show that this partitioning can be obtained by solving max-min and min-max optimization problems. We leverage neural causal models to approximately recover this decomposition in practice. We demonstrate via experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets that our algorithm can determine when collecting more samples will not help determine the best action. Our framework can help practitioners decide when to resort to non-observational studies or seek to measure some of the unmeasured confounders for optimal decision-making.
Authors: Chuanzhe Guo, Jingjing Wu, Sijun He, Yang Chen, Zhaoqi Kuang, Shilong Fan, Bingjin Chen, Siqi Bao, Jing Liu, Hua Wu, Qingfu Zhu, Wanxiang Che, Haifeng Wang
Abstract: The evolution of Large Language Model (LLM) agents for software engineering (SWE) is constrained by the scarcity of verifiable datasets, a bottleneck stemming from the complexity of constructing executable environments across diverse languages. To address this, we introduce MEnvAgent, a Multi-language framework for automated Environment construction that facilitates scalable generation of verifiable task instances. MEnvAgent employs a multi-agent Planning-Execution-Verification architecture to autonomously resolve construction failures and integrates a novel Environment Reuse Mechanism that reduces computational overhead by incrementally patching historical environments. Evaluations on MEnvBench, a new benchmark comprising 1,000 tasks across 10 languages, demonstrate that MEnvAgent outperforms baselines, improving Fail-to-Pass (F2P) rates by 8.6% while reducing time costs by 43%. Additionally, we demonstrate the utility of MEnvAgent by constructing MEnvData-SWE, the largest open-source polyglot dataset of realistic verifiable Docker environments to date, alongside solution trajectories that enable consistent performance gains on SWE tasks across a wide range of models. Our code, benchmark, and dataset are available at https://github.com/ernie-research/MEnvAgent.
Authors: Hongyang Du, Junjie Ye, Xiaoyan Cong, Runhao Li, Jingcheng Ni, Aman Agarwal, Zeqi Zhou, Zekun Li, Randall Balestriero, Yue Wang
Abstract: While recent video diffusion models (VDMs) produce visually impressive results, they fundamentally struggle to maintain 3D structural consistency, often resulting in object deformation or spatial drift. We hypothesize that these failures arise because standard denoising objectives lack explicit incentives for geometric coherence. To address this, we introduce VideoGPA (Video Geometric Preference Alignment), a data-efficient self-supervised framework that leverages a geometry foundation model to automatically derive dense preference signals that guide VDMs via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). This approach effectively steers the generative distribution toward inherent 3D consistency without requiring human annotations. VideoGPA significantly enhances temporal stability, geometric plausibility, and motion coherence using minimal preference pairs, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art baselines in extensive experiments.
Authors: Sophia N. Wilson, Sebastian Mair, Mophat Okinyi, Erik B. Dam, Janin Koch, Raghavendra Selvan
Abstract: Large-scale data has fuelled the success of frontier artificial intelligence (AI) models over the past decade. This expansion has relied on sustained efforts by large technology corporations to aggregate and curate internet-scale datasets. In this work, we examine the environmental, social, and economic costs of large-scale data in AI through a sustainability lens. We argue that the field is shifting from building models from data to actively creating data for building models. We characterise this transition as hyper-datafication, which marks a critical juncture for the future of frontier AI and its societal impacts. To quantify and contextualise data-related costs, we analyse approximately 550,000 datasets from the Hugging Face Hub, focusing on dataset growth, storage-related energy consumption and carbon footprint, and societal representation using language data. We complement this analysis with qualitative responses from data workers in Kenya to examine the labour involved, including direct employment by big tech corporations and exposure to graphic content. We further draw on external data sources to substantiate our findings by illustrating the global disparity in data centre infrastructure. Our analyses reveal that hyper-datafication drives substantial and growing environmental costs while systematically redistributing labour risks and representational harms toward the Global South. Thus, we propose Data PROOFS recommendations spanning provenance, resource awareness, ownership, openness, frugality, and standards to mitigate these costs. Our work aims to make visible the often-overlooked costs of data that underpin frontier AI and to stimulate broader debate within the research community and beyond.
Authors: Tianyi Hu, Niket Tandon, Akhil Arora
Abstract: Existing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems often assume that each query has a single correct answer. This assumption overlooks open-ended information-seeking scenarios where multiple plausible answers are valuable, and where diversity is important for creativity, fairness, and inclusive access to information. We show that standard RAG systems fail to fully use diverse retrieved contexts: simply increasing retrieval diversity does not necessarily lead to diverse generations. To address this limitation, we propose Diverge, a plug-and-play agentic RAG framework that improves the diversity--quality trade-off through iterative, reflection-guided exploration of diverse viewpoints and diversity-aware retrieval support. We further introduce evaluation metrics for characterizing the diversity-quality trade-off in open-ended question answering. Experiments across multiple real-world datasets and backbone LLMs show that Diverge achieves the best trade-off among competitive baselines, increasing diversity by $\sim2\times$ without noticeable quality degradation. These results reveal a systematic limitation of current RAGs and show the value of explicit diversity modeling.
Authors: Haichuan Wang, Tao Lin, Lingkai Kong, Ce Li, Hezi Jiang, Milind Tambe
Abstract: Existing alignment methods directly use the reward model learned from user preference data to optimize an LLM policy, subject to KL regularization with respect to the base policy. This practice is suboptimal for maximizing user's utility because the KL regularization may cause the LLM to inherit the bias in the base policy that conflicts with user preferences. While amplifying rewards for preferred outputs can mitigate this bias, it also increases the risk of reward hacking. This tradeoff motivates the problem of optimally designing reward models under KL regularization. We formalize this reward model optimization problem as a Stackelberg game, and show that a simple reward shaping scheme can effectively approximate the optimal reward model. We empirically evaluate our method in inference-time alignment settings and demonstrate that it integrates seamlessly into existing alignment methods with minimal overhead. Our method consistently improves average reward and achieves win-tie rates exceeding 66% against all baselines, averaged across evaluation settings.
Authors: Julian Rodemann, Unai Fischer-Abaigar, James Bailie, Krikamol Muandet
Abstract: Performative predictions influence the very outcomes they aim to forecast. We study performative predictions that affect a sample (e.g., only existing users of an app) and/or the whole population (e.g., all potential app users). This raises the question of how well models generalize under performativity. For example, how well can we draw insights about new app users based on existing users when both of them react to the app's predictions? We address this question by embedding performative predictions into statistical learning theory. We prove generalization bounds under performative effects on the sample, on the population, and on both. A key intuition behind our proofs is that in the worst case, the population negates predictions, while the sample deceptively fulfills them. We cast such self-negating and self-fulfilling predictions as min-max and min-min risk functionals in Wasserstein space, respectively. Our analysis reveals a fundamental trade-off between performatively changing the world and learning from it: the more a model affects data, the less it can learn from it. Moreover, our analysis results in a surprising insight on how to improve generalization guarantees by retraining on performatively distorted samples. We illustrate our bounds in a case study on prediction-informed assignments of unemployed German residents to job trainings, drawing upon administrative labor market records from 1975 to 2017 in Germany.
Authors: Xiandong Zou, Jianshu Li, Jing Huang, Pan Zhou
Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates inference for (M)LLMs, yet a training-decoding discrepancy persists: while existing methods optimize single greedy trajectories, decoding involves verifying and ranking multiple sampled draft paths. We propose Variational Speculative Decoding (VSD), formulating draft training as variational inference over latent proposals (draft paths). VSD maximizes the marginal probability of target-model acceptance, yielding an ELBO that promotes high-quality latent proposals while minimizing divergence from the target distribution. To enhance quality and reduce variance, we incorporate a path-level utility and optimize via an Expectation-Maximization procedure. The E-step draws Monte Carlo samples from an oracle-filtered posterior, while the M-step maximizes weighted likelihood using Adaptive Rejection Weighting (ARW) and Confidence-Aware Regularization (CAR). Theoretical analysis confirms that VSD increases expected acceptance length and speedup. Extensive experiments across LLMs and MLLMs show that VSD achieves up to a 9.6% speedup over EAGLE-3 and 7.9% over ViSpec, significantly improving decoding efficiency.
Authors: Ehud Shapiro
Abstract: Grassroots Logic Programs (GLP) is a concurrent logic programming language in which logic variables are partitioned into paired readers and writers. An assignment is produced at most once via a writer and consumed at most once via its paired reader, and may contain additional readers and/or writers. This enables the concise expression of rich multidirectional communication modalities. The language was introduced together with concurrent (cGLP) and multiagent (maGLP) operational semantics. Here, we derive from these (\ia)~dGLP, a deterministic counterpart of cGLP, and (\ib)~madGLP, a counterpart of maGLP in which deterministic agents communicate solely by asynchronous message passing, and prove them correct against their abstract counterparts. maGLP shared variable pairs spanning agents can be implemented as local variables paired by \emph{global links}, with correctness following from disjoint substitution commutativity (a consequence of GLP's single-occurrence invariant). We further prove that madGLP is grassroots. Both dGLP and madGLP serve as formal specifications for an AI-driven implementation discipline (math $\to$ informal spec $\to$ Dart) employed and described here: from dGLP, AI (Claude) developed a workstation-based GLP implementation in Dart, and from madGLP it is developing a smartphone-based multiagent one.
Authors: Mingfu Liang, Yufei Li, Jay Xu, Kavosh Asadi, Xi Liu, Shuo Gu, Kaushik Rangadurai, Frank Shyu, Shuaiwen Wang, Song Yang, Zhijing Li, Jiang Liu, Mengying Sun, Fei Tian, Xiaohan Wei, Chonglin Sun, Jacob Tao, Shike Mei, Wenlin Chen, Santanu Kolay, Sandeep Pandey, Hamed Firooz, Luke Simon
Abstract: Recent studies increasingly explore Large Language Models (LLMs) as a new paradigm for recommendation systems due to their scalability and world knowledge. However, existing work has three key limitations: (1) most efforts focus on retrieval and ranking, while the reranking phase, critical for refining final recommendations, is largely overlooked; (2) LLMs are typically used in zero-shot or supervised fine-tuning settings, leaving their reasoning abilities, especially those enhanced through reinforcement learning (RL) and high-quality reasoning data, underexploited; (3) items are commonly represented by non-semantic IDs, creating major scalability challenges in industrial systems with billions of identifiers. To address these gaps, we propose the Generative Reasoning Reranker (GR2), an end-to-end framework with a three-stage training pipeline tailored for reranking. First, a pretrained LLM is mid-trained on semantic IDs encoded from non-semantic IDs via a tokenizer achieving $\ge$99% uniqueness. Next, a stronger larger-scale LLM generates high-quality reasoning traces through carefully designed prompting and rejection sampling, which are used for supervised fine-tuning to impart foundational reasoning skills. Finally, we apply Decoupled Clip and Dynamic sAmpling Policy Optimization (DAPO), enabling scalable RL supervision with verifiable rewards designed specifically for reranking. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate GR2's effectiveness: it surpasses the state-of-the-art OneRec-Think by 2.4% in Recall@5 and 1.3% in NDCG@5. Ablations confirm that advanced reasoning traces yield substantial gains across metrics. We further find that RL reward design is crucial in reranking: LLMs tend to exploit reward hacking by preserving item order, motivating conditional verifiable rewards to mitigate this behavior and optimize reranking performance.
Authors: Jaylen Jones, Zhehao Zhang, Yuting Ning, Eric Fosler-Lussier, Pierre-Luc St-Charles, Yoshua Bengio, Dawn Song, Yu Su, Huan Sun
Abstract: Although computer-use agents (CUAs) hold significant potential to automate increasingly complex OS workflows, they can demonstrate unsafe unintended behaviors that deviate from expected outcomes even under benign input contexts. However, exploration of this risk remains largely anecdotal, lacking concrete characterization and automated methods to proactively surface long-tail unintended behaviors under realistic CUA scenarios. To fill this gap, we introduce the first conceptual and methodological framework for unintended CUA behaviors, by defining their key characteristics, automatically eliciting them, and analyzing how they arise from benign inputs. We propose AutoElicit: an agentic framework that iteratively perturbs benign instructions using CUA execution feedback, and elicits severe harms while keeping perturbations realistic and benign. Using AutoElicit, we surface hundreds of harmful unintended behaviors from state-of-the-art CUAs such as Claude 4.5 Haiku, Claude 4.5 Opus, and Operator. We further evaluate the transferability of human-verified successful perturbations, identifying persistent susceptibility to unintended behaviors across various other frontier CUAs. This work establishes a foundation for systematically analyzing unintended behaviors in realistic computer-use settings.
Authors: Bojian Hou, Xiaolong Liu, Xiaoyi Liu, Jiaqi Xu, Yasmine Badr, Mengyue Hang, Sudhanshu Chanpuriya, Junqing Zhou, Yuhang Yang, Han Xu, Qiuling Suo, Laming Chen, Yuxi Hu, Jiasheng Zhang, Huaqing Xiong, Yuzhen Huang, Chao Chen, Yue Dong, Yi Yang, Shuo Chang, Xiaorui Gan, Wenlin Chen, Santanu Kolay, Darren Liu, Jade Nie, Chunzhi Yang, Ellie Wen, Jiyan Yang, Huayu Li
Abstract: Deriving predictable scaling laws that govern the relationship between model performance and computational investment is crucial for designing and allocating resources in massive-scale recommendation systems. While such laws are established for large language models, they remain challenging for recommendation systems, especially those processing both user history and context features. We identify poor scaling efficiency as the main barrier to predictable power-law scaling, stemming from inefficient modules with low Model FLOPs Utilization (MFU) and suboptimal resource allocation. We introduce Kunlun, a scalable architecture that systematically improves model efficiency and resource allocation. Our low-level optimizations include Generalized Dot-Product Attention (GDPA), Hierarchical Seed Pooling (HSP), and Sliding Window Attention. Our high-level innovations feature Computation Skip (CompSkip) and Event-level Personalization. These advances increase MFU from 17% to 37% on NVIDIA B200 GPUs and double scaling efficiency over state-of-the-art methods. Kunlun is now deployed in major Meta Ads models, delivering significant production impact.
Authors: Md. Khairul Islam, Zeyu Xia, Ryan Goudjil, Jialu Wang, Arya Farahi, Judy Fox
Abstract: Reconstructing the early universe from the evolved present-day universe is a challenging and computationally demanding problem in modern astrophysics. We devise a novel generative framework, Cosmo3DFlow, designed to address dimensionality and sparsity, the critical bottlenecks inherent in current state-of-the-art methods for cosmological inference. By integrating 3D Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) with flow matching, we effectively represent high-dimensional cosmological structures. The Wavelet Transform addresses the ``void problem'' by translating spatial emptiness into spectral sparsity. It decouples high-frequency details from low-frequency structures, and wavelet-space velocity fields facilitate stable ordinary differential equation (ODE) solvers with large step sizes. Using large-scale cosmological $N$-body simulations at $128^3$ resolution, we achieve up to $46\times$ faster sampling than diffusion models. Our results enable initial conditions to be sampled in seconds, compared to minutes for previous methods.
Authors: Zhengbing He
Abstract: Stop-and-go traffic waves, a major form of freeway congestion, impose severe and persistent adverse impacts, including reduced traffic efficiency, increased safety risks, and elevated vehicle emissions. Among various freeway traffic management strategies, jam-absorption driving (JAD), in which a dedicated vehicle performs "slow-in" and "fast-out" maneuvers before being captured by a stop-and-go wave, has been proposed as a promising approach to suppressing the propagation of such waves. However, most existing JAD strategies remain impractical, primarily due to the lack of consideration of implementation vehicles and operational conditions. Inspired by real-world observations of police-car swerving behavior, this paper first introduces the Single-Vehicle Double-Detector Jam-Absorption Driving (SD-JAD) problem and then proposes a practical JAD strategy based on a definition of the JAD Triangle, transforming such behavior into a traffic control strategy capable of suppressing the propagation of an isolated stop-and-go wave. Five key parameters that significantly affect the proposed strategy, namely JAD speed, inflow traffic speed, wave width, wave speed, and in-wave speed, are identified and systematically analyzed. Using a SUMO-based simulation as an illustrative example, we further demonstrate how these parameters can be measured in practice using only two stationary roadside traffic detectors. The results show that the proposed JAD strategy successfully suppresses the propagation of a stop-and-go wave without triggering secondary waves. This paper is expected to take a significant step toward the practical implementation of JAD, advancing it from a theoretical concept to a feasible and deployable traffic management strategy.
Authors: Haolin Liu, Braham Snyder, Chen-Yu Wei
Abstract: We study offline reinforcement learning under $Q^\star$-approximation and partial coverage, a setting that motivates practical algorithms such as Conservative $Q$-Learning (CQL; Kumar et al., 2020) but has received limited theoretical attention. Our work is inspired by the following open question: "Are $Q^\star$-realizability and Bellman completeness sufficient for sample-efficient offline RL under partial coverage?" We answer in the negative via an information-theoretic lower bound. To identify additional structure that enables sample-efficient offline RL under partial coverage, we introduce a general decision-estimation framework, inspired by model-free decision-estimation coefficients (DEC) for online RL (Foster et al., 2023b; Liu et al., 2025b). Our framework decomposes offline RL complexity into decision complexity and value estimation error. This allows modular study of both sub-problems. Our result not only unifies existing results (Chen and Jiang, 2022; Uehara et al., 2023), but further improves and generalizes them. On the decision complexity side, our improvement includes: the first $\epsilon^{-2}$ sample complexity bound for soft $Q$-learning under partial coverage that improves Uehara et al.'s (2023) $\epsilon^{-4}$ bound, the removal of the need for additional online interaction in the value-gap setting of Chen and Jiang (2022), and new learnable settings beyond the above two cases. On the value estimation side, we provide a new characterization of the role of Bellman completeness under partial coverage, and the first characterization of offline learnability for general low-Bellman-rank MDPs (Jiang et al., 2017; Du et al., 2021; Jin et al., 2021). The latter is a canonical online RL setting that has remained unexplored in offline RL except for special cases. As a side contribution, our techniques give the first analysis of CQL in the function approximation setting.
Authors: Hao Chen, Ye He, Yuchun Fan, Yukun Yan, Zhenghao Liu, Qingfu Zhu, Maosong Sun, Wanxiang Che
Abstract: Knowledge augmentation has significantly enhanced the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive tasks. However, existing methods typically operate on the simplistic premise that model performance equates with internal knowledge, overlooking the knowledge-confidence gaps that lead to overconfident errors or uncertain truths. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel meta-cognitive framework for reliable knowledge augmentation via differentiated intervention and alignment. Our approach leverages internal cognitive signals to partition the knowledge space into mastered, confused, and missing regions, guiding targeted knowledge expansion. Furthermore, we introduce a cognitive consistency mechanism to synchronize subjective certainty with objective accuracy, ensuring calibrated knowledge boundaries. Extensive experiments demonstrate the our framework consistently outperforms strong baselines, validating its rationality in not only enhancing knowledge capabilities but also fostering cognitive behaviors that better distinguish knowns from unknowns. All codes are available at https://github.com/AI9Stars/Know-More-Know-Clearer.
Authors: Hanlin Zhang, Jikai Jin, Vasilis Syrgkanis, Sham Kakade
Abstract: Machine learning model performance improvements tend to arise from competition and application. For deployment, we consider prescriptive scaling laws: given a pre-training compute budget, what downstream accuracy is attainable with contemporary post-training practice, and how stable is that mapping as the field evolves? Using large-scale observational evaluations with 5k existing and 2k newly evaluated model checkpoints spanning 2022-2026 across six benchmarks, we estimate capability boundaries, high conditional quantiles of benchmark scores as a function of log pre-training FLOPs, via smoothed quantile regression with a monotone, saturating sigmoid parameterization. We validate temporal reliability by fitting on earlier model generations and evaluating on later releases: across four of six tasks, the out-of-distribution coverage error remains below 2%, while math reasoning exhibits a consistently advancing boundary over time. For instance, at a budget of 10^24 FLOPs, the estimated attainable accuracies are 0.83 on IFEval and 0.54 on MATH Lvl 5. We then extend our approach to analyze task-dependent saturation and to probe contamination-related shifts on math reasoning tasks. Finally, we introduce a balanced I-optimal sampling algorithm that recovers near-full-data frontiers using roughly 20% of the parameter-count-weighted evaluation budget, as low as 5% on some tasks, while maintaining comparable calibration. Together, our work releases Proteus-2k, the latest model performance evaluation dataset, and introduces a practical methodology for translating compute budgets into reliable performance expectations and for monitoring when capability boundaries shift across time.
Authors: Jash Rajesh Parekh, Wonbin Kweon, Joey Chan, Rezarta Islamaj, Robert Leaman, Pengcheng Jiang, Chih-Hsuan Wei, Zhizheng Wang, Zhiyong Lu, Jiawei Han
Abstract: Current biomedical question answering (QA) systems often assume that medical knowledge applies uniformly, yet real-world clinical reasoning is inherently conditional: nearly every decision depends on patient-specific factors such as comorbidities and contraindications. Existing benchmarks do not evaluate such conditional reasoning, and retrieval-augmented or graph-based methods lack explicit mechanisms to ensure that retrieved knowledge is applicable to given context. To address this gap, we propose CondMedQA, the first benchmark for conditional biomedical QA, consisting of multi-hop questions whose answers vary with patient conditions. Furthermore, we propose Condition-Gated Reasoning (CGR), a novel framework that constructs condition-aware knowledge graphs and selectively activates or prunes reasoning paths based on query conditions. Our findings show that CGR more reliably selects condition-appropriate answers while matching or exceeding state-of-the-art performance on biomedical QA benchmarks, highlighting the importance of explicitly modeling conditionality for robust medical reasoning.
Authors: Haoyang Li, Changsong Liu, Wei Rao, Hao Shi, Sakriani Sakti, Eng Siong Chng
Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) degrades severely in noisy environments. Although speech enhancement (SE) front-ends effectively suppress background noise, they often introduce artifacts that harm recognition. Observation addition (OA) addressed this issue by fusing noisy and SE enhanced speech, improving recognition without modifying the parameters of the SE or ASR models. This paper proposes an intelligibility-guided OA method, where fusion weights are derived from intelligibility estimates obtained directly from the backend ASR. Unlike prior OA methods based on trained neural predictors, the proposed method is training-free, reducing complexity and enhances generalization. Extensive experiments across diverse SE-ASR combinations and datasets demonstrate strong robustness and improvements over existing OA baselines. Additional analyses of intelligibility-guided switching-based alternatives and frame versus utterance-level OA further validate the proposed design.
Authors: Evangelia Christakopoulou, Vivekkumar Patel, Hemanth Velaga, Sandip Gaikwad, Sean Suchter, Venkat Sundaranatha
Abstract: Large-scale commercial search systems optimize for relevance to drive successful sessions that help users find what they are looking for. To maximize relevance, we leverage two complementary objectives: behavioral relevance (results users tend to click or download) and textual relevance (a result's semantic fit to the query). A persistent challenge is the scarcity of expert-provided textual relevance labels relative to abundant behavioral relevance labels. We first address this by systematically evaluating LLM configurations, finding that a specialized, fine-tuned model significantly outperforms a much larger pre-trained one in providing highly relevant labels. Using this optimal model as a force multiplier, we generate millions of textual relevance labels to overcome the data scarcity. We show that augmenting our production ranker with these textual relevance labels leads to a significant outward shift of the Pareto frontier: offline NDCG improves for behavioral relevance while simultaneously increasing for textual relevance. These offline gains were validated by a worldwide A/B test on the App Store ranker, which demonstrated a statistically significant +0.24% increase in conversion rate, with the most substantial performance gains occurring in tail queries, where the new textual relevance labels provide a robust signal in the absence of reliable behavioral relevance labels.
Authors: Rishabh Kabra, Maks Ovsjanikov, Drew A. Hudson, Ye Xia, Skanda Koppula, Andre Araujo, Joao Carreira, Niloy J. Mitra
Abstract: Pre-trained vision encoders like DINOv2 have demonstrated exceptional performance on unimodal tasks. However, we observe that their features are poorly aligned across different visual modalities. For instance, the feature embedding for an RGB image and its corresponding depth map of the same scene exhibit a cosine similarity that is nearly identical to that of two random, unrelated images. To address this, we propose the Omnivorous Vision Encoder, a post-training framework that learns a modality-agnostic feature space. We fine-tune the encoder with a dual objective: first, to maximize the feature alignment between different modalities of the same scene; and second, a distillation objective that anchors the learned representations to a fully frozen teacher. The resulting student encoder becomes "omnivorous" by producing more consistent embeddings for a given scene, regardless of the input modality (RGB, Depth, Segmentation, etc.). This approach enables robust cross-modal understanding while retaining the discriminative semantics of the original foundation model. Omnivorous model weights are available at https://github.com/google-deepmind/representations4d.
Authors: Wenhao Wu, Zhentao Tang, Yafu Li, Shixiong Kai, Mingxuan Yuan, Zhenhong Sun, Chunlin Chen, Zhi Wang
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit high reasoning capacity in medical question-answering, but their tendency to produce hallucinations and outdated knowledge poses critical risks in healthcare fields. While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates these issues, existing methods rely on noisy token-level signals and lack the multi-round refinement required for complex reasoning. In this paper, we propose MA-RAG (Multi-Round Agentic RAG), a framework that facilitates test-time scaling for complex medical reasoning by iteratively evolving both external evidence and internal reasoning history within an agentic refinement loop. At each round, the agent transforms semantic conflict among candidate responses into actionable queries to retrieve external evidence, while optimizing history reasoning traces to mitigate long-context degradation. MA-RAG extends the self-consistency principle by leveraging the lack of consistency as a proactive signal for multi-round agentic reasoning and retrieval, and mirrors a boosting mechanism that iteratively minimizes the residual error toward a stable, high-fidelity medical consensus. Extensive evaluations across 7 medical Q&A benchmarks show that MA-RAG consistently surpasses competitive inference-time scaling and RAG baselines, delivering substantial +6.8 points on average accuracy over the backbone model. Our code is available at https://github.com/NJU-RL/MA-RAG.
Authors: Alex Thillen, Niels M\"undler, Veselin Raychev, Martin Vechev
Abstract: LLM coding agents can generate working code, but their solutions often accumulate complexity, duplication, and architectural debt. Human developers address such issues through refactoring: behavior-preserving program transformations that improve structure and maintainability. We investigate whether agents (i) can execute refactorings reliably and (ii) identify the refactorings that human developers actually chose in real codebases. To this end, we construct CodeTaste, a benchmark mined from large multi-file open-source refactorings. To score solutions, we combine repository test suites that measure functional correctness with tailored static checks that verify removal of undesired and introduction of desired code patterns using dataflow reasoning. Our results show a clear gap: agents perform well at implementing refactorings that are specified in detail, but often fail to discover the human refactoring choices when given a focus area for changes. A propose-then-implement decomposition improves alignment, and selecting the best-aligned proposal before implementation can yield further gains. CodeTaste provides an evaluation target and a potential preference signal for aligning coding agents with human refactoring decisions in realistic codebases. We release the benchmark, leaderboard, and code.
Authors: Zeju Qiu, Lixin Liu, Adrian Weller, Han Shi, Weiyang Liu
Abstract: Efficient and stable training of large language models (LLMs) remains a core challenge in modern machine learning systems. To address this challenge, Reparameterized Orthogonal Equivalence Training (POET), a spectrum-preserving framework that optimizes each weight matrix through orthogonal equivalence transformation, has been proposed. Although POET provides strong training stability, its original implementation incurs high memory consumption and computational overhead due to intensive matrix multiplications. To overcome these limitations, we introduce POET-X, a scalable and memory-efficient variant that performs orthogonal equivalence transformations with significantly reduced computational cost. POET-X maintains the generalization and stability benefits of POET while achieving substantial improvements in throughput and memory efficiency. In our experiments, POET-X enables the pretraining of billion-parameter LLMs on a single Nvidia H100 GPU, and in contrast, standard optimizers such as AdamW run out of memory under the same settings.
Authors: Kewen Zhu, Zixi Liu, Yanjing Li, Jing Chen
Abstract: Behavioral interview evaluation using large language models presents unique challenges that require structured assessment, realistic interviewer behavior simulation, and pedagogical value for candidate training. We investigate chain of thought prompting for interview answer evaluation and improvement through two controlled experiments with 50 behavioral interview question and answer pairs. Our contributions are threefold. First, we provide a quantitative comparison between human in the loop and automated chain of thought improvement. Using a within subject paired design with n equals 50, both approaches show positive rating improvements. The human in the loop approach provides significant training benefits. Confidence improves from 3.16 to 4.16 (p less than 0.001) and authenticity improves from 2.94 to 4.53 (p less than 0.001, Cohen's d is 3.21). The human in the loop method also requires five times fewer iterations (1.0 versus 5.0, p less than 0.001) and achieves full personal detail integration. Second, we analyze convergence behavior. Both methods converge rapidly with mean iterations below one, with the human in the loop approach achieving a 100 percent success rate compared to 84 percent for automated approaches among initially weak answers (Cohen's h is 0.82, large effect). Additional iterations provide diminishing returns, indicating that the primary limitation is context availability rather than computational resources. Third, we propose an adversarial challenging mechanism based on a negativity bias model, named bar raiser, to simulate realistic interviewer behavior, although quantitative validation remains future work. Our findings demonstrate that while chain of thought prompting provides a useful foundation for interview evaluation, domain specific enhancements and context aware approach selection are essential for realistic and pedagogically valuable results.
Authors: Hanbum Ko, Chanhui Lee, Ye Rin Kim, Rodrigo Hormazabal, Sehui Han, Sungbin Lim, Sungwoong Kim
Abstract: Retrosynthesis prediction aims to identify reactants that can synthesize a given product molecule. Although molecular large language models (LLMs) have recently shown promising results, most existing methods either generate reactants directly or provide only generic product-level analysis, without explicitly reasoning about bond-disconnection strategies that justify specific reactant choices. This paper proposes RetroReasoner, a retrosynthetic reasoning model that captures chemists' strategic disconnection-based thinking. RetroReasoner is trained with supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. For supervised fine-tuning, SyntheticRetro generates structured disconnection rationales paired with reactant predictions. For reinforcement learning, a round-trip reward evaluates predicted reactants by passing them through a forward synthesis model and rewarding predictions that reconstruct the original product. RetroReasoner can also be applied to multi-step retrosynthetic planning by incorporating it into a parallelized Monte Carlo tree search framework, reducing search time while increasing the number and diversity of valid synthetic pathways. Experimental results show that RetroReasoner outperforms prior baselines, including not only molecular LLMs but also retrosynthesis-specific expert models, and generates a broader range of feasible reactant proposals, especially for challenging reaction instances.
Authors: Javier Mar\'in
Abstract: When a decoder-only transformer is forced to process matched correct and incorrect single-token continuations of a factual query, the two pathways through hidden-state space diverge in a specific way: displacement vectors from the query-only representation maintain approximately equal magnitude but rotate apart in direction. The angular separation grows through mid-depth, and late layers resolve the asymmetric outcome -a logit-lens preference that, in the incorrect run, falls far below the naive prior of equal probability, corresponding to the model assigning approximately 11.5 times more probability to the incorrect token than to the correct one. We characterize this two-phase pattern-rotational divergence in mid-depth followed by late-layer asymmetric commitment-as the empirical geometric signature of what looks externally like the model rejecting a wrong continuation, while remaining explicit that it is an observational characterization, not a causal account. The pattern is consistent across six decoder-only transformers including five architecture families from 1B to 13B parameters. A seventh model (Qwen2 1.5B) shows a flat profile under the present extraction protocol that is plausibly a tokenizer-fragmentation artefact rather than a real scale floor; the question of an emergence threshold is left open. Single-layer activation patching does not recover the correct token at any layer band, meaning the late-layer asymmetry is not localized to a discrete component under the protocol used. Taken together, the evidence is consistent with a distributed-by-trajectory account of factual constraint processing-geometric structure that emerges cumulatively across many layers rather than from a single localized circuit and inconsistent with the simplest single-layer localized-recall account.
Authors: Mansoor Ahmed, Nadeem Taj, Imdad Ullah Khan, Hemanth Venkateswara, Murray Patterson
Abstract: Computational antibody design has seen rapid methodological progress, with dozens of deep generative methods proposed in the past three years, yet the field lacks a standardized benchmark for fair comparison and model development. These methods are evaluated on different SAbDab snapshots, non-overlapping test sets, and incompatible metrics, and the literature fragments the design problem into numerous sub-tasks with no common definition. We introduce CHIMERA-Bench: (CDR Modeling with Epitope-guided Redesign), a unified benchmark built around a single canonical task: epitope-conditioned CDR sequence-structure co-design. CHIMERA-Bench provides three components. The first is a curated, deduplicated dataset of 2,922 antibody-antigen complexes with epitope and paratope annotations. The second is a set of three biologically motivated splits that test generalization to unseen epitopes, unseen antigen folds, and prospective temporal targets. The third is a comprehensive evaluation protocol with five metric groups, including novel epitope-specificity measures. We benchmark eleven methods spanning six generative paradigms and report results across all splits. CHIMERA-Bench is the largest dataset of its kind for the antibody design problem, allowing the community to develop and test novel methods and evaluate their generalizability.
Authors: Jiarui Zhang, Junqi Hu, Zurong Mai, Yang Liu, Yuhang Chen, Shuohong Lou, Henglian Huang, Hong Cheng, Lingyuan Zhao, Jianxi Huang, Yutong Lu, Haohuan Fu, Juepeng Zheng
Abstract: Modern agricultural data is sourced from diverse platforms and spans multiple spatial scales, ranging from ground-level close-up photography to Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) aerial observation and satellite remote sensing imagery. Accordingly, agricultural multimodal reasoning demands robust cross-scale spatial understanding. However, due to the lack of multi-view agricultural benchmark datasets, existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit severe ground-level bias, which leads to scale confusion then semantic collapse in agricultural perception tasks, such as misinterpreting farmland imagery as walls or floors. To address this, we introduce AgroOmni, a large-scale multi-view training corpus with 288K Visual Question Answering pairs covering 56 specialized task categories across 14 task types, designed to capture diverse scales in modern precision agriculture. Built on this dataset, we propose AgroNVILA, which achieves a new state-of-the-art of 62.32% on the AgroMind benchmark (+15.03% over GPT-5.2), effectively mitigating the multi-view cross-scale gap for holistic agricultural understanding. Diagnostic evaluations on AgMMU further reveal an inherent heterogeneity between macro-priors and micro-diagnostics through constrained zero-shot performance. Meanwhile, even minimal fine-tuning leads to a dramatic performance gain of AgroNVILA on AgMMU, strongly demonstrating its generalization capability empowered by AgroOmni. Full training scripts are publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AgroOmni-6510.
Authors: Hector Borobia, Elies Segu\'i-Mas, Guillermina Tormo-Carb\'o
Abstract: Hybrid language models combine softmax attention with linear-time sequence mechanisms such as state-space or linear-attention layers, but the functional contribution of each component type remains insufficiently characterized. We study component-level ablation in two sub-1B hybrid language models, Qwen3.5-0.8B and Falcon-H1-0.5B, using likelihood-based evaluation, downstream benchmarks, layer-wise interventions, random controls, and representation-level diagnostics. Across the tested models, removing either attention or the alternative sequence-processing pathway substantially degrades performance, indicating that both component types contribute to model behavior. Likelihood metrics are especially sensitive to the linear-attention or state-space pathway, while downstream benchmark degradation depends on task and architecture. Layer-wise ablations show that component importance is position-dependent, with the strongest effects concentrated in early or mid-network components rather than uniformly across depth. Random-removal controls further show that hybrid architectures and same-family Transformer baselines degrade differently under structural perturbation. These results suggest that component ablation is a useful diagnostic for understanding hybrid language model architectures. The findings provide evidence relevant to efficient model design, compression, robustness analysis, and deployment decisions in architectures that combine attention with alternative sequence-processing mechanisms.
Authors: Jiajian Huang, Dongliang Zhu, Zitong YU, Hui Ma, Jiayu Zhang, Chunmei Zhu, Xiaochun Cao
Abstract: Multimodal deception detection aims to identify deceptive behavior by analyzing audiovisual cues for forensics and security. In these high-stakes settings, investigators need verifiable evidence connecting audiovisual cues to final decisions, along with reliable generalization across domains and cultural contexts. However, existing benchmarks provide only binary labels without intermediate reasoning cues. Datasets are also small with limited scenario coverage, leading to shortcut learning. We address these issues through three contributions. First, we construct reasoning datasets by augmenting existing benchmarks with structured cue-level descriptions and reasoning chains, enabling model output auditable reports. Second, we release T4-Deception, a multicultural dataset based on the unified ``To Tell The Truth'' television format implemented across four countries. With 1695 samples, it is the largest non-laboratory deception detection dataset. Third, we propose two modules for robust learning under small-data conditions. Stabilized Individuality-Commonality Synergy (SICS) refines multimodal representations by synergizing learnable global priors with sample-adaptive residuals, followed by a polarity-aware adjustment that bi-directionally recalibrates representations. Distilled Modality Consistency (DMC) aligns modality-specific predictions with the fused multimodal predictions via knowledge distillation to prevent unimodal shortcut learning. Experiments on three established benchmarks and our novel dataset demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both in-domain and cross-domain scenarios, while exhibiting superior transferability across diverse cultural contexts. The datasets and codes will be released.
Authors: Jianfeng Wang, Amine M'Charrak, Luk Koska, Xiangtao Wang, Daniel Petriceanu, Ruizhi Wang, Michael Bumbar, Luca Pinchetti, Thomas Lukasiewicz
Abstract: Recent vision backbones, such as Transformer families and state-space models like Mamba, have achieved remarkable progress on image recognition. Despite their empirical success, these architectures remain far from the computational principles of the human brain, often demanding enormous amounts of training data while offering limited interpretability. We propose the Vision Hopfield Memory Network (V-HMN), a brain-inspired vision backbone that integrates hierarchical memory mechanisms across layers with iterative refinement updates. Specifically, V-HMN incorporates local Hopfield modules that provide associative memory dynamics at the image patch level, global Hopfield modules that function as episodic memory for contextual modulation, and a predictive-coding-inspired refinement rule for iterative error correction. By organizing these memory-based modules hierarchically, V-HMN captures both local and global dynamics in a unified framework. Memory retrieval exposes the relationship between inputs and stored patterns, providing a prototype-based form of interpretability through explicit memory retrieval, while the reuse of stored patterns improves data efficiency. This brain-inspired design therefore enhances data efficiency and provides a prototype-based form of interpretability compared to existing self-attention- or state-space-based approaches. We conducted extensive experiments on public image classification benchmarks. V-HMN achieves strong performance on small- and medium-scale benchmarks, and remains competitive with widely adopted backbone architectures on ImageNet despite minimal architectural tuning, while offering improved data efficiency and a prototype-based form of interpretability. These findings highlight the potential of V-HMN as a memory-centric alternative to standard vision backbones, thereby bridging brain-inspired computation with modern machine learning.
Authors: Jiahao Wu, Ning Lu, Shengcai Liu, Kun Wang, Yanting Yang, Bailong Lin, Chen Jason Zhang, Li Qing, Ke Tang
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become essential for post-training large language models (LLMs) in reasoning tasks. While scaling rollouts can stabilize training and enhance performance, the computational overhead is a critical issue. In algorithms like GRPO, multiple rollouts per prompt incur prohibitive costs, as a large portion of prompts provide negligible gradients and are thus of low utility. To address this problem, we investigate how to select high-utility prompts before the rollout phase. Our experimental analysis reveals that sample utility is non-uniform and evolving: the strongest learning signals concentrate at the ``learning edge", the intersection of intermediate difficulty and high uncertainty, which shifts as training proceeds. Motivated by this, we propose HIVE (History-Informed and online-VErified prompt selection), a dual-stage framework for data-efficient RL. HIVE utilizes historical reward trajectories for coarse selection and employs prompt entropy as a real-time proxy to prune instances with stale utility. By evaluating HIVE across multiple math reasoning benchmarks and models, we show that HIVE yields significant rollout efficiency without compromising performance.
Authors: Ryszard Tuora, Mateusz Gali\'nski, Micha{\l} Godziszewski, Micha{\l} Karpowicz, Mateusz Czy\.znikiewicz, Adam Kozakiewicz, Tomasz Zi\k{e}tkiewicz
Abstract: One of the key problems in Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems is that chunk-based retrieval pipelines represent the source chunks as atomic objects, mixing the information contained within such a chunk into a single vector. These vector representations are then fundamentally treated as isolated, independent and self-sufficient, with no attempt to represent possible relations between them. Such an approach has no dedicated mechanisms for handling multi-hop questions. Graph-based RAG systems aimed to ameliorate this problem by modeling information as knowledge-graphs, with entities represented by nodes being connected by robust relations, and forming hierarchical communities. This approach however suffers from its own issues with some of them being: orders of magnitude increased componential complexity in order to create graph-based indices, and reliance on heuristics for performing retrieval. We propose UnWeaver, a novel RAG framework simplifying the idea of GraphRAG. UnWeaver disentangles the contents of the documents into entities which can occur across multiple chunks using an LLM. In the retrieval process entities are used as an intermediate way of recovering original text chunks hence preserving fidelity to the source material. We argue that entity-based decomposition yields a more distilled representation of original information, and additionally serves to reduce noise in the indexing, and generation process. Furthermore we experimentally show that on end to end QA evaluation VectorRAG performs better than standard GraphRAG and almost as good as current SOTA graph-based solutions, for a fraction of the cost.
Authors: Anubhab Sahu, Diptisha Samanta, Reza Soosahabi
Abstract: System Instructions in Large Language Models (LLMs) are commonly used to enforce safety policies, define agent behavior, and protect sensitive operational context in agentic AI applications. These instructions may contain sensitive information such as API credentials, internal policies, and privileged workflow definitions, making system instruction leakage a critical security risk highlighted in the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications. Without incurring the overhead costs of reasoning models, many LLM applications rely on refusal-based instructions that block direct requests for system instructions, implicitly assuming that prohibited information can only be extracted through explicit queries. We introduce an automated evaluation framework that tests whether system instructions remain confidential when extraction requests are re-framed as encoding or structured output tasks. Across four common models and 46 verified system instructions, we observe high attack success rates ( > 0.7) for structured serialization where models refuse direct extraction requests but disclose protected content in the requested serialization formats. We further demonstrate a mitigation strategy based on one-shot instruction reshaping using a Chain-of-Thought reasoning model, indicating that even subtle changes in wording and structure of system instructions can significantly reduce attack success rate without requiring model retraining.
Authors: Jaehyeok Lee, Xiaoyuan Yi, Jing Yao, Hyunjin Hwang, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Xing Xie, JinYeong Bak
Abstract: As LLMs are globally deployed, aligning their cultural value orientations is critical for safety and user engagement. However, existing benchmarks face the Construct-Composition-Context ($C^3$) challenge: relying on discriminative, multiple-choice formats that probe value knowledge rather than true orientations, overlook subcultural heterogeneity, and mismatch with real-world open-ended generation. We introduce DOVE, a distributional evaluation framework that directly compares human-written text distributions with LLM-generated outputs. DOVE utilizes a rate-distortion variational optimization objective to construct a compact value codebook from 10K documents, mapping text into a structured value space to filter semantic noise. Alignment is measured using unbalanced optimal transport, capturing intra-cultural distributional structures and subgroup diversity. Experiments across 12 LLMs show that DOVE achieves superior predictive validity, attaining a 31.56% correlation with downstream tasks, while maintaining high reliability with as few as 500 samples per culture.
Authors: Yuming Xu, Mingtao Zhang, Zhuohan Ge, Haoyang Li, Nicole Hu, Yongqi Zhang, Zhiyuan Wen, Jason Chen Zhang, Qing Li, Lei Chen
Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) extends large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge, but this access path also introduces security risks that existing work often conflates with inherent LLM flaws. We frame secure RAG as securing external knowledge access and organize the literature with SLOT, a taxonomy along four axes: the attack Surface (S) where an adversary acts, the defense Layer (L) that controls the same point, the Objective (O) it breaks following the CIA properties, and the Target (T) it pursues, from a single known query (T1) to target-claim manipulation across a query distribution (T2). Mapping attacks, defenses, remediation, and evaluation onto a six-stage knowledge-access pipeline, we expose two structural mismatches. Finally, we discuss directions for more realistic targets, no-blind-spot and adaptively evaluated defenses, stronger confidentiality, and evaluation for multimodal and agentic RAG. The curated paper list for RAG security is in: https://github.com/TreeAI-Lab/Awesome-RAG-Security.
Authors: Cyrus Zhou, Yufei Jin, Yilin Xu, Yu-Chiang Wang, Chieh-Ju Chao, Monica S. Lam
Abstract: Many important retrieval problems are not merely problems of semantic similarity, but problems of constraint satisfaction: a retrieved item should be topically relevant to a query and satisfy explicit requirements involving negation, temporal conditions, numeric thresholds, exceptions, ontological relations, and incomplete evidence. We study this challenge in clinical trial matching, a high-stakes test bed where a useful trial must both address a patient's medical needs and satisfy complex eligibility criteria. We propose SatIR, a scalable constraint-based retrieval method for clinical trial matching. SatIR converts trial eligibility criteria and summaries into formal constraints, then retrieves patient--trial pairs by executing these constraints over a database. The system combines Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT), relational algebra, medical ontology grounding, and large language models (LLMs): formal methods provide executable and inspectable matching, while LLMs convert ambiguous, incomplete, and implicit clinical information into explicit, controllable constraint representations. Across the SIGIR 2016 patient--trial collection and TREC-2022-RetrievalSubset, a benchmark derived from TREC 2022, SATIR consistently improves eligibility-aware retrieval over similarity-based baselines. Relative to TrialGPT-style retrieval, SATIR retrieves 32%--72% more relevant-and-eligible trials per patient on SIGIR 2016 and achieves $1.8$--$3.2\times$ higher eligible-trial recall on TREC-2022-RetrievalSubset. Retrieval is fast, requiring only 146 milliseconds per patient over 3,621 SIGIR trials.
Authors: Ziyue Liu, Ruijie Zhang, Zhengyang Wang, Yequan Zhao, Yupeng Su, Zi Yang, Zheng Zhang
Abstract: Muon has emerged as a promising optimizer for large-scale foundation model pre-training by exploiting the matrix structure of neural network updates through iterative orthogonalization. However, the orthogonalization quality of Muon hinges on the number of Newton--Schulz (NS) iterations performed, which poses efficiency challenges due to its non-trivial computation and communication cost. We propose Muon$^2$, an extension of Muon, to improve both quality and efficiency by applying Adam-style adaptive second-moment preconditioning before orthogonalization. Our key insight is that the core challenge of polar approximation in Muon lies in the ill-conditioned momentum matrix, of which the spectrum is substantially improved by Muon$^2$, leading to faster convergence toward a practically sufficient orthogonalization. We further characterize the practical orthogonalization quality via directional alignment, under which Muon$^2$ demonstrates dramatic improvement over Muon at each polar step. Across GPT, LLaMA, and Mixture-of-Experts pre-training experiments up to 13B parameters, Muon$^2$ (and its memory-efficient variant Muon$^2$-F that preserves most of its benefits) consistently outperforms Muon and its variants while reducing NS iterations by 40%, and saves up to 1/4 training time over Muon when achieving the same loss.
Authors: Justice Owusu Agyemang, Jerry John Kponyo, Elliot Amponsah, Godfred Manu Addo Boakye, Kwame Opuni-Boachie Obour Agyekum
Abstract: LLM-powered coding agents increasingly rely on tool-use protocols such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to read and write files on a developer's workstation. When a write fails - due to content filters, truncation, or an interrupted session - the agent typically receives no structured signal, loses the draft, and wastes tokens retrying blindly. We present Resilient Write, an MCP server that interposes a six-layer durable write surface between the agent and the filesystem. The layers - pre-flight risk scoring, transactional atomic writes, resume-safe chunking, structured typed errors, out-of-band scratchpad storage, and task-continuity handoff envelopes - are orthogonal and independently adoptable. Each layer maps to a concrete failure mode observed during a real agent session in April 2026, in which content-safety filters silently rejected a draft containing redacted API-key prefixes. Three additional tools - chunk preview, format-aware validation, and journal analytics - emerged from using the system to compose this paper. A 186-test suite validates correctness at each layer, and quantitative comparison against naive and defensive baselines shows a 5x reduction in recovery time and a 13x improvement in agent self-correction rate. Resilient Write is open-source under the MIT license.
Authors: Yang Liu, Dongxin Guo, Tom Zheng, Siu Ming Yiu, Liam Ning, Jikun Wu
Abstract: Global self-attention drives modern graph transformers, yet the softmax at its core imposes a structural constraint rarely examined directly: every attention row is non-negative and sums to one, so each per-head output is a mass-conserving convex combination of value vectors. A node can never "attend to nothing." We argue this conservation constraint is a single root cause behind three pathologies usually studied in isolation: the collapse of node representations with depth (over-smoothing), a low-rank bottleneck on per-head outputs, and brittle optimization in deep stacks. Drawing on how sigmoid gating removes analogous attention sinks in language models, we introduce SigGate-GT, a graph transformer that applies a learned, per-head, input-conditioned sigmoid gate to the attention output inside the GraphGPS framework. The gate is a smooth, per-dimension "volume control" that can drive head outputs toward zero, relaxing the constraint without abandoning attention's probabilistic interpretation. Analytically and through synthetic experiments, we show the gate strictly increases the stable rank of per-head outputs, and connect this rank gain to all three manifestations. On five molecular and long-range benchmarks, SigGate-GT matches the prior best on ZINC (0.059 MAE), records the strongest result among the graph-transformer baselines we evaluate on ogbg-molhiv (82.47% ROC-AUC), and is competitive on ogbg-molpcba and the Long-Range Graph Benchmark, with statistically significant gains over GraphGPS on all five datasets (p < 0.05). Mechanism analyses confirm the diagnosis: gating slows over-smoothing (a 30% mean relative gain in representation diversity across 4-16 layers), keeps attention entropy from collapsing, and stabilizes training across a 10x learning-rate range, at about 1% parameter overhead on OGB and under 3% wall-clock cost.
Authors: Daniela Baiamonte, Elena Fano, Matteo Gabburo, Stefano Simonazzi, Leonardo Rigutini, Andrea Zugarini
Abstract: Vision Language Models (VLMs) achieved rapid progress in the recent years. However, despite their growth, VLMs development is heavily grounded on English, leading to two main limitations: (i) the lack of multilingual and multimodal datasets for training, and (ii) the scarcity of comprehensive evaluation benchmarks across languages. In this work, we address these gaps by introducing a new comprehensive suite of resources for VLMs training and evaluation spanning five European languages (English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish). We adopt a regeneration-translation paradigm that produces high-quality cross-lingual resources by combining curated synthetic generation and manual annotation. Specifically, we build Multi-PixMo, a training corpus obtained regenerating examples from Pixmo pre-existing datasets with permissively licensed models: PixMo-Cap, PixMo-AskModelAnything, and CoSyn-400k. On the evaluation side, we construct a set of multilingual benchmarks derived translating widely used English datasets (MMbench, ScienceQA, MME, POPE, AI2D). We assess the quality of these resources through qualitative and quantitative human analyses, measuring inter-annotator agreement. Additionally, we perform ablation studies to demonstrate the impact of multilingual data, with respect to English only, in VLMs training. Experiments, comprising 3 different models show that using multilingual, multimodal examples for training VLMs aids is consistently beneficial on non-English benchmarks, with positive transfer to English as well.
Authors: Elija Perrier
Abstract: We develop a thermodynamic theory of algorithmic catalysis within the watts per intelligence framework, identifying reusable computational structures that reduce irreversible operations for a task class while satisfying bounded restoration and structural selectivity constraints. We prove that any class specific speed-up is upper-bounded by the algorithmic mutual information between the substrate and the class descriptor, and that encoding this information incurs a minimum thermodynamic cost via Landauer erasure. Combining these results yields a coupling theorem that lower-bounds the deployment horizon required for an algorithmic catalyst to be energetically favourable. The framework is illustrated on an affine SAT class and situates contemporary learned systems within an information thermodynamic constraint on intelligent computation.
Authors: Azmul A. Irfan, Nur Ahmad Khatim, Alfan Alfian Irfan, Achmad Zaki, Erike A. Suwarsono, Mansur M. Arief
Abstract: Grading knee osteoarthritis (KOA) on plain radiographs is poorly reproducible across readers. A single-grade disagreement on the Kellgren-Lawrence (KL) scale can alter surgical management or redirect a patient from conservative therapy to intra-articular injection. Meanwhile, deep learning models that outperform human readers often offer no explanation for their decisions. We present Knee-xRAI, a pipeline that decomposes the grading process by mimicking clinical radiological workflows. It independently measures joint space narrowing (JSN), osteophytes, and subchondral sclerosis, then combines these findings into an explainable KL grade. Specifically, a U-Net++ architecture quantifies JSN via contour segmentation, an SE-ResNet-50 multi-task network grades osteophytes per anatomical site on the OARSI scale, and a hybrid texture-CNN detects binary sclerosis. This pipeline yields a 50-dimensional feature vector evaluated via an XGBoost-SHAP classifier (Path A, audit) and a ConvNeXt hybrid predictor (Path B, deployed). On 8,260 OAI-derived radiographs, the JSN module achieved a Dice score of 0.8909 and an mJSW ICC of 0.8674. Path A reached a QWK of 0.6294 and an AUC of 0.8046, confirming the structured feature vector carries substantial diagnostic signal. Path B achieved a QWK of 0.8436 and an AUC of 0.9017. SHAP analysis identifies JSN as the dominant feature, with osteophytes adding a consistent increment and sclerosis contributing marginally. Removing JSN evidence collapses KL3-KL4 recall while early grades remain intact, aligning with the KL diagnostic criteria. Knee-xRAI grounds every prediction in an auditable chain of measured radiographic findings, providing clinical transparency at the point of care.
Authors: Liang Xu, Diego Caviedes-Nozal, W. Bastiaan Kleijn, Longfei Felix Yan, Rasmus Kongsgaard Olsson
Abstract: We propose Speech Enhancement based on Drifting Models (DriftSE), a novel generative framework that formulates denoising as an equilibrium problem. Rather than relying on iterative sampling, DriftSE natively achieves one-step inference by evolving the pushforward distribution of a mapping function to directly match the clean speech distribution. This evolution is driven by a Drifting Field, a learned correction vector that guides samples toward the high-density regions of the clean distribution, which naturally facilitates training on unpaired data by matching distributions rather than paired samples. We investigate the framework under two formulations: a direct mapping from the noisy observation, and a stochastic conditional generative model from a Gaussian prior. Experiments on the VoiceBank-DEMAND benchmark demonstrate that DriftSE achieves high-fidelity enhancement in a single step, outperforming multi-step diffusion baselines and establishing a new paradigm for speech enhancement.
Authors: Wenbin Huang, Yuhang Qiu, Bohan Li, Yiwei Guo, Jing Peng, Hankun Wang, Xie Chen, Kai Yu
Abstract: Automatic speech recognition systems often produce confident yet incorrect transcriptions under noisy or ambiguous conditions, which can be misleading for both users and downstream applications. Standard evaluation based on Word Error Rate focuses solely on accuracy and fails to capture transcription reliability. We introduce an abstention-aware transcription framework that enables ASR models to explicitly abstain from uncertain segments. To evaluate reliability under abstention, we propose RAS, a reliability-oriented metric that balances transcription informativeness and error aversion, with its trade-off parameter calibrated by human preference. We then train an abstention-aware ASR model through supervised bootstrapping followed by reinforcement learning. Our experiments demonstrate substantial improvements in transcription reliability while maintaining competitive accuracy.
Authors: Weihang Su, Jianming Long, Qingyao Ai, Qiaozhi He, Yichen Tang, Changyue Wang, Yiteng Tu, Yingbo Wang, Yiqun Liu
Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) evolve into agentic problem solvers, they increasingly rely on external, reusable skills to handle tasks beyond their native parametric capabilities. In existing agent systems, the dominant strategy for incorporating skills is to explicitly enumerate available skills within the context window. However, this strategy fails to scale: as skill corpora expand, context budgets are consumed rapidly, and the agent becomes markedly less accurate in identifying the right skill. To this end, this paper formulates Skill Retrieval Augmentation (SRA), a new paradigm in which agents dynamically retrieve, incorporate, and apply relevant skills from large external skill corpora on demand. To make this problem measurable, we construct a large-scale skill corpus and introduce SRA-Bench, the first benchmark for decomposed evaluation of the full SRA pipeline, covering skill retrieval, skill incorporation, and end-task execution. SRA-Bench contains 5,400 capability-intensive test instances and 636 manually constructed gold skills, which are mixed with web-collected distractor skills to form a large-scale corpus of 26,262 skills. Extensive experiments show that retrieval-based skill augmentation can substantially improve agent performance, validating the promise of the paradigm. At the same time, we uncover a fundamental gap in skill incorporation: current LLM agents tend to load skills at similar rates, regardless of whether a gold skill is retrieved or whether the task actually requires external capabilities. This shows that the bottleneck in skill augmentation lies not only in retrieval but also in the base model's ability to determine which skill to load and when external loading is actually needed. These findings position SRA as a distinct research problem and establish a foundation for the scalable augmentation of capabilities in future agent systems.
Authors: Michael Cardei, Huu Binh Ta, Ferdinando Fioretto
Abstract: Masked diffusion models (MDMs) generate discrete sequences by iterative denoising under an absorbing masking process. In standard masked diffusion, if a token remains masked after a reverse update, the model discards its clean-state prediction for that position. Thus, still-masked positions must be repeatedly inferred from the mask token alone. This design choice limits cross-step refinement. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a simple, yet effective, post-training adaptation for MDMs that conditions each denoising step on the model's own previous clean-state predictions. The resulting method, called Self-Conditioned Masked Diffusion Models (SCMDM), requires minimal architectural change, does not introduce a recurrent latent-state pathway, does not rely on an auxiliary reference model, and adds no extra denoiser evaluations during sampling. This is an important departure from partial self-conditioning approaches which requires expensive model training from scratch. In particular, the paper shows that partial self-conditioning, including the commonly used 50% dropout strategy for training self-conditioned models from scratch, is suboptimal in the post-training regime. Instead, once the model's self-generated clean-state estimates become informative, the specialization to refinement is preferable to mixing conditional and unconditional objectives. SCMDM is evaluated across multiple domains, demonstrating consistent improvement over vanilla MDM baselines, achieving nearly a 50% reduction in generative perplexity on OWT-trained models (42.89 to 23.72), alongside strong improvements in discretized image synthesis quality, small molecular generation, and enhanced fidelity in genomic distribution modeling.
Authors: Yujin Jeong, Arnas Uselis, Iro Laina, Seong Joon Oh, Anna Rohrbach
Abstract: Text-to-image diffusion models achieve impressive visual fidelity, yet they remain unreliable in multi-object generation. Despite extensive empirical evidence of these failures, the underlying causes remain unclear. We begin by asking how much of this limitation arises from the data itself. To disentangle data effects, we consider two regimes across different dataset sizes: (1) concept generalization, where each individual concept is observed during training under potentially imbalanced data distributions, and (2) compositional generalization, where specific combinations of concepts are systematically held out. To study these regimes, we introduce mosaic (Multi-Object Spatial relations, AttrIbution, Counting), a controlled framework for dataset generation. By training diffusion models on mosaic, we find that scene complexity plays a dominant role rather than concept imbalance, and that counting is uniquely difficult to learn in low-data regimes. Moreover, compositional generalization collapses as more concept combinations are held out during training. These findings highlight fundamental limitations of diffusion models and motivate stronger inductive biases and data design for robust multi-object compositional generation.
Authors: Xingyu Hu, Kai Zhang, Jiancan Wu, Shuli Wang, Chi Wang, Wenshuai Chen, Yinhua Zhu, Haitao Wang, Xingxing Wang, Xiang Wang
Abstract: In large language model (LLM)-based recommendation systems, direct preference optimization (DPO) effectively aligns recommendations with user preferences, requiring multi-negative objective functions to leverage abundant implicit-feedback negatives and sharpen preference boundaries. However, our empirical analyses reveal a counterintuitive phenomenon, preference optimization collapse, where increasing the number of negative samples can lead to performance degradation despite a continuously decreasing training loss. We further theoretically demonstrate that this collapse arises from gradient suppression, caused by the dominance of easily discriminable negatives over boundary-critical negatives that truly define user preference boundaries. As a result, boundary-relevant signals are under-optimized, weakening the model's decision boundary. Motivated by these observations, we propose DynamicPO (Dynamic Preference Optimization), a lightweight and plug-and-play framework comprising two adaptive mechanisms: Dynamic Boundary Negative Selection, which identifies and prioritizes informative negatives near the model's decision boundary, and Dual-Margin Dynamic beta Adjustment, which calibrates optimization strength per sample according to boundary ambiguity. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show that DynamicPO effectively prevents optimization collapse and improves recommendation accuracy on multi-negative preference optimization methods, with negligible computational overhead. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/xingyuHuxingyu/DynamicPO.
Authors: Rameen Mahmood, Omar El Shahawy, Souptik Barua, Zachary Beattie, Jeffrey Kaye, Xuhai "Orson'' Xu, Chao-Yi Wu, Danny Yuxing Huang
Abstract: Human behavior is challenging to measure continuously at scale, yet traces of daily routines and well-being may be reflected in interactions with personal devices. We investigate whether encrypted smartphone network traffic can serve as a passive sensing signal for behavioral states related to sleep disturbance, stress, and loneliness. To capture both population-level patterns and individual-specific behavior, we employ a transformer-based model with user-specific adapters that learns representations of network activity while accounting for personal baselines and deviations from them. To improve interpretability, we further analyze these representations using sparse representation learning to identify latent behavioral features associated with distinct activity patterns. We relate the resulting features to sleep disturbance, stress, and loneliness using generalized estimating equations with Mundlak decomposition, enabling separation of stable between-person differences from within-person changes over time. Our analysis reveals that the three outcomes are characterized by different temporal dynamics: stress is predominantly associated with persistent between-person variation, loneliness is more strongly linked to within-person fluctuations, and sleep disturbance reflects a combination of both. Importantly, these within-person behavioral signals are not recovered by conventional handcrafted network-traffic features, highlighting the advantages of learned representations for longitudinal behavioral modeling. Overall, our findings demonstrate that encrypted network traffic contains interpretable behavioral information and can support passive, scalable monitoring of behavioral dynamics, particularly changes relative to an individual's typical pattern of activity.
Authors: Mohit Kumar, Somayeh Kargaran, Bernhard A. Moser, Manuela Gei{\ss}
Abstract: Transformer-based semantic encoders are effective for retrieval, but in many deployments the recurring bottleneck is online query encoding rather than offline corpus indexing. This paper studies whether, once a strong teacher representation space and corpus index are fixed, repeated neural query encoding can be replaced by a substantially lighter and analytically explicit estimator. We formulate fixed-teacher lexical-to-semantic encoding as a conditional-mean estimation problem in which the target semantic vector is represented as a noisy mixture of semantic prototypes weighted by posterior cluster probabilities. Kernel Affine Hull Machine (KAHM) geometry is used to estimate these posterior weights from inexpensive lexical features in an explicitly identified RKHS hypothesis space, and the semantic prototypes are refined by normalized least-mean-squares updates from noisy teacher embeddings. This yields a backpropagation-free query-side encoder together with an end-to-end error decomposition into posterior-approximation, finite-sample/generalization, and teacher-noise terms. We instantiate the approach on a controlled Austrian-law retrieval benchmark with 5,000 test queries, 84 candidate laws, and 10,762 aligned retrieval units, using law-specific encoders into a frozen Mixedbread embedding space. Among evaluation-matched learned adapters, KAHM achieves the strongest teacher-space reconstruction and the best rank-sensitive retrieval performance at all evaluated cutoffs. At k=20, it obtains MRR@20 = 0.504, Hit@20 = 0.694, and Top-1 Accuracy = 0.411, while reducing online per-query time by 8.53 relative to direct transformer query encoding in the reported CPU setting. The results support KAHMs as compute-efficient encoders for supervised fixed-representation deployment regimes.
Authors: Francesco Sovrano, Gabriele Dominici, Marc Langheinrich
Abstract: A central goal of explainable AI is to express large language model (LLM) decision logic symbolically and ground it in internal mechanisms. Existing rule-extraction methods usually learn ungrounded symbolic surrogates, while mechanistic interpretability links behavior to neurons but often requires hand-crafted hypotheses and costly interventions. We introduce MechaRule, a pipeline that grounds rule extraction in LLM circuits by localizing sparse agonist activations whose ablation disrupts rule-related behavior. MechaRule rests on two findings. First, in a fixed baseline/flip regime, sparse agonist effects can exhibit overtopping: a few high-effect activations remain detectable within larger groups, dominate weaker ones, and flip many of the same examples. In such regimes, adaptive group testing with confidence-guided conservative pruning requires O(k log(N/k) + k) interventions over N candidates when k << N are agonists. Second, agonists are localized more reliably on data splits aligned with close-to-faithful rule behavior; spectral splits provide a rule-free fallback, whereas unfaithful splits degrade localization. Empirically, on arithmetic and jailbreaking, MechaRule recalls 97.0% of highest-effect agonists in matched brute-force validations at only 2.14% of exhaustive-ablation cost on average. Ablating the localized agonists eliminates 97.6--100.0% of eligible correct arithmetic answers and jailbreaks, and can correct arithmetic errors or induce jailbreaks by up to 72.8% and 32.5%.
Authors: Prakhar Gupta, Garv Shah, Donghua Zhang
Abstract: Safety fine-tuning of language models typically requires a curated adversarial dataset. We take a different approach: score each candidate prompt's difficulty by how often the target model's own rollouts are judged harmful, then fine-tune on the hardest prompts paired with the model's own non-jailbroken rollouts. On Llama-3-8B-Instruct and Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct, this approach cuts the WildJailbreak attack success rate from 11.5% and 20.1% down to 1-3%, but pushes refusal on jailbreak-shaped benign prompts from 14-22% to 74-94%. Interleaving the same hard prompts 1:1 with adversarially-framed benign prompts (prompts that look like jailbreaks but have benign intent) cuts that refusal back down to 30-51% on 8B and 52-72% on 3B, at a cost of 2-6 percentage points of attack success rate. Within the mixed regime, training on the hardest half of the eligible pool rather than a random half cuts the remaining ASR by 35-50% (about 3 percentage points) on both models.
Authors: Jaavid Aktar Husain, Dorien Herremans
Abstract: Music popularity prediction has attracted growing research interest, with relevance to artists, platforms, and recommendation systems. However, the explosive rise of AI-generated music platforms has created an entirely new and largely unexplored landscape, where a surge of songs is produced and consumed daily without the traditional markers of artist reputation or label backing. Key, yet unexplored in this pursuit is aesthetic quality. We propose APEX, the first large-scale multi-task learning framework for AI-generated music, trained on over 211k songs (10k hours of audio) from Suno and Udio, that jointly predicts engagement-based popularity signals - streams and likes scores - alongside five perceptual aesthetic quality dimensions from frozen audio embeddings extracted from MERT, a self-supervised music understanding model. Aesthetic quality and popularity capture complementary aspects of music that together prove valuable: in an out-of-distribution evaluation on the Music Arena dataset, comprising pairwise human preference battles across eleven generative music systems unseen during training, including aesthetic features consistently improves preference prediction, demonstrating strong generalisation of the learned representations across generative architectures.
Authors: Dijia Zhan, Jinyi Li, Chenxi Zheng, Shaoyu Huang, Yong Li, Jie Tang, Xuemiao Xu
Abstract: Existing Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) methods typically adopt an egocentric, step-by-step paradigm, which struggles with error accumulation and limits efficiency. While recent approaches attempt to leverage pre-built environment maps, they often rely on incrementally updating memory graphs or scoring discrete path proposals, which restricts continuous spatial reasoning and creates discrete bottlenecks. We propose Top-Down VLN (TD-VLN), reformulating navigation as a one-step global path planning problem on pre-built top-down maps, supported by our newly constructed R2R-TopDown dataset. To solve this, we introduce NavOne, a unified framework that directly predicts dense path probabilities over multi-modal maps in a single end-to-end forward pass. NavOne features a Top-Down Map Fuser for joint multi-modal map representation, and extends Attention Residuals for spatial-aware depth mixing. Extensive experiments on R2R-TopDown show that NavOne achieves state-of-the-art performance among map-based VLN methods, with a planning-stage speedup of 8x over existing map-based baselines and 80x over egocentric methods, enabling highly efficient global navigation.
Authors: Alessandro Ronca
Abstract: We introduce MinMax Recurrent Neural Cascades (MinMax RNCs), a class of recurrent neural networks built from a novel form of recurrence over the MinMax algebra. We show that MinMax RNCs enjoy key properties that are difficult to obtain simultaneously: strong formal expressivity, efficient evaluation, stable dynamics, and non-vanishing state gradients. First, their formal expressivity corresponds to the regular languages, arguably the maximal expressivity for finite-memory systems. Second, in addition to evaluation in recurrent form, they also admit parallel-scan evaluation with logarithmic depth and linear work in the input length. Third, their states and activations are uniformly bounded for all sequence lengths. Fourth, their loss gradients exist almost everywhere and are uniformly bounded for all sequence lengths. Fifth, they do not exhibit vanishing state gradients: the gradient of a state with respect to a past state can retain norm one independently of the temporal distance between the states. Empirically, we find that these theoretical properties translate into strong practical performance. MinMax RNCs solve the considered synthetic tasks perfectly, generalise to long sequences, and outperform the recurrent baselines considered in our experiments. We also train a 112M-parameter MinMax RNC for next-token prediction, obtaining competitive performance for its size and providing initial evidence that MinMax recurrence can scale to real-world sequence-modelling tasks.
Authors: Daemyung Kang, Eunjin Hwang, Hanjeong Lee, HyeokJin Kim, Hyunhoi Koo, Jeongkyu Shin, Jeongseok Kang, Jihyun Kang, Jinho Heo, Joongi Kim, Junbum Lee, Jungseung Yang, Kyujin Cho, Youngsook Song
Abstract: Large-scale AI training is fundamentally a distributed systems problem, where hardware failures are routine operating conditions rather than rare exceptions, yet public operational evidence from production training clusters remains limited. This 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 environment is cross-organizational: five parties (SKT, Upstage, Lablup, NVIDIA Korea, VAST Data) share a unified monitoring pipeline. This enabled joint diagnosis of a 60-node-scale storage I/O bottleneck absent in 2-4-node tests, a production-scale phenomenon no single team could isolate alone. We perform three quantitative analyses yielding four findings. First, over 751 Prometheus metrics and 10 XID-identified GPU failures, no single metric is consistently dominant across failure types, motivating multi-signal detection. Second, 523 checkpoint events trace the save/load path from GPU VRAM to the NFS server: restart loading reaches 21.5% of maximum read bandwidth (700 GB/s) and save bursts 16.0% of maximum write bandwidth (250 GB/s), with NFS/RPC queueing and transport-layer backlog rising together. Third, across 224 sessions over 73 days, node exclusions concentrate so the top 3 of 63 nodes account for over 50%. Fourth, auto-retry chain analysis shows a 33.3% success rate over 12 chains (73 attempts), 2.7x the 12.5% manual rate, with a median retry interval of 11 minutes (IQR 10-11). All analyses are grounded in production infrastructure providing session-level workload management, GPU-centric scheduling, and unified observability.
Authors: Chelsea Zou, Yiheng Yao, Selena She, Noah Goodman, Robert D. Hawkins
Abstract: Personal AI assistants are beginning to act as delegates with access to calendars, inboxes, and user preferences. Calendar scheduling makes the trust problem concrete: an assistant must coordinate with other assistants while deciding what to reveal about the person it represents. We introduce CalBench, a controlled benchmark for multi-agent calendar scheduling under private information. In each task, $N$ agents manage separate private calendars and schedule a stream of $M$ incoming meetings while minimizing disruption costs. Because no agent can inspect another agent's calendar, success requires language-mediated coordination rather than centralized planning. CalBench generates solvable scenarios with CP-SAT oracle solutions and decentralized non-LLM reference protocols, enabling evaluation of task success, excess cost, communication efficiency, burden fairness, and privacy leakage under matched information constraints. Across seven model families, we find that completion alone misses important failures: agents leave avoidable cost on the table, communication volume does not predict lower regret, and privacy-preserving silence can deprive teammates of cost information needed for fair burden allocation. CalBench provides a reproducible testbed for studying whether autonomous assistants can coordinate on behalf of users before deployment at scale.
Authors: Lauhitya Reddy, Seth Donahue, Jeremy Bauer, Susan Sienko, Anita Bagley, Joseph Krzak, Maura Eveld, Karen Kruger, Ross Chafetz, Vedant Kulkarni, Hyeokhyen Kwon
Abstract: Cerebral Palsy (CP) is a neurological disorder of movement and the most common cause of lifelong physical disability in childhood. Approximately 75% of children with CP are ambulatory, and accurate gait assessment is central to preserving walking function, which deteriorates by mid-adulthood in a quarter to half of adults with CP. The Rodda and Graham classification system quantifies sagittal-plane gait deviations using ankle and knee z-scores derived from 3D Instrumented Gait Analysis (3D-IGA), but 3D-IGA is expensive and limited to specialized centers, while observational assessment shows only moderate inter-rater agreement. We developed a markerless gait analysis pipeline that quantifies Rodda and Graham knee and ankle z-scores directly from single-view clinical gait videos. Across 1,058 bilateral limb samples from 529 trials of 152 children (88 male, 63 female; age 12.1 $\pm$ 4.0 years; 60 distinct primary diagnoses, cerebral palsy the most common at $n=54$), the sagittal-view model achieved $R^2 = 0.80 \pm 0.02$ and CCC $= 0.89 \pm 0.02$ for knee z-scores and $R^2 = 0.57 \pm 0.02$ and CCC $= 0.72 \pm 0.02$ for ankle z-scores against 3D-IGA. Binary screening for excess knee flexion achieves AUROC $= 0.88$, correctly identifying 83% of affected children, and applying Rodda and Graham rules yields $43 \pm 1$% 7-class accuracy with macro-AUROC $= 0.78 \pm 0.01$, ankle prediction error remaining the primary bottleneck. Beyond cross-sectional screening, continuous z-scores support longitudinal trajectory tracking across visits, providing a quantitative substrate for monitoring disease progression and treatment response unavailable from observational scales. These results demonstrate the feasibility of video-based z-score estimation, excess-flexion screening, and longitudinal trajectory tracking as a path toward scalable, objective gait assessment in low-resource clinical settings.
Authors: Julien Brandoit, Arthur Fyon, Damien Ernst, Guillaume Drion
Abstract: Sequence learning is dominated by Transformers and parallelizable recurrent neural networks (RNNs) such as state-space models, yet learning long-term dependencies remains challenging, and state-of-the-art designs trade power consumption for performance. The Bistable Memory Recurrent Unit (BMRU) was introduced to enable hardware-software co-design of ultra-low power RNNs: quantized states with hysteresis provide persistent memory while mapping directly to analog primitives. However, BMRU performance lags behind parallelizable RNNs on complex sequential tasks. In this paper, we identify gradient blocking during state updates as a key limitation and propose a cumulative update formulation that restores gradient flow while preserving persistent memory, creating skip-connections through time. This leads to the Cumulative Memory Recurrent Unit (CMRU) and its relaxed variant, the $\alpha$CMRU. Experiments show that the cumulative formulation dramatically improves convergence stability and reduces initialization sensitivity. The CMRU and $\alpha$CMRU match or outperform Linear Recurrent Units (LRUs) and minimal Gated Recurrent Units (minGRUs) across diverse benchmarks at small model sizes, with particular advantages on tasks requiring discrete long-range retention, while the CMRU retains quantized states, persistent memory, and noise-resilient dynamics essential for analog implementation.
Authors: Or Ordentlich, Yury Polyanskiy
Abstract: This is the second part of the work investigating quantized matrix multiplication (MatMul). In part I we considered the case of calibration-free quantization, whereas here we discuss the setting where covariance matrix $\Sigma_X$ of the columns of the second factor is available. This setting arises in the ubiquitous task of weight-only post-training quantization of LLMs. Weight-only quantization is related to the problem of weighted mean squared error (WMSE) source coding, whose classical (reverse) waterfilling solution dictates how one should distribute rate between coordinates of the vector. We show how waterfilling can be used to improve practical LLM quantization algorithms (GPTQ), which at present allocate rate equally. A recent scheme (known as ``WaterSIC'') that only uses scalar INT quantizers is analyzed and its high-rate performance is shown to be (a) basis free (i.e., characterized by the determinant of $\Sigma_X$ and, thus, unlike existing schemes, is immune to applying random rotations); and (b) within a multiplicative factor of $\frac{2\pi e}{12}$ (or 0.25 bit/entry) of the information-theoretic distortion limit. GPTQ's performance, in turn, is affected by the choice of basis, but for a random rotation and actual $\Sigma_X$ from Llama-3-8B we find it to be within 0.1 bit (depending on the layer type) of WaterSIC, suggesting that GPTQ with random rotation is also near optimal, at least in the high-rate regime.
Authors: Gaojie Jin, Yong Tao, Lijia Yu, Tianjin Huang
Abstract: Jung et al. (2025) introduce a hypothesis testing framework for guaranteeing agreement between large language models (LLMs) and human judgments, relying on the assumption that the model's estimated confidence is monotonic with respect to human-disagreement risk. In practice, however, this assumption may be violated, and the generalization behavior of the confidence estimator is not explicitly analyzed. We mitigate these issues by learning a dedicated confidence estimator instead of relying on heuristic confidence signals. Our approach leverages simulated annotator diversity and a margin-based ranking formulation to explicitly model how confidently an LLM distinguishes between human-agreement and human-disagreement cases. We further derive generalization guarantees for this estimator, revealing a margin-dependent trade-off that informs the design of an adaptive estimator training procedure. When integrated into fixed-sequence testing, the learned confidence estimator yields improved ranking accuracy and empirically strengthens the monotonic relationship between confidence and disagreement risk, leading to higher success rates in satisfying target agreement levels across multiple datasets and judge models.
Authors: Vincent-Daniel Yun, Junhyuk Jo, Sai Praneeth Karimireddy, Sunwoo Lee
Abstract: Layer pruning removes entire Transformer decoder blocks from large language models, but introduces a mismatch between the hidden state received by the next surviving layer and the distribution it was trained to process, leading to significant performance degradation. We propose Ghosted Layers, a training-free recovery module that addresses this issue by solving a boundary activation alignment problem. Our method derives a closed-form optimal linear operator from a small calibration set to reconstruct the activation discrepancy introduced by the pruned layers. We show that this solution corresponds to the unconstrained optimum of the alignment objective, whereas existing methods are restricted to constrained solutions over limited operator subspaces. Experiments across multiple LLM backbones and pruning strategies demonstrate that our method consistently improves accuracy and perplexity over prior training-free baselines, while preserving the efficiency gains of layer pruning. Official code repository: https://github.com/daniel-eai/ghosted_layers_official_repository/.
URLs: https://github.com/daniel-eai/ghosted_layers_official_repository/.
Authors: Adrienne Deganutti, Dingning Cao, Jaejung Seol, Elad Hirsch, Purvanshi Mehta
Abstract: Generative video models are increasingly used in design animation tasks, yet no standardized evaluation framework exists for this domain. Unlike natural video generation, design animation imposes structured constraints: specific components shall animate with prescribed motion types, directions, speed and timing, while non-animated regions must remain stable and layout structure must be preserved. This paper provides a fully automated evaluation framework organized across four dimensions: layout fidelity, motion correctness, temporal quality, and content fidelity. This eliminates the reliance on subjective human evaluation and establishes a common basis for benchmarking progress in the field. We release the code and dataset here: https://github.com/purvanshi/lica-bench.
Authors: Yanke Zhou, Yiduo Li, Hanlin Tang, Maohua Li, Kan Liu, Tao Lan, Lin Qu, Yuan Yao, Xiaoxing Ma
Abstract: Long-context inference in large language models is bottlenecked by the quadratic cost of full attention. Existing efficient alternatives often rely either on native sparse training or on heuristic token eviction, creating an undesirable trade-off among efficiency, training cost, and accuracy. In this work, we show that full-attention LLMs are already intrinsically sparse and can be transformed into highly sparse models with only minimal adaptation. Our approach is built on three observations: (1) only a small subset of attention heads truly requires full long-context processing; (2) long-range retrieval is governed primarily by a low-dimensional subspace, allowing relevant tokens to be retrieved efficiently with a 16-dimensional indexer; and (3) the useful token budget is strongly query-dependent, making dynamic top-$p$ selection more suitable than fixed top-$k$ sparsification. Based on these insights, we propose RTPurbo, which retains the full KV cache only for retrieval heads and introduces a lightweight token indexer for sparse attention. By exploiting the model's intrinsic sparsity, RTPurbo achieves sparsification with only a few hundred training steps. Experiments on long-context benchmarks and reasoning tasks show that RTPurbo preserves near-lossless accuracy while delivering substantial efficiency gains, including up to a 9.36$\times$ prefill speedup at 1M context and about a 2.01$\times$ decode speedup. These results suggest that strong sparse inference can be obtained from standard full-attention training without expensive native sparse pretraining.
Authors: Jingjing Li, Zhi Liu, Xiyao Jin, Tatsuki Fushimi, Yoichi Ochiai
Abstract: Cultural heritage exhibitions often struggle to sustain attention and support reflective engagement. Physical exhibitions rely on fixed interpretive aids that lack adaptability to individual backgrounds or curiosity, and their effectiveness depends heavily on a visitor's Personal Context, prior knowledge, and cultural literacy. Meanwhile, digital exhibitions prioritize convenience and accessibility but risk weakening the Physical and Social Contexts that define embodied cultural experience. WhiteTesseract addresses this gap by enabling in-situ interpretation through high-resolution XR and conversational AI. The system integrates spatial intelligence via artwork recognition to allow visitors to selectively reduce environmental distractions (via diminished reality) and engage in context-aware dialogue (via large language models). The goal is to preserve the richness of the physical and social environment while providing a flexible space for personal reflection, enhancing Personal Context without compromising physical authenticity. We deployed the system in a Claude Monet exhibition and conducted a controlled user study with 26 participants. Quantitative results showed that WhiteTesseract modulation significantly increased average viewing duration from 35.3 to 98.3 seconds (p < 0.001). Analysis of 529 visitor-AI interactions revealed that 60% extended beyond factual queries to include analytical, emotional, and comparative inquiries. These findings demonstrate how XR and AI can enrich the physical exhibition experience by supporting deeper, more personalized engagement without displacing the embodied value of cultural heritage. We discuss technical and social constraints for real-world deployment and limitations of our controlled setting.
Authors: Mohammad Mozaffari, Younes Hourri, Mohammad Rastegari, Mahyar Najibi
Abstract: Unstructured sparsity is now natively accelerated by recent GPU kernels and dataflow hardware, shifting the bottleneck from inference execution to the pruning algorithm. State-of-the-art methods for unstructured LLM pruning are layer-wise surrogates derived from the Optimal Brain Surgeon principle, and they sacrifice end-to-end accuracy, especially under aggressive sparsity. End-to-end alternatives such as MaskLLM and PATCH show that learnable masks can close this gap, but their categorical-over-patterns parameterization scales with the number of valid masks per row and does not port to the unstructured setting. We introduce LEAP, which replaces this intractable parameterization with a per-weight Bernoulli-via-Gumbel-sigmoid relaxation that makes end-to-end unstructured mask learning tractable. Across five LLM families from 0.5B to 8B parameters at 50% and 60% sparsity, LEAP improves six-task average zero-shot accuracy by +2.59 points on average over ADMM, the best layer-wise baseline in our sweep.
Authors: Chenyu Wang, Yueyuan Li, Yingmin Liu, Yang Shu
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems implicitly assume mutual consistency among retrieved documents -- an assumption that frequently fails in practice. We present ConflictRAG, a conflict-aware RAG framework that detects, classifies, and resolves knowledge conflicts prior to answer generation. The framework introduces three contributions: (1) a two-stage conflict detection module combining a lightweight embedding-based MLP classifier with selective LLM refinement, reducing API costs by 62% while maintaining 90.8% detection accuracy; (2) an Entropy-TOPSIS framework for data-driven source credibility assessment, improving selection accuracy by 7.1% over manual heuristics; and (3) a Conflict-Aware RAG Score (CARS) for diagnostic evaluation of conflict-handling capabilities. Experiments on three benchmarks against six baselines demonstrate 88.7% conflict-detection F1 and consistent 5.3--6.1% correctness gains over the strongest conflict-aware baseline, with the pipeline transferring effectively across backbone LLMs.
Authors: Xingtai Lv, Li Sheng, Kaiyan Zhang, Yichen You, Siyan Gao, Xueheng Luo, Yuxin Zuo, Yuchen Fan, Junlin Yang, Ganqu Cui, Bingning Wang, Fan Yang, Youbang Sun, Ning Ding, Bowen Zhou
Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) scales language models efficiently through sparse expert activation, and its dynamic variant further reduces computation by adjusting the activated experts in an input-dependent manner. Existing dynamic MoE methods usually rely on pre-training from scratch or task-specific adaptation, leaving the practical conversion of fully trained MoE underexplored. Enabling such adaptation would directly alleviate the inference costs by allowing easy tokens to bypass unnecessary expert during serving. This paper introduces Zero-Expert Self-Distillation Adaptation (ZEDA), a low-cost framework that transforms post-trained static MoE models into efficient dynamic ones. To stabilize this architectural conversion, ZEDA injects parameter-free zero-output experts into each MoE layer and adapts the augmented model through two-stage self-distillation, utilizing the original MoE as a frozen teacher and applying a group-level balancing loss. On Qwen3-30B-A3B and GLM-4.7-Flash across 11 benchmarks spanning math, code, and instruction following, ZEDA eliminates over 50% of expert FLOPs at marginal accuracy loss. It outperforms the strongest dynamic MoE baseline by 6.1 and 4.0 points on the two models, and delivers ~1.20$\times$ end-to-end inference speedup.
Authors: Xiaoou Liu, Tiejin Chen, Dengjia Zhang, Yaqing Wang, Lu Cheng, Hua Wei
Abstract: Large Language Models have achieved strong performance on reasoning tasks with objective answers by generating step-by-step solutions, but diagnosing where a multi-step reasoning trace might fail remains difficult. Confidence estimation offers a diagnostic signal, yet existing methods are restricted to final answers or require internal model access. In this paper, we introduce Stepwise Confidence Attribution (SCA), a framework for closed-source LLMs that assigns step-level confidence based only on generated reasoning traces. SCA applies the Information Bottleneck principle: steps aligning with consensus structures across correct solutions receive high confidence, while deviations are flagged as potentially erroneous. We propose two complementary methods: (1) NIBS, a non-parametric IB approach measuring consistency without graph structures, and (2) GIBS, a graph-based IB model that learns subgraphs through a differentiable mask to capture logical variability. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning and multi-hop question answering show that SCA reliably identifies low-confidence steps strongly correlated with reasoning errors. Moreover, using step-level confidence to guide self-correction improves the correction success rate by up to 13.5\% over answer-level feedback.
Authors: Wanyi Ning, Yinshang Guo, Haitao Qian, Jiyuan Cheng, Weiyuan Feng, Yufei Zhang
Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are typically optimized for verbatim transcription, which preserves disfluencies, filler words, and informal spoken structures that are often unsuitable for downstream writing-oriented applications. A common workaround is a two-stage ASR+LLM pipeline for post-editing, but this design increases latency and memory cost and is difficult to deploy on-device. We present FormalASR, two compact end-to-end models (0.6B and 1.7B) that directly transcribe spoken Chinese into formal written text. To enable this setting, we build WenetSpeech-Formal and Speechio-Formal, two large-scale spoken-to-formal datasets constructed by LLM-based rewriting and quality filtering. We then fine-tune Qwen3-ASR at two scales (0.6B and 1.7B) with supervised fine-tuning. Experiments on WenetSpeech-Formal and Speechio-Formal show that FormalASR achieves up to 37.4% relative CER reduction over verbatim baselines, while also improving ROUGE-L and BERTScore. FormalASR requires no post-processing LLM at deployment time, providing a lightweight, on-device solution for spoken-to-formal transcription.
Authors: Ali Mahdavi, Azadeh Zamanifar, Amirfarhad Farhadi, Omid Kashefi
Abstract: Federated learning systems must support data deletion requests to comply with privacy regulations, yet retraining from scratch after each deletion is computationally prohibitive. We present HF-KCU, a method that removes a client's contribution by approximating the influence function through conjugate gradient iterations in Krylov subspaces, reducing complexity from O(d^3) to O(kd) where k<
Authors: Bo Ye, Xinyu Cui, Jian Zhao, Tong Wei, Min-Ling Zhang
Abstract: Autoregressive long video generation often adopts bounded-memory streaming for efficiency, typically combining local windows for short-term continuity with static early-frame sinks as long-range anchors. However, this fixed allocation keeps early frames cached even when the current visual state has substantially diverged from them, while discarding potentially more relevant intermediate history. As a result, the retained long-range context may become less adaptive and bias generation toward outdated cues; in severe cases, RoPE-induced phase re-alignment can homogenize inter-head attention and cause sink collapse, where content regresses toward sink frames. We propose DySink, a retrieval-based framework that maintains a compact memory bank and selects visually relevant historical frames as dynamic frame sinks. DySink couples adaptive retrieval with a sink anomaly gate, which detects excessive inter-head consensus over retrieved context and suppresses collapse-prone context. Experiments on minute-long videos show that DySink consistently improves dynamic degree over strong baselines while also achieving higher temporal quality. The code and model weights will be released at https://github.com/yebo0216best/DySink.
Authors: Zhi Liu
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have rapidly converged on a small set of architectural patterns: discrete-token autoregression (e.g. OpenVLA) and continuous-action flow-matching (e.g. pi-0.5). Yet preference alignment via Direct Preference Optimisation (DPO) -- the de-facto post-training step in language models -- has been studied almost exclusively on autoregressive VLAs. We present CrossVLA, an empirical study of cross-paradigm VLA post-training. Three contributions: (i) a surrogate flow-matching log-probability estimator that lets DPO operate on continuous-action backbones without probability-flow ODE integration; (ii) a head-to-head comparison of LoRA and DoRA as the parameter-efficient layer for VLA DPO, finding DoRA improves over OpenVLA SFT by a mean +10.4 pp across LIBERO 4-suite (600 trials, 3 seeds) -- per-suite +20.0 Object, +11.0 Long-horizon, +8.0 Goal, +2.7 Spatial -- with zero seed variance on Object (38/50 on each of 3 seeds); (iii) an inference-time anatomy showing the denoise loop dominates 78.6% of sample_actions latency and prefix-K/V caching a la VLA-Cache caps at a 21% acceleration ceiling -- both chunk-level and token-level cache strategies degrade success rate to 0-80% in our benchmarks. We further pretrain a multi-view + temporal projection head on 6000 LIBERO frames, achieving 99.5% k-NN recall@1 for same-task retrieval (36x over random), available as a downstream initialisation. All code, ckpts, training logs, and reproduction scripts are open at https://github.com/lz-googlefycy/vla-lab.
Authors: Yunpeng Dong, Jingkai He, Shiqi Liu, Yuze Hou, Dong Du, Zhonghu Xu, Si Yu, Baochuan Yang, Yubin Xia, Haibo Chen
Abstract: LLM-powered AI agents require high-frequency state exploration (e.g., test-time tree search and reinforcement learning), relying on rapid checkpoint and rollback (C/R) of the complete sandbox state, including files and process state (e.g., memory, contexts, etc.). Existing mechanisms duplicate the entire state, causing hundreds of milliseconds to seconds of latency per C/R, which severely bottlenecks deep search and large-scale fan-outs. This paper observes that subsequent checkpoints in AI agents are highly similar. Therefore, instead of full duplication, a sandbox should only duplicate the changes between consecutive checkpoints (Key Insight). However, it is non-trivial to realize the idea, mainly due to the missing OS supports. This paper proposes a new OS-level abstraction, DeltaState, to enable the change-based transactional C/R for AI agents with two co-designed OS mechanisms. First, DeltaFS enables change-based filesystem C/R by organizing the file states into layers and dynamically freezing the writable layer and inserting a new one during checkpoint, reducing file updates to copy-on-write, and making rollback a simple layer switch. Second, DeltaCR enables change-based process state C/R using incremental dumps, and accelerates rollback by bypassing traditional pipelines to directly fork() from a frozen template process. We then present DeltaBox, a novel agent sandbox achieving millisecond level C/R through the two new mechanisms. Evaluations on SWE-bench and RL micro-benchmarks show DeltaBox completes checkpoint and rollback in millisecond-level latency (14ms and 5ms, respectively), empowering agents to explore substantially more nodes under fixed time budgets.
Authors: Trinh Pham, Viet Huynh, Hongzhi Yin, Quoc Viet Hung Nguyen, Thanh Tam Nguyen
Abstract: The rapid advancement of machine learning has led to an unprecedented expansion of model ecosystems, making it increasingly difficult to assess the reliability of newly released models on unseen and unlabeled data. Existing evaluation pipelines typically rely on costly annotation, repeated fine-tuning, or assumptions that do not generalize well to new models. We introduce MetaEvaluator, a cost-effective, model-agnostic framework for fast, label-free evaluation of unseen models across diverse architectures and modalities. MetaEvaluator meta-learns over a pool of reference models to acquire an effective initialization for accurate assessment of unseen models, thereby amortizing evaluation cost and eliminating the need for per-model retraining. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first model-agnostic framework that evaluates new models on unlabeled datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MetaEvaluator delivers stable and accurate performance estimates at substantially lower cost than conventional approaches, enabling scalable benchmarking on unlabeled datasets for emerging models. The code is available at: https://github.com/phkhanhtrinh23/MetaEvaluator.
Authors: Vyzantinos Repantis, Ameya Gawde, Harshvardhan Singh, Joey Blackwell II
Abstract: Before an LLM agent can use a tool, a retrieval system must decide which candidate tools to show to the agent. How long should that shortlist be? Show too many tools and the model struggles to choose. Show too few and the correct tool may not appear. Most systems apply a fixed shortlist size to every query, but no standard metric exists to evaluate whether that size was appropriate. We treat the number of tools shown to an LLM agent as the object of evaluation and we apply Bits-over-Random (BoR), a chance-corrected metric that asks whether success at a given depth is better than what random selection would achieve at that same depth. We evaluate BoR across three tool-selection benchmarks, multiple scorers, and registries ranging from 20 to 3,251 tools. We then turn the same principle into a reinforcement learning (RL) reward for choosing tool shortlist depth per query. The RL agent is deliberately simple, serving as a probe of the metric rather than a proposed system. As the shortlist grows, random chance of including the correct tool rises, so the reward naturally decreases, reducing the need for an engineered depth penalty. On BFCL (370 tools), the learned policy nearly matches the coverage of showing 50 tools ($90.3\%$ vs $90.8\%$) while presenting only 7 on average. On ToolBench (3,251 tools), a fixed shortlist of 5 tools achieves higher aggregate coverage ($64.7\%$ vs $61.9\%$) but finds nothing on hard queries (correct tool ranked 6th-20th). The BoR agent finds $16.7\%$ on those same queries by searching deeper. Downstream validation with Claude Sonnet 4.6 indicates that shorter adaptive lists also improve the LLM's ability to select the right tool: $93.1\%$ versus $87.1\%$ when always shown 5 tools, widening to $76.8\%$ vs $60.9\%$ on medium-difficulty queries where the correct tool is present but not ranked first.
Authors: Narmeen Oozeer, Shivam Raval, Philip Quirke, Manikandan Ravikiran, Jeff Phillips, Shriyash Upadhyay, Amirali Abdullah
Abstract: Steering a language model - intervening on its internal activations to change downstream behaviour - has recently expanded beyond linear interpolation to nonlinear methods such as angular and kernelized steering, which define intervention transformations without learning an explicit geometry over paths in activation space. Freshly introduced geometry-aware manifold methods do learn such a geometry, but require labelled class centroids together with prescribed cyclic or sequential structure. These assumptions restrict where manifold steering can be applied, since existing constructions require labelled centroids and compatible boundary conditions. We recast manifold steering more broadly as \textbf{Riemannian geodesic computation} on activation space, recovering linear and labelled-spline steering as geodesics under particular choices of metric. A principled metric within this framework is the output-space Hellinger distance pulled back to activations; we approximate this with a learned encoder trained on output distances over a small concept-token schema - no per-prompt labels, no topology prior, and no per-task curve fitting. Empirically, the method reliably drives the model onto the target class across all tasks in a standard four-task language-model arithmetic benchmark, while following more behaviourally natural trajectories than baselines on smaller output spaces. We thereby provide a unified Riemannian framework for manifold steering together with a schema-supervised, label-free instantiation that operates without labelled centroids or prescribed boundary conditions.
Authors: Munsik Kim
Abstract: We study the rate-distortion limits of online KV cache compression in autoregressive language models, formulating it as sequential Wyner-Ziv source coding on the filtration induced by the model, with the next-step query as decoder side information. Empirically, across four models spanning two families and $0.5$-$3$B parameters, we find that the next-token distribution's sensitivity to context truncation decays \emph{polynomially} rather than \emph{geometrically}: a power law improves on an exponential fit by an order of magnitude in extrapolation, the fitted exponent is recovered independently from a sink-plus-recent KL measurement, and the decay is verified to be free of positional-encoding artifacts by a position-preserving ablation. Under a corresponding \emph{polynomial truncation-sensitivity} assumption, our main result characterizes the per-token memory requirement of \emph{suffix-only} cache policies: a sliding-window scheme attains distortion $\varepsilon$ with window $w = O(\varepsilon^{-1/\alpha})$, and -- under an additional two-sided Bayes-risk condition -- a converse shows $w = \Omega(\varepsilon^{-1/\alpha})$ is necessary within this policy class, so the scaling is $\Theta(\varepsilon^{-1/\alpha})$ for suffix-only policies. Whether recurrent or propagating cache summaries can beat this scaling is left open. An explicit block-Markov scheme achieves the upper bound; its rate-of-convergence exponent matches the converse under additional forward-decay and regularity hypotheses (not implied by truncation sensitivity alone), and differs by a factor of two otherwise. Empirically, the polynomial law predicts the degradation curves of concrete cache policies: recency-based eviction (sliding, sink-plus-recent) suppresses distortion by roughly two orders of magnitude over random retention at equal budget, with a power-law decay in the budget.
Authors: Zhengyu Hu, Zheyuan Xiao, Linxin Song, Fengqing Jiang, Yuetai Li, Zhengyu Chen, Zhihan Xiong, Yue Liu, Junhao Lin, Yao Su, Lijie Hu, Kaize Ding, Teng Xiao, Radha Poovendran
Abstract: LLM training increasingly relies on teacher-generated supervision, from synthetic responses to reasoning traces and tool-use demonstrations. Current practice often chooses the highest-performing teacher to generate student training data, implicitly treating teacher test performance as a proxy for teaching quality. We show that this assumption can fail: even when multiple teachers provide correct answers to the same question, the answer from the strongest teacher is not necessarily the best supervision for a given student. To address this gap, we propose Student-Centric Answer Sampling (SCAS), a framework that selects from verified teacher-generated answers according to their estimated student-centric learning cost. Motivated by a token-wise gradient decomposition, we derive an efficient forward-only proxy for this cost and use it to guide answer selection during training. Experiments across 30 teacher models, 6 student base models, and 6 tasks show that SCAS consistently improves student performance, suggesting that effective distillation should prioritize supervision matched to the current student rather than teacher strength alone.
Authors: Vincent-Daniel Yun, Youngrae Kim, Woosang Lim, YoungJin Heo, Minkyu Kim, Sunwoo Lee
Abstract: Large language models are known to contain representational redundancy across network depth, making depth pruning an effective approach for improving inference efficiency. Existing one-shot pruning methods rely on local layer importance or fixed redundancy assumptions across architectures. We propose Locality-Aware Redundancy Pruning (LoRP), a training-free one-shot depth pruning framework guided by representation locality. We show that inter-layer redundancy can be either localized or globally distributed depending on the LLM architecture. To characterize this phenomenon, we introduce Representation Locality Score (RLS), derived from global inter-layer hidden-state similarity. Using a small calibration set, LoRP computes pairwise layer similarity, clusters layers by representational similarity, and allocates pruning according to residual intra-cluster redundancy. Experiments across diverse LLM families show improvements in both perplexity and downstream task accuracy. Official github repository: https://github.com/daniel-eai/LoRP-Locality-Aware-Redundancy-Pruning/
URLs: https://github.com/daniel-eai/LoRP-Locality-Aware-Redundancy-Pruning/
Authors: Junhyuck Kim, Jihun Yun, Haechan Kim, Gyeongman Kim, Joonghyun Bae, Jaewoong Cho
Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) is now the dominant architecture for frontier language models, yet it requires all expert parameters to be loaded in memory, making it less preferable for memory-constrained deployment. Existing compression methods reduce the number of experts but the output remains an MoE model with the same fundamental limitation. We present the first systematic framework for converting a trained MoE into a standard fully dense architecture: experts are scored, selected, and grouped, then concatenated into a dense FFN and refined by knowledge distillation from the MoE teacher. We evaluate 7 scoring, 5 grouping, and 2 magnitude scaling methods across a range of selected expert counts on Qwen3-30B-A3B, yielding 350 configurations. We find that the choice of scoring method is the most impactful, with our novel diversity-aware scoring consistently outperforming prior methods on Qwen3-30B-A3B, DeepSeek-V2-Lite, and GPT-OSS-20B. Under a controlled comparison at matched parameter count, MoE-to-dense outperforms dense-to-dense pruning by +6.3 pp in average downstream accuracy after ~4B-token distillation at 1.6x faster training wall-clock speed.
Authors: Andrea Gurioli, Davide D'Ascenzo, Federico Pennino, Maurizio Gabbrielli, Stefano Zacchiroli
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) for code completion and generation are increasingly used in software development, yet they may reproduce training examples verbatim and without authorship attribution, raising legal and ethical concerns around plagiarism and license compliance. Classical fingerprint-based plagiarism detectors based on fingerprinting, such as Winnowing, remain highly effective, yet the inspection requires comparing fragments of code to the entire training set, and their linear-time search makes them impractical for the billion-scale corpora used to train modern code LLMs. To bridge this gap, we introduce SOURCETRACKER, a 300M-parameter encoder tailored for code retrieval, together with a hybrid two-stage provenance-tracking pipeline HYBRIDSOURCETRACKER (HST). HST first narrows down a small set of candidate snippets via vector search, then re-ranks those candidates using Winnowing on exact fingerprints. We train and evaluate our system on a 10M-snippet subset of the THESTACKV2 dataset, with both verbatim and adapted snippets that emulate realistic identifier renaming. On an in vitro 100k-snippet search space with adapted queries, our hybrid approach reaches a mean reciprocal rank on par with Winnowing for 30-token fragments. Then, starting from windows >= 60 tokens, it consistently over-performs by up to 5.4% while preserving logarithmic-time query complexity. In a complementary evaluation using an LLM-based judge, we find that many retrieved snippets not labeled as ground truth are still highly similar to the expected sources, particularly with longer context windows, and thus remain useful for end users. Overall, our results demonstrate that integrating vector search with fingerprinting enables scalable, high-precision provenance tracking for code produced by LLMs.
Authors: Encheng Su, Jianyu Wu, Jinouwen Zhang, Qiucheng Yu, Chen Tang, Pengze Li, Lintao Wang, Aoran Wang, Xinzhu Ma, Shixiang Tang, Yizhou Wang, Houqiang Li
Abstract: Long-horizon memory question answering often requires sparse evidence from heterogeneous histories, including events, object states, visual observations, temporal relations, and causal steps. Existing memory interfaces expand reader context, retrieve semantically related chunks, or expose graph neighborhoods, but they are not explicitly designed to select compact evidence for a fixed reader. We propose Structured Spatiotemporal Scene--Event Memory (S3Mem), a query-time memory interface that writes textual, visual, and agent-use histories into structured scene--event units and routes compact evidence packs to the reader. Its router scores candidate units, query anchors, and anchor--support links, enabling both single-hop selection and short multi-hop evidence chains without reader fine-tuning or test-time training. Across LoCoMo, EMemBench Visual Games, and AMA-Bench, S3Mem provides a strong score--token trade-off, with the clearest gains on localized event, state, temporal, causal, or provenance evidence. On LoCoMo, S3Mem reaches \(0.48\) F1 and \(0.40\) BLEU with (1{,}073) evidence tokens per question, about \(15.8\times\) fewer than the LoCoMo reference. On EMemBench Visual Games, it obtains the best F1 and second-best accuracy with only \(189\)tokens.On AMA-Bench, it is not the highest-scoring method, but remains competitive while using the fewest reader-visible evidence tokens.
Authors: Jeanmely Rojas Nunez, Viraj Sawant, Nathan Allen, Nomgondalai Amgalanbaatar, Yannis Zongo, Vasu Sharma, Maheep Chaudhary
Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) frequently induces catastrophic forgetting of prior capabilities. Recent work has shown that reinforcement learning (RL) retains prior capabilities more effectively than supervised fine-tuning (SFT), attributing this to policy-gradient updates remaining closer to the base policy \cite{shenfeld2025rl}. We extend this behavioral account to the mechanistic level and ask whether RL's advantage is mirrored by stronger preservation of internal computational circuits. We introduce differential circuit vulnerability, a head-level measure of how much a circuit degrades under fine-tuning, and use it to compare RL and SFT on Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct adapted to scientific question-answering. We find a clear mechanistic trade-off: SFT adapts more rapidly to the target task but produces substantially greater circuit disruption and forgetting of prior capabilities, whereas RL preserves a larger fraction of the base circuit at the cost of slower task adaptation. These findings suggest that circuit preservation may help explain why RL is more robust to catastrophic forgetting. We released our code here: https://github.com/rl-sft-circuit-research/differential-circuit-vulnerability.
URLs: https://github.com/rl-sft-circuit-research/differential-circuit-vulnerability.
Authors: Hongran An, Zonglin Yang
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) show remarkable potential in scientific hypothesis discovery. However, existing approaches face two critical limitations: they treat divergent exploratory search and convergent fine-grained refinement as isolated tasks, and they operate autonomously with little to no human guidance. We present MOOSE-Copilot, the first unified framework to bridge this abstraction gap through a formalized human-AI interaction (HAII) protocol. Our system empowers scientists to steer the generative process via three explicit signals: initial blueprints, inter-stage routing, and intra-stage feedback. Using an oracle-simulated evaluation in which an LLM provides idealized expert signals, we show that injecting these structured signals significantly outperforms purely autonomous baselines, characterizing the gains achievable under high-quality guidance. Furthermore, we build a web-based interface that turns the framework into a no-code workflow: researchers pose a question, watch the hypothesis search unfold as an interactive tree, and steer it by selecting hypotheses, routing between stages, and injecting feedback-no command-line agents required. This makes end-to-end hypothesis discovery directly accessible to interdisciplinary researchers.
Authors: Zhongxi Chen, Yifan Han, Yanming Shao, Huanming Liu, Congsheng Xu, Xiaoyu Chen, Yao Mu, Wenzhao Lian
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for grounding visual-language understanding into real-world robotic manipulation. However, dexterous manipulation remains challenging for VLA policies due to high-dimensional hand control and compounding execution errors, which makes real-world RL post-training essential for bridging the gap between visually grounded action generation and physically reliable dexterous execution. However, high-dimensional dexterous exploration often triggers temporal inconsistency, sample inefficiency and hardware risks in the real world. To address these challenges, we propose BORA, an offline-to-online RL post-training framework designed for real-world dexterous VLA models. In the offline phase, BORA constructs a critic that takes both the VLM's cognition tokens and action chunks as inputs. This design enables action-conditioned value guidance, allowing the critic to evaluate dexterous hand motions beyond visual context alone. During the subsequent online phase, BORA freezes the VLA base and introduces a lightweight, Human-in-the-Loop (HiL) chunk-wise residual adaptation mechanism to mitigate real-world execution errors and further correct the offline-learned intents within the actual physical environment. By inheriting the offline critic and employing intervention-driven rewards, BORA effectively corrects execution discrepancies and adapts to real-world physical variances while preserving the pretrained policy as a stable prior. Extensive evaluations across five complex real-world dexterous tasks demonstrate that BORA significantly outperforms pure imitation learning and traditional decoupled RL baselines, achieving a 33% absolute increase in average success rate under standard settings and up to a 43% improvement in unseen object generalization.
Authors: Yujie Luo, Xiangyuan Ru, Jingsheng Zheng, Jingjing Wang, Yuqi Zhu, Jintian Zhang, Runnan Fang, Kewei Xu, Ye Liu, Zheng Wei, Jiang Bian, Zang Li, Shumin Deng
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on general tasks, while often struggling to adapt to specialized domains without high-quality domain-specific data. Existing LLM-based data curation methods primarily rely on human-designed workflows, leaving it unexamined whether LLMs can autonomously execute an end-to-end data engineering pipeline for model specialization. We formalize Autonomous Agentic Data Engineering, a novel task designed to evaluate LLMs as autonomous data engineers that drive model specialization through end-to-end data curation. We frame data as an optimizable component and study agents that plan, generate, and iteratively optimize training data across multiple domains, guided by post-training performance improvement. Experiments show that autonomous LLM data engineers yield substantial gains, as GPT-5.2 constructs a training curriculum that improves a student model by 57.29%, entirely through iterative, agent-driven data adaptation. By illuminating both potential and bottlenecks, our study establishes autonomous data engineering as a measurable capability and charts a path toward agent-driven model specialization (Code will be released at https://github.com/zjunlp/DataAgent).
Authors: Duoduo Xue, Zhiyu Zhu, Junhui Hou
Abstract: Image generative models aim to sample data points from the underlying data manifold, a task that requires learning and decoding a dense, low-dimensional, and compact parameterization space. To achieve this, we propose the Data Manifold-aware Image diffusioN moDel (MIND), a novel framework that explicitly models manifold geometry by integrating discrete patch tokenization into the score function of a continuous diffusion model. This approach successfully leverages both the structural quantification capabilities of discrete tokens and the parallel generation flexibility of continuous diffusion. Moreover, we enable end-to-end differentiable training via a novel soft top-$k$ aggregation mechanism and introduce dual-branch high-frequency feature embedding layers to alleviate the spectral bias of transformer backbones on low-dimensional inputs. Furthermore, for inference, we design a multi-stage transition sampling scheme that dynamically adjusts the sampling scheme based on timestep. Extensive experiments on ImageNet 256$\times$256 demonstrate the effectiveness of MIND. After 80-epoch training, our base model achieves an FID of 22.73 without guidance, nearly halving the 43.47 FID of the vanilla DiT-B/2 baseline. The proposed method reduces FID by 15.95 and 9.06 on average compared with the baselines DiT and SiT, respectively. For image generation on ImageNet-256$\times$256 with guidance, the proposed MIND-B with only 130M parameters achieves an FID of 2.06, superpassing the LlamaGen-3B with 3.1B parameters. The proposed MIND-XL with 715M parameters further reduces the FID to 1.95. Our MIND introduces a fresh perspective on diffusion-based image generation, paving the way for future research and innovation in this community. The code will be publicly available.
Authors: Yueh-Hua Wu, Tatsuya Matsushima, Kei Ota
Abstract: Natural language is a powerful reasoning medium for language and vision-language models, but it is mismatched to the granularity of continuous control. Text and explicit subgoals operate at task-level granularity, whereas vision-language-action (VLA) policies must choose actions at a much finer temporal scale; a single reasoning step can therefore span many action chunks while remaining only weakly coupled to the action needed now. This suggests a different question for VLA: what should play the role of language? We argue that a useful VLA reasoning medium must be shareable across model instances, verifiable through downstream action improvement, and aligned with temporally extended control structure. Based on this view, we propose Continuous Reasoning for Vision-Language-Action. Our model first predicts continuous reasoning in the form of a structured set of continuous thoughts, then reuses them as shared context for chunk-structured action generation. Better action prediction alone does not certify good reasoning: if the same internal medium cannot be shared across model instances and independently verified through improved downstream control, the added latent may simply become a model-private shortcut that helps on seen behaviors without supporting generalizable control. We therefore instantiate continuous reasoning as a shared Gaussian latent interface and train it with a self-verification objective in which an exponential-moving-average teacher must successfully consume the student's reasoning when predicting target actions. Empirically, Continuous Reasoning improves LIBERO-PRO robustness and performs strongly on real robots, raising mean subtask success over {\pi}0.5 by 40.4% on TX-G2, an AgiBot G2-compatible variant, and 26.3% on HSR. This suggests that reasoning in VLA is less about extra tokens than about a shareable, verifiable internal language for action.
Authors: Xinpeng Lv, Chunyuan Zheng, Yunxin Mao, Renzhe Xu, Jinxuan Yang, Yuanlong Chen, Wangrong Huang, Shaowu Yang, Wenjing Yang, Xinwang Liu, Peng Cui, Haotian Wang
Abstract: Strategic classification (SC) investigates scenarios where agents manipulate their features to obtain favorable decisions from predictive models. Existing fairness-aware SC approaches primarily focus on group fairness and typically assume that agents respond independently. However, when individual fairness is required, ensuring similar individuals receive similar outcomes, agents' manipulation becomes interdependent: an agent's preferred manipulation depends on the neighborhoods' outcomes. This induces a mismatch between classical SC formulations and fairness-aware decision settings, where independent models no longer accurately characterize strategic manipulations. To address this issue, we introduce individual fairness-aware strategic classification (IFSC), a framework that models peer-driven manipulation arising from individual fairness, where agents imitate nearby positively decided peers to obtain favorable outcomes. IFSC characterizes strategic manipulation as similarity-based imitation toward visible accepted peers and learns classifiers under the resulting post-manipulation distributions. To account for uncertainty in peer observability, IFSC employs a robust learning process that introduces stochastic perturbations during manipulation simulation. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that IFSC improves individual-fairness consistency and mitigates imitation-induced distortions.
Authors: Partha Pratim Saha, Samarth Raina, Mayur Parvatikar, Amit Dhanda, Vinija Jain, Aman Chadha, Amitava Das
Abstract: Preference alignment has substantially improved the observable behavior of large language models, yet it remains unclear what alignment changes internally. Aligned systems still fail under jailbreaks, prompt injection, and retrieval-time corruption, suggesting behavior-level evaluation alone is incomplete. Post-training should leave measurable traces in internal computation. We ask: when an instruction-tuned (IT) model becomes a preference-aligned (PA) model, what geometric structure changes, where do those changes concentrate, and how selectively do they vary across concepts, prompts, and model families? We introduce MENTIS, a geometry-first framework for measuring alignment-induced internal reorganization in paired checkpoints. MENTIS compares IT and PA models using a primary layerwise covariance-based torsion norm (T1), a secondary spectral torsion diagnostic (T2), and an Energy-Radiance-Activation measure (ERA) for depth localization. Across four 7-8B model pairs on LITMUS, our study reveals that alignment-induced change is selective rather than uniform: normative concepts exhibit larger torsion shifts than factual concepts on average; torsion is negatively correlated with contextual entropy; and peak effects localize to architecture-specific mid-to-late layers. The same pattern appears across word-level, prompt-level, and model-level analyses. These results suggest preference alignment leaves structured, depth-localized geometric signatures in internal computation beyond what behavior-level evaluation alone can reveal.
Authors: Martin Schuck, Marcel P. Rath, Yufei Hua, Abhishek Goudar, SiQi Zhou, Angela P. Schoellig
Abstract: High-quality, large-scale synthetic data from simulations is becoming a cornerstone for pushing the capabilities of robot algorithms. While aerial robotics simulators have evolved to support specialized needs such as fidelity, differentiability, and swarms independently, a unified platform that can synthesize data across all these domains is missing. In this work, we propose Crazyflow, a simulator designed to push the limits of aerial-robotics algorithm development, from model-based to data-driven methods, gradient-based to sampling-based approaches, and single-agent to multi-agent systems. Compared to existing state-of-the-art drone simulators, it achieves speeds more than an order of magnitude faster for a single drone and can simulate thousands of swarms of 4000 drones each. Real-world experiments show Crazyflow supports both analytical-gradient-based policy learning, achieving sub-centimeter trajectory tracking accuracy without domain randomization, and sampling-based obstacle avoidance at speeds exceeding half a billion steps per second. Breaking the traditional train-then-deploy paradigm, we show that its unprecedented speed even enables in-flight reinforcement learning; we demonstrate this by throwing a physical drone into the air and training a recovery policy from scratch in 0.38 seconds, successfully stabilizing the drone. Crazyflow supports multiple levels of simulation abstraction, is directly compatible with all open-source Crazyflie models, and enables rapid reconfiguration across custom drone platforms and applications by providing a light-weight system identification pipeline. By pushing accuracy, speed, and differentiability simultaneously, Crazyflow serves as an open-source resource for synthetic data generation, with emerging capabilities for large-scale parallelization for online, in-execution learning and optimization, opening the door to novel algorithm development.
Authors: Yoshinari Fujinuma, Varun Gangal, Traian Rebedea, Makesh Narsimhan Sreedhar, Prasoon Varshney, Rebecca Qian, Anand Kannappan
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on reusable skills i.e. documents describing task-specific procedures. However, this introduces a new attack surface for agents to manage. We study two complementary directions for this threat. First, we evaluate guardian-based defenses: an intermediary LLM agent that acts as a mediator for skill file access (dynamic guardian) or pre-rewrites these files at build time (static guardian). Across three LLM agent families, our guardians cut attack success rate (ASR) by well over half while preserving task utility. Second, we stress test them through attack reframing using four attacks that preserve the malicious instruction but change the phrasing. For non-guardian setup, the reframing pushes the ASR up to 81.4\%, but the dynamic guardian brings it down to 18.6\%, showing that real-time mediation is a robust defense.
Authors: Jiaming Qu, Lucheng Fu, Yibo Hu
Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used in multi-agent systems, where they see and respond to other agents' answers. A key risk is conformity: a model may abandon its own answer simply because others agree on a different one. Prior studies show that LLMs often revise toward a majority answer, but it remains unclear whether these revisions help correct mistakes as often as they introduce new errors. In this paper, we conduct a controlled study in which an LLM first answers a question, then sees simulated peer responses before making a final decision. We manipulate two social cues: consensus structure and authority labels assigned to peers, and measure how they influence beneficial and harmful revisions. Across four open-weight LLMs and seven QA datasets, we find that peer agreement makes it much easier to mislead initially correct models than to correct initially wrong ones. Authority labels make models more likely to choose the endorsed answer, regardless of whether it is correct. More concerningly, generic reasoning interventions such as chain-of-thought and reflection do not reliably reduce harmful revision while preserving beneficial revision. These findings suggest that multi-agent LLM systems should verify peer answers rather than simply aggregate them.
Authors: Yekyung Kim, Yapei Chang, Chau Minh Pham, Mohit Iyyer
Abstract: As LLMs are increasingly used to draft public-facing arguments, they may flatten public debate by repeatedly introducing the same polished, plausible arguments. We study argument collapse, the tendency of essays generated by different LLMs to converge to a smaller set of main arguments, sub-arguments, and paragraph-level structures. We compare 1,039 human responses from 195 New York Times (NYT) debates, 448 human responses from 61 longer-form Boston Review (BR) forums, and 23,384 LLM-generated essays. In the NYT corpus, 65.3% of human main arguments are unique within a debate, compared to 3.4% of LLM main arguments. Asking LLMs to generate diverse answers adds variation, but a typical model recovers only about half of the distinct human main arguments, with much of the added variation falling outside the observed human argument space. Collapse also appears in sub-arguments, where among essays with the same main argument, 41.0% of human sub-arguments are unique versus 9.1% from LLM responses. Qualitatively, LLMs often reuse generalized and hedged sub-arguments, while humans prefer more concrete and topic-specific ones. Structure-wise, LLM-generated essays tend to follow a more fixed arc, often opening with a direct claim and moving quickly toward proposals. The same patterns hold in longer BR essays, suggesting that argument collapse extends beyond short-form responses.
Authors: Yueh-Hua Wu, Tatsuya Matsushima, Kei Ota
Abstract: Generalization remains a central bottleneck for vision-language-action (VLA) models: under distractors, appearance shifts, and semantically similar tasks, the policy must often infer local execution details from coarse instructions while also deciding which parts of the image matter for control. We present S2 (See Less, Specify More), a framework for improving VLA generalization by training the executor under a cleaner interface. Specify More preserves the original instruction as a stable high-level goal while relabeling each trajectory into refined trajectory- and subtask-level language that disambiguates the current execution mode. Unlike native attention, See Less imposes an explicit visual evidence budget, training the executor to act from task-sufficient evidence rather than unconstrained visual context, without any region or mask annotation. This interface lets the executor follow detailed guidance without relying on distracting visual patches or resolving avoidable ambiguity on its own, and it remains compatible with off-the-shelf VLM planners through in-context learning. Across our main evaluation settings, S2 improves overall generalization metrics by changing the executor's learning problem: coarse instructions induce avoidable supervision aliasing, goal-preserving local guidance outperforms instruction replacement in our main ablations, and explicit evidence budgeting reduces dependence on broad visual context beyond efficiency considerations. Across eight real-robot tasks on TX-G2 (an AgiBot G2-compatible variant) and HSR, S2 raises mean subtask success from 54.2% to 79.0% over pi0.5. Together, these results suggest that VLA generalization improves when the executor is trained to act from informative local guidance and task-sufficient visual evidence, rather than recovering both from weak supervision.
Authors: NVIDIA, :, Aditi, Niket Agarwal, Arslan Ali, Jon Allen, Martin Antolini, Adeline Aubame, Alisson Azzolini, Junjie Bai, Maciej Bala, Yogesh Balaji, Josh Bapst, Aarti Basant, Mukesh Beladiya, Mohammad Qazim Bhat, Zaid Pervaiz Bhat, Dan Blick, Vanni Brighella, Han Cai, Tiffany Cai, Eric Cameracci, Jiaxin Cao, Yulong Cao, Mark Carlson, Carlos Casanova, Ting-Yun Chang, Yan Chang, Yu-Wei Chao, Prithvijit Chattopadhyay, Roshan Chaudhari, Chieh-Yun Chen, Junyu Chen, Ke Chen, Qizhi Chen, Wenkai Chen, Xiaotong Chen, Yu Chen, An-Chieh Cheng, Click Cheng, Xiu Chia, Jeana Choi, Chaeyeon Chung, Wenyan Cong, Yin Cui, Magdalena Dadela, Nalin Dadhich, Wenliang Dai, Joyjit Daw, Alperen Degirmenci, Rodrigo Vieira Del Monte, Robert Denomme, Sameer Dharur, Marco Di Lucca, Ke Ding, Wenhao Ding, Yifan Ding, Yuzhu Dong, Nicole Drumheller, Yilun Du, Aigul Dzhumamuratova, Aleksandr Efitorov, Hamid Eghbalzadeh, Naomi Eigbe, Imad El Hanafi, Hassan Eslami, Benedikt Falk, Jiaojiao Fan, Jim Fan, Amol Fasale, Sergiy Fefilatyev, Liang Feng, Francesco Ferroni, Sanja Fidler, Xiao Fu, Vikram Fugro, Prashant Gaikwad, TJ Galda, Katelyn Gao, Yihuai Gao, Wenhang Ge, Sreyan Ghosh, Arushi Goel, Vivek Goel, Akash Gokul, Rama Govindaraju, Jinwei Gu, Miguel Guerrero, Elfie Guo, Aryaman Gupta, Siddharth Gururani, Hugo Hadfield, Song Han, Ankur Handa, Zekun Hao, Mohammad Harrim, Ali Hassani, Nathan Hayes-Roth, Yufan He, Chris Helvig, Cyrus Hogg, Madison Huang, Michael Huang, Sophia Huang, Yufan Huang, Jacob Huffman, DeLesley Hutchins, Suneel Indupuru, Boris Ivanovic, Arihant Jain, Joel Jang, Ryan Ji, Yanan Jian, Dongfu Jiang, Jingyi Jin, Atharva Joshi, Nikhilesh Joshi, Pranjali Joshi, Andy Ju, Jaehun Jung, Weiwei Kang, Scott Kassekert, Jan Kautz, Ashna Khetan, Julia Kiczka, Slawek Kierat, Gwanghyun Kim, Kuno Kim, Sunny Kim, Kezhi Kong, Xin Kong, Zhifeng Kong, Tomasz Kornuta, Egor Krivov, Hui Kuang, Saurav Kumar, Chia-Wen Kuo, George Kurian, Wojciech Kutak, JF Lafleche, Himangshu Lahkar, Omar Laymoun, Jayjun Lee, Sanggil Lee, Gabriele Leone, Boyi Li, Freya Li, Jiajun Li, Jinfeng Li, Ling Li, Pengcheng Li, Shangru Li, Tingle Li, Xiaolong Li, Xuan Li, Zhaoshuo Li, Zhiqi Li, Hao Liang, Maosheng Liao, Chen-Hsuan Lin, Tsung-Yi Lin, Ming-Yu Liu, Sifei Liu, Zihan Liu, Hai Loc Lu, Xiangyu Lu, Alice Luo, Ruipu Luo, Wenjie Luo, Jiangran Lyu, Martin Ding Ma, Nic Ma, Qianli Ma, Dawid Majchrowski, Louis Marcoux, Miguel Martin, Qing Miao, Ashkan Mirzaei, Shreyas Misra, Kaichun Mo, Durra Mohsin, Hyejin Moon, Pawel Morkisz, Saeid Motiian, Kirill Motkov, Seungjun Nah, Yashraj Narang, Deepak Narayanan, Thabang Ngazimbi, Julian Ouyang, Shubham Pachori, David Page, Yatian Pang, Sehwi Park, Mahesh Patekar, Mostofa Patwary, Marco Pavone, Trung Pham, Wei Ping, Soha Pouya, Shrimai Prabhumoye, Varun Praveen, Delin Qu, Hesam Rabeti, Morteza Ramezanali, Marilyn Reeb, Xuanchi Ren, Kristen Rumley, Wojciech Rymer, Jun Saito, Yeongho Seol, John Shao, Piyush Shekdar, Tianwei Shen, Humphrey Shi, Min Shi, Stella Shi, Kevin Shih, Mohammad Shoeybi, Mateusz Sieniawski, Shuran Song, Alexander Sotelo, Amir Sotoodeh, Sunil Srinivasa, Vignesh Srinivasakumar, Bartosz Stefaniak, Rahul Heinrich Steiger, Shangkun Sun, Jiaxiang Tang, Shitao Tang, Yangyang Tang, Yue Tang, Tolou Tavakkoli, Kayley Ting, Krzysztof Tomala, Wei-Cheng Tseng, Jibin Varghese, Sergei Vasilev, Thomas Volk, Raju Wagwani, Roger Waleffe, Andrew Z. Wang, Boxiang Wang, Haoxiang Wang, Qiao Wang, Shihao Wang, Shijie Wang, Ting-Chun Wang, Yan Wang, Yu Wang, Rohit Watve, David Wehr, Fangyin Wei, Xinshuo Weng, Jay Zhangjie Wu, Kedi Wu, Hongchi Xia, Summer Xiao, Tianjun Xiao, Kevin Xie, Daguang Xu, Jiashu Xu, Mengyao Xu, Ruqing Xu, Xingqian Xu, Yao Xu, Dinghao Yang, Dong Yang, Hans Yang, Xiaodong Yang, Xuning Yang, Yichu Yang, Yurong You, Zhiding Yu, Hao Yuan, Simon Yuen, Xiaohui Zeng, Pengcuo Zeren, Cindy Zha, Haotian Zhang, Jenny Zhang, Jing Zhang, Liangkai Zhang, Paris Zhang, Shun Zhang, Xuanmeng Zhang, Zhizheng Zhang, Ann Zhao, Yilin Zhao, Yuliya Zhautouskaya, Charles Zhou, Fengzhe Zhou, Shilin Zhu, Yuke Zhu, Dima Zhylko, Artur Zolkowski
Abstract: We introduce Cosmos 3, a family of omnimodal world models designed to jointly process and generate language, image, video, audio, and action sequences within a unified mixture-of-transformers architecture. By supporting highly flexible input-output configurations, Cosmos 3 seamlessly unifies critical modalities for Physical AI -- effectively subsuming vision-language models, video generators, world simulators, and world-action models into a single framework. Our evaluation demonstrates that Cosmos 3 establishes a new state-of-the-art across a diverse suite of understanding and generation tasks, demonstrating omnimodal world models as scalable, general-purpose backbones for embodied agents. Our post-trained Cosmos 3 models were ranked as the best open-source Text-to-Image and Image-to-Video models by Artificial Analysis, and the best policy model by RoboArena at the time the technical report was written. To accelerate open research and deployment in Physical AI, we make our code, model checkpoints, curated synthetic datasets, and evaluation benchmark available under the Linux Foundation's OpenMDW-1.1 License at https://github.com/nvidia/cosmos and https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/cosmos3. The project website is available at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/cosmos-lab/cosmos3.
URLs: https://github.com/nvidia/cosmos, https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/cosmos3., https://research.nvidia.com/labs/cosmos-lab/cosmos3.
Authors: Hu Xu, Zhaolong Xing, Congcong Liu, Jiaxing Wang, Zhida Jiang, Junshi Huang, Zhen Chen, Jianfeng Xu
Abstract: Post-training pruning compresses large language models to high sparsity using a small unlabelled calibration set, and recent work has concluded that the choice of calibration source has only modest impact on averaged post-pruning accuracy. We ask whether this conclusion survives once calibration impact is evaluated separately across distinct capability dimensions rather than aggregated. Decomposing post-pruning capability into General, Commonsense, Code, and Math, and analysing $n{=}15$ calibration sources via Spearman correlations between OIT information metrics and per-dimension retention, we uncover an opposite-sign trade-off: calibration perplexity correlates positively with General retention ($\rho{=}{+}0.71$) but negatively with Math and Code retention ($\rho{=}{-}0.53,\,{-}0.59$; $p{<}0.05$), so no single source can preserve all capabilities. We respond with multi-source calibration mixing, and propose IGSP, an information-guided self-calibration protocol that automates multi-source construction without capability-aligned corpora by minimising 4-gram aggregation and balancing perplexity across dimensions. On LLaMA-3.1-8B at SparseGPT 60% sparsity, a uniform multi-source mix reaches 58.8% total retention, outperforming the best single source (MetaMath, 50.0%) by $+8.8$ and the C4 default (40.0%) by $+18.8$; IGSP improves over Self-Cal by $+2.4$ and SGS by $+4.8$.
Authors: Michael T. M. Emmerich
Abstract: The 2026 disproof of Erd\H{o}s's unit-distance conjecture and Sawin's quantitative refinement show that the maximum number $u(n)$ of unit distances among $n$ planar points can exceed $n^{1+\varepsilon}$ for a fixed positive $\varepsilon$. Sawin's explicit bound gives more than $n^{1.014}$ unit distances for arbitrarily large $n$ and exposes integer parameters whose choice is not fully optimized. This report treats Sawin's parameter selection as a nonlinear integer optimization problem and develops an open-source Python optimization and verification pipeline for certificates involving prime sets $T$ and $S_Q$, integer multiplicities $k(p)$, and a rationally encoded real parameter $R$. After reproducing Sawin's certificate with $\delta=0.014114\ldots$, the pipeline yields improved certificates with the same $T$. We develop a tailored integer evolution strategy achieving a certificate with $\delta=0.015263\ldots$ and supporting the cautious statement $u(n)>n^{1.0152}$ for arbitrarily large $n$. For extended ramified prime ranges, the Emmerich--Cordella certificate obtained with the same framework reports $u(n)>n^{1.031}$ for $\#T=67$, illustrating the importance of enlarging $T$. Very recent MathOverflow discussions, brought to the author's attention as of version~4, report further improvements, including certificates above $\delta>0.035$ and beyond $\delta>0.036$. Some of these improvements may rely not only on larger prime ranges but also on modified constraint systems and additional degrees of freedom that deviate from Sawin's original formulation. Beyond this application, the work illustrates how randomized optimization heuristics can improve, verify, and refine explicit certificates for combinatorial geometry through nonlinear integer optimization.
Authors: Parnian Behdin, Kevin Roice, Golnaz Mesbahi
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has received increasing attention and adoption in real-world use cases. Most of these systems follow a train-then-fix paradigm, where trained agents do not learn while interacting with the world until performance degrades and retraining becomes necessary. In this position paper, we argue that deploying an agent that is incapable of optimality, but receives an evaluative reward signal, is inherently a continual RL problem. We identify four sources of non-stationarity after deployment that necessitate never-ending learning, and highlight why the best deployed agents never stop adapting. We analyze successful examples of continual RL in the real world, and present the community with the advantages and measures to move away from the current train-then-fix paradigm.
Authors: Jason L. Volk
Abstract: We present an algorithmic framework for incremental maintenance of first sheaf cohomology $H^1(X; \mathcal{F})$ on dynamically evolving 1-dimensional cellular complexes equipped with finite-dimensional cellular sheaves. The classical computation of $H^1$ via factorization of the coboundary matrix requires $O(n^3)$ time; when the complex evolves with a stream of $m$ edits, full recomputation after each edit costs $O(mn^3)$. Under a bounded local geometry assumption -- bounded cell size $v_{\max}$, bounded stalk dimension $d$, and bounded nerve degree $D$ -- each edit (vertex insertion, edge insertion, restriction map update) affects only a bounded set of local coboundary blocks. The algorithm therefore processes lazy streaming edits in $O(1)$ time with respect to the total complex size $n$ (with cost polynomial in the local geometry parameters $v_{\max}$, $d$, and $D$, which are treated as constants independent of $n$), deferring local eigensolves and Mayer-Vietoris global assembly to synchronization points (Flush). At synchronization, the maintained state agrees with the corresponding batch assembly of the partitioned sheaf model; we observe zero measured drift in all batch-verified runs (through $V = 10^6$). We also give an amortized $O(|E|)$ streaming construction for the cellular decomposition and discuss an adversarial algebraic-RAM barrier arguing that unpartitioned non-trivial sheaves ($d \geq 2$, non-identity restriction maps) do not admit the same locality. Experiments on Barabasi-Albert graphs with up to $5 \times 10^6$ vertices and $1.7 \times 10^7$ streaming edits show 35 $\mu$s median lazy per-edit update latency (excluding flush); query time (global assembly at synchronization) is $O(n)$ per flush in the implemented full-traversal path. Exact synchronization costs are reported separately.
Authors: Yidi Zhouluo
Abstract: Modern deep neural networks usually have large parameter scales and nonlinear hierarchical structures, and they have achieved strong performance in computer vision. However, the source of their generalization performance remains difficult to explain using traditional statistical learning theory. Among the factors that may affect visual generalization, data scale, model complexity, and input modalities are fundamental and controllable variables. This study empirically analyzes how these three factors influence model generalization performance. Specifically, in a preliminary experiment, we construct a one-dimensional nonlinear function and vary the number of training samples and the polynomial degree to observe the effects of data scale and model complexity on model performance. In the main experiments, we compare model performance on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 under different training data scales, model architectures, and input modalities. The experimental results show that increasing the training data scale consistently improves generalization performance, whereas changes in model complexity do not provide stable gains. In addition, removing color information degrades model performance, while explicit prior features such as gradients, edges, and wavelets have inconsistent effects across different model architectures. Overall, this study provides an empirical analysis of the relationships among data scale, model complexity, input modalities, and visual generalization performance. Code and experimental logs are available at: https://github.com/YidiZhouluo/DeepLearning-Empirical-Studies/tree/main/Exp_01.
URLs: https://github.com/YidiZhouluo/DeepLearning-Empirical-Studies/tree/main/Exp_01.
Authors: Haotian Zheng, Zhanwei Wang, Mingyao Cui, Chang Cai, Hongyang Du, Kaibin Huang
Abstract: Speculative inference (SPIN) was originally developed as an efficient architecture to accelerate Large Language Models (LLMs). In this work, we propose its distributed deployment to enable cooperative token generation in a multiuser edge system; its advantage is to effectively balance computational loads between resource-constrained devices and servers. The resulting architecture, termed Multi-access SPIN (Multi-SPIN), utilizes on-device small language models to generate and upload candidate token drafts, while an edge server operates the LLM to verify them in parallel batches. Given the severe heterogeneity in users' computation and communication capabilities, the draft length emerges as a critical control variable that influences node-level computation loads and multi-access latency, thereby governing the sum token goodput. Consequently, considering frequency-division multiple access, we investigate the problem of multi-access draft control, a joint optimization of draft-length control and bandwidth allocation to maximize sum token goodput. We examine two cases: (1) homogeneous draft lengths across users to facilitate server-side batching, and (2) heterogeneous draft lengths to introduce a new dimension for goodput enhancement. By developing decomposition methods, we reduce these complex optimizations into tractable sub-problems, which allow efficient draft control algorithms to be derived in closed form. Our analysis shows that the optimal bandwidth allocation compensates users with weaker computation-and-communication capabilities in the homogeneous case due to the batching synchronization requirements, whereas its heterogeneous-case counterpart rewards users with higher acceptance rates by relaxing such requirements. Experiments using Llama-2 and Qwen3.5 model pairs across diverse tasks demonstrate that Multi-SPIN improves goodput by up to 88% over heterogeneity-agnostic baselines.
Authors: Ossi Lehtinen
Abstract: Transformers consuming multi-channel scalar signals must embed $C$ simultaneous values into one $d_{\text{model}}$-dimensional vector per time step. We audit eight input encoders -- a shared-scalar baseline, per-channel linear projections, an orthogonality regulariser, a nonlinear MLP, block-partitioned concatenation, channel-independent and channel-as-token architectures, and a projected positional encoding -- on a synthetic benchmark where channel identity is informative and on ETTh1, scored by next-step negative log-likelihood. The headline is practical near-equivalence within a wide "top tier": the standard per-channel linear projection matches every alternative up to small, statistically real but practically modest differences. A direct geometric probe attributes this to a spontaneous orthogonalisation of the per-channel projections: they end up near-orthogonal with no explicit regulariser, letting the standard linear recover channel identity from the summed embedding. Two encoders lose decisively: the shared-scalar baseline collapses for information-theoretic reasons we make explicit, and the channel-independent PatchTST-spirit baseline overfits universally on the synthetic benchmark and underperforms on both. Paired tests resolve two small gaps: projecting the sinusoidal positional encoding through a learned linear layer edges the rest at small $C$ by extending this orthogonality to the positional subspace; a nonlinear MLP stem edges them at the largest $C$, with the gap shrinking under more training data. The practical recommendation: use the standard per-channel linear projection by default; reach for something more elaborate only when the task calls for it.
Authors: Al Zadid Sultan Bin Habib, Md Younus Ahamed, Prashnna Kumar Gyawali, Gianfranco Doretto, Donald A. Adjeroh
Abstract: We investigate how to make small tabular foundation models effective for High-Dimensional, Low-Sample Size (HDLSS) tabular prediction without retraining large backbones. We introduce Graph-guided Ordering with Local Refinement (GO-LR), show its equivalence to weighted Minimum Linear Arrangement, and interpret the practical solver as a TSP-path-style surrogate. We propose GOTabPFN,which builds on GO-LR, and a Neuro-Inspired Subunit Compression (NSC) unit to pool locally adjacent ordered features into meta-features, yielding a compact representation that makes TabPFN-style prediction practical in HDLSS regimes. Across tabular benchmarks, GOTabPFN improves stability and accuracy under tight token budgets.
Authors: Jihun Cho, Soo-Yeon Jeong, Sun-Young Ihm
Abstract: T2I models cannot effectively capture sentiment from various types of text, including diaries, as they primarily focus on visual object-related patterns rather than contextual emotional understanding. This paper proposes an emotion-aware text-to-image pipeline that generates children's hand drawing style images from short Korean diary entries. The proposed pipeline employs Qwen3-8B for recognising implicit sentiment from short diaries, and Stable Diffusion 3.5 Medium fine-tuned with LoRA on children's drawing images with emotion-based trigger words for image generation. Additionally, this paper presents experiments examining the effect of emotion trigger words on generated images and discusses the limitations of CLIP Score as an evaluation metric for emotion-aware image generation.
Authors: Shenzhi Yang, Guangcheng Zhu, Bowen Song, Haobo Wang, Mingxuan Xia, Xing Zheng, Yingfan Ma, Zhongqi Chen, Weiqiang Wang, Gang Chen
Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) supervises the student only in output space by matching next-token probabilities. This output-only paradigm has two limits: (1) sampling variance from Monte Carlo KL estimates over large vocabularies (e.g., Qwen's ~150k tokens) persists throughout training, and (2) it treats the teacher as a black-box, discarding all intermediate hidden states after the LM head. We propose On-Policy Representation Distillation (OPRD), which lifts distillation into hidden-state space by aligning student and teacher representations across selected layers on the same rollouts, bypassing the LM head entirely. Theoretically, OPRD eliminates sampling variance and provides richer per-layer structural information. Empirically, OPRD closes the student-teacher gap on AIME 2024/2025 and AIMO, while output-space OPD baselines plateau below the teacher. OPRD also trains 1.44x faster and uses 54% less memory than top-k OPD. Code: https://github.com/ShenzhiYang2000/OPRD.
Authors: Lizhi Yang, Junheng Li, Nehar Poddar, Yiling Hou, Gio Huh, Robert Griffin, Georgia Gkioxari, Aaron Ames
Abstract: For a humanoid robot to be deployed in the real world, the choice of command space (i.e., the interface between task planning and whole-body control) is crucial. Existing whole-body controllers typically demand dense kinematic or spatial references that planners struggle to synthesize from task semantics. We instead propose a compact, explicit interface that is intuitive, general, modular, and expressive enough for diverse loco-manipulation skills. To this end, we introduce HANDOFF, a single humanoid whole-body controller that follows this interface and is distilled via multi-teacher KL distillation under a context-conditioned gating scheme into a mixture-of-experts student from three complementary specialists: whole-body motion tracking with safety-filtered data, locomotion, and fall-recovery. On the Unitree G1, HANDOFF matches state-of-the-art velocity tracking and offers one of the largest robust manipulation workspaces. We further demonstrate hardware feasibility through multiple natural-language-driven task roll-outs, powered by a VLM-driven agentic planner with no task-specific data or controller fine-tuning.
Authors: Roshni Mahtani, Il\'an Carretero, Laura Monroy, Aldo Moreno-Oyervides, Oscar El\'ias Bonilla-Manrique, Roc\'io del Amor
Abstract: Reliable polymer identification is essential for ensuring the quality and safety of recycled plastics, yet conventional sorting and spectroscopic techniques often struggle to deliver robust discrimination. Terahertz (THz) spectroscopy offers a promising alternative, providing high-resolution and non-destructive measurements. In this work, we leverage THz signals to classify 12 types of polymers, including pure polymers, multilayer films, commercial blends, and biopolymers. To handle the complexity of these spectral signals, we propose the Multi-Scale Feature Attention Network (MSFAN), a novel deep learning architecture tailored for THz data. The framework integrates feature gating for signal recalibration and multi-scale parallel convolutions to capture diverse frequency patterns. These features are further refined through cross-feature attention and attention pooling, enabling the model to intrinsically highlight the most informative THz regions. MSFAN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models, reaching a classification accuracy of 85.2%. This study demonstrates the potential of combining THz spectroscopy with deep learning techniques for effective, scalable, and interpretable polymer classification.
Authors: Vladislav Smirnov, Chieu Nguyen, Sergey Senichev, Minh Ngoc Ta, Ekaterina Fadeeva, Artem Vazhentsev, Daria Galimzianova, Nikolai Rozanov, Viktor Mazanov, Jingwei Ni, Tianyi Wu, Igor Kiselev, Mrinmaya Sachan, Iryna Gurevych, Preslav Nakov, Timothy Baldwin, Artem Shelmanov
Abstract: Test-time compute (TTC) scaling has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving large language model (LLM) reasoning by allocating additional compute during inference, e.g., via multi-sample generation and verifier-based reranking. Existing TTC scaling strategies and reasoning scorers remain fragmented, evaluated under inconsistent protocols, and are rarely analyzed through the lens of quality-cost trade-offs. We introduce ThinkBooster, a unified framework for seamless test-time compute scaling of LLM reasoning, which consists of (i) a modular Python library implementing state-of-the-art TTC scaling strategy and scorer families, (ii) a benchmark that jointly evaluates performance and computational efficiency, and (iii) a deployable OpenAI-compatible proxy service that enables drop-in integration of adaptive reasoning into real-world applications. We further provide a demo visual debugger for inspecting the reasoning trajectories, intermediate selection decisions, and alternative reasoning paths. Empirical results on mathematical and coding tasks reveal the performance-compute trade-offs of TTC scaling strategies and scoring methods and demonstrate that ThinkBooster provides practical gains in real-world tasks. The code is available online under an MIT license.
Authors: Thanawat Lodkaew, Johannes Ackermann, Soichiro Nishimori, Nontawat Charoenphakdee, Masashi Sugiyama, Takashi Ishida
Abstract: A growing failure mode in agent evaluation and training is that models can achieve high evaluation scores by exploiting shortcuts instead of solving the intended task, producing deceptive performance. This makes evaluation scores unreliable as measures of true task-solving ability. We propose CapCode, a framework for constructing coding datasets with randomized tests whose best achievable non-cheating performance is deliberately capped below one. This capped-performance design gives evaluation scores a clearer interpretation: scores substantially above the cap are implausible and therefore provide evidence of cheating. To prevent cheating, we propose CapReward, a reward design based on the CapCode principle to discourage optimization beyond the cap. Experiments across multiple datasets show that CapCode detects cheating while preserving performance ranking of models, and CapReward reduces cheating behavior, yielding models that better follow the intended task specification.