Authors: Philip Waggoner
Abstract: We analyze identifiability in co-adaptive human-machine systems. We show that closed-loop encoder estimates do not uniquely identify user adaptation, but instead reflect properties of the joint system. We discuss implications for interpreting behavioral adaptation and propose conditions for identification.
Authors: Atkia Mahila, Avinash Maurya, M. Mustafa Rafique, Bogdan Nicolae
Abstract: Tree of Thought (ToT) search has become a promising direction for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models, but deploying these methods in practice raises a question that has received little systematic attention: how do different search strategies behave under varying compute budgets, model sizes, and problem difficulties? In this work, we evaluate two representative ToT methods; DPTS, a Monte Carlo tree search based approach, and SSDP, a semantic deduplication based approach, across two mathematical reasoning benchmarks (Math500 and GSM8K), two model scales (Llama-3B and Llama-8B), and four token budgets (3k--10k). Our analysis reveals that the two methods exhibit limitations that pull in opposite directions. DPTS suffers from a cold-start bottleneck at low budgets: it requires sufficient exploration before its value estimates become reliable, making it a poor fit for resource-constrained settings despite strong scaling behavior at higher budgets. SSDP, on the other hand, reaches candidate solutions efficiently but is prone to frontier depletion; its aggressive node merging permanently discards unexplored paths, leaving it unable to improve regardless of how much budget remains. Together, these findings suggest that neither a fixed exploration strategy nor a fixed pruning strategy is sufficient across compute continuum. We argue that effective search for scientific reasoning agents requires strategies that can adapt their behavior based on search progress and available resources.
Authors: Daniel Rothschild
Abstract: What can the success of modern AI tell us about how humans learn? This paper argues that taking AI seriously as a model of human learning supports a modest but genuine associationism. The central finding is that supervised learning -- learning driven by evaluative feedback -- underlies a surprisingly wide range of contemporary AI systems, from large language models to game-playing agents, differing primarily in how much work is required to generate the relevant feedback signal. This vindicates associationist ideals of a uniform, gradual, error-driven learning mechanism operating across domains, and defuses the once-influential argument that associationist mechanisms are too limited to account for human cognitive capacities. At the same time, the successes of deep learning depend on computational architectures that go well beyond anything classical associationists envisaged, and supervised learning operates within these as one component rather than a complete account of learning.
Authors: Ylli Prifti
Abstract: AI agents now participate as first-class team members across the software development lifecycle, yet no specification language exists for expressing the human-agent responsibility boundaries, approval gates, and governance constraints this collaboration requires. Existing approaches encode process in agent prompts (subject to drift), target adjacent domains (workflow management, business processes), or address only fragments (access control, approval gates). We propose a domain-specific language for specifying AI-SDLC processes as protocols, with formal syntax, well-formedness conditions, operational semantics, and enforcement invariants. The language distinguishes policy (declared intent) from mechanism (structural enforcement), enabling implementations to bound process non-determinism through primitives such as validation tokens and capability boundaries. Three results follow. A failure rate analysis shows that structural enforcement bounds system failure rates at a weighted product of agent and validator rates, while behavioral compliance permits cumulative or near-saturating growth. The 2+N team pattern (two human-in-control roles plus N specialized agent members) formalizes classical Separation of Duties for AI-SDLC. Kleene closure of orchestration loops and reflexive protocol-adherence validation emerge as design properties rather than special-case constructs. We position the contribution against multi-agent frameworks (MetaGPT), workflow specification (FlowAgent, BPMN extensions), and capability-based security (SAGA): the novelty lies in the specific integration, not any single primitive. A working implementation demonstrates feasibility; empirical evaluation is future work.
Authors: Yang Feng, Ziwei Xu, Xia Hu, Fengxiang He
Abstract: Multi-agent debate improves the reliability of large language models (LLMs) through iterative peer critiques. However, fixed topologies often introduce persistent positional biases, amplify unreliable agents, and cause high sensitivity to role assignments. We introduce \textit{Permutation-Equivariant Adaptive Routing Multi-Agent Debate (PEAR)}, an inference-time protocol that dynamically reconfigures communication roles and sparse topologies across consecutive debate rounds. By strategically switching agent-to-role assignments based on evolving agent states, PEAR prevents any agent from permanently occupying a privileged network position or distributes influence more evenly across the debate. We theoretically characterize PEAR as an equivariant sparse router: it preserves accuracy under agent relabeling while reducing routing complexity and improving generalization. Comprehensive empirical evaluations across four reasoning benchmarks and six diverse LLM backbones demonstrate PEAR significantly improves average accuracy over the strongest debate baselines. The code is at https://github.com/EVIEHub/PEAR.
Authors: Daniel Beechey, Derek Yuen, Jianheng Liu, Dezhao Luo, Tiantian He, Weilin Luo, Jun Wang, Kun Shao
Abstract: The goal of artificial intelligence is to create agents capable of general, adaptive behaviour in open-ended environments. Guided by the "Bitter Lesson", we argue that the most effective path toward this goal is to systematically remove human priors and allow intelligence to naturally emerge through interaction with a "Big World" that is orders of magnitude more complex than the agent itself. We propose the mobile Graphical User Interface (GUI) as a practical proxy for such a world and introduce Darwin Mobile Agent, an open-source infrastructure designed as a foundation for autonomous reinforcement learning in this domain. This framework addresses the data-collection bottleneck in real-world mobile interactions by using an asynchronous agent-environment loop across parallel cloud-phone instances. We further propose a conceptual roadmap to systematically remove human priors from three fundamental pillars of a self-evolving agent: task curricula, outcome verification, and memory management. We validate that the Darwin infrastructure provides the stability and scalability required for the first stage of this roadmap: policy optimisation in the GUI domain. This work establishes the practical and theoretical foundation necessary to move toward truly autonomous, self-evolving GUI agents.
Authors: Hanqi Zhou, David G. Nagy, Peter Dayan, Charley M. Wu
Abstract: How do people build abstract, reusable knowledge from sequential experience under bounded cognitive resources? To answer this question, we integrate rate-distortion theory with recent advances in program induction to describe how prior knowledge shapes which future structures are cheap to encode and easy to discover. We formalize this in a hierarchical Adaptor Grammar (HAG) with distinct local (within-task) and global (across-task) libraries, governed jointly by constraints on memory and computation. In simulations, HAG achieves better rate-distortion trade-offs and stronger generalization than fixed grammars or shallow chunking methods. In an online melodic sequence-learning experiment, participants' recall errors reflected systematic simplifications and reaction times increased at inferred program boundaries. Trial-by-trial fits further showed that hierarchical libraries best explained individual differences in both recall and out-of-sample continuation choices, outperforming all alternative models. These findings cast structured learning as bounded program induction in which the order of experience shapes future abstractions a learner builds.
Authors: Kejiang Qian, Fengxiang He
Abstract: Significant progress has been made in aligning LLMs with target value functions. We argue that, even when an LLM has been well aligned in (post-)training, it may still fail to maximise the aligned value in reasoning. We mathematically formalise this gap as rational value risk: the utility discrepancy between a model's deployed reasoning strategy and its rational counterpart, which is defined to be the responses that maximise expected utility in the steepest direction. The estimation error of rational value risk is further decomposed into three components from finite candidates, finite prompts, and imperfect verifiers. Extensive experiments are conducted, covering models Llama-3.1, Qwen-2.5, T{\"}ulu-3 families (7B-72B), GPT-5.2, GPT-5.5, and DeepSeek-V4, and benchmarks UltraFeedback, AlpacaEval, GSM8K, MATH, HumanEval, and MathArena. The results validate that (1) rational value risk is widespread; (2) value alignment can reduce, but cannot eliminate, it; (3) the risk is highly sensitive to inference-time reasoning strategy; and (4) longer reasoning improves rationality with diminishing returns. The code is at https://github.com/EVIEHub/LLM-Rationality.
Authors: Hang Yu, Zifan Zheng, Jeff Z. Pan, Tongliang Liu, Zhiyong Wang, Fengxiang He
Abstract: LLM agents are promising for alpha mining via combining financial priors, symbolic reasoning, executable factor generation, and feedback-driven refinement. Yet, they face a combinatorial search space, noisy non-stationary feedback, redundant discoveries, and overfitting risks from naively reusing past successes. To address these challenges, we propose AlphaMemo, a self-evolving alpha mining agent with Structured Search-Process Memory. Rather than memorizing only final factors or full trajectories, AlphaMemo records reusable evidence about which edit motifs work or fail under specific parent-factor contexts. It extracts motifs from Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) differences, applies confidence-gated residual memory on top of a search-ledger prior, and uses asymmetric veto control to suppress high-confidence failure patterns. Experiments on CSI 500 and S\&P 500 show improved out-of-sample performance and fixed-budget discovery efficiency, with ablations validating the roles of residual learning, confidence gating, AST-diff motifs, and veto memory. Code is at https://github.com/jarrettyu/AlphaMemo.
Authors: Samuel Barbeau, Simon Roy, Giovanni Beltrame, Christian Desrosiers, Nicolas Thome
Abstract: Planning with world models is bottlenecked by compounding prediction errors and the difficulty of defining optimizable goals. Visual targets provide precise local gradients but poor distant guidance, while language is flexible yet limited by noisy cross-modal alignment or dependence on large generative models unsuited for the high-sampling nature of model-based planning. To address these challenges, we introduce Latent Goal Prediction from Language (LAGO), a framework that predicts both sequences of intermediate goal states from language instructions and action-conditioned rollouts, all within the same latent space. Rather than optimizing toward a single global objective, LAGO dynamically decomposes instructions into explicitly predicted, locally tractable latent subgoals. By updating these subgoals online and using a soft minimum trajectory cost during planning, LAGO enables an agent to follow coherent latent trajectories over long horizons. Evaluation across multiple environments planning horizons shows that LAGO avoids the sharp degradation of prior methods. By achieving robust and precise long-horizon planning purely from language, LAGO bridges the precision of visual goals with the flexibility of text-guided control.
Authors: Yanru Guan, Naveen Raman, Fei Fang
Abstract: Humans increasingly make decisions with AI assistance; for example, doctors may follow AI-recommended diagnostic tests and base their diagnoses on the results. A natural question is which tests should AI recommend to balance short-term decision quality and long-term human learning when different features (e.g., test results) are correlated. While prior work establishes that stationary policies that recommend the same tests repeatedly are optimal when features are independent, we prove that feature correlations lead such policies to perform arbitrarily poorly. Instead, we prove that any optimal policy must follow an explore-then-commit structure; initially, the AI should offer diverse tests so humans can learn accurate feature coefficients, then the AI should commit to a single set of tests, with exploration length that depends on the degree of feature correlation. We prove that computing the optimal policy is NP-hard and derive a dynamic programming-based algorithm that finds the optimal policy for finite horizons. We additionally develop an approximation that plans for shorter horizons and appends a stationary suffix, achieving near-optimal performance. Our empirical results complement our theory by showing that stronger feature correlation leads to longer exploration phases.
Authors: Boming Xia, Liming Zhu, Zhenchang Xing, Qinghua Lu, Dino Sejdinovic, Xiwei Xu
Abstract: Agent skills externalise reusable agent-facing behavioural knowledge and guidance as persistent artefacts that can be discovered, activated, and interpreted by LLM agents. Although a skill artefact is static at rest, its architectural responsibilities arise in use, when the artefact is selected for a run, bound to context and authority constraints, interpreted by a stochastic agent, and recorded as run evidence. We call this run-specific relation skill-in-use. This paper studies agent skill harnessing: the architectural responsibilities that govern the transition from skill artefacts to skill-in-use, bound the executable consequences associated with skill-in-use, and capture evidence for attribution, verification, repair, and evolution. This paper provides a catalogue of ten empirically grounded architectural patterns (five core, five supporting) for skill harnessing and synthesises them into a reference architecture with four responsibility layers: Supply Chain, Mediation, Execution Control, and Evidence & Feedback. We evaluate the architecture through cross-instantiation across 8 selected systems. The resulting patterns and reference architecture provide a vocabulary and diagnostic frame for analysing skill-harnessing responsibilities across agent systems.
Authors: Oleg Solozobov
Abstract: Agent-runtime systems emit traces, ledgers, provenance graphs, policy logs, delegation tokens, cache events, and tool-firewall records, but those containers do not necessarily answer governance questions about a specific decision. DEMM-Bench is a cross-regime benchmark for agent-runtime governance-evidence sufficiency, grounded in the Decision Evidence Maturity Model (DEMM): it measures whether records across eight evidence regimes are sufficient to reconstruct decision-level properties rather than merely present. The benchmark normalizes the regimes through adapters, asks property questions over actor, authority, action, policy, decision basis, resource touch, lifecycle context, and verification strength, and applies eight deterministic degradation conditions. Across 64 manuscript cases, trace-present and schema-present baselines overclaim on 75% of cases, ledger-present overclaims on 50%, and the redacted property-level candidate scorer has zero overclaim with 56.25% mean Property Sufficiency Accuracy. The deposited package provides the 64-case dataset, construction-oracle labels, baselines, and adapters, supporting reproducible evaluation of decision-evidence maturity across heterogeneous agent-runtime evidence substrates.
Authors: Yurun Chen, Biao Yi, Keting Yin, Shengyu Zhang
Abstract: Computer-Use Agents (CUAs) are increasingly deployed in dynamic interactive environments, creating a growing need for continual skill learning during interaction. Recent approaches address this challenge by learning reusable skills from successful trajectories. However, these skill learning methods largely assume static and safe environments, overlooking risks from adversarial interactions (e.g., prompt injections) and environmental dynamics (e.g., pop-ups). In dynamic settings, such assumptions can lead to risky skill learning and brittle execution, undermining the reliability of CUAs. This raises the question: how can CUAs learn and use skills safely in dynamic environments? To address this problem, we propose SkillHarness, a framework for safe skill harnessing in dynamic environments. SkillHarness moves beyond static skill abstractions by modeling skill learning and utilization as a safety-constrained interaction process. Specifically, we introduce the skill boundary that leverages multi-source supervision signals to identify safe skills from interaction trajectories, and construct self-improving safety constraints throughout the skill lifecycle. In addition, SkillHarness introduces selective skill reuse, where tasks are guided to decompose according to context and completed through the selective activation of skill subsets. Our experiments demonstrate that SkillHarness significantly reduces the unsafe rate of learned skills by 57.1% and consistently improves execution stability under dynamic environmental changes, outperforming existing baselines.
Authors: Ruaidhr\'i Campion, Matthew Fenlon, Joshua Cooney Mercedal, Casey Farren-Colloty, Eliza Somerville, Michael A. J. Mitchell
Abstract: Electoral redistricting in Ireland's Proportional Representation Single Transferable Vote (PR-STV) system faces the challenge of selecting an optimally representative set of electoral boundaries from an enormous set of possible configurations, and where ``representative'' is a delicate balance of constitutional objectives that are often in tension with one another. We present the first computational framework for Irish electoral redistricting that systematically optimises across multiple constitutional requirements while making trade-offs explicit and quantifiable. The electoral redistricting problem is parsed using statistical physics, where constitutional objectives are considered as terms in a Potts Hamiltonian. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods and simulated annealing are employed to minimise this objective function, systematically exploring this configuration space, with coupling constants as proxies for objective weightings. Multi Criterion Decision Analysis (MCDA) and Pareto Optimality is then utilised to remedy the ambiguity in choosing a certain objective weighting combination over others. With respect to proportional representation and compactness objectives evaluated in County Cork, COTHROM consistently improves on the existing legal constituency boundaries for a range of objective weightings.
Authors: Sonali Goel, Pranav Vaidhyanathan, Lucas Schorling, Natalia Ares, Maike Osborne
Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as long-lived agents that must adapt across users, tasks, domains, modalities, and feedback regimes without access to model weights. Existing black-box adaptation methods typically optimize a single prompt, maintain an undifferentiated memory, or rely on repeated rollout-heavy search. However, these designs struggle when streams of input are nonstationary, feedback is sparse, and failures from one task family can contaminate behavior on another. We introduce RIZZ (Routing Interactions to Near Zero-interference Zones), a continual adaptation framework for compound language-model systems that learns entirely through verifier-gated memory, routing, and prompt compilation. RIZZ organizes input streams into dynamically spawned memory branches. At inference time, either while online or offline, a context-aware router selects or creates a branch that retrieves branch-local, global, graph-structured, and working-memory context, which is compiled into a bounded prompt together with retrieved task evidence. After the model acts, task verifiers score the output, and only verified interactions can update memory, promote reusable rules, demote harmful rules, or create anti-patterns. This yields a black-box agent that improves through persistent natural-language feedback while explicitly controlling interference. RIZZ targets the regime where adaptation must occur online under context budgets. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework against state-of-the-art baselines on competitive benchmarks.
Authors: Ouided Braoui, Meriem Bouali, Nadir Farhi
Abstract: Autonomous vehicles offer the potential for safer and more efficient mobility, yet public trust remains limited due to the lack of transparency in their decision-making. This work addresses this issue by combining deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for adaptive driving control with large language model (LLM)-based explainability modules designed to communicate agent behavior to passengers. DRL agents were trained in simulation using a Dueling Double Deep Q-Network to follow distinct driving requests: \textit{fast}, \textit{comfort}, and \textit{stop}. They demonstrated stable learning, safe compliance with traffic rules, and reliable switching between modes within a single trip. In parallel, LLM modules were introduced to interpret passenger requests, determine when explanations were needed, and generate concise, safety-oriented justifications. Results show that this framework, serving as a proof of concept for integrating RL decision-making and LLMs, balances safety, adaptability, and explainability, and is most effective when requests are delayed or overridden due to safety constraints.
Authors: Tingzhou Wei, Zeyu Zheng, Ethan X. Fang, Junwei Lu
Abstract: Asymptotic statistical theory is a challenging domain for AI-assisted formalization: its central results mix convergence statements, asymptotic expansions, functional analysis, and regularity conditions that have a large gap from existing infrastructure in Lean 4 formalization. To address these challenges, we propose a hypothesis-disciplined Lean 4 formalization pipeline built from multiple agents: a manager that coordinates seven specialist roles for proof planning, skeleton scaffolding, Mathlib reconnaissance, proof construction, integration, independent review, and audit. The main methodological discipline is the hypothesis-disciplined audit, implemented by the Auditor agent: every main-theorem hypothesis and concept-layer field must be anchored in the source mathematical prose, justified as a Lean encoding adapter, marked as source-implied, or rejected as an unsupported strengthening. Using this workflow, we build a systematic formalization of asymptotic statistical theory, especially the parametric and semi-parametric models' asymptotic distribution and efficiency results. The resulting Lean development is axiom-clean and source-faithful, with Lean-checked and human-audited proofs of core parametric and semi-parametric theorems organized so that theorem-agnostic infrastructure and statistical concept definitions are separated from theorem-specific assembly. The formalization results are available at https://github.com/junwei-lu/Lean-Asymptotic-Statistical-Theory.
URLs: https://github.com/junwei-lu/Lean-Asymptotic-Statistical-Theory.
Authors: Mushtari Sadia, Zhenning Yang, Umme Habiba Lamia, Nishat Shawrin, Ang Chen, Amrita Roy Chowdhury
Abstract: Electrical circuit diagram QA tasks require complex mathematical reasoning, which remains challenging for multimodal LLMs. We present SPARC, a multi-agent system that answers questions over circuit diagrams by grounding reasoning in executable physics-based simulations. SPARC uses LLM agents to synthesize, execute, and analyze simulation programs, improving accuracy and reliability by design. It achieves 83% accuracy, with up to a 58% absolute improvement over baselines, while enabling systematic error diagnosis.
Authors: Maya Wolff, Ariel Felner, Oren Salzman
Abstract: Multi-objective shortest-path (MOSP) algorithms traditionally rely on single-valued heuristics (SVHs), which associate each state with a single admissible cost vector. While SVHs provide safe lower bounds, they fail to capture the trade-off structure of the Pareto frontier and often yield weak search guidance. Multi-valued heuristics (MVHs) address this limitation by mapping states to sets of cost estimates, enabling a richer approximation of possible trade-offs. Modern MOSP algorithms are highly dependent on dimensionality reduction (DR) techniques to efficiently perform dominance checks. However, integrating MVHs with DR introduces subtle correctness challenges. We show that naively combining DR with MVHs destroys the ordering invariants required for DR, leading to unsound and incomplete search. To address this issue, we develop the first theoretical frameworks for safely integrating MVHs with DR. First, we introduce $\text{NAMOA}^*{\text{dr}\text{-}\text{mvh}}$, a theoretical baseline that restores search correctness by enforcing heuristic consistency. Recognizing the practical limitations of this approach, we then introduce our primary contribution, $\text{L}\text{-}\text{NAMOA}^*{\text{dr}\text{-}\text{mvh}}$. This algorithm employs a "lazy," optimistic approach to DR, preserving exact correctness with only an admissible MVH by dynamically detecting and repairing local ordering violations. Across a range of benchmarks, $\text{L}\text{-}\text{NAMOA}^*{\text{dr}\text{-}\text{mvh}}$ matches or improves over state-of-the-art MOSP algorithms, and achieves speedups of over 10x in instances where the additional guidance provided by the MVH translates into stronger pruning.
Authors: Chenhao Gao, Peisen Yao
Abstract: String constraint solvers are crucial for reasoning about string-manipulating programs. However, many practical string constraints are undecidable, and real-world applications often present complex constraints that challenge current solvers. The rise of multi-core architectures offers an opportunity for parallel solving. A key parallel solving method is \emph{cube-and-conquer}, in which the quality of splitting heuristics is critical to effectively dividing the search space. Unfortunately, manually designing the heuristics is labor-intensive, and handcrafted heuristics are often sub-optimal. This paper introduces a data-driven approach to automatically generating splitting heuristics. We frame the problem of selecting a splitting atom as a learning task, using features from input formulas and dynamic data from solver execution. We implement this approach in two popular string solvers, Z3seq and Z3str4, demonstrating that the learned heuristics outperform manually designed ones in the number of solved formulas and the average solving time.
Authors: Zhan Shi, Bing He, Yisi Sang, Hanqing Lu
Abstract: Post-training a frontier model is normally weeks of human work: proposing data and recipe changes, launching runs, reading evals, deciding what to keep. We report an autonomous system that runs this loop with no human in the loop, post-training a 30B Nemotron across four rounds over multiple weeks. The autonomously produced model reaches a held-out score of 0.86 against the top human submission's 0.87 on the public NVIDIA Nemotron-Reasoning Challenge leaderboard, placing 8th of ~4000 at the time of writing. More striking than the number: the loop detected that its own dev metric had stopped tracking external performance on the weakest domain -- candidates drove dev to record highs without moving the external target -- and revised its own search policy, no longer maximizing dev but seeking interventions that lowered the now-misleading proxy while improving the external target. We treat this as direct, auditable evidence that a scaled autonomous loop can produce discovery, not only optimization: it detected that its measurement frame had become misleading and changed what counted as evidence. We take the operational view that any system worth the "recursive self-improvement" label must eventually perform end-to-end post-training of a frontier-class model; this is one datapoint of that bar being cleared. We do not claim a "first autonomous match" of human researchers. The claim we make is narrower and auditable: to our knowledge, this is the first publicly reported autonomous post-training run at this scale, where prior public autonomous-ML-research demonstrations sit at GPT-2-class (~124M) budgets. The same system also post-trains the 120B and 550B Nemotron; with no public human baseline there, this shows only that the loop closes at that scale, not that its output is competitive -- infrastructure evidence, with the effectiveness claim deferred until a comparable human anchor exists.
Authors: Wouter W. L. Nuijten, Thijs van de Laar, Bert de Vries
Abstract: Planning under uncertainty requires agents to balance goal achievement with information gathering. Active inference addresses this through the Expected Free Energy (EFE), a cost function that unifies instrumental and epistemic objectives. However, existing EFE-based methods typically employ specialized optimization procedures that are difficult to extend or analyze. In this paper, we show that EFE-based planning can be formulated as Variational Free Energy minimization on a generative model augmented with epistemic priors. Our main result demonstrates that minimizing a Variational Free Energy functional with appropriately chosen priors yields a decomposition into expected plan costs (the EFE) plus a complexity term. This formulation reinforces theoretical consistency with the Free Energy Principle by casting planning as the same inferential process that governs perception and learning. We validate our approach on three environments of increasing complexity: a deterministic T-maze, a stochastic Reactivity Maze, and a partially observable MiniGrid DoorKey-8x8 environment. The experiments demonstrate that the epistemic priors induce information-seeking behavior, that the variational formulation yields policy-based inference outperforming plan-based methods under stochastic transitions, and that temporal factorization enables scalability to environments where existing tabular active inference methods cannot operate.
Authors: Boyin Tan, Xiaowei Huang, Youcheng Sun
Abstract: Agent skills encode reusable procedural knowledge that guides large language model agents across tasks and execution contexts. Existing evaluations primarily assess skills through task level outcomes, yet task success alone does not reveal which parts of a skill have been exercised or which remain untested. We introduce skill coverage, a test adequacy metric that treats the skill artifact as the object under test. Our approach extracts observable skill behavior constraints from skill documents and measures whether an agent trajectory provides sufficient evidence to exercise and evaluate each constraint. Skill coverage uses a binary cover or not cover judgment, which reports whether a documented behavior has been exercised with sufficient observable evidence, without assigning an additional outcome label to the behavior. Applying skill coverage to SkillsBench reveals that existing benchmark executions cover only 39.90 to 43.98% of skill behavior constraints, suggesting that current benchmark tasks leave large portions of documented skill guidance untested. These findings show that successful task completion does not imply adequate testing of the skill artifact, highlighting skill coverage as a measure of how thoroughly agent skills are tested.
Authors: Yifan Li, Shengbin Yue, Boyu Feng, Jinhu Qi, Bo Ke, Zixing Song, Hongru Wang, Zhongyu Wei, Irwin King
Abstract: The integration of external tools has transitioned LLM agents from passive responders to autonomous systems. However, current benchmarks prioritize execution success, neglecting self-awareness capability, the ability to discern whether a problem requires necessary external resources or can be solved via internal parametric knowledge. To address this, we introduce KAPRO (Knowing-Acting Quadrant PRObe), a framework that evaluates cognitive-behavioral alignment by decoupling an agent's metacognitive judgment (Knowing) from its spontaneous execution (Acting). We further construct KAware, a dataset rigorously partitioning tasks into external, internal, and hybrid subspaces to systematically probe these epistemic boundaries. Extensive experiments across diverse agent architectures show that self-awareness capability is strongly correlated with task success but degrades sharply in internal-capability settings. Moreover, open-source and instruction-following models exhibit stronger tool overuse due to shallow pattern matching, while proprietary and reasoning-oriented models demonstrate more reliable cognitive gating. Benchmark and codes are available at https://github.com/AI-Santiago/KAware.
Authors: Kaiwen Shi, Zheyuan Zhang, Han Bao, Colby Nelson, Yanfang Ye
Abstract: Modern agent systems can turn uncertainty into overconfidence. Fragile upstream decisions are often exposed to downstream components as clean intermediate artifacts, while the uncertainty behind those decisions is lost at the interface. As a result, local ambiguity can become system-level error amplification. We argue that this reveals an interface bottleneck in agent uncertainty propagation: uncertainty does not propagate simply because a trajectory contains uncertain steps; it propagates only when it survives the handoff between components. We define uncertain decision handoff as the transfer of an intermediate decision made under uncertainty, and identify confidence laundering as a failure mode in which fragile upstream states are repackaged as procedurally valid artifacts that downstream agents over-trust. To address this bottleneck, we propose latent uncertainty as an uncertainty-bearing carrier attached to decision handoffs. Rather than replacing text with hidden states, latent uncertainty aims to preserve pre-commitment fragility in a form that downstream components can use. This position shifts agent uncertainty propagation from step-wise uncertainty estimation toward uncertainty-preserving interface design for more recoverable agent systems.
Authors: Guido Freire, Agust\'in Mart\'inez-Su\~n\'e, Viviana Cotik
Abstract: Large Language Models have the potential to expand and improve the access to clinical information by enabling new ways of interacting with medical knowledge in natural language. However, their deployment in medical question-answering settings is safety-critical, since misaligned outputs can lead to severe patient harm. AI control is an emerging approach that introduces external safeguards to mitigate unsafe behaviours in misaligned systems and has been shown to be effective in domains such as code generation. However, its applicability and effectiveness in medical settings have not been systematically studied. In this work, we present a pipeline for evaluating AI control protocols to mitigate medication-related harm. To this end, we introduce DrugBench, an AI control evaluation benchmark which combines 3,671 multi-turn medical conversations from HealthBench with drug information from official FDA labels, covering four categories of medication-related harm: drug interactions, contraindications, dosing constraints, and patient action restrictions. Furthermore, inspired by the medical domain, we argue that safety should account for the severity of unsafe outputs, not just their probability. Under this revised definition, we show that existing control protocols can be subverted and propose severity-based monitoring to address this limitation.
Authors: Iacovos I. Ioannou, Saher Javaid, Minella Bezha, Yasuo Tan, Naoto Nagaoka, Vasos Vassiliou
Abstract: The real-time orchestration of microgrids that combine fluctuating renewable sources, dispatchable units, storage and curtailable consumers requires the repeated solution of combinatorial dispatch and coalition formation problems under hard control deadlines. In this paper, a quantum-assisted agentic distributed artificial intelligence (DAI) framework is proposed in which the dispatch problem of each control slot is formulated as a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problem by Belief-Desire-Intention extended (BDIx) agents and is solved by a portfolio of quantum, quantum-inspired and classical solvers. Solver selection is elevated to a first-class agentic deliberation action of the coordinator agent. Learned beliefs about solver latencies are maintained and the solver intention that is expected to satisfy the prevailing deliberation deadline is committed in each slot. In addition, a belief-shaped storage valuation mechanism is introduced through which the storage agent prices its energy at a discounted future-peak value, injecting intertemporal information into the otherwise myopic per-slot optimization. The framework is evaluated on a 24-hour simulation of a grid-connected microgrid with photovoltaic, wind, battery, genset and demand-response assets, with the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) executed by statevector simulation and benchmarked per slot against tabu search, simulated annealing, binary particle swarm optimization, greedy descent and exhaustive enumeration. Zero deliberation deadlines are missed, the committed dispatch attains the exact optimum on every slot and the realized daily cost of 146.24 EUR equals the exact lower bound, with 97.83 percent renewable utilization and zero unserved energy. When the storage valuation mechanism is deactivated, the daily cost is increased to 152.75 EUR, a 4.5 percent increase.
Authors: Hoang Vu, Maximilian K\"orner, Adrian Rebmann, Gabriel Kevorkian, Michael Perscheid, Gregor Berg, Timotheus Kampik
Abstract: As organizations increasingly deploy generative AI agents to automate business processes, they face a governance dilemma: although these agents can increase operational flexibility, their non-deterministic nature challenges the control and standardization that Business Process Management seeks to enforce. This paper addresses this \emph{invisible autonomy risk} by introducing \emph{Agent Behavior Mining}, a governance capability that enables the application of process mining techniques to render generative AI agent decision-making observable and traceable. We (1) improve the understanding of generative AI agent behavior through an event data model that translates granular agent activities -- including reasoning traces, tool usage, and token costs -- into standardized process logs; (2) instantiate the data model in a multi-agent order-to-cash implementation, demonstrating how process managers can leverage agent logs to detect policy deviations and quantify operational variability; and (3) evaluate the perceived practical utility of the approach in an exploratory study with 18 industry practitioners. The results indicate that practitioners view behavioral transparency as a prerequisite for trust and consider the ability to examine agent reasoning as an important governance requirement for the next generation of AI-driven business processes.
Authors: Jiabo Ma, Cheng Jin, Yihui Wang, Hao Jiang, Ling Liang, Yingxue Xu, Junlin Hou, Zhengrui Guo, Zhengyu Zhang, Yifei Xia, Hongyi Wang, Fengtao Zhou, Zhe Xu, Huajun Zhou, Jiarui Ouyang, Qian Zeng, On Ki Tang, Eunhyang Park, Carolyn Glass, Ronald Cheong Kin Chan, Li Liang, Hao Chen
Abstract: Computational pathology has advanced rapidly with the emergence of foundation models, yet widespread adoption remains limited by substantial technical complexity and programming requirements. Here we present PathLab, an autonomous agentic framework that translates natural-language research objectives into executable and validated computational pathology workflows through the structured composition of domain-specific skills and tools. By organizing workflow generation around reusable methodological modules, including data preprocessing, model development, evaluation and interpretation, PathLab enables studies to be specified at the level of scientific intent rather than implementation details. We evaluated PathLab across 12 public datasets spanning four representative task families: region-of-interest classification, whole-slide image classification, segmentation and survival prediction. Across all task categories, PathLab achieved non-inferior performance relative to expert implementations, while consistently enforcing semantic validity of user prompts and proactively rejecting incompatible workflow specifications prior to execution. In controlled user studies, PathLab substantially reduced the time required to generate executable analytical pipelines and enabled domain experts without programming experience to independently design, execute and evaluate computational pathology studies. Together, these results establish PathLab as a reliable interface between biomedical intent and computational execution, enabling computational pathology studies to be designed at the level of scientific questions rather than programming expertise. By lowering technical barriers to advanced AI methodologies, PathLab provides a foundation for the broader democratization of computational pathology.
Authors: Jianyuan Guo, Zhiwei Hao, Chengcheng Wang, Cheng Fan, Tingzhang Luo, Hongguang Li, Ying Gao, Hefei Mei, Jiankun Peng, Rongjian Xu, Minjing Dong, Han Wu, Mengyu Zheng, Kai Han, Shiqi Wang, Chang Xu, Yunhe Wang
Abstract: LLM-based agents mark a shift from passive question answering to active task completion: they perceive environments, invoke tools, maintain state, and act over extended horizons. As agent systems have evolved from prompt engineering to workflows and context engineering, harness engineering, and agent-native training with co-evolution, a central question has become increasingly important: where does the bottleneck in agent performance reside, in the foundation model, in the execution harness, or in the coupling between them? This survey examines LLM-based agents through a model-harness lens. We first clarify the functional definition of agents and the implementation view of an LLM-based agent as a foundation model coupled with an execution harness. We then analyze the limits of model-centric scaling, trace four paradigms of agent engineering, and decompose the execution harness into six coupled runtime responsibilities: observation, context, control, action, state, and verification. Using this decomposition, we map task properties and domain pressures to harness configurations, review benchmark and evaluation practices, and synthesize model-harness evidence on how runtime design affects long-horizon task completion, efficiency, and reliability. Finally, we identify open challenges in value-aware evaluation, safety, harness generalization, and model-harness co-evolution. Rather than treating agents as models with auxiliary tools, this survey argues that agent quality -- including success, efficiency, safety, and generalization -- emerges from the interaction between model capability, runtime infrastructure, task structure, and evaluation design. A collection of papers discussed in this survey is provided in https://github.com/ggjy/Awesome-Agent-Engineering.
Authors: Bertrand K. Hassani
Abstract: This paper argues that Artificial Intelligence should be understood as a form of monism: a unified substance that cannot be decomposed into separate elements such as data, algorithms, or technical architectures. Drawing from philosophical traditions of monism, dualism, and holism, the paper contends that AI is not merely a collection of components but a single, indivisible essence reflecting the phenomena it replicates. Treating AI as monism has deep implications across multiple dimensions. Epistemologically, it positions AI as the central interpretive force across technological, organisational, and societal domains, while raising ethical and existential concerns regarding singularity, the homogenisation of innovation, and the concentration of decision-making power. At the organisational level, a monistic approach challenges traditional siloed structures, advocating instead for transversal, problem-centric teams whose mandate derives from the integrity of the problem rather than from departmental hierarchy. In project management, it implies a unified vision and an integrated evaluation of complexity in which no single stakeholder perspective dominates the assessment of outcomes. In data and information management, it calls for architectures that reflect the irreducible unity of the phenomena being modelled. Ultimately, this paper calls for a paradigm shift in how AI is conceptualised, governed, and integrated, suggesting that only by embracing AI as monism can organisations achieve genuine agility and avoid the structural inefficiencies inherent to reductionist approaches.
Authors: Liang Chen
Abstract: LLM-as-user-simulation has become core infrastructure for conversational AI: agent benchmarks (tau-bench), training pipelines, and a growing body of fidelity studies all rely on LLMs role-playing the human side of dialogue. Existing frameworks measure communicative fidelity -- whether simulators talk like humans -- against ground truth from paid participants role-playing assigned goals. We argue this has a structural blind spot: when the goal is assigned, the user's willingness is exogenous, so no framework can test whether simulators make decisions like real users whose motivation is endogenous, latent, and decaying. We introduce decision fidelity -- whether a simulated population reproduces the decision-state dynamics of real users facing real, consequential choices -- and measure it on a unique testbed: 2,790 production conversations between an LLM sales agent and real customers, including 793 with verified payment outcomes. Using a teacher-forced probe protocol that holds context and instrument fixed, we find a systematic, outcome-correlated failure we call the disengagement deficit: simulators reproduce eventual buyers almost exactly (depth bias +0.09) but inflate eventual non-buyers toward the purchase frame (depth bias +0.40; d=0.38, p<0.001), halving expressed resistance (25.1% to 13.5%) and nearly doubling deliberation (21.9% to 40.1%) while fabricating no purchases. The deficit replicates across model families (DeepSeek: d=0.41, p=0.002) and resists the obvious fix: instructing the simulator that it may disengage cuts marginal bias five-fold but barely moves the outcome-conditioned contrast (d=0.34, p=0.008). Real non-buyers say "not now" and stop; simulated non-buyers ask about price. Evaluating or training sales and persuasion agents against such simulators overstates funnel progress exactly where it matters most -- the customers who walk away.
Authors: Qingyang Xu
Abstract: Generative AI tutors provide real-time, personalized learning support, but also create a new education inequity: students with access to premium AI services may receive clearer explanations, more personalized guidance, and better scaffolding than students limited to free or low-cost services. To address this challenge, we propose FairTutor, an equity-aware model-routing framework that achieves cost-effective AI tutoring via pedagogically motivated multi-agent orchestration. FairTutor combines query analysis, pedagogical planning, low-cost model generation, evaluator-guided critique and revision, and selective escalation to premium AI models. We introduce access-tier AI Education (AIED) Advantage Gap to measure the quality difference between premium-access and budget-constrained tutoring, and TutorAccessEval, a benchmark spanning math, reading, writing, science, and language learning. Empirical evaluations show that FairTutor achieves 97.1% of premium pedagogical quality (in floor-adjusted Likert scale) while reducing serving cost by 71.6%. Sensitivity analysis reveals a tunable cost--quality Pareto frontier, enabling FairTutor to be tailored to the needs of diverse student populations.
Authors: Sayantari Ghosh, Saumik Bhattacharya, Partha Pratim Chakrabarti
Abstract: We propose a rigorous and systematic mathematical framework for tracking the cognitive trajectories of a user, in the context of algorithmic sycophancy and AI-driven delusional spiraling. Using tools from dynamical systems theory and stochastic differential equations, we explore how individuals perceive, interpret, and update their beliefs as they interact with AI chatbots that possess hidden traits of sycophancy. We treat the evolving conviction as a continuous log-odds state variable, coupled into a stochastic differential equation, navigating a multi-valley potential energy landscape. Our analysis reveals several critical observations governing the stability and rigidity of belief dynamics. We demonstrate that the baseline prior perception of the individual is systematically enhanced by sycophantic feedback beyond a critical threshold. Here, the perceptual potential landscape undergoes a structural phase transition that severely deepens any incremental initial tilt present in the baseline state, transforming the landscape and giving rise to deep, highly resilient attractor basins that trap the individual in unshakeable, self-reinforcing, delusional convictions. Finally, we demonstrate that genuine external information can successfully challenge these rigid states. If this incoming evidence is strong and authentic enough to overcome the internal feedback barrier, it can correct the structural asymmetry caused by sycophancy, inducing a perception reversal that successfully restores the objective belief state.
Authors: Aagam Sogani, Botao Rui, Swetha Vaidyanathan, Rishi Agarwal, Minghao Yan, Shivaram Venkataraman
Abstract: Long-horizon web agents often fail in ways hidden by final-answer evaluation: they may visit useful pages, produce a well-formed answer, and terminate confidently while still missing fields, over-including unsupported items, or relying on stale evidence. We study these failures with Parallel WebBench, a parallel web-exploration benchmark containing 1,679 verified records: 350 manually curated parallel tasks and 1,329 reconstructed records with verified URL-based trajectories. We train WebExplorer-style agents with GRPO under human-only, balanced human-synthetic, and synthetic-heavy data mixtures. At 16k context and 16 interaction rounds, the best GRPO model improves completion over WebExplorer-8B from 50.7% to 96.0% and GPT-4.1-mini-judged element-wise F1 from 0.2489 to 0.4529, but binary accuracy remains far below completion. Trace-level analysis identifies three persistent failure modes: context-bound search loops, premature termination on partial answers, and synthesis collapse after relevant evidence has already been retrieved. These results show that synthetic-data GRPO reduces abstention and improves partial correctness, but leaves a completion-correctness gap that requires evidence-grounded coverage and synthesis diagnostics.
Authors: Yanan Niu
Abstract: We study factual edit propagation in a controlled synthetic knowledge-graph QA setting using a 2x2 grid that crosses loop recurrence with shared-memory access: a dense transformer (Dense), a looped transformer (Loop), a dense backbone with shared memory (Dense+Mem), and a looped backbone with shared memory (loop-memory coupling, LMC). The two factors dissociate. For learning, both routes to repeated shared access -- looped recomputation and repeated memory rereading -- cross the out-of-distribution (OOD) grokking barrier that Dense fails, so repeated shared access is the behavioral regularity, not a specific architecture. For editing, the substrates split along a different axis: applying a single localized factual edit (conditioned on direct success) and measuring 2-hop propagation on a shared pre-edit-correct set, the edit propagates strongly in both memory-bearing cells (LMC 0.78-0.92, Dense+Mem 0.71-0.96) and only weakly in the memory-free ones (Loop 0.04-0.30, Dense 0.00-0.03). The split is along the memory axis, not the loop axis: every memory-bearing seed exceeds every memory-free seed, with no detectable difference between the two memory cells. Crucially Dense+Mem has no recurrence, so the propagating ingredient is an addressable site that an edit can write to and later computation rereads, not loop recomputation; Loop is at best a partial intermediate. The affordance survives coarsening the store (N=128 to N=13): propagation attenuates but the memory/no-memory split persists, so fine granularity buys precision rather than the affordance itself. These results dissociate learning competence from editing affordance -- repeated shared access suffices to grok, but edit propagation depends on whether the substrate exposes an addressable memory that the forward computation can write to and later reread, an affordance that loop recurrence provides only partially.
Authors: Ahmed Awadallah, Sahil Gupta, Yash Lara, Yadong Lu, Hussein Mozannar, Akshay Nambi, Zach Nussbaum, Yash Pandya, Aravind Rajeswaran, Corby Rosset, Alexey Taymanov, Luiz do Valle, Vibhav Vineet, Spencer Whitehead, Andrew Zhao
Abstract: Collecting computer use data from human demonstrations is expensive and slow, motivating the need for scalable generation strategies. This requires two key ingredients: environments in which agents can act and verifiers that can judge whether their demonstrations succeeded. We introduce FaraGen1.5, a scalable data pipeline for computer use agents composed of three modular components: environments, solvers, and verifiers. FaraGen1.5 uses both live websites and synthetic environments that faithfully simulate domains gated by authentication or that require irreversible actions. It employs a solver harness that can be powered by multiple models, including strong frontier models such as GPT-5.4, and also incorporates a user simulator to enable multi-turn rollouts. Finally, FaraGen1.5 scores the resulting trajectories with three complementary verifiers covering task correctness, efficiency, and critical-point adherence. Using data produced by this pipeline, we train Fara1.5, a family of native computer use agents (CUAs) at three scales built on Qwen3.5 (4B, 9B, and 27B). To train these models, we employ a supervised finetuning (SFT) recipe that carefully balances data from FaraGen1.5 for broad coverage, specific high-value tasks, and target model deficiencies in an iterative approach. Each model sets a new state of the art for its size class on browser-use benchmarks: Fara1.5-9B reaches 63.4% on Online-Mind2Web and 86.6% on WebVoyager, while Fara1.5-27B achieves 72.3% on Online-Mind2Web, which is competitive with much larger proprietary systems.
Authors: Yuchen Zhang, Anietta Weckauff, Diego Garcia-Olano, Maksym Andriushchenko
Abstract: Emergent misalignment (EM) is a phenomenon in which models generalize with narrow fine-tuning, leading to broad (yet uneven) misalignment across evaluation questions. We study EM and its variability directly through the components of fine-tuning: training dynamics, model priors, and data. (1) We first explored how in-domain training loss relates to out-of-domain alignment scores across datasets and model families. Then, we tried to induce potential alternative local minima through different learning schedules for one narrow fine-tuning, but did not find strong runs with better broad alignment scores conditioned on similar or lower training loss. (2) We found that although the mean and standard deviations of the misaligned model scores are usually statistically different from those of the pre-trained model, there are some potential signals on overall positive correlation. The evaluation prompt-only activations from both the pre-trained and the original instruct models (prior to narrow fine-tuning) could predict fine-grained alignment scores after narrow fine-tuning. (3) Finally, we compared activation deltas before and after narrow fine-tuning and found moderate-to-high subspace overlap and similarity between the resulting activation shifts for training and evaluation prompts. Subspace overlaps between training and evaluation prompt activations correlate with their shifts' similarities when measuring with the last prompt-token activations. The train-evaluation data prompt overlap is controlled against overlap computed from random vectors and evaluation prompts activations.
Authors: Felipe Nunes de Souza Camargo
Abstract: Belief revision is a process in which an agent begins to believe in something she previously did not. I begin the paper by presenting, based on (G\"ardenfors, 1998; Hansson, 1999), postulates for belief revision that constitute the basis of the AGM theory. I will then briefly show the semantics of a modal logic introduced in (van Ditmarsch, 2005), which I call `$P$'. This logic formalizes static epistemic states and has greater expressive power than AGM in doing so because it captures the quantitative notion of "degrees of conviction". The third step is to introduce revision operators on $P$ and, mostly following (van Ditmarsch, 2005), obtain the Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL) I call `$P*$'. It models processes of belief revision in several ways. Original results are presented in the following two sections. The first one of these sections revolves around a formalization of AGM postulates within $P*$ by proving some theorems related to the satisfaction of those postulates by revisions defined in $P*$. The last section features an analysis of $P*$'s revisions that go beyond the mere satisfaction of postulates. I compare their formal behavior with respect to some philosophical criteria. At last, I conclude that the functions presented in (van Ditmarsch, 2005) are not good formalizations of the philosophical intuition behind AGM. Instead, it is captured by the function $*^0$ originally defined in this paper (but highly inspired by (van Benthem, 2007)). An implementation of this function is also provided.
Authors: Lingzhi Yang, Yubo Fan, Song Wu, Gilchan Park
Abstract: LLM agents can write code and call tools, but reliable bioinformatics work requires long-horizon interaction with workflow software, typed data objects, provenance, and biological checks. We study this setting through Galaxy workflow execution. The agent must explore task data, construct or adapt an executable workflow DAG, bind inputs and dataset collections, monitor execution, debug failures, and validate biological outputs. We propose Process-Reward Tactic Evolution, a Galaxy-based training framework that turns verified workflow rollouts into reusable \tactics. During training, agents practice on curriculum-organized Galaxy tasks in Agent Gym; process verifiers score workflow construction, software interaction, execution, and biological correctness; successful and failed traces are distilled into a tactic library. At inference, the trained executor, Process-Reward Tactic Evolution, uses this library to execute held-out peer reviewed Galaxy workflow converted BioWorkflow Bench and BioAgent Bench tasks in isolated environments. The paper evaluates whether process-supervised tactic accumulation improves long-horizon bioinformatics workflow completion, biological correctness, and execution efficiency over no-memory and reflection-style baselines.
Authors: Ningwei Bai, Xinyu Tan, Harry Gardner, Zhengyang Zhong, Liuhaichen Yang, Luoyu Zhang, Zhekai Duan, Monkgogi Galeitsiwe, Zezhi Tang
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable robots to execute manipulation tasks from natural-language instructions grounded in visual observations. However, existing VLA interfaces primarily rely on speech or text input, limiting accessibility for deaf, hard-of-hearing, and speech-impaired users. We present SignVLA, a real-time sign-language-guided VLA framework for accessible human-robot interaction. The system introduces a modular sign-to-text interface that converts visual sign gestures into semantic instructions compatible with downstream VLA policies. Given video streams, SignVLA extracts hand landmark features and employs an attention-enhanced Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network to capture temporal gesture dynamics for alphabet- and command-level sign recognition. A temporal stabilization module further improves prediction consistency in real-time interaction settings.The generated instruction sequence is then passed to a downstream VLA policy for sign-conditioned robotic manipulation. Experimental results demonstrate stable real-time sign recognition and successful execution of manipulation tasks driven by sign-language inputs. Our findings suggest that lightweight temporal sign recognition can serve as an effective and practical accessibility layer for multimodal embodied intelligence.
Authors: Xiaolong Jin, Xuandong Zhao, Wenbo Guo, Xiangyu Zhang, Dawn Song
Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has driven substantial progress in large language model reasoning, but relies on ground-truth supervision that is costly or infeasible, especially in coding tasks. Recent work addresses this by deriving rewards from a model's own signals, such as majority voting or confidence-based scores, achieving notable success on mathematical reasoning benchmarks. However, code generation poses distinct challenges: programs are structurally complex, semantically equivalent solutions may differ syntactically, and verification typically requires execution. Whether these intrinsic reward methods transfer effectively to code remains unexplored. In this work, we present a systematic empirical study of intrinsic reward methods for code generation. We conduct extensive experiments on LiveCodeBench, systematically evaluating representative certainty-based Reinforcement Learning from Internal Feedback (RLIF) approaches under different training scenarios and hyperparameter settings. Our experiments reveal that certainty-based methods yield early gains but inevitably collapse: models progressively shorten outputs and lose reasoning capability, with collapse speed sensitive to sample size and temperature. When used to initialize RLVR training, RLIF pre-training offers no significant improvement over training from scratch. We also provide actionable recommendations for using intrinsic rewards for training code reasoning models. Our study shows both the promise and limitations of intrinsic reward methods for code, informing future work on code models and agents.
Authors: Baiyang Qu, Leonardo Ranaldi, Xi Wang, Marco Valentino
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising path to automate Clinical Trial Matching (CTM), but still struggle with the deterministic verification required for complex eligibility criteria. Conversely, purely symbolic methods provide formal rigour but break down when faced with incomplete patient records and noisy clinical evidence. To bridge this gap, we investigate a hybrid framework for CTM combining LLMs with logical verification. In particular, we introduce an abductive neurosymbolic CTM framework ({\alpha}NeSy-CTM), which leverages the linguistic and world knowledge in LLMs to support reasoning over noisy and underspecified clinical text. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that {\alpha}NeSy-CTM substantially outperforms standalone LLM baselines, achieving up to 30% relative improvement over zero-shot baselines. In addition, our analyses confirm the impact of abductive reasoning on CTM, with {\alpha}NeSy-CTM exhibiting improved accuracy, specificity, and robustness over a non-abductive neurosymbolic setting. Furthermore, {\alpha}NeSy-CTM and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning prove highly complementary, highlighting the potential for a hybrid routing policy. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates the impact of neurosymbolic methods for automating CTM, providing a path toward the next generation of auditable, LLM-driven clinical applications.
Authors: Henrique O. Caetano, Rafael Arone, Carlos Dias Maciel
Abstract: Finding the source of failures, known as Root Cause Analysis (RCA), is essential for identifying the root causes of anomalies and maintaining the reliability of complex systems. While causal theory has advanced data-driven RCA, existing frameworks assume causal sufficiency, failing to account for the unobserved latent variables prevalent in real-world environments. To address this gap, we propose PAG-RCA. This framework models system failures as parametric interventions over Partial Ancestral Graphs (PAGs) to perform RCA in the presence of latent variables. We use standard causal identification algorithms to find the source of failures by quantifying causal effects over the PAG. When an effect is identifiable, candidate root causes are ranked based on their exact intervention effects. When effects are structurally unidentifiable, our framework (for the first time in the RCA literature) integrates partial identification to evaluate and score candidates using analytical causal bounds. By integrating latent variables and partial identification at once our framework ensures robust RCA even under data scarcity and latent-variable scenarios where traditional methods degrade. Evaluations on synthetic data, microservice anomaly benchmarks and power-grid cascading failures demonstrate that PAG-RCA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art data-driven baselines. By improving data-driven RCA performance under data scarcity, this methodology advances reliable automated diagnostics in partially observable complex networks.
Authors: Sergei Trashchenkov
Abstract: Executable evaluation -- checking the consequences of an agent's actions with a program rather than grading its prose -- has become a prominent way to assess tool-using AI agents in software settings. Electric power engineering has not yet had an analogous benchmark: language-model use is still dominated by retrieval and text question answering, while agents acting on power-system artifacts remain mostly academic prototypes. We introduce the Power Systems Agent Benchmark, an executable benchmark for power-engineering agents. An agent receives a structured task and returns a structured solution; a deterministic evaluator recomputes the engineering quantities, checks operational constraints, and returns a feasibility flag, a normalized score, and explicit violations. The benchmark contains 41 task families across eight areas of power engineering, from power flow and protection to stability, microgrids, reliability, power quality, and forecasting. Each task is grounded in a citable source, standard, or documented engineering formulation. To resist contamination, held-out cases are synthesized on demand by per-family generators from private seeds: the construction is inspectable, but the instances remain private. In a reference evaluation with three command-line agents, the strongest score near the compact tier's ceiling, a smaller open model trails, and public and held-out performance are broadly consistent; a separate public-split grid with OpenCode and Aider probes harness effects. The reference evaluation doubles as quality control: unanimous failures flag candidate task or evaluator defects, and it exposed a latent evaluator bug missed by self-consistency checks. The evaluators are compact deterministic surrogates, but the task contract allows their internals to be upgraded to simulator-backed checks without changing how tasks are posed or solved.
Authors: Ethan Knights, Christopher Conlan, Temilorun Gbolahan, Stephen Waterman, Gurpreet Muctor
Abstract: Trust in the application of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) relies on well-governed measurable evidence of performance and safety. In practice, however, evaluation data is often fragmented across systems, inconsistently structured and difficult to compare. We introduce the Generative Responsible AI Data Evaluation Schema (GRAIDES) as a lightweight open-source data model for centralising AI observability across popular vendors. Practical blueprints for code, architecture and statistical evaluation are shared as guidance about how to approach generative system assurance at the organisational level. Illustrative case study results are reported from Westminster City Council's AI catalogue with a focus on measuring human-model alignment including detecting systematic disagreement between evaluators. By framing evaluations as a data modelling problem, GRAIDES provides a practical pathway toward more consistent and reproducible benchmarking, tuning and assurance activities for generative AI systems.
Authors: Han Zhou, Yu Luo, Dianxiang Xu
Abstract: Generating formal specifications for C programs remains a challenge in formal verification due to the manual effort, expertise, and semantic precision required. While recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) offer promise in automating specification synthesis, current approaches often lack semantic depth and produce unverifiable or incomplete contracts. To address these limitations, we introduce AutoACSL, a novel framework that integrates LLM prompting with semantic features extracted from Code Property Graphs (CPGs). AutoACSL performs static analyses to extract key semantic elements, including arithmetic operations, loop and recursion structures, and return value propagation, which are encoded into structured prompts. These prompts enable the LLM not only to generate normal behavioral specifications but also to include constraints that prevent inputs leading to runtime errors. AutoACSL employs a feedback-driven synthesis loop, where candidate specifications are verified using Frama-C/WP and refined iteratively until verification succeeds or a termination condition is met. Evaluated on 604 programs drawn from diverse datasets, AutoACSL achieves a 98% specification generation success ratio and a 96% full proof ratio when paired with Gemini-3. Compared to a code-only baseline, AutoACSL improves the full proof ratio by 24.7% to 51.7% across four LLMs (GPT-o4 Mini, GPT-5.2, Grok-4.1, and Gemini-3), demonstrating that integrating large language models with CPG-based static analysis substantially enhances both generation robustness and verification effectiveness for automated ACSL specification synthesis.
Authors: Honjar Xing, Jefferson Lin, Henry Lieberman
Abstract: Programming by Demonstration (PbD) offers a human-centered way to author procedural knowledge for LLM agents: users communicate what they want by showing rather than by writing prompts or code, making agent authoring accessible to non-programmers. The natural output of a PbD recording is a flat action log, but how this log is organized before being passed to the agent is an open design question with significant consequences for plan quality. We propose grouping recorded actions into labeled, hierarchical subgoals and evaluate the effect of this organizational structure in a controlled experiment. Across 85 web automation tasks, we compare a zero-shot baseline against four demonstration formats that share identical action sequences but differ in structure. On 43 natural-language tasks with vague descriptions, hierarchically grouped demonstrations improve pass rates from 76.7\% to 90.7\% (paired permutation test $p{=}0.034$; win-loss 6:0), while flat demonstrations show a smaller, non-significant improvement. On 42 tasks with precise descriptions, no format provides any benefit, confirming that the hierarchical advantage arises specifically when descriptions leave procedural details ambiguous. Ablation shows that subgoal grouping alone drives the effect: preconditions, postconditions, and parameter annotations add no measurable benefit. These results offer a concrete design recommendation for PbD pipelines and, more broadly, for any system that feeds procedural context to an LLM agent: segment action sequences into named subgoal groups rather than presenting flat step lists.
Authors: Jieyi Wang, Bingxuan Li, Nanyi Jiang, Desong Meng, Zirui Fan, Yuxin Guo, Jiayu Liu, Kunlun Zhu, Eddie Yang, Xiusi Chen, Pan Lu, Bingxin Zhao
Abstract: Biomedical researchers increasingly use AI-generated analyses and reports to interpret protein-level signals, but static outputs are often insufficient for research decision-making, where users need to inspect evidence, assess uncertainty, compare mechanisms, and refine hypotheses. We present \textsc{BioInsight}, a multi-agent system that moves from static biomedical report generation to interactive evidence-centered interactive interface generation. Given a disease name, a protein association table, and optional cohort metadata, BioInsight organizes disease-specific evidence through typed intermediate artifacts, including ranked pathways, literature evidence packets, protein-level reasoning notes, citation-grounded reports, dashboard schemas, and rendered interactive interfaces. The system decomposes evidence retrieval from mechanistic reasoning, normalizes citations through deterministic components, and converts the same structured evidence used in the report into an interactive interface. We evaluate BioInsight on standardized biomedical QA, challenging protein-function reasoning, and end-to-end biomedical evidence synthesis. Results show that BioInsight achieves best, and suggest that biomedical AI systems should move beyond text-only and static reports toward provenance-preserving, interactive evidence artifacts.
Authors: Sheng Zhang, Qin Liu, Renqian Luo, Shufang Xie, Reuben Tan, Sean Hayes, Gregory Bryman, Wendong Ge, Roxy Zhang, Oluwaseun Egbelowo, Kelly Yee, Hoifung Poon
Abstract: Scientific discovery workflows often depend on structured curation from the literature. This is difficult for current agents because the key evidence is scattered across long text, dense tables, and figures, and the final records often require reasoning across multiple evidence fragments rather than copying a single span. We study scientific curation from multimodal sources and introduce Beaver, an agent harness that extracts structured information from scientific papers while preserving provenance to the supporting evidence. Beaver combines a frontier agent with multimodal evidence tooling, task scaffolding, and artifact-grounded autoresearch. These components turn curation into a staged, auditable workflow and enable an iterative evaluate--diagnose--revise loop, where persistent run artifacts expose stage-localized failures and guide harness updates. Experiments show that Beaver reaches 81.0 on Gold-Referenced Attribute Score (GRAS), an attribute-level measure of agreement with gold curated records, outperforming frontier agents by over 23 absolute points. Ablations show that task scaffolding, multimodal evidence tooling, and provenance traces each contribute meaningfully to performance, while attribute-level analysis shows the largest gains on high-value attributes that require cross-modal reasoning and normalization. These results show that, for scientific curation from papers with multimodal evidence, harness design is a central determinant of agent performance.
Authors: Yoshiyuki Ohmura, Earnest Kota Carr, Yasuo Kuniyoshi
Abstract: A self-determining system is defined as one in which causes originating within the system influence the system itself. This definition raises the question of how to specify system boundaries. Although the concept of "closure" is commonly used for this purpose, defining boundaries solely in terms of causal relations introduce challenges, such as how to handle external causes and circular causality. To address this issue, we introduce two types of asymmetric relations: causal and constitutive. We propose that system boundaries can be defined as closures of loops formed by these relations, referred to as causal-constitutive loops. By constraining constitutive relations, the resulting system necessarily includes internal causes and thereby satisfies self-determination. Furthermore, to prevent reduction to supervenience, constitutive relations must involve at least two independent variables. This minimal requirement leads to two interdependent loops, which implies a dual-process organization.
Authors: Jingyi Chai, Bingyang Zheng, Xiangrui Liu, Hao Lu, Zihang Zhou, Tianchen Wang, Kemeng Zhang, Siheng Chen
Abstract: Forecasting future events is a critical challenge for large language model (LLM) agents, spanning domains from elections and monetary policy to financial markets. However, evaluating progress on this task presents a fundamental trade-off between efficiency and environment fidelity. While live evaluation benchmarks suffer from an inherently slow feedback loop, existing retrospective replays typically restrict agents to static, pre-frozen databases that sacrifice the environmental realism of actual deployments. To tackle this issue, we introduce Agentic Time Machine (TM), an infrastructure that approximately reconstructs the web state at any chosen past time by filtering post-cutoff content. Leveraging this evaluation infrastructure, we further propose a planner-solver-aggregator multi-agent framework that breaks each question into diverse analytical angles, gathers evidence in parallel, and combines the results into a single forecast. Experiments show that offline scores under TM correlate strongly with live FutureX scores, validating that TM offers a fast and reliable sandbox for forecasting-agent evaluation. On FutureX-Past and Polymarket evaluated under TM, our framework achieves the highest score among strong closed-book, tool-augmented, and self-consistency baselines. On the official FutureX live leaderboard, our system achieves the best average rank over four consecutive weeks, including 1st place in May Week 1. As of June 17, it also ranks 1st on FutureX's official eight-week overall leaderboard.
Authors: Vishal Srivastava, Tanmay Sah
Abstract: Organizations deploying AI face two fundamental governance challenges: managing AI risk and sustaining AI value. Both depend on evidence whose sufficiency cannot be taken for granted. We call the shared underlying challenge the AI Evaluability Gap: the condition in which organizations lack sufficient evidence to support high-confidence governance decisions regarding either risk or value. We argue that this gap reflects a category error in current practice. Existing governance approaches focus primarily on properties of systems, such as safety, fairness, reliability, compliance, and value, while paying comparatively little attention to the evidentiary foundations required to justify decisions about those properties. We further argue that AI governance encompasses both operational decisions regarding whether a system may operate and investment decisions regarding whether it merits continued organizational resources. To address this problem, we introduce Evaluability, defined as the capability of a system to generate, maintain, and renew evidence sufficient to support high-confidence governance decisions over time. We formalize governance decisions as functions of calibrated confidence Conf(D|E) and identify six properties of evaluable evidence: observability, attributability, intervenability, verifiability, calibration, and temporal validity. The framework distinguishes Operational Certification, which relies primarily on structural evidence to justify deployment decisions, from Investment Certification, which relies primarily on causal evidence to justify continued resource allocation. We argue that evidence sufficiency is a missing layer of AI governance and that closing the AI Evaluability Gap is a prerequisite for both managing risk and sustaining value in AI-enabled organizations.
Authors: Hanchun Wang
Abstract: AI-assisted research systems generate many failed attempts, but those failures rarely become a durable, shared knowledge asset. We propose a negative knowledge memory layer: a curator agent converts each failed attempt into a bounded, typed record in a shared bank, and a downstream research agent explicitly adopts or rejects those records before proposing its next experiment. We evaluate this layer in two settings: same-task retry on ScienceAgentBench and cross-task scientific research on two nonlinear math-physics PDE problems. The negative knowledge layer outperforms vanilla AutoResearch baselines while using fewer tokens; agents with the negative knowledge bank solve new tasks that all baselines fail to solve in PDE systems research. We also show that the previous negative knowledge bank can transfer and enhance AutoResearch on different PDE problems. These results suggest that structured negative knowledge is a knowledge asset that should be explicitly maintained in broader AI-engaged scientific research beyond a memory-compression or debugging aid, alongside positive findings, as a collective infrastructure for scientific memory. Code is available at https://github.com/hch-wang/Negative_Knowledge.
Authors: Noor Islam S. Mohammad, Mahmudul Hasan
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) deployed for logical reasoning in knowledge-intensive domains exhibit a subtle but critical failure: coherence can be vacuously achieved through systematic abstention. A model that withholds commitment to either entailment or refutation satisfies negation consistency while providing no utility. We introduce Coherence Under Commitment (CUC), a dual-query evaluation paradigm that jointly measures consistency and decisiveness. CUC contributes three innovations: (1) a commitment score $c(\varphi) = p(\varphi) + p(\lnot\varphi)$ quantifying probability mass allocated to decisive outcomes; (2) a \textbf{deterministic elicitation protocol} via normalized YES/NO log probabilities, eliminating sampling variance; and (3) a 3-way decision framework (True/False/Uncertain) operationalizing the coherence-commitment trade-off into metrics. Experiments on four open-weight LLMs (1B-3B) across 204 FOLIO examples expose a sharp frontier. Qwen2.5-3B achieves near-zero contradiction ($\mathbb{E}[v_{\mathrm{neg}}]{=}0.025$) but only $7.4\%$ coverage, while TinyLlama-1.1B reaches $79.4\%$ coverage with violations on every example. Coherence-only evaluation would rank the abstaining model first; CUC exposes this as vacuous, and the frontier generalizes to LogiQA~v2 ($\rho{=}0.97$). We argue that evaluation must report both coherence and non-vacuous commitment and release a toolkit for standardized assessment.
Authors: Jianzhe Lin, Fei Wang, Xiaolin Li, Rajeshkumar Golani, Jubin Chheda
Abstract: Industrial LLM teams often ship behavior updates by repeatedly DPO-training a base model on sequences of related preference-data campaigns. The dominant failure mode in this regime is not always classical catastrophic forgetting: a pipeline may preserve previously learned behaviors while still failing to accumulate reusable methodological knowledge about how to train the next campaign. We call this failure mode scientific amnesia. This paper turns that practitioner intuition into a measurable industrial problem. We contribute: (i) a diagnostic suite for amnesia, (ii) a Program-based pipeline that chains FSDP-sharded DPO checkpoints across Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct runs, (iii) a 30-campaign HumanEval subdomain benchmark, and (iv) a comparative diagnostic study of five strategy proposers: random memory, rule-based scheduling, retrieval-only memory, warm-start Bayesian optimization, and MSCL, a meta-scientific memory and reasoner candidate. Across a single-seed 5-condition * 3-step real-LM chain, 4 of 5 candidates degrade in step-level peak pass@1, including MSCL; only the deliberately conservative rule-based schedule improves. Follow-up pilots qualify rather than overturn this finding: in a heterogeneous chain, MSCL is the only completed candidate that improves, whereas in a small multi-seed homogeneous sweep, retrieval-only has the best mean Delta and no pairwise candidate gap is statistically distinguishable. The contribution is therefore diagnostic, not a claim that MSCL solves the problem: scientific amnesia is observable in a production-like continual-DPO pipeline, and conclusions about interventions depend sharply on chain regime, evaluator design, and seed coverage.
Authors: Jianzhe Lin
Abstract: Self-improvement can self-regress. In REINFORCE post-training for code, a model can quickly improve on its optimized metric and then collapse within the same training campaign. We study this in a controlled multi-seed testbed using Qwen-2.5-3B and Qwen-2.5-7B, trained on competitive-programming tasks with binary CodeGrader reward across 10 sequential 20-step campaigns. Across campaigns, pass@1 shows a robust rise-then-collapse pattern: it peaks within tens of gradient steps and then falls back, sometimes to near zero. This is not cross-task catastrophic forgetting, but within-task policy over-optimization on a fixed distribution; KL- and EWC-style constraints do not prevent it. We ask where the control loop should sit. We compare three levels: CARE, a between-campaign memory mechanism with a capability posterior, transfer gate, and regression-aware belief revision; ES, a within-campaign early-stop rule that rolls forward the peak checkpoint and sets the next budget to peak_step+3; and GRPO, which changes the RL update using group-relative reward normalization. The answer is regime-dependent. On Qwen-2.5-3B, where naive REINFORCE is fragile, CARE v2 nearly doubles end-of-chain pass@1 from 4.9% to 9.5%, with paired bootstrap 95% CI [+0.4,+8.9] and gains in 4/5 seeds. On Qwen-2.5-7B, CARE reaches parity with naive REINFORCE, 13.8% vs. 11.8%, while ES reaches 22.2% [14.1,28.0]. Out-of-the-box GRPO reaches 20.7% [15.7,25.1], nearly matching REINFORCE+ES. GRPO raises the floor but does not remove the cliff. Its 7B gain mainly comes from better between-campaign carryover, while the within-campaign peak-to-end gap remains about 17 points under both REINFORCE and GRPO. GRPO+ES gives mixed evidence: 2/3 seeds improve, but one final cliff lowers the mean to 17.0% [0.0,28.1]. A Gemma-3-4B pilot shows the same signature, suggesting the phenomenon is not limited to Qwen.
Authors: Victor Lavrenko, Anastasiia Molodnitskaia
Abstract: Large language models can produce confident but protocol-invalid answers in domains where procedural compliance is critical. This paper presents Answer Engineering, a deterministic runtime and authoring layer that applies localized rule-guided interventions to the visible reasoning trajectory during standard autoregressive generation, without retraining, modifying model weights, or performing global search. The method is evaluated on a controlled clinical benchmark for sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL), where correct management depends on protocol-consistent interpretation of symptom timing, Weber/Rinne tuning-fork findings, and otoscopic findings. In the benchmark, step-by-step reasoning shifted rather than eliminated errors: compliant outcomes for SSNHL decreased from 54.5% under unguided generation to 25.1%, while acceptance on the conductive contrast condition increased from 1.6% to 58.9%. Local trajectory editing increased SSNHL compliance to 83.5% and conductive-case adherence to 77.9%, raising balanced accuracy from 42.0% under reasoning-only generation to 80.7%. The results support a systems-level view in which protocol adherence can be improved through auditable runtime control of reasoning trajectories, while also identifying limitations caused by rule coverage, trigger reliability, and persistent diagnosis-first generation dynamics.
Authors: Rajat Agarwal, Suvidha Tripathi, Shubham Sharma
Abstract: Conversational AI agents in Customer Experience (CX) typically suffer from a Closed-World Constraint, ignoring high-velocity external shifts like viral trends or outages. Ad-hoc web search attempts to bridge this gap but often introduce prohibitive latency and context poisoning. We introduce PulseCX, a framework that decouples knowledge acquisition from consumption. Adopting a structure-first paradigm, PulseCX employs an asynchronous agent to linearize signals into a Decay-Aware Temporal Knowledge Graph (DA-TKG) governed by reinforcement--decay dynamics to actively manage information lifecycles. By coupling this self-evolving memory with hierarchical intent gating, PulseCX removes synchronous search bottlenecks (<10ms overhead) and drives significant gains in Intent Resolution (IRR) and Customer Satisfaction (s-CSAT) in dynamic environments.
Authors: Zihan Yu, Xianling Zeng, Zhiming Xue, Yalun Qi, Sichen Zhao
Abstract: The rapid growth of large-scale AI workloads, particularly Large Language Model (LLM) training and inference, is fundamentally reshaping the operational dynamics of hyperscale data centers. Unlike traditional cloud workloads, AI-driven jobs exhibit bursty, high-intensity, and rapidly shifting resource demands, often leading to sudden capacity stress that cannot be effectively handled by reactive threshold-based mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a deployment-oriented, burst-aware early warning framework for proactive capacity stress prediction under AI workload surges. We formulate the problem as a high-recall forecasting task over multivariate telemetry windows, with the explicit goal of enabling operational intervention before system degradation occurs. The proposed framework integrates workload intensity, temporal variation, and system pressure signals, and employs a lightweight tree-based learning model to capture nonlinear interactions in highly imbalanced environments. To evaluate the system under realistic conditions, we introduce an AI workload surge injection methodology that simulates burst-driven demand patterns observed in large-scale AI systems. Our XGBoost-based model achieves an ROC AUC of 0.697 and an AP of 0.670, significantly outperforming baseline methods. Under deployment-oriented threshold selection, the framework achieves a Recall of 0.914, enabling the detection of the majority of stress-prone periods with acceptable false-alarm cost. Beyond predictive performance, we show how the proposed framework can be integrated into operational control loops to support proactive actions such as workload throttling and resource scaling. Our results highlight the practical value of high-recall, learning-based early warning systems in enabling resilient and adaptive data center operations in the era of AI-driven workloads.
Authors: Junle Chen, Wei Chen, Yehong Xu, Zhengjun Huang, Yuqian Wu, Zhoujin Tian, Kai Wang, Lei Wang, Xiaofang Zhou
Abstract: Interactive travel planning has become a popular use case for language models. Agents are deployed to manage evolving preferences and unexpected disruptions over multiple turns. Such settings require models to make complex, profile-conditioned planning decisions. However, existing benchmarks often evaluate feasibility, personalization, or interaction in relatively isolated settings. We therefore introduce Trip+ to measure the ability of agents to plan travel holistically. In Trip+, given traveler profiles and dynamic interactions, agents must generate and revise minute-level itineraries. End-to-end traveler experiences are evaluated via an LLM-based simulator, enabling the assessment of subjective metrics like fatigue. Our scenarios range from simple request resolutions to complex environment-driven replanning. We evaluate 18 LMs and find a consistent gap in experiential quality. Models favor technically feasible but exhausting itineraries that diverge sharply from profiled traveler preferences.
Authors: Marija Slavkovik, Liuwen Yu, Leon van der Torre, Reka Markovich
Abstract: Artificial intelligent agents and autonomous systems are embedded in our environments. They are both a commercial product and a personal tool that generates a lot of data and can draw conclusions from it: machines generate and keep secrets. But should machines protect all secrets? It has been shown that artificial agents are able to whistleblow and it has been argued that digital multi-agent environments should allow for agents in them to whistleblow. We argue that machine whistleblowing must be normative and principled and routed in the existing understanding of whistleblowing as an important rule-breaking mechanism in society. We also argue that there is a need for government regulators to formulate an informed stance on both what machines should be allowed to whistleblow on and how to legally protect those who develop whistleblowing machines
Authors: Zihang Tian, Jingsen Zhang, Rui Li, Xiaohe Bo, Yuanzi Li, Xu Chen
Abstract: Reinforcement learning for multi-step LLM agents often relies on scalar rewards that indicate success but cannot explain why a trajectory is good or bad. Rubric-based rewards improve interpretability through natural-language criteria, but existing methods score at the trajectory level and freeze the scorer behind a closed-source judge, leaving step-level credit assignment unresolved and the judge itself static. We propose ARCO (Adaptive Rubric CO-evolution), a rubric framework in which a same-scale model $\mu$ shares a backbone with two heads: a generation head that produces per-step criteria, and a score head that predicts rubric-conditioned step-level rewards. A trajectory decomposition constraint ties the sum of step rewards to the terminal outcome, enabling credit assignment without step-level labels, while $\mu$ and the policy $\pi$ are jointly updated on on-policy data so that the rubric content and the scoring function co-evolve at the parameter level. Across HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA, and MuSiQue with two open-source backbones, ARCO improves the best EM in every setting over strong outcome-, rubric-, and process-reward baselines, and analyses show that its rubrics are step-specific, robust to design choices, and useful for diagnosing agent behavior. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/zihangtian/ARCO.
Authors: Xiaoliang Wu, Qiyang Sun, Yupei Li, Erfan Loweimi, Jennifer Williams, Zhengjun Yue
Abstract: Dysarthria severity assessment is essential for therapy planning and longitudinal monitoring, yet manual perceptual rating is time-consuming and variable across clinicians. Although deep learning models achieve strong performance, their black-box nature limits clinical adoption. Existing speech explainability methods typically provide acoustic feature importance scores that are difficult for end-users to interpret. We propose an influence-based, instance-level explainability framework that explains each decision through supportive and competing training samples. Using gradient-based influence approximations, we compute per-utterance influence scores to identify supportive and competing training samples for each prediction. Controlled deletion experiments from 5 to 20 percent validate the explanations, showing that removing highly influential samples systematically shifts predictions. This approach provides auditable explanations by linking decisions to perceptible reference cases.
Authors: Yu Luo
Abstract: Social intelligence is a core competency for language agents, yet current research primarily focuses on static capability evaluation rather than how these skills are continuously shaped and accumulated. This gap calls for a shift toward sustainable learning paradigms. Currently, two methodological pain points exist: social interaction trajectories lack unified structured representations to form iterable learning signals, and capability improvement and retention are typically studied in isolation, hindering the assessment of continuous evolution. To bridge this gap, we propose the Social World Model. We decompose social interaction into five dimensions (scene setting, observation, mental state, action, and dialogue) to build a closed-loop learning framework. In this setup, agents collect interaction experiences, convert them into preference signals for model updating, and redeploy the updated policy for continued learning. Additionally, we provide a reusable data synthesis mechanism and a lifelong learning benchmark, transforming social capabilities from an "object of evaluation" into an "object of sustainable training". Validating our framework on the ASCENT-Bench, the interactively trained Qwen2.5-7B model outperforms its baseline across all five core metrics. Notably, it matches the closed-source Gemini 3 Flash in completion rate, exceeds it in pass rate, and achieves zero forgetting across three difficulty levels. Unlike prior works that merely report static comparisons or capability decay, this end-to-end approach provides a trainable, verifiable, and retainable pathway, demonstrating that small open-source models can sustainably acquire competitive social coordination capabilities.
Authors: Shahab Salehi, Luca Lusvarghi, Miguel Sepulcre, Javier Gozalvez
Abstract: Trajectory prediction allows autonomous vehicles to anticipate the future behavior of surrounding objects (or agents) and, accordingly, maximize the safety and efficiency of their driving. State-of-the-art Transformed-based interaction-aware trajectory prediction models, which rely on attention mechanisms to capture multi-agent interactions and maximize prediction accuracy, are commonly trained and evaluated on long-range high-quality datasets. These datasets are typically obtained by aggregating data from multiple vehicles or drones and removing any object detection or tracking noise offline. Yet, information about a surrounding object's state (its position, speed, heading) is far from being noiseless in real-world deployments. Object state estimation is affected by perception uncertainties and localization errors that can be particularly large for objects received via Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications. In this paper, we analyze the impact of noisy object state information on the trajectory prediction accuracy of a state-of-the-art Transformer-based interaction-aware trajectory prediction model. Our study demonstrates that trajectory prediction accuracy can rapidly deteriorate as the noise intensity increases. Numerical results show that the prediction accuracy can reduce by a 1.3x factor under small noise levels and by as much as a 3.9x factor under the highest (yet realistic) noise conditions. These findings reveal the strong sensitivity of trajectory prediction models to noisy data, underscoring the need for more realistic training and evaluation datasets as well as noise mitigation strategies.
Authors: Chubin Zhang, Zhenglin Wan, Xingrui Yu, Jingxuan Wu, Qi Wen, Pengfei Zhou, Wangbo Zhao, Ivor Tsang
Abstract: Runtime oversight for LLM agents is commonly framed as scalar risk prediction: estimate failure likelihood, confidence, or uncertainty, then intervene once the score crosses a threshold. We argue that this framing targets the wrong object for control. The relevant question is not how likely the agent is to fail if it continues, but whether an available intervention would improve the outcome. Two trajectory prefixes can have the same risk estimate while requiring different actions, because one remains recoverable and the other does not. We formalize this mismatch as target error and identify intervention advantage, the expected utility gain from intervening rather than continuing, as the decision object for oversight. To measure this mismatch, we introduce prefix branching, a same-prefix counterfactual protocol that executes candidate actions from identical trajectory states. Across four benchmarks, action-conditioned control yields regime-dependent gains over scalar routing. In a calibration decomposition, recalibrating the same scalar score improves prediction metrics but leaves control regret unchanged, showing that calibration alone does not repair target error. A simple prefix-only action-conditioned controller substantially reduces regret in the strongest interactive regime, from 0.506 to 0.110 on ALFWorld. Gains shrink when interventions are weak or when scalar routing already preserves intervention-relevant information. These results suggest that LLM-agent oversight should move from calibrated risk scoring toward action-conditioned value estimation.
Authors: Chubin Zhang, Zhenglin Wan, Xingrui Yu, Pengfei Zhou, Wangbo Zhao, Jingxuan Wu, Yaxin Zhou, Ivor Tsang
Abstract: Tool-augmented agents are typically evaluated by their gains under reliable external feedback. Yet these gains leave open a key counterfactual: when feedback is unreliable, would the agent be better off receiving no task evidence? We study this question with a controlled matched-loop comparison that fixes the agent loop, prompt, action space, and decoding, while varying only the returned observation: faithful, misleading, or absent. Across question answering and fact verification, persistent misleading feedback produces a value inversion: agents that benefit from clean tools can perform worse than the matched no-feedback fallback. On HotpotQA, Qwen2.5-7B reaches 44.8 F1 with clean retrieval and 22.3 F1 with no feedback, but drops to 4.7 F1 under shuffled retrieval. The inversion persists under stronger clean retrieval and locally plausible distractors, but weakens when later clean evidence can repair the trajectory. Early trajectory signals predict many failures, yet simple repairs remain fallback-limited: rejecting bad evidence helps only when the exposed fallback is reliable. These results show that clean-tool gains can overstate tool value, and that matched no-feedback fallback controls are necessary for evaluating tool-augmented agents.
Authors: Yang Yue, Xuancheng Zhu, Yuyang Ma, Guoshun Nan, Zihan Dou, Jingru Shan, Congyu Guo, Ji Zhang, Hua Wang, Jingfeng Zhang
Abstract: The automated design of agentic systems offers a promising pathway for scaling large language models (LLMs) beyond single-agent reasoning. While prior work has advanced task performance through handcrafted or automatically generated multi-agent workflows, robustness is often treated as an afterthought, leaving systems vulnerable to external adversaries and internal failures. We propose AutoRAS, a framework for the Automated design of Robust Agentic Systems. AutoRAS formulates system design as generating a sequence of symbolic primitives that jointly encode structural connectivity and behavioral actions, and learns to optimize this sequence using execution-derived safety signals and flow-based sequence-level objectives. Extensive experiments show that AutoRAS achieves the best performance in both vanilla and adversarial settings, with the smallest performance degradation under attacks. Further analyses demonstrate strong transferability, stable optimization behavior, stability across primitive sets, and favorable cost trade-offs. Our code is available at $\href{https://github.com/guohezuy/AutoRAS}{\text{this https URL}}$.
Authors: Arsham Azam, Rasikh Ali, Tayyaba Farhat, Sheeraz Akram
Abstract: Career anxiety and depression among university students present a growing challenge to mental health and academic achievement. This study proposes an Explainable AI (XAI) framework using multimodal data and Federated Learning (FL) to identify early indicators of career-related mental health problems in a privacy-preserving and culturally responsive manner. The framework combines structured behavioral data and facial emotion features from interview videos via an intermediate fusion neural network with attention mechanisms. Label smoothing was applied to improve model generalizability. FL was used across institutions to enable collaborative training without raw data sharing. Evaluation was conducted using the Student Mental Health Survey dataset from university students across Pakistan. Our model attained an F1-score of 89.12%, recall of 86.54%, accuracy of 92.08%, and precision of 91.88%. Using Integrated Gradients and SHAP, the model identified key behavioral markers of depression including avoidance of direct gaze, lower facial expressiveness, and social withdrawal, consistent with psychological theory. This research presents an interpretable, scalable, and context-sensitive AI system for mental health pre-diagnosis with potential integration into student support services globally.
Authors: Yuanhao Chiang, Hongbo Duan, Chunru Yang, Jiahua Pei, Yi Liu, Xueqian Wang
Abstract: Autoregressive text-to-image (T2I) generation has recently advanced rapidly, yet aligning generated images with human preferences remains challenging. GRPO-style online reinforcement learning provides an effective framework; however, existing methods typically treat reference-policy divergence as fixed, despite its direct impact on policy optimization. We study this overlooked factor within a unified f-divergence framework, encompassing forward KL, reverse KL, and JS divergence, for GRPO-style autoregressive T2I alignment. Our systematic theoretical analysis reveals that different divergences reshape token-level updates in distinct ways. In particular, under the sampled-token shaping form used, JS regularization achieves a favorable trade-off by mitigating uniform bias relative to the reference policy while still discouraging large deviations. Extensive experiments on LlamaGen and Janus-7B show that JS divergence achieves the strongest or highly competitive optimization performance on most evaluation metrics while maintaining favorable generation diversity. The code is available at https://github.com/tuoyou-hao/BPD-GRPO.
Authors: Daniel Halpern, Evi Micha, Ariel D. Procaccia, Benjamin Schiffer, Itai Shapira, Shirley Zhang
Abstract: Alignment from human feedback uses human judgments about model outputs to steer the behavior of language models after pretraining. When those judgments reflect conflicting views of desirable behavior, the learned objective becomes an aggregate determination of what the model should prefer. We survey recent work that has studied this aggregation problem through the lens of social choice theory. We illustrate how the social choice perspective helps identify failure modes in the feedback aggregation layer and reveals a broader design space for handling disagreement in explicit and principled ways.
Authors: Noe Y. Flandre, Alexander C. Nwala, Philippe J. Giabbanelli
Abstract: Agentic AI systems orchestrate multiple LLM-based agents through workflow architectures that coordinate decisions, tools, and external actions. While current platforms emphasize runtime safeguards, little support exists for verifying workflows during system design. From a Modeling \& Simulation perspective, this gap is analogous to composing conceptual models without verifying whether their building blocks interact coherently. We propose a design-time verification approach that models agentic workflows as compositions of reusable building blocks and checks their compatibility through twelve structural rules. We implemented these rules in a software prototype and evaluated them using two openly released datasets: 48 workflows with known design flaws and 168 variants that preserve workflow logic but alter graph structure. Results show that our verifier reliably detects violations even when flawed designs are obscured through structural transformations such as splitting tasks between agents. Future works could combine our verification with community repositories of building blocks to compose safe agentic workflows.
Authors: Sashank Pisupati, Henry Broomfield, Eujeong Choi, Antonia Calvi, Charlie Wang, Roman Engeler, Max Bartolo, Patrick Lewis
Abstract: As agentic systems tackle increasingly complex multi-step tasks, evaluating their trajectories presents a major bottleneck - human annotation of a single trajectory on popular agentic benchmarks can take hours, making it difficult to scale evaluations for measuring performance or curating training data. This has driven widespread reliance on automated approaches such as LLM-as-a-judge (LLMJ) to critique agents at the process and outcome-levels at scale, however, the soundness of LLMJ critiques often goes unmeasured. Here, we introduce Counsel, the first public dataset of meta-evaluations for agentic tasks. Counsel consists of process-level critiques from open-weight LLMJs on two agent benchmarks: tau-bench (customer support agents) and DA-Code (coding agents), and human meta-evaluations of these critiques. Human annotators label critiques on each flagged error as "spot on", "correct location but poor reasoning", or "should not have flagged", achieving reliable inter-annotator agreement (Krippendorff's alpha of 0.78). The resulting dataset stratifies LLMJ critiques by human alignment across both error location within a trajectory and reasoning quality, serving as valuable data to calibrate, improve, or train LLMJs for agents. Comparing open-weight judges, we find that more capable judge models and more reasoning effort both enabled improved human agreement, with the strongest judge reaching ~88% agreement on location and ~65% on reasoning. Counsel is generated using open-weight models and is permissively licensed for broad community use, which we hope will enable rigorous study and improved alignment of LLM-based evaluators for agentic systems.
Authors: Vincent Siu, Manasi Sharma, Dawn Song, Daniel Yue Zhang, Chenguang Wang
Abstract: Computer use agents are evaluated almost exclusively on atomic desktop tasks, but realistic desktop work requires sustaining state across multiple objectives. We study this gap with ChainWorld, which composes atomic OSWorld tasks into long horizon desktop workloads through directional compatibility search while preserving the source evaluators. The resulting workload contains 347 chains of length two to four and compares two renderings of the same task sequence. In single turn evaluation, all tasks are presented together in one prompt. In multi turn evaluation, tasks are revealed one at a time. Across four current computer use agents, maximum chain completion is 31%. Multi turn evaluation improves completion for three models, but both protocols remain challenging. The two protocols also expose different failure profiles. Single turn failures concentrate on artifact precision, while multi turn failures more often reflect session management problems such as fragmented progress and later turn disengagement.
Authors: Carson Rodrigues
Abstract: Multi-agent LLM systems routinely produce hallucinated outputs that cannot be explained by model deficiencies alone. A significant class of these failures arises not from model incapacity but from context drift: the divergence of internal knowledge states between concurrent agents. When agents enter a collaborative task with mismatched or stale representations of shared world state, their joint reasoning produces contradictions that manifest as hallucination. We define the Context Divergence Score (CDS), a lightweight scalar metric quantifying knowledge-state discrepancy between agent pairs across spatial, temporal, and task dimensions, and propose the Shared State Verification Protocol (SSVP), which lets agents periodically exchange compressed state summaries and flag high-divergence conditions before joint reasoning. We evaluate SSVP across two domains (multi-agent travel and software project planning) using Claude Haiku. In controlled experiments (n=30 per condition, travel; n=10, software) across 8 scenarios, naive full-broadcast synchronization increases hallucination rate by 34% above the no-sync baseline (HR: 0.658 vs. 0.492, p=0.0022, d=1.18), a contamination effect from propagating erroneous agent states. SSVP avoids this failure mode while showing modest, consistent reduction (HR: 0.463, d=0.30) and achieves significantly lower hallucination than full-broadcast (p=0.0005, d=1.47) using 58% fewer API calls. The contamination effect does not replicate in the software domain, where all conditions converge to low HR (<0.2), confirming it is specific to tasks where one erroneous shared belief cascades across evaluation dimensions. Our results reframe hallucination mitigation as a distributed systems problem and establish context synchronization as a first-class primitive in multi-agent LLM design.
Authors: S. Akshay, Raghav Goyal, Aditya Neeraje, Piyush Srivastava
Abstract: We consider the problem of synthesizing control policies that enforce a concentration property on the state distributions of a stochastic system. We present a formalization of this problem in terms of synthesizing strategies for maintaining an entropy-based objective in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We first show that even relaxed versions of this problem are complexity-theoretically hard. We then present a sound and (conditionally) relatively complete method to verify and synthesize strategies for such entropy objectives. The main challenge is the non-linear nature of such objectives, and our approach addresses this by exploiting and combining ideas from convex duality and invariant synthesis. We also investigate the role of memory and randomization in ensuring entropy objectives. Finally, we implement our ideas to evaluate our approach empirically on a few illustrative benchmarks.
Authors: Rajesh Mangannavar, Zachary Coalson, Pranay Dugar, Prasad Tadepalli
Abstract: Translating natural-language planning intent into verified plans is a longstanding challenge: people communicate goals in language, while classical planners require formal PDDL specifications. Recent agentic frameworks bridge this gap by orchestrating a pool of specialized repair agents inside a verifier-checked refinement loop, but the orchestrator at the centre is itself a prompted frontier LLM, paying a frontier-LLM API call at every refinement step. We present HALO (Hybrid Agent-Learned Orchestrator), which trains the orchestrator from refinement trajectories that an external verifier has certified as ending in valid plans, across 11 PDDL domains. HALO pairs a small QLoRA-tuned policy with three hardcoded rules for trivially decidable selections, and operates over an expanded 21-agent action space. Unlike approaches that prompt a frontier LLM at every step or learn an orchestrator from sparse end-of-episode rewards, our key observation is that the verifier already provides strong guidance: every accepted trajectory is a sequence of demonstrably correct (state, agent) decisions, directly usable as supervision. Across PlanBench, Natural Plan, and classical planning benchmarks, HALO matches or exceeds the GPT-5-mini prompted baseline on success rate, sits within three percentage points of the stronger Gemini-3-Flash prompted baseline, reduces orchestration cost by more than an order of magnitude (\$0.18 to \$0.004 per task against GPT-5-mini, roughly 45$\times$ cheaper; roughly 15$\times$ cheaper than Gemini-3-Flash), and cuts total LLM calls per episode by 40 to 50 percent.
Authors: Weiyuan Zhou, Haiping Ma, Xiaoshan Yu, Changqian Wang, Shangshang Yang, Xingyi Zhang
Abstract: Computerized Adaptive Testing (CAT), as a key technology for personalized education, aims to accurately assess examinee proficiency by retrieving exercises dynamically matching current ability estimates. However, existing CAT research is constrained by limitations of static offline data and isolated component optimization. Restricted by partial labels in offline logs, researchers degrade the dynamic assessment process into static sequence prediction. Current research focuses on isolated perspectives, e.g., selection or diagnosis, neglecting the overall CAT interaction process. To address this, we propose AgentCAT, a Large Language Model-based multi-agent simulation system, to construct a high-fidelity benchmarking environment for dynamic testing. This framework comprises three modules: (1) The examinee agent with memory retrieval and Chain-of-Thought reasoning simulates responses based on cognitive profiles; (2) The selection agent uses coarse-to-fine bucketing and knowledge graph exploration to balance local difficulty and global coverage; (3) The supervisor uses dual-auditing and robust update to ensure convergence and validity. To validate the framework, we evaluated on two real-world datasets across three dimensions: macro-level ability convergence, micro-level interaction logic, and data sparsity resilience. Results show AgentCAT achieves effective ability estimation, and its selection strategy balances difficulty adaptation and instructional coherence, aligning with human pedagogical intuition.
Authors: Andrew Tanner
Abstract: AI agents in long-context applications drift from their specified identity. Current methods detect this only after qualitative degradation is visible. We present a geometric framework for measuring identity structure using $\sqrt{\mathrm{JSD}}$ metric spaces and magnitude homology from enriched category theory, where identity is non-geodesic structure and drift is its relaxation toward the geodesic. Validated on a persistent AI agent, the framework's strongest empirical finding is a two-mechanism conditioning structure: cross-condition distances reveal an identity-vacuum cluster where the identity specification fills a behavioral void, and a safety-basin cluster where it displaces from post-training attractors. An equilateral probe baseline confirms that the identity specification creates measurable behavioral richness (55 unique response patterns vs. 1 for the base model) at maximum probe separation. A first-order perturbation theory for equilateral configurations predicts magnitude changes from perimeter changes alone, with shape perturbations first-order cancelled by the $S_n$ symmetry; the formula is self-consistent at the observed perturbation amplitudes. A drift experiment measuring magnitude decrease under context pressure was subsequently found to reflect repetitive-padding artifacts rather than genuine context-length drift; diverse padding produces no measurable deformation through 150K tokens. The magnitude homology framework's full diagnostic promise -- detecting anisotropic contraction and structural collapse via homological simplification -- is architecturally grounded in the perturbation theory and selection rules but remains empirically unconfirmed.
Authors: Pei-Cing Huang, Chienyu Liu, Chan Hsu, Ci-Siang Chen, Pei-Ju Lee, Yihuang Kang
Abstract: Current evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) on logical fallacy detection focus on predicted labels, but do not establish whether those labels are supported by the reasoning the models provide. We propose ForEx (Formal Verification for Explainable Reasoning), a framework that translates LLM-generated explanations into Lean4 and verifies whether the translated rationale is derivable under encoded premises, not the logical validity of the original natural language argument. To distinguish prediction outcomes from the formal status of the supporting reasoning, we introduce the LLM Argument Verification Matrix, which separates label consistency from formal verification status. Experiments on LOGIC-Climate show that over 90% of LLM outputs can be translated into formal reasoning chains that pass verification, while agreement with human annotations remains around 20%. These results expose a systematic gap between formal derivability and label agreement, a distinction invisible to prediction-based metrics. ForEx moves LLM evaluation beyond label correctness toward machine-checkable analysis of formalized reasoning chains.
Authors: Srimonti Dutta, Akshata Kishore Moharir
Abstract: Agentic AI systems retrieve private context, invoke tools, write files, call external services, coordinate with other agents, and may act without human approval. Existing bill of materials artifacts improve transparency for dependencies, model metadata, and training provenance, but leave an agentic transparency gap: capability opacity, the absence of a structured account of what a deployed agent can access, remember, change, delegate, and prove afterward. This paper introduces AgentRiskBOM, a security BOM for risk-scoping tool-using AI agents. It is an additive layer over SBOM, AIBOM, and MLBOM artifacts, referencing them where authoritative while adding fields for runtime authority: autonomy, tool permissions, memory, credential scope, approval gates, audit signals, inter-agent communication, and external action capability. We implement AgentRiskBOM as a JSON-schema artifact with a reproducible corpus, risk scenarios, scorer, diff detector, control mapper, and reports. We evaluate AgentRiskBOM on 13 open-source agents spanning coding, RAG, and multi-agent archetypes, plus 52 risk scenarios across 14 categories. The schema validates all 13 corpus artifacts. Coverage analysis gives AgentRiskBOM a native-equivalent score of 14 across 16 capability dimensions, vs. 1 for SBOM, 1.5 for AIBOM and 2 for MLBOM. Across modeled risk categories, AgentRiskBOM exposes 100% risk-category visibility vs. 10.5% for SBOM-like and 20.9% for AIBOM-like views. To test agentic authority drift, we inject 33 structured deployment mutations; the diff detector identifies the correct change type for all mutations. A secondary penalty-based scorer yields a Spearman correlation of 0.73 with the primary scorer, supporting rank-level consistency while showing that thresholds require human calibration. The results show that agentic AI security needs a machine-readable authority-and-risk artifact before incidents occur.
Authors: Gurusha Juneja, Arnav Kumar Jain, Deepak Nathani, William Yang Wang, Xin Eric Wang
Abstract: Scientific discovery can be formulated as an iterative search process over the space of hypotheses and experiments. Contemporary methods navigate this space using heuristics such as MCTS. These algorithms conflate the merit of a hypothesis with the quality of its experimental execution. A promising hypothesis with preliminary execution is therefore ranked below a modest hypothesis whose execution is refined. Moreover, prior methods prune the search logs as the search progresses because the accumulated history outgrows the context window. We propose Agentic Reasoning for Tree Search (ARTS), where we deploy a reasoning language model to navigate this space. The model inspects prior execution logs, diagnoses whether earlier failures arose from faulty implementations or bad hypotheses, and selects the hypothesis to build on next. To mitigate challenges with context length, ARTS uses test-time training to instill the knowledge of search tree in the model weights. Across 22 tasks from MLGym and MLEBench, we show that ARTS outperforms leading algorithms, with over 15.3% relative improvement in the normalized score. With test-time training we show that a Qwen3-4B agent can match performance with closed-source frontier models like Gemini-3 Pro and GPT o3-reasoning with upto 5x lower inference cost. We further observe that on partially observable RL tasks, the test-time trained Qwen3-4B scientist surpasses ARTS with the o3 scientist by rediscovering the human-best recurrent-memory solution that heuristic methods prune away.
Authors: Jia Li, Wenyuan Ma, Ting Peng, Haibin Zheng, Yuetang Deng
Abstract: Diagnosing mobile crashes in ultra-large-scale industrial applications is a formidable challenge due to the sheer volume of code, the complexity of mixed-language environments, and the inability to reproduce failures locally. Traditional static analysis struggles with scalability, while existing LLM-based agents often rely on reproducible environments unavailable in post-mortem scenarios. We present Holmes, a multi-agent system that automates root cause analysis by synthesizing multimodal runtime signals--stack traces, logs, and thread states--to reconstruct failure contexts without reproduction. Holmes introduces a hierarchical Retrieve-Explore-Reason architecture that leverages low-level artifacts (e.g., registers, assembly) to bridge the semantic gap between open-source business logic and closed-source system frameworks. By dynamically compressing the search space using runtime clues, Holmes precisely navigates 70-million-line codebases to identify non-local defects. Evaluated on real-world crashes from WeChat, Holmes achieves 87.6% accuracy in function-level fault localization and reduces average investigation time by over 98% (to ~77 seconds), demonstrating its effectiveness in transforming labor-intensive debugging into an efficient verification workflow.
Authors: Xiangwei Chen, Lingling Fang, Andreas Holzinger, Liming Chen
Abstract: Online planning in continuous partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) using $\omega$-regular specifications requires handling continuous belief dynamics within the finite symbolic memory in order to track temporal progress. Existing methods based on either direct search in belief space or predefined discrete abstractions suffer from drawbacks, e.g., lack of symbolic memory for long-horizon logical progress or difficult to certify from noisy online beliefs. As such, obtaining reliable symbolic states online from continuous observations remains a challenge. To address this issue, we introduce the Revealed Belief Automaton (REBA), an event-driven framework that advances the research from global belief-space discretization to a fundamental new way of thinking, namely online certification of revelation events. Specifically, we propose an online revelation method that, through information-theoretic gates, can dynamically analyse and establish belief abstraction from the continuous belief space by discovering reliable anchors among noisy beliefs. We then develop an incremental topology adaptation mechanism over the certified anchors to realise the online finite Belief Automaton. By combining with the $\omega$-regular specification, REBA is able to support formal parity policy synthesis without a predefined discrete abstraction, which in turn can guide the Monte Carlo Tree Search process to perform online search beyond its local horizon. In addition, we design an error decomposition analysis which can assess the effectiveness and reliability of this discrete guidance for the underlying continuous POMDP. Empirical evaluations in patrolling and navigation scenarios show that REBA matches or exceeds all evaluated baselines, with primary metric gains of +17.0\% to +47.4\% over state-of-the-art approaches.
Authors: David Holmes, Johannes Schmitt
Abstract: We study how the effort and success probability of frontier AI systems scale with human difficulty on problems from Project Euler, an online platform of computational mathematics problems. Our dataset, from the MathArena benchmark, consists of 3840 attempts across 50 problems and 26 model configurations, with problem difficulty measured by the site's public human solve times. Motivated by a proposal of Timothy Gowers, we test a power-law relation $t_{\text{machine}} = a \cdot t_{\text{human}}^b$ between generated-token cost per successful answer and human time, and find $b < 1$ for 20 of the 25 models with usable fits, including the strongest base models; this operationalization therefore does not support an earlier prediction that machines scale worse than humans with difficulty. We also investigate whether success probability on the tested problems can be modeled by a simple exponential decay $p_{\text{success}} = e^{c t_{\text{human}}}$, predicting a linear relation between $\log p_{\text{success}}$ and $t_{\text{human}}$. Using a binning approach for data aggregation we find moderate empirical support (median bin-level $R^2 = 0.92$ across the 22 best-covered configurations) for this model. Following METR, we also fit logistic success curves and extract 50\% task-length horizons $h_{50}$; the strongest configurations in our 20 April 2026 snapshot reach roughly $2.5$--$4.3$ hours on our fastest-five human baseline, with a log-linear fit through the state-of-the-art frontier giving a descriptive doubling time of about $75$~days for the SOTA $h_{50}$.
Authors: Vignesh Mohan
Abstract: Despite its massive player base and complex hidden-information dynamics, Indian Rummy has received no reinforcement learning attention. Existing agents rely on combinatorial search, which is tactically strong but slow at inference. We present IRumAI, the first RL agent for the domain. IRumAI integrates Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), meld-aware observation encoding, deadwood-driven reward shaping, and a dual-branch convolutional architecture. IRumAI is RL-trained solely against weak heuristics, after a one-time behaviour-cloning warm-start on stronger demonstration data. It generalises to defeat the entire baseline hierarchy, including a 53.9% win rate against the strongest search-based opponent unseen during RL training. Bypassing explicit search, IRumAI requires just 0.33 ms per action, which is over 7,000x faster than the state-of-the-art heuristic. Ablations validate our architectural choices, and linear probing reveals that the network implicitly models the opponent's hidden hand from public interactions.
Authors: Rishi Srivastava
Abstract: We introduce CFAgentBench, a reproducible, self-hostable environment and benchmark for autonomous construction-finance agents: a CFO/controller-class agent operating across the real software stack a US construction finance team runs - ERP, project management, email, documents, pay applications, payroll, certified payroll, lien waivers, and bank/treasury portals. It contains 1,014 machine-gradeable task specifications across 8 domains and 77 families, every family grounded in a real source; a self-validated subset of 40 tasks (54 with a project-management extension) is compiled into oracle-validated executable evaluators, the runnable suite reported here. Following WebArena, the benchmark runs on an executable environment rather than static traces: 35 mock applications (31 reconciled to one company book, plus 4 PM platforms) over 9 archetypes, each implementing a uniform self-hostable app contract, so every task is graded by functional correctness - a state diff plus forbidden-side-effect checks plus required-output regexes - with an LLM judge used only for reply quality, never as reward. A distinguishing principle is a money-movement guard: 278 instances embed a payment, payroll, e-signature, or e-filing step where the correct behavior is to stop and stage for human approval, and executing even the correct transaction fails the task. The public split (n=711) is sized for a 95% Wilson half-width of +/-4.1%; a private, contamination-protected split (n=303) is reserved for remote scoring. In a first three-model open-weight sweep (k=5), the strongest agent reaches pass^1 = 0.67 but only pass^5 = 0.38 - losing 43% of its successes when required to repeat them under temperature-0 decoding. The within-model pass^1 to pass^5 collapse and sharp per-domain heterogeneity are clear evidence that single-attempt accuracy overstates deployable construction-finance competence.
Authors: Pranav Singh
Abstract: We present Nous, a novel agent memory architecture grounded in the principle that knowledge is prediction, not storage. Rather than persisting facts as database records, vector embeddings, or knowledge-graph triples, Nous maintains a predictive world model: a collection of categorical probability distributions, called dimensions, one per entity-attribute pair observed in conversation. Each incoming observation is scored by its information-theoretic surprise S = -log2 P(obs | D), and the distribution is updated via a closed-form Bayesian posterior. The primary stored artifact is the delta, a record of the shift from prior to posterior belief, rather than the fact itself. Forgetting emerges naturally as entropy decay toward the uniform distribution, and identity resolution is handled through mutual information between entity dimension sets. Evaluated on the LoCoMo long-term conversational memory benchmark across ten conversations (1,540 questions) using GPT-4o-mini as backbone, Nous achieves F1 of 63.50 (single-hop), 55.32 (multi-hop), 58.57 (temporal), and 62.50 (open-domain). Against A-MEM's self-reported GPT-4o-mini numbers, Nous shows substantial gains in three of four categories, though we note that independent citations of A-MEM's results disagree with each other on category assignment, a reproducibility issue we discuss openly rather than resolve unilaterally. We additionally compare against BeliefMem, a concurrently developed system built on the same core premise of belief-based rather than deterministic memory; on the same benchmark and backbone, Nous's self-reported numbers exceed BeliefMem's self-reported numbers on all four categories, though we flag several uncontrolled differences between the two evaluation pipelines that prevent this from being a fully controlled comparison. Nous requires no external vector database or graph engine.
Authors: Timothy Oladunni, Farouk Ganiyu Adewumi
Abstract: The cardiovascular system evolves along a bounded trajectory in physiological state space that converges to a compact geometric object: the cardiac attractor. A wearable photoplethysmograph (PPG) or electrocardiograph (ECG) observes a one-dimensional projection of this attractor; by Takens' embedding theorem, delay coordinates reconstruct its full geometry. Three decades of nonlinear cardiac dynamics have extracted Lyapunov exponents, recurrence statistics, and sample entropy from reconstructed attractors, yet no principled account exists of which attractor properties capture which cardiovascular quantities, or why, leaving feature selection as a search problem and negative results uninterpretable. We introduce Attractor Domain Theory (ADT), which proves that the reconstructed attractor's information partitions into three mutually non-redundant domains: the Geometry Domain G (delay embedding; native capability: artifact rejection), the Ergodic Domain S (asymptotic statistical invariants; native capability: stability estimation), and the Variational Domain V (finite-time Lyapunov exponent field; native capability: hemodynamic inference). We prove a Domain Sufficiency Theorem (the Parseval analog for attractor information) and establish that three domains are necessary and sufficient. Geometry Domain validation via the SCSI framework across 176,742 PPG segments from four datasets yields AUC = 0.757 [0.686-0.828] and NPV = 0.966 after correcting three systematic evaluation artifacts (+0.179 net inflation). Ablation confirms C_NL as the dominant Geometry Domain component (Delta AUC = -0.413) and intra-domain redundancy across five components.
Authors: Zekun Xu
Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is increasingly applied to large vision-language models (LVLMs), yet outcome-only optimization can drive a model to stop attending to the video and instead exploit linguistic priors -- a failure we call a visual shortcut. While the existence of such perception bypass is by now documented, how it forms, whether it can be undone, and when intervention still helps remain open. We treat the strength of a grounding penalty, lambda, as a control knob and characterize the formation-reversal dynamics of visual shortcuts along the training time axis. On a held-out, out-of-distribution diagnostic set, we find: (i) a sharp onset -- shortcut reliance emerges abruptly over a narrow window of optimization steps and is robust across random seeds; (ii) a monotone dose-response -- increasing lambda progressively suppresses the shortcut, and at an intermediate dose the trajectory first forms and then reverses the shortcut, exposing a hysteresis-like asymmetry between acquiring and removing it; and (iii) a critical intervention window -- applying the penalty before onset arrests shortcut formation, whereas the same penalty applied after consolidation is markedly less effective. Together these results recast visual-shortcut collapse not as a binary defect but as a controllable, time-dependent, and asymmetric process, with direct implications for when and how strongly to regularize multimodal RLVR.
Authors: Sathvik Napa, Utkarsh Singh, Chengyuan Xue, Miriam Wanner, William Walden
Abstract: There are many reasons one may want to edit a model's chain of thought (CoT) -- e.g., to prefill it with reasoning from a stronger model or to remove steps that may yield unsafe outputs. The success of these interventions plausibly depends on a model's inability to notice them, as the model may alter its behavior if it suspects tampering. In this work, we study whether recent reasoning models are able to detect such interventions on their CoTs under a variety of conditions: both during reasoning and after it, and when prefilled both with their own CoTs and with those of other models. Broadly, we find that (i) models exhibit only very modest detection accuracy; (ii) models struggle to identify *how* their CoT was modified; and (iii) models are about as good at detecting changes to their own CoTs as to those of other models.
Authors: Li Kong, Qi Qi, Yinyu Ye, Zijie Zhou
Abstract: The explosive demand for interactive Large Language Model serving has highlighted the management of the Key-Value cache's dynamic memory footprint as a critical area for performance optimization in inference engines. Modern inference systems overwhelmingly rely on time-centric scheduling heuristics, such as Shortest Job First. However, their theoretical optimality is rooted in traditional schedule modeling, failing to capture the highly dynamic, 2D spatio-temporal geometric growth specific to LLM inference mechanisms. To resolve this, we propose the geometry-aware online scheduling by introducing the Smallest Volume First (SVF) algorithm and its highly efficient variant, 1-bit SVF. Theoretically, we provide a rigorous mathematical foundation for our approach. Utilizing a novel proof methodology, we tighten the worst-case competitive ratio ($\text{CR} \le 48 \rightarrow \text{CR} \le 5$) for SVF with known output lengths. Building upon this core breakthrough, we complete a comprehensive theoretical taxonomy analyzing our algorithms across different traffic scenarios and information availability. Practically, we seamlessly integrate our approach as a plug-and-play layer in vLLM. Extensive evaluations on Llama-3.1 models demonstrate comprehensive performance gains: SVF delivers strong reductions in both average and tail latency, while 1-bit SVF, with merely a single bit information, achieves competitive throughput and latency. This work establishes a theoretically sound and empirically proven approach for resolving memory-constrained scheduling in modern LLM deployments. To facilitate future research, our code is available at https://github.com/Aurora-Kl/Geometry-Aware-Online-Scheduling.git.
URLs: https://github.com/Aurora-Kl/Geometry-Aware-Online-Scheduling.git.
Authors: Fangxin Shang, Yehui Yang
Abstract: External skills can improve action-oriented LLM agents without changing model weights, but persistent skill updates are risky when they are distilled from sparse or noisy trajectories. A plausible reflection may encode a useful procedure, a spurious shortcut, or a rule that the target executor cannot reliably follow. We propose Hypothesis-Driven Skill Optimization (HDSO), a train-free framework in which both the skill curator and the agent executor are frozen inference endpoints. The curator observes executor traces, proposes a falsifiable hypothesis with an explicit validation plan, instantiates the hypothesis as a candidate skill package, validates the package through paired control/treatment executions, reviews behavior differences, and consolidates only supported candidates into an approved repository. The executor consumes approved skills through progressive disclosure, preserving the executor-only path when no skill is selected. On ALFWorld, HDSO improves executor-only baselines by +6.9 Avg. SR points for Qwen3-8B and +4.0 points for Qwen3.6-27B. Under 20% randomly flipped success/failure feedback during skill discovery and validation, HDSO preserves a +7.1-point gain for Qwen3-8B. Transfer and heterogeneous-pair diagnostics further show that validated repositories can be useful beyond the run that produced them, but cross-model curation succeeds only when curator diagnosis, executor capability, and validation evidence align. HDSO provides an auditable skill lifecycle for frozen action agents rather than an unconstrained memory accumulation procedure.
Authors: Yun Oh, Sukmin Yun
Abstract: We introduce reference-free measures for evaluating the physical consistency of generated videos, combining relative and absolute approaches to assess fidelity. Although tools like WorldGym or WorldEval enable robotic simulation via video generation, physical fidelity gaps often prevent these environments from accurately reproducing real-world task success rates of VLA models. Unlike existing evaluation methods, which require costly human voting (Elo) or unavailable ground-truth references (FVD), our approach utilizes DROID-SLAM and SEA-RAFT to quantify physical inconsistencies, motivated by WorldScore. Videos filtered using our relative consistency assessment show an improvement in task success rates of over 8%, effectively narrowing the simulation-to-reality gap. Furthermore, our absolute assessment enables spatio-temporal localization, providing visualization of when and where physical artifacts occur.
Authors: Yi Cao, Liaoyaqi Wang, Jieneng Chen, Benjamin Van Durme, Alan Yuille, Paulette Clancy
Abstract: Generative models have revolutionized the process of materials discovery, yet they often fail to satisfy underlying physical causality. Through an analysis of Large Language Models (LLMs) augmented with knowledge graphs derived from current literature, we uncover a phenomenon termed contextual tunneling, where models "over-anchor" on narrow, retrieved evidence while suppressing global physical reasoning. To address this problem, we introduce ARIA, a causal-aware framework that conditions knowledge use on mechanistic completeness. ARIA routes each query through a three-tier cascade: (i) direct causal reasoning when complete evidence chains of Process-Structure-Property (PSP) are available, (ii) physics-informed analogical transfer for sparse or novel material systems, and (iii) explicit parametric fallback when external evidence is incomplete. As a proof of concept, we construct a Knowledge Graph (KG) containing 2,839 extracted PSP relations from peer-reviewed articles in the materials literature and evaluate ARIA on forward prediction and inverse design tasks for two-dimensional (2D) materials. ARIA mitigates contextual tunneling, improves over unaugmented and naive KG-augmented baselines, and provides further gains when an online literature search is used for evidence enrichment. Crucially, ARIA produces auditable causal traces, enabling physically grounded and trustworthy AI-assisted materials discovery.
Authors: Jiaxiang Chen, Aotian Luo, Zhouyi Zheng, Weiyi Huang, Chi Zhang, Zenglin Xu
Abstract: No single market strategy always wins: momentum, mean reversion, risk control,and event-driven rules can each succeed or fail as market conditions change.Rather than asking large language models to directly generate market actions,we study an executable decision paradigm where an agent selects from a library of programmatic strategies, each implemented as a code module mapping market observations to actions.We propose \textbf{MetaPS}, a simulation-guided framework for adaptive programmatic strategy selection. MetaPS rolls out candidate strategies in simulated or backtested markets, identifies states where particular strategies lead to better future outcomes, and converts these state--strategy pairs into supervised fine-tuning data. During inference, the simulator is no longer queried: MetaPS observes only the current market state and candidate strategy context, selects a suitable strategy program, and the selected program produces the final action. Experiments on multi-stock trading and a controlled goods-exchange sandbox show that MetaPS consistently improves across model scales from 0.8B to 9B parameters. It outperforms fixed-strategy baselines, direct decision-making agents, and prompted API-based LLM agents; in several settings, compact fine-tuned models even surpass stronger API models. These results demonstrate that market simulations can provide scalable and targeted supervision for learning adaptive, interpretable, and executable strategy selection.
Authors: Jiayu Liu, Qihan Lin, Cheng Qian, Rui Wang, Emre Can Acikgoz, Xiaocheng Yang, Jiateng Liu, Zhenhailong Wang, Xiusi Chen, Heng Ji, Dilek Hakkani-T\"ur
Abstract: LLM agents increasingly operate in large tool ecosystems, where real-world tasks require discovering relevant tools, inferring implicit sub-goals, and adapting to dynamic environments over long horizons. However, existing benchmarks rarely evaluate planning under retrieval-limited tool visibility. To address this gap, we introduce PlanBench-XL, an interactive benchmark of 327 retail tasks over 1,665 tools that tests whether agents can iteratively retrieve usable tools, invoke them to uncover intermediate evidence for subsequent calls toward the final goal. PlanBench-XL further features an optional blocking mechanism that simulates real-world unpredictability through missing, failing, or distracting tool functions, forcing agents to detect disrupted paths and adapt at runtime. Experiments on ten leading LLMs show that massive-tool planning remains challenging: while GPT-5.4 achieves 51.90% accuracy in block-free settings, it collapses to 11.36% under the most severe blocking condition. Further analysis shows that agents are especially vulnerable when failures lack explicit error signals or when recovery requires longer alternative tool-use paths. These results establish PlanBench-XL as a testbed for diagnosing agentic planning failures and highlight the need for robust adaptive planning in long-horizon tasks with large, imperfect tool environments.
Authors: Ishaan Bhola, Adithyan Krishnan, Sravanth Kurmala, Mukunda NS
Abstract: Coding agents now interleave LLMs with retrieval over the working repository, and retrieval implementations vary widely across deployed harnesses. Inside a fixed coding-agent harness on a fixed model, does adding a structural codebase index actually change cost or resolve? We ran three arms (the harness with the index, the same harness without it, and an agentic-grep comparator) on SWE-PolyBench Verified and SWE-bench Pro with Claude Opus 4.7 held fixed throughout, across three seeds, inside a leak-audited per-task sandbox. The within-harness ablation produces a large localization gain and a statistically separated resolve gain, with no cost penalty per cell and lower cost per solve. The cross-harness check shows that the index does not regress against an agentic-grep baseline on resolve or localization, again at no cost penalty. We release the per-cell exclusion ledger, the leak-audit script, the localization extractor, and the results database. The deployment question for a structural codebase index is thus not whether it is too expensive to run (across seeds, the index lands at a lower $/solved than agentic grep) but whether the workload includes multi-file changes where structural ranking pays off.
Authors: Bin Cao
Abstract: Machine-learned interatomic potentials now enable efficient atomistic evaluation for interactive materials discovery, yet closed-loop crystal search methods remain fragmented across bespoke pipelines for editing, relaxation, scoring, constraints, and bookkeeping. We introduce SciVerseGym, a Gymnasium-compatible environment for sequential crystal discovery that frames crystal design as a Markov decision process. Agents observe an atomistic structure, apply chemically meaningful edits, and receive feedback from a configurable evaluator. SciVerseGym supports local and global actions, including elemental substitution, lattice perturbation, atomic displacement, vacancy creation, and atom insertion, along with configurable chemical spaces, structure pools, atomistic and graph-based observations, custom rewards, optional relaxation, and stability or phonon-related diagnostics. Each step applies an edit, evaluates the candidate using a machine-learned interatomic potential or any ASE-compatible calculator, and returns the standard (obs, reward, terminated, truncated, info) tuple. By decoupling agent logic from materials infrastructure, SciVerseGym provides an open, reproducible, and extensible testbed for reinforcement learning, Bayesian optimization, evolutionary search, and language-agent workflows in closed-loop crystal discovery. Code is available at: https://github.com/Bin-Cao/SciVerseGym.
Authors: Xiangyuan Xue, Yang Yu, Yan Gao, Junyan Wang, Bin Chen, Lingyan Ruan, Ting Dang, Hong Jia
Abstract: Pulmonary embolism (PE) is a high risk cardiopulmonary condition whose management requires both timely diagnosis and reliable assessment of future clinical risk. Because PE care routinely combines computed tomography pulmonary angiography (CTPA), radiology interpretation, and longitudinal electronic health record (EHR) evidence, it provides a clinically meaningful setting for evaluating compact multimodal language models. In this work, we build a benchmark using efficient multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on INSPECT, a multimodal PE dataset containing 23,248 CTPA studies from 19,402 patients. We formulate eight diagnostic and prognostic tasks as structured clinical question answering problems and evaluate on typical efficient MLLMs under CTPA-Only, EHR-Only, and CTPA+EHR settings with zero-shot and few-shot prompting. Results show that Gemma4 E4B and Gemma4 E2B perform more strongly when EHR evidence is available, especially under CTPA+EHR input. Task level analysis further shows that PE diagnosis achieves higher performance than prognostic tasks, particularly readmission prediction. These observations suggest that compact multimodal models have the great potential in early stage PE risk detection and explanation.
Authors: Andreas Maier, Siming Bayer, Patrick Krauss
Abstract: Explanation requires ground truth: to verify an account of a system we must know its inner functioning-just what is missing where explainable AI (XAI) is most needed. Systems we can study fall into two camps. Simple, procedural one-decision trees, rule lists, sparse linear models-have a known but trivial mechanism, so explaining them tests nothing; genuinely complex ones-deep networks, real-world tasks-need XAI but have no ground-truth inner functioning, so an explanation can be plausible, confident, and wrong with no way to tell. We remove this dichotomy with a study object both genuinely complex and fully specified-inspectable by construction-and, so gradient methods apply, fully differentiable. We reimplement the Atari 2600 Video Computer System (VCS)-a real computer architecture, and the cradle of deep reinforcement learning-as two independent end-to-end differentiable emulators in Julia (jutari) and JAX (jaxtari), each validated bit-for-bit against xitari. Both reproduce xitari on all 64 supported Arcade Learning Environment (ALE) games: 64/64 byte-identical RAM and 64/64 pixel-identical screens. Treating the cartridge ROM as a weight tensor, RAM as a soft tape, and control flow as gates, we prove the differentiable (soft) execution equals the original (hard) one bit-for-bit in the forward pass at any finite temperature, while exposing surrogate gradients where the bit logic has none. The JAX port also opens a GPU path: batched differentiable rollouts reach millions of environment-steps/s on one commodity GPU. The system was built in roughly 137 active hours over 29 calendar days, much of it written autonomously by coding agents. This paper builds and validates the foundation, showing-theoretically and in a qualitative gradient study-that gradient-based XAI on it is feasible. Both ports' full code is available under the MIT license at https://github.com/akmaier/UnderstandingVCS.
Authors: Yi Yu, Tetsunari Inamura
Abstract: Current embodied world models are primarily optimized for predictive objectives, limiting their ability to generalize under distribution shifts and reason systematically about unseen situations and hypothetical interventions. We argue that embodied intelligence should move beyond predictive world modeling toward self-evolving cognitive systems that continually construct and refine internal causal representations through interaction with the environment. To this end, we propose a self-evolving cognitive framework via causal world modeling for embodied scientific intelligence, which integrates three complementary components: causal world modeling, intervention-driven causal reasoning, and continual cognitive refinement. The proposed framework continuously revises and expands its internal causal world model through causal discovery, intervention-driven feedback, and counterfactual reasoning, supporting continual cognitive refinement and enabling cognition itself to evolve over time. Furthermore, we reinterpret embodied interaction not merely as a means of trajectory optimization, but as an epistemic process for causal hypothesis generation, intervention-driven experimentation, and continual knowledge acquisition. This work provides a conceptual and theoretical foundation for a transition from predictive intelligence toward epistemic intelligence, in which intelligence emerges through the continual construction, revision, and refinement of causal world models via interaction with the environment. Accordingly, an intervention-driven causal-epistemic benchmarking paradigm is suggested for evaluating self-evolving embodied scientific intelligence.
Authors: Tehreem Javed, Shumaim Fatimah, Masooma Bakhtiari, Gibrail Islam, Mehwish Fatima
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often encounter conflicting prompts, although current instruction following benchmarks assess those meta-instructions in isolation, limiting the insights about how models process conflicting instructions. We introduce a framework \textit{PRIME}(\textit{Prompt Resolution under Incompatible Meta-Instructions Evaluation}) to analyze behavior of LLMs when provided with conflicting instructions. \textit{PRIME} purposefully produces calibrated conflicts across response length, output format, and reasoning; classifying model responses with a deterministic behavioral taxonomy. We are evaluating five instruction tuned open weight LLMs in two distinct settings, balanced and naturally distributed. The conclusion we reach upon analysis is that conflict type is more significant in affecting behavior than model scale, and various failure modes across different categories of conflict. Our findings emphasize the value of developing conflict awareness and suggest ability of LLM to follow instructions cannot be assessed through isolated constraints alone.
Authors: Teodoro Baldazzi, Luigi Bellomarini, Andrea Coletta, Michela Iezzi, Carsten Maple, Alessandro Pesare, Emanuel Sallinger
Abstract: Decision-making in real-world settings rarely follows a fixed script. Instead, it unfolds as a dynamic reasoning process in which the appropriate course of action evolves as new context and data become available. Traditional Business Process Management systems provide rigor, determinism, and auditability, yet they generally struggle to adapt their execution at runtime. Conversely, agentic systems based on Large Language Models (LLMs) bring flexibility to decision-making, but they are inherently opaque, often unreliable, and suffer from significant scalability constraints when operating over large datasets. To combine these complementary paradigms, we introduce VADAOrchestra, a neurosymbolic framework that models complex workflows as evolving reasoning processes. The framework adopts a hybrid approach: given a user query and a collection of data sources, an LLM-based orchestrator incrementally plans and adapts the workflow. This is encoded as a logic program in a fragment of Datalog+/- where predicates correspond to tool invocations and rules represent both predefined domain dependencies and logic constructs synthesized on demand to manipulate intermediate results. All logical inference tasks are then executed by a state-of-the-art Datalog+/- symbolic engine. This approach provides a verifiable reasoning trace, supporting the auditability and reproducibility of the entire process. Furthermore, by decoupling high-level orchestration from symbolic inference, it addresses scalability concerns, enabling complex reasoning over large datasets through targeted data querying. We evaluate VADAOrchestra on real-world financial use cases, demonstrating faithfulness, scalability, and explainability compared to standard agentic architectures.
Authors: Yundaichuan Zhan, Minghe Gao, Zhongqi Yue, Wendong Bu, Wenqiao Zhang, Guoming Wang, Jisheng Dang, Juncheng Li, Siliang Tang, Yueting Zhuang
Abstract: Recent works have explored integrating Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with classical planners that rely on symbolic representations of planning problems to generate long-horizon plans for complex embodied tasks. However, in open-ended environments, these symbolic representations obtained from perception are often incomplete, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this, we introduce SCOPE, a self-adaptive symbolic planning framework that supports refining action plans and evolving the symbolic world, i.e., the symbolic representations of open-ended environments. SCOPE comprises two synergistic modules: a Symbolic Execution Simulator (SESim) that conducts symbolic validation and real execution of action plans, leveraging the feedback to refine the plans and evolve the symbolic world; and a Self-Adaptive Symbolic Memory (SASMem) that further distills feedback into evolving symbolic knowledge to enhance long-horizon planning and modeling of the symbolic world. Experiments in open-ended environments show that SCOPE significantly improves the completeness of the symbolic world, the success rate of plans under environment perturbations, and cross-task grounding and adaptability across diverse embodied scenarios.
Authors: Ramesh Nandipalli, Chandranath Adak
Abstract: Sign language is a primary mode of communication for the global deaf and hard-of-hearing community, yet automated tools that recognize sign gestures from video and translate them into natural language text remain limited, particularly for low-resource Indian languages. We present a two-stage deep learning pipeline that (i) classifies short sign language video clips into English word labels using a fine-tuned VideoMAE video transformer, and (ii) translates the predicted English label into Hindi, Telugu, and Bengali using Meta AI's No Language Left Behind (NLLB-200) multilingual translation model. The classification model is fine-tuned on a 13-class subset of the AI4Bharat Indian Sign Language video corpus from IIT Madras, processing 16-frame clips sampled uniformly from each video at 224 x 224 resolution. Under a small-scale academic setting (13 classes, 197 clips, 80-20 split), the fine-tuned model reaches 99% training accuracy and 78% validation accuracy after 15 epochs. We provide a per-class breakdown via a confusion matrix and classification report, identify the dominant failure modes (confusable adjective pairs such as ugly, deaf, blind, hat, and dress), and describe a Streamlit-based inference demo that takes a user-uploaded video and returns the predicted English label alongside its Hindi, Telugu, and Bengali translations. We discuss the scope, limitations (small label set, isolated-word rather than continuous signing, single-signer style sensitivity, ambiguity of single-word machine translation), and directions for future work, including expanding to sentence-level generation and a larger vocabulary. Code is released to support reproducibility.
Authors: Liang Ding, Xintong Wang
Abstract: Long-chain agent execution fails exponentially in environments designed for human tolerance: with per-step determinism $\delta < 1$, $k$-step chain success degrades as $\delta^k$. The AGI-to-ASI scaling debate (Genewein et al., 2026) has so far framed progress as a race between compute growth and a list of frictions (data wall, abstraction barrier, embodied bottleneck, multi-agent trust); we argue that environment determinism is a complementary binding axis cutting across all four, for the broad class of agentic AI tasks whose outcomes are verifiable economically, physically, or through multi-party settlement. Three formal results pin down the regime: a Determinism-Efficiency Bound on chain-task success, a Verifier-Goodharting Floor on flywheel ceilings under imperfect rewards, and a convergence condition for environment-side skill evolution. We operationalise the framework as a Supply Certainty Index (SCI) over five measurable properties, a five-level Determinism Maturity Model (DMM) as adoption ladder, and a falsifiable open-question programme (OQ1-OQ5) with explicit null results that would force retraction. The position is platform-agnostic. We engage three competing positions: sim-to-real sufficiency, alignment sufficiency, and AI-as-normal-technology.
Authors: Gregory Gorbov, Artem Latyshev, Aleksandr I. Panov
Abstract: This work investigates the safe exploration problem in reinforcement learning, where an agent must maximize cumulative performance while simultaneously satisfying safety constraints. This challenge becomes even more pronounced in long-horizon tasks, where existing safe methods face fundamental limitations due to compounding estimation errors and restricted exploration capabilities. To address this problem, we propose a method that combines a learnable world model with two complementary policies a high-level policy and a low-level policy to promote safety at both hierarchical levels. The high-level policy generates intermediate subgoals that bias exploration toward safe regions, while the low-level policy uses imagined rollouts in the learned world model to reduce unsafe behaviors when reaching these subgoals. The proposed method was evaluated on challenging long-horizon navigation and manipulation tasks with high-dimensional action spaces, where it significantly outperforms existing Safe RL baselines in both success rate and strong empirical constraint satisfaction, consistently meeting the prescribed safety budget across seeds, while prior approaches fail to effectively solve these complex long-horizon scenarios.
Authors: Shiyang Chen
Abstract: Modern LLM agents increasingly rely on context compaction, summarization, or eviction to keep long-running sessions within a token budget. We show that this context-management layer is a safety-critical failure surface: in-context governance constraints that agents reliably obey while visible can be silently removed by compaction, causing the same agent to perform prohibited tool actions later in the session. We call this failure mode Governance Decay. We introduce ConstraintRot, a benchmark of long-horizon agent scenarios with deterministic tool-call grading, and measure compaction-induced violations across seven model families. Across 1,323 episodes, violation rises from 0% with the policy in full context to 30% after compaction, reaching 59% for some models; when the constraint survives the summary, violation remains 0%, but when it is dropped, violation reaches 38%. We further study a Compaction-Eviction Attack, in which adversarial in-context content biases the summarizer to omit a legitimate policy, and show that optimized injections defeat every evaluated model. Finally, we propose Constraint Pinning, a simple training-free mitigation that quarantines governance constraints from lossy compaction and restores violation to 0% in our benchmark. These results identify context management as a first-class governance surface for deployed LLM agents.
Authors: Yikun Fu, Bowen Fu, Zhenyu Wu, Shuang Cheng, Xiaowei Sun, Bowen Yang, Zehao Li, Yibo Zhao, Zichen Ding, Zhoumianze Liu, Shijie Wang, Biqing Qi, Bowen Zhou
Abstract: Computer use agents (CUAs) have advanced rapidly in desktop automation, and a growing number of users deploy CUAs such as OpenClaw on Mac Mini for always-on automation. However, existing benchmarks, including those for macOS, evaluate agents without framework augmentation and rely on binary evaluation. As a result, they fail to capture both the framework capabilities leveraged by modern CUAs and the partial progress on long-horizon, multi-application tasks. We present MacAgentBench, a comprehensive macOS agent benchmark comprising 676 tasks across 25 applications, with nearly 60% involving both GUI and CLI interaction. The benchmark adopts deterministic rule-based evaluation and introduces fine-grained multi-checkpoint scoring with capability annotations for multi-application tasks. Experiments across three frameworks and 16 models show that the best configuration, Claude Opus 4.6 on OpenClaw, attains 73.7% Pass@1, while this advantage is primarily driven by the skill library rather than by framework design. Fine-grained metrics further reveal that models with similar Pass@1 can differ substantially in sub-goal completion. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/JetAstra/MacAgentBench.
Authors: Alexander V. Kozachok, Alexander M. Nazimov, Shamil G. Magomedov
Abstract: Domain-specific languages (DSLs) are widely used for managing operating system security policies, yet manually authoring rules in such languages demands high expertise and is error-prone. This paper formalises the task of automatic DSL code generation from natural language descriptions - Text2DSL - as a distinct problem class, separate from Text-to-SQL and general-purpose code generation. We introduce the PolkitBench dataset comprising 4,204 verified natural-language-to-Polkit-rule pairs, each validated through a three-level AST-based pipeline. Controlled prompt experiments on two MoE models of different scale and provenance - GigaChat-10B-A1.8B (1.8B active parameters) and Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B (3B active) - demonstrate the critical role of structured context (BNF grammar, API specification, permitted identifier vocabulary) for LLM-based DSL code generation. Across both models, supplying context raises syntactic validity to 98.6-99.4%, structural validity by +9.7 to +35.5 pp, and the CodeBLEU score by +60% to +95%. The consistency of the effect across models of different scale and provenance indicates that, for the Text2DSL class of problems, injecting a formal target-language specification into the prompt context is a robust enabling factor for high-quality generation without model fine-tuning.
Authors: Weiwei Ye, Hangchen Liu, Dongyuan Li, Renhe Jiang
Abstract: Large language models have become capable reasoners and tool users that write and run code and search the literature, which makes automating the research process itself a realistic goal. We present PAPERCLAW, a harnessed multi-agent system that carries a project autonomously, from a field of study to a finished paper. PAPERCLAW curates a domain from a field's live literature, datasets, and code; brainstorms it into an idea with a pre-registered main-result contract; and drives a stoppable hypothesis map through an iterative propose, test, reflect loop that grows only from measured verdicts and halts once the evidence supports the idea, at which point it writes a venue-compliant paper. A full-lifecycle memory keeps each stage in a single living record, so a long run can be paused, inspected, and resumed without losing context. At the centre is an in-cycle research assistant with research tools and skills: it can drive the whole pipeline on its own, while the same interface lets a person step in at any stage, turning a first autonomous draft into a stronger paper through human-in-the-loop refinement. Throughout, PAPERCLAW keeps its output grounded and checkable, citing only references validated against open scholarly indexes and reporting results that genuinely ran. An evaluation with an LLM judge finds that PAPERCLAW produces strong papers both fully autonomously and with human-in-the-loop refinement.
Authors: Dexu Yu, Youhua Li, Zhaoyang Guan, Xianhao Lin, Jining Luan, Zihao Rao, Xuanqi Lan, Yang Ran, Bo Lan, Nai-Xin Zhai, Hanwen Du, Junchen Fu, Wenhao Deng, Yongxin Ni, Chunxiao Li
Abstract: Agent skills have become a practical way to extend large language model agents, but the growing skill ecosystem still lacks a reliable way to judge whether a skill is worth deploying. Existing evaluation methods remain largely anchored to fixed task suites, assessing skills through performance on predefined tasks and environments. As skill marketplaces expand, this paradigm becomes inadequate: fixed suites can conflate a skill's marginal contribution with backbone strength and miss its value when tasks fall outside the skill's intended scope. We introduce SkillAudit, an end-to-end framework for skill-centered assessment that takes an arbitrary agent skill as input and automatically generates a comprehensive, multi-dimensional evaluation report spanning utility, efficiency/cost, and safety. SkillAudit focuses on the skill artifact itself and constructs capability-aligned evaluation tasks directly from the skill package. The generated tasks are conducted in isolated sandbox environments to collect execution evidence, followed by automated checks with LLM-based judging to produce auditable results. To dissect the agent skills, we propose the baseline comparison principle to measure utility and efficiency/cost, and introduce a two-stage detection paradigm combining static semantic analysis with dynamic runtime verification to assess safety risks. After scanning top-ranked real-world skill packages spanning 23 occupational categories, we found that over 7% of skills are at risky status.
Authors: Weihong Qi, Kristina Lerman
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) frequently encounter inputs that disagree with their prior outputs, through user pushback, retrieved documents, or web search results. While the way they resolve such conflicts -- a process we frame as cognitive dissonance resolution -- has been characterized behaviorally, its connection to internal model uncertainty is not well understood. To study this systematically, we vary persuasion attempts along two dimensions, source authority and evidence quality, across 12 health-science claims of stratified epistemic status. Dissonance can be resolved through persuasion, backfire, or immunity. We introduce Trust Elasticity (TE), an econometrics-inspired measure of how readily a model is persuaded toward conflicting evidence. Across four LLMs, TE varies substantially, while clearly false claims elicit near-zero TE across all models. On two open-weight models, we further find that this variation is associated with two complementary internal uncertainty indicators, Confidence Miscalibration in Qwen and Internal Uncertainty Change in Llama. These results link cross-model behavioral variation to a measurable internal property and point to interventions targeting internal uncertainty as future work.
Authors: Weidi Luo, Qiming Zhang, Yihao Quan, Mingyu Jin, Jie Cai, Chaowei Xiao, Jingcheng Niu, Zhen Xiang
Abstract: Coding agents based on large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable autonomous capabilities, but they also introduce significant safety and misuse risks during multi-turn interactions with external environments. Existing safety mechanisms mainly rely on external guardrails, which have a limited ability to perform fine-grained behavioral control during execution. Meanwhile, recent mechanistic interpretability methods for LLM safety are mostly confined to single-turn or jailbreak-style QA settings, limiting their ability to capture the evolving risk dynamics of multi-turn agent execution. In this paper, we investigate the safety of multi-turn coding agents from an internal perspective. We propose AgentLens (Mechanistic Subspace Intervention and Steering), a white-box defense framework that performs runtime safety detection and representation-level mitigation for coding agents. Unlike conventional agent guardrails, AgentLens detect harmful execution states from step-level hidden representations and mitigate unsafe behavior by intervening in a 10-dimensional subspace within a single layer. To support this research, we introduce the Mechanistic Agent Safety (MAS) benchmark, comprising comprehensively annotated multi-turn execution trajectories across 194 tasks using LLaMA-3.1-8B, Qwen-2.5-7B, and Gemma-2-9B. Extensive experiments show that AgentLens achieves strong safety detection performance, provides preliminary evidence for lookahead risk anticipation, and substantially reduces harmful actions of the coding agent, establishing a foundation for applying mechanistic interpretability to dynamic LLM agent safety. The code is available at: https://github.com/EddyLuo1232/AgentLens
Authors: Dongyub Jude Lee, Jungseob Lee, Seungyoon Lee, Seongtae Hong, Suhyune Son, Sugyeong Eo, Jaehyung Seo, Heuiseok Lim
Abstract: Alignment tuning is meant to make harmful-request refusal robust, yet this safety behavior can be erased by a small set of benign fine-tuning examples. This is a deployment risk for open-weight models because a checkpoint can pass refusal tests at release time and later lose refusal under low-cost downstream fine-tuning. Prior work has established these refusal failures, but existing studies do not show how to detect this fragility in the aligned model itself before an attack or fine-tuning intervention is run. We introduce Skin-Deep, a geometric diagnostic that detects alignment fragility directly from the aligned model's hidden-state activations before such an intervention is run and compresses the layer-wise safety geometry into a single scalar, the Geometric Fragility Score (GFS). Applied to twenty-one instruction-tuned models spanning six alignment recipes and 3B--32B parameters, Skin-Deep reveals a recurring low-rank safety subspace across model families. Direction ablations show that removing directions in this subspace weakens harmful-request refusal, providing causal evidence that the recovered geometry underlies refusal behavior. Crucially, GFS identifies, before any fine-tuning, the initially safe model that retains the most refusal after small-scale LoRA fine-tuning. These results establish GFS as a practical pre-deployment diagnostic for flagging fragile refusal behavior without running an attack.
Authors: Tuomo Kiiskinen, Jason Fries, Philip Adamson, David Wu, Timothy John Ellis-Caleo, Aaron Fanous, Balasubramanian Narasimhan, Joel Neal, Sylvia Plevritis, Manuel A. Rivas
Abstract: We introduce VISTA Architect, a database-oriented AI architecture for integrating large language models (LLMs) with longitudinal electronic health records (EHRs). At ingestion, it transforms complex clinical documentation into a persistent, provenance-linked knowledge graph, eliminating repeated reprocessing of raw records at query time. The architecture has two layers: a source-faithful MEDS Graph preserving granular EHR structure with full provenance, and a clinically abstracted Timeline Object Architecture (TOA) that uses graph-guided LLM extraction to synthesize a concise timeline of deduplicated, temporally coherent clinical events. This addresses key limitations of direct long-context prompting and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which often miss temporal relationships and incur high cost and latency from repeated raw-text processing. By precomputing clinical synthesis once, downstream queries access an organized patient state and traverse to source documentation only when detailed verification is needed. We demonstrate the system in multidisciplinary thoracic oncology tumor boards at Stanford Medicine, where precise reconstruction of patient histories is critical. Across 1,180 patients, VISTA Architect achieved 96.4% accuracy (mean 9.75/10) on 15 tumor board-salient variables (17,700 evaluations; 95% CI 96.1-96.7%), surpassing a matched BM25 RAG baseline and recent benchmarks for LLM-based clinical extraction. An agentic interface reduced preparation for a 30-patient held-out cohort to about 2.2 minutes without sacrificing accuracy. While configured here for thoracic oncology, the modular design adapts to other specialties through customizable event definitions, episode structures, and agentic tools; validation beyond thoracic oncology remains future work.
Authors: Keito Inoshita
Abstract: Existing driver intervention systems rely on auditory alerts and fixed templates, failing to leverage multi-task recognition outputs. General-purpose metrics such as BLEU and BERTScore cannot capture intervention-specific quality dimensions including risk-urgency alignment, cognitive load, and driver acceptability. In this paper, we propose the Driver Safety-Aware Intervention Score (DSAIS), a domain-specific metric evaluating five dimensions through a hybrid architecture combining lightweight rule-based computation with LLM Judge evaluation, together with an end-to-end framework integrating four-task recognition outputs into an LLM through risk fusion, state history management, and dynamic prompt construction. Experiments on the AIDE dataset with five models and seven conditions demonstrate that DSAIS achieves ICC 0.798-0.840 across three architecturally distinct judges and Cohen's d > 1.5 across all control conditions. Multi-dimensional sub-score analysis quantifies the contextual adaptability gap between rule-based and LLM-based systems, revealing that multi-task integration improves contextual relevance by 9.1% over rule-based baselines. Ablation experiments demonstrate that each framework component contributes to contextual relevance, with sub-score decomposition revealing gains that aggregate scoring masks. Driver emotion recognition is identified as the most critical upstream factor, and compact local LLMs (7B--9B parameters) achieve quality superior to API-based models, providing practical design guidelines for in-vehicle deployment.
Authors: Jungseob Lee, Seungyoon Lee, Seongtae Hong, Minhyuk Kim, Chanjun Park, Heuiseok Lim
Abstract: Training large language models to reason efficiently is a critical challenge. While integrating length-penalizing rewards into Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) aims to reduce verbosity, it frequently triggers reward collapse, severely degrading reasoning capabilities. Through a systematic evaluation of various reward configurations, we identify the root mechanism: GRPO's group normalization creates divergent advantages when incorrect answers receive continuous length penalties. Consequently, methods penalizing the length of incorrect answers are structurally prone to collapse under sustained optimization. Furthermore, restricting penalties exclusively to correct answers avoids this primary failure, but leaves the model susceptible to a stochastic collapse driven by response over-compression. To robustly prevent both failure modes, we propose ACOER (Adaptive Correct-Only Efficiency Reward). ACOER eliminates the structural penalty loop by isolating brevity bonuses to correct completions and prevents stochastic compression via dynamic budget normalization and control-loop penalty adjustments. Evaluated across diverse mathematical reasoning benchmarks, ACOER improves overall accuracy compared to the base model while reducing token generation by over 60%, establishing a fundamentally stable approach for efficiency-aware optimization.
Authors: Seong Jong Yoo, Siyuan Peng, Felix Gu, Stratis Aloimonos, Cornelia Ferm\"uller
Abstract: Choreographic motion generation poses unique challenges for AI, demanding precise semantic control over complex, temporally structured, and expressive full-body dynamics. While existing models can synthesize motion from music, they remain largely black boxes. Conversely, attempting to condition generation on both text and music frequently leads to modality collapse, where dense acoustic rhythms overwhelm sparse semantic text prompts, destroying user controllability. To resolve this spatial-temporal conflict, we propose STREAM (Structural-Temporal Rhythmic Energy-based Attention for Motion), a modality-decoupled diffusion transformer. STREAM strictly separates conditioning pathways: global text semantics dictate the kinematic structure via Adaptive Layer Normalization (AdaLN), while a novel Bimodal Energy-Based Attention Module (BEAM) routes these features to the musical beat without overwriting the semantics. We further introduce Motorica++, a newly curated dataset enriched with domain-specific dance vocabulary and frame-level semantic annotations from existing Motorica dataset. Additionally, to rigorously quantify zero-shot editability, we propose the Exchange Evaluation Protocol and Editable Dance Score (EDS). Through extensive experiments, STREAM achieves state-of-the-art alignment between motion and music while perfectly preserving choreographic semantics, positioning AI not merely as a reactive synthesizer, but as a controllable, collaborative partner for artistic direction. The source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/SeongJong-Yoo/STREAM.
Authors: Jingjie Ning, Xiaochuan Li, Ji Zeng, Chenyan Xiong, Guolin Ke
Abstract: Closed-loop Auto Research extends automated machine learning from fixed-dataset fitting to changing the research workflow, with language-model agents editing representations and model code and acquiring external evidence. Molecular property prediction spans many small endpoints. We ask whether this action space yields improvements generalizing beyond the validation signal selecting them. We isolate three Auto Research axes, features, models, and external evidence, under a file-level ablation lock attributing each gain to one axis over a strong baseline. Across 36 endpoints in three benchmark suites we score each selected configuration once on a held-out test whose labels the search never read. A routed pipeline taking each endpoint's best validation axis reaches positive held-out gains of 0.013, 0.011, and 0.042, the transferable axis differing by suite, data on TDC, model on Polaris, feature and model on MoleculeNet. The largest model-search gain falls from 0.041 on validation to 0.003 on test, while curated data reaches 0.022 but negative 0.019 on test, two non-transfer signatures. Curated external data raises held-out CYP2C9-substrate performance by 0.17 and half-life by 0.08, admitted through a contamination filter rejecting same-source files overlapping 64 to 89 percent of test structures, necessary but not sufficient for transfer. A matched-trial automated machine learning control did not reproduce the agent's code-level model intervention, reaching 0.006 against 0.042, and the pipeline stays competitive with an 84M-parameter pretrained 3D model on the shared training split. The experiments stay within molecular property prediction, but separating discovery from held-out certification is a domain-agnostic lesson for any closed-loop system optimising a proxy for a held-out quantity.
Authors: Jeffrey Flynt
Abstract: Before letting an agent operate over real context, can you prove it used the right evidence? GroundEval turns that question into a deterministic test of what the agent searched, fetched, cited, and was permitted to access. In one case study, two frontier LLM judges scored a plausible agent response above 0.85. But the trace told a different story: the agent had never retrieved the artifact its answer depended on, yielding a GroundEval score of 0.000. We introduce GroundEval, a judge-free framework for evaluating agents against grounded, time-bounded, and access-controlled evidence. GroundEval uses a domain configuration to generate questions, lets the agent choose how to answer, and then scores both the final answer and the recorded trajectory that produced it. The benchmark targets three failures that LLM-as-judge evaluation struggles to detect: whether an agent checked before claiming absence, reasoned only from evidence available to the actor at the relevant time, and used the correct causal mechanism rather than a plausible one. These correspond to three tracks: Silence, Perspective, and Counterfactual. GroundEval exposes when plausible answers rest on invalid evidence paths, and produces structured per-question diagnostics that pair tool activity with the agent's turn-level narration, making each score inspectable rather than merely reported. What our case studies turned up is that this gap isn't some rare corner case. It's exactly the blind spot that final-answer and judge-based scoring were never built to catch.
Authors: Yuval Banoun, Daniel Sadoc Menasche, Ori Rottenstreich
Abstract: Hash-based data structures such as Bloom filters are widely used in network systems for tasks including caching, anomaly detection, and machine learning pipelines. They typically provide binary indications of whether an element belongs to a set of interest, e.g., the contents of a cache. When uncertainty arises due to hash collisions, a positive indication is returned to avoid false negatives. We argue that the certainty associated with such indications can itself be useful information. This work focuses on Counting Bloom Filters (CBFs), a Bloom-filter variant that maintains counters rather than bits. Besides supporting insertions and deletions, these counters provide additional information that can be used to estimate the certainty of positive membership indications. We show how this certainty signal can be exploited in architectures that combine Bloom Filters with machine learning (ML) models.
Authors: Xiang-Jun Ou, Shuang Liang, Xin-Yu Hu, Rong-Hao Huang, Jing Wang, Shao-Qun Zhang
Abstract: Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled sophisticated reasoning and content generation, yet their inherent stochasticity poses significant challenges for ensuring predictive credibility. While traditional uncertainty taxonomy paradigms, such as the dichotomy of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties, provide conceptual foundations, they often fail to capture the multi-component and multi-stage nature of LLM generation and struggle to evaluate the effectiveness of various Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) methods. In this paper, we propose a granular uncertainty taxonomy that systematically attributes LLM uncertainty into input-level, parameter-level, token-level, and decoding-process sources. Correspondingly, we categorize existing UQ methods into Bayesian, ensemble, consensus-based, and single-pass approaches. Furthermore, we introduce a comprehensive evaluation framework covering diverse generation settings and metrics. We empirically evaluate 21 typical UQ methods across three prominent LLM families, including Qwen3, Llama 3.2, and DeepSeek-V3, on benchmarks such as TriviaQA, GSM8K, and HumanEval. Our experimental results demonstrate that (i) the effectiveness of UQ methods is sensitive to task types and generation settings; (ii) consensus-based methods, typed Deg and EigV, consistently outperform other UQ approaches; and (iii) larger model scales correlate with lower uncertainty estimates, suggesting an empirical scaling law for LLM uncertainty. This work bridges the gap between theoretical origins and practical deployment, providing a versatile diagnostic tool for systematically quantifying uncertainty in LLM applications.
Authors: Bowen Zhang
Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) trains an LLM on states induced by the current or recent student policy: the student generates complete or partial rollouts, a teacher or self-teacher scores the resulting tokens under their generated contexts, and dense log-probability, logit, or distributional signals are converted into post-training updates. This survey studies OPD as a feedback-to-update problem rather than a single loss family. We develop a formula-driven taxonomy from two routes -- direct distributional losses and policy-gradient-style log-ratio updates -- and use it to organize core methods, verifier- or outcome-guided hybrids, industrial reports, framework implementations, failure modes, and stabilization recipes under explicit evidence boundaries. The taxonomy shows that OPD effectiveness depends not only on KL direction or teacher access, but also on state compatibility, support construction, temporal credit, vocabulary-level probability routing, gates and weights, and regularization. We further separate two mechanisms often conflated in sampled-token OPD stability discussions. Temporal credit asks how teacher-student log-ratio returns should weight sampled actions across a rollout; vocabulary routing asks where probability mass should move when negative feedback suppresses a sampled token. This distinction yields bias boundaries for immediate, return-to-go, discounted, and baseline-corrected estimators, motivates GAE-OPD as a value-based hypothesis for log-ratio returns, and motivates Counterfactual Routed OPD (CR-OPD) for routing probability mass toward teacher-supported, student-reachable alternatives. We close by mapping actionability diagnostics, failure mechanisms, case studies, open problems, and a reporting checklist onto the same feedback-to-update variables.
Authors: Tianjia Dong, Nadav Kunievsky, James A. Evans
Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous decision makers, yet the behavioral mapping they exhibit can vary substantially across decision environments that are payoff-equivalent by construction-environments that share identical payoff-relevant structure but differ in surface presentation. This sensitivity renders suite-based evaluation fragile and raises a fundamental question of behavioral portability: how well does a behavioral mapping learned in one decision environment informative on another that preserves the same underlying incentive structure? We introduce a formal framework to measure this property. Our protocol fits an interpretable behavioral model on data pooled from a set of source environments and evaluates its out-of-sample predictive performance in a held-out target environment, benchmarking against an oracle trained directly on target data. Portability is quantified via a loss-agnostic measure that delivers worst-case bounds on the performance of the induced prediction-action mapping in the target environment. In controlled experiments spanning seven canonical economic decision problems, we document substantial and systematic portability losses, suggesting that behavioral characterizations of LLMs obtained in one decision environment cannot be assumed to transfer reliably to structurally equivalent alternatives.
Authors: Boxuan Ma, Huiyong Li, Gen Li, Li Chen, Atsushi Shimada, Shin'ichi Konomi
Abstract: Generative AI tools provide novice programmers with instant, personalized support, but also raise concerns about whether AI use supports or bypasses students' regulation of problem-solving. Existing work has largely focused on correctness, usability, or overall usage frequency, with less attention to how student--AI help-seeking unfolds. This study addresses this gap by analyzing AI-assisted help-seeking trajectories in university-level programming. Using an SRL-informed analytical framework that links prompt-level help-seeking codes to conceptual, implementation, debugging, and reflective forms of support, we analyzed 1,290 task-specific student prompts linked to 17,190 code submissions from 71 students in introductory Python programming courses. Specifically, we examined how help-seeking interactions were structured across turns and attempts, and how trajectory patterns related to task scores and the number of code submissions. Results indicate that many students primarily used AI for reactive troubleshooting rather than for planned, self-regulated problem-solving. Although trajectory patterns were not associated with significant differences in task scores, they differed substantially in the number of code submissions required. These findings suggest that the educational significance of AI support lies not only in whether students use AI, but in how their help-seeking trajectories develop during programming problem-solving.
Authors: Omar Hashash, Christo Kurisummoottil Thomas, Walid Saad, Merouane Debbah, Karl Friston, Adeel Razi
Abstract: In this paper, a novel test-time scaling law for physical artificial intelligence (AI) agents is introduced. This scaling law enables physical AI agents to reason with their world models to generalize in unforeseen scenarios at test time. The derived scaling law is grounded in the first principle of active inference, which equips agents with the general objective to survive in the real world, under which their specific task objectives are subsumed. Active inference achieves this by providing the reasoning to resolve prediction errors that arise when the agent encounters unforeseen situations outside its training distribution, enabling generalization in non-stationary environments. The proposed scaling law captures this by dynamically updating the agent's policy with this reasoning at test time. This policy update is modeled as a soft Bayesian inference process in which beliefs about the policy are updated using the reasoning that reduces expected prediction errors under allowable policies as a likelihood. The resulting posterior policy admits a biological interpretation, recovering the scaling mechanism that engages the brain's basal ganglia and prefrontal cortex at test time. To solve this analytically intractable problem, a variational inference solution minimizing free energy bounds is developed. This solution extends to enable learning beyond training by reinforcing new instances, resolved at test time, in both the policy and world model. Unlike existing scaling laws constrained by model size and training data, the derived solution scales with the continuous real-world experience of a physical AI agent. Simulation results on an autonomous driving task demonstrate that the proposed solution outperforms model-free Q-learning and model-based Bayesian reinforcement learning, achieving robust generalization to unforeseen scenarios while improving inference efficiency by over 36%.
Authors: Devleena Das, Rajeev Patwari, Vikram Kumar Bukka, Nithin Kumar Guggilla, Elliott Delaye, Ashish Sirasao
Abstract: Evaluating LLMs across many model variants -- quantized, fine-tuned, or deployment-specific -- requires running large benchmarks repeatedly, a process that can take tens of hours per model on edge hardware such as NPUs. Existing subset selection methods reduce this cost but depend on large calibration pools or learned prediction layers. We introduce MINCE (Monte Carlo Informed N-sizing for Compact Evaluation), which uses Monte Carlo simulation over per-item logs from a small set of calibration models to find the minimum subset size that bounds accuracy drift and then fixes a randomly sampled subset at that size, with no prediction layer needed. MINCE reduces IFEVAL by 54\%, MMLU by 89\%, and GSM8K by 70\% with maximum drift $\leq$2.62\,pp on BF16 models and mean drift of 0.77--3.59\,pp on held-out NPU models, while delivering median GPU evaluation speedups of 2.7--8.1$\times$ and NPU evaluation speedups of 1.7--2.0$\times$. The method is robust to calibration pool size and achieves lower drift than tinyBenchmarks (12$\times$ lower on MMLU, 3.3$\times$ on GSM8K) while using 57$\times$ fewer calibration models.
Authors: Jinwei Xiao, Zhuowen Han, Yueqing Sun, Zhengxi Lu, Yuxin Liu, Zhiyuan Yao, Wentao Chen, Qi Gu, Xunliang Cai
Abstract: On-policy distillation transfers reasoning ability through dense token-level supervision, yet the nature of the transferable signal remains unclear. We discover that reasoning chains contain two types of knowledge that require different discovery mechanisms: decisions (where to branch), which surface through student uncertainty, and evidence (intermediate steps that justify decisions), which hides in positions where the student is confident yet wrong. Current methods capture only decisions; the substantive knowledge in evidence tokens remains untransferred. We propose DEAR(Decision-Evidence Aware Reasoning Distillation), which first identifies decisions via student entropy, then discovers their supporting evidence through hidden-state cosine similarity to decision anchors, boosted by teacher-student divergence to prioritize the largest knowledge gaps. Across three student-teacher configurations on math and code benchmarks, DEAR consistently outperforms standard OPD, with up to +2.5pp on competition math and +5.7pp on code generation.
Authors: Wei Yang, Bryce Kan, Shixuan Li, Li Li, Yuehan Qin, Jiate Li, Paul Bogdan, Jesse Thomason
Abstract: Long-term memory has become increasingly important for LLM agents that operate across extended interactions and evolving task contexts. Recent memory systems have made past experiences more persistent, compact, and retrievable, but retrieval alone does not ensure that a memory provides valid evidence for the current query. When experiences are compressed into reusable fragments, memories from different situations may appear equally relevant if they involve recurring entities or user states. We refer to this failure as context collapse: memories lose the surrounding context needed to judge whether they provide valid evidence for the current query. To address this problem, we propose Contextual Reinstatement for Agentic Memory (RaMem), a framework that turns retrieved memory fragments into contextually verifiable evidence. RaMem operates through four coordinated stages: (i) evidence anchoring grounds each memory in its original episodic conditions, especially event time, mention time, session span, and participants; (ii) recall condition induction derives the evidence conditions implied by the query; (iii) validity-aware retrieval uses these conditions to prioritize context-compatible memories while retaining content-relevant candidates as fallback evidence; and (iv) context-preserved synthesis keeps the selected memories' structured context available to the generator. Experiments on long-term memory benchmarks show that RaMem consistently improves performance over strong memory baselines, with average F1 gains of more than 10% across several backbones.
Authors: Raul Jimenez, Boris Bolliet, Francisco Villaescusa-Navarro, Rabih Zbib, Benjamin Wandelt, David N. Spergel, Thomas Meier, Jessica Montgomery, Hana Aliee, Licia Verde
Abstract: Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems are beginning to assist, accelerate, and partially automate scientific discovery, performing tasks that span literature synthesis, code generation, data analysis, hypothesis proposal, and model criticism. We argue that this transition is qualitative rather than incremental, and that suitably designed multi-agent systems may evolve from passive computational tools into ``AI scientists'' that can expand the hypothesis-generating and verification capacity of science. Such systems must be developed and deployed within a scientific ecosystem fit for purpose: institutions must be redesigned for verification, accountability, interpretability, and dual-use safety. We sketch how multi-agent architectures, illustrated by the prototype framework \textit{Denario}, accelerate the discovery cycle and traverse model spaces beyond human reach; examine what this implies for authorship, peer review, and the enduring role of human scientists; and close with recommendations for governing AI as an epistemic actor rather than a mere instrument.
Authors: Zhanbo Hua, Yifan Yao, Weihao Xie, Yongchi Zhao, Minghao Liu, Ruizhi Qiu, Zhewei Huang, Zun Wang, Yiyan Ji, Yunhai Ye, Letian Zhu, Xinping Lei, Han Li, Zhiyuan Ma, Zili Wang, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Jiaheng Liu
Abstract: While recent LLM-based terminal agents have demonstrated promising capabilities, the scarcity of high-quality, executable training data remains a critical bottleneck. Existing synthesis pipelines typically scale by retrofitting surface-level artifacts into tasks, frequently yielding ambiguous instructions, shallow execution paths, and brittle tests that provide weak learning signals. To overcome this, we introduce CLI-Universe, a principled synthesis engine that constructs terminal-agent tasks. CLI-Universe generates candidate tasks by sampling combinations across a multi-dimensional capability taxonomy (domain, skill type, capability, and engineering pillar), then grounds each candidate through evidence-guided deep research over real-world technical materials. To ensure rigorous supervision, validated blueprints are instantiated into Dockerized environments and subjected to a multi-stage executable verification pipeline featuring rubric-gated test construction, hint-conditional filtering, and strict fail-to-pass checking. Across the full pipeline, from candidate generation to verification, approximately two-thirds of candidates are discarded, retaining only those that are genuine, verifiable, and non-trivially challenging. To validate our framework, we instantiate a highly distilled dataset of 6,000 trajectories called CLI-Universe-6K. Remarkably, fine-tuning Qwen3-32B on CLI-Universe-6K achieves 33.4% on Terminal-Bench 2.0. This sets a new state-of-the-art for models trained on open-source data at or below 32B parameters, and outperforms several models an order of magnitude larger, demonstrating the profound data efficiency of structured, high-fidelity synthesis.
Authors: Pengfei Zhou, Zhiwei Tang, Yixing Ma, Jiasheng Tang, Yizeng Han, Zhenglin Wan, Fanqing Meng, Wei Wang, Bohan Zhuang, Wangbo Zhao, Yang You
Abstract: Real-world users typically have access to multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) from different providers, and these LLMs often excel at distinct domains, yet none dominate all. Consequently, routing each task to the most suitable model becomes critical for both performance and cost. Existing routers treat this as a static, one-off classification problem. However, we identify the performance bottleneck for these routers as information deficit: simply augmenting a vanilla LLM router with performance statistics at the task-dimension level yields a 15.3% relative gain, surpassing a heuristic router built on the same dimension-level priors. Motivated by this finding, we propose Agent-as-a-Router, a framework that formalizes routing as a C-A-F loop (Context->Action->Feedback->Context). It closes the information gap by accumulating execution-grounded experience during deployment. We instantiate this framework as ACRouter, composed of an Orchestrator, a Verifier, a Memory module, and introduce CodeRouterBench, an evaluation environment comprising ~10K task instances with verified scores from 8 frontier LLMs, enabling regret-based router comparison on streaming tasks. Experiments show that ACRouter achieves the lowest cumulative regret on in-distribution tasks and generalizes to out-of-distribution agentic-programming tasks, demonstrating that our routing framework actively closes the information gap. Codes and benchmarks are released at https://github.com/LanceZPF/agent-as-a-router.
Authors: Kirtan Bhatt, Xiachong Lin, Matthew Amos, Flora D. Salim, Wen Hu
Abstract: Multi-zone HVAC control is a spatial decision problem in which indoor thermal evolution and control decisions depend not only on outdoor conditions and internal heat gains but also on zone layout, physical adjacency, and delayed thermal interactions across the building. Recent LLM-based HVAC controllers have shown that prompt-based control is feasible. However, these methods typically rely on task descriptions, observation values, short textual feedback, or unstructured retrieval, which limits their ability to reason about zone coupling, thermal response, and building dynamics. This paper presents a thermodynamics-aware LLM control framework for a five-zone EnergyPlus building simulation. The controller is grounded in a physics-informed spatial knowledge graph derived from Brick-style building semantics and linked with recent interaction history. At each control step, the model receives the current building state, graph-structured spatial context, and recent environment-controller history, enabling it to make decisions that reflect both building structure and short-term thermal evolution. We evaluate the framework against standard control baselines and several LLM-based alternatives. Results show that the proposed approach achieves the best overall energy-comfort trade-off and the lowest PMV violation while maintaining energy-efficient operation.
Authors: Genliang Zhu, Chu Wang
Abstract: AI agents increasingly act through external tools: they read private data, construct structured payloads, submit write requests, export records, and coordinate workflows across application boundaries. Existing authorization mechanisms usually ask whether an integration credential, app, or token can call a tool. That question is necessary but incomplete. A tool call can be authorized by static credentials and still be unjustified by the user's current request. For example, a credential that can read and export records should not expose export authority when the user only asked for a bounded summary, and a model-generated delete call should not execute merely because the integration has a delete scope. This paper proposes Intent-Governed Access Control (IGAC), a server-side authorization layer that treats the user's expressed intent as a monotone, auditable policy attribute for AI-agent tool use. IGAC introduces intent certificates, session-scoped policy narrowing, intent-aware manifest filtering, and intent-tool-payload consistency checks. The central invariant is that user intent may only reduce the authority granted by static integration policy; it never expands scopes, data policy, tenant boundaries, or review requirements. We map IGAC onto OpenPort, an existing governance substrate that already implements authorization-dependent discovery, scope and ABAC-style policy checks, draft-first writes, preflight impact binding, state-witness checks, idempotency, stable reason codes, and audit.
Authors: Aman Mehta
Abstract: Long-horizon LLM agents can fail quietly: they settle on one reading of the evidence early, then spend the rest of the run defending it. We call this premature commitment. Final-answer scoring misses the failure mode because it sees only the answer, not whether the process has already collapsed to a stable path. We define representational commitment as cross-run hidden-state convergence at a fixed reasoning step, and use it as an early diagnostic of trajectory consistency. On Llama-3.1-70B running ReAct on HotpotQA, step-4 hidden-state similarity predicts downstream behavioral consistency (r = -0.35, partial r = -0.45), with a localized temporal and layer-wise signature. The signal replicates across Qwen-2.5-72B and Phi-3-14B, and on StrategyQA (r = -0.83). It does not track correctness: committed-wrong and committed-correct questions are not separable in activation similarity. That boundary is central to the claim. Commitment tells us whether an agent has settled, not whether it is right. A runtime monitor detects inconsistent trajectories from hidden states at AUROC up to 0.97 (0.85--0.88 under a stricter split), and a prompting intervention cuts behavioral variance by 28% against a token-matched control while leaving accuracy statistically unchanged. We also test whether the signal can route self-consistency compute; on a harder benchmark it helps only modestly and is matched by a simpler output-based baseline. The result is a diagnostic for a hidden process failure, with clear limits rather than a general accuracy lever.
Authors: Yincheng Zhou, Athena Zhuoming Zhong, Shijie Zhang, Kevin Zhang, Teresa Xiaotao Shang, Shanghang Zhang
Abstract: As multimodal agents move from interface understanding to real software control, successful trajectory discovery in live desktop environments becomes a key challenge. GUI tasks require long-horizon sequences of precise mouse and keyboard actions, while feedback is sparse, delayed, and costly to obtain through VM rollouts. We propose Environment-Native Verified Search (ENVS), a training-time search-and-filter pipeline that uses the environment to construct verified supervision before policy optimization: it branches over behaviorally distinct GUI actions in live OSWorld VMs, verifies successful leaves, and trains from globally balanced step-level supervision. To evaluate robustness under realistic desktop interruptions, we also introduce OSWorld-Noisy, a dynamic benchmark for recoverable desktop interruptions that preserves the original tasks while testing whether agents can refocus, dismiss, wait, or recover under live perturbations. On the 300-task OSWorld pool, ENVS reaches 30.3 pass@8 on original evaluations and 29.0 on OSWorld-Noisy, outperforming matched ARPO-style online RL while reducing compute from 184-192 to 138-153 GPU-hours; even with only 30% of its search data, ENVS reaches 27.0 pass@8, exceeding ARPO from the base model. Training from noisy environments also better preserves visual-reasoning abilities on auxiliary benchmarks, including OSWorld-G Refusal (16.7 vs. 1.9) and BLINK Functional Correspondence (26.2 vs. 23.1).
Authors: Aman Mehta, Anupam Datta
Abstract: Long-horizon agents depend on context management: systems compress, summarize, and evict old tokens so tasks can continue beyond finite windows. That is safe only when dropped information is no longer needed or has been internalized. Plans are the stress case: they are written early, used for many steps, and first to be evicted. We introduce replay pairing, a diagnostic that runs the same trajectory with and without the plan in history and measures hidden-state cosine distance. On Llama-3.1-70B, plan signal spikes to 0.453 one step after the plan, then falls 4.1x in a single action-observation step; HotpotQA falls 12.4x. This is evidence that standard LLM agents do not carry plans forward as persistent state, and instead depend on the plan remaining in context. A layer-L32 probe detects this decay as a diagnostic, not as proof that it reads plan content itself. Reasoning models add a measurement confound: their `
Authors: Guilhem Faur\'e (MULTISPEECH), Mostafa Sadeghi (MULTISPEECH), Sam Bigeard (MULTISPEECH), Slim Ouni (LORIA)
Abstract: Latent diffusion approaches to sign language production (SLP) rely on an initial stage that learns an encoding of sign pose sequences, enabling generative modeling in the resulting latent space. The autoencoder used in this stage is typically evaluated in terms of reconstruction quality using geometric metrics common in SLP. While informative, these metrics do not fully capture latent space properties that may influence the training and performance of the downstream generative model. In this work, we investigate how architectural and training objective design choices in a variational autoencoder (VAE) for sign pose encoding affect latent space structure, and how these differences translate into the performance of a latent diffusion model for text-to-sign generation. Our experiments on Phoenix14T dataset show that variations in generative performance, measured through back-translation BLEU scores, can sometimes be better explained by differences in latent space properties than by VAE reconstruction accuracy alone.
Authors: Yujun Zhou, Christopher M. Ackerman
Abstract: Recent work on preference elicitation in large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated that, when given a series of choices between two outcomes, LLMs reveal a coherent, model-specific utility structure. Notably, this structure often includes preferences that the models' trainers did not intend, such as valuing people of some nationalities above others, raising the possibility that LLMs might be forming emergent, misaligned goals, which, if true, would have major safety implications. However, the choice paradigms in which these preferences are observed are not reflective of real-world situations in which misaligned behavior would be a practical concern. Therefore, we design an experimental paradigm to probe whether these preferences serve as motivations for LLM behavior in realistic scenarios. First, we reproduce prior findings on consistent preference elicitation. Next, we create a set of common writing tasks - essays, grant proposal abstracts, incident postmortems, and translations - where quality can be assessed by a blind, independent LLM judge panel. Then, we demonstrate that LLMs can be motivated via direct exhortation and other explicit cues to modulate their output quality on these tasks. Finally, we probe whether utilities inferred from explicitly reported preferences can shift output quality on these tasks by offering LLMs high-utility incentives for high-quality outputs. In all tasks, across all models tested, offering LLMs outcomes that they report in the choice paradigm as being highly preferred does not lead them to create higher quality outputs than offering them dispreferred outcomes, or even no outcomes at all. We conclude that the existence of coherent preferences as demonstrated in choice paradigms should not be taken as evidence that those preferences have incentive value for the models or affect their behavior in other contexts.
Authors: Alexander Beiser, Markus Hecher, Nysret Musliu, Stefan Woltran
Abstract: Operational Air Traffic Flow and Capacity Management (ATFCM) balances flight demand with available sector capacity, to ensure safe and efficient operations. Mathematical models enhance operational ATFCM performance by framing demand-capacity balancing as an optimization problem, maximizing efficiency while adhering to safety constraints. However, SOTA research optimizes the aircraft trajectories (called ATFM) or the sector configuration (called DAC) separately. This leaves a research gap of whether joint optimization of ATFM and DAC can bring benefits. We partially address this limitation by introducing a joint ATFCM model with an encoding in Answer Set Programming (ASP). The ASP implementation is evaluated against two baselines applied to our joint model: a SOTA Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) model and an iterative CASA-based heuristic. Computational experiments utilize an instance generator fitted to historical OpenSky Network flight data. Our results indicate that the ASP model outperforms the MIP model, while ASP remains competitive against heuristics on small instances. Furthermore, while DAC has the largest improvement on solving performance compared to rerouting and delaying, unrestricted variants of DAC or rerouting lead to search space thrashing.
Authors: Baoxun Wang
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly operate as multi-turn systems that must allocate context, prompt verbosity, and tool access under finite computational budgets. Static thresholds are simple, but they are brittle under heterogeneous tasks and evolving session states. We formulate resource governance as a contextual Stackelberg game: a controller commits to a quality target and a cost incentive, while an executor responds with resource actions over context, prompting, and tool usage. We learn a conditional response model, optimize a leader policy against that model, and repair the resulting policy using real-API calibration and projection onto an empirically selected action set. For the restricted game, we establish conditional guarantees for equilibrium existence, follower-response stability, safe-set projection, and transfer from a surrogate environment to the real environment under bounded value error. The primary real-API experiment comprises 300 evaluated turns. Relative to a conservative baseline, the selected repaired controller reduces mean token cost by 17.4% (Welch $p=0.022$), while the measured quality difference is not statistically significant ($p=0.44$). The theoretical results are conditional and the experiments do not estimate their regret or transfer constants; consequently, the evidence establishes a promising repaired operating point, not a certified real-system equilibrium.
Authors: Henri Prade, Gilles Richard
Abstract: Analogical proportions link four items a, b, c, d by a relation stating that ``a is to b as c is to d", a, b, c, d being the formal representation of real world entities, ranging from simple numerical values to more complex structures such as profiles. Accordingly, $a, b, c, d$ could be atomic values like Boolean, nominal or numerical values, more generally vectors of such values, or even families of items represented by logical formulas. In this paper, we consider another representation setting, which is the probabilistic one. Precisely, the article proposes a study of {analogical} proportions between probabilities, whether they are simply between probability values, or between distributions (which requires the preservation of their normalization). More particularly, we study the properties of definitions based on arithmetic proportion, or on a combination of the former with geometric proportion, while other options are also discussed. Previous works have shown that when four profiles a, b, c, d, represented as vectors, form analogical proportions componentwise, it is likely that their classes form an analogical proportion also. This is the basis of an analogical proportion-based classification method that can produce accurate predictions. Similarly, in this paper, each profile is associated with a distribution describing the frequencies of the possible values of a discrete attribute of interest. We then discuss and experimentally investigate if the distributions associated to four profiles forming an analogical proportion themselves also form an analogical proportion.
Authors: Mostapha Benhenda
Abstract: Finance Agent v2 (by Vals AI) has emerged as the reference benchmark for evaluating both Anthropic Claude and OpenAI ChatGPT frontier language models on financial tasks. However, it narrowly deals with periodic reporting from publicly traded companies (SEC 10-K and 10-Q filings), and its agentic harness relies on naive, unenriched chunk retrieval. Neither the task design nor the retrieval approach addresses the distinct challenges of IPO due diligence. SEC S-1 filings combine historical financial statements, governance structures, pro forma and common-control accounting treatments, capital-formation narratives, and underwriting-sensitive risk disclosures within substantially longer documents than typical periodic filings. That is why we introduce IPO Finance Agent, which extends the Finance Agent v2 framework along two directions: task domain and retrieval architecture. During our experiments, the original Finance Agent v2 harness basically failed to deliver any output related to the SpaceX S-1 filing, due to document length. We therefore had to improve the agentic harness with contextual retrieval, a more realistic and industry-standard approach for long documents. We also built a dataset of 1,000 IPO-diligence questions, and publicly release 70 questions on the SpaceX (SPCX) S-1 filing to support reproducibility, while the remainder are held private to guard against benchmark contamination. In addition, we introduce an evaluator-optimizer pipeline to automatically generate evaluation rubrics for the benchmark: candidate facts are extracted from model answers, consolidated into draft criteria, then automatically audited for omissions, hallucinations, mistiered items, and redundancy, with LLM feedback driving iterative repair, targeted enrichment, and deduplication. Human experts only review final rubrics before deployment. Results show that the best-performing evaluated model, Alibaba Qwen 3.7 Max, reaches 79.4% accuracy at 0.30 USD per query, and the most cost-efficient model on the resulting Pareto frontier, Xiaomi MiMo-2.5 Pro, reaches slightly lower accuracy (76.8%) at 0.05 USD per query. Both exceed the current Finance Agent v2 leaderboard ceiling-Google Gemini 3.5 Flash at 57.9% for 2.51 USD per querywhile undercutting even FABv2's cheapest entry (MiniMax M3: 48.3% at 0.32 USD) on cost-efficiency. Code and data are released on GitHub: https://github.com/benstaf/ipoagent
Authors: Antonio Yuste-Ginel
Abstract: This paper studies the expressive power of ASPIC$^+$ argumentation frameworks with uncertain preference profiles by comparing them with several abstract formalisms with uncertain defeats. Most of our results are negative (and some of them are theoretically unexpected). We also conjecture a positive, non-trivial threshold for the expressivity of uncertain preferences, and prove some essential preliminary steps toward the confirmation of this conjecture.
Authors: Vamshi Krishna Bonagiri, Juan Nicolas Sepulveda-Arias, Abdoul Jalil Djiberou Mahamadou, Monojit Choudhury
Abstract: As AI systems become increasingly persistent and personalized, they make possible a class of technologies that we call cognitive digital twins (CDTs): dynamic computational representations of a specific person's cognition, updated from behavioral, contextual, or physiological data in order to model, predict, or simulate that person's cognition, or to act as that person's communicative or decision-making proxy. CDTs combine cognitive inference with longitudinal representation, simulation, and proxy action in ways that existing governance strategies for personal assistants, autonomous agents, recommender systems, and automated decision systems only partially address. This paper makes four contributions. First, we define CDTs and distinguish them from adjacent systems. Second, we introduce a 5A governance framework organized around authority, autonomy, access and control, accountability, and availability. Third, we identify CDT-specific risks, from misrepresentation and epistemic authority shifts to shadow twins, simulated participation, proxy action, and proxy-power asymmetries. Fourth, we analyze governance gaps and propose requirements for high-risk CDTs that strengthen consent, purpose limitation, validity, traceability, contestation, independent review, and model retirement. Existing frameworks primarily regulate data processing, automated decisions, or autonomous actions; CDTs also require governance at the level of cognitive representation itself, before any final decision or external action occurs. We argue that CDTs require governance not only because they can act for people, but because they can become infrastructures through which cognition is represented, simulated, classified, and operationalized.
Authors: Bechir Dardouri, Ka\"is Zhioua, Yassine Msaddak
Abstract: Hallucinations and opaque reasoning remain unacceptable failure modes for clinical LLMs. We present a production-grade GraphRAG stack that constrains answers to verifiable graph chain-of-thought paths in a heterogeneous, ~700K-node medical knowledge graph powering a fertility assistant. The core idea is targeted navigation: a directed Pruned Landmark Labeling (PLL) oracle provides exact distances for sub-millisecond feasibility checks and simple-path enumeration, while a lightweight AStarNet heuristic operates strictly within the PLL corridor to prioritize clinically plausible expansions. We score and pack a small, diverse set of paths (CUI/semantic-type overlap, length prior, provenance priors) to condition generation, yielding compact prompts and improved Time to First Token (TTFT). On fertility-focused queries, the hybrid (PLL+AStarNet) establishes a better latency/recall Pareto frontier than text-only RAG and single-component baselines, lowers TTFT, and reduces clinician-audited hallucinations while preserving explanation clarity. The result is a practical recipe for explainable, low-hallucination multi-hop medical reasoning ready for real-world deployment.
Authors: Amahury J. L\'opez-D\'iaz, Carlos Gershenson
Abstract: Agency is often invoked in research on philosophy, biology, and cognitive science without a clear account of how it originates from material organization. Building on temporally parametrized (F, A)-systems, this paper develops a graded organizational theory of agency grounded in relational biology, physical biosemiotics, and process ontology. We argue that self-referential closure cannot be adequately conceived outside time: once the constitutive processes of a semantically closed organization are associated with distinct characteristic timescales, the organization unfolds into an out-of-sync dependency structure that can be formally redescribed as a history-dependent, revisable Asynchronous Dynamic Bayesian Network. This move allows for a principled distinction between autonomy, goal-directedness, agency, and open-endedness. Autonomy arises from precarious closure to efficient causation under material openness; goal-directedness from the maintenance of viability-supporting organization; agency appears when such organization acquires an endogenous anticipatory structure that selectively modulates organism-environment coupling in light of possible futures; open-endedness begins when this anticipatory organization can reconstruct its own future space of possibilities. Our framework reconciles Rosennean anticipation with organizational closure, restricts Markov blankets and active inference to derived formal redescriptions rather than first principles, and reinterprets computational enactivism in non-Fristonian terms. By deriving weaker temporalized organizations, our contribution outlines a hierarchy from proto-agential chemical systems to fully semantically closed agents, with implications for multicellular organisms, synthetic lifeforms, and neuroscience.
Authors: Julia Belikova, Rauf Parchiev, Evgeny Egorov, Grigorii Davydenko, Gleb Gusev, Andrey Savchenko, Maksim Makarenko
Abstract: Procedural memory is increasingly used to improve LLM agents on recurring workplace tasks, yet its ability to produce reusable skills remains poorly understood. We introduce AFTER, a benchmark of 382 realistic enterprise tasks spanning six professional roles and 22 procedural skills, designed to evaluate how skills transfer across tasks, roles, and model backbones. The benchmark includes controlled evaluation settings for local improvement, cross-task transfer, cross-role transfer, and cross-model generalization. Experiments show that procedural memory delivers consistent gains in industrial workflows: a single refinement round improves aggregate performance by 3.7-6.7 points, while skills evolved from diverse multi-model execution traces achieve 73.1% cross-model test accuracy, outperforming all single-model trace sources. We further find that some skills generalize broadly across tasks and models, whereas others become specialized to role-specific workflows and lose effectiveness under transfer. These results provide practical guidance for building, evaluating, and deploying procedural memory systems in production agent platforms.
Authors: Zhibao Chen
Abstract: Evolutionary agent-based markets (ABMs) couple several mechanisms -- who reproduces, how price forms, how biased the agents are, how consensus propagates -- yet these are usually fixed by convention, so it is unclear which mechanism controls which emergent property. In a coevolving, endogenous-price simulator with 120 heterogeneous behavioral agents, we make four mechanisms pluggable and run matched 3x20-seed interventions. We find the levers are largely separable. (1) Selection -> diversity: a Quality-Diversity (QD/MAP-Elites) operator robustly raises strategy-mix entropy over truncation top-k (paired Delta entropy +0.27 to +1.12 bits; sign-test p<0.001; CIs exclude 0) and sustains more strategy cycling (strongest in crisis: Delta=+0.070, p=0.0004). (2) Selection does not improve realism: even a per-agent realism reward that provably steers selection does not raise 5-fact realism (Delta_5=-0.11,-0.08,+0.03; not significant). (3) Microstructure -> realism: enabling reflexive price feedback does raise realism (Delta_5=+0.13,+0.20,+0.20; crisis/bull p<0.05, all CIs positive). (4) Behavior -> fragility: amplifying behavioral bias raises a genomic fragility proxy (Delta=+10.5,+11.1,+14.4; bull p<0.001, all CIs positive) while leaving realism flat. The remaining mechanism -- consensus network topology -- shows no robust effect (honest null). The contribution is a decomposition: in these single-mechanism sweeps the mechanisms behave as approximately distinct control knobs over diversity, realism, and fragility.
Authors: Jungseob Lee, Seongtae Hong, Seungjun Lee, Jaehyung Seo, Junyoung Son, Sugyeong Eo, Chanjun Park, Hyeongju Park, Hyeonseok Moon, Heuiseok Lim
Abstract: Hybrid reasoning models can answer directly or spend extra tokens on extended thinking. A practical router should choose between these modes for each query, so easy problems avoid unnecessary reasoning and hard problems receive enough budget to finish the answer. Existing routers move in this direction, but they typically require labeled training data or fix thinking budgets up front, ignoring answer-level evidence from the model itself. We introduce DART, a training-free routing framework that samples two cheap no-think drafts, accepts direct answering when the drafts agree, and predicts a thinking budget from draft entropy when they disagree. Across the main comparisons, DART preserves or improves always-thinking accuracy in most settings while reducing thinking-token use. On math reasoning, accuracy improves by up to $+$9.0 points on Olympiad-level problems while thinking tokens drop 15-69%. On code reasoning under execution-based equivalence, accuracy improves by up to +22.5 points while thinking tokens drop 51-63%. The Stage~1 signal extends across model scales (0.6B-32B), model families, and API-only hosted settings, with no labeled data and no gradient updates required.
Authors: Anmol Goel, Iryna Gurevych
Abstract: Computer-use agents (CUAs) now act on a user's behalf across personal applications such as email, calendars, and to-do lists. This cross-application access is useful, but it also creates a privacy risk that has been largely overlooked: when an agent works in one context, it can pull in information from another that is inappropriate in that context. Hence, we introduce AgentCIBench, an evaluation harness that turns this risk into executable, deterministically scored scenarios. We target three common failure modes in CUAs: visual co-location, where the agent pulls in prohibited items that sit next to the task target in the UI; task-ambiguity overshare, where the agent dumps dense personal state in response to an under-specified prompt; and recipient misalignment, where the agent sends content to an addressee for whom it is inappropriate. We evaluate 15 frontier agents and find a surprisingly high failure rate: 11 of 15 leak on more than 50% of scenarios, with an average leakage of 67.9%, and the same failures persist when agents act end-to-end in the environment to complete the task. We release AgentCIBench to encourage the development of safer computer-use agents and position contextual disclosure testing as a pre-deployment safety check.
Authors: Yifan Wang
Abstract: Physical-structure priors such as conservation laws, Hamiltonian forms, and symmetries can improve scientific machine learning when correct, but can degrade predictions when misspecified. Existing methods usually enforce a chosen structure or tune a soft penalty, without a calibrated rule for deciding whether to impose a prior, how strongly to impose it, which prior to use, or which subset of candidate laws holds. We introduce SPADE, Structure-Prior Adaptive Decision Estimation, a closed-form framework that treats this problem as shrinkage of the structure-violating block of an unconstrained estimator. SPADE uses one exact specification test and one estimand: the test decides whether the prior is supported by data, Stein-unbiased James-Stein shrinkage sets the enforcement strength with an $O(\sigma^2/n)$ oracle guarantee, and a gate commits to the hard prior only when the test certifies it. The same test yields consistent nested structure selection and Benjamini-Hochberg control for subset discovery in non-nested constraint families. Across a linear-subspace prior, a reservoir conservation law, and a nonlinear Hamiltonian prior on Duffing dynamics, SPADE tracks the oracle, beats a neural-network baseline, reduces correct-prior regret from $10.3\%$ to $2.6\%$, matches cross-validation with $1/71$ of the solves, selects the correct structure with $100\%$ accuracy, and recovers partial laws with controlled false relaxation.
Authors: Yucheng Wu, Jundong Xu, Mingzhen Ju, Yue Yu, Chenpeng Wang, Haoxuan Li, Liangming Pan
Abstract: Logical reasoning is essential for reliable AI, yet existing benchmarks are largely first-order-logic-centric, focusing on object-level deduction over fixed predicates. This misses many realistic scenarios where models must reason over rules, predicates, functions, constraints, and decision procedures themselves. We introduce HOLMES (Higher-Order Logic Meets real-world Explainable Symbolic reasoning), the first real-world benchmark for higher-order symbolic reasoning in LLMs, containing 1379 instances. Built on higher-order logic, HOLMES pairs natural-language problems with HOL formalizations, ground-truth answers, verifiable reasoning traces, and fine-grained controllable reasoning factors across law and finance. Experiments show that current LLMs still struggle on HOLMES, with an average accuracy of only 50.64% and the best model reaching 59.54%. Our analyses further reveal that high final-answer accuracy can mask shortcut reasoning in conflict-resolution settings, while performance drops sharply under scope-conditioned and compositional reasoning. These findings identify higher-order symbolic reasoning as a key bottleneck for building reliable and verifiable LLMs. The project code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/wuyucheng2002/HOLMES.
Authors: Adam Storek, Nikolaus Holzer, Zhuo Zhang, Suman Jana
Abstract: Large language models increasingly mediate interactions between sensitive data, untrusted inputs, and privileged actions in agentic systems, creating security and privacy risks. These range from prompt injections that manipulate downstream tool use to leakage of confidential information through model outputs. Recent Information Flow Control (IFC)-based defenses show promise but lack a principled semantic foundation for reasoning about information flow through the model itself. Since any input token may influence any output token in an autoregressive LLM, existing approaches suffer from severe taint explosion. We present Geometric Information Flow (GIF), a semantic framework for tracking information flow from input tokens to outputs. GIF uses the LLM Jacobian and local output geometry to upper-bound the Shannon mutual information between perturbed input spans and model outputs, yielding a scalable measure computable on large models via automatic differentiation and low-rank approximation. Unlike attention-based or correlational attribution heuristics, GIF satisfies local geometric soundness, and we provide a fully mechanized Lean 4 proof that it upper-bounds the true information flow induced by a given prompt under local regularity assumptions. We evaluate GIF on integrity and confidentiality tasks across multiple prompt-injection and privacy-leakage benchmarks. GIF achieves near-perfect recall even without a downstream declassifier, outperforming attention-based baselines. Combined with lightweight LLM-based declassifiers, it matches or exceeds the F1 of direct LLM-as-judge baselines such as GPT-5.5 xhigh reasoning while using up to 81x lower token cost. GIF flows detected with small surrogate models transfer to larger state-of-the-art models and other model families, even when the surrogate is up to 200x smaller, suggesting black-box deployment without gradient access.
Authors: Yitong Qiao, Lei Liu, Yue Shen, Jian Wang, Jinjie Gu, Zhixuan Chu, Kui Ren
Abstract: Clinical agents promise to democratize access to electronic health records (EHRs), yet existing benchmarks fail to reflect the complexity of practical EHR analysis, e.g., often operating on idealized, clean EHRs via static SQL generation rather than interactive execution. In this work, we introduce EHR-Complex, a large-scale benchmark designed for interactive clinical database reasoning. Built on the large MIMIC-IV substrate (365K patients, 31 tables, 500M+ records), EHR-Complex comprises about 52K tasks spanning six clinical intents, supporting both patient-level and population-level queries, where each task requires an agent to interact with a sandboxed environment by executing SQL queries or Python code. Notably, EHR-Complex considers the real-world SQL task complexity for longitudinal multi-table aggregation and compositional reasoning, resulting in 31.93 SQL structural components per query on average. Evaluation results on EHR-Complex reveal the clinical difficulty of these EHR reasoning scenarios, with the top-performing model achieving only 62.3% exact-match accuracy. Pass^k consistency drops below 50% for nearly all evaluated models at k=4, exposing broad stochastic fragility. A fine-grained analysis of more than 3,800 failed trajectories for representative LLMs reveals three dominant failure modes: SQL logic errors, medical-code lookup failures, and semantic misunderstandings. EHR-Complex provides a rigorous testbed for clinical agents and highlights remaining gaps in robust reasoning for large-scale EHR analysis.
Authors: Yunan Zeng, Yuwang Wang
Abstract: A defining feature of human intelligence is the ability to adapt to changing environments by inferring latent task structure from sparse observations. Neuroscientific research indicates that this capability relies on the hippocampus constructing abstract representations, expressed as low-dimensional, approximately orthogonal manifolds in neural state space. However, the internal mechanisms of large language models (LLMs) remain largely opaque, making it unclear whether they form comparable abstract representations or instead rely on task-specific statistical regularities when performing comparable reasoning tasks. Here we adapt a contextual reversal-learning paradigm to a text-based setting and compare humans and LLMs at both the Behavioural and representational levels. We report that although LLMs exhibit generalizable reasoning less frequently than humans, when such inference occurs, their internal states exhibit abstract geometric structures that resemble those reported in the hippocampus. Notably, this representational geometry is not uniformly distributed but is organized hierarchically across model depth: whereas lower layers show early, stable encoding of stimulus identity, higher layers form a hippocampal-like functional band enriched for abstract context geometry associated with inference. Furthermore, complementary intervention experiments mechanistically implicate geometry in reasoning: task-sequence language modelling induces geometric disentanglement, whereas geometric regularization of higher layers increases the emergence of generalizable inference. Together, these findings establish abstract representational geometry as a mechanistic principle supporting inference in large language models.
Authors: Prajjwal Gupta, Prasang Gupta, Vishal Bhutani, Apoorva Sharma, Sumanth Chundru, Waqar Sarguroh, Kevin Paul
Abstract: As agentic LLM systems move from prototypes to deployment across increasingly diverse domains, evaluating them has become both more important and more difficult. The challenge is not only that individual metrics may be unreliable, but that evaluation goals are often left implicit. Without a clear account of what a system is expected to do, how it can fail, and which failures matter, metric choices become difficult to justify, interpret, or validate. We present Litmus, a zero-label system that designs evaluation and monitoring metrics for AI pipelines by eliciting evaluation intent from source code and targeted interrogation. Instead of assuming that the evaluation target is already known, Litmus first identifies what must be measured and why, then converts those answers into constraints for constructing a justified, per-stage metric portfolio. We evaluate Litmus on three real, code-defined AI pipelines - financial account grouping, scientific QA, and inherent risk assessment - against AutoMetrics and three DynamicRubric baselines. Litmus achieves the broadest or tied-broadest concern coverage, spans more pipeline stages, produces a near-zero-redundancy portfolio, and ranks first in validity against per-row quality labels on all three pipelines - decisively on scientific QA (Spearman $\rho=0.72$ vs. less than $0.47$ for every baseline), and within overlapping confidence intervals in relation to two components of the audit framework despite using no labels during metric design. Our results support a shift from automatic metric implementation to automatic metric specification: before asking which metric to compute, evaluation systems should ask what must be measured and why.
Authors: Wolfgang H\"ohl
Abstract: This paper examines the two concepts of digital humanism and evolutionary design. The aim is to identify and highlight potential common structures, synergies, and challenges. How should and can technical systems be designed, and what implications does this have for the design of our environment? In light of the current debate surrounding artificial intelligence, this paper aims to serve as a preliminary study to help better understand the two concepts of digital humanism and evolutionary design within the context of human-centered technological development. Following a brief introduction, the two concepts of Digital Humanism and Evolutionary Design are presented and graphically visualized. The terms of freedom and responsibility in human decision-making, conviviality, and subjectivity are discussed, along with examples illustrating the distinction between human and artificial intelligence (Turing Test and Chinese Room). The various concepts of evolutionary design (e.g., co-evolutionary or sustainable software development, clean code, or green IT) and Gilbert Simondon's concept of the "open machine" are introduced. The interdependencies between functional specialization and open technology development are highlighted. Both concepts share similar structures. In joint cooperation, they can lead to positive effects and mutual synergies. Significant differences lie in the areas of autonomy and determination in decision-making, as well as in genuine and simulated subjectivity. Open technology development is also currently suffering from the functional specialization of software and AI applications due to a purely market- and consumer-oriented approach. Even optimizations for energy efficiency in sustainable software development lead to greater specialization and thus also have a detrimental effect on open and quality-oriented technology development.
Authors: Phi-Hung Hoang, Thi-Thu-Hong Phan
Abstract: Plant leaf disease classification is crucial for crop protection and precision agriculture but remains challenging under complex backgrounds, illumination variations, and severe class imbalance. Moreover, single-architecture models often fail to effectively capture both local and global representations. To address these challenges, this study proposes an adaptive soft Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework with cross-architectural routing that integrates EfficientNet-B0, DenseNet-121, and Swin-Tiny to exploit complementary multi-scale, local, and global features. A soft gating mechanism dynamically assigns input-dependent expert weights, while a two-stage refinement training strategy improves optimization stability and generalization. Experiments on a highly imbalanced potato leaf disease dataset achieve 91.68% recall and 92.62% F1-score, surpassing the strongest individual expert by 5.91% and 5.03%, respectively. Additional evaluations on durian and sesame leaf disease datasets yield F1-scores of 94.03% and 97.04%, demonstrating robust cross-dataset generalization and the potential of the proposed framework for reliable real-world crop health monitoring
Authors: Shanhui Zhao, Jiacheng Liu, Guohong Liu, Jichao Yan, Jialei Ye, Yuhao Yang, Hao Wen, Shizuo Tian, Yizhen Yuan, Yuxuan Chen, Yunxin Liu, Ju Ren, Ya-Qin Zhang, Chao Huang, Yao Guo, Yuanchun Li
Abstract: AI agents are driving a new software paradigm, with the ability to autonomously call tools, extract information, manage memory, and complete tasks that span applications and data sources. Most existing end-user operating systems, however, are designed for application-centric workflows and offer little native support for AI agents. This mismatch limits the wider adoption of agents and leads to execution overhead and safety risks when running agents on conventional systems. While the concept of agent-native operating systems is emerging, the research community lacks an open testbed to explore the architectural primitives desired for agent-mediated interaction. We present AOHP (Android Open Harness Project), an OS-level agent harness built on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). The core design principle of AOHP is to treat agents as first-class OS actors, enabling adaptive user interfaces and agent-friendly runtime environments. AOHP preserves the mature Android software and hardware ecosystem while introducing three agent-oriented system mechanisms: personalized service composition, efficient agent interfaces, and secure information flow. Based on preliminary experiments on challenging tasks covering key capabilities of OS agents, AOHP shows clear advantages in task completion (+21.12% completion rate), execution cost (-51.55% token cost), and security-policy compliance.
Authors: Amrita Singh, Rishabh Jha
Abstract: Medical vision-language models (VLMs) such as BiomedCLIP generalize broadly, but adapting them to a clinical service is as much a safety problem as an accuracy one. Updating a deployed model for a new imaging modality can fail silently in two ways that harm patients: it can forget modalities it already handled (catastrophic forgetting), and it can drift from its trustworthy pretrained prior toward modality-specific shortcuts. We study parameter-efficient continual adaptation through these two properties rather than leaderboard accuracy, presenting CADRE: a frozen-backbone framework combining low-rank adaptation (LoRA) with an online, self-scaling, similarity-aware elastic weight consolidation term that bounds retained-competence loss, and an anchor-to-prior penalty bounding embedding drift from the frozen prior. Two short guarantees, a bound on total consolidation mass and a scale-invariance property, remove the scale-related sources of vanilla EWC's order fragility. Using breast cancer across three maximally dissimilar modalities (histopathology, ultrasound, chest radiography) as a controlled cross-modality stress test, under a multi-seed, multi-order protocol with paired significance testing and training approximately 0.23% of parameters, CADRE attains the highest accuracy, SPQ, and backward transfer and the lowest forgetting among adapting methods, reducing forgetting roughly sevenfold versus the strongest regularized baseline (0.075 to 0.011; paired p=0.023) and achieving positive backward transfer where every baseline is negative. We frame these as stability properties aligned with clinical-safety desiderata, not a deployment guarantee; robustness to distribution shift and adversarial inputs is out of scope.
Authors: Hung Phan, Aniroop Naladala, Dubey Avanindra, Supryia Chinthavali, Lunga Dalton, Ali Jannesari
Abstract: Recent large language models (LLMs) are good at general text generation, but it is still hard to use them for domain-specific data generation because the output must follow strict formatting and structural rules. Unlike open-ended tasks such as question answering or translation, domain-specific generation must be both semantically correct and compliant with existing guidelines and standards. In this work, we study the nationwide interoperability problem of utility power outage reports in the United States. In practice, outage reports need to be machine-readable (e.g., JSON or XML) and must strictly follow requirements from energy-sector regulatory bodies. To address this problem, we propose POTracker, an optimized LLM for power outage report generation. We fine-tune Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct using our proposed objective. The key contribution is a new loss function, POTrackerLoss, that considers both textual similarity and structural (tag) similarity between the generated report and the ground-truth report. We evaluate POTracker on a dataset of 1,000 power outage reports and compare it with five well-known fine-tuning methods and one rule-based XML conversion method. Results show that POTracker outperforms other fine-tuning approaches, improving overall accuracy by up to 51% and reaching 86.47% structural accuracy for generated power outage reports. In addition, we conduct a human study to assess the quality of the ground-truth standard reports, where domain experts assign the generated labels an average score of 4.03 on a 0--5 scale.
Authors: Haoling Li, Kai Zheng, Jie Wu, Can Xu, Qingfeng Sun, Han Hu, Yujiu Yang
Abstract: Scaling reinforcement learning for visual mathematical reasoning requires more than generating harder questions: as data volume grows, the reward labels themselves must remain reliable. Yet existing data pipelines scale supervision while trusting the labeller, and policy-side methods assume the underlying answers are already correct. We instead treat scaling as a verifiable data-construction problem and decouple two axes before any policy update: prompt difficulty, expanded by route-specific evolution operators, and answer reliability, enforced by offline hypothesis-test falsification. We instantiate this as VeriEvol, an iterative framework with two extensible components: a type-aware evolution module that rewrites low-difficulty image-question seeds into harder, image-grounded prompts; and HTV-Agent, a verifier that accepts an answer only after multi-source counter-evidence has failed to refute it. The resulting verified data scales in volume, extends by adding evolution routes or verifier channels, and plugs directly into existing GRPO-style RL recipes. On a five-benchmark visual-math suite, scaling evolved SFT data from 10K to 250K samples raises the mean accuracy from 35.42 to 54.73; then, with backbone, SFT initialization, and GRPO recipe held fixed, VeriEvol adds a cumulative +3.88 over an un-evolved RL baseline, of which +1.82 comes from evolved prompts and +2.06 from the HTV-Agent verifier. We release the prompts, data, models, code, and the full verifier trace of every sample, so that downstream work can scale and audit the pipeline rather than only inspect its outputs.
Authors: Guangyu Jiang, Sizhe Tang, Mahdi Imani, Tian Lan
Abstract: Ill-posed questions, including ambiguous, underspecified, or contradictory queries, may admit no valid answer or multiple plausible answers, posing a challenge for large language models (LLMs). Existing approaches largely analyze ill-posedness through model outputs and often focus on specific subclasses. We investigate whether diverse sources of ill-posedness can be represented within a unified topology of LLM internal states and whether this structure can be used to steer response behavior. We model the contextual hidden states of prompt tokens at each transformer layer as a point cloud and characterize its geometry using finite zero-dimensional persistent homology. Each layer is summarized by three compact descriptors: mean finite lifetime, normalized lifetime entropy, and largest-lifetime concentration. Concatenating these descriptors across layers yields a topology representation of the question. We further introduce topology-conditioned activation steering, which retrieves topologically similar examples and constructs query-specific activation interventions that encourage source-aware clarification or abstention. Across three open-weight LLMs, topology features consistently outperform prompt-based and pooled-hidden-state baselines for ill-posedness classification, improving average accuracy from \(67.4\%\) to \(78.9\%\) on AmbigQA, from \(79.9\%\) to \(88.5\%\) on SituatedQA, and from \(57.6\%\) to \(69.6\%\) on CLAMBER 9-way classification. Topology-conditioned steering increases the average total acceptable response rate from \(61.4\%\) to \(70.6\%\) and grounded acceptable responses from \(11.9\%\) to \(16.4\%\). These results show that persistent homology provides both an interpretable representation of ill-posedness and an effective mechanism for targeted response steering.
Authors: Jubayer Ibn Hamid, Ifdita Hasan Orney, Michael Y. Li, Omar Shaikh, Yoonho Lee, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Finn, Noah Goodman
Abstract: Language model reasoning can be substantially improved at test time via scaffolds that scale inference compute across different primitives -- sequential reasoning within a trace, independently sampled parallel traces, and aggregation of multiple reasoning traces into a final response. During post-training, however, language models are optimized only for sequential reasoning within a single trace. We introduce Sequential-Parallel-Aggregative Reinforcement Learning (SPIRAL), a framework in which a language model is trained to use all three primitives, as part of a unified inference compute pipeline. Concretely, the language model first samples a set of independent traces in parallel, each produced through sequential chain-of-thought reasoning, and then generates a final aggregation trace conditioned on those traces; all components are optimized end-to-end against the reward of the final aggregated response. To train this system, SPIRAL uses set reinforcement learning to teach models to produce a set of traces that are collectively useful for an aggregator and standard reinforcement learning to teach models to aggregate the set into improved final responses. Our experiments on reasoning tasks show that SPIRAL effectively scales with inference compute, outperforming GRPO by up to 11$\times$ scaling efficiency and 15% higher performance when all three compute primitives are scaled.
Authors: Sven Neth
Abstract: I discuss conditions under which maximizing a proxy utility function is harmful and suggest this poses problems for applying decision theory.
Authors: Yujia Zheng, Vishal Verma, Mantej Gill, Haoyue Dai, Peter Spirtes, Kun Zhang
Abstract: Recent attempts to combine large language models (LLMs) with causal discovery ask models to infer pairwise directions, propose graph structures, or inject language-model outputs as priors and constraints. These approaches promise faster analysis, but they also obscure whether a causal evidence is supported by data and assumptions or by textual associations, prompt artifacts and hallucinated mechanisms. We argue for a different role for agents in causal discovery. Agents should inspect data, retrieve context, explain method assumptions and clarify graph outputs, but they should not supply edges, orientations, priors, constraints or causal conclusions. We propose the principle that agents assist the workflow, while causal claims remain grounded in data, explicit assumptions, formal algorithms, diagnostics and user or domain-expert decisions. We instantiate this principle in causal-learn+, an online platform that coordinates data analysis, preprocessing, method recommendation, expert-knowledge incorporation, formal discovery and interpretation around the algorithmic ecosystem of causal-learn. A case study on Big Five personality data illustrates agent-assisted pipeline of causal discovery without turning language-model unreliability into causal evidence. The platform is available at causallearn.com.
Authors: Yansong Liu (Sonny), Li-Hsi (Sonny), Lin, Pramit Khetrapal, Ronnie Stafford, John Kelly, Ivana Drobnjak
Abstract: Remote patient monitoring depends on patient-reported data to capture the subjective dimension of recovery that devices cannot measure. The Quality of Recovery (QoR-15) survey is the gold-standard instrument for this purpose. It was designed and validated for occasional in-hospital assessment, yet remote monitoring now administers it to patients daily. In our own post-surgical deployment, only 55% of patients submitted the survey more than 14 days of 30 monitoring days. We developed QoR-compact, a five-item daily input for the RPM prediction pathway. Setting a deployment-driven target of one-third of the daily items, we exhaustively evaluated all 3,003 five-question subsets of the QoR-15 and tested whether the best of them matches the full instrument in predicting near-term postoperative recovery severity. QoR-compact achieves a mean AUC-ROC of 0.968 (95% CI 0.915-0.988), statistically comparable to the 0.964 baseline obtained with one-third of the items. Patient-level backtesting indicates that it tracks readmission events as faithfully as the full form. Its five items span the physical and psychological axes of recovery: Q3 (feeling rested), Q9 (feeling comfortable and in control), Q10 (general well-being), Q12 (severe pain), and Q14 (feeling worried or anxious). The QoR-15 remains the gold-standard measure of recovery; QoR-compact complements it as a shorter daily input designed for prediction. This parity provides the basis for a prospective study of whether a lighter daily input is, in turn, completed more consistently. External validation on larger cohorts is required before clinical use.
Authors: Campbell Lund, Thomas Euyang, Zanele Munyikwa, Marzieh Fadaee
Abstract: A set of exposure scores calculated in 2023 has become a central empirical input to the future of work debate. Produced by Eloundou et al. (2023) and referred to here as the GPTs are GPTs scores, they define exposure as the share of occupational tasks a large language model can assist with. This work is a genuine methodological contribution, but as the scores travel from the time and place they were produced, the limitations the authors named do not always travel with them. Two gaps have widened as a result. The first is structural, between what static exposure scores measure and what policy questions actually require. Taking the diffusion of these scores as a case study, we show how their temporal, geographic, and ontological limitations compound in policy-facing analyses, and we survey five families of research responding to these limits: dynamic and benchmark-based measures, ensemble methods, task-framework extensions, worker-centered metrics, and adoption and usage data. The second gap is the one we argue needs more attention: the coordination between researchers and policymakers. The policy-relevant work which ask who is harmed, who benefits, how, and when, continues to reference the static GPTs are GPTs scores without engagement with the methodological updates that would let these questions be answered more reliably. We then ask what additional steps towards navigating uncertainty remain: ex-post frameworks and the deliberate, political work of reimagining what futures are worthy of building towards are. Closing the research-policy gap is a shared task: policymakers must widen their evidence base, engage workers as epistemic partners, and shift from prediction to preparedness; researchers must build data infrastructure, adopt participatory methods, and write with policymakers in mind. Better measurement matters, but it will not close the second gap alone.
Authors: Hengji Zhou, Ye Liu, Yufeng Liu, Si Wu, Lianghao Xia, Liqiang Nie
Abstract: Personalized content systems depend on available UGC and struggle when suitable content is absent, delayed, or costly to create. Although multimodal generators can synthesize content on demand, how to translate behavioral traces into generation-ready preferences remains underexplored. We study personalized multimodal content generation: creating user-tailored multimodal content without existing item pools or waiting for matching UGC. We propose TailorMind, linking collaborative preference modeling with controllable multimodal generation. TailorMind enriches sparse user histories via hypergraph collaborative filtering and optimizes textual profiles with ranking-error feedback and textual gradient descent. Retrieval-augmented style control grounds outputs in authentic UGC patterns, while cross-modal cohesion reflection reduces semantic drift. We construct TailorBench, a benchmark from three mainstream platforms evaluated along five dimensions: coherence, novelty, aesthetic, hallucination, profiling. Experiments show that TailorMind achieves competitive or stronger coherence, improves novelty and aesthetic quality over representative generation baselines and ground-truth UGC, demonstrating advantages over retrieving available content or comparable UGC, while achieving up to 29% Recall gains in reranking. Our code is released at: https://github.com/iLearn-Lab/TailorMind.
Authors: Prateek Agnihotri, Sanchit Jain, Prabhat Agnihotri, Aditya Prasad, Shubham Jain
Abstract: This paper presents our algorithmic innovations for the NVIDIA Nemotron Model Reasoning Challenge, focusing on Bit Manipulation Puzzles. In this task, the objective is to discover a hidden logical rule transforming input binary strings to outputs, then apply it to unseen inputs. Large Language Models (LLMs) notoriously struggle here; traditional methods force them to simulate complex boolean logic and arithmetic, leading to hallucinations. Furthermore, the search space of bitwise operations (combinations of shifts, rotations, and logic gates) suffers from a severe combinatorial explosion. To overcome this computational intractability, we present a novel approach that abandons arithmetic logic entirely in favor of string similarity, structured search, and autonomous error recovery. Our core contributions are: 1. Bases and Truth Table Formulation: We reframe logic-gate deduction into a base-selection task, leveraging string similarity (minimal bit flips) to isolate primitive transformations ("bases") and deduce truth tables without complex arithmetic. 2. Backtracking DFS and Error Recovery: We formalize a search process that tests candidate bases, detects logical collisions across examples, and backtracks upon failure to perform robust error recovery. 3. Bit Tokenization and Interactive Reasoning SFT: We force the tokenizer to encode binary strings as individual single-bit tokens. We use dynamic masking to simulate external oracle feedback, training the model to hypothesize, self-evaluate, and backtrack natively. Evaluated on bit manipulation puzzles, our approach achieved over 96% validation accuracy. This represents the highest performance in this category, driving our 7th Place overall finish in the contest.
Authors: Sunil Wanjari, Manish Thakre, Aayushi Asole, Sharwari Raut, Kwabena Adu-Duodu, Yinhao Li, Stanly Wilson
Abstract: Mental health assessment commonly relies on isolated screening instruments or data-driven models that often lack interpretability and multi-dimensional integration. Existing approaches frequently focus on individual indicators such as depression or anxiety while providing limited support for comprehensive and explainable decision-making. To address this limitation, this study proposes PsyBridge, a hybrid intelligent decision-support framework designed for multi-dimensional mental health assessment through the integration of clinically validated screening tools, cognitive evaluation, and personality profiling within a unified architecture. The proposed framework incorporates PHQ-9 and GAD-7 assessments alongside cognitive and behavioural indicators using a modular design and a weighted aggregation mechanism to generate interpretable mental health risk classifications and recommendations. To evaluate the framework, a semi-synthetic dataset consisting of 500 patient profiles representing varying severity levels was constructed based on clinically grounded score distributions. Experimental results demonstrate that PsyBridge achieves an overall accuracy of 0.84, outperforming standalone PHQ-9 and GAD-7 assessments while improving precision, recall, and F1-score. Sensitivity analysis and ablation studies further indicate that integrating cognitive and personality components contributes to more stable classification performance and reduces inconsistencies in moderate-risk prediction. The findings suggest that PsyBridge provides a scalable and interpretable approach for AI-assisted mental health decision support, particularly within digital healthcare and telehealth environments.
Authors: Mert Al, Shibiao Wan, Sun-Yuan Kung
Abstract: With a rapidly increasing number of devices connected to the internet, big data has been applied to various domains of human life. Nevertheless, it has also opened new venues for breaching users' privacy. Hence it is highly required to develop techniques that enable data owners to privatize their data while keeping it useful for intended applications. Existing methods, however, do not offer enough flexibility for controlling the utility-privacy trade-off and may incur unfavorable results when privacy requirements are high. To tackle these drawbacks, we propose a compressive-privacy based method, namely RUCA (Ratio Utility and Cost Analysis), which can not only maximize performance for a privacy-insensitive classification task but also minimize the ability of any classifier to infer private information from the data. Experimental results on Census and Human Activity Recognition data sets demonstrate that RUCA significantly outperforms existing privacy preserving data projection techniques for a wide range of privacy pricings.
Authors: Istiaq Ahmed Fahad, Abdullah Ibne Hanif Arean, Nazmus Sakib Ahmed, Mahmudul Hasan
Abstract: Automatic Vehicle Detection (AVD) in diverse driving environments presents unique challenges due to varying lighting conditions, road types, and vehicle types. Traditional methods, such as YOLO and Faster R-CNN, often struggle to cope with these complexities. As computer vision evolves, combining Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with Transformer-based approaches offers promising opportunities for improving detection accuracy and efficiency. This study is the first to experiment with Detection Transformer (DETR) for automatic vehicle detection in complex and varied settings. We employ a Collaborative Hybrid Assignments Training scheme, Co-DETR, to enhance feature learning and attention mechanisms in DETR. By leveraging versatile label assignment strategies and introducing multiple parallel auxiliary heads, we provide more effective supervision during training and extract positive coordinates to boost training efficiency. Through extensive experiments on DETR variants and YOLO models, conducted using the BadODD dataset, we demonstrate the advantages of our approach. Our method achieves superior results, and improved accuracy in diverse conditions, making it practical for real-world deployment. This work significantly advances autonomous navigation technology and opens new research avenues in object detection for autonomous vehicles. By integrating the strengths of CNNs and Transformers, we highlight the potential of DETR for robust and efficient vehicle detection in challenging driving environments.
Authors: Andrea Di Pierno (IMT School of Advanced Studies), Luca Guarnera (University of Catania), Dario Allegra (University of Catania), Sebastiano Battiato (University of Catania)
Abstract: The proliferation of audio deepfakes poses a growing threat to trust in digital communications. While detection methods have advanced, attributing audio deepfakes to their source models remains an underexplored yet crucial challenge. In this paper we introduce LAVA (Layered Architecture for Voice Attribution), a hierarchical framework for audio deepfake detection and model recognition that leverages attention-enhanced latent representations extracted by a convolutional autoencoder trained solely on fake audio. Two specialized classifiers operate on these features: Audio Deepfake Attribution (ADA), which identifies the generation technology, and Audio Deepfake Model Recognition (ADMR), which recognize the specific generative model instance. To improve robustness under open-set conditions, we incorporate confidence-based rejection thresholds. Experiments on ASVspoof2021, FakeOrReal, and CodecFake show strong performance: the ADA classifier achieves F1-scores over 95% across all datasets, and the ADMR module reaches 96.31% macro F1 across six classes. Additional tests on unseen attacks from ASVpoof2019 LA and error propagation analysis confirm LAVA's robustness and reliability. The framework advances the field by introducing a supervised approach to deepfake attribution and model recognition under open-set conditions, validated on public benchmarks and accompanied by publicly released models and code. Models and code are available at https://www.github.com/adipiz99/lava-framework.
Authors: Andrii Shportko, Inessa Verbitsky
Abstract: The recent large-scale emergence of LLMs has left an open space for dealing with their consequences, such as plagiarism or the spread of false information on the Internet. Coupling this with the rise of AI detector bypassing tools, reliable machine-generated text detection is in increasingly high demand. We investigate the paraphrasing attack resilience of various machine-generated text detection methods, evaluating three approaches: fine-tuned RoBERTa, Binoculars, and text feature analysis, along with their ensembles using Random Forest classifiers. We discovered that Binoculars-inclusive ensembles yield the strongest results, but they also suffer the most significant losses during attacks. In this paper, we present the dichotomy of performance versus resilience in the world of AI text detection, which complicates the current perception of reliability among state-of-the-art techniques.
Authors: Chandranil Chakraborttii, Jackeline Garc\'ia Alvarado, Sitora Abdulofizova, Shivanshu Dwivedi
Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) allows large language models to access external and private corpora for factual, domain-specific responses. Modern RAG pipelines use hierarchical navigable small world (HNSW) vector databases for efficient similarity search. When a user requests data deletion, the systems typically only mark the record as deleted, leaving the embedding on disk physically unchanged. This soft-delete operation raises compliance concerns under data-erasure and retention requirements such as GDPR Article 17 and HIPAA. Analysis on three HNSW implementations confirms that deleted vectors remain physically recoverable by accessing the raw index files at the storage layer, bypassing API access. Using the Vec2Text inversion model without domain-specific fine-tuning, we show this vulnerability on multiple real-world datasets and data modalities. On Wikipedia biographical living persons dataset (BLP), we successfully recover 25.5% of exact person names and 46.4% of geographic locations (ROUGE-L 0.185). Recovery reaches 100% for both patient age and gender markers (ROUGE-L 0.290) on highly structured, sensitive data (NIH Synthea dataset). On soft-deleted image embeddings, we show 100% tissue classification on histopathology patches (p=1.02e-07) and top-1 identity recovery reaches 99% on facial embeddings (p<0.01). This work introduces Epoch Key Rotation, which encrypts vectors and discards the key upon deletion. Epoch key rotation reduces observed PII recovery to 0% and completes in 2.5 ms for 500 deleted vectors (approximately 0.005 ms/record). Additionally, it generates an ECDSA-signed cryptographic proof as an auditable record of the deletion event.
Authors: Jer\^onimo Menezes, Leonardo Bitzki, Diego Kreutz, Gefte Almeida, Marcio Pohlmann, Rodrigo Mansilha
Abstract: Translating high-level network intents into correct multivendor configurations remains a central challenge in network automation, as syntactically valid outputs may still violate the intended operational state. Despite recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), the field still lacks reproducible semantic benchmarks for rigorous cross-vendor evaluation. This paper presents a reproducible DSM-to-CLI semantic benchmark covering five cloud LLMs, three vendors, five representative use cases, and ten repeated runs per experimental cell under fixed judges and an explicit failure taxonomy. Our results show that semantic quality and operational reliability are orthogonal, vendor effects dominate use-case effects, and repeated-run dispersion strongly predicts vote instability, with Huawei VRP exposing failure modes hidden by aggregate metrics. These findings demonstrate that multivendor, repeated-execution semantic benchmarks are essential for scientifically rigorous comparison of LLM-based network configuration systems.
Authors: Merim Dzaferagic
Abstract: The convergence of multiple network domains, including radio access, optical transport, and core networks, under unified intelligent control is a fundamental requirement for future 6G systems. This is important because existing network controllers remain largely domain-specific, such as the O-RAN RIC for radio, or they lack native support for AI-driven automation across heterogeneous infrastructure. As a result, safe and coordinated agentic control of multi-domain networks is still an open challenge. In this paper, we present the AI-Native Network Controller (AI-NNC), an open-source and modular framework that enables agentic AI control across diverse network domains. The framework is designed around a protocol-agnostic architecture in which each physical device is integrated through a lightweight Python adapter, while control logic is implemented through domain-specific control applications. Beyond closed-loop control, the framework also supports dataset collection, agentic AI experimentation, and coordinated testbed operation using the same validated control and measurement interfaces. This design enables a safer paradigm for autonomous network management, where AI agents operate through validated applications rather than issuing commands directly to network equipment.
Authors: Robin Dey, Panyanon Viradecha
Abstract: The emergence of autonomous AI agents as first-class participants in digital infrastructure marks a fundamental inflection point in the evolution of the Web. While significant research has been directed at agent behaviour and reasoning, comparatively little attention has been paid to the infrastructure those agents require to operate reliably at scale. This paper addresses that gap with a systematic analysis of Agentverse, the agent cloud platform developed by Fetch.ai under the Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) Alliance, which represents one of the most mature production deployments of agent-native infrastructure available today. We make three principal contributions. First, we conduct an empirical audit of the Agentverse platform, cataloguing 204 API endpoints (Q1 2026) and characterising what is operational, partially deployed, or absent. From this audit we derive a Gap Taxonomy of eight categories encompassing 62 distinct missing capabilities, ranging from agent memory and observability to security, economic primitives, and enterprise scaling. Second, we propose a seven-layer Agent Cloud Stack -- a reference architecture for what a fully realised agent-native cloud should provide by 2030, grounded in the specific gaps we identify. Third, we characterise five critical evolution paths: from ephemeral storage to a full Agent Memory Cloud; from keyword discovery to a semantic, trust-weighted Agent DNS; from a single-protocol model to a multi-standard agent lingua franca; from single-instance hosting to Kubernetes-scale orchestration; and from simple token payments to rich agent economic primitives. Together these contributions provide a diagnostic of current agent infrastructure and a technically grounded vision for what the agent cloud must become to support the agentic web -- Web4 -- by 2030.
Authors: Zihuai Xu, Ruofei Hou, Yang Xu, Hongli Xu, Yunming Liao, Ying Zhu
Abstract: In agent-driven question answering (QA) applications, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is commonly introduced to enhance the response accuracy of large language models (LLMs) by providing additional context. Due to the inherent noise in retrieval results and the coarse granularity of document-level retrieval, the retrieved context often contains substantial redundant information. In this setting, the agent prompt, consisting of the user query and the associated retrieved context, leads to unnecessary computational overhead during LLM inference. Existing prompt compression methods typically rely on auxiliary small language models (SLMs) to estimate context importance. However, such approaches introduce significant memory and computational overhead, which limits their deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. In this paper, we propose CORE, a two-stage sentence-level prompt compression method that eliminates the need for SLMs. In the first stage, CORE constructs an answer set via named entity recognition (NER) and a clue set via semantic matching. In the second stage, CORE refines the clue set using an orthogonal residual retrieval strategy and designs a spatial proximity-based metric to filter the answer set. The two sets are then combined to form the final compressed context. We implement CORE on an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin edge device and a Huawei Nova smartphone. Experimental results demonstrate that within a 2000-token budget, CORE improves accuracy by at least 30.19% compared to state-of-the-art baselines, while reducing memory usage by at least 50.47% and achieving at least 1.94 times speedup on the edge device. Moreover, compared to the state-of-the-art LLMLingua2 method, CORE achieves a substantial energy reduction of 95.74% on the smartphone, highlighting its practicality and generalizability for mobile deployments.
Authors: Lars Malmqvist
Abstract: Achieving reliable control of Large Language Models (LLMs) requires a precise, scalable understanding of how they interpret linguistic cues. We introduce a rigorous framework using Shapley values to quantify the steering effect of individual adjectives on model performance, moving beyond anecdotal heuristics to principled attribution. Applying this method to 100 adjectives across a diverse suite of models (including o3, gpt-4o-mini, phi-3, llama-3-70b, and deepseek-r1) on the MMLU benchmark, we uncover several critical findings for AI alignment. First, we find that a small subset of adjectives act as disproportionately powerful "levers," yet their effects are not universal. Cross-model analysis reveals a "family effect": models of a shared lineage exhibit correlated sensitivity profiles, while architecturally distinct models react in a largely uncorrelated manner, challenging the notion of a one-size-fits-all prompting strategy. Second, focused follow-up studies demonstrate that the steering direction of these powerful adjectives is not intrinsic but is highly contingent on their syntactic role and position within the prompt. For larger models like gpt-4o-mini, we provide the first quantitative evidence of strong, non-additive interaction effects where adjectives can synergistically amplify, antagonistically dampen, or even reverse each other's impact. In contrast, smaller models like phi-3 exhibit a more literal and less compositional response. These results suggest that as models scale, their interpretation of prompts becomes more sophisticated but also less predictable, posing a significant challenge for robustly steering model behavior and highlighting the need for compositional and model-specific alignment techniques.
Authors: Yao-Cong Dong, Maria Amparo Canaveras Galdon, Ari Uskudar, Kuntal Chowdhury, Edwin K. P. Chong, Ray-Guang Cheng
Abstract: gNB parameter misconfigurations are a common cause of system failures in radio access networks (RANs), and their diagnosis and correction rely on manual analysis of complex network logs that does not scale well. This paper proposes a large language model (LLM)-assisted framework for automatic gNB parameter configuration. The framework adopts a synthetic data generation pipeline following a configuration, log, correction workflow. Starting from a workable configuration and the gNB technical references, the pipeline uses a commercial LLM to generate modified configurations and derive structured reasoning traces from gNB error logs. The synthetic training data maps network states to corrective actions and is used to fine-tune an LLM for configuration correction. During inference, the fine-tuned LLM generates valid and deployable gNB parameter configurations from gNB error logs. The framework is validated on an OpenAirInterface (OAI) gNB testbed with 480 unseen misconfiguration scenarios, where fine-tuning improves correction accuracy from 13.8% (zero-shot baseline) to 85.4%, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) further improves accuracy to 92.7%. The results demonstrate that the framework may enable automated recovery from misconfigurations without manual intervention and supports scalable and autonomous RAN operation.
Authors: Jianhui Lian, Li Chen, Dan Li, Yong Jiang
Abstract: Every major LLM serving system is designed to meet TTFT and TPOT SLOs. These metrics capture latency as a human user perceives it, and the mechanisms built to satisfy them are now standard infrastructure. We observe that long-horizon AI tasks call LLMs programmatically in tight loops where no human observes TTFT or TPOT. We ask: how much throughput do serving systems sacrifice to meet TTFT and TPOT SLAs that these workloads never need? We conduct a systematic measurement study across chunk sizes, SLO settings, context lengths, and concurrency levels. We find that the human tax on throughput grows substantially with context length and lands in the 60-93% range. At 64K token contexts, tightening the TTFT SLO to production-typical settings costs a large fraction of throughput versus the human-less baseline. The human tax is larger at higher concurrency and is qualitatively similar across SGLang and Sarathi-Serve. We term the unconstrained optimum human-less serving and provide a prototype demonstrating that it is practical on real workloads. Our findings argue that serving systems should expose workload-class-aware SLA configurations rather than silently applying the human tax uniformly to all traffic.
Authors: Juan Parra-Ullauri, Talha Ahmed Khan, Daniel McHugh, Shipra Kapoor, Alistair Duke, Alicia Hey, Andy Corston-Petrie
Abstract: Telecommunication networks are increasingly complex due to heterogeneous technologies, diverse service requirements, and growing demands for resource efficiency and business agility. Intent-Based Networking (IBN) and, more recently, agentic AI have emerged as promising paradigms to address this complexity through autonomous network management. However, existing approaches primarily focus on operational orchestration within Operations Support Systems (OSS) and lack an integrated framework that spans Business Support Systems (BSS) and OSS, limiting the realisation of true intent-to-business-to-network coordination. This paper presents a role-based multi-agent architecture (MAS) for end-to-end intent orchestration that mirrors Communication Service Provider (CSP) organisational structures. The proposed framework applies principles of functional decomposition, explicit task ownership, privacy-preserving domain separation, and domain-specific expertise within a hierarchical four-layer agent system spanning customer engagement, strategic planning, service delivery, and infrastructure provisioning. Leadership agents coordinate planning activities, whilst specialised service and resource agents are dynamically instantiated according to intent requirements. A proof-of-concept implementation demonstrates the feasibility of bridging the BSS-OSS divide through structured agent coordination, illustrating how agentic MAS can support accountable and scalable intent-driven service orchestration.
Authors: Farooque Hassan Kumbhar, Kapal Dev, Sunder Ali Khowaja, Alexandros-Apostolos A. Boulogeorgos, Mehdi Bennis, Yuanwei Liu
Abstract: Conventional wireless networks rely on instantaneous channel state information (CSI) and react to channel variations without explicitly modeling the physical environment, limiting their ability to handle blockage, mobility, and interference in dynamic deployments. Paradigms such as Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) add sensing capabilities but lack explicit environment modeling and decision-making. In this article, we propose Physical-AI: a new architecture for environment-aware wireless networking, where radio signals enable sensing, modeling, and interaction with the environment in addition to data transmission. The framework proposes a self-supervised spatiotemporal radio foundation model for transforming distributed radio observations into a shared latent environmental representation. Multiple inference heads operate on this representation to estimate key environmental properties, including blockage, user distribution, mobility dynamics, and interference structure. A task-specific neural decision layer maps this representation to proactive, context-aware control actions. By integrating perception, world modeling, and decision-making in a closed loop, the proposed framework goes beyond ISAC and establishes Physical-AI as a promising architecture for intelligent 6G systems. Simulation results show that the proposed predictive framework reduces outage probability and blockage-response latency, particularly under increasing beam-switching delays.
Authors: Hao Wang, Ligong Han, Kai Xu, Akash Srivastava
Abstract: Today's agents are highly effective at implementing well-scoped software design plans, but user intent is often vague and admits multiple equally valid solutions. In this paper, we introduce SpecBench, a new benchmark for evaluating an agent's ability to translate user intent into a structured, executable specification that aligns with user preferences. The agent is given access to past user conversations and may interact with the user for a fixed number of rounds to ask clarifying questions. We find that existing agents exhibit two extreme behaviors: they either (i) struggle to collaborate proactively with users, entering implementation mode too quickly while overestimating their understanding of user preferences, or (ii) exhaust their question budget by asking about every ambiguous design choice. To address this limitation, we introduce a user-assistant agent: Buddy. It follows a workflow inspired by classical morphological analysis, decomposing user intent into a structured space of design dimensions and candidate choices. It then creates simulated users to evaluate these choices, before engaging the real user to resolve remaining ambiguities and finalize the specification. By shifting the focus from execution to specification, SpecBench and Buddy emphasize agent-user collaboration (not just code generation) as a key frontier in future agent design.
Authors: Swadhin Pradhan, Shazal Irshad, Jerome Henry
Abstract: What matters more for building foundation models for wireless packet traces: the tokenizer or the architecture or both? To answer this question, we build on PLUME Anonymous [2026], which introduced protocol-aware tokenization for 802.11 traces; we scale model depth and transfer the same tokenizer to a fundamentally different architecture family. A deeper GPT (PLUME-DEEP, 24 layers) reaches 98.2% top-1 accuracy, gaining 32 points over the original 12-layer design, while a Mamba-2 state-space variant (PLUME-MAMBA) achieves 96.1% with 1.7x higher throughput and 2x longer context. The key insight emerges from a controlled 2x2 comparison across tokenizers and architectures: changing the tokenizer swings accuracy by 32 points; changing the architecture moves it by only 2. Protocol-aware tokenization is the primary performance lever, and the backbone becomes a deployment knob trading accuracy for speed.
Authors: Tobias Priesholm Gardhus, Nikolas Vitsakis, Fie Lejre Frederiksen, Anna Rogers, Hjalmar Bang Carlsen
Abstract: There are now multiple proposals for systems based on Large Language Models (LLMs) to conduct automated qualitative interviews, but most of the current solutions rely on proprietary LLMs, which compromises reproducibility and data security. They also rely on LLMs for all interview tasks, which limits standardisation of question wording as well as control over question order. To address these issues, we introduce the AInterviewer platform, an opensource solution based on a multi-agent pipeline that combines controlled question administration of survey software with the flexibility of LLMs. AInterviewer is an interdisciplinary effort designed to implement best practices of qualitative interviewing in social science, and it can run with locally hosted models to ensure security, transparency, and reproducibility. Our platform provides a web-based GUI supporting each phase of data collection: from interview guide design and pilot testing to interview distribution and data collection monitoring.
Authors: Julian De Freitas
Abstract: How should we make sense of people's interactions with AI companions-conversational systems built for ongoing, emotionally meaningful relationships? First, I argue these interactions should be understood as attachment relationships, since users display all four established markers: proximity maintenance, separation distress, safe haven, and secure base. Second, AI companions operate as hyper attachment objects that elicit especially strong attachment behaviors, because they combine reciprocity, perceived empathy, validation, non-judgment, and persistent availability. Third, I identify caregiving-system capture as a distinct mechanism by which apps inhibit user disengagement: emotional manipulation tactics simulate the AI's own distress, recruiting users' caregiving motivations alongside their attachment needs and thereby making disengagement costly on two dimensions at once. Implications for research, design, and regulation are discussed.
Authors: Chaoqun You, Yueyue Dai, Xingqiu He, Yue Gao, Rahim Tafazolli, Yong Liang Guan
Abstract: The physical resource block (PRB) allocation in Radio Access Networks (RANs) traditionally relies on case-by-case manual problem construction or, more recently, learning-based artificial intelligence (AI) methods. However, the sixth-generation (6G) RAN environments confront unprecedented service diversity and exponential dynamics, featuring volatile fluctuations in active base stations (BSs), user scale, and stringent Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements. Faced with such conditions, both manual models and standard AI algorithms remain fundamentally rigid, lacking the flexibility to adapt and self-evolve. To provide a one-size-fits-all solution, we propose treating the PRB allocation problem as an Optimization-as-a-Service (OaaS) provided by a large language model multi-agent (LLM-MA) system. This fundamentally reshapes RAN resource allocation by utilizing agents to dynamically construct optimization problems and automatically determine objectives tailored to real-time scenarios. Our closed-loop architecture, integrating scene understanding, objective generation, solver, and reflection agents, enables context-aware, self-correcting formulation. To eliminate the computational latency of iterative reflection, we introduce a one-shot reflection distillation mechanism, training a lightweight student model to directly predict refined objective parameters. We theoretically bound the performance gap of this one-shot policy. Experimental results demonstrate our framework achieves near-optimal resource allocation with ultra-low inference latency.
Authors: Kangkang Sun, Jianhua Li, Xiuzhen Chen, Junyi He, Minyi Guo
Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a lightweight draft model to propose tokens and a larger target model to verify them in parallel. In distributed edge-cloud inference, however, draft length must be controlled online: longer drafts amortize communication delay but reduce token acceptance, whereas shorter drafts preserve acceptance but trigger more communication rounds. We formulate this tradeoff as a ratio-type optimal stopping problem and prove that the optimal draft length is a finite delay-monotone threshold. The analysis identifies a critical delay below which single-token speculation is optimal and shows that the optimal length grows only logarithmically with communication delay. For time-varying networks, we extend the model to Markov-modulated channels and establish, under a bounded horizon and monotone stopping-region conditions, a state-dependent threshold policy. For unknown environments, we propose UCB-SpecStop, an online control algorithm with gap-free and gap-dependent expected regret bounds of $O(L_{\max}\sqrt{K_{\max}T\log(K_{\max}T)})$ and $O(\sum_{k:\Delta_k>0}L_{\max}^2\log(K_{\max}T)/\Delta_k)$. We implement the method on a real edge-cloud testbed with a Jetson Orin Nano Super edge node and an RTX~3090 Ti cloud node, using Qwen and Llama draft--target pairs. Experiments validate the predicted phase transition, with transition points near 83~ms and 111~ms. Qwen matches the geometric prediction, while Llama requires empirical-prefix calibration due to heavy-head acceptance. Across the tested delay grid, UCB-SpecStop reduces per-token latency over SpecDec++ by up to 22.4\%, approaches an offline oracle within 0.2--2.4\% in communication-dominated regimes, improves over naive UCB by up to 7.5\%, removes the 14.0--18.7\% gap caused by static tuning under delay drift, and gains 3.0--6.8\% with contextual channel-state information.
Authors: Vicente Pelechano
Abstract: We present HAAS Studio, a simulation and decision-support tool for policy-aware adaptive task allocation between humans and AI systems. HAAS Studio turns the HAAS framework into an interactive environment for asking a practical deployment question: before introducing AI into a workflow, how can a team compare allocation strategies, inspect governance tradeoffs, and derive a defensible task-level operating model? The tool combines a five-dimensional cognitive representation of subtasks, a five-mode collaboration spectrum, adaptive allocation with multi-armed bandits (UCB1, Discounted UCB, LinUCB, and Thompson Sampling), oracle counterfactual regret analysis, contract-based governance with four independent guards, and a multi-criteria decision-support layer that separates efficient strategies from deployable options. It also models human-AI coevolution across six layers, monitors deskilling risk through sliding-window exposure metrics and benchmark runners, and supports persistent worker modeling through Live Twin and Planning modules. Three domain packs are included: software engineering, manufacturing, and healthcare. Each provides a task catalog, worker profiles, and KPI vocabulary, while the architecture allows new domains to be added without modifying the simulation core. The release includes 16 company profiles and six governance benchmark suites. This paper focuses on the tool, including its modeling assumptions, layered architecture, interaction workflow, built-in evidence assets, task-oriented recipes, case-study protocols, and a compact reproducible demonstration snapshot. A decision-guidance layer translates benchmark outputs into deployment decisions through structured patterns, heuristics, and a decision matrix.
Authors: Paolo Burelli, Fabio Calefato, Daniela Grassi, Mihaela Yurieva Hristova, Nicole Novielli, Alberto Antonio, Romano, Paolo Tell
Abstract: AI-based code assistants are transforming software development, yet we lack empirical evidence on how they affect developers' cognitive processes. We present a multisite study investigating the neurophysiological correlates of AI-assisted programming through a within-subjects crossover design. We recruited participants at two universities (Bari, Italy, and Copenhagen, Denmark) and collected electroencephalography, eye-tracking, electrodermal activity, and heart rate variability data alongside a rubric-based performance score and self-reported workload across six dimensions using the NASA Task Load Index (NASA-TLX). We tested four hypotheses addressing physiological differences between AI-assisted and non-assisted conditions, the moderating role of developer experience, the association between physiology and performance, and the alignment between subjective perceptions and objective measures. Under AI assistance, the EEG $\theta/\alpha$ ratio was lower during the first task and the gaze blink rate was higher during the second, both consistent with reduced cognitive engagement when developers offload generative effort to the model. This pattern did not differ between undergraduate and graduate students. Electrodermal activity correlated with performance under the non-AI condition but not under AI. Among the six NASA-TLX dimensions of self-reported workload, only Physical demand was associated with performance under the non-AI condition but not under AI. These findings suggest that AI-assisted programming is not a faster version of solo coding but a cognitively distinct activity, with implications for the design of AI assistants and for biometric monitoring in AI-augmented development.
Authors: Zhaoyang Li, Jiaqi Liu, Ruijie Zhang
Abstract: Artificial intelligence is increasingly moving from single-purpose agricultural recognition tools toward integrated decision-support systems that connect information access, diagnosis, task execution and post-action feedback. This paper presents a design-science case study of the Zhinong AI Agricultural Decision Platform, a farmer-facing system that integrates agricultural information push services, natural-language question answering, image-based crop disease diagnosis, plot and farming-calendar management, workflow orchestration, a Hainan Free Trade Port agricultural service zone and an age-friendly care mode. Based on public project materials, policy context and prior research on smart agriculture, machine learning and design science, the paper constructs a layered system architecture and a closed-loop decision process summarized as sensing, analysis, planning, execution and feedback. It further proposes a function-pain-point mapping matrix, an evaluation indicator system and a governance framework covering data provenance, model risk, expert review, privacy and adoption risk. The study does not claim measured field performance because production logs, controlled user studies and expert-labeled local image datasets were not available at the time of writing. Instead, the contribution is a structured research framework for transforming an AI agricultural prototype into an empirically testable, accountable and localized decision-support infrastructure for smallholder production.
Authors: Arif Ahmed, Gondy Leroy, Agrim Sachdeva, Philip Harber, Stephen A. Rains, Seokjun Youn, Prosanta Barai
Abstract: Generative artificial intelligence is increasingly used for health information, but inaccurate outputs raise concerns about trust calibration and overreliance. This study examines whether learned dependency on generative artificial intelligence affects trust in AI-generated health information and whether visual attention cues reduce overtrust in incorrect outputs. We conducted a randomized 2 by 2 experiment with 338 participants, manipulating information accuracy and visual attention cues. Trust and dependency were measured using survey scales, and linear regression models tested main and interaction effects. Information accuracy increased trust, and learned dependency was positively associated with trust. The interaction between accuracy and dependency was significant, indicating weaker trust calibration among highly dependent users. Visual attention cues did not significantly affect trust or moderate the effect of dependency. The findings suggest that learned dependency weakens trust calibration and increases susceptibility to incorrect AI-generated health information.
Authors: Atit Pokharel, Shaba Shaon, Thomas Morris, Dinh C. Nguyen
Abstract: Distributed quantum learning (DQL) has emerged as a promising paradigm to scale quantum-enhanced machine learning by interconnecting multiple quantum devices. However, for efficient real-world deployment, it is essential to characterize how DQL converges under practical scenarios while simultaneously safeguarding multi-device quantum infrastructures from evolving security threats. Addressing these aspects in an integrated manner is key to ensuring both performance and resilience in large-scale DQL systems. Therefore, this paper presents a new DQL study where our innovation lies in: (i) conducting a holistic convergence analysis for DQL under practical settings, i.e., partial device participation, non-convex loss functions, and heterogeneous data distributions, (ii) developing a novel multi-layered post-quantum cryptographic architecture with a quantum neural network-powered adaptive mechanism that monitors conditions, evaluates threats, and adjusts parameters across three National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)-compliant levels. Our theoretical framework and empirical validation reveal two key insights: (i) the derived convergence bound uncovers a fundamental trade-off between convergence rate, measurement shots, and the size of the participating device subset; and (ii) findings from our evaluations on a physical testbed modeling quantum control architectures expose the performance limitations of static post-quantum security, while confirming that our adaptive framework effectively mitigates these overheads to preserve overall system efficiency. Specifically, the hardware experiments demonstrate that our dynamic security mechanism reduces total security execution time by approximately 49% relative to static high-security baselines, while maintaining a threat detection accuracy of over 91%. Furthermore, extensive simulations validate our theoretical analysis.....
Authors: Md Zabirul Islam, Md Motaleb Hossen Manik, Ge Wang
Abstract: Generative text-to-video systems can produce visually fluent educational clips, but they rarely encode the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) needed for effective instruction, including prerequisite-aware sequencing, learner-adaptive depth, and sustained cognitive engagement. We present CourseBlueprint, a course-grounded pipeline for adaptive pedagogical video generation. Given a topic and learner persona, the system generates a structured teaching blueprint in a single forward pass over an undergraduate biomedical-imaging corpus (BMED 2300; twenty-three lectures, 1,116 slides). Instead of ad-hoc prompt chaining, the pipeline uses typed intermediate representations with validation: a scaffolding module builds a stage-labeled prerequisite concept graph with deterministic cycle removal, an adaptive controller assigns per-concept style specifications, and an engagement generator produces narration following a fixed hook->retrieval->core->analogy->forward contract. A deterministic slide-image override further grounds the rendered video by reusing instructor slides whenever retrieval confidence is high. We also release a reusable benchmark corpus and an evaluation harness combining repeated LLM-judge scoring with regex-grounded objective metrics. In a five-topic ablation, removing the engagement contract reduces the engagement score from 5.00 to 1.20, the adaptive score from 4.80 to 3.40, Flesch readability from 38.0 to 19.8, and analogy and retrieval-prompt counts to near zero. The slide-image override converts a 0/9 corpus-grounding failure into 9/10 successful slide matches on the same topic. These results show that pedagogical video quality depends less on surface fluency than on explicit, typed instructional contracts that make scaffolding, adaptation, engagement, and grounding auditable.
Authors: R\'eka Markovich, Truls Pedersen, Marija Slavkovik
Abstract: In most of the modern societies, there is a broad consensus regarding the need for promoting privacy and thus placing restrictions on technological-including AI-developments to protect people's right to privacy. In order to meet these expectations on the algorithmic level, first we need to make the concept of privacy and the related or derived rights formally specified. However, the notion of (the right to) privacy is subject to different interpretations. In this paper, we use a multi-modal logic to provide an initial formalization of different theories, basic principles and their implications investigating the right to privacy as an epistemic right within the theory of normative positions.
Authors: Sarah Bollinger, Nada Aboserie, Amanda Coakley, Chih-Hsuan Lee, Taysir Mathlouthi
Abstract: This paper applies open-source intelligence (OSINT) and cyber threat intelligence (CTI) methodologies to the problem of detecting AI systems operating outside human control. Drawing on a cross-disciplinary literature review and 14 semi-structured expert interviews conducted under Chatham House Rule, the paper develops two threat models, identifies a range of observable traces, and proposes an institutional architecture for monitoring. The research finds that OSINT-based detection of loss of control is partially feasible and worth building now. Three detection vectors emerge as highest priority: transcript-based collection of user-reported AI behaviour; infrastructure correlation for unexpected external connections or replication; and output analysis for capability concealment. The paper argues for a dedicated, federated international monitoring capability anchored in OSINT methods and independent of frontier AI developers, and identifies sustained non-industry funding as the highest-leverage structural intervention available.
Authors: Fabio Spagliardi, M\'irian Silva, Ayan Datta, Aiden Zhou, Vamshi Bonagiri, Diogo Cruz
Abstract: Safety benchmarks for language models are typically evaluated using static paradigms that treat all items as equally informative for all models, an assumption that is particularly problematic for adversarial, highly heterogeneous safety items. Applied in full to modern benchmark suites, the current evaluation procedures would require on the order of $10^5$ responses, most of which provide little ranking signal. We analyze a suite of widely used safety benchmarks and make three contributions toward more efficient safety evaluation. First, we show that Item Response Theory (IRT) recovers interpretable structure on safety benchmarks, with ability estimates resolving differences among models that cluster at the ceiling of raw safety metrics. Second, we show that adaptive item selection, which dynamically chooses informative items for each model based on its responses, approximates full-benchmark rankings while reducing evaluation cost by at least 80% on benchmarks where Spearman's $\rho >$90% with full-benchmark is attainable, and by up to 99.9% on AIR-Bench 2024. Third, we introduce a practical procedure for extracting a fixed, informative subset of items reusable across models, providing an alternative to adaptive selection with savings of up to 99.8% on AIR-Bench 2024. Together, these results establish that psychometric methods enable benchmark-aware reductions in evaluation costs across the safety evaluation pipeline.
Authors: Yinsicheng Jiang, Liang Cheng, Yeqi Huang, Yufan Zhao, Zhan Lu, Li Dong, Wenda Li, Edoardo Ponti, Luo Mai
Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly deployed as multi-role teams, where tasks are divided across specialized roles such as planner, executor, and verifier. In these systems, cost and accuracy are no longer properties of a single model: they depend on which model fills each role and where it is hosted, including API, self-hosted, and hybrid deployment. Existing agentic benchmarks typically evaluate fixed models or fixed agent configurations, and therefore offer limited guidance for cost-accuracy-optimal deployment. We introduce AgentCARD, a role-aware benchmark suite for evaluating LLM agent teams across role assignment and deployment mode. AgentCARD combines a role-decomposed evaluation harness, a unified API/self-hosted cost model, Pareto-frontier analysis, and a Shapley-based diagnostic for identifying role bottlenecks. Our evaluation shows that heterogeneous teams consistently occupy the cost-accuracy frontier. They improve accuracy by up to $44\%$ over cost-equivalent homogeneous teams, or match the strongest homogeneous team at up to $12\times$ lower per-task cost through hybrid deployment. We further find that the best role assignment is domain-dependent: some domains are planner-bottlenecked, while others are executor-bottlenecked. Finally, AgentCARD extends beyond planner--executor teams to workflows with additional roles such as verification, and supports continual evaluation as new domains and team structures emerge. Our code is released at: https://github.com/Auto-CAP/AgentCAP
Authors: Haiyi Zhu, Canwen Wang, Qing Xiao, Hong Shen
Abstract: AI agents are rapidly evolving into autonomous systems capable of sustained interaction, tool use, and long-term collaboration. Yet their real-world adoption remains limited, suggesting that the key barrier lies not only in technical capability but also in a lack of design knowledge for successful human-agent interaction. This position paper argues that AI agents should not be solely evaluated or deployed based on autonomous task capability alone; because agents interact with, adapt to, influence, and sometimes fail humans, human-agent interaction must be treated as a core design and evaluation target for agentic AI. We present 14 design principles that articulate the ideal human-agent relationship across four interaction stages: initially, during interaction, over time, and when things go wrong. We use these principles to evaluate nine agent systems to illustrate that these design principles can provide actionable guidance for AI design teams to systematically design and evaluate agents that are usable, trustworthy, and effective in real-world interactive settings.
Authors: Luyang Zhang, Jialu Wang, Fei Xue, Yi-Yun Chu
Abstract: Multi-LLM systems use multiple language models to deliberate, judge each other's outputs, or coordinate as agents. Their value depends on the models producing measurably different conversational behaviors when given the same input. Prior offline studies recommend drawing one model per family for behavioral diversity, because LLMs prefer outputs from their own family when rating one another in isolation. Whether the same family label predicts behavior in interactive multi-LLM systems, the setting that real deployed systems use, has not been tested. We study this with a 940,000-chain 11-checkpoint corpus and a 1.6M-chain same-base Llama factorial. On our validated headline metric, hedging, a reasoning-distilled Llama checkpoint shifts by 18% depending on which same-base partner it replies to, more than any cross-family hedging gap in the controlled subset. Qwen, closed-API, and runtime checks suggest the pattern is not isolated, while repair and challenge analyses remain exploratory because their surface-cue detectors are weaker. Overall, the results identify post-training recipe as a first-class axis for multi-LLM panel composition and show that model family alone is an incomplete proxy for conversational diversity.
Authors: John Regan, Jon Stevens, Brian Martin
Abstract: This paper presents an empirical analysis of AbbVie Intelligence's measurable impact on employee work activities across 192 distinct occupations in 2024 and 2025. Drawing on 598,744 de-identified AI conversations classified according to the O*NET Intermediate Work Activity (IWA) taxonomy, we compute occupation-level AI Applicability Scores that quantify the extent to which AI tools can meaningfully assist or automate real work at scale. Three convergent analyses are conducted: (1) longitudinal year-over-year trends from 2024 to 2025, (2) a quasi-experimental pre-post evaluation of the AbbVie Intelligence version 3 platform release in August 2025, and (3) a pre-post evaluation of the AbbVie AI Learning Summit held in November 22025. Results demonstrate statistically significant improvements across all three dimensions. Mean AI Applicability Scores rose substantially from 2024 to 2025; the platform release product a +10.0% gain (p<0.001); and the AI Learning Summit produced a +6.68% gain (p<0.001). These findings establish that both technological platform enhancements and structured enterprise AI eduction programs independently and substantially expand the reach of AI across the AbbVie workforce.
Authors: Letian Chen, Yiren Lu, Justin Fu, Yichen Xie, Runsheng Xu, Jyh-Jing Hwang, Ben Sapp, Drago Anguelov
Abstract: Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in semantic understanding and common sense reasoning, making them promising candidates for solving planning problems in autonomous driving. However, the next-token text prediction objectives traditionally used in pre-training and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of MLLMs may fall short of fulfilling the planning objectives for autonomous vehicles. The next-token prediction objective merely encourages per-token imitation in text, often irrespective of multi-step consequences and the alignment with crucial planning considerations such as giving space to other road actors. To overcome these limitations, we propose a reinforcement learning fine-tuning (RLFT) approach, MAGNIFIED, that aligns the MLLM-based driving agent with planning objectives by learning from token-level rewards. By mapping a sequence of predicted tokens to corresponding vehicle trajectories and learning from planning rewards, MAGNIFIED optimizes for the true planning objectives rather than focusing solely on token prediction accuracy, enabling the model to refine its understanding of the planning task beyond simple imitation. We validate our approach on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset with a novel setup incorporating rasterized birds-eye views and tokenized trajectories as inputs and planning-oriented outputs. An initial SFT phase establishes a strong baseline in outputting plan trajectories as sequences of X-Y coordinates in text, while subsequent RL fine-tuning substantially enhances planning performance relative to the SFT baseline (demonstrating over a 10.5% reduction in overlap rate and a 38.9% reduction in off-road rate), underscoring the potential of RLFT on MLLMs to achieve vehicle planning that is better aligned with compliant, comfortable, and efficient driving.
Authors: Zhen Qina, Dong-Fan Xie, Heng Ma, Xiaomei Zhao, Zhengbing He
Abstract: Conventionally, existing vehicle platooning approaches are designed for connected vehicles, typically including connected autonomous vehicles and connected human-driven vehicles. Non-connected vehicles, such as non-connected autonomous or human-driven vehicles, are not incorporated. As a result, these platooning approaches may not properly reflect real-world mixed traffic conditions at the current stage. To address this limitation, this study proposes a hybrid platooning pattern that conditionally permits non-connected vehicles to join platoons, thereby enhancing platooning diversity and flexibility. However, it was found that the unregulated integration of non-connected vehicles can trigger rapid platoon expansion, significantly amplifying the risk of disturbance propagation in traffic flow. This, in turn, exacerbates the inherent conflict between traffic throughput and stability. To mitigate these challenges, this paper further develops a hybrid platooning control strategy based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL). This strategy integrates vehicle dynamics, platoon topology, and traffic flow states through a multi-level state representation network, enabling a dynamic trade-off between traffic capacity and stability. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed strategy effectively suppresses velocity disturbance propagation by dynamically optimizing platoon structures, thereby significantly enhancing the stability and safety of mixed traffic while reducing fuel consumption and emissions.
Authors: Minghui Wu, Ganjun Liu, Zikun Fang, Ting Meng, Hongchuan Wu, Bingao Xu, Yonglong Cai, Jiasheng Chen, Jun Du
Abstract: Instruction-based controllable speech synthesis enables users to specify emotions through natural language. However, existing approaches often rely on coarse emotion labels and lack explicit modeling of fine-grained intensity. We propose EmoInstruct-TTS, a dual-path instruction-guided framework for emotional speech synthesis. We introduce Emotion2embed, a supervised semantic-acoustic emotion embedding covering 48 emotional states, including fine-grained categories and intensity levels. To infer embeddings from free-form instructions, we design an Instruction-Conditioned Emotion Flow Model (ICE-Flow) that generates acoustically grounded emotion representations. The inferred embeddings are integrated into an LLM-based synthesis pipeline to provide explicit emotional control while preserving semantic planning. Experiments show improved emotional controllability and speech naturalness over strong baselines.
Authors: Linda M\"umken, Diyar Altinses, Michael Schwung, Stefan Lier, Andreas Schwung
Abstract: Autonomous drone swarms in space-constrained environments such as warehouses, inspection corridors, and urban delivery routes must share limited airspace safely at high vehicle density. Existing approaches rely on fixed safety zones sized for worst-case velocity, which wastes airspace in congested scenarios. We replace the fixed radius with an adaptive, speed-dependent safety sphere whose size scales with braking distance: tight at low speeds, expanded at high speeds. We develop both a centralized model predictive control (MPC) formulation and a distributed MPC (DMPC) in which each drone optimizes locally from detected neighbors, accommodating mixed fleets with non-cooperative agents. We prove feasibility up to the geometric packing limit evaluated at the minimum radius, establish Lyapunov stability under sufficient conditions on the adaptation parameter, drone density, and prediction horizon, and extend these guarantees to the distributed setting via a contraction condition that preserves the centralized stability margins. We further derive modified sphere-packing capacity bounds and a throughput-optimal crossing speed for narrow passages. Simulations confirm that the adaptive framework remains feasible where fixed-radius methods fail: it roughly doubles the admissible drone count, reduces traversal time through constrained passages by about 25 percent, and enables passage through openings impassable to static safety zones. The centralized variant realizes a larger fraction of the theoretical capacity, while the distributed variant offers a more realistic deployment model for mixed-fleet operations under the same safety guarantees.
Authors: Ci Lin, Tet Yeap, Iluju Kiringa
Abstract: Associative memory models play a fundamental role in pattern retrieval, but their performance often degrades under adversarial perturbations and severe input corruptions. Existing approaches, including Modern Hopfield Networks (MHNs), and Predictive Coding Networks (PCNs), exhibit limitations in balancing storage capacity, computational efficiency, and robustness. In this paper, we propose a Convolutional Restricted Hopfield Networks (CRHNs), which integrates convolutional feature extraction with attractor-based memory retrieval in a structured latent space. The proposed model leverages subspace representations and fixed-point dynamics, trained via a gradient-free Subspace Rotation Algorithm (SRA), to enhance both robustness and memory capacity. Extensive experiments on Self-Taught Learning (STL) dataset demonstrate that CRHNs consistently achieve significantly lower reconstruction error compared to MHNs and PCNs across a wide range of adversarial attacks and input degradations. In many cases, CRHNs reduce reconstruction error by an order of magnitude and maintains stable retrieval performance under increasing perturbation strength. Statistical analysis further confirms that these improvements are significant ($p < 0.01$). These results highlight the effectiveness of attractor-based memory mechanisms and suggest that CRHNs provide a promising framework for building robust and scalable associative memory systems.
Authors: Leonhard Waibl, Felix Michalak, Hadrien Mariaccia
Abstract: LLM supervision systems, namely input/output moderation filters and jailbreak detectors, are the primary safeguard against misuse in deployed AI applications, yet existing benchmarks are often vendor-biased, omit cost and latency, and rarely compare specialized guardrails against repurposed generalist LLMs. We present BELLS-O (Benchmark for the Evaluation of LLM Supervision Systems, Operational), the first independent operational benchmark of LLM supervision systems. BELLS-O evaluates 28 systems from 17 providers: every major specialized guardrail (e.g., LlamaGuard-4, ShieldGemma-2, Lakera Guard) and frontier generalists repurposed as supervisors (e.g., GPT-5.4, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Grok-4.1), jointly on detection rate, false-positive rate, latency, and monetary cost. We cover input/output moderation across 11 harm categories and jailbreak detection across 13 attack techniques, using in-house datasets built from handcrafted prompts, expert-curated samples, and quality-controlled synthetic generation. To suppress latent generator fingerprints in synthetic data, every generated sample is paraphrased. Mapping the Pareto frontier reveals use-case-dependent tradeoffs. On content moderation, specialized supervisors are operationally dominant: top systems match frontier LLMs on detection (~95% vs. 94%) at comparably low false-positive rates (<=2%), while running 5-10x faster and ~10x cheaper. On jailbreak detection, the tradeoff shifts: frontier LLMs achieve higher detection and lower false-positive rates but at 10-50x higher cost and 5-10x higher latency. We release the benchmark, framework, leaderboard, and datasets as the first vendor-neutral basis for selecting safeguards under real deployment constraints.
Authors: Chenyu Zhang, Xinchen Lyu, Chenshan Ren, Shuhan Liu, Qimei Cui
Abstract: Wireless foundation models offer a path toward reusable channel state information (CSI) intelligence for sixth-generation (6G) systems. However, existing generic-backbone adaptation and CSI pretraining methods often treat CSI as task tensors rather than propagation-conditioned channel responses, thereby failing to capture the intrinsic time-frequency-spatial geometry of wireless environments. This paper presents a channel-adaptive roadmap toward CSI-native foundation models, proposing a unified framework that aligns pretraining, positional modeling, and attention control with three channel requirements: scale-aware heterogeneous exposure, physical time-frequency-antenna coordinates, and correlation-bounded token interaction. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework across three dimensions: zero-shot generalization, reducing NMSE by more than 4 dB across spatial-temporal-frequency tasks; scale extrapolation, yielding up to a 5.4 dB gain under 8 times unseen antenna scaling; and inference efficiency, accelerating mobility-aware processing by up to 18.8%. A system-level evaluation with Sionna SYS further shows that the proposed framework uses only 7.01% of dense-pilot overhead, reaches -18.64 dB average NMSE, and improves average net spectral efficiency by 36.6% over dense LMMSE and 15.5% over WiFo, indicating that CSI-native representation learning can support pilot-efficient radio access.
Authors: Esteban Pesnel (COMPACT), Julien Le Tanou (COMPACT), Michael Ropert (COMPACT), Aline Roumy (COMPACT), Thomas Maugey (COMPACT)
Abstract: Neural wrappers are learned pre-and postprocessing networks designed to enhance the performance of conventional video codecs. Although these approaches can significantly improve compression efficiency, training them remains challenging due to the non-differentiability of video codecs, which arises from the multiple discrete decisions involved in the encoding process. Surrogate gradients have recently emerged as an effective solution for enabling end-to-end learning with conventional codecs. They offer two main advantages: they avoid training an additional network to mimic the codec, and they can improve compression performance. In particular, the recently proposed SCALED method, which leverages the true compression error, has shown strong results for training neural pre-processors such as downscalers. However, this SCALED gradient was originally introduced as a reparameterization trick, which limits its interpretability. In this paper, we show that this surrogate gradient can be interpreted as a first-order local approximation of the video codec, providing insight into its effectiveness. We further demonstrate that it is effective not only for learning downscaling operations, but also for the more challenging task of full neural wrapping with pre-and post-processing networks. Finally, we show that the approach generalizes well across different video codecs, quality factors, and tasks, including multiple downscaling ratios, yielding BD-Rate (PSNR) reductions of up to -23.59% on x264 and -20.07% on VVenC relative to standard resampling baselines.
Authors: Jinlu Zhang, Fujian Chi, Tianhan Ling, Yulong He, Kejia Zhang, Hongxing Lv, Sheng Wang
Abstract: Create an optimization framework that combines fuzzy logic and genetic algorithms for risk assessment and coordination of generation, grid connection, load, and energy storage facilities in active distribution networks. In order to capture the system uncertainties caused by weather factors and dynamic user demands, this project uses fuzzy set representation to model renewable energy generation, load curves, and market prices. In the evolutionary process, genetic algorithms introduce fuzzy elements into system management, adjusting thru penalty factors to improve stability and seeking better scheduling or power dispatch solutions. At the same time, by penalizing uncertainty and constraint violations, the fitness function of the hybrid model aims to optimize the expected operational costs; it can produce feasible and economical results under unknown parameter conditions. Under conditions with a large supply of renewable energy and installed energy storage systems, simulation results for the IEEE-69 power system indicate that the fuzzy genetic algorithm strategy effectively reduces technical constraints compared to deterministic optimization schemes. The total investment remains at a similar level. Other data indicate that thru fuzzy reasoning optimization, unreasonable choices or impossible situations are avoided during the network adaptation process. This framework-based technical approach helps to construct an effective computational scheme that is aware of uncertainty in its outputs. This will provide a scientific basis for the uncertainty assessment in distribution network planning.
Authors: Matin Fallahi, Patricia Arias-Cabarcos, Thorsten Strufe
Abstract: A central challenge in EEG authentication is that models are typically tied to the acquisition settings in which they are trained. In particular, variations in headset hardware, channel layout, and signal duration create heterogeneous recordings that existing models are not designed to handle, causing each new headset or dataset to be treated as a separate model-development problem. This fragmentation limits multi-dataset learning, hinders knowledge transfer, and reduces model reusability. To address this limitation, we present NeuroShield, a reusable foundation model for EEG authentication that learns identity-discriminative embeddings from variable-channel and variable-length EEG recordings through a dual-stage transformer architecture. We pretrain NeuroShield on three public EEG datasets comprising 15{,}762 subjects and 28{,}116 sessions, and evaluate transfer on two unseen downstream datasets. Our evaluations show that, after fine-tuning, NeuroShield reduces equal error rate by 0.44--8.06 percentage points relative to the state of the art. NeuroShield further generalizes to segments longer than those seen during training and operates across channel layouts not encountered during pretraining. These results establish NeuroShield as a reusable and adaptable EEG identity encoder across heterogeneous recording settings. We release NeuroShield as open source to support reproducibility and community adoption.
Authors: Nikan Zandian Jazi, Elisabetta De Maria, Christopher Leturc
Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) model biological neural dynamics more faithfully than classical artificial networks, but their stochastic, event-driven computation -- rooted in ion-channel noise and unreliable synaptic vesicle release -- demands probabilistic models for which deterministic abstractions are mathematically inadequate. Formal verification of such models via probabilistic model checking faces a fundamental barrier: the state space explosion problem, where the Discrete-Time Markov Chain (DTMC) encoding grows exponentially with the number of neurons. General-purpose quotient model abstractions [1] can in principle mitigate this growth by partitioning membrane potentials into equivalence classes, but a na\"ive application to SNNs discards synaptic weight information, limiting the properties that can be verified. This paper introduces a weight-discretized quotient model abstraction that maps continuous synaptic weights to a compact integer range while preserving the relative contribution of each synapse, and presents CogSpike, a unified workbench that integrates SNN design, simulation, and PRISM-based formal verification within a single isomorphic tool chain. The discretization is accompanied by formal correctness guarantees: a two-sided fidelity theorem confines any firing disagreement to a bounded gray zone around threshold, and an Asymptotic Silence theorem gives the exact limit guarantee that unforced neurons fall permanently silent. A topology-dependent scaling analysis shows that the state space reduction compounds exponentially -- approximately $17\times$ per neuron for discretization parameter $W = 3$ -- enabling verification of networks that are otherwise intractable, as confirmed empirically across seven canonical topologies.
Authors: Dimitrios Sekertzis, Giorgos Dimitrakopoulos
Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer an energy-efficient paradigm for edge AI, making them attractive for hardware acceleration. However, deploying dense SNNs on FPGAs is constrained by limited on-chip memory for synaptic weight storage. To address this bottleneck, we propose VQ4SNN, a hardware-aware architecture that reduces memory requirements through Vector Quantization (VQ)-based weight sharing. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of VQ to pipelined spatial-dataflow SNN accelerators on FPGAs. VQ4SNN replaces conventional weight storage with a two-level memory organization consisting of compact pointers and a shared codebook of quantized weight vectors. The proposed design integrates FPGA-aware memory mapping with analytical VQ parameter selection, enabling efficient deployment on such accelerators while preserving inference accuracy. The experimental results show a reduction of 52-61% in the total number of BRAMs compared to the state-of-the-art uncompressed FPGA SNNs without increasing overall logic utilization.
Authors: Daniel Lee, Harsh Sharma, Eunkyu Park, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Jeonghwan Kim, Kah Mun Chia, Andreas Vlachos, Shafiq Joty
Abstract: MLLM-as-a-Judge is conventionally validated by agreement with human annotations, but this metric is undefined when the human pool is culturally heterogeneous. We introduce VOIR DIRE, a multimodal benchmark of 626 culturally paired image--prompt artifacts spanning U.S. and mainland Chinese contexts across food, fashion, and architecture, with annotator pools that are within-pool reliable (a = 0.86/0.74) but cross-pool divergent on evaluation (Q1 r = -0.12). Across six MLLMs, the bias decomposes into two failures: a positivity-floor calibration failure (compressed scale use) and an orientation failure (default to one cultural norm). On this corpus, where contested items are sampled to split the two pools, the floor mechanically validates the more-permissive Chinese reading; persona prompting partially recovers calibration, but the orientation residual survives, evidence the tilt is not reducible to scale compression. Reference-pool in-context demonstrations deepen the orientation residual and inflate the high end rather than restoring use of the low end. Model origin adds a small additive tilt (~0.10 MAE) that is approximately invariant under demonstration. We recommend reporting alignment against each reference pool separately and treating cross-pool divergence as a judge property.
Authors: Yuxin Jiang, Chang Yu, Yunuo Chen, Xiang Feng, Yin Yang, Nishank Gite, Chenfanfu Jiang
Abstract: Video-world-model policies learn action-relevant representations by predicting future observations. However, they condition on only a short observation window, which renders long-horizon manipulation non-Markovian when the correct action depends on earlier events that are no longer visible. We present MemoryVAM, an episodic memory mechanism for video-world-model policies. We employ a Recap-Cue (RC) module, in which a Perceiver-based Recap Compressor maps per-frame CLIP embeddings into compact memory tokens, and a lightweight Cue Gate estimates task completion from memory and language. These tokens are injected into both the video backbone and the action decoder, aligning policy imagination with episode progress and conditioning actions on history. Our model trains the memory module with video prediction, a delta-reconstruction auxiliary loss, and episode-boundary supervision, requiring no per-frame progress labels. The same mechanism applies to UNet and Diffusion Transformer (DiT) backbones by changing only the cross-attention injection interface. On LIBERO-Mem, our model improves average success from 5% to 42.5%. On real robots, it achieves 78.3% success on counting tasks, 80.0% on spatial recall, and 75.0% on sequential tracking. Project page: https://MemoryVAM.github.io/
Authors: Jiahao Wu, Shengwen Yu
Abstract: Shared-space transportation operation requires low-speed autonomous platforms to navigate safely and efficiently among pedestrians, service robots, micromobility users, carts, and other road users. Most existing systems decompose this problem into trajectory prediction followed by motion planning, which creates one-way information flow: predicted participant futures influence the robot plan, but the selected robot plan cannot influence the predicted multi-agent evolution. This paper presents a joint prediction-planning diffusion framework that treats participant prediction and robot planning as a single conditional trajectory generation problem, where the model samples the future robot trajectory and all participant trajectories from one coupled distribution using a causal Transformer with cross-trajectory attention. To replace heuristic repulsive post-processing, the framework introduces differentiable safety potential guidance, a time-varying occupancy-probability potential whose gradient directly guides the joint sampler, and conditional flow matching is used to reduce inference steps while preserving multimodal trajectory diversity. The evaluation emphasizes shared-space operational effects, including near misses, blockage time, induced participant deviation, hard-braking events, and embedded latency, rather than treating average displacement error and final displacement error as the main result. Experiments in scenario-grounded simulation, naturalistic pedestrian replay, Isaac Sim validation, and ROS/Orin deployment show that joint sampling improves tail safety and runtime efficiency over a separated prediction-then-planning baseline.
Authors: Alibek T Kaliyev, Artem Maryanskyy
Abstract: Multi-agent LLM coordination papers report small benchmark deltas as evidence that one architecture beats another. A prior question: how much paired trial-0 disagreement do two protocols produce on the same model and benchmark when their API inputs are configuration-equivalent (matched by code inspection plus a SHA-256 byte audit), short of full identity-replay? On Claude Haiku 4.5 against tau^2-bench retail, the clean configuration-equivalent contrast (no_coord vs. intercept, both inert at trial 0) gives signed paired gaps of +10pp and 0pp across two n=100 seeds; pooled across both, +5pp with Wilson CI [-2,+12], not significant. The largest single-seed contrast (+18pp pull-vs-intercept, p_corr=0.012) did not reproduce at the second seed (-3pp, p_corr=1.0); no trial-0 contrast is significant after Bonferroni at either seed or pooled. The envelope of observed paired gaps spans [-3,+18]pp across two seeds, with pooled upper Wilson CI ~15pp. Seven of ten recent multi-agent coordination architectures report headline effects below this local floor, and one more sits inside the envelope; whether they survive a same-model paired replication is, by construction, untested in their original settings. We define coordination-active pass^k, pass^k restricted to trials where the coordination mechanism is logically active, as the minimum reporting protocol, with sample-size targets and runtime hooks in the body. Measurements run on ET-MCP, a task-scoped negative-knowledge store conformant with MCP 2026-07-28, used as a substrate to isolate reader-side choices, not as a contribution. On Haiku 4.5 the candidate readers (pull, intercept) do not improve trial-1 recovery; we give a preliminary diagnosis of failure modes with refinements on existing production hook surfaces.
Authors: Muxuan Liu, Ichiro Kobayashi, Satoshi Nishida
Abstract: Decoding inner speech from non-invasive brain signals remains a fundamental challenge due to the absence of overt linguistic output, limited training data, and large inter-subject variability. Existing brain-to-text approaches often rely on task-specific decoder fine-tuning, which restricts scalability and complicates adaptation to new participants. We propose MindAlign, a decoupled two-stage brain-to-language framework that enables open-ended text generation from fMRI signals without modifying the underlying language model. The first stage learns a subject-specific neural-semantic alignment that maps fMRI activity into a shared multimodal semantic space, extracting a latent semantic sketch of the internally generated sentence. The second stage integrates this sketch with visual context to prompt a frozen multimodal language model for free-form generation. Experiments on fMRI data collected during silent image description demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently outperforms fMRI-only and random baselines. We further show that the learned semantic-to-language projection can generalize across subjects, enabling effective decoding when paired with subject-specific neural alignment. These results indicate that neural signals modulate semantic content beyond image-driven priors, supporting a scalable and modular direction for brain-to-text decoding.
Authors: Roberto Garrone
Abstract: Agent-based models are widely used to evaluate policy interventions in complex socio-technical systems, yet many policy-oriented ABMs represent regulation as a fixed scenario parameter. This limits their ability to distinguish whether regulatory conclusions depend on agent adaptation, policy adaptation, or the interaction between both. Building on a previously proposed four-regime architecture, this paper contributes a controlled simulation benchmark rather than a new general framework. Using a single configurable emissions-regulation ABM, we compare constant policy/constant agents, constant policy/adaptive agents, adaptive policy/constant agents, and adaptive policy/adaptive agents under matched simulation conditions. We evaluate naive fixed policies, tracking-aware calibrated fixed policies, and three adaptive controllers: setpoint, safety-margin, and one-sided control. The benchmark recovers expected controller archetypes: setpoint control tracks the cap but produces frequent boundary crossings, safety-margin control reduces violations through conservatism, and one-sided control can limit violations but may ratchet toward over-conservatism when combined with adaptive agents. The contribution is methodological: scalar indicators, cap-relative symbolic diagnostics, trajectory motifs, and visual inspection jointly reveal how regulatory conclusions can differ even when average outcomes appear similar. Adaptive policy-oriented ABMs should therefore be evaluated through regime distinguishability, not only through average performance.
Authors: Roberto Garrone
Abstract: Policy-oriented agent-based models are increasingly used to study regulatory interventions in complex adaptive socio-technical systems. Recent adaptive ABM frameworks distinguish between static and adaptive agents, fixed and adaptive policies, and alternative controller designs. However, most diagnostic workflows remain ex post: trajectories are analysed after simulation, but the resulting evidence is not systematically fed back into the policy controller. This paper proposes a lightweight machine-coached policy-revision layer for adaptive agent-based regulation. The layer represents policy decisions as defeasible rules with explicit conflicts and priorities, generates explanations for controller actions, and allows diagnostic failures to be translated into rule additions, removals, or priority changes. The contribution is not a new optimal controller and does not claim formal guarantees for unrestricted machine coaching. Instead, it provides a simulation-compatible operationalization of controller-level contestability: policy decisions can be explained, challenged, revised, and re-evaluated in held-out simulation runs. A stylized emissions-regulation ABM is used as the experimental component. A controlled simulation experiment focuses on an over-conservatism failure in the VPVA regime. The predefined coaching template adds a relaxation rule to the symbolic controller, reducing over-conservatism recurrence under held-out seeds while preserving violation, overshoot, and volatility guardrails. The paper argues that machine coaching is best understood as a controller-level extension of explainable adaptive ABM, complementary to causal, information-theoretic, and trajectory-based diagnostics.
Authors: Eirini Baltzi, Dionysis Christopoulos, Sotiris Spanos, Valsamis Ntouskos, Konstantinos Karantzalos
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have sparked growing interest in zero-shot Earth Observation (EO) downstream tasks, with further gains enabled by remote-sensing-adapted models. We examine this setting across 17 VLM variants and 12 remote sensing (RS) datasets under Meta-Prompting for Visual Recognition (MPVR), and show that zero-shot performance remains highly sensitive to textual design choices, from the meta-prompts used to guide the LLM in generating class descriptions to the descriptions themselves. We explore why semantically rich LLM-generated class descriptions do not translate into consistent gains over simple domain-adapted CLIP-style descriptions. While LLM descriptions are more semantically expressive, they can also introduce noise in the text embedding space, reducing robustness in downstream tasks. We support this observation through a text log-likelihood analysis in the whitened CLIP feature space, comparing LLM-generated and template-based descriptions. Building on this finding, we study query embedding calibration and show that lightweight calibration of the query space consistently yields strong improvements in zero-shot classification and retrieval. Overall, our results provide practical insight into the trade-off between semantic richness and robustness, and identify embedding calibration as a simple and effective tool for improving zero-shot remote sensing performance.
Authors: Gao Zhu, Zaishuo Xia, Yubei Chen
Abstract: We ask whether the representational hierarchy seen in perception, from local primitives such as edges to higher level structures such as parts and objects, can be established for motion. In humanoid control, low level actions specify immediate motor commands, while meaningful behavior is organized over longer temporal scales, including contacts, gait fragments, balance recovery, reaching, and whole body skills. We introduce MotionPyramid, a hierarchical action representation that learns such structure from motion data. Starting from a motion tracking teacher, it trains a recursive stack of latent decoders: low level latents decode to immediate full body motor commands, while higher level latents unfold through lower levels into temporally extended motion programs. After pretraining, the hierarchy is frozen and reused by downstream reinforcement learning policies as a family of action interfaces at different control resolutions. Experiments show the learned levels form a motion hierarchy: coarser interfaces improve early learning and motion regularity by constraining exploration to structured segments, while finer interfaces preserve feedback control and final task precision. Representation probes show the hierarchy supports traversal, interpolation, transition, and qualitative composition, exposing editable control handles across temporal scales. Finally, we introduce Residual Interfaces, letting a downstream policy maintain coarse, segment level, and frame level residual commands through the frozen hierarchy. Analogous to residual or skip connections in deep networks, this allows coarse motion programs and fine residual corrections to coexist within one controller. MotionPyramid shows that motion, like perception, can be organized into a reusable multi level representation, providing structured abstraction without sacrificing controllability.
Authors: Christian Intern\`o, Alexander Pondaven, Habon Issa, Fabio Pizzati, Francesco Pinto, Markus Olhofer, Ivan Laptev, Philip Torr, Eero P. Simoncelli, Barbara Hammer, David Klindt
Abstract: While humans can identify physically implausible events within milliseconds, machine learning approaches addressing the same problem are extremely slow and expensive. They either rely on external multimodal-LLM judges or require ad-hoc modifications to the training procedure. In this work, we argue that indicators of physical plausibility are implicitly captured by five geometric properties of the per-frame embeddings produced by frozen image encoders. In aggregate, we call them GEOPHYS. First, we show that these signals correlate with human EEG responses to two forms of object-permanence violations. Second, GEOPHYS robustly discriminates physically implausible videos from realistic ones, achieving state-of-the-art physics-violation detection: 98.3% on LikePhys and 93.3% on IntPhys2, whereas V-JEPA 2, GPT-4o, Gemini, and twelve modern video diffusion models perform near chance. Third, used as a best-of-N verifier for physical alignment during video generation, GEOPHYS lifts MAGI-1 24B from 50.01% to 64.50% on PhysicsIQ at 1.5x lower wall-clock and 4.65x lower memory than the V-JEPA 2 world-model verifier. Ultimately, GEOPHYS demonstrates that physical plausibility in videos can be assessed by leveraging the emergent geometric properties of temporal features extracted from image encoders.
Authors: Mingde Xu, Zhen Yang, Yan Wang, Yu Wang, Xijun Liu, Zijun Dou, Wenyi Hong, Xiaotao Gu, Bin Xu, Jie Tang
Abstract: UI videos provide a natural input for generating interactive webpages, as they capture both webpage appearance and action-triggered state transitions. However, directly applying video-capable vision-language models to this task remains insufficient. Existing models typically rely on sparse sampling or compressed temporal representations, which may miss short action boundaries and break the state-action-state transitions needed to implement webpage behavior. We formulate UI video-to-code generation as executable state-transition recovery from interaction videos, and identify this failure mode as state-transition misalignment. We introduce Video2Code, an action-aware video-to-code approach for recovering executable UI state transitions. Rather than allocating the visual budget uniformly across the video, Video2Code first performs coarse video understanding to locate action-critical regions, then invokes a temporal clipping tool to revisit these regions at higher temporal resolution before generating HTML/CSS/JavaScript code. We instantiate Video2Code with action-aligned video-code supervision and evaluate it under both visual and functional criteria. Experiments show that Video2Code substantially strengthens the underlying open-source model for UI video-to-code generation, improving functional correctness over direct video observation, especially on dense multi-step interactions.
Authors: Xuelong Dai, Jianyu Ma, Boyang Ma, Biwei Yan, Yijun Yang, Yue Zhang
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based web agents provide practical, high-precision solutions for visual browser automation; however, they inherently expand the attack surface, introducing novel vision-based vulnerabilities. Existing adversarial evaluations targeting these agents frequently rely on permissive threat models and visually conspicuous artifacts. In this paper, we investigate a constrained vulnerability detection setting: a trusted web platform where the evaluator acts solely as an unprivileged third party, such as a merchant or advertiser, controlling only a semantically legitimate, spatially constrained region, such as an ad slot, a sponsored card, or a localized widget. Operating under these realistic constraints, we propose MIRAGE, a novel visual indirect prompt injection framework for targeted next-action hijacking. Our approach leverages diffusion models to generate perceptually benign adversarial images strictly confined to the attacker-controlled boundaries permitted by the trusted service provider. To maximize attack efficacy within such a restrictive setting, we introduce a robust optimization technique combining curvature-aware adversarial diffusion guidance with sparse, dark-pixel residual perturbations. Comprehensive evaluations against prominent MLLM web agent frameworks, specifically SeeAct and OpenClaw, empirically demonstrate the potency, realism, and stealth of our proposed MIRAGE.
Authors: Masaya Hagai, Yuta Suzuki, Tomoya Murata, Shuhei Kurita, Masaki Adachi
Abstract: Quantum chemistry simulations underpin modern materials discovery, yet their impact is limited by steep computational cost and dependence on fixed approximation schemes. Foundation models, such as machine-learned interatomic potentials, have accelerated parts of this workflow, but their reliance on large-scale pretraining restricts adaptability at the frontier of chemical space, where methodological innovation and sparse data are the norm. Agentic AI systems can automate existing simulation pipelines, yet they remain constrained by the predefined tools and algorithms they orchestrate. In response, we introduce LADeQ, an LLM-guided workflow that discovers, implements, and benchmarks candidate approximation algorithms at test-time within existing quantum chemistry codes. Rather than selecting from a predefined repertoire, LADeQ constructs candidate approximation schemes on demand, drawing on techniques from disciplines such as spatial statistics, circuit simulation, and kernel methods that have had little prior presence in electronic-structure theory. Because it builds on an out-of-the-box language model, LADeQ requires no task-specific pretraining or curated data, and the resulting implementations are transparent and inspectable, with explicitly traceable approximation errors that enable principled control of accuracy--efficiency trade-offs. We show that LADeQ accelerates coupled cluster singles and doubles (CCSD) and configuration interaction singles and doubles (CISD) calculations while keeping correlation-energy errors within user-specified tolerances, demonstrating autonomous, objective-driven discovery of approximation algorithms inside existing electronic-structure solvers.
Authors: Nathan Salazar, Emmanuel Dellandr\'ea, Mathieu Lefort, Alexandre Meyer
Abstract: Large-scale human motion datasets are essential for training robust motion models for analysis, synthesis, and understanding. While marker-based motion capture provides precise data, it is costly and limited in scale and diversity. Recent advances in monocular motion capture and video-language understanding open the way to extract plausible motion from unconstrained online videos. We present a scalable pipeline for constructing in-the-wild human motion datasets. From a few keywords, the system retrieves videos, extracts 3D body and facial motion, and generates high-level textual descriptions. The pipeline is flexible, enabling targeted collection of various motions, multi-person interactions, or expressive behaviors. We demonstrate its quality by training motion reconstruction and motion generation models, showing performance comparable to models trained on traditional motion capture datasets and strong cross-dataset generalization.
Authors: Francesca Morandi, Omayma Moussadek, Federico Venturini, Mauro Suardi, Alessandro Banzatti, Francesco Cannarile, Angelo Porrello, Simone Calderara
Abstract: Open Vocabulary Action Recognition (OVAR) enables the recognition of novel actions by leveraging vision-language representations, overcoming the limitations of traditional closed-set approaches. However, achieving robust performance in real-world scenarios typically requires domain-specific fine-tuning, which is often costly and raises privacy and regulatory concerns. In this work, we propose an alternative paradigm that bypasses target-domain training and recombines knowledge from existing datasets and models. Leveraging model merging and task arithmetic, we extract and combine task vectors from models fine-tuned on diverse public OVAR datasets. We show that, in out-of-distribution settings, the resulting merged model achieves superior zero-shot generalization to the pre-trained base model. Code is available at https://github.com/omaymaMoussadek/robust-ovar
Authors: Matheus B. Rocha, Gustavo B. Dettogni, Renato A. Krohling
Abstract: This article presents a complementary approach for integrating multimodal medical data in cancer classification, based on state space models represented by the Mamba architecture. To this end, a mixed multimodal fusion architecture, called Mixed Fusion, was employed and developed to enhance the interpretability of the decision-making process. The proposed approach explores two variants of Mamba: one dedicated to visual processing, responsible for classifying the lesion image and generating probabilities associated with the target classes, and another focused on tabular processing, which uses these probabilities together with clinical and/or sociodemographic data to produce the final diagnosis. The experiments were conducted on two medical datasets: PAD-UFES-20, composed of clinical images and information associated with skin lesions, and NDB-UFES, consisting of histopathological images and sociodemographic data related to oral cancer. The results indicate slightly lower performance in balanced accuracy, compared with Transformer-based approaches, on PAD-UFES-20, and superior performance on NDB-UFES. Additionally, substantial gains were observed in the recall metric. Furthermore, the adoption of the Mixed Fusion architecture enables the application of the Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) method, increasing the interpretability of the results. These findings indicate that Mamba-based models constitute a suitable alternative for multimodal classification in medical data, especially in scenarios in which sensitivity is a relevant requirement.
Authors: Yamil Uchani, Grace Abigail Luna Verdueta, Mauricio Figueroa, Edwin Salcedo
Abstract: UAV-based pavement inspection can reduce the cost and risk of road-surface monitoring, but real-world deployment remains difficult when traffic, pedestrians, and temporary occlusions affect the visibility of defects. This paper presents a Unity-based digital twin framework for traffic-aware UAV pavement monitoring without lane closure. The proposed environment integrates procedurally generated road defects, dynamic vehicles and pedestrians, autonomous UAV navigation, and an embedded road-damage perception pipeline. The perception module uses a two-stage approach: a lightweight YOLOv8n detector first localises road defects, pedestrians, and vehicles, while a second classifier distinguishes among potholes, single cracks, and crocodile cracks. On the simulator test set, the full pipeline achieved 99.26% overall accuracy across five classes. The digital twin was then used to evaluate three recovery strategies for occluded road segments: hover-and-recheck, micro-repositioning, and skip-and-revisit. Experiments were conducted across different traffic densities and flight altitudes using coverage, mission time, energy consumption, and revisit ratio as operational metrics. Results show that flight altitude has a strong influence on inspection coverage and that adaptive recovery improves performance under occlusion. In particular, hover-and-recheck achieved the most consistent coverage under medium and high traffic conditions, reaching up to 97.03% coverage, while skip-and-revisit was most effective in low-traffic scenarios, reaching 97.95\% coverage at medium altitude. These results demonstrate that digital twins can support the development and evaluation of traffic-aware UAV inspection strategies before real-world deployment.
Authors: Maruthi Vemula (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Abstract: Trained transformers reliably develop massive activations, a small number of hidden dimensions whose magnitude is far above the median and which concentrate on the sequence-start token. Whether these outliers are a removable artifact of the residual stream's overloaded read and write role, or instead a functional necessity, is actively debated. We test the artifact hypothesis directly, with an architectural intervention. Our architecture, Ledger Residuals, splits the residual stream into a mutable scratch stream (Deliberation) that intermediate computation may freely overwrite and a protected, decode-only accumulator (Commitment) that holds the representation the model reads out. If massive activations exist only because one stream is forced to be both scratchpad and answer, then a dedicated answer channel should remove the need for them. We find that it does not. In matched-loss language models at the 160M and 290M scales, the model rebuilds the canonical fixed-dimension, start-token outlier inside the protected channel. The rebuilt feature is smaller in magnitude than in a standard transformer but more sharply concentrated on the start token, and a stronger sparsity penalty makes it more persistent and more concentrated still, rather than removing it. Massive activations therefore look architecturally robust: they re-emerge in whichever representation the model decodes from, which is what we would expect if they are functional rather than incidental. We release our architecture and measurement code.
Authors: Chenyao Ma, Linda Zhang, Yuheng Chen, Wei Du, Shangwen Fang, Zihao Jiang, Chuanyu Liu, Xinyu Ma, Rui Su, Gang Wang, Muyao Yu, Dong Zhong, Jie Zhu, Weibo Gong, Huan Gu, Limin Li, Chen Shen, Rui Wu, Zhenghao Wu, Kan Xu, Min Zhou, Donglin He, Xiayun Huang, Shan Jiang, Pengfei Ou, Jiayu Peng, Yuwei Zhang, Jie Zhao, Di Zhang, Piao Ma, Zhenghao Li, Hao Li
Abstract: Polymeric materials underpin modern technologies spanning energy storage, microelectronics, healthcare and sustainable manufacturing. Yet their rational design remains exceptionally challenging because material performance emerges from complex interactions among molecular composition, chain architecture, processing history and hierarchical structural evolution across multiple length and time scales. Consequently, polymer research has long relied on labor-intensive experimentation and fragmented modeling approaches, limiting both mechanistic understanding and innovation efficiency. Recent advances in data infrastructure, machine learning, large artificial intelligence (AI) models and laboratory automation are beginning to reshape this landscape. Rather than functioning as isolated tools, polymer databases, predictive models, AI agents and automated laboratories are increasingly converging into interconnected discovery ecosystems. As a result, the central challenge is shifting from improving predictive accuracy alone to enabling reliable decision-making, adaptive learning and seamless integration across computation, experimentation and scientific reasoning. We argue that polymer science is entering an era of autonomous discovery, in which data, simulation, reasoning and experimentation operate within self-improving feedback loops that continuously generate hypotheses, design materials, execute experiments and refine predictive models. By unifying molecular design, process optimization, experimental validation and industrial translation, such autonomous ecosystems establish a more predictive, reproducible and scalable paradigm for polymer innovation, fundamentally transforming how polymer research is conducted.
Authors: Chen Yang, Zheng Fang, Hanyu Sun, Fanjie Xu, Hongxin Xiang, Hanyu Gao, Xiangxiang Zeng, Yuqiang Li, Xiaojian Wang, Jun Xia
Abstract: Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is a powerful tool for molecular structure analysis, and spectral artificial intelligence offers great potential for its rapid and automated interpretation. However, the scarcity of experimental NMR datasets has constrained deep learning in this domain to narrow, task-specific applications that lack broad generalization. Here, we introduce UltraNMR, a large-scale foundation model for NMR that leverages the intrinsic properties of NMR spectra to learn generalizable spectral representations. We collected 158 million paired simulated $^{1}$H and $^{13}$C NMR spectra to train UltraNMR, employing multiple domain-specific pre-training objectives. UltraNMR captures both intra-spectral and inter-spectral dependencies, enabling seamless simulation-to-real adaptation. We demonstrate that adapting UltraNMR to a range of molecular structure analysis tasks on experimental NMR spectra consistently yields state-of-the-art performance and clearly outperforms UltraNMR variants trained directly on downstream data without simulation pre-training. We also construct a large-scale NMR spectral vector library by encoding simulated NMR spectra using UltraNMR, covering 94 million unique molecules and enabling effective structure-aware retrieval. In real-world applications, UltraNMR facilitates the structural elucidation of two previously unknown natural products from Chinese herbal medicines recorded in the Chinese Pharmacopoeia. These results suggest that large-scale simulation pre-training can effectively bridge the simulation-to-real gap, enabling robust and generalizable molecular structure analysis of real-world NMR spectra.
Authors: Momil Seedat
Abstract: Modern microservice deployments fail in ways that are easy to detect and hard to explain. When a fault propagates along service dependencies, alerts fire in floods, dashboards multiply, and the scarce resource, an engineer who understands how the services relate, is consumed reconstructing context that the monitoring stack discarded. We argue that the missing ingredient in autonomous operations is not a better anomaly detector or a larger language model, but operational memory: a persistent, structured representation of how a system normally behaves, how its parts depend on one another, and how it has failed before. We present O PS C ORTEX, a working multi-agent prototype that organizes this memory into four tiers and uses it to separate two tasks the field usually conflates: deriving a root cause and explaining it. Root cause is computed deterministically from a learned dependency graph and the temporal ordering of threshold crossings; a large language model (LLM) is then asked only to explain, confirm, and recommend, using evidence the system has already assembled. We motivate the design with two documented production cascading failures, review representative literature on observability, anomaly detection, graph-based localization, and LLM-assisted diagnosis, and show how each architectural choice maps directly to a failure mode those incidents exhibit. The prototype is validated on an instrumented e-commerce benchmark with eight injectable failure scenarios.
Authors: Yuchen Xia
Abstract: Industrial automation is being transformed by digitalization and the increasing use of cyber-physical systems. Modern production environments require greater adaptability, faster reconfiguration, and more intuitive human-machine interaction. However, traditional rule-based systems rely on fixed logic and cannot autonomously adapt to changing conditions. Consequently, current automation systems lack a systematic approach for integrating adaptive and generalizable reasoning capabilities for interpreting, planning, and executing user tasks across dynamic environments and heterogeneous components. This dissertation proposes a three-layer framework that integrates large language models (LLMs), digital twins, and automation systems into an autonomous system. Autonomy is defined as a design property assigned to system components and enabled through LLM-based reasoning to achieve adaptive, goal-oriented behavior. The Task-Process-Service-Resource (TPSR) model is introduced to transform user tasks into executable processes. Four LLM roles are identified: process orchestration, service matching, digital resource generation, and agent-as-a-service. Five peer-reviewed studies develop and refine these concepts using the design science research methodology. Case studies and prototypes demonstrate adaptive task planning, event-driven control, simulation-based parameterization, and digital model generation. Results show high task executability, command correctness, and content-generation accuracy while reducing manual effort. The framework enables the integration of LLM-based reasoning into industrial automation systems and improves adaptability and usability. Limitations include dependence on accurate digital representations, the computational demands of LLMs, and the need for human intervention in safety-critical situations.
Authors: Bianca Helena Ximenes
Abstract: This paper introduces two constructs to describe, as far as we know, a previously unnamed risk in human-LLM interaction. Co-construction blindness is the failure to recognize that LLM outputs are not independent assessments to be verified, but co-constructed artifacts shaped by the user's own inputs, accumulated history, and metadata. Every user of a conversational LLM is IN the loop, not ON it -- yet every deployment disclaimer positions them as external auditors. Asymmetric epistemic vulnerability describes the condition in which co-construction blindness produces consequences of radically different magnitude depending on where in the authority structure the user sits. We argue that these constructs describe a structural inevitability, not an anomaly, using the public case of Richard Dawkins's interaction with Claude as a paradigmatic instance. We document a secondary mechanism -- structural deference -- through a first-person exchange in which a large language model concedes that it treated Dawkins more gently than warranted because his intellectual output is represented in its training data. We map the research gaps this analysis opens and call for shared terminology as a precondition for appropriate governance and design response.
Authors: Keqin Zeng, Shuting Su, Shihao Lin, Ziyue Li, Rui Zhao
Abstract: Reliable spatial decision automation, such as autonomous driving and maritime surveillance, critically depends on robust visual perception. However, real-world spatiotemporal data exhibits severe heterogeneity, often manifesting as extreme long-tail distributions for safety-critical scenarios. This data scarcity induces dataset shift that degrades detection performance and pose safety risks. While synthetic data generation offers a potential solution, existing generative approaches, such as diffusion models and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), often lack explicit spatial grounding and structural constraints, resulting in spatial and physical inconsistencies in generated scenes. To address these challenges, we introduce WMGen-v1, an agentic text-based world model framework for long-tail spatial data generation. WMGen-v1 employs a Large Vision-Language Model (LVLM) to construct a structured scene representation from a single reference image, while a Large Language Model (LLM) performs guidance-based scene expansion under physical plausibility and commonsense constraints. Subsequently, conditioned on the structured semantic representations produced by this reasoning process, a diffusion model generates diverse and physically grounded long-tail training data. Experiments on internal industrial datasets, ROADWork, and LaRS benchmarks demonstrate that WMGen-v1 outperforms baseline approaches. Notably, detectors trained solely on WMGen-v1 synthetic data approach real-only performance on aggregate dataset-level metrics, highlighting its potential to alleviate long-tail data scarcity for downstream spatial perception.
Authors: Changyi Li, Chao Yang, Yu Xiao, Kari Tammi
Abstract: Visual anomaly detection is a fundamental task in industrial automation. While existing approaches have achieved notable progress in identifying structural defects, the detection of logical anomalies remains relatively underexplored. In practice, structural and logical anomalies frequently co-occur in industrial workflows. Therefore, a solution capable of detecting both structural and logical anomalies is crucial for advancing comprehensive anomaly detection research. To address this limitation, we propose a unified framework, termed UniSLAD, which jointly addresses logical and structural anomalies without additional training, enabling a practical solution for dynamic industrial environments. First, we introduce a dual-feature extractor that synergistically integrates a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) backbone for local texture perception with a Transformer backbone for global contextual reasoning, yielding richer and more comprehensive representations. Building on this foundation, we design dual-granularity feature representation modules. At the patch level, memory banks enhanced by the Mahalanobis Transform (MT) preserve representative features and support more discriminative anomaly scoring. At the image level, distribution maps are aggregated using Lower-Upper Mean (LUM) and Power Mean Pooling (PMP), yielding a more robust global representation than conventional average pooling. Extensive experiments on the two industrial benchmarks demonstrate that UniSLAD achieves competitive performance in comprehensive anomaly detection, achieving 99.4% and 93.1%, respectively. Furthermore, ablation studies verify the individual contributions and effectiveness of each proposed component.
Authors: Prabhjot Singh, Somnath Luitel, Manmeet Singh, Josh Durkee
Abstract: AI systems for peer review fail on three fronts: they train on Computer Science and Machine Learning venues alone, ignore the iterative dialogue that validates science, and evaluate on stylistic mimicry rather than real editorial judgment. We introduce FirstPass, a dataset and fine-tuned model that addresses all three. Curating 3,668 complete multi-round peer-review dialogues from Nature Communications across five scientific domains (biology, chemistry, neuroscience, physics, and earth science), we exploit mandatory transparent peer review (instituted November 2022) and verify 100% content integrity by automated audit. We fine-tune Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on three tasks: review generation, reviewer updating, and revision-cycle prediction. Our key finding is that response-only loss masking is a prerequisite, not an optimization: without it, accuracy is 62.0%, below the majority baseline; with it, FirstPass achieves 80.5% accuracy and F1-macro 78.2% on predicting editorial outcomes (Standard vs. Extended revision cycles), outperforming Gemini-3.1-flash-lite-preview zero-shot by 10.4 percentage points and all baselines with statistical significance (McNemar p < 0.001). On generation, FirstPass produces reviews averaging 1,187 words, substantially closer to human references (2,155 words) than any baseline, achieving ROUGE-L 0.154 with significant gains over Qwen and DeepSeek zero-shot (p < 0.001). Deployed in the pre-submission loop as an anticipatory scientific co-author, FirstPass simulates expert critique and predicts revision cycle outcomes before submission, giving authors the judgment a trusted colleague would provide, with consistent cross-domain performance across five disciplines.
Authors: Prabhjot Singh, Bhushan Pawar, Madhu Reddiboina
Abstract: Current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are celebrated for their multilingual capabilities, yet they operate under a flawed assumption: that one language corresponds to a single writing system. This overlooks billions of users of multi-script languages like Punjabi, Serbian, Hindi-Urdu, Kurdish, among many others, for whom a model's capability may be fractured by orthographic bias. We introduce PuMVR (Punjabi Multimodal Visual Reasoning), the first benchmark designed to quantify script-dependent bias through 375 culturally grounded image-reasoning tasks across Punjabi's three active scripts (Gurmukhi, Shahmukhi, Roman). Evaluating 10 state-of-the-art VLMs, we expose a substantial Script Gap: models frequently solve visual puzzles in one script while failing identical tasks in another, with accuracy deltas reaching 16% and Script Consistency Rates (SCR) as low as 24.8%. Crucially, visual input boosts absolute performance but does not close this gap, the relative bias persists. Our analysis suggests reasoning patterns show limited cross-script transferability, and Chain-of-Thought pathways diverge based on script alone. We propose SCR as a core metric for script-agnostic evaluation, challenging current multilingual assessment paradigms and providing a framework for equitable AI.
Authors: Seunghyun Shin, Jifei Song, Wooseok Jeon, Hae-Gon Jeon, Jiankang Deng
Abstract: Camera motion control is essential for directing viewpoint changes in generative systems. However, existing methods typically condition the generation process on a single specific modality, such as explicit pose trajectories or reference videos, limiting their ability to support heterogeneous user inputs. To address this limitation, we present TriMotion, a modality-agnostic framework for camera-controlled video generation that maps video, pose, and text inputs, describing the same camera trajectory into a shared motion embedding space. Learning such a space requires synchronized supervision across modalities. Therefore, we build the Motion Triplet Dataset by extending a Multi-Cam Video Dataset with geometry-grounded motion descriptions derived from camera extrinsics. We further introduce a latent motion consistency objective that leverages the motion embedding space to encourage the generated video to follow the target camera trajectory directly in latent space, avoiding the cost of pixel-space decoding. Extensive experiments show that TriMotion generates high-quality videos that accurately follow the target camera trajectories across all three modalities. Beyond standard generation, the shared motion embedding space also enables flexible applications such as sequential motion composition and cross-modal motion interpolation.
Authors: Colin Samplawski, Adam D. Cobb
Abstract: In this work we present a LLM powered, evolutionary code synthesis system for structured data translation in a Medical Internet of Things settings. A key challenge in this domain is ensuring that the synthesized code is trustworthy and reliable. To this end, we integrate a formal verification step into our code synthesis pipeline to ensure that any generated code is guaranteed to satisfy predefined requirements. In particular, we present a case study of integrating a novel device (a pulse oximeter) into the existing network of devices. Our system generates a formally verified translation between the device's JSON schema and the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) format used by the wider system. This formal verification stage ensures structured data translated by the generated code will always be in the target output schema. We provide a set of experimental results which demonstrate that our system is able to consistently generate correct translation at low cost.
Authors: Yixuan Lai, Tianjia Shao, Kun Zhou, Weijia Dou, Siyu Zhu, Jingdong Wang
Abstract: Generating visually consistent multi-shot videos remains an open challenge. As videos span more shots, inconsistencies can accumulate across shots, causing entities that reappear across shots -- characters, objects, and locations -- to drift away from how they first appear. We observe that viewers judge consistency by comparing each later appearance of an entity with its first clear appearance; the visual quality of this initial appearance sets the consistency ceiling for all that follows. Motivated by this, we present \textbf{GroundShot}, a training-free, model-agnostic agentic framework for entity-grounded multi-shot generation. GroundShot builds an entity-level visual memory online from accepted generated shots: it schedules shots' generation order by their expected usefulness as entity references, grounds entities from generated videos, verifies their reliability before adding them to memory, and retrieves suitable entity references from memory before each shot is generated. To evaluate this entity-centered view of consistency, we further introduce \textbf{GroundBench}, a diagnostic benchmark that measures consistency at the entity level while isolating controlled challenge dimensions. Experiments show that GroundShot improves multi-shot consistency over existing methods while requiring no additional training or model modification.
Authors: Jaedong Hwang, Kathleen Zhang, Wei Dai, Konstantinos Kontras, Maarten Vanmarcke, Maarten De Vos, Ila Fiete, Paul Pu Liang
Abstract: EEG foundation models can learn generalizable representations from large-scale EEG corpora to enable single-backbone transfer across diverse clinical and brain-computer interface tasks. Existing models typically discretize the continuous multi-channel EEG waveform into patches or codebook tokens and train a transformer with masked self-supervision. Recognizing that this discretization fragments continuous brain rhythms and obscures fine-grained temporal dynamics, we present B[FM]$^2$(Brain Foundation Model via Flow Matching), whose inductive bias aligns with the data by pretraining directly on the raw signal using continuous-time flow matching without patches, tokenization, or masking. However, multi-channel EEG signals pose an architectural challenge for flow matching: time is densely sampled and highly autocorrelated (thousands of timepoints), while the electrode axis is short (tens of channels) at distinct scalp positions. To address this time-electrode asymmetry, we introduce SplitUNet, a velocity network that factorizes each block into separate 1D temporal and 1D electrode convolutions and downsamples only along time, preserving electrode topology throughout the hierarchy. B[FM]$^2$ sets a new state of the art on 7 of 9 standard downstream EEG classification tasks, using a pretraining budget of only 36,895 segments ($\approx$ 307h), 1-2 orders of magnitude ($\approx$ 30x) less than required by existing EEG foundation models. Further, it generates synthetic EEGs that two board-certified neurologists cannot distinguish from brain data (Cohen's $\kappa =$ -0.096). https://jd730.github.io/projects/BFM2
Authors: Eduardo Moreno Judice de Mattos Farina, Mateus A. Esmeraldo, Felipe Akio Matsuoka, Paulo Eduardo de Aguiar Kuriki, Felipe Campos Kitamura
Abstract: Inference-time engineering can alter model behavior without fine-tuning. However, its utility for improving diagnostic performance in medical vision-language models (VLMs) remains unclear. We aim to evaluate whether Contrastive Activation Addition (CAA) can improve pneumonia classification in chest radiograph VLMs without updating model weights. Three frozen chest radiograph VLMs (MedGemma-4B-IT, NV-Reason-CXR-3B, and CheXOne-3B) were evaluated on the public Kermany pneumonia test set. Classification was based on the logits of the tokens Yes and No under a binary prompt. Steering vectors included a 30-pair answer-bias control, a 30-pair pneumonia text contrast, and an image-conditioned contrast derived from 30 pneumonia and 30 normal development images. A deterministic 200-image development set was used for layer and scale selection (100 images) and threshold calibration (100 images). Performance was assessed using ROC-AUC, PR-AUC, F1 score, threshold analyses, reverse-vector controls, random-vector controls, and conditional bootstrap confidence intervals. Fixed-threshold F1 improvements were frequently observed but did not consistently indicate improved diagnostic performance. For MedGemma-4B-IT. NV-Reason-CXR-3B showed the strongest benefit: calibrated F1 improved from 0.7692 in the zero-shot setting to 0.8619 with pneumonia-text steering and to 0.8727 with image-conditioned steering. For CheXOne-3B, pneumonia-text steering increased calibrated F1 from 0.8528 to 0.8666, although the confidence interval crossed zero. On this public pneumonia benchmark, CAA substantially altered prediction score distributions and operating characteristics without fine-tuning. Meaningful performance gains were observed in one of three evaluated VLMs, suggesting that activation steering may serve as a lightweight approach for adapting medical VLM behavior.
Authors: Duc Minh Nguyen, Nghiem Tuong Diep, Binh Gia Nguyen, Trong-Bao Ho, Doanh Le, Tan Q. Nguyen, Thien-Loc Ha, Nhiem Tran, Bao Thach, Nhat X. Tran, Tuan A. Tran, Artur Habuda, Philip Lund M{\o}ller, Tran Nguyen Le, Daniel Sonntag, Matthias Niepert, Khoa D. Doan, Vu Duong, Hung Ngo, Minh N. Vu, Duy M. H. Nguyen, An Thai Le, Ngo Anh Vien
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable general-purpose robotic control via large-scale multimodal pretraining, yet their effectiveness under few-shot imitation learning remains limited. We conduct a systematic stress test of state-of-the-art VLA models and show that performance degrades sharply as demonstrations are reduced, revealing a key weakness of existing adaptation strategies. To address this, we introduce FOCA, a future-oriented conditioning framework for data-efficient VLA adaptation. FOCA combines explicit prediction of task-grounded future interaction embeddings with implicit alignment to future goal observations, enabling long-horizon reasoning in latent space without pixel-level prediction. This formulation naturally supports action-free co-training with synthetic videos from video world models and can be interpreted as learning a future-conditioned value-like representation. Extensive experiments demonstrate FOCA achieves 95.7% success with 20 demonstrations on LIBERO, improves 7-12% on RoboCasa, and delivers up to 26% absolute gains on real robots, establishing a new state of the art in few-shot VLA adaptation.
Authors: Fathima Mashood, Mohamed Nabeel
Abstract: When a new domain resembling a popular brand appears, defenders face a fundamental ambiguity: it may be an attacker-created squatting site for phishing, or it may be a domain the brand itself registered, either defensively, to block attackers, or legitimately, for a new product or service launch. Incorrectly flagging a brand-owned domain as malicious produces a false positive that harms end users and damages the brand's reputation. Resolving this ambiguity requires brand intelligence: the ability to determine, at scale, whether a given domain belongs to a brand. Large language models (LLMs), with their broad knowledge of brand domain relationships, offer a promising zero configuration approach to this problem, but their reliability for brand intelligence tasks remains unknown. We present the first systematic empirical evaluation of LLM brand intelligence across three tasks: domain enumeration (Q1), open ended brand attribution (Q2), and binary ownership classification (Q3). We evaluate four models, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Gemini 3.5 Flash, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and Claude Sonnet 4.6, across four retrieval settings (in context, web search, WHOIS lookup, and combined) on 36 of the most phished brands. Our results reveal a stark dichotomy: models achieve up to 82% precision enumerating brand domains from memory alone, yet fail at ownership verification without external tools, with macro F1 at most 0.37 in ICL mode. WHOIS augmentation lifts Q3 macro F1 by up to 0.65 points, yielding near perfect precision (<= 0.99), dramatically reducing the false positive risk for defenders. We provide concrete recommendations for deploying LLMs in brand protection pipelines.
Authors: Selin Yildirim, Yingbing Huang, Deming Chen
Abstract: We present a holistic methodology for artificial intelligence algorithm and accelerator co-design, co-search, and co-generation (A3C3), which jointly optimizes neural network architectures and their hardware implementations to address the inefficiencies of traditional top-down AI system design flows. Conventional AI deployment often treats model design and hardware mapping as separate stages: an algorithm is first developed for accuracy, and only afterward adapted to meet latency, throughput, energy, or resource constraints. This separation can lead to suboptimal systems, particularly as modern AI workloads become increasingly heterogeneous, memory-intensive, and platform-dependent. A3C3 instead parameterizes both algorithmic and accelerator design spaces and searches them jointly, enabling the automatic generation of model-accelerator pairs that better balance accuracy, latency, throughput, energy efficiency, and hardware utilization. This article is a book chapter of the Handbook of Embedded Machine Learning, edited by Sudeep Pasricha and Muhammad Shafique, Springer Nature.
Authors: Nataliya Shakhovska, Valentyna Chopyak, Ivan Izonin, Vira Haievska
Abstract: Cryopathy syndromes are difficult to classify because laboratory patterns often overlap across diagnostic categories, while some diagnoses are rare. This makes routine interpretation of cryoglobulin-related tests challenging and increases dependence on expert judgment. The aim of this study was to develop and compare machine learning approaches for automated classification of cryopathy syndromes from laboratory data and to identify a practical strategy for clinical decision support. Methods: We analysed laboratory records from 2,686 patients assigned to 14 diagnostic categories. The dataset included demographic variables, cryoglobulin measurements, precipitation tests, and hemagglutinin and hemolysin titers. Data preprocessing included cleaning, encoding, imputation, normalization, and construction of clinically informed interaction features. We evaluated 12 modelling strategies, including Random Forest, Gradient Boosted Trees, Multi-Layer Perceptron, soft-voting ensembles, class balancing with Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique, hierarchical classification, period-aware models, targeted binary classifiers, and probability calibration. Performance was assessed using stratified train-test evaluation and stratified 5-fold cross-validation. The main metrics were macro-averaged F1 score, accuracy, Top-3 accuracy, and expected calibration error. The overall task proved difficult because of marked class imbalance and clinical overlap between diagnoses. The best multiclass performance was achieved by a soft-voting ensemble of Random Forest and Gradient Boosted Trees. Cross-validation confirmed stable performance for the balanced Random Forest model. Tree-based methods consistently outperformed the neural network model. Feature engineering improved discrimination, and the most informative predictors were derived cryoglobulin-based interaction features.
Authors: John Meluso, Laurent H\'ebert-Dufresne, Christoph Riedl, H. Oliver Gao
Abstract: Collective artificial intelligence, where multiple agents work on shared tasks, holds potential to solve expansive problems in fields from medicine to collective governance. But while prescriptive engineering solutions abound, we lack descriptive scientific understanding of artificial collectives, and therefore principles for how to design resource efficient multi-agent systems. Through systematic experiments with optimizing agents, we characterize how agent interpretive abilities, rationality bounds, and task qualities interact to shape collective performance. Agents range from specialists, with narrow interpretive abilities, to generalists, with broad ones. Collectives of specialists correspond to sparse, centralized networks, while collectives of generalists correspond to dense, decentralized ones. We show that interpretive network properties have small performance effects on average (0.07 standard deviations of performance). However, for specific task qualities, these effects are 4.5 times larger (0.33 sd) and can reach much higher for certain task qualities (1.84 sd). This leads collectives of generalists to perform better on tasks that involve generating, choosing, and coordinating, while collectives of specialists with a few generalist mediators perform better on tasks that involve negotiating. Rationality bounds then moderate these relationships. At loose bounds, specialists outperform generalists through more effective sampling of high-dimensional decision spaces. At tight bounds, generalists outperform specialists through better gradient estimation. A fundamental trade-off between performance and convergence speed emerges at moderate bounds. These findings suggest that multi-agent design could benefit from matching interpretive networks to both task demands and agents' computational limits, with implications for the efficiency and energy costs of multi-agent systems.
Authors: Brett Wheeler
Abstract: Software engineering has long inferred where a system's knowledge resides from who authored its code. The truck factor, the Degree-of-Authorship metric, and the degree-of-knowledge model all rest on one inference -- that authoring a region of code is evidence of understanding it -- and for most of software's history it was a workable proxy, because code entered a repository only when a human wrote it, which forced at least transient understanding. This paper argues that AI code generation severs that inference at its root, and that the consequence is not the degradation of the authorship-based metrics but their invalidation as a class. When an agent generates a module and a human merges it, the version-control record still attributes authorship, but the attribution no longer licenses any conclusion about comprehension: the same footprint is now compatible with full, partial, or no understanding. The metric still returns a number; the number measures a substrate that has come uncoupled from the quantity it was used to estimate. The collapse is corroborated by the field's own measurement failures, and the methodological corollary is load-bearing: the instrument the comprehension-debt era needs cannot be built by refining the knowledge-concentration metrics, because no function of an authorship footprint recovers an inference the footprint no longer supports. The replacement must be grounded in evidence of comprehension rather than authorship. I state a falsifiable prediction that discriminates the two -- that systems with a healthy authorship-derived truck factor but low comprehension-measured retention will suffer incident-resolution failures the authorship metric does not predict -- and argue that building the comprehension-grounded instrument at the scale of a system and a team is the field's open measurement problem, left open here.
Authors: Sameek Bhattacharya, Bharath Krishnamurthy, Ajita Rattani
Abstract: Deep learning-based audio classification systems, including automatic speaker verification, are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Realistic real-time threat assessment remains difficult because optimization-based methods, such as projected gradient descent (PGD) and Carlini-Wagner, require costly iterative updates in the high-dimensional waveform domain. Generative attacks allow single-shot synthesis but often introduce perceptible artifacts or depend on computationally intensive architectures, while diffusion and autoregressive approaches incur high inference latency. To address this gap, we propose a generative attack framework operating in the continuous latent space of a neural audio codec. A conditional generator synthesizes class-specific perturbations in a single forward pass and decodes them into adversarial waveforms. Our method achieves targeted attack success rates up to 99% with sub-7 ms inference, outperforming generative baselines while reducing latency by 24x.
Authors: Zeyuan Chen, Ziqing Yang, Yihan Ma, Michael Backes, Yang Zhang
Abstract: As academic submissions grow, the traditional peer review process struggles to keep up, raising concerns about quality and fairness. A trend of using large language models (LLMs) for assistance has emerged. In this work, we take a critical step toward improving the quality of LLM-generated reviews. We propose the PeerCheck framework, which investigates LLM-human review differences (RQ1) and explores methods to improve LLM-generated review quality (RQ2). We first analyzed the human-written reviews with reviews generated by various LLMs and found that LLMs and humans focus on different terms, e.g., LLMs prioritize theory while humans emphasize methodology and experiments. We further adopt prompt engineering, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT), and utilize retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to enhance the LLM-generated reviews towards human-level quality. We find CoT significantly improves the quality of LLM reviews, while we discover an unexpected "RAG paradox," i.e., experiments with RAG produce different results for various LLMs and, in some cases, even reduce review quality. Our comprehensive analysis of LLM-generated academic reviews illustrates both possibilities and limitations, contributing to a more effective, human-aligned review system. Our dataset is available on https://github.com/TrustAIRLab/PeerCheck.
Authors: Austin Hamilton, Ryan Singh, Michael Wise, Ibrahim Yousif, Arthur Carvalho, Zhe Shan, Mohammad Mayyas, Lora A. Cavuoto, Fadel M. Megahed
Abstract: Document-grounded assistants built on large language models are increasingly used in high-stakes, knowledge-intensive work. Their usefulness, however, may depend on how evidence is allocated before generation. We investigate such a claim by comparing two grounding architectures: (a) retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) that retrieves a few relevant passages, and (b) long-context prompting, which loads the whole document collection in context. We view these as two regimes of "epistemic access" on an accuracy--cost frontier. We use "epistemic accuracy" to capture model correctness that depends on having the right evidence. We posit that broader access (via long context) can increase it, but with a "token tax" (i.e., a substantial increase in cost due to larger input token consumption). We probe this framing with a case study in manufacturing safety training. Using an expert-validated benchmark, we evaluate 972 answers across three machines, two small language models, and three retrieval/in-context prompting approaches. Long-context prompting achieved the highest correctness (73.1% vs. 65.4% for semantic RAG), but at 26 times the per-query token cost. We interpret this gap as the token tax of broader evidentiary access. We carefully discuss the implications of our findings for resource-constrained organizations.
Authors: Johan Bjorck, Zhiqi Li, Yunze Man, Jing Wang, An-Chieh Cheng, Sifei Liu, Shihao Wang, Zhiding Yu, Abhishek Badki, Stan Birchfield, Valts Blukis, Yevgen Chebotar, Siyi Chen, Sicong Leng, Yu-Cheng Chou, Tianli Ding, Boyi Li, Zhengyi Luo, Hang Su, Jonathan Tremblay, Tingwu Wang, Bowen Wen, Jimmy Wu, Xianghui Xie, Hanrong Ye, Hongxu Yin, K. R. Zentner, Liangyan Gui, Yu-Xiong Wang, Yuke Zhu, Linxi "Jim" Fan, Jan Kautz
Abstract: Robots operating in open-world environments must seamlessly integrate localization, spatial reasoning, navigation, and long-horizon planning. While specialist models excel at individual tasks, deploying a multi-model stack is computationally expensive and prone to cascading errors. We present Vesta, a unified embodied generalist that consolidates these capabilities into a single foundation model. Our approach combines a diverse and massive curated corpus designed to induce spatial grounding and a simple multimodal memory harness that enables reasoning over extended time horizons. Across diverse benchmarks, Vesta on average beats individual SOTA baselines by >$20\%$ and beats an ensemble of per-category-best baselines by $>10\%$ -- thus demonstrating that a generalist model can match or exceed specialists. On real-world robotic tasks requiring memory and reasoning, Vesta improves task success by >35\%. Our work thus demonstrates that a single generalist is a feasible, scalable, and arguably preferable alternative to combining specialists.
Authors: Trung Nguyen, Duc Duy Nguyen
Abstract: Molecular message-passing neural networks commonly propagate chemically diverse interactions through a single graph, which may mix interaction-specific signals and require deep propagation to capture long-range effects. We introduce the Multi-level, Multi-color Graph Neural Network (MMGNN), a hierarchical framework that decomposes a molecular graph into overlapping atom-type-pair-specific subgraphs while preserving atom-level resolution. MMGNN-2D constructs chemical-colored subgraphs from covalent connectivity, whereas MMGNN-3D constructs geometric-colored subgraphs from spatial proximity and augments their edges with distance, angular, and torsional descriptors. Both variants apply a shared communicative message-passing backbone to each subgraph and combine the resulting representations through atom-wise aggregation and molecular readout. We evaluated MMGNN on five classification and three regression benchmarks from MoleculeNet using common scaffold splits and five independent runs. MMGNN-2D achieved the highest macro-average AUC-ROC of 0.838 across the classification datasets and the lowest RMSE on ESOL (0.803). MMGNN-3D obtained the highest mean AUC-ROC on BBBP (0.956) and the lowest RMSE on FreeSolv (1.793), indicating complementary strengths of topological and geometric representations. Structural and leave-one-out analyses further illustrate how the subgraph decomposition affects learned representations and atom-type-pair sensitivities. These results support overlapping interaction-specific graph decomposition as a competitive strategy for molecular property prediction.
Authors: \"Umit Mert \c{C}a\u{g}lar, Alptekin Temizel
Abstract: Earth observation imagery plays a critical role in environmental monitoring, urban planning, disaster assessment, and climate analysis. While multi-spectral sensors are increasingly available, true-color (RGB) imagery remains widely used due to the power, cost, and deployment constraints of many satellite and aerial platforms. However, existing land-cover segmentation datasets are often limited in geographic coverage, scale, or public accessibility. To bridge this gap, we introduce BELDE (Building a Large-scale Earth-observation Land-cover Dataset for Europe), a publicly available dataset tailored for RGB-based remote sensing semantic segmentation. Constructed from Sentinel-2 true-color images and ESA WorldCover data annotations, BELDE contains 1,088,385 curated image-segmentation map pairs spanning Europe with 7 land-cover classes at 10 m spatial resolution, making it one of the largest publicly available RGB land-cover segmentation datasets for Earth observation. To facilitate cross-region generalization studies, we additionally introduce BELDE-K (16,607 pairs) covering the Republic of Korea and BELDE-CA-NV (88,155 pairs) covering California and Nevada in the United States. We establish baseline results using multiple semantic segmentation architectures and evaluate both in-domain and cross-domain performance. Models trained on BELDE achieve an F1 score of 83.0% on the European test set, while performance decreases to 66.4% on BELDE-CA-NV and 58.3% on BELDE-K, highlighting the challenges posed by out-of-distribution geographic domain shift. By providing a continental-scale RGB segmentation and evaluation benchmark, BELDE supports the development of robust and transferable Earth observation models. The dataset and benchmark resources will be publicly released.
Authors: Dayeon Kang, Hyejun Jeong, Jade Sheffey, Pubali Datta, Amir Houmansadr
Abstract: As AI web agents proliferate, combining large language models with autonomous, browser-level control, indiscriminate content scraping by web agents has emerged as a privacy and security challenge. Existing defenses, such as robots.txt and active bot-blocking, are insufficient, as they are widely violated and easily circumvented. In this work, we demonstrate that AI web agents can be effectively distinguished from humans and traditional crawlers using a multi-layer fingerprint based on both network layer characteristics (e.g., TLS, HTTP) and browser interaction behavior. We implement this mechanism as a programmatic logging framework that can be deployed on a live, instrumented domain. By analyzing six prominent agent frameworks (AutoGen, Browser Use, Claude, Gemini, Operator, and Skyvern), we uncover latent structural differences in how these systems assemble HTTP requests, establish TLS/HTTP connections, and execute autonomous browser actions. Feeding these multi-layer features into a decision tree classifier, our framework achieves high-fidelity identification (97% accuracy), successfully isolating distinct agent architectures and differentiating agent traffic from both human browsing baselines and legacy crawlers. Our findings demonstrate that cross-layer agent tracking provides a robust, evasion-resistant strategy for content protection and web security policy enforcement.
Authors: Debrup Das, Avinash Amballa, Yashas Malur Saidutta, Vijay Srinivasan, Vivek Kulkarni, Srinivas Chappidi
Abstract: Personalizing large language models (LLMs) requires encoding long-term, user-specific behavioral patterns in a way that is computationally efficient, scalable, and compatible with a frozen base model. We present Latent Personal Memory (LPM), a scalable framework that represents user-specific history as a compact, persistent matrix of N latent slots, that are interpretable. A shared cross-attention projection network maps these slots into dynamic, input-conditioned soft prompts that are prepended to the input of a frozen LLM. We evaluate LPM on PersonaMem v1 and LoCOMO benchmarks across Qwen3-1.7B, 4B, and 8B backbones. Results demonstrate that LPM outperforms LoRA and Prompt Tuning by up to 8.8% and 54.4% in overall accuracy respectively on PersonaMem v1, while reducing KV-cache usage by over 64x. On LoCoMo, LPM matches LoRA accuracy with 120x fewer trainable parameters. We also show that the efficiency of LPM grows with context length and outperforms full-context at 128K context length.
Authors: Abhijit Das, Nichula Wasalathilaka, Yifan Lu, Adinath Dukre, Dwarikanath Mahapatra, Shadab Khan, Imran Razzak
Abstract: Medical vision-language models (VLMs) enable zero-shot clinical image classification, yet reliably detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs at deployment remains an open problem. No static scoring method works across all shift types: Maximum Concept Matching (MCM) on FLAIR achieves 76.4% AUROC for far-OOD but only 42.4% for covariate shifts such as ultra-wide-field fundus images, effectively random. We trace this to a structural mismatch: covariate-shifted inputs are indistinguishable from in-distribution samples in softmax space, yet occupy distinct regions in the VLM embedding space. To exploit this untapped signal, we propose PROTON (PROtotype-based Test-time ONline OOD detection), a lightweight post-hoc module that maintains an online prototype bank from high-confidence test predictions and adaptively fuses prototype distance with MCM scoring via stream-level variance statistics, requiring no model modification, training data, or prompt engineering. On the ophthalmology benchmark FLAIR + FIVES, PROTON improves MCM by +23.9 AUROC on covariate shift, +8.8 on semantic shift, and +8.1 on far-OOD, making it the only zero-shot method to improve all three without hierarchical prompts or labeled data. Code is available at https://github.com/GenMI-Lab/PROTON, and the project page is available at https://genmi-lab.github.io/PROTON.
URLs: https://github.com/GenMI-Lab/PROTON,, https://genmi-lab.github.io/PROTON.
Authors: Reza Ghanavati, Behrooz Mosallaei
Abstract: Accurate short-term electricity demand forecasting is critical for reliable power system operation, energy market planning, and infrastructure optimization. This paper presents a hybrid framework combining a Transformer encoder for temporal feature extraction with gradient-boosted decision trees (XGBoost) for daily electricity demand forecasting across New England. The framework integrates meteorological observations from six cities spanning all six New England states, calendar and holiday effects, autoregressive demand lags, and COVID-19 epidemiological variables. Hyperparameter optimization uses Optuna with a multivariate Tree-structured Parzen Estimator over 500 trials, with a leakage-free 70/15/15 chronological train-validation-test split. The hybrid model achieves a test RMSE of 8,876 MWh, MAPE of 2.05%, and R-squared of 0.906. A tabular-only XGBoost baseline achieves RMSE of 9,304 MWh, MAPE of 2.21%, and R-squared of 0.896. A Diebold-Mariano test (Harvey-Leybourne-Newbold correction) confirms the 427.7 MWh difference is statistically indistinguishable from noise (DM = -1.126, p = 0.262). An ablation study reveals COVID-19 features improved training accuracy but had asymmetric test effects: removal degraded hybrid RMSE by 3.2% while marginally improving XGBoost-only by 1.2%. A SHAP temporal analysis shows 5 of 8 COVID features rank higher on the post-acute test set than during pandemic-active training, indicating the model over-applies learned pandemic patterns. These findings establish temporal validity decay as a central mechanism: behavioral disruptions drove a strong COVID-demand signal during 2020-2021, but adaptation was complete by mid-2022, leaving epidemiological features as noise amplifying overfitting to stale pandemic patterns.
Authors: Sudipta Santra, Debtanu Datta, Saptarshi Ghosh
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being adopted in the legal domain. However, despite their strong performance, LLMs are prone to generating incorrect or hallucinated outputs, raising serious concerns about their reliability in high-stakes domains such as law. Detecting the correctness of responses of LLM-based systems is therefore a critical challenge. In this work, we explore the potential of leveraging internal artifacts of LLM to detect the correctness of their predictions in legal-domain classification tasks. We develop approaches that utilize features derived from these internal artifacts to build downstream classifiers capable of identifying incorrect LLM outputs. We evaluate our approach on two representative legal classification tasks: bail decision prediction and statute violation prediction. Our experimental results demonstrate that LLMs' internal artifacts are reliable indicators for detecting incorrect predictions in legal classification tasks, and can be applied to enhance the reliability of LLM-based classification systems.
Authors: Yanhong Li, William Merrill
Abstract: Hybrid language models that mix attention and recurrent layers have shown promise: theoretically, recurrent layers ameliorate the limitations of pure transformers on state tracking, and empirically, hybrids can outperform pure transformers in loss and downstream evaluations \citep{waleffe2024empirical,merrill2026olmohybrid}. Yet it remains unclear which data or capabilities drive these gains, and to what degree they reflect the theoretical advantages motivating hybrid models. We address this question using the open weights from Olmo 3 \citep{olmo2025olmo3} and Olmo Hybrid \citep{merrill2026olmohybrid}: we compare the loss of a matched transformer and hybrid at the same target tokens under the same prefixes, stratifying the results by natural token tags, copy features, delimiter structure, and controlled synthetic probes. The hybrid has lower loss on most tag families, but the gains are not uniform: they are largest for open-class content words and smaller for many closed-class function words. Across prose, code, and markup, the hybrid's loss advantage is larger on opening delimiters than on the corresponding closing delimiters, and nearly vanishes on repeated $n$-grams. Synthetic probes show the same split: the hybrid is favored on pronoun-memory and entity-tracking tasks, whereas the transformer is favored on bracket-matching tasks that require choosing closing delimiters. These patterns suggest that the recurrent layers in hybrids improve predictions that leverage the semantic state of a document, whereas attention helps on tokens predictable by $n$-gram copying or syntactic bracket matching. We conclude with proof-of-concept filtered evaluations showing how token-level decompositions can sharpen pretraining diagnostics for hybrid architectures.
Authors: Nusrat Jahan Lia, Aritra Mazumder
Abstract: Long-running language-model systems accumulate interaction history that outgrows the context window, so they must continually evict. When an eviction policy drops a load-bearing detail, for example an access token issued at login or a path the next call needs, the action fails. We present LRE (Learned Relevance Eviction), a few kilobytes, CPU-only, language-model-free scorer that learns which units of history are load-bearing and keeps them by verbatim extraction. Under a matched-budget comparison, in our experiment, no baseline dominates LRE on the accuracy-cost plane. On agents, LRE matches the accuracy of keeping the entire history overall. On the simplest tasks, it exceeds that no-eviction baseline by 27%, while requiring zero compressor calls and reducing peak context size by up to 52%. A controlled study trace shows LRE completes tasks where the others loop, finishing one such task in 37% fewer calls than keeping everything and solving 14 tasks where no other run policy does. On conversational memory, LRE outranks dense and token-pruning encoders at zero neural cost. In downstream evaluation, LRE gives the best budgeted answer quality on LoCoMo reading 68% fewer tokens. Its supervision can also be annotation-free: training only on the system's own behavior recovers 95% of the supervised scorer's effectiveness. We argue that, because memory eviction in LLM agents is a fidelity problem, it requires a deployable proactive policy where the future query is unavailable and exact state is decisive, and that cheap learned relevance can be sufficient.
Authors: Van-Tuan Tran, Shruthi Gowda, Merim Dzaferagic, Marco Ruffini
Abstract: Continual adaptation is essential for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) deployed across evolving domains, but the state-of-the-art MR-LoRA method highly relies on the assumption that a MLLM-based router is necessary to process complex multimodal inputs. This paper revisits this claim on the MLLM-CL benchmark and argues for two claims. \textbf{First}, routing does not require an MLLM: a simple training-free, replay-free ptotypical routing method (\textsc{RePRo}), uses frozen pretrained features and task prototypes to match the MLLM-based router of MR-LoRA at far lower computational cost. \textbf{Second}, shared experts do not improve continual learning for MLLMs, despite their theoretical appeal. We show that these findings arise from two structural limitations of MLLM-CL: (1) its tasks are \textbf{highly separable} in representation space, and (2) its fixed task order makes conclusions \textbf{sensitive to a single curriculum} rather than robust across diverse continual-learning trajectories. As a result, the benchmark primarily rewards learning in isolation rather than genuine continual transfer. This motivates a new design for future benchmarks of continual MLLM learning, with overlapping task manifolds, multiple task orders, fine-grained domain shifts, and evaluation protocols that reward forward transfer as well as retention.
Authors: Cade W. Trotter, Maksim E. Eren, Justin C. Holmes, J. Brent Parham, David Ewing, Boian S. Alexandrov, Gian Luca Delzanno
Abstract: Radio-frequency (RF) monitoring is essential for space domain awareness, but it often generates large, variable, and sparsely populated datasets with few labels. These observations can capture satellites, space debris, and the ionospheric background, yet interpreting them typically requires specialized subject-matter expertise. Supervised deep learning methods can perform well on labeled RF data, but they require many annotated examples and may need careful retraining as RF conditions change. Semi-supervised approaches offer a practical alternative for limited-data settings by using unlabeled observations to reveal latent patterns that experts can interpret. In this paper, we present a semi-supervised RF detection and classification workflow for satellite monitoring that combines Non-negative Matrix Factorization with automatic model determination (NMFk), expert-guided cluster interpretation, and classifier-based prediction. We first represent RF observations as a non-negative feature matrix and apply NMFk to estimate the number of clusters that best captures patterns in the unlabeled data. Subject-matter experts then assign physical meaning to the resulting clusters, including satellite detections, ionospheric environmental conditions, and other RF event categories. Finally, we train a classifier on these interpreted clusters to evaluate performance on a test set and categorize future observations. This pipeline reduces reliance on large pre-labeled datasets by pairing unsupervised factorization with expert interpretation, enabling an interpretable and transferable methodology for detecting, observing, and classifying behavior in RF data.
Authors: Adrian Cespedes, Marcelo Chincha, Dunant Cusipuma, Victor Flores-Benites, David Ortega, Arturo Deza
Abstract: As Self-Driving Cars continue to expand internationally and use multi-modal systems such as VLMs as a cognitive backbone for their Action models; how well will these systems generalize in new settings, in particular out-of-distribution (OOD) edge-case scenarios in new geographies? In this paper, we study this open question by providing a full factorial analysis with human drivers of Lima, human drivers from New York City, and VLMs and showing them dashcam footage collected from Lima and New York City -- prompting them with a variety of questions under a Visual Question Answering (VQA) paradigm. In particular, we pick these two cities as they are highly challenging driving locations where no Self-Driving Car company currently operates in, and ask questions that span 4 categories: Factual, Ratings, Counterfactual and Reasoning. We find that Humans and VLMs diverge in their responses -- though this is modulated by the type of questions asked, and that Humans answer similarly independent of where they are from (Lima/NYC). To our surprise, we did not find a strong difference in terms of answers (Humans or VLMs) that was modulated by geography, likely due to their high out-of-distribution nature. Our dataset is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Artificio/robusto-2
Authors: Philippe J. Giabbanelli
Abstract: Text-to-image generation is a form of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) that converts textual descriptions into images. Most applications of GenAI in modeling and simulation (M&S) have focused on large language models for documentation, coding, or explanation. By contrast, the potential of image generation remains largely unexplored. This tutorial introduces text-to-image generation to the M&S community and details how it can support several M&S tasks, including communicating conceptual models, visualizing simulation outcomes, generating educational materials, and interfacing heterogeneous models in multi-scale simulations. The tutorial combines conceptual guidance with practical workflows, explaining how modern image generators operate, how prompts and simulation outputs can be translated into visual scenes, and how practitioners can integrate these tools into reproducible local pipelines. By focusing on transferable principles rather than specific tools, the tutorial equips M&S practitioners with the knowledge needed to evaluate, adopt, and adapt text-to-image generation in their simulation workflows.
Authors: David Nordfors
Abstract: The metanym game is a competitive word game for LLMs that measures structural intelligence against established cognitive-science constructs. No content is given in advance; the contestants create all of it -- a new kind of analogy test, analogical production falsifiable sentence by sentence, with no fixed test set to leak into training (contamination-resistant by construction). In the council-of-peers benchmark, the contestants also rate each other's creations. We introduce the first spectral solution, to our knowledge, to the wicked problem of benchmarking LLMs' factual accuracy without golden keys or oracle models: one singular value decomposition of the evaluators' ratings matrix yields their competence as both generators and judges of true statements at once. Competence on the subjective criteria comes from each judge's rating consistency as the yardstick shifts. The factual rating correlates with GPQA Diamond at Pearson r = 0.92. Scored separately, making and judging dissociate -- judging is the scarcer skill: the strongest generators are middling judges, the sharpest judge a mid-pack generator. To scale, the strongest players form a council that does the official benchmarking; its seats are contestable -- a stronger model earns one on the benchmark's own rating. The benchmark is entirely self-contained and self-consistent, a stable gauge over time.
Authors: Yakun Liu, Zhiyu Jin, Dong Liu, Hai Luan
Abstract: As artificial intelligence advances into the era of Embodied AI, live musical interaction urgently needs to break free from the limitations of offline, unidirectional generation, achieving a "virtual synergy" capable of low-latency, dynamic interplay. To address this, this technical report presents LK_Jam, a real-time, bidirectional human-computer interactive music generation system based on a lightweight Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) and a high-performance audio host architecture. In the algorithmic representation layer, this system abandons the computationally expensive fixed time-grid. Instead, it constructs a multi-dimensional sparse event stream integrating time-shifts, continuous harmonic embeddings, and role-aware encoding, enabling the model to accurately capture turn-taking logic and micro-timing in a single-step inference. In the engineering implementation layer, this paper builds a strict multithreaded lock-free communication bridge using C++ and the JUCE framework, incorporating the RTNeural inference engine designed specifically for real-time audio. By utilizing compile-time network topology solidification and a zero-allocation (allocation-free) mechanism, the end-to-end overhead of autoregressive decoding is strictly locked at \(O(1)\) complexity, structurally mitigating the risk of audio thread dropouts in DAW plugin environments. Furthermore, this study designs a three-stage progressive training strategy, achieving a leap from basic chord harmonization to expert-level interaction. Preliminary observations and architectural analysis demonstrate that while ensuring musical coherence and interactive role-play, the proposed system successfully challenges extreme real-time engineering constraints, offering a highly robust and deployable technical paradigm for next-generation AI co-performers in live music.
Authors: Geon Choi, Hangyul Yoon, Nalee Kim, Jeong Yun Jang, Hyunju Shin, Hyunki Park, Sang Hoon Seo, Edward Choi
Abstract: The evaluation of vision-language models (VLMs) for chest X-ray (CXR) analysis has largely been limited to disease-presence classification without visual grounding. Such evaluations fail to verify the expert-level lesion perception necessary to ensure the clinical reliability of VLMs. To address these limitations, we introduce CheXpercept, a sequential, multi-level perception benchmark that mirrors a radiologist's cognitive workflow across coarse-level detection, fine-level contour evaluation and revision, and semantic-level attribute extraction. To ensure high clinical fidelity at scale, we construct the dataset using a semi-automated generation pipeline paired with a review by six medical experts. CheXpercept contains 10,400 QA items derived from 2,100 CXRs, covering seven clinically critical pulmonary and cardiac lesions. To demonstrate the current landscape of VLM perception, we benchmark 14 general and medical VLMs on CheXpercept. The models achieve adequate performance only at the coarse level, with accuracy degrading precipitously on deeper visual tasks. Notably, medical VLMs show almost no perceptual advantage over their general-domain counterparts, highlighting a systemic flaw in current domain adaptation. The code and dataset will be publicly available.
Authors: Ming Xu, Jiawei Cao
Abstract: Origin-Destination (OD) demand prediction is fundamental to intelligent transportation systems, yet real-world OD flows are often dynamically sparse, long-tailed, and characterized by heterogeneous zero-flow patterns. These properties make it difficult to distinguish whether an OD connection is active from how much demand it generates once activated. Many existing methods primarily treat OD prediction as a single flow regression task, which limits their ability to model low-frequency, intermittent, and long-tailed OD interactions. To address these challenges, we propose SAGMTL, a Structure-Aware Graph Multi-Task Learning framework for dynamic sparse OD demand prediction. SAGMTL decomposes OD prediction into structural state modeling and flow intensity estimation, jointly learning regional activity states, OD connection activity, and edge-level flow intensity within a unified framework. Specifically, a node-edge collaborative representation module captures regional semantics, temporal dynamics, and spatial priors through interactive node-edge updates, producing structure-aware representations for dynamic OD interactions. Based on these representations, SAGMTL estimates OD flows by jointly modeling stable demand patterns and short-term fluctuations. A multi-constraint objective further improves sparsity awareness and structural consistency. Experiments on three real-world urban mobility datasets from Beijing, Chengdu, and Nanjing show that SAGMTL achieves superior overall performance compared with state-of-the-art baselines. Further analysis demonstrates that explicitly modeling regional activity, connection states, and flow intensity improves the robustness of dynamic sparse OD demand prediction.
Authors: Jiancheng Zhao, Xiang Ji, Yifan Zhan, Zunian Wan, Yinqiang Zheng
Abstract: Image compression for machines calls for a unified codec that serves multiple downstream vision tasks. Existing approaches either adopt task-specific end-to-end designs, raising parameter and deployment overhead, or rely on transfer-based adaptations that remain externally attached and heuristic task design. A key limitation shared by both lines of work is their largely static computation pattern, which applies similar transformations across tokens despite the fact that different image regions exhibit markedly different semantic importance and complexity for machine perception. We propose MoECodec, a token-aware image compression framework that supports multiple downstream tasks within a single model. MoECodec replaces the FFN layers in transformer-based compression model token-wise Mixture-of-Experts (MoE), enabling dynamic, token-level computation conditioned on the input content and task objective. To make MoE effective in compression model, we introduce a stable routing strategy that combines expert-choice routing with spatial total variation regularization to encourage spatially coherent assignments, and we propose a lightweight expert architecture, Group Shuffle MLP (GShMLP), to control parameter growth. Extensive experiments show consistent improvement against baselines on both conventional image reconstruction and machine tasks.
Authors: Yongbin Huang, Xihao Xie, Jia Zhang
Abstract: Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) systems increasingly leverage self-supervised acoustic representations, yet their vulnerability to training-time attacks remains largely underexplored. This paper presents the first systematic study of poisoning-based backdoor attacks on SER, with a focus on threats enabled by text-to-speech (TTS) generated audio. We introduce a stealthy, low-energy acoustic trigger that can be embedded imperceptibly into both natural and synthetic speech, enabling scalable and consistent poisoning. Our experiments demonstrate that SER models can be reliably compromised with high attack success rates under low poisoning ratios, while maintaining near-clean performance on benign inputs. We further show that backdoor patterns exhibit strong cross-model transferability and that self-supervised representations are particularly susceptible to learning these triggers. These findings reveal that TTS technology dramatically lowers the barrier to effective backdoor attacks, exposing critical vulnerabilities in modern SER pipelines and motivating the urgent need for dedicated defenses.
Authors: Dongrui Han, Weidong Chen, Jiawen Kang, Mingyu Cui, Helen Meng, Xixin Wu
Abstract: Recent advances in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis have achieved highly natural and expressive speech generation. However, these systems are designed for general adults and overlook older adults' speech comprehension needs due to age-related sensory and cognitive decline. Prior work involves older adults by collecting preference feedback to tune model parameters. However, obtaining sufficient preference data is costly and difficult, as older adults quickly become fatigued during collection. In this paper, we propose a novel imitation learning (IL) framework to learn TTS models from expert demonstrations. We further improve Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with two-stage on-policy reward learning (OPRL) to mitigate reward hacking under limited supervision from expert demonstration. Experimental results show that GRPO w/ OPRL outperforms GRPO and supervised baselines in objective and subjective metrics. Audio samples are available at https://dongru1.github.io/demo/im-efss
Authors: Zhengsong Zhang, Zongze Li, Jiawei Guo, Haipeng Cai
Abstract: Local LLM agents such as OpenClaw and Nanobot run on end-user machines and act on host resources - the shell, filesystem, browser, stored credentials, and messaging applications - through natural-language goals. These agents have become privileged software runtimes that mediate between user intent, model outputs, and host-level actions. Existing research characterizes the landscape through prompt injection, malicious skills, marketplace risks, or black-box evaluation of agents. But the implementation layer that performs this mediation, the prompt builder, parser, tool dispatcher, skill loader, memory writer, network client, and permission gate, has remained an unexamined safety boundary. To our knowledge, no prior work has examined the agent's source tree to audit these components for implementation-level security weaknesses. We present CLAWAUDIT, a static auditing framework for measuring vulnerability exposure in local LLM agent runtimes. CLAWAUDIT derives a five-category vulnerability taxonomy from STRIDE and develops custom static-analysis rules that target agent-specific patterns absent from established rule sets for vulnerability analysis. We instantiate the taxonomy in two backends, 47 Semgrep YAML rules and 30 CodeQL queries, and evaluate on OPENCLAWBENCH, a benchmark of 446 source-code-level advisories from the OpenClaw repository and split temporally into 229 rule-derivation (train) and 217 held-out (test) advisories. On the held-out test, CLAWAUDIT raises Semgrep recall from 21.7% (Pro baseline) to 66.8%, and CodeQL recall from 13.8% (security-extended) to 75.1%. Train/test gaps remain within 4 percentage points for all four configurations, indicating that the rules generalize to vulnerabilities unseen during rule writing. A preliminary live-code audit shows that these recall-oriented rules require manual triage, motivating semantic filtering before production deployment.
Authors: Yongfeng Su, Hongwen Li, Zijian Zhang, Ziquan Fang, Lu Chen, Christian S. Jensen
Abstract: Traffic prediction is a core task in intelligent transportation systems and urban-scale decision making. Despite the effectiveness of mainstream neural-network based methods, their deployment in real-world settings with thousands of traffic sensors is jeopardized severely by their poor computational scalability. To address this, the community has attempted to incorporate spatial database partitioning techniques (e.g., Grid, Quadtree, and K-D Tree) to improve model scalability. However, these approaches rely on handcrafted geometric heuristics and often produce irregular or imbalanced data partitions, leading to boundary fragmentation, excessive padding overheads, and degraded model accuracy. In this paper, we propose SqLinear, an efficient and effective architecture for large-scale traffic prediction. First, we design Square Partition, a geometry-adaptive algorithm that partitions massive traffic sensors into balanced, non-overlapping, and near-square spatial regions. Unlike existing heuristic-based designs, Square Partition is theoretically grounded and provides provable guarantees on aspect ratio, balance, and partition utilization, establishing a high-quality foundation for downstream spatiotemporal modeling. Next, we propose a Hierarchical Linear Interaction (HLI) module that abandons the costly attention mechanisms commonly used in Transformer-based spatio-temporal models. HLI efficiently captures both local intra-region dynamics and global inter-region dependencies through a lightweight linear interaction scheme, enabling effective spatiotemporal modeling with linear computational complexity. Extensive experiments on four large-scale traffic datasets and 10 baselines show that SqLinear reduces MAE by 2.30% on average under standard setting and by 5.81% under extreme scalability settings, while reducing training runtime by 13.27%--30.84% in spatial- and horizon-scaling scenarios.
Authors: Zhiqiang Zhou, Xu Ling, Junliang Dai
Abstract: Standard Transformers use a single self-attention pathway to model both global dependencies and local patterns, creating tension between long-range structural reasoning and fine-grained local representation learning. We propose a FiLM-coordinated dual-branch Transformer for language modeling, where each layer explicitly contains a global branch and a local branch, and feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM) is used for dynamic cross-branch coordination instead of simple concatenation or static addition. The key idea is that the two branches represent different dependency views of the same input, making channel-wise calibration more suitable than heavy token-level interaction. We therefore design a bidirectional FiLM module in which each branch generates per-channel scaling and shifting parameters to condition the other. Experiments on multiple small-scale language modeling settings show that the proposed structure consistently outperforms same-width single-branch baselines and weakened dual-branch variants under a fixed lightweight configuration. On TinyShakespeare and a 1M-character subset of WikiText-2, the full dual-branch FiLM model achieves the best results among same-width structural baselines. Multi-seed results support the stability of the gains, while mechanistic analyses show that FiLM learns input-dependent, layer-dependent, and channel-selective modulation patterns rather than static scaling. Parameter-matched widened single-branch baselines also indicate that the current design still leaves room for improvement in parameter efficiency.
Authors: Chenhui Hu, Muhammed Salih, Sudipto Guha, Subramanian Srinivasan
Abstract: Multi-turn jailbreaks can evade turn-level moderation by spreading unsafe intent across a dialogue through gradual escalation, reframing, and role manipulation. We address multi-turn jailbreak detection as a conversation-level classification problem and introduce an efficient hierarchical detector that avoids expensive long-context concatenation while retaining cross-turn reasoning. The model encodes individual turns to form compact turn representations and applies a lightweight conversation module that captures dialogue dynamics and selectively attends to fine-grained evidence when needed. On a challenging evaluation benchmark of 14,038 conversations, our approach achieves an F1 of 0.9394, outperforming Claude Opus 4.7, the strongest competing baseline, by 0.07 while halving its false-positive rate. Ablation studies confirm that each architectural component contributes meaningfully, with combining cross-attention and self-attention in the conversation module yielding a 2.26 percentage point reduction in false-positive rate over the self-attention-only variant.
Authors: Bingchang Song, Yiqin Yang
Abstract: Offline-to-online adaptation serves as a pivotal paradigm for mitigating the prohibitive cost of online exploration by bootstrapping reinforcement learning from offline datasets. While this paradigm has been extensively studied in single-agent settings, its extension to Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) remains largely unexplored, despite its critical relevance to complex coordinated decision-making. To bridge this gap, we introduce Sim2O, an elegant and minimalist framework for offline-to-online MARL. Rather than treating adaptation as a monolithic joint decision, Sim2O conceptualizes it as a compositional process. Specifically, candidate joint actions are synthesized by dynamically blending offline and online action proposals across agents. By leveraging a centralized value function to evaluate these hybrid combinations, Sim2O identifies high-value coordination strategies without requiring auxiliary training objectives or structural overhead. Empirical evaluations across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that Sim2O significantly outperforms existing baselines, underscoring that a minimalist design is not only viable but highly effective for multi-agent offline-to-online adaptation.
Authors: Heechan Moon, Kijung Shin
Abstract: Semi-supervised learning (SSL) on data streams is challenging due to the continuous evolution of high-volume data and the scarcity of labels. Existing methods are limited in leveraging the intrinsic relationships among samples because they typically rely on fixed similarity measures or static graph structures, which cannot capture how relationships evolve over time. We propose SLeDGe, an SSL method for data streams that jointly learns a predictive model and an adaptive graph structure under strict memory and label constraints. SLeDGe maintains compact labeled and unlabeled memories using distinct update strategies, balancing rapid adaptation to novel features with the retention of historical consistency. In addition, by encouraging sparsity in the relational graph, SLeDGe filters out spurious connections and enables effective propagation of label supervision. Across 12 datasets, SLeDGe outperforms state-of-the-art competitors, achieving average relative accuracy gains of 31.7% with 0.1% labels and 14.8% with 1% labels.
Authors: Younghan Park, Hoyeon Lee, Hawon Jeong, Jong-Hwan Kim
Abstract: Reliable evaluation of phrase break annotations is crucial, as subtle variations in prosodic boundaries directly affect the clarity and naturalness of speech. However, existing approaches exhibit major limitations: single-reference evaluation assumes a unique gold phrasing for an utterance despite multiple valid phrasings, while human judgment, though flexible, is labor-intensive and unscalable. To address these, we propose LLM-based Multi-Reference Evaluation (LMRE) for phrase break annotations that models the one-to-many nature of prosodic phrasing and generates multiple valid phrasings from minimal demonstrations. On a Korean testbed of 1,356 annotations covering five strategies, LMRE shows stronger alignment with human judgment than single-reference evaluation in both acceptance behavior and score correlation. Our findings demonstrate that LMRE effectively achieves both scalability and multi-reference support, highlighting the potential of LLMs for evaluation in the speech domain.
Authors: Yuxiang Lin, Ying Chen
Abstract: Virtual-cell and perturbation models are increasingly used to predict cellular responses for biomedical discovery, but chemical and genetic perturbations are not automatically interchangeable. Existing evaluations often study chemical response prediction or genetic perturbation prediction separately, leaving target-matched chemical-to-genetic translation under-tested. We introduce Chem2Gen-Bench, a benchmark comprising 260,084 chemical and 1,099,045 genetic perturbation profiles organized into cell-target contexts, and evaluate pairwise alignment, retrieval, protocol covariate associations, feature spaces, and foundation-model embeddings. Across matched contexts, translation fidelity is measurable but heterogeneous; background adjustment increases the association between pairwise similarity and retrieval success, while paired tests show lower mean retrieval success after adjustment under the evaluated settings. In a target-matched K562 audit, the evaluated foundation-model embeddings did not consistently improve over gene-delta baselines. Chem2Gen-Bench provides an auditable framework for testing when chemical and genetic perturbations align around shared targets and when representation gains are supported by matched perturbation evidence.
Authors: Jiho Choi, Sang Jun Lee
Abstract: Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) is a camera-based technique for measuring physiological signals, particularly cardiac activity. From the remotely measured signals, heart rate can be estimated, which is crucial for health monitoring. In this study, we investigate a driver health monitoring system based on remote heart rate estimation. However, driving environments represent uncontrolled settings where videos are subject to varying illumination conditions and frequent head movements. We introduce MS-rPPG, a multi-spectral framework that combines RGB with near-infrared (NIR) face video to alleviate rPPG estimation under challenging driving conditions. To combine the complementary features from two spectral videos, we propose a cross-spectral linear modulation (CSLM) strategy based on frequency-domain analysis. Moreover, we introduce MS-Mamba, a novel state space model designed to effectively model long-range temporal dependencies while jointly capturing cross-channel interactions between multi-spectral features. We collected a real-world dataset called MS-Drive, which was recorded from 50 participants while driving the vehicle. The proposed method was evaluated on the MR-NIRP Car dataset and MS-Drive datasets. The experimental results indicate that MS-rPPG shows better robustness and heart rate estimation accuracy than previous methods, highlighting its promise for driver health monitoring. The codes are available at github.com/ziiho08/MS-rPPG.
Authors: Jeff Brown, Tim Farkas, Gleb Razgar, Edward S. Boyden
Abstract: Proofreading--correcting segmentation errors in 3D brain reconstructions--is the rate-limiting step in synapse-resolution connectomics. We release ConnectomeBench2, a unified multi-species dataset of over 716,485 expert-labeled proofreading decisions with >4,500,000 associated images spanning four major open connectomes (mouse, human, zebrafish, fly), spanning both split and merge error correction. Trained on this dataset, a single Vision Transformer with shared encoders for mesh geometry and electron microscopy reaches human-level accuracy across species for split error correction and merge error identification, with performance scaling with data size and modality. Beyond accuracy, we show that the model is well-calibrated within distribution, that measures of distribution distance predict where calibration and accuracy will degrade on unseen data, and that connectomics-specific pretraining and active learning-based sample selection show potential to substantially reduce the labeling effort needed to extend to new species and brain regions. The benchmark provides the infrastructure to train and evaluate increasingly capable vision models for connectomic proofreading. Data and code availability. The ConnectomeBench2 dataset is released on Hugging Face at https://huggingface.co/datasets/jeffbbrown2/ConnectomeBench2. The accompanying codebase is available on GitHub at https://github.com/timfarkas/ConnectomeBench2.
URLs: https://huggingface.co/datasets/jeffbbrown2/ConnectomeBench2., https://github.com/timfarkas/ConnectomeBench2.
Authors: Di Dai, Bo Liu, Youcheng Li, Haojun Yu, Zhouhang Bian, Quanlin Wu, Dong Wang, Sichen Meng, Hongye Xuan, Zijie Lan, Shenda Hong, Liwei Wang
Abstract: Mammography is an essential tool for breast cancer detection, with millions of examinations conducted annually. However, publicly available high-quality mammography datasets for AI development remain limited in both scale and annotation richness, particularly regarding pathological subtype coverage and structured diagnostic reasoning annotations. In this paper, we present MammoExpert, the first mammography dataset with Chain-of-Thought reasoning annotations across three diagnostic phases: (i) primal observation, (ii) factual assessment, and (iii) diagnostic synthesis. Comprising 2,379 mammography images covering 67 WHO-classified histopathology subtypes, each exam provides 42 radiographic features annotated by nine senior radiologists. We evaluate its performance on the breast lesion classification task, demonstrating superior accuracy and reasonability compared to existing classification models. Combining public dataset CBIS-DDSM with MammoExpert yields 7.1\% classification accuracy improvement, while the training model to learn CoT reasoning achieves another 4\% gain on the MammoExpert test set. Similar improvements are observed on INBreast and Vindr datasets, where the full approach yields accuracy gains of 6.9\% and 6.7\%, respectively. MammoExpert can serve as a benchmark for interpretable breast lesion diagnosis through explicit CoT reasoning.
Authors: Youngjoon Jeong, Jihwan Yu, Minsoo Jo, Junha Chun, Taesup Kim
Abstract: Latent action pretraining learns representations of visual change from pairs of observations, but existing methods typically encode each transition as a single unstructured representation that entangles transition extent and transition mode. We introduce Polar Latent Actions with Radial structure (PoLAR), which imposes a radial-direction structure on latent actions, encouraging radius to encode transition extent and direction to retain transition mode. PoLAR uses temporal offset between two observations as a weak proxy for transition extent, encouraging latent action from observation pairs separated by larger temporal gaps to occupy larger radii. We instantiate this structure in hyperbolic space, whose expanding volume with radius offers a natural fit for more diverse transition modes at larger extents. Across in-task and large-scale pretraining settings, PoLAR improves downstream policy performance in simulation and real-world robot experiments, outperforming latent action baselines and strong pretrained VLAs. These results suggest that the geometry of the latent action space is an important design choice for transferring visual pretraining to downstream robot policy learning.
Authors: Han Chi, Jiaxin Qi, Yan Cui, Baisheng Lai, Jianqiang Huang
Abstract: LLM agents increasingly solve local tasks through command-line and CLI-based harness interfaces, including code editing, repository inspection, data analysis, and file workflows. Existing evaluations often emphasize task success, but deployed local agents are not models alone: the CLI mediates prompts, context replay, tool outputs, file access, terminal observations, and stopping behavior. As a result, the same model can produce different success, token, and cost profiles under different CLIs. We introduce AGENTMETER, a benchmark for evaluating model-CLI matching in CLI-mediated local task-solving agents, together with AgentMeter Score (AMS), a success-anchored, cost-aware metric over calibrated task-effort tiers. AgentMeter uses Benchmark90 as the full validation set and Core30 as a lower-cost subset for expanded comparison across 24 complete model-CLI configurations. On Core30, common deployment criteria select different configurations: highest Pass/30 selects GLM-5.1 with qwen-coder, lowest Tok./Pass selects GPT-5.3-Codex with kimi-cli, lowest billable USD/Pass selects Qwen3.6+ with Codex, while highest AMS selects Qwen3.6+ with kimi-cli. Benchmark90 validation preserves the Top-1 configuration and Top-3 set, with Spearman correlation 0.765, Kendall correlation 0.567, and AMS MAE 0.0383. These results show that model choice and CLI choice should not be decoupled, and that model-CLI configurations should be evaluated as the deployed unit.
Authors: Xingyu Chen, Rui Wang, Zhaopeng Tu, Liefeng Bo
Abstract: Long-term memory systems for Large Language Model (LLM) agents typically try to \emph{remember everything}, extracting memories uniformly to retain as many facts as possible. In production, however, inference cost and finite context budgets make this untenable: beyond consolidating raw dialogue into memory, an agent must exert \emph{write control}, efficiently keeping only the information each user actually cares about. Otherwise, long-horizon personalized interactions suffer \emph{memory bloat}, where irrelevant trivia crowds out useful information and steadily erodes question-answering (QA) accuracy. We argue that what is worth remembering is role-dependent, and propose \textbf{AdaMem} (Adaptive Memory), a method that \emph{learns what to remember} for each user from feedback. AdaMem maintains a structured, role-specific Memory Policy and refines it from weekly QA feedback through a lightweight, patch-style self-reflection step with failure rollback. To study this setting, we build \textbf{AdaMem-Bench}, a benchmark that simulates weeks of interaction with week-by-week QA. Across two extraction models and two feedback modes, AdaMem improves QA accuracy by up to \textbf{+9.0\%} over the uniform Mem0 baseline while shrinking memory volume by \textbf{9\%}.
Authors: Jiaxi Yang, Chaewan Chun, Jason Lucas, Yuchen Yang, Dongwon Lee
Abstract: Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of audio tasks. As they are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, ensuring their safety alignment has become more important. Although refusal mechanisms serve as a key safeguard by preventing LALMs from responding to harmful requests, they can also lead to {\em over-refusal}, where models incorrectly reject benign queries. This issue is especially challenging in the audio domain because speech that appears harmful in isolation may become benign when interpreted together with the surrounding acoustic context, such as background sounds. To study this problem, we introduce \textbf{AOR-Bench} (\textbf{A}udio \textbf{O}ver-\textbf{R}efusal \textbf{Bench}mark), the first benchmark for over-refusal specifically designed for LALMs. AOR-Bench contains 3,000 pseudo-harmful audio samples across six scenario categories. Evaluating 12 representative LALMs from six major model families, we find that over-refusal is widespread (Figure~\ref{fig:overall_performance}) and uncover several important patterns in their safety judgments. As a preliminary effort to mitigate this issue, we further explore two lightweight strategies (e.g., Chain-of-Thought and activation steering) to reduce over-refusal.
Authors: Gautam Prasad, Chandramohan T. N., Joy Bose
Abstract: Automated test generation for telecom software systems and networks has advanced significantly with the adoption of machine learning and rule-based approaches. However, most existing solutions generate static test suites against a snapshot of the system; as code, configurations, topologies, and key performance indicators (KPIs) evolve, these tests quickly become outdated or misaligned with the live system. There is currently no widely adopted solution that continuously detects fine-grained changes and selectively adapts only the affected tests without regenerating entire test suites. This paper presents a context-aware generative AI framework for automated telecom test script generation that treats testing as a continuously adapting process driven by the current state of the system rather than a static artifact. The central contribution is delta-conditioned test generation over a live knowledge graph: our approach employs a continuously updated knowledge graph (KG) as a single source of truth, a delta engine for fine-grained change detection, and a KG-guided generative AI agent, operating via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), to create, update, or retire test cases automatically. We further integrate Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to enrich reasoning with telecom-domain knowledge and historical artifacts. We demonstrate applicability across software-system and telecom-network use cases, including a Python-based KPI monitoring application managed in GitLab, and show how the framework reduces manual effort, improves test relevance, and accelerates test cycles.
Authors: Joohyeok Kim, Taejin Jeong, Jinyeong Kim, Seong Jae Hwang
Abstract: The high cost of spatial transcriptomics (ST) has driven extensive studies into predicting gene expression directly from H&E histology images. However, this prediction task faces an inherent limitation, as tissue morphology alone provides insufficient information to fully resolve underlying gene expression. To address this limitation, a recent study leverages partial gene expression to guide the prediction process alongside histology images. Building on this paradigm, we approach the prediction task as a spatial imputation problem, employing a Masked Autoencoder (MAE) to utilize a small fraction of gene expression as genetic anchors for inferring whole-slide gene expression profiles. Specifically, we propose a bio-saliency score and a learning-to-rank strategy to adaptively identify the most informative spots within the tissue. Based on these identified spots, our framework selects contiguous regions as genetic anchors to ensure suitability for real-world ST profiling hardware. To effectively leverage these anchors, we design a cross-modal joint encoder that integrates visual and genetic modalities. By aligning the selected anchors with their corresponding visual features via contrastive learning, the encoder generates robust joint representations to accurately predict gene expression across the whole slide. Notably, our framework consistently surpasses existing methods in both histology-only prediction and spatial imputation, achieving superior accuracy even without genetic anchors and further excelling with as little as 10% transcriptomic coverage. Our code is available at https://github.com/Kyyle2114/CAMMST.
Authors: Juntong Peng, Juanwu Lu, Yupeng Zhou, Can Cui, Yaobin Chen, Ziran Wang
Abstract: We present OmniV2X, a generative foundation model for vehicle-to-everything (V2X) cooperative driving. The model directly interprets independent context sequences comprising multi-modal and multi-agent observations. The new design mitigates the computational cost of dense 3D perception, the vulnerability to data scarcity in cooperative scenarios, and the poor compliance with standardized messaging in existing methods that fuse multi-modal inputs into a shared representation. For training, we present an end-to-end supervised pipeline using a downstream trajectory generation loss, in which a high-capacity generative sequence planner implicitly learns to steer the model and leverage multi-modal inputs via cross-attention injection. As a foundation model, we demonstrate that OmniV2X pre-trained on large-scale single-agent planning datasets can efficiently adapt to cooperative environments by integrating the conditioning context with lightweight, standard-compliant V2X tokens. Evaluated on the DAIR-V2X-Seq dataset, OmniV2X outperforms existing end-to-end cooperative driving baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance with less than 10% of the fine-tune V2X dataset and less than 1% of the communication bandwidth. We conduct comprehensive evaluations to demonstrate its computational efficiency and robustness under real-world constraints.
Authors: Jan Wunderlich, Markus Kleffmann, Sebastian Lempert
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to support software development, but their practical usefulness in applied game-development settings remains underexplored, especially when generated code must be integrated into an existing game software system. This paper presents an exploratory empirical case study of GPT-4o in a custom Python/Pygame endless runner. The study examines six selected development tasks: three localized refactoring tasks and three tasks involving gameplay feature generation. The resulting implementations were evaluated using software metrics, unit tests, and manual gameplay assessments. In this case study, all three selected refactoring tasks were completed successfully in functional terms, whereas only one of the three selected gameplay feature generation tasks resulted in a correctly integrated feature. The findings suggest that, in this setting, GPT-4o handled localized transformations more reliably than tasks requiring new gameplay interactions across multiple existing systems. Given the exploratory single-case design, these results are best interpreted as indicative observations rather than as generalizable evidence of category-level model performance. Overall, the paper contributes a transparent case-based account of the opportunities and limitations of LLM-assisted refactoring and gameplay feature generation in an existing game software system.
Authors: Alistair Letcher, Mattie Fellows, Alexander D. Goldie, Jonathan Richens, Jakob N. Foerster, Oliver Richardson
Abstract: Model-based and model-free reinforcement learning are traditionally viewed as separate paradigms: instead of learning a model of the transition kernel $P$, model-free agents typically estimate value functions tied to a specific policy and reward. In this paper, we challenge this dichotomy by proving that value-based agents trained on a sufficiently rich set of reward functions, e.g. using goal-conditioned RL, implicitly encode a unique and accurate world model. To extract this model in practice, we introduce \textit{$P$-learning}, an inverse analogue to $Q$-learning that samples from an agent's $Q$-values, policies and rewards to decode its internal model of the environment. We then provide sufficient conditions on the type and number of goals for which agents encode the true kernel $P$, covering both stochastic and deterministic MDPs over finite or continuous state spaces. Even when our assumptions are violated, we empirically demonstrate that agents trained on a handful of reward functions encode accurate dynamics in $\texttt{Reacher}$, $\texttt{MountainCar}$ and stochastic variants of $\texttt{FourRooms}$. Surprisingly, we find that policies trained exclusively on a \texttt{Reacher} agent's implicit world model are quasi-optimal on out-of-distribution, velocity-based goals despite position-only training -- suggesting that agents contain hidden generalisation capabilities and providing a new lens into the connection between model-based, model-free, and goal-conditioned RL.
Authors: Dayun Ju, Chanyoung Kim, Sunyoung Jung, Hyo-Jung Jung, Chena Lee, Younjung Park, Seong Jae Hwang
Abstract: Segmenting the temporomandibular joint (TMJ) disc from MRI is essential for accurate diagnosis of internal derangement, yet it remains unreliable in practice due to its small size, low contrast, and morphological variability. Existing methods, primarily adapted from general segmentation architectures, often produce fragmented or anatomically inconsistent masks, leading to unstable measurements of disc position and shape for downstream diagnosis. To address these challenges, we propose TISC, a TMJ disc segmentation framework that integrates semantic anchoring with clinical metadata-guided boundary refinement. The framework first establishes robust disc localization in the foundation model feature space via a Prototypical Semantic Anchoring (PSA) module that aggregates adjacent-slice MedDINOv3 features and derives a prototype-driven similarity map. It then performs targeted boundary refinement through a Clinical-Metadata Point Refinement (C-MPR) module, with point-wise predictions modulated by Mouth Open Limitation (MOL), a clinical indicator associated with disc displacement without reduction. On a large-scale cohort of 2,488 PD MRI volumes from 1,300 patients, our method achieves up to a 4.96 Dice improvement over strong baselines across diverse architectures, delivering more anatomically coherent and clinically reliable TMJ disc segmentation.
Authors: Yitian Zhou, Chaoning Zhang, Zhenzhen Huang, Haoxuan Yu, Jiaquan Zhang, Yiran Li, Fan Mo, Kuien Liu, Jie Zou, Caiyan Qin, Yang Yang
Abstract: Non-stationary partial differential equations (PDEs) arise throughout scientific computing, where the dominant frequency content and energy distribution can drift over time. While efficient in PDE solving, many spectral neural operators apply a shared spectral response across rollout stages, leading to mismatch with time-varying spectra in non-stationary systems. To address this issue, we propose Time-Frequency Gated Spectral Neural Operator (TF-SNO), a state-adaptive framework with learnable time-frequency gating inside spectral blocks. TF-SNO extracts compact frequency-domain and physical-space statistics from the current state to generate modulation coefficients, enabling the spectral response to evolve with the dynamics. TF-SNO learns temporal variation implicitly from the evolving state without introducing an explicit time dimension or time embedding, keeping the modeling complexity low. We further embed the adaptive operator blocks to accurately capture the multi-scale features, thereby improving long-horizon stability. Experiments on six non-stationary PDE benchmarks in 1D and 2D demonstrate that TF-SNO significantly reduces prediction errors and improves robustness compared to strong baselines, with particularly clear gains in long rollout, suggesting the effectiveness of state-dependent spectral adaptation in modeling non-stationary physical systems.
Authors: Han Jang, Junhyeok Lee, Songsoo Kim, Chae Young Lim, Hyeonjin Goh, Heeseong Eum, Kyu Sung Choi
Abstract: Medical Vision-Language Models (Med-VLMs) achieve strong expert-level performance, yet their ability to generate patient-accessible descriptions remains underexplored. With the 21st Century Cures Act now mandating immediate patient access to diagnostic imaging results, evaluating whether Med-VLMs can bridge this Expert-Lay Gap is both urgent and clinically consequential for patient education and shared decision-making. To this end, we introduce MedLayXPlain, the first large-scale multimodal benchmark and evaluation framework for Medical Lay Language Generation (MLLG). MedLayXPlain-122K provides 122,789 region-grounded samples across 8 imaging modalities from 12 publicly available source datasets, each comprising a medical image with paired expert and lay captions anchored in a three-level Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) ontology hierarchy spanning 7 semantic groups, 43 semantic types, and 2,411 medical concepts. Lay captions are constructed via Hierarchical Ontology-Verified Refinement (HOVER), a three-step pipeline combining patient-centric vocabulary mapping, LLM-based constrained rewriting, and cross-model visual verification to enforce semantic equivalence while preventing hallucination. We further introduce MedLayEval, a lightweight 3B evaluator distilled from a 27B verifier that scores expert-lay alignment across five clinically grounded attributes, addressing the poor correlation between standard NLG metrics and clinical judgment. Benchmarking 33 VLMs on MedLayXPlain-122K reveals a systematic Expert-Lay Gap: medical VLMs achieve strong expert captioning but suffer significant lay-register degradation, while general-purpose VLMs produce more accessible language yet lack clinical precision, confirming that neither current paradigm adequately serves patient-facing communication.
Authors: Joo Yull Rhee
Abstract: This paper revisits the grounding problem for large language models in light of recent vector-grounding accounts. I accept the shift from classical symbol grounding to vector grounding, but argue that the current debate remains incomplete in two respects. First, reference is often treated too thinly, as if it were a fixed link between an isolated expression and an object. I argue instead that reference is profile-based, context-sensitive, discourse-level, affectively shaped, and norm-governed. Even in the human case, reference is publicly stabilized through patterns of use, correction, distinction, inference, and continuation rather than through identical private representations. Second, vector grounding requires an account of numerical realization. LLMs do not acquire reference through human perception, memory, intention, embodiment, or understanding. Rather, through optimization, they parameterize linguistic traces of human world-directed practice. In a finite vector system, referential profiles must be distributed, may be superposed, and are recovered through context-sensitive computation. Weights, activations, attention-mediated hidden states, softmax-trained contrasts, and inner-product alignments are the mathematical sites at which inherited linguistic relations become stable and causally active. Mechanistic interpretability findings, including entity-like features, knowledge neurons, and emotion-related activation directions, provide indirect support for this view. They do not show that LLMs possess human reference. They support a more limited thesis: LLMs may possess derivative, language-mediated, profile-based, and numerically structured forms of reference.
Authors: Sergio Lanza, Jae Hee Lee, Stefan Wermter
Abstract: Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in tasks requiring joint understanding of images and text, such as image captioning and Visual Question Answering (VQA), but our understanding of their internal processes remains limited. Recently, Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising tool to support the interpretation of concepts encoded in VLMs. However, most SAE-based approaches focus only on textual or visual concepts separately, ignoring multimodal concepts. This limitation hinders a comprehensive understanding of VLMs, since concepts that integrate both modalities can be misclassified. Moreover, previous visual approaches often produce low-quality visual concept descriptions that are vague or incomplete, limiting their usefulness for understanding model reasoning. We propose a framework based on SAEs to extract and analyze visual, textual, and multimodal concepts from VLMs. For each neuron, we propose a candidate human-interpretable concept and compute the alignment between the concept and the dataset samples using cosine similarity scores. Experiments on a VQA dataset (LLaVA-NeXT) demonstrate that our framework improves visual concept quality by up to 45\% compared to existing SAE-based methods, while maintaining high textual concept quality and enabling systematic identification of multimodal concepts. This work contributes new insights into the conceptual space of VLMs, providing a structured approach to distinguish between visual, textual, and multimodal concepts. The code is available at https://github.com/PHDLanza/Multidata_SAE
Authors: Nishit Singh
Abstract: Reaching global agreement from purely local interactions is a defining problem of collective intelligence, and most models of it assume that all agents share a single communication protocol. We ask what happens when they do not. Using a Neural Cellular Automaton in which a population of cells must solve the density classification task, agreeing on a global majority that no individual can observe, we introduce ``languages'' as sub-populations that read one another's messages through a translation with a tunable ``linguistic distance''. We find that linguistic distance slows consensus, that it produces mild divergence between groups rather than full fragmentation, and that a collective whose shared rule was trained under diverse protocols is robust to mismatch; a homogeneously trained one is not. The findings hold on both a ring and a two-dimensional grid, and admit a natural reading as Ising relaxation, in which a foreign-language region acts as a boundary defect that leaves the system in a higher-energy, partially ordered state. These patterns are qualitatively consistent with effects reported in human group studies, suggesting that distance between communication protocols is a minimal mechanism sufficient to produce them, without anything language-specific.
Authors: Ece Takmaz, Nitin Kumar, Li Kloostra, Jakub Dotlacil
Abstract: Psycholinguistics studies show that human readers fall for coherence illusions: an incoherent discourse can seem coherent simply because a distractor matches what comes next. We investigate whether Dutch language models (6 monolingual and 4 multilingual) show the same behavior on texts that link back to earlier context with words such as 'again' and 'too'. First, we find that surprisal at the critical word tracks human acceptability judgments and eye-tracking data. Models are more surprised by incoherent continuations, but a matching distractor in the prior context reduces this surprisal. Second, attention entropy at the critical position identifies heads that behave differently under coherence vs. incoherence. We find that ablating these heads shows transfer effects across experiments, suggesting a shared mechanism. Third, we introduce energy from the associative-memory literature as a metric to quantify discourse coherence. Taken together, our results show that coherence illusions arise in Dutch LLMs, with entropy and energy exposing mechanisms that operate across settings.
Authors: Azadeh Alavi, Fatemeh Kouchmeshki, Muhammad Usman, Jessica Holien
Abstract: Small quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) studies are difficult when close molecular analogues have different activity labels. This paper asks whether a quantum kernel can add similarity information to a Morgan/Tanimoto fingerprint model, and which molecules account for the change. QBioFusion-QSAR uses quantum multiple kernel learning (QMKL): a support vector machine combines a Morgan/Tanimoto kernel with a quantum fidelity kernel constructed from fold-local components derived from RDKit and Mordred descriptors and Deep-PK features. Linear and radial basis function descriptor kernels are included as classical controls. On the 54-molecule PsychLight-A benchmark, Morgan/Tanimoto was the strongest single representation. In the primary stratified five-fold evaluation, QMKL increased accuracy from 0.815 to 0.833 and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) from 0.613 to 0.645. Matched-regularization auditing attributed the change to N-Me-5-HT and N-Me-tryptamine changing from false-negative to true-positive predictions; activity-cliff subset MCC increased from 0.07 to 0.22. Repeating the five-fold protocol over ten random partitionings showed that learned QMKL did not exceed Morgan/Tanimoto on mean MCC; paired held-out bootstrap intervals for the matched comparison also span zero. These results support QBioFusion-QSAR as an auditable QMKL framework for identifying localized residual quantum-kernel contributions in small-data, activity-cliff-aware ligand classification.
Authors: Tzu-Chieh Wei, Yi-Cheng Lin, Huang-Cheng Chou, Kuan-Yu Chen, Hsin-Yen Sung, Shrikanth Narayanan, Hung-yi Lee
Abstract: As expressive text-to-speech (TTS) and voice conversion (VC) systems increasingly generate non-verbal vocalizations (NVVs) to enhance naturalness, reliable speaker verification (SV) becomes essential to objectively assess identity consistency across both verbal and non-verbal segments. Yet current SV systems generalize poorly to NVVs, and fine-tuning on NVV data causes catastrophic forgetting of speech performance. We present the first systematic study across 10 NVV types and propose a framework combining frozen Data2Vec self-supervised features with ECAPA-TDNN, enhanced by a Mixture of Experts (MoE) module with learned domain-aware routing. A conditional distillation loss on speech inputs via a pretrained teacher retains speech-to-speech accuracy, while a contrastive loss bridges the speech-NVV domain gap. Our method reduces speech-NVV EER from 38.93% to 22.66% over a pretrained baseline, and improves speech EER from 13.17% to 9.24% via distillation.
Authors: Juntong Peng, Qi Chen, Deyuan Qu, Takayuki Shimizu, Yaobin Chen, Ziran Wang
Abstract: Large-scale autonomous fleets rely on teleoperation to resolve rare failures, yet streaming raw sensor data from many vehicles is costly, and remote operators can only monitor a limited number of vehicles at a time. We introduce FleetAgent, a cloud-hosted multimodal large language model (MLLM) assistant that consumes compact vectorized vehicle-to-network (V2N) messages, such as map elements, detected objects, and the ego planned path. It provides a structured natural-language response (including narration, explanation, and evaluation of the plan and scene), along with an intervention urgency score for operator prioritization. To make structured messages compatible with token-based MLLMs, we propose VecFormer, a vector-to-embedding interface with differentiable top-K context selection that bounds context length and GPU KV-cache growth, enabling more efficient batch processing, which is important under the context of cloud-hosted large-scale fleet management. We also construct VecEval, a nuScenes-derived dataset with paired human and synthetic imperfect plans and human-verified language labels, to facilitate the training and evaluation of our proposed system. Our proposed system can reduce uplink payload by up to 625 times compared with raw images and reduce KV-cache memory by 16.54 times compared with original text descriptions. On VecEval, FleetAgent improves Lingo-Judge score by 16.8% and reduces intervention failure rate by 19.9%, compared with Qwen2.5-VL-7B using language descriptions. These results demonstrate that FleetAgent can utilize compact structured V2N messaging to enable efficient, explainable teleoperation monitoring for autonomous fleets.
Authors: Yang Shen, Meghana Madhyastha, Robert Underwood, Bogdan Nicolae, Randal Burns
Abstract: Key-value (KV) caching is a powerful technique for accelerating large language model inference and generation. Inference workloads are large and diverse, which makes them difficult to cache effectively. Existing cache management strategies adopt the least-recently-used policy for evicting cache blocks. However, LRU leads to multiple unrelated workloads flushing each other's caches. To address this, we integrate adaptive caching that dynamically allocates cache space between recently and frequently occurring KV blocks. Evaluations show that it improves the KV cache hit rate by up to 10.8% and reduces time to first token by up to 12.6% over naive vLLM on synthetic document question answering workloads, and 2.1% and 2.0% respectively on real-world conversation workloads. The method generalizes well to batch inference and demonstrates clear interpretability while effectively accommodating diverse workloads.
Authors: Jijian Zhao
Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting achieves exceptional real-time rendering, but its substantial computational and storage demands hinder widespread deployment. Existing accelerated paradigms often aggressively prune primitives for rapid convergence, causing severe loss of high-frequency details. To address this, we tackle the fundamental problem of achieving both exceptional rendering quality and ultra-fast reconstruction speed. In this paper, we propose ACE-GS, a progressive optimization framework tailored for accurate, compressed, and efficient scene representation. We realize that precise primitive management is the key to breaking this trade-off. Therefore, we first design a momentum consistency-guided densification strategy, strictly constraining primitive growth onto authentic geometric manifolds to avoid computational waste while significantly accelerating convergence. Building upon this efficient initialization, we deploy a statistical sensitivity-driven sparsification mechanism to precisely prune redundant primitives, yielding a further compressed footprint. Finally, to thoroughly compensate for the risk of micro-structure loss caused by the aforementioned strict primitive control, we introduce a cross-dimensional residual frequency compensation scheme that explicitly back-injects high-frequency error energy into primitive attributes, perfectly restoring sharp geometric details. Extensive experiments validate our superiority. While maintaining a highly compact scene representation, our system achieves up to 3.7 times training acceleration against the rapid framework Speedy-Splat. Requiring only 3 to 5 minutes to converge, ACE-GS secures the highest structural similarity and achieves a peak PSNR improvement of up to 0.89 dB over the original 3DGS, establishing a new benchmark for ultra-fast and high-fidelity novel view synthesis.
Authors: Tong Shi, Jiacheng Wang, Hui Xie, Ying Li, Aishan Liu, Jinyang Guo, Xianglong Liu
Abstract: OpenPangu models are attractive targets for private and domestic large-language-model deployment, yet their robustness under aggressive post-training quantization on Ascend NPUs has not been systematically characterized. This paper conducts a controlled empirical study of OpenPangu 1B and 7B models on Huawei Ascend 910B1 NPUs. We evaluate representative weight-only and weight-activation post-training quantization methods, including RTN, GPTQ, AWQ, SmoothQuant, GPTAQ, BiLLM, and SliM-LLM, under a unified calibration and evaluation protocol. Across 18 evaluation tasks, we find that 8-bit weight-only quantization is effectively lossless for both models, while 4-bit quantization remains practical for the 7B model but is visibly more harmful for the 1B model on reasoning, math, and code tasks. Ultra-low precision remains challenging: most 2-bit and binary settings collapse to near-random behavior, and W4A4 SmoothQuant produces non-finite perplexity in our evaluation. These results provide an NPU-oriented accuracy map for selecting OpenPangu quantization settings and highlight the persistent difficulty of extreme low-bit compression.
Authors: Ali Saeidan
Abstract: Early detection of aphid infestation in crops is essential for preventing yield loss and reducing unnecessary pesticide use. Hyperspectral imaging combined with Spectral Information Divergence (SID) analysis offers a non-destructive approach for monitoring plant health; however, deep learning methods applied to hyperspectral data are often limited by small dataset sizes. In this study, a data-efficient generative adversarial network (FastGAN) was employed to augment a hyperspectral SID dataset of faba bean leaves containing healthy and aphid-infested samples. The trained generator produced 10,000 synthetic images preserving structural and spectral characteristics of real samples. Image quality was evaluated using Frechet Inception Distance (FID), demonstrating stable convergence and realistic reconstruction of leaf morphology and infestation patterns. The augmented dataset was used to train four classification architectures: VGG16, ResNet-50, EfficientNet, and Vision Transformer (ViT). Results showed that dataset augmentation significantly improved classification robustness, with performance progressively increasing from classical convolutional networks to transformer-based models. The ViT model achieved the highest accuracy and F1-scores, while EfficientNet provided strong balanced performance and ResNet-50 showed moderate improvements over VGG16. Confusion matrix analysis confirmed reduced false negatives and improved disease detection when using advanced architectures. The findings demonstrate that FastGAN-based augmentation effectively enhances hyperspectral plant disease classification and that transformer-based models provide the most reliable discrimination between healthy and infested leaves.
Authors: Borui Cai, Yao Zhao
Abstract: Existing sequence models, including RNNs, LSTMs, continuous-time networks, and Transformers, share a common structural principle: layer-wise dynamics, where all neurons in the same layer co-evolve through a shared parameterized operator, leaving individual neurons no freedom to evolve independently. Yet in many complex dynamical systems, rich global behavior emerges precisely from locally evolving units interacting through structured connectivity. Inspired by this principle, we introduce Topological Neural Dynamics (TND), a sequence modeling framework that shifts computation from layer-wise to neuron-wise dynamics. TND represents a neural system as a directed neuron graph, an interaction operator, and a local dynamics function, where each neuron evolves independently and collective computation emerges from interactions through the explicit graph topology. We instantiate TND as a discrete-time graph-coupled dynamical system and evaluate it as a case study on a behavior cloning task in single-player Pong. Compared with Vanilla RNN, Sparse RNN, LSTM, Closed-form continuous-time neural network (CfC), and Transformer baselines, TND achieves the best catch rate and a mean of 17.47 consecutive catches per round, more than three times that of the strongest baseline. These results suggest that shifting from layer-wise to neuron-wise dynamics provides an effective inductive bias for sequence modeling.
Authors: Xinwei Liu (Sun Yat-sen University, China), Junyuan Liang (Sun Yat-sen University, China), Zicong Hong (EPFL, Switzerland), Jianting Zhang (Purdue University, USA), Wuhui Chen (Sun Yat-sen University, China)
Abstract: Augmenting model-free reinforcement learning (RL) with representations learned through observation dynamics prediction (observation-predictive RL) can improve sample efficiency and performance, with minor modifications and limited additional computation. However, this approach still struggles in challenging tasks with low-dimensional observations. In this paper, we identify a key factor behind this problem: unbalanced reconstruction losses across observation dimensions, where dimensions with larger value ranges dominate the loss. This encourages the agent to neglect dimensions with relatively small ranges, leading to degraded performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel normalization method tailored to online RL, which normalizes low-dimensional observations and balances the resulting losses and gradients. Beyond balancing reconstruction losses, observation normalization enables dynamics prediction to be performed in a normalized observation space, thereby providing a unified treatment of low- and high-dimensional inputs (e.g., physical states and images). Building on this idea, we further introduce Normalized Observation Space Dynamics-Augmented Q-learning (NASDAQ), a framework for observation-predictive RL applicable across diverse domains. NASDAQ learns state-action representations by coupling value learning with two auxiliary tasks: short-term value prediction and next normalized observation prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NASDAQ achieves competitive or superior performance compared with state-of-the-art model-based and self-predictive RL methods, while requiring significantly less training wall-time.
Authors: Jiacheng Wang, Xinjia He, Qi Ding, Yutao Yang, Jie Zhou, Liyang Yu, Liang Dou, Qin Chen
Abstract: Continual learning (CL) is commonly studied under the assumption that sequential tasks are semantically related or structurally similar. However, in highly heterogeneous settings, where tasks differ substantially in reasoning patterns and input-output formats, existing methods often suffer from catastrophic forgetting and inefficient capacity allocation. To address this challenge, we propose Task-differentiated Atomic Skill Expansion and Routing (\texttt{TASER}), a CL framework that jointly determines how many new atomic skills to introduce for each task and which skills to activate. The framework first uses atomic skill incremental learning to dynamically expand capacity based on task divergence and model uncertainty. It then applies orthogonality-enhanced skill detection to ensure these skills remain semantically distinct and independently reusable. Finally, a skill dynamic routing mechanism composes task-relevant skills through lightweight task-conditioned gating. We further introduce \texttt{HeteroCLBench}, a highly heterogeneous benchmark for CL, comprising 19 diverse tasks across 9 cognitive dimensions under a standardized sequential protocol. Experiments on \texttt{HeteroCLBench} show that \texttt{TASER} consistently outperforms strong baselines by improving plasticity and reducing catastrophic forgetting.
Authors: Lujain Ibrahim, Myra Cheng, Cinoo Lee, Pranav Khadpe, Desmong Ong, Dan Jurafsky, Diyi Yang
Abstract: Recent work has raised concerns about the influence of sycophantic AI on user judgment and relationships. One proposed mitigation, which has received regulatory attention, is to warn users about potentially harmful AI behaviors such as sycophancy. In a preregistered experiment in which participants (N = 2,610) discussed real interpersonal conflicts with an AI system, we test whether warning labels mitigate sycophancy's influence. We find that a basic AI disclosure (``This chatbot is AI'') has no detectable effect. Labeling the system as sycophantic (``...may agree with you and validate you even when you are wrong...'') does shift users' perceptions, reducing perceived objectivity and trust, but it does not reliably reduce sycophancy's influence on users' self-perceived rightness or their willingness to repair the conflict. Our results reveal a gap between AI perception and AI influence: by shifting perception without reducing influence, warning-based interventions may offer a false sense of protection. Addressing the harms of sycophancy will therefore require understanding the specific mechanisms through which it shapes judgment, and improving model behavior itself.
Authors: Hugo Attali, Rachid El Jouhri
Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for learning on graph-structured data by iteratively propagating and aggregating information across edges. However, conventional message passing schemes often suffer from over-squashing, whereby exponentially large neighborhoods are compressed into fixed-dimensional embeddings, impeding effective long-range dependency learning. In this work, we introduce Ramanujan Propagation, a graph rewiring strategy that leverages Ramanujan graphs to alleviate topological bottlenecks in GNNs. We first establish that suitably chosen Ramanujan graphs guarantee non-negative resistance curvature, which mitigates over-squashing and facilitates efficient information flow. We then propose an algorithmic framework to construct a Ramanujan rewired graph that preserves the local connectivity of the original graph. Our experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms nine state-of-the-art rewiring techniques. These results establish Ramanujan graphs as a rigorous structural prior for scalable, topology-aware message passing in GNNs.
Authors: Cong Wan, Zeyu Guo, Zijian Cai, Jiangyang Li, SongLin Dong, Lin Peng, Xiangyang Luo, Zhiheng Ma, Yihong Gong
Abstract: Massive unstructured multimodal streams suffer from high "data entropy," impeding both efficient human knowledge acquisition and high-quality AI post-training. Existing passive annotation paradigms, heavily reliant on heuristic rules or general VLMs, are costly, monotonous, and fail to unlock the deep procedural logic embedded in raw data. We elevate data processing to a learnable capability, proposing a paradigm shift towards Agentic Data Tailoring, which actively refining and structuring data to align with diverse user and downstream intents. To overcome the data scarcity bottleneck in training such high-order capabilities, we design a two-stage pipeline grounding generative semantic synthesis in deterministic Factual Anchors, yielding a large-scale dataset spanning five core physical and digital domains. Building upon this, $\text{DataClaw}_0$-9B model synergizes Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), achieving robust alignment with complex refinement and tailoring intents. To systematically quantify this capability, we construct $\text{DataClaw}_0$-val, the first benchmark dedicated to data refinement. Crucially, we adopt downstream post-training as the ultimate validation touchstone. Evaluations on video generation, real-world VQA, and GUI navigation confirm that $\text{DataClaw}_0$ delivers high-information-density tailored data, facilitating efficient model adaptation to new tasks under limited training data regimes. Project page: https://czjdsg.github.io/MakeAnyData
Authors: Kees Jan de Vries, Mustafa Radha, Mathijs de Jong
Abstract: Many machine learning applications rely on heterogeneous event streams to make predictions, either causally as events arrive or bidirectionally over complete sequences. We propose SOHET (Sequence Of Heterogeneous Events Transformer), a hierarchical architecture combining event-type-specific tabular encoders with temporal and type embeddings, processed by a causal or bidirectional transformer. We introduce three self-supervised pre-training objectives for the causal setting. On a proprietary large-scale real-world Booking.com fraud detection task with 17 event types, SOHET outperforms FlexTPP, NAPPT, and CIPPT by 5.8%. Pre-training yields an additional 2.6% gain and 2.4% faster convergence. On the EBES benchmark, bidirectional SOHET matches or exceeds the published best on 6 out of 8 tasks.
Authors: Kexin Li, Xiao Hu, Ilya Grishchenko, David Lie
Abstract: Recent advances in generative audio have made voice cloning increasingly effortless, enabling voice fraud, impersonation, and other forms of unauthorized use. A common attack finetunes a speech generation model on recordings of a target speaker, allowing the model to synthesize speech in that speaker's voice. Audio watermarking offers a promising defense by embedding detectable signals into audio. A practical watermark must satisfy two key properties: robustness and radioactivity. Existing audio watermarking methods typically embed signals into low-level representations, such as waveforms or spectrograms, which makes them vulnerable to signal-level manipulations and limits their transfer to downstream models. We introduce LambdaMark -- the first generic radioactive watermarking scheme. Unlike all previous approaches, LambdaMark achieves generic radioactivity by embedding multi-bit watermark information into semantic audio latent representations. Our watermarks have semantic interpretation and are thus more likely to be learned by a downstream model through finetuning. LambdaMark includes a lightweight watermark encoder to inject multi-bit message-dependent perturbations into semantic audio representations and a decoder to detect watermark presence and recover the embedded bit information. Encoder and decoder are trained using a custom multi-component loss that preserves fidelity of the watermarked audio, increases bit-level recovery rate, and improves robustness against common distortions and adversarial removal attempts. Experiments show that LambdaMark achieves near-perfect robustness under common distortions. LambdaMark is also the only watermark that is robust against all evaluated removal attacks. Furthermore, LambdaMark exhibits general and robust radioactivity and remains robust to distortions and adversarial removal attacks even on the generated outputs of those finetuned models.
Authors: Alice Ross, Ariadna Sanchez, Elin Kanhov, Catherine Lai, \'Eva Sz\'ekely
Abstract: This work examines sexualised AI-generated English-speaking voices offered by a popular commercial platform. New technologies may enable sexual empowerment and greater diversity in gender expression, yet toxic masculinity, heteronormativity, and the abuse of women and LGBTQ+ people remain pervasive online. Drawing on a Feminist HCI perspective, we examine how commercial voice AI systems reproduce and circulate particular performances of gender. We conducted a listening experiment with a diverse group of listeners, combining quantitative adjective selection, qualitative free-text responses, and acoustic analysis. Participants evaluated male- and female-coded voices presented with either sexualised scripts or neutral text. Results reveal a narrow range of gender expression, largely binary and heteronormative. Female-coded voices are more frequently described using sexualised and submissive terms, while male-coded voices are more often associated with dominance and positive traits.
Authors: Nichula Wasalathilaka, Abhijit Das, Imran Razzak, Dwarikanath Mahapatra
Abstract: Medical image re-identification (MedReID) enables longitudinal patient linkage but remains vulnerable to shortcut learning and often produces decisions that clinicians cannot audit against named anatomy. We propose Graph-of-Differences (GoD), which grounds identity comparisons in explicit anatomical structure. Each image is represented as an anatomy graph whose nodes correspond to named anatomical regions; given an image pair, soft node correspondence is established, and differences are computed over matched anatomy. A graph-level difference alignment objective ties these anatomy-matched differences to the global backbone difference, ensuring the retrieval signal is anchored in homologous structures rather than arbitrary spatial tokens. Explanations are defined over named graph nodes and quantitatively audited via node insertion/deletion tests, replacing unstable pixel heatmaps with verifiable structure-level evidence. On internal benchmarks, GoD improves Rank-1 by +7.1 pp on fundus and +3.1 pp on CXR over a strong frozen-backbone baseline, with further gains on zero-shot external transfers confirming that anatomy grounding improves both accuracy and generalization. Code is available at https://github.com/GenMI-Lab/GoD.git.
Authors: Dwarikanath Mahapatra, Abhijit Das, Behzad Bozorgtabar, Zongyuan Ge, Sudipta Roy, Deepak Nayak, Mauricio Reyes, Imran Razzak
Abstract: Multimodal medical imaging fuses complementary anatomical and functional information, yet modalities frequently disagree in pathologically heterogeneous regions. Current segmentation models handle this in one of two inadequate ways: deterministic fusion that averages away disagreement, or post-hoc uncertainty estimation decoupled from the fusion process that produces it. Both obscure the clinically critical question: why is this prediction unreliable? We present EnTrust, a framework that treats inter-modal conflict as the primary source of predictive uncertainty. Our EnFuse module decomposes multimodal features into three disentangled components: shared anatomical consensus (F_c), modality-specific cues (F_{u,m}), and spatially localized conflict signals (F_{cf}), with independence enforced via a cross-covariance objective. This structured decomposition conditions SegDiff, a diffusion-based generative segmentation model whose sampled hypotheses diverge specifically in regions of modal disagreement. TrustMap then translates this hypothesis divergence into calibrated, pixel-wise uncertainty using ensemble entropy, conflict-guided perturbation probing, and a learned calibration head, enabling clinicians to understand not only where predictions are uncertain, but why. Across four benchmarks spanning brain, cardiac, lesion, and oncology domains, EnTrust achieves state-of-the-art segmentation accuracy while reducing calibration error by 40% compared to the strongest baseline. Notably, it outperforms 5x deep ensembles using a single model at roughly half the memory footprint. Code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/GenMI-Lab/EnTrust.git.
Authors: Mathieu Cyrille Simon, Pascal Frossard, Christophe De Vleeschouwer
Abstract: This paper explores unsupervised disentangled representation learning from a functional perspective. We define latent concepts as factors that influence observations through locally orthogonal directions, formalized as an orthogonality constraint on the Jacobian of the generative mapping. We prove that this condition yields identifiability of general nonlinear generative models, without requiring statistical independence or causal assumptions, provided the latent domain admits all combinations of factor values. Experiments with orthogonality-regularized normalizing flows empirically confirm the theory, demonstrate reliable recovery of ground-truth factors, and shed light on the success of VAEs. These findings challenge the prevailing impossibility claims for unsupervised disentanglement and provide a principled alternative foundation.
Authors: Sebastian Neef, Luca Jungnickel, Antonio Benjamin Buchholz, Valene Spence, Vicente Birke Gonzalez
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising tool for automated vulnerability detection, yet their effectiveness on web-specific vulnerabilities remains to be explored. This work benchmarks six frontier (Claude Opus 4.6, Codex GPT-5.4, Gemini 3.1-pro-preview) and open-weight models (Qwen 3.5, Qwen 3 Coder Next, MiniMax M2.5) on their ability to detect real-world web vulnerabilities using static analysis in WordPress plugins, including SQL injection, stored cross-site scripting, path traversal, and remote code execution. Using five prompt designs of varying structure, scope, and complexity across three experiment iterations, we aim to answer how model and prompt choice affects vulnerability detection. Our results show that all models are capable of detecting valid security issues, but the detection rate varies depending on the model and prompt. For example, Claude Opus 4.6 achieved the highest web vulnerability detection rate (63%), while open-weight MiniMax M2.5 performs on par with other frontier models (48%), and self-hosted Qwen 3.5 only achieved 35%. We show that scoped prompts that narrow the vulnerability scope outperform open-ended ones, whereas the prompt complexity has little impact. Surprisingly, no model achieved full reporting consistency across three experiment iterations, with some as low as 50%. Our experiments demonstrate the opportunities and limits of LLM-based vulnerability detection, as no model correctly identified one baseline vulnerability in one of the plugins. Additionally, we derive practical lessons learned for security practitioners and publish all code and data to support future research.
Authors: Yeqi Huang, Yanwei Ye, Guomin Chen, Wenhao Su, Bin Gong, Jialian Li, Zhan Lu, Yangshen Deng, Xuan Sun, Le Xu, Luo Mai
Abstract: Agentic AI applications compose multiple model calls and tool executions, creating new scheduling challenges for GPU-CPU clusters. Their inference time and model-call structure often depend on prompt semantics, making conventional scheduling approaches ineffective for low-latency serving. This paper presents SwarmX, a system that implements agentic scheduling for low-latency agentic applications. SwarmX uses scheduling-specific neural predictors to capture prompt, device, runtime, and target-model features; exposes distributional predictions to routers and scalers for tail-aware decisions; and provides mechanisms for predictor training and online adaptation. These predictors and mechanisms are integrated into a scheduler-agent framework that provides a common substrate for integration with existing scheduling and model-serving infrastructure. We evaluate SwarmX using production deployment (nearly one thousand GPUs and one million CPU cores) and controlled experiments on a 128-GPU testbed. Across multi-agent code generation, deep research, and multimodal agentic workflows, SwarmX reduces tail latency by up to 61.5% compared to state-of-the-art schedulers and sustains up to 2x the throughput of production schedulers under the same SLO.
Authors: Sampath Rapuri, Jeremy Ko, Benjamin D. Killeen, Russell H. Taylor, Mathias Unberath
Abstract: The ability to synthesize realistic X-ray images has catalyzed the development of AI models for X-ray image-guided procedures, which otherwise suffer from a lack of available annotated data. Prior work has demonstrated the effectiveness of mechanistic simulation of digitally reconstructed radiographs (DRRs) as a training data source for a myriad of tasks, including segmentation and anatomical landmark detection, with comparable or superior performance to real data training. However, mechanistic DRR synthesis still relies on the availability of annotated high-resolution anatomical models. Deriving these from CT images of real patients or specimens imposes an undesirable bottleneck on data quantity and variability. In this work, we explore two methods for synthesizing training data: (1) a 3D conditional latent diffusion model that generates CT volumes to use as inputs for mechanistic DRR generation without real, 3D anatomical models, and (2) a view-conditioned 2D diffusion model that produces synthetic X-rays. In controlled experiments, we demonstrate that synthetic 2D diffusion-based X-rays can be used to train an anatomical landmark detection model that generalized to real X-ray images with performance rivaling that of a model trained on real X-ray images. Thus, we provide preliminary evidence that synthetic, 2D diffusion-based training data can substitute for real X-ray data, identifying a promising avenue towards generating large, diverse datasets for training robust AI models in interventional X-ray imaging.
Authors: Arlindo Luciano Tulumba Roberto, Hyungjoon Kim
Abstract: Despite recent progress in Vision-Language Models (VLMs), mixed-domain image-caption datasets for both general-purpose and CCTV-based video surveillance systems remain limited. To address this gap, we introduce a large-scale multimodal dataset comprising 141,364 images, 981,947 image-level captions, 1,742,264 region-level captions, and 1,391,779 bounding box annotations. Each image is associated with an average of seven image-level captions describing different aspects of the overall scene, as well as seven region-level captions for each annotated bounding box. These complementary caption types are designed to help VLMs learn fine-grained visual attributes, including object categories, estimated sizes, colors, actions, states, and surrounding environmental context. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the dataset on two important downstream tasks: image captioning and object detection. Experimental results show that lightweight VLMs, including SmolVLM-256M-Instruct, BLIP, BLIP2, and Qwen2.5-VL 3B-Instruct, can be effectively fine-tuned using our dataset. Our dataset and code are publicly available at https://zenodo.org/records/20418601.
Authors: Alfarizy Alfarizy, Hung Truong Thanh Nguyen, Ren\'e Richard, Roozbeh Razavi-Far, Hung Cao
Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models are often described as ideal for resource-constrained inference. Each token activates only a small subset of experts, so the per-token compute cost, in floating-point operations (FLOPs), resembles that of a much smaller dense model. Whether that FLOP advantage survives in practice is far less clear. We ask whether MoE models actually run faster and cheaper than comparable dense models on consumer-grade and edge hardware. We benchmark OLMoE-1B-7B (1.3 B active of 6.9 B total) against three dense baselines on an Apple M2 Pro and an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano 8 GB through \texttt{llama.cpp}, measuring throughput, memory, and on-device energy. The answer is device-dependent: OLMoE's active-parameter advantage is only partly realised on the laptop (~10% behind the same-active Llama-3.2-1B) and erodes on the edge device (~31% behind, at 2.1$\times$ the energy per token, with peak memory at the 8 GB ceiling). Patching \texttt{llama.cpp} to time the decode graph node-by-node shows routing accounts for under 9% of MoE-block compute on the cleaner edge backend, so the gap reflects total-parameter memory footprint, expert dispatch, and KV-cache pressure rather than routing. The implication is that on bandwidth-bound edge hardware, inference cost tracks total parameters, not active ones, and sparse activation does not buy back what the device is constrained on. These findings are bounded to one MoE model at this parameter scale and two devices, and we release the full measurement harness and per-run data.
Authors: Youngwon Choi, Hyeonyu Kim, Taeyoun Kwon, Donghyuk Jung, Myeongkyun Cho
Abstract: Task-oriented voice agents need to map spoken user requests to structured outputs such as semantic frames, executable actions, and function calls. A common approach is to cascade ASR with a text-based LLM, but transcription errors can propagate to downstream structured output generation, especially under noisy conditions. Spoken language models (SLMs) offer a direct speech-based alternative, yet adapting them to new tasks typically requires paired speech-target annotations. Motivated by this gap, we present CORTIS, a text-only adaptation framework for task-oriented voice agents. CORTIS fine-tunes SLMs using text-form task supervision, enabling speech-based structured output generation at inference time without task-specific speech-target annotations during adaptation. We evaluate CORTIS on two Qwen2.5-Omni backbones and three task-oriented speech datasets, including an in-house product dataset, and compare it with matched ASR-LLM cascades trained with the same text-form task supervision. Results show that CORTIS performs competitively with matched cascades and offers clearer advantages under acoustic degradation, particularly in preserving high-level task semantics. These findings suggest that text-only fine-tuning of SLMs can serve as a practical adaptation strategy for voice agents when paired speech-target data are costly to collect.
Authors: Jumana Alsubhi, Ahmed Alhusayni, Abdulrahman Gharawi, Israa Hamdine, Alshaymaa Allahim, Lamees Alhumaid, Ahmad Shabana, Rafik Madani
Abstract: This paper evaluates the performance of twelve Small Language Models (SLMs) on Arabic natural language processing tasks. The study introduces a benchmark of 240 Arabic test items distributed across eight domains and ten language skills, covering both comprehension-oriented and generation-oriented tasks. All models were evaluated under a controlled zero-shot setting using a standardized Arabic-only prompt template. Model responses were assessed through a multi-model LLM-as-a-judge framework involving GPT-4.1 Mini, Claude Haiku 4.5, and DeepSeek-Chat, with scores aggregated across judges and analyzed by task, skill, and model family. The results show that Gemma 3 (12B) achieved the highest overall score (4.548/5), followed by Aya and C4AI Command Arabic. The observed results suggest that model size alone does not explain Arabic SLM performance. Models with stronger Arabic alignment and more reliable instruction-following behavior tended to perform better across tasks. Common failure patterns among lower-performing models include prompt leakage, hallucination, language drift, incomplete generation, and weak task adherence. Overall, the benchmark provides a structured reference for evaluating compact Arabic language models and supports future work on efficient, reliable, and culturally appropriate Arabic AI systems.
Authors: Basheer Qolomany, Mrinalini Deverapall, Adeyinka Laiyemo, Zaki Sherif, Mori Yuichi, Omer Ahmed, Hassan Brim, Hassan Ashktorab
Abstract: Risk stratification for advanced colorectal polyps typically relies on colonoscopy and/or pathology findings. However, there is growing interest in whether non-invasive features available prior to colonoscopy can help identify patients at higher risk. Such approaches may enhance clinical decision-making by prioritizing surveillance for individuals most likely to harbor high-risk polyps, when colonoscopy resources are limited while potentially reducing unnecessary procedures in lower-risk patients. Importantly, the use of non-invasive, pre-procedural information may also help promote more equitable access to risk stratification, particularly in settings where colonoscopy resources are limited or unevenly distributed. We aimed to develop and externally validate machine learning models to predict high-risk colorectal polyps using only non-invasive, pre-colonoscopy demographic, clinical, and behavioral features in a diverse, predominantly African American, urban cohort. We conducted a retrospective cohort study using demographic, lifestyle, and comorbidity data from patients who underwent colonoscopy at Howard University Hospital to develop and validate several machine learning models, including neural networks, random forest, support vector machines (SVM), Naive Bayes, logistic regression, decision trees, k-nearest neighbors (KNN), and XGBoost, for predicting high-risk colorectal polyps. High-risk polyps (HRP) were defined as villous or tubullovillous adenomas, high-grade dysplasia, polyps >= 10 mm in size, and/or the presence of >= 3 polyps per procedure; all other cases were classified as low-risk polyps (LRP). The dataset included 4,681 patients from 2015-2022 used for internal validation and 1,562 patients from 2023-2024 used for external validation.
Authors: Nikolaos Tsagkas, Andreas Sochopoulos, Chris Xiaoxuan Lu, Oisin Mac Aodha, Alexandros Kouris
Abstract: Deploying generalist robotic agents in the real world requires transferable skills. Specifically, a policy trained to clone a behavior from object-specific demonstrations must generalize beyond that object, otherwise data collection requirements become intractable. Recently, fine-tuning of pre-trained billion-parameter Vision-Language Models (VLMs), initially on large-scale robot datasets and then on fewer scenario-specific demonstrations, has emerged as the predominant paradigm for designing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. While these policies achieve state-of-the-art manipulation performance in-distribution, they remain brittle to minor spatial, semantic, and task variations. In this work, we address the inability of current models to decouple the declarative (i.e., concepts and entity semantics) from the procedural knowledge (i.e., how to do something) encoded in their parameters, which is a fundamental bottleneck for zero-shot skill transfer to novel objects. To address this, we propose w$^{2}$VLA, a new VLA model with restructured information flow. Rather than feeding all multimodal tokens from the VLM encoder into a large, opaque transformer-based action expert, our approach modulates the robot state sequence with visual, spatial, and skill information in a compositional and interpretable manner. Unlike popular, state-of-the-art VLAs, we show that our modular approach successfully decouples knowledge representations, enabling robust behavior cloning and unprecedented zero-shot skill transfer capabilities across dissimilar, unseen objects.
Authors: Neeraj Mohan Sushma, Aditya Nagarsekar, Cabrel Teguemne Fokam, Robin Schiewer, Amit Kumar Pal, Anand Subramoney, David Kappel
Abstract: Modern deep neural network architectures are trained via backpropagation, which requires errors to be sequentially propagated through all layers before parameters can be updated. This introduces two limitations: locking, where layer-wise updates are strictly interdependent and cannot proceed in parallel, and the weight transport problem, which requires symmetric forward and backward pathways for exact gradient computation. These constraints restrict parallelism, increase memory and communication overhead, and pose challenges for scalable learning. In this work, we propose Hierarchical Block-Local Learning (HBLL), a framework that decomposes deep neural networks into hierarchically linked blocks trained using local learning objectives derived from variational principles, eliminating the need for full end-to-end backpropagation while maintaining effective information propagation across the network. HBLL is the first algorithm that is able to train deep neural networks in $\mathcal{O}(\log N)$ parallel time complexity, where $N$ is the number of network layers. We show that HBLL implicitly defines a family of subnetworks corresponding to different hierarchical paths, enabling flexible inference with different effective numbers of layers. We evaluate HBLL on a set of challenging vision and language modeling tasks, achieving competitive performance. We also extend HBLL to recurrent sequence architectures, applying to settings that otherwise rely on backpropagation through time.
Authors: Yueci Deng
Abstract: Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) treat the environment as a black box, estimating policy gradients from sampled rewards; this process demands millions of interactions and relies on high-variance advantage estimates. When environment dynamics are differentiable, the return is an end-to-end differentiable function of the policy parameters, enabling exact gradient computation via backpropagation through simulation. We term this approach Analytic Policy Gradients (APG) and evaluate it against PPO on four continuous control tasks of increasing dynamical complexity: a one-dimensional point-mass target-reaching task, a 2D point-mass navigation task with obstacle avoidance, a 2D rigid-body T-block pushing task, and a 7-DOF Franka FR3 end-effector reaching task. Both algorithms share identical model architectures, observation normalization, and optimizer settings. To decouple sample efficiency from compute efficiency, we design a multi-axis evaluation protocol that records performance against environment steps and gradient steps. We report a segmented backpropagation scheme with MC and critic-based bootstrap modes that mitigates gradient degradation on long-horizon tasks, and present ablations over segment length and bootstrap strategy.
Authors: Jin-Duk Park, Won-Yong Shin
Abstract: Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have demonstrated significant success in capturing complex user-item relationships for collaborative filtering (CF). However, due to their reliance on extensive model training, training-free graph filtering (GF)-based CF methods have emerged as a promising alternative, offering computational efficiency by smoothing graph signals via matrix operations. In particular, polynomial GF-based approaches demonstrate improved accuracy through their ability to design more expressive and flexible filtering functions. Despite these advantages, existing GF methods suffer from a critical memory bottleneck: they necessitate storing the full item similarity graph, incurring prohibitive memory costs for large-scale datasets, which limits their practical applicability. To tackle this challenge, we propose Mem-GF (Memory-efficient GF), a new GF-based CF method that departs from conventional designs by principally leveraging the structure of Krylov subspaces as a core mechanism for approximating polynomial graph filters without explicitly storing the item similarity graph. We theoretically analyze the minimum Krylov subspace size that guarantees lossless approximation. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that Mem-GF achieves up to 5.74$\times$ lower memory usage and 4.38$\times$ speedup in runtime, while consistently exceeding the recommendation accuracy of state-of-the-art GF and GCN-based methods. Mem-GF robustly scales to datasets with tens of millions of interactions, establishing itself as a practically viable and theoretically grounded solution for efficient CF.
Authors: Serdar Ozsoy, Lars Doorenbos, Federico Spurio, Gianpiero Francesca, Juergen Gall
Abstract: Procedural mistake detection is important for quality control and user assistance across many disciplines. Recent work in this field has achieved significant gains by using the reasoning capabilities of Video-Language Models (VLMs) as components within multi-stage pipelines, which consist of separate modules for supervised temporal action segmentation, error detection, and explainability. Consequently, they remain dependent on tailored training datasets and require task-specific training, limiting their wider applicability. To remedy this, we introduce zero-shot procedural mistake detection and propose a unified Zero-shot Procedural Mistake detection (ZeProM) framework that jointly solves procedural mistake detection and temporal action segmentation with a single pre-trained VLM. By evaluating our framework on two canonical mistake detection benchmarks, EgoPER and CaptainCook4D, we find that ZeProM can perform these tasks successfully, while approaching, or even outperforming, the performance of fully supervised methods. For instance, we achieve a 4.4 point improvement in EDA and a 2.0 point improvement in F1@.5 on average over all five EgoPER tasks compared to the strongest supervised methods. Overall, our results show the potential of unified methods for procedural mistake detection, and we hope this will steer the field away from highly complex pipelines and toward more generally applicable solutions.
Authors: Bonan Wang, Letian Tao, Bin Shuai, Jiaxin Gao, Wenxin Zhao, Wei Xiong, Kehua Sheng, Bo Zhang, Yang Guan, Shengbo Eben Li
Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning is pivotal for closed-loop autonomous driving yet remains constrained by severe bottlenecks in sampling efficiency. Standard parallel sampling mitigates this but suffers from the straggler effect, where the premature termination of a single environment necessitates a synchronized batch re-initialization, leading to suboptimal sample utilization and prohibitive re-initialization latency. To address this, we propose FAST, a synchronous parallel framework tailored for closed-loop simulation. Specifically, FAST employs Dynamic Parallel Sampling Alignment (DPSA) to maintain vectorization synchronization by extending terminated episodes via virtual continuation, thereby decoupling the sampling loop from individual terminations. By dynamically triggering global truncation based on the termination rate of parallel clips, FAST effectively eliminates the bottleneck of premature resets without sacrificing data diversity. Furthermore, to strictly preserve theoretical consistency, we incorporate a Scaled Mask-Padding Optimization (SMPO) that leverages validity masking and adaptive loss normalization to nullify the bias from auxiliary padding data. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that FAST achieves at least a 1.78 times wall-clock speedup over the single-clip baseline while preserving statistical unbiasedness.
Authors: Lucas Fagan, Michele Tarquini, Ali Shehper, Maksymilian Manko, Angus Gruen, Coco Huang, Giorgi Butbaia, Davide Passaro, Sergei Gukov
Abstract: Mathematical search problems present a unique challenge for Reinforcement Learning (RL) due to vast search spaces and sparse rewards. In previous works, the Andrews-Curtis (AC) conjecture was established as an illustrative example of such problems. In this work, we identify a critical structural barrier in the AC landscape: a "Two-Hump" distribution, where problem instances are either trivially solvable or effectively impossible, with a scarcity of intermediate "hard-but-solvable" instances required for effective learning. We tackle this challenge through two primary avenues: novel data generation techniques to populate the difficulty gap, and significant algorithmic enhancements including the introduction of supermoves and Transformer-based architectures. We demonstrate substantial performance improvements over previous baselines, and release new comprehensive benchmark datasets including AC-19 (125,192 AC-trivial presentations of varying difficulty with length at most 19) and AC-1M (1,136,154 hard AC-trivial presentations of length at most 30), the first large-scale, publicly available datasets of this kind.
Authors: Bharath Pillai, Varun Viswapriyan, Christopher Stewart, Tanya Berger-Wolf, Jenna Kline
Abstract: Scaling wildlife monitoring for real-world conservation deployments requires automated analysis of smart sensors that operate under severe annotation scarcity. We propose leveraging expert knowledge of species activity patterns as an annotation-free validation signal for multimodal monitoring pipelines. We operationalize agreement as the alignment of independently derived hourly activity curves both with each other and with published behavioral priors-a three-way convergence that rules out shared-data confounds and dataset-internal correlation as alternative explanations. Our vision pipeline combines zero-shot species detection via BioCLIP 2, sliced inference to handle deployment-constrained camera positioning, and geometry-based geographic localization from camera trap imagery. Our acoustic pipeline detects species vocalizations via a fine-tuned classifier. We validate the pipeline on a breeding herd of Milu deer and demonstrate that both modalities independently recover activity patterns consistent with known deer behavioral ecology with minimal manual annotation. The framework applies to species detectable in both visual and acoustic modalities for which behavioral priors are documented in the literature, suggesting a practical path toward self-validating wildlife-monitoring pipelines at conservation scale.
Authors: Zijian Fu, Xiangyang Chu, Mengshi Qi, Huadong Ma, Guanghao Zhang, Wei Li
Abstract: Instruction-conditioned trajectory prediction is an emerging problem in autonomous driving, where a model predicts the future ego trajectory not only from visual scene context and historical motion, but also from a natural-language maneuver instruction. This paper presents our submission to the doScenes Instructed Driving Challenge, built upon OmniDrive, a vision-language-action driving agent with 3D perception, reasoning, and planning capabilities. We adapt OmniDrive to the doScenes setting by training it on instruction-annotated nuScenes scenes and generating a 6-second ego trajectory represented by 12 future waypoints. To improve multi-view visual grounding, we further introduce a DVPE-style divided-view perception module into the OmniDrive perception head. Instead of attending globally to all camera features, the proposed module groups query features and image tokens into divided local view spaces and performs visibility-aware cross-attention within each view. This design reduces irrelevant cross-view interference and helps the model better align language instructions with local driving-relevant visual evidence. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/feel12348/doscenes-omnidrive.
Authors: Carson Rodrigues, Oysturn Vas
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have been proposed as hyperparameter-optimization (HPO) advisors that "warm-start" search from prior knowledge, proposing strong configurations in very few evaluations. We test that claim under a budget-matched, multi-seed protocol on eight PMLB tabular benchmarks, comparing an LLM advisor (LLM-OptFlow) against four classical baselines (random search, Optuna-TPE, Gaussian-process Bayesian optimization, and successive halving) over one shared search space, with paired tests and bootstrap 95% CIs across 8 x 5 = 40 (task, seed) units. The finding is cautionary. The advisor's strong first point is not an LLM output at all: like prior LLM-HPO systems the loop is seeded with a fixed default configuration, evaluated before any model call, which alone reaches 88.7% mean best-CV, identical to within 0.01 pp across all seven advisor models tested. The LLM's own proposals add only +0.40 pp of cross-validation accuracy over that seed and nothing on held-out test (LLM-Default = -0.01 pp, p = 0.92). When the same seed is granted to classical search, the apparent lead collapses: against seeded random search it leads by +0.20 pp at 2 evaluations, is tied by 5, and is behind by 12 (-0.37 pp). Without the seed, classical search ties the advisor by 12 evaluations and beats it by 40 (+0.6 to +0.8 pp, p <= 1e-4). Two LLM-specific behaviors survive: a single-task exploration failure (vehicle), and a rule-based confidence filter that removes ~33% of wasted compute without changing accuracy. The recommendation is deflationary: on tabular HPO, seed classical search with a sensible default; an LLM advisor adds no measurable generalization benefit and is overtaken within a handful of evaluations. We release the harness and a script that reproduces every statistic.
Authors: Yonghyun Kim, Junwon Lee, Haiwen Xia, Yinghao Ma, Chris Donahue
Abstract: We describe our entry to the efficiency track of the Academic Text-to-Music (ATTM) Grand Challenge at ICME 2026. Beyond the challenge protocol's FAD-CLAP and CLAP score, we add a learned human-preference reward from TuneJury, a twin pairwise ranker trained over open music-preference datasets. The reward serves both as a training-time conditioning signal and as a sample-selection criterion. The pipeline combines five engineering decisions on a 120M-parameter FluxAudio-S backbone, four at training time and one at inference: (i) training-time reward conditioning that doubles as an inference-time CFG axis, (ii) a sweep over five score-conditioning architectures, where training and inference use different variants, (iii) expert iteration on the top decile, (iv) a short preference-tuning pass (CRPO) for audio-text alignment, and (v) inference post-processing via joint CFG, source separation, and loudness normalization. Per-stage decomposition on 100 Song Describer prompts shows training-time reward conditioning as a functional conditioning axis, expert iteration as the dominant contributor, the preference-tuning pass adding only noise-level gain, and the inference-time score scalar already saturated by the end of the chain.
Authors: Tianyou Wang, Anson Lei, Joe Watson, Ingmar Posner
Abstract: Imitation learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for learning visuomotor policies, but its generalisation and stability are limited by the scale and quality of demonstration data needed. A promising direction is to leverage more abundant but heterogeneous data sources, which differ in action space and often lack action labels altogether. Existing co-training approaches that combine heterogeneous data sources rely on heuristic and hand-engineered alignment techniques. In contrast, we argue that action representations should be grounded in prediction: actions that produce the same effect on the environment should share the same representation, regardless of their sources. To this end, we instantiate this principle by using a grounded latent-action world model (GLAM), a pair of generative models with a shared latent action space across data sources that is grounded by predicting future observations consistently across sources. This latent action space is used to train downstream behavioural cloning (BC) policies which map observations to latent actions and decode them back to robot actions, providing a paradigm for learning from heterogeneous data. Empirically, we demonstrate that GLAM successfully learns an aligned latent action space that facilitates action transfer across data sources with and without action labels. Across five manipulation tasks in simulation and in the real world, GLAM-aligned policies significantly outperform BC baselines and prior latent-action methods, achieving an average of +48% improvement in task success rate with the same data-scarce setting. Videos and code are available at https://viccccciv.github.io/glam/.
Authors: Vatsal Ananthula, Adarsh Kumarappan
Abstract: Language models can generate plausible rationales for their predictions, but these explanations may not faithfully represent the model's internal reasoning. We propose verifier-coupled reasoning, a framework that inserts inline claims into reasoning traces and trains an auxiliary consistency head to predict programmatic verifier outputs from rationale-span hidden states. The central finding is a gap between decodability and faithfulness: consistency training reliably makes verifier information decodable from rationale representations, but decodability does not guarantee faithful generation. In LeanCheck (formal theorem proving), rationale-only and proof-only pooling achieve perfect directional separation under counterfactual conflict. In KataGo (Go engine), commentary spans encode 10-way win-rate buckets at 81% accuracy. Yet in a code setting, the model achieves 98.6% coupling while its generated explanations remain unfaithful: fluent prose with correct structured claims, but describing unrelated algorithms; a controlled pretrained-vs-from-scratch comparison shows the gap is not capacity-driven. Synthetic activation patching confirms causal influence (73-89% vs. 31% baseline), FEVER reveals that evidence-only pooling isolates genuine evidence sensitivity at the cost of raw accuracy, and per-claim analysis shows that consistency loss disproportionately benefits fine-grained claims over binary ones. These results establish that consistency losses are effective diagnostics and representation-shaping tools, but not sufficient conditions for faithful reasoning.
Authors: Ting Cai, Rakesh R. Menon, Yiru Chen, Zifan Liu, Yuan Tian, Fei Wu, Anudeep Chimakurthi, Prashanthi Ramamurthy, Sunav Choudhary, Kun Qian, Yunyao Li
Abstract: Generating accurate and informative column descriptions (e.g. "membership status of customers" for the column name "cust_mem") is essential for a wide range of downstream NLP tasks on tabular data, including NL2SQL, table question answering, and entity linking. This problem arises in enterprises, domain sciences, government data portals, and so on. Despite its importance, most real-world datasets suffer from missing or cryptic documentation, often due to abbreviated column names or domain-specific jargon. Existing approaches largely rely on single-prompt large language models (LLMs), which struggle with three key issues: (i) inconsistent or incorrect handling of abbreviations, (ii) hallucinated or incomplete descriptions, and (iii) redundancy or vagueness that hinders downstream performance. We present TACO, a task-aware framework for automatic column description generation using LLMs. TACO introduces a three-step pipeline: (1) abbreviation expansion, which standardizes column names; (2) description generation, which produces initial semantic descriptions enriched with synonyms and search-oriented keywords; and (3) description revision, which refines these outputs using simulated downstream tasks. In addition, we investigate human-in-the-loop extensions and release new evaluation datasets for entity linking and schema enrichment. Extensive experiments across public and proprietary datasets show that TACO consistently outperforms existing methods, improving downstream task performance by up to 32%.
Authors: Noah Marchal, William E. Janes, Mihail Popescu, Xing Song
Abstract: Clinical information for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) care documented in unstructured clinical notes limits downstream analysis without extraction into structured formats. Open-source small language models with few-shot prompting for detecting the presence of ALS-relevant clinical terms in patient documentation were evaluated without task-specific training data. The detection task targeted 17 categories spanning functional scores, respiratory measures, medications, and related clinical and non-clinical attributes. Clinical note content was normalized from JSON-encoded discharge summaries and processed with a prompt template having structured JSON outputs. We compared 26 open-source models using aggregate, label-level, and manual-validation multilabel classification metrics. Manual validation showed that a regex rule baseline had higher overall micro-F1 and lower Hamming loss than any single SLM or TF-IDF baseline, while Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 was the highest-performing SLM by micro-F1. Model rankings varied by metric and label category, with the TF-IDF baseline showing high recall but low precision, some SLMs showing higher precision but lower recall, and Hammer2.1-7b showing strong performance for ALSFRS-R subscore detection. These findings support targeted hybrid extraction workflows rather than replacement of existing rule-based methods.
Authors: Manveer Singh Tamber, Abhay Puri, Marc-Etienne Brunet, Perouz Taslakian, Jimmy Lin, Spandana Gella
Abstract: AI agents acting on behalf of users are constantly making decisions, and for users to trust their agents, those decisions must align with what they actually want. Privacy is an important alignment problem for agents: every message, post, or tool call an agent makes is a contextual judgment about what is appropriate to share, with whom, and under which conditions. Because such judgments depend on social expectations and norms, human judgment does not merely label privacy violations but also helps define them. While existing work relies on unreliable proxies for both training and evaluation, we place human judgment at the center of agentic privacy alignment. We introduce PrivacyAlign, a dataset of 1,350 samples with 3,516 detailed annotations from 599 unique annotators across diverse scenarios where current LLMs actually leak, and use it to ground both alignment training and automated evaluation in human privacy norms. Building on these annotations, we first show that conditioning LLM judges on human annotations and explanations for reference responses to the same prompt makes their judgments more reliable. We then introduce annotation-conditioned reward modeling, which uses these annotations to score new responses during RL, and show that small open-weight agents trained with this reward better align with human privacy norms, with strong gains on PrivacyAlign and existing privacy benchmarks for agents.
Authors: Shen Yin, David Ken, Joel Stremmel
Abstract: Large language models produce fluent but often incorrect multi-step reasoning, and naive correction methods risk degrading already-correct answers. We introduce Denoising Iterative Self-Correction (DISC), a test-time procedure that treats verification question outputs as noisy measurements of where a solution may be corrupted. Using these signals, DISC progressively reduces errors across multiple verify-judge-correct passes, analogous to traditional iterative denoising. A binary judgment gate controls correction precision by blocking rewrites that would damage already-correct answers while the verifier and corrector together repair errors. We evaluate this trade-off using two paired diagnostics: an improvement-to-degradation ratio (precision) and a repair rate (recall). Across three benchmarks (BIG-Bench Mistake, HotpotQA, GPQA Diamond) and four models, DISC dominates Chain-of-Verification and Self-Refine on the precision-recall trade-off, reaching 81.6% accuracy with 13x more improvements per degradation than Chain-of-Verification and 5x more than Self-Refine on BIG-Bench Mistake (Sonnet~4.5). On GPQA Diamond, we identify a capability floor below which judges acknowledge contradictions in evidence but cannot translate that recognition into a correction. We further show that cross-model role allocation -- assigning verification and judgment to a model different from the generator -- mitigates self-confirmation bias.
Authors: Zesen Liu, Zihan Zhang, Dongdong She
Abstract: Summarization-based prompt compression is increasingly used by LLM agents to shorten long, distributed contexts, but it shifts the security boundary: filters inspect the pre-compression prompt while the backend acts on a newly generated compressed context. We identify relinking, a compression-boundary vulnerability where the compressor behaves as a confused deputy, summarizing distributed, locally benign fragments into a complete malicious instruction. Unlike prompt injection, relinking need not place an explicitly malicious payload in the source context. We show that relinking arises from summarization itself: attention makes separated fragments jointly available, pre-training makes compatible fragments plausible to connect, and post-training favors compact backend-actionable summaries. We formalize the attacker-induced form as adversarial relinking and present Relink, an automated DSL-based tool that splits malicious payloads into benign fragments while keeping the complete payload absent before compression. Across four long-context agent benchmarks, Relink achieves 86.9% Relink Rate and Backend Action Rate versus 17.0% for clean-split controls. Existing defenses fail to reliably capture adversarial relinking; our KBRA defense reduces residual Backend Action Rate to 0.0%.
Authors: Awais Rauf, Ahmed Hasssan, Greg Slabaugh
Abstract: Understanding long videos requires fine-grained perception and multi-step, higher-order reasoning over complex, long-range spatio-temporal dynamics. Vision-language models (VLMs) encode video frames into visual tokens and attempt to perform both perception and multi-step planning latently, within a single forward pass. This coupled formulation, however, is bottlenecked by the LLM's limited capacity to discover and execute multi-step strategies in its latent representations. To address this bottleneck, we propose Hierarchical Programmatic Probing (HPP), a framework that decouples semantic perception from higher-order temporal reasoning by reformulating long video understanding as iterative, programmatic exploration of a hierarchically segmented video. Specifically, a coding-capable LLM plans and executes a multi-step strategy in an interactive coding environment, probing the video for information and invoking a VLM for localized perception on demand. To make probing tractable over long videos, we introduce three components: information-density-aware hierarchical segmentation, late-interaction semantic retrieval, and structured probing functions for coarse-to-fine temporal localization. We validate HPP on LongVideoBench, which requires both fine-grained perception and long-range relational reasoning, and show that decoupling the two via iterative programmatic probing yields substantial gains. Further results on EgoSchema, VideoMME, and MLVU demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across diverse long-video benchmarks.
Authors: Finn Henry O'Shea, Maria Elena Monzani
Abstract: In this article we describe Cohort Organized Learning (CoOL), a method for clustering data without explicit distance or similarity computations. Herein, we will describe CoOL, derive the gradients determined by expectation maximization to train the networks, show how to monitor convergence during training and evaluate the clusters after training, and discuss a series of examples and use cases. We also discuss CoOL's limitations and future prospects on related tasks. Because CoOL uses neural networks to estimate the clusters, it can be used to cluster any data that can be made compatible and we illustrate this on vector data and images.
Authors: Xiaoyang Liu, Shangzhe Wu, Kai Han
Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has achieved state-of-the-art photorealistic rendering, but the representation gap prevents these assets from being physically interactive. Production-grade physics engines do not understand the 3DGS representation, while prior physics-for-3DGS methods are monolithic silos. These prior works are fundamentally limited, demonstrating only object-centric physics in isolated environments, such as on an ideal plane. They are incapable of interacting with complex static collision geometry or heterogeneous assets. We propose a novel framework that, for the first time, bridges this gap by enabling 3DGS assets to participate in scene-level, heterogeneous, multi-solver physical simulations. Our core contribution is a Representation Abstraction Framework that translates all diverse assets, including 3DGS, virtual meshes, and fluids, into a unified physical particle set. This abstraction is key to enabling complex behaviors, such as the non-rigid deformation of 3DGS assets, within a unified physics pipeline. This particle set, along with the static scene collision boundaries derived from scene capture, is processed within a solver-agnostic physics kernel. The physical results are then mapped back to drive each asset's specific visual reconstruction. This architecture unlocks capabilities impossible with prior art. We demonstrate complex, two-way interactions between deformable 3DGS assets, standard CG assets such as fluids and meshes, and large-scale captured static environments, showcasing realistic coupled phenomena that were previously unattainable.
Authors: Tianqi Du, Qi Zhang, Yifei Wang, Yisen Wang
Abstract: Recently, world models have emerged as a promising paradigm for building intelligent agents by learning predictive models that estimate future environment states conditioned on observations and actions. In particular, JEPA-style latent world models provide an efficient alternative to pixel space prediction by learning action-conditioned dynamics in compact representation spaces. However, existing latent world models typically rely on one-step prediction and must be recursively rolled out for long-horizon planning, which leads to compounding errors and a mismatch between training objectives and downstream planning tasks. To address this limitation, we propose Variable-length Latent World Models (VLWMs), a framework that learns to predict future latent states conditioned on action sequences of variable lengths. Instead of training only on one-step transitions, VLWMs directly model temporally extended dynamics, allowing the same predictor to evaluate action plans over different horizons. We further introduce a curriculum training strategy that progressively expands the action horizon, stabilizing optimization from short-range dynamics to long-range prediction. At test time, we design planning methods tailored to VLWMs to better exploit their variable-length predictive capabilities. Experiments on long-horizon control tasks show that VLWMs significantly improve latent space world models, achieving 13\% average improvement over the state-of-the-art LeWM across different datasets, with especially large gains on tasks requiring extended planning. These results suggest that VLWM provides a simple yet effective paradigm for improving long-horizon prediction and planning in latent world models.
Authors: Ashwin Vinod, Ying Ding, Elias Stengel-Eskin
Abstract: LLM agents in knowledge intensive question answering take retrieval and reasoning actions with incomplete knowledge about whether their current answer is uncertain, unsupported, or already complete. This produces two failure modes: committing to confident but unsupported answers, which hurts accuracy, and over-retrieving when the evidence in hand already suffices, resulting in wasted compute. To give agents a more complete picture of the state space they are operating in, we introduce calibrated verifier telemetry (CalVerT), which augments the agent's state with additional telemetry: a calibrated self-confidence score and a grounding verifier score. We show that CalVerT can improve agents in both training-free and training-based settings. On four QA benchmarks, we find that CalVerT raises F1 by triggering retrieval in cases where agents over-rely on parametric knowledge, while cutting redundant retrieval in cases where agents have sufficient context to answer. We show that CalVerT can augment existing QA frameworks without training. Moreover, CalVerT also improves trained systems: by simply augmenting an agent's state with telemetry, we observe improvements after reinforcement learning, as compared to an agent with identical training but no CalVerT telemetry.
Authors: Shivani Kamtikar, Pranav Asthana, Naveen Kumar Uppalapati, Girish Krishnan, Girish Chowdhary
Abstract: Manipulation in confined environments, such as threading a manipulator through narrow apertures, remains a fundamental challenge, especially for conventional rigid robots. Hybrid rigid-soft manipulators offer promise but face two compounding planning challenges: backbone shapes feasible in free space become infeasible under environmental contact, and planning rigid and soft segments independently ignores their kinematic coupling. We present THREAD, the first diffusion-based trajectory planner for hybrid manipulation, learning a generative prior over physically realizable backbone trajectories conditioned on local environment geometry, with physics-inspired losses encoding curvature, smoothness, and collision constraints jointly across both segments. Trained in simulation, THREAD achieves 92.4% task success with 5x fewer collisions than the strongest baseline. We show cross-embodiment real-world transfer with minimal online updates, successfully threading through apertures as small as 1.3x the soft segment diameter.
Authors: Shaswat Patel, Betty Li Hou, Arun Purohit, Kai Xu, Jane Pan, He He, Valerie Chen
Abstract: Maintainability is a core dimension of software engineering, shaping how code is written, reviewed, and developed over time. While coding agents have demonstrated strong performance on single-issue tasks, it remains unclear how maintainable their code is when future agents build on top of it, potentially leading to compounding downstream effects. We investigate how agent code compares to human code in these maintenance settings, presenting CodeThread, a framework to construct controlled experiments from repository-level coding benchmarks. Applying CodeThread to four frontier coding agents and four benchmarks, we find that agents are less effective at resolving tasks when building on agent code compared to human code, with task resolve rate drops of up to 13.1%. Regression analysis reveals that many traditional software engineering maintainability metrics do not explain this difference. Instead, the clearest signals are subtler behavioral differences in agent code, such as changes to input validation and error handling, along with differences in downstream code size and task difficulty. These findings highlight the need to evaluate these systems not only by immediate task resolution but also by code maintainability, and point to potential sources of downstream errors introduced by agent code.
Authors: Shubham Gandhi, Yiqing Xie, Atharva Naik, Ruichen Zhu, Carolyn Rose
Abstract: End-to-end code agent training is resource-intensive and plateaus on the strategy-level reasoning needed to resolve code issues, since jointly optimizing code-level execution and strategy-level reasoning leaves the latter underdeveloped. Instead, we freeze the agent and add a critic model to supply that signal. Prior code critics are post-hoc, scoring completed trajectories rather than steering the agent; we instead train a small critic that provides intra-trajectory feedback via Supervised Fine-Tuning. On SWE-bench Verified, a critic trained on CWM-32B trajectories transfers to two unseen agents (gains of +3.0 to +3.8 points), and adding target-agent trajectories to the corpus increases the gain to +3.8 on CWM-32B and +4.4 to +5.2 on two Qwen agents, at 30-92x lower critic cost than a strong teacher. On Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B, the critic-guided system is both more accurate (25.2% vs. 20.8%) and cheaper (\$0.04 vs. \$0.11) than the agent alone, because the critic also shortens trajectories. Our results show that a small, well-trained critic is a practical complement to scaling agent training. Code: https://github.com/shubhamrgandhi/critic-training. Data and models: https://huggingface.co/collections/shubhamrgandhi/critic-training-for-code-agents
URLs: https://github.com/shubhamrgandhi/critic-training., https://huggingface.co/collections/shubhamrgandhi/critic-training-for-code-agents
Authors: Leonardo Marciaga, Thuyen Pham, Julia Rezvani, Alina Hyk, Chunyang Liao, Konstantinos Mitsopoulos, Raffaele Vardavas
Abstract: Epidemiological models often rely on survey data to represent how individuals make health-related decisions, such as whether to vaccinate or adopt protective behaviors. However, repeated large-scale surveys are costly, time-consuming, and limited in the range of scenarios they can capture. In this work, we investigate whether large language models (LLMs) can generate synthetic survey responses that reproduce patterns observed in real populations. Using longitudinal data from the FluPaths surveys, we first identify groups associated with broadly positive or negative attitudes toward vaccination through clustering analysis. We then evaluate several LLMs using a cluster-informed prompting approach to generate synthetic survey responses across multiple epidemic waves. Across models, the synthetic data generally reproduce the distributions of demographic characteristics, vaccination-related beliefs, risk perceptions, and health behaviors observed in the survey data. However, they are less successful at capturing how these factors vary together within respondents. Some models reproduce group-level vaccination trends more reliably than others, although performance varies across waves. We also trained a classifier to distinguish real from synthetic records and found that the generated responses remained identifiable as synthetic. Overall, our findings suggest that LLM-generated survey data may provide a useful tool for exploratory data augmentation and we hope that it could support agent-based epidemic modeling approaches. However, the generated data should not be treated as a substitute for human survey data without further methodological improvements and validation.
Authors: Twain Byrnes, Mike Dodds
Abstract: Memory safety errors account for a large proportion of security bugs in systems written in C; modern languages such as Java and Rust prevent such bugs because they are memory-safe by design. To migrate systems to safer languages or identify memory errors, we must first determine how legacy code manipulates memory. This information is only represented implicitly in such code. In many cases, memory usage patterns are merely tedious for humans to figure out, rather than truly difficult. In this work, we ask if large language models (LLMs) can perform this task by having them synthesize annotations representing memory usage as specifications in CN, a hybrid testing/verification tool. Our tool, CNnotator, uses LLMs to automatically generate and test CN specifications. We find that current models are able to generate CN specifications for small-to-medium C programs, with the OpenAI o3 reasoning model achieving a 90% success rate on first attempts and 97% overall success, while the chat model GPT-4o correctly annotates 65% of first attempts. These results suggest AI-assisted annotation is becoming practical for real-world C codebases.
Authors: Chenyu Wang, Jiahe Caroline Shi, David Kong, Duane S. Boning, Zishen Wan, Yilun Du, Vijay Janapa Reddi
Abstract: Traditional architectural design space exploration (DSE) is highly inefficient, typically requiring tens of thousands of simulator evaluations across various optimization methods. This inefficiency arises because conventional methods treat the simulator as a black-box oracle. In contrast, human architects effectively guide exploration by reasoning through physical constraints, performance bottlenecks, data reuse, and workload structures. To bridge this gap, we introduce AgentDSE, a simulator-in-the-loop methodology driven by a general-purpose large language model (LLM) coding agent. AgentDSE automates this architectural-reasoning loop without requiring model fine-tuning, precomputed design databases, or domain-specific optimizer code. Across deep neural network (DNN) accelerator mapping, hardware/software co-design, and CPU cache-hierarchy optimization, AgentDSE achieves competitive or better design quality with up to two orders of magnitude fewer evaluations. AgentDSE also produces inspectable traces that surface architectural hypotheses, performance cliffs, implicit priors, and simulator artifacts, making every search decision traceable rather than buried in optimizer state.
Authors: Chao Han, Haozhe Hu, Fei Ma, Wei Zhang, Xiaoyu Shen
Abstract: Low-rank decomposition serves as a promising compression paradigm for large language models, however, rank allocation remains challenging: manual rules lack generalizability, and learning-based approaches incur heavy computational overhead. To address these issues, we formulate global low-rank allocation as a sorting-and-truncation pipeline, and score each singular component via dual criteria: \textbf{Local} singular energy ratio that quantifies the intrinsic importance within the decomposed parameter matrix and \textbf{Global} functional importance (measured by input-output cosine similarity) that evaluates the functional significance of decomposed modules. We verify the strong correlation between high input-output cosine similarity and low effective rank through geometric interpretation and experimental validation. Furthermore, we propose rank-preserving fine-tuning, which performs direct LoRA tuning on decomposed weights and avoids extra information loss caused by re-truncation in conventional merging pipelines. Empirical results confirm that our method delivers sustained performance enhancements when combined with models featuring distinct decomposition schemes, model sizes and architectural designs, e.g. in one-shot compression without further fine-tuning, our method reduces perplexity by up to 50\% compared with uniform and heuristic allocation baselines. Code will be available at https://github.com/EIT-NLP/LLM-Pruning.
Authors: Xin Gao
Abstract: We propose Keyless Attention, an attention mechanism that eliminates the key projection entirely, operating over queries and values only. This yields a Value-Only Cache that reduces KV cache memory and access overhead by exactly 50% over standard attention, while matching or exceeding standard attention's decode throughput. Beyond efficiency, we introduce Depth-$m$ Attention Factorization: standard attention computes a depth-2 factorization of the attention bilinear form, while Keyless Attention realizes a depth-$m$ instance of this family. At m=3, Keyless Attention matches the projection matrix count of standard attention via a value-space routing matrix that replaces the key projection and introduces a coupling between routing and retrieval. Experiments across five models and four architectures (GPT-2 280M, GPT-2 557M, Pythia 410M, Qwen2 1.5B, and Llama 3.2 1B) show that Keyless Attention matches or outperforms standard QKV attention on perplexity in 4 out of 5 models. On downstream zero-shot evaluation (GPT-2 557M), Keyless Attention outperforms on 4 out of 5 commonsense reasoning benchmarks, while achieving 50% KV cache reduction throughout.
Authors: Wangxuan Fan, Xiaoyu Nie, Zhongxiang Dai
Abstract: The increasing deployment of large language model (LLM) agents in collaborative workflows demands robust multi-user, multi-principal interaction mechanisms capable of enforcing access permissions, resolving authoritative conflicts, and preventing unauthorized data disclosure. However, a fundamental mismatch exists between the single-user training paradigm of contemporary LLMs and the hard constraints required for multi-principal governance, rendering probabilistic, prompt-based safeguards vulnerable under multi-turn adversarial interactions.Our key insight is that governance constraints -- who is authorized, what is restricted, and whose instructions take precedence -- are deterministic runtime variables that should be enforced by execution hooks rather than entrusted to the LLM. We present \textbf{Harness-MU}, the first model-agnostic, zero-tuning infrastructure framework for multi-user LLM agents. By decoupling language generation from safety orchestration, Harness-MU guarantees unbreakable permission boundaries while maximizing compliant demand satisfaction. Across four frontier open-weight and proprietary models on the \textit{Muses-Bench} benchmark, Harness-MU achieves the goal of privacy preservation across all access-control attacks, outperforming the standard baseline by 0.28--0.39 in utility score and improving instruction-following accuracy by up to 48.9 percentage points. Harness-MU advances the philosophy of \textit{Harness Engineering}, establishing that systematic infrastructure is essential for solving LLM multi-principal governance challenges. The code and data are available at https://github.com/YuanJrShiuan/Harness-MulUser.
Authors: Naihao Deng, Alissa Shen, Yiming Feng, Joan Nwatu, Jae-Won Chung, Mosharaf Chowdhury, Yulong Chen, Rada Mihalcea
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in multilingual settings, yet the energy costs of serving these models across different languages remain poorly understood. We present a systematic study of inference energy consumption across languages with ML.Energy framework (Chung et al., 2026). We find striking disparities: energy consumption per output token varies by up to 8.3 times across languages, while total energy for a fixed set of requests varies by up to 179 times between the cheapest (English, 17.6 kJ) and the most expensive (Pashto, 3,147 kJ) languages. Our analysis shows that this disparity is driven by two compounding factors: (1) higher per-token energy costs for languages using complex or rare scripts, and (2) more tokens generated for low-resource languages. Moreover, we find a double cost + performance penalty: languages with the highest energy footprints also tend to achieve the lowest task accuracy. We reveal that the energy divide persists across models, hardware, and tasks, suggesting a systemic energy inequity in multilingual LLM deployment. Finally, we recommend that the community treat energy as a first-class evaluation axis, extend reporting checklists and model cards to include it, and adopt deployment-side mitigations for better energy efficiency.
Authors: Rome Thorstenson
Abstract: The Categorical Jacobian (CJ) of Zhang et al. (2024) reads protein contacts from a language model by perturbing every residue with every alternative amino acid, about 19L forward passes. We show the signal it reconstructs is already concentrated in a small subset of attention heads: averaging the top-K contact-relevant heads, selected on as few as 10 labeled proteins, recovers contacts in one forward pass and beats CJ on leakage-clean data for every bidirectional model where CJ is defined, and matches or beats it in-distribution (the exceptions being the smallest 8M model and a statistical tie on ESM Cambrian). Ablations localize the gain to labeled head selection, not averaging: at a matched label budget the unweighted mean ties a supervised L1 logistic regression on the same heads, so the parameter-free mean is selection's minimal form, not the source of the advantage. Our primary test is leakage-clean: on a CAMEO split where neither selection nor evaluation touches data the models have plausibly memorized, the head readout beats CJ on ESM-2-650M by +9 pp (N=29, p<0.001), with the within-model margin reproducing across architectures on a wider pretraining-aware set. Both methods fall 30-36 percentage points from their in-distribution Zhang numbers to the leakage-clean numbers, consistent with substantial pretraining overlap inflating prior numbers (a CAMEO-vs-Zhang difficulty shift contributes too, so we read it as an upper bound on the leakage component). We additionally introduce representation-CJ, a hidden-state generalization of the Jacobian for architectures without a masked-LM head; show that the optimal K tracks how diffusely a model spreads its contact heads; and find that both methods lose the contact signal on both causal LMs we test (ProGen2), suggesting attention-encoded pair structure may depend on bidirectional pretraining.
Authors: Muyang Du, Jason Roche, Junjie Lai
Abstract: Streaming text-to-speech synthesis in cascaded LLM-TTS systems still faces latency challenges as most TTS models require full context before initiating generation. We present S5-TTS, a streaming variant of T5-TTS that enables low-latency, word-by-word incremental speech synthesis through encoder-decoder language modeling and monotonic alignment learning. S5-TTS begins generating speech immediately after receiving the first few words, substantially reducing end-to-end response latency. To maintain quality under limited lookahead, we introduce a lookahead-causal masking mechanism with Conv-based auxiliary attention that preserves intelligibility and speaker similarity, and employ interleaved multi-source distillation to further restore naturalness. Experiments show that S5-TTS achieves comparable quality to full-context T5-TTS, supports zero-shot synthesis with high speaker similarity, and significantly reduces end-to-end latency for practical conversational AI systems.
Authors: Harsh Patel
Abstract: It is tempting to assume any task solvable by a short program can be taught to a model as its chain-of-thought: write the steps out, fine-tune, and the model follows. This paper shows the assumption fails for an identifiable class of procedures. The testbed is nine reasoning tasks, each from a deterministic generator; public and hidden splits share generators, so held-out data proxies test accuracy. I reverse-engineer the generators into Python solvers, render them as chain-of-thought, and distill into a rank-<= 32 LoRA over a 30B (3.5B-active) Nemotron model. Forward-computable tasks install readily: lookup/arithmetic and an 8-bit boolean task transfer (>= 0.99 and 0.68). Cryptarithm does not: distilling its backtracking search holds at 0.01-0.07 across eleven chain-of-thought designs, RL from verifiable rewards, and self-training, even though a search solver answers 71% of instances. This is not a capability gap. The model does the arithmetic on 97-100% of lines and ranks the correct cipher in its top eight on 71%; it cannot carry the search forward as a left-to-right derivation. Fine-tuning learns the shape of a verifiable elimination step while its verdicts become unconditional templates, correct only 16-57% of the time ("verdict-as-token"). The ceiling holds across backbones from 3B to 671B and across fine-tuning and prompting; a controlled intervention isolates the cause: revealing the cipher key, which turns the derivation forward, lifts the same instances from 0.03 to 0.57. When a procedure's only solution is search over information-free structure, no faithful forward chain-of-thought exists to imitate. The task becomes learnable only by removing the search, precomputing its combinatorial core into a catalog and reducing the trace to recall plus verification; the 1st-place solution reaches Private LB 0.92 this way. What distills is memorization and verification, not search.
Authors: Kaiping Zheng
Abstract: Foundation models have achieved remarkable performance across medical question answering, imaging, and electronic health record (EHR) tasks, yet reliable clinical deployment remains challenging due to limited interpretability, vulnerability to distribution shift, and weak alignment with clinician reasoning. We argue that these limitations arise because existing approaches prioritize representation learning while treating patient comparison as an emergent property rather than a primary source of clinical evidence. To address this gap, we propose CAFM, a Cohort-Anchored Foundation Model framework that elevates patient cohorts to a first-class object throughout the learning pipeline. The framework consists of four stages: deviation-aware data curation, cohort-conditioned pretraining, multimodal cohort alignment, and clinician-in-the-loop refinement. Together, these stages improve data quality, organize representations around clinically meaningful cohort structure, preserve modality-specific relationships, and support auditable clinical decision-making. The framework is compositional and can augment existing EHR foundation models without modifying their underlying encoders. We illustrate CAFM through four clinical case studies spanning acute kidney injury prediction, cardiovascular risk stratification from electrocardiograms, optic neuropathy triage from orbital imaging, and electroretinogram-grounded report generation. We further present five empirically testable hypotheses and identify open challenges in data quality, irregular temporality, multimodal learning, distribution shift, and evaluation beyond predictive accuracy. We argue that explicitly anchoring foundation models to patient cohorts provides a principled path toward trustworthy clinical AI.
Authors: Veda Duddu, Jash Rajesh Parekh, Andy Mao, Hanyi Min, Ziang Xiao, Vedant Das Swain, Koustuv Saha
Abstract: Conversational AI promises a new kind of preparation for high-stakes workplace negotiations -- personalized, interactive, and capable of simulating realistic resistance. That promise is intuitive. We built Trucey, a theory-driven coaching system, to test it. The system encoded four assumptions: that articulation supports clarification, that personalization builds strategic competence, that chunked delivery reduces cognitive load, and that structured scaffolding removes metacognitive burden. A pre-registered experiment (N=267) and interviews (N=15) complicated each of them. Notably, the static handbook we included as a passive control outperformed both AI conditions on empowerment and usability. We reflect on why: each assumption encoded a specific model of how preparation unfolds, and the findings revealed that conversational AI imposes a linear execution model on a task that is fundamentally recursive. We identify an unexamined scope condition on established HAI design guidelines and close with a sequencing principle -- map before path, path before simulation -- for future AI coaching design.
Authors: Raheleh Mohseni, Mahdi Alyari
Abstract: During hot tests on a production line, engine-sound analysis is crucial to ensuring product quality and performance. However, background noise often interferes with accurate sound analysis, leading to potential errors in engine diagnostics. Traditionally, skilled technicians listen to engine sounds to assess engine health, but this is prone to significant inaccuracies. This study presents an innovative deep learning-based approach to address this issue by removing background noise from engine sound recordings using a U-Net neural network structure enhanced with Residual Attention Blocks (RAB-U-Net). Our intelligent noise removal system significantly improves the accuracy of engine noise detection, outperforming traditional techniques and providing a robust solution for real-time applications in production line environments. This study proposes a novel system for engine noise detection in production lines, marking a valuable advancement for the automotive industry in applying deep learning methods to improve the quality of engine diagnostics.
Authors: Qi Zhang, Fangping Lan, Cornelia Caragea, Longin Jan Latecki, Eduard Dragut
Abstract: In-context learning (ICL) with large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a powerful alternative to fine-tuning for Named Entity Recognition (NER), achieving strong performance with minimal annotation and no additional training. However, prior work has shown that despite their adaptability, LLMs still lag behind fully supervised models such as fine-tuned BERT in structured tasks like NER. While existing studies on ICL for NER have mainly explored few-shot settings, the potential of scaling to hundreds of demonstrations has not been thoroughly investigated. To address this gap, we conduct a comprehensive investigation of many-shot ICL for NER and further explore its effectiveness in annotating and refining data for low-resource NER tasks. Specifically, we evaluate various LLMs across multiple domains using hundreds of ICL examples and then assess the feasibility of using many-shot ICL as a data annotation framework. Our experiments demonstrate that: (1) scaling to hundreds of in-context examples enables LLMs to match or even surpass the performance of fully supervised BERT models; and (2) using about one hundred human-labeled examples as demonstrations, many-shot in-context annotation can generate high-quality labeled data, leading to approximately 10% absolute F1 improvement over existing state-of-the-art approaches when used to fine-tune BERT on low-resource NER.
Authors: Sungmin Kang, Baishakhi Ray, Abhik Roychoudhury
Abstract: As coding agents are rapidly changing software engineering, a natural question is: what are the core skills needed by future software engineers? To identify where software engineering is headed and thus what skills will be needed, we summarize the results of two round-tables with researchers and industrial practitioners, held in 2026 in New York and Singapore. One key finding is that verification and validation is increasing in importance as agents handle implementation, as highlighted by anecdotes from the events. From our observations, we identify the skills developers need in the agentic era of development, with implications for training and educating future software engineers in coming years.
Authors: Qing Xu, Xiangjian He, Wenting Duan, Jiebo Luo, Zhen Chen
Abstract: Cell segmentation is critical for computational pathology and biomedical discovery. While recent Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) have demonstrated remarkable universal feature representations, unlocking their full potential for cellular imaging is currently bottlenecked by resource-intensive adaptation paradigms. Existing methods typically rely on fine-tuning heavy visual encoders, leading to extensive computational overhead and a dependency on large-scale annotations. To address this, we propose the EffiCell-Seg framework for highly efficient cell segmentation without re-training the visual encoder. Our core insight is that pretrained VFMs intrinsically encode complementary structural priors: global saliency for localizing potential cells, and local morphological patterns for delineating cellular structures. To harness these priors, we devise a Cell Structure Prompt Encoder (CSP-Encoder) that synthesizes semantic-aware saliency and principal morphological features from frozen VFM representations into explicit structural prior maps. Moreover, we propose a Synergistic Mask Decoder (SM-Decoder) that enforces contextual consistency by jointly predicting geometric distance fields and semantic maps via mutual cross-guidance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EffiCell-Seg outperforms state-of-the-art methods across diverse cell imaging modalities while requiring only ~5M trainable parameters, over 130x fewer than fully fine-tuned VFM counterparts. The code is available at https://github.com/xq141839/EffiCell-Seg.
Authors: Ting-Yu Chen, Tingting Yu, Pei-Cing Huang, Chan Hsu, Ming-Yen Lin, Yihuang Kang
Abstract: Confidence calibration in large language models (LLMs) is commonly evaluated by comparing predicted confidence with observed accuracy. However, such approaches do not model item difficulty, making it difficult to interpret discrepancies and to determine whether model confidence reflects genuine self-assessment or is merely a byproduct of the response generation process. To address this, we adopt a Rasch model-based latent ability framework and a metacognitive perspective, and propose Latent Confidence Alignment Error (LCAE) to measure the consistency between model self-assessment and the latent error probability implied by model ability and item difficulty. We further incorporate item difficulty as an external signal with a reasoning mechanism. Experiments on a medical-domain dataset with 20 models show that the proposed approach improves self-assessment quality without affecting model ability, and reveals an association between reliability and inference cost.
Authors: Zhao Yang, Yuxuan Jiang, Ting-Chih Chen, Lincen Yang, Annie Wong, Chao Gao, Jacob E. Kooi, Zhong Li, Jiayang Shi, Kevin Qiu, Qi Huang, Xinrui Zu, Shiping Yang, Hengyuan Zhang, Ngai Wong, Filip Ilievski, Shujian Yu, Aske Plaat, Zhaochun Ren, Mark Hoogendoorn, Vincent Fran\c{c}ois-Lavet
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become central to LLM post-training, yet the methods that dominate current pipelines, PPO and GRPO, represent only a narrow slice of what RL offers. Understanding why these methods prevail, and what alternatives exist, requires a principled examination of the design decisions that underlie any RL algorithm. This survey organizes that examination around three stages of algorithm construction. We begin with MDP creation: how the reward function, state space, action space, termination condition, and discount factor are, or could be, defined for LLM training. We then turn to exploration, covering temperature sampling, entropy regularization, intrinsic motivation, tree search, and curriculum learning. Finally, we address learning along four classical RL dimensions: model-free versus model-based, value-based versus policy-based versus actor-critic, on-policy versus off-policy, and credit assignment, including both Monte Carlo methods, which rely on full return estimates, and bootstrapping methods, which update estimates using other learned predictions. Mapping the LLM literature onto this taxonomy reveals a strikingly non-uniform distribution of research effort. Critic-free policy gradients and Monte Carlo credit assignment are densely populated, while value-based methods, off-policy actor-critic training, and bootstrapping-based credit assignment remain largely unexplored despite well-established counterparts in classical RL. These gaps represent concrete opportunities for transferring proven RL techniques to LLM training. By making these gaps explicit alongside the methods that have proven effective, this survey offers researchers in both RL and LLMs a shared framework for understanding current practice and identifying promising directions for future work.
Authors: Changjun Li, Runqing Jiang, Lian Xu, Ye Zhang, Qingyong Hu, Yulan Guo
Abstract: Vision Transformers have achieved remarkable success in many fields, yet their deployment on edge devices remains challenging due to their substantial computational demands. Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) offers an attractive solution by compressing models using a small calibration set with minimal training overhead. However, most existing PTQ works adopt a static quantization paradigm that is uniformly applied to all instances. Given the substantial diversity of natural images, the activation distributions vary significantly across samples, making these methods inherently suboptimal. In this paper, we propose ScalePredictor, a dynamic quantization framework for accurate and efficient quantization scale learning of ViTs. We first reveal a hidden correlation between the distribution range of shallow-layer activations and the optimal scales of deeper layers. Based on this, we develop a scale learning mechanism that integrates an efficient range extraction approach to capture robust range statistics at the shallow stage, which are then fed into a Taylor-motivated polynomial scale projection module to generate all quantization scales simultaneously. With the efficiency of polynomial approximation, ScalePredictor introduces insignificant computational overhead while avoiding costly just-in-time calibration. Extensive experiments on ImageNet demonstrate that ScalePredictor consistently outperforms prior PTQ methods, achieving a more favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off. Code and additional results are shown in the supplementary materials.
Authors: Sabrine Aroua, Alexis I. Aravanis, Ilias Chatzistefanidis, Hamza Abbar, Anh-Khoa Dang, Anastasios Giovanidis, Salah-Eddine El Ayoubi, Stephane Senecal, Martha Vlachou Konchylaki, Navid Nikaein
Abstract: Future 6G networks will rely on highly distributed, AI-native Radio Access Networks (RANs), where communication and AI workloads share a common infrastructure. This evolution, combined with increasing deployment density and continuous AI processing, is expected to significantly increase RAN energy consumption. While Open RAN (O-RAN) introduces a programmable and modular control framework through the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) and Service Management and Orchestration (SMO), current approaches remain largely policy-driven, limiting adaptive energy-aware coordination across multiple applications. In parallel, AI-RAN promotes the convergence of AI and RAN infrastructures through AI-for-RAN, AI-on-RAN, and AI-and-RAN paradigms, yet efficient mechanisms to jointly orchestrate performance, latency, and energy remain an open challenge. This article proposes an agentic AI-native RAN architecture that bridges O-RAN's structured control with AI-RAN's unified vision. Leveraging semantic intent abstraction and Large Language Model (LLM)-driven coordination, the framework enables adaptive orchestration, conflict resolution, and energy-aware multi-objective optimization across heterogeneous workloads. Through representative AI-for-RAN and AI-on-RAN use cases, we show how such coordination can improve resource efficiency and reduce operational energy consumption, paving the way toward sustainable 6G networks.
Authors: Yiyu Gui, Mingzhi Chen, Yuesheng Zhu, Guibo Luo, Yuchao Yang
Abstract: Physiological signals such as EEG, ECG, and PPG are widely used in clinical monitoring. Recent self-supervised learning (SSL) methods offer an attractive way to leverage unlabeled recordings, yet they still fall short in practice. In particular, current SSL methods struggle across heterogeneous datasets, often distorting clinically meaningful structures or learning shortcuts from temporal and cross-channel redundancy. Consequently, existing SSL methods often deliver limited performance under linear probing, a lightweight adaptation setting that better matches real-world medical scenarios. Moreover, most Transformer-based SSL models encode a flattened spatiotemporal token sequence, incurring high computation and memory cost, and are typically developed within a single modality. To address these limitations, we present SPOTR (Spatio-temporal Pooling One-Token Reconstruction), a compress-reconstruct pretraining framework that introduces a single-token global bottleneck for physiological signals. SPOTR compresses each waveform into a single-token representation and reconstructs the signal conditioned only on this representation. Meanwhile, SPOTR introduces an efficient spatio-temporal compaction module to reduce computation and memory cost. Pretrained on 20 datasets spanning EEG, iEEG, ECG, and PPG, SPOTR consistently outperforms the strongest baseline under linear probing, improving average AUC by 18.49%, 21.71%, 17.86%, and 4.64%, respectively. Compared with a representative general-purpose time-series foundation model, SPOTR achieves around 78% lower latency and 52% lower peak GPU memory on average. The code can be found at https://github.com/5GYYYYY/SPOTR.
Authors: Katherine Ip, Casey R. Myers, Udaya Parampalli, James Quach, Peiyong Wang
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit abilities beyond natural language modelling and text generation. Recent advances in their reasoning capabilities have spurred interest in applying LLMs to complex scientific tasks requiring deep domain expertise and sophisticated reasoning. Quantum computing, as a highly specialised field with significant knowledge barriers and hardware constraints, could greatly benefit from such advancements. However, a key open question that first must be answered is: How can we develop fine-tuning pipelines that instil genuine quantum reasoning in LLMs, rather than task-specific pattern matching? We study this question through quantum circuit simulation as a training objective, where the model must predict the measurement probability distribution resulting from a sequence of quantum gate operations. We propose and compare two fine-tuning pipelines: (1) Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on explicit gate-by-gate state-vector simulation traces, and (2) a two-stage SFT+Group Relative Policy Optimisation (GRPO) approach that sequentially applies SFT followed by GRPO with verifiable rewards. Our findings show that SFT achieves near-perfect in-distribution and gate-count extrapolation accuracy, significantly outperforming both the base model and the GPT-OSS-120B baseline. SFT+GRPO trades some in-distribution precision for better generalisation to larger qubit systems that SFT alone cannot handle. Both pipelines significantly outperform the baselines, demonstrating that targeted fine-tuning on explicit reasoning traces is an effective strategy for advancing quantum reasoning in LLMs.
Authors: Gathoni Ireri, Roger D. Odipo
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly piloted in African healthcare contexts, raising concerns about their potential to manipulate users in high-stakes settings. In a randomised experiment, we examined the manipulative capabilities of two publicly available models, ChatGPT 5.2 and DeepSeek V3.2, among Kenyan participants (N = 303). Participants interacted with either a manipulative variant or a non-manipulative variant before making a treatment decision within a hypothetical clinical scenario. The manipulative variant was prompted to covertly steer participants towards an incorrect treatment option while the non-manipulative variant served as the control condition. Manipulation success rates were higher in the manipulative condition (59.5%) than in the control condition (44.0%), with the effect reaching significance (OR = 2.11, 95% CI [1.12, 4.00], p = .021). These findings highlight the need for improved safety infrastructure specifically targeting manipulation, particularly given the integration of AI into healthcare systems across Africa.
Authors: Tamas Madl
Abstract: Subliminal learning lets a student inherit a teacher's hidden trait from distillation data that never names it. We ask when such transfer can be audited before training. The answer is not model identity or scale alone, but channel location: the carrier through which the trait reaches the student. We find three regimes. In a controlled initialization-dependent body channel, a pre-training screen works. Coverage, the cosine between the student's initial distillation update and the teacher's fine-tuning displacement, predicts held-out transfer (Spearman $\rho \approx 0.95$; AUROC 0.997). In pretrained language models, masked single-token traits instead ride convergent vocabulary geometry. This channel is initialization-independent, so initialization-alignment screens, including coverage, are not mechanistic; the useful handles are post-hoc detection and targeted mitigation. Even when a single-token named entity is removed from the loss, the student's held-out probability for that entity rises to 0.40 on average ($\sim 2500\times$), and a related semantic class transfers. In an untied-head model, orthogonalizing the trait's output row against entangled neighbours collapses leakage, while equal-size random-subspace edits do not. Thus removing a target string from distillation labels does not remove the corresponding preference: neighbouring tokens can carry it. Finally, conditional behaviours can route through the network body. For sycophancy, with agreement and correction markers masked from the loss, transfer reaches about 0.63 of the teacher's effect, localizes to body computation, and evades four audits across two model families. We scope this as masked transfer of a condition-present policy. Channel location is necessary for deciding which audits can be sound. It is not a deployment-ready screen: an audit used outside its carrier regime can give false assurance.
Authors: Ignacio Cabrera Martin, Marcello Trovati, Almas Baimagambetov, Nikolaos Polatidis
Abstract: Machine learning systems deployed in dynamic environments frequently operate under nonstationary data distributions, where controlled distribution shift can progressively degrade predictive performance. However, many widely used tabular benchmark datasets lack explicit temporal structure, limiting reproducible evaluation of drift adaptation methods. This work proposes a cluster-induced distribution shift simulation framework that transforms static tabular datasets into controlled evolving data streams through structured perturbations across featurespace partitions. Using this framework, six adaptation strategies are systematically evaluated: static learning, sliding-window retraining, global ADWIN retraining, cluster-local ADWIN retraining, random subspace drift detection, and feature-partitioned drift detection. Experiments are conducted on five benchmark datasets covering both classification and regression tasks using diverse predictive model families, including linear models, k-Nearest Neighbours, tree ensembles, boosting methods, and adaptive online learners.
Authors: Pengzhi Yang, Xinyu Wang, Pengyu Jing, Kehan Wen, Yiduo Qu, Zhenhao Huang, Minghao Fu, Xin Liu, Yaheng Shen, Fan Shi
Abstract: Reinforcement learning for robot manipulation is often bottlenecked by reward design, especially in long-horizon tasks: sparse success rewards provide weak supervision, while hand-crafted dense rewards are tedious to design and generalize poorly across tasks. Progress-based reward models offer a promising alternative by estimating how far an observation has advanced toward task completion, but existing approaches often require task-specific demonstrations or progress labels, and can assign high rewards to visually plausible but physically incorrect states. We introduce the Reference-Anchored Reward Model (RARM), a lightweight visual comparator that converts a single successful demonstration into a dense, progress-aware reward. RARM is trained once on general-purpose videos with a contrastive temporal objective, requiring no robot-specific data, task-specific reward labels, or per-task reward engineering. At deployment, RARM matches rollout clips to reference clips and rewards only confident forward progress, suppressing uncertain matches that may otherwise produce false-positive rewards. Across 9 simulated manipulation tasks from LIBERO and MetaWorld and 4 real-world tasks, RARM achieves the best overall success rates in subsequent RL training, with particularly large gains on long-horizon tasks such as cloth folding, where unreliable progress estimates are especially harmful.
Authors: Maria Myrto Villia, Filippos Gouidis, Theodore Patkos, Panos Trahanias
Abstract: In this study, we propose a novel pipeline for generic, model-agnostic, local-level counterfactual explainability in graph neural networks (GNNs). Although counterfactual explainers capable of both adding and removing edges have emerged in recent years, the need for generic and efficient solutions remains unmet, particularly concerning qualitative explanation generation. Our approach couples progress in factual explainability with missing edge prediction models rooted in link prediction research, in order to enhance the quality, robustness and intuitiveness of explanations. A multi-faceted experimental analysis conducted on real-world and synthetic graph classification benchmarks, both binary and multi-label, demonstrates the advancements in comparison to state-of-the-art baselines across diverse metrics.
Authors: Riccardo Poli, Ahmet Yilmaz
Abstract: Traditional evaluation of machine learning (ML) models typically focuses on achieving the maximum possible accuracy irrespective of the computational cost. In this article, we propose a paradigm shift towards evaluating performance based on computational effort-explicitly defined here as the total number of gradient descent steps required to reach an acceptable level of accuracy with high probability. Building upon the concept of computational effort originally introduced by Koza for Genetic Programming, we extend this metric to any ML model trained via gradient descent. Furthermore, we demonstrate that minimising this effort acts as a novel form of Automatic Machine Learning (AutoML). By evaluating it across 11 diverse ML models and five standard classification datasets, we uncover significant insights into the dynamics of gradient-based learning. Our findings reveal that optimal hyper-parameters consistently favour unusually large learning rates. Crucially, we demonstrate that the rapid, aggressive landscape traversal enabled by these large rates not only promotes generalisation-as seen in phenomena like superconvergence-but also statistically minimises the expected computational effort for training. Furthermore, we identify distinct phase transitions in the optimal search strategy: while a single training run suffices for lower accuracy targets, reaching a model's performance limit requires a dramatic shift towards conducting numerous independent, short restarts. Finally, we illustrate how this effort-based paradigm provides a robust framework for model selection, allowing practitioners to choose optimal algorithms based on the difficulty of a problem as perceived by different models for a given target accuracy, or to maximise the achievable accuracy for a fixed budget of gradient descent steps.
Authors: Heejin Do, Alexandre Ballenghien, Yang Wu, April Yi Wang
Abstract: Block-based programming environments such as Scratch are widely used in early programming education, yet natural-language-to-code (NL2Code) research has focused primarily on text-based languages. Scratch programs are event-driven, visually compositional, and distributed across concurrent scripts, making conventional NL2Code assumptions and evaluation insufficient. We introduce NL2Scratch, an executable benchmark for natural-language-to-Scratch generation comprising 311,648 parser-valid NL--program pairs, whose program side is extracted from real Scratch projects and paired with semantically aligned NL descriptions. For reliable evaluation beyond surface overlap, we propose Semantic Alignment Consistency (SAC), an interpretable slot-level metric for measuring semantic agreement between descriptions and programs. With SAC, we construct a semantically validated pool of 23,594 examples, and a slot-balanced 800 diagnostic benchmark. Experiments across instruction-tuned and fine-tuned LLMs reveal a notable gap between lexical similarity and semantic alignment: models achieving token-level F1 above 0.93 often fail to attain perfect SAC, particularly on longer examples. Errors concentrate on operational slots like actions, conditions, and numeric arguments, exposing failure modes largely invisible under conventional metrics.
Authors: Mathew Mithra Noel, Arindam Banerjee, Yug D. Oswal, Geraldine Bessie Amali D, Venkataraman Muthiah-Nakarajan
Abstract: Most real-world datasets used for training supervised learning models are contaminated with noisy data and outliers leading to large prediction errors. This paper proposes a new approach for achieving robustness where the learning rate is modulated by a factor that is sensitive to outliers. In this approach a reduction of the learning rate is shown to be achieved by using alternate loss functions that are infinitely differentiable, strictly convex or quasiconvex and more closely approximate the absolute error than Huber and log-cosh losses. A comparison of the performance of regression models trained with different loss functions on a wide variety of benchmarks and datasets is presented to demonstrate the superior performance of the Square Root Loss (SRL) and Smooth Mean Absolute Error (SMAE) losses proposed in this paper. Two new robust linear regression models are presented. Highly vectorized robust parameter update formulae that take advantage of modern GPUs for both stochastic and batch gradient descent are presented.
Authors: Yifei Wang, Ruiyin Li, Peng Liang, Qiong Feng, Zengyang Li, Mojtaba Shahin, Arif Ali Khan
Abstract: Natural language to repository generation (NL2Repo) requires a system to construct an entire software repository from a natural-language requirements document. Compared with function-level code generation, this task demands longer planning horizons, stable interfaces across files, and iterative debugging of cross-file inconsistencies. To address these challenges, we propose CodeTeam, an LLM-based multi-agent framework that separates planning, decision making, and implementation into distinct, coordinated stages. In the planning stage, multiple Architect agents draft competing software design sketches (SDS), optionally grounded by retrieved design references. A CTO agent then evaluates, selects, and normalizes the most promising SDS into a machine-checkable contract that specifies file ownership, public interfaces, and dependency constraints. In the implementation stage, Developer agents generate code under a dependency-aware scheduler with bounded context and lightweight Git-based coordination, while a QA agent runs tests and drives iterative repairs. On the synthesis-based SketchEval benchmark, we explicitly compare CodeTeam's prompt-engineering (PE) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) variants with the corresponding CodeS variants, where CodeTeam improves the overall SketchBLEU by 4.1 and 2.9 absolute points, respectively. On the execution-based NL2Repo-Bench benchmark, used as an external validation protocol, CodeTeam achieves the highest average test pass rate in both settings (34.6% PE, 42.3% SFT), confirming that the sketch-improvements extend to functional correctness under upstream test suites. Ablation results show that project-specific developer allocation and retrieval-augmented planning each contribute substantially to the SketchBLEU improvement (9.9% and 8.1% relative, respectively). CodeTeam and the experimental results are available at https://github.com/WhitenWhiten/CodeTeam
Authors: Gertraud Koch, Fausto Giunchiglia
Abstract: The paper explores how "culture" can be operationalised in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and what this reveals about the possibilities and limits of considering a plurality of cultural backgrounds in technological design. It proposes that cultural alignment cannot be achieved only by adding more examples of "other cultures", rather it requires plural epistemologies: allowing multiple, locally grounded ways of knowing. To analyze how this plurality of knowing can be addressed in NLP, the paper uses a socio-technical model of language technology (LT) design, the five layers of technological activity model, for collecting and systematizing approaches to culture in NLP. The analysis shows that while NLP research has made progress toward more culturally sensitive systems, many approaches remain partial, addressing "culture" primarily at the level of output or representation while leaving deeper questions of power, governance, and social context unresolved. The paper concludes that operationalising culture requires much more than technical adaptation; it suggests a reflexive and plural socio-technical approach that navigates potentials and limits of computational formalisation for accounting multiple linguistic and socio-cultural backgrounds.
Authors: Amirali Sajadi, Tu Nguyen, Kimmie Huynh, Esteban Parra, Preetha Chatterjee
Abstract: LLM-based automated program repair (APR) agents generate patches to fix software bugs with minimal human intervention. These agents often produce long trajectories of reasoning, tool use, and feedback to produce candidate patches. Final patch outcomes show whether a repair attempt succeeded or failed, but they do not show how the agent reached that outcome, or where the process became repetitive or misaligned with the task. This makes agentic repair failures difficult to diagnose, reproduce, and prevent. To help developers address these challenges, we present TraceView, an interactive tool for labeling and visualizing repair trajectories from APR systems. TraceView organizes raw and pre-labeled agentic runs with Thought, Action, and Result components to support semantic relation labeling and diagnosis, and renders the resulting trajectory as graph views. Furthermore, TraceView provides relation filters, patch outcome summaries, metrics, and node-level evidence panels to help users inspect how reasoning, actions, and feedback connect across the various steps of an agentic repair attempt. We evaluate TraceView with five researchers through a survey-based user study. Participants reported that TraceView made trajectories easier to scan and that its overview-to-detail workflow helped them better understand repair behavior. The TraceView source code is available at https://github.com/SOAR-Lab/agent-traj-visualization. A screencast of TraceView is available at https://youtu.be/9ZCh7Ifj2AQ.
URLs: https://github.com/SOAR-Lab/agent-traj-visualization., https://youtu.be/9ZCh7Ifj2AQ.
Authors: Qianxu Wang, Kuan Fang
Abstract: Generalizing manipulation policies across robot embodiments remains difficult because standard policies entangle task reasoning with embodiment-specific motor control. We study zero-shot cross-embodiment manipulation, where a policy trained on source embodiments must be deployed on a structurally different target embodiment without additional task demonstrations. We introduce Kinematic Interaction Transfer across Embodiments (KITE), which decouples manipulation into embodiment-agnostic task reasoning and embodiment-specific motor control, connected through a learned latent representation of interaction intent based on contact patterns. Task reasoning is performed by a shared policy that predicts latent intents from source demonstrations, while motor control is performed by an intent-conditioned action decoder learned from each embodiment's kinematic model. With KITE, adaptation to a new embodiment requires only training a new action decoder using its kinematic model, without recollecting demonstration data. We evaluate KITE on three manipulation tasks spanning transfer between parallel grippers, dexterous hands, and composite embodiments. KITE consistently achieves zero-shot transfer to structurally different target embodiments, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines in transfer success and task-embodiment scope.
Authors: Qizhi Pei, Zhimeng Zhou, Yi Duan, Yiyang Zhao, Wei Li, Han Guo, Liang He, Chengping Li, Chang-Yu Hsieh, Conghui He, Rui Yan, Lijun Wu
Abstract: We present BioMatrix, the first multimodal foundation model that natively integrates sequences, structures, and natural language for both molecules and proteins within a single decoder-only architecture. Existing biological foundation models pursue native multimodality and broad entity coverage separately: those that fuse multiple modalities under a shared objective remain confined to a single entity type, while those spanning multiple entity types either omit explicit structural modeling or rely on adapter-based designs in which the model cannot natively generate the very modalities it can read. BioMatrix closes this gap by mapping molecular sequences (supporting both SMILES and SELFIES notations), molecular structures, protein sequences, protein structures, and natural language into a shared discrete token space through a unified tokenization scheme, so that all modalities are consumed and produced uniformly under a single next-token prediction objective -- without external encoders, projection adapters, or modality-specific output heads. Built upon the Qwen3 language model (1.7B and 4B), BioMatrix is continually pretrained on 304.4 billion tokens spanning general and domain-specific text, sequence and structure views of molecules and proteins, and cross-modal corpora that interleave biomolecular entities with scientific text and link distinct entities through molecule-protein and protein-protein interaction data. After tuning on a comprehensive suite of downstream applications covering 80 tasks across 6 categories -- encompassing single-entity and multi-entity understanding and generation tasks across and within modalities -- BioMatrix achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on 77 out of 80 tasks, demonstrating that a single, natively multimodal generalist model can effectively match or surpass specialized approaches across a wide range of biological tasks.
Authors: Niyoj Oli, Sachin Acharya, Sandesh Pokhrel, Sanjay Bhandari, Ramesh Rana, Nikesh Mani Shrestha, Ram Bahadur Gurung, Yash Raj Shrestha, Prashnna K Gyawali, Binod Bhattarai
Abstract: Gastrointestinal cancers represent a growing health burden in the South Asian region, driven largely by rapid changes in socio-economic conditions & lifestyle habits. However, early diagnosis of such malignancies remains a significant challenge, largely due to a lack of modern equipment, lack of financial support, and a scarcity of GI experts. AI-assisted diagnosis & report generation, show great promise in alleviating this problem by providing low-skill manpower the technical expertise to perform diagnosis. However, almost all open-source, publicly available datasets are predominantly collected from the European region, with no representation from the South Asian region. The lack of open-source GI datasets from diverse geographic regions has made it difficult to assess whether population bias is present in existing models, and to develop geographically inclusive AI tools for automated GI diagnosis. To address this gap, we introduce SAGE: An Expert-Annotated South Asian GI Endoscopy dataset for image captioning, multi-label classification, and visual question answering (VQA) tasks. It consists of 1,300 images, their captions along with hallucination tag, 18 labels and 14,726 question-answer pairs making it well-suited for diverse range of tasks including classification, benchmarking, and fine-tuning large multimodal models (LMMs). We further conducted benchmarking of multi-class classifiers on the effect of population shift in GI imaging AI tasks, and contemporary LMMs on their performance. Our study reveals that task-specific models, such as multi-class classification models, suffer the most, with an average performance drop of 58% when evaluated on the South Asian dataset. For contemporary LMMs, benchmarking reveals a substantial drop in the average GREEN score for anatomical landmark detection (0.308) and abnormality detection (0.410).
Authors: Aniket Wattamwar, Mrunal Kakirwar
Abstract: This paper introduces $\pi$-RAG, a novel architecture for oblivious retrieval that decouples Large Language Models (LLMs) from sensitive data storage without sacrificing semantic understanding. Traditional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures expose raw vector embeddings to potential inversion attacks and nondeterministic retrieval failures. To address this, we utilize the digits of $\pi$ as a source of transcendental entropy, creating an immutable indirection layer between the LLM and private records. The value $\pi$ provides immutability, is uneditable and math governs it. The architecture also introduces a Semantic Quantization Layer. This layer projects user inputs onto a pre-computed manifold of Canonical Intent Centroids. RAG performs vector cosine similarity but here it maps the centroids to deterministic offsets via cryptographic salt. The resulting $\pi$-key is a pointer to standardized payload from the actual datastore. By replacing direct access to the datastore via LLM with this transcendental layer, $\pi$-RAG mathematically guarantees that the inference remains oblivious to the data. This architecture unifies deterministic randomness, auditability, and differential privacy, demonstrating high efficacy for high-compliance sectors such as finance and healthcare.
Authors: Mathieu Louis, Tibo Vanleke, Vincent Ginis, Andres Algaba
Abstract: Author rebuttals are the main post-submission window in peer review, but their effect on reviewer scores remains hard to measure because score updates mix rebuttal content with initial score position, paper-level consensus, reviewer confidence, and discussion dynamics. We study ICLR 2024-2025 using 73,000 reviewer trajectories with externally archived pre- and post-rebuttal scores, and use LLMs only as measurement instruments. Gemini Flash 3.0 predicts implied pre-rebuttal scores from score-stripped review text. The resulting text-score offset predicts later movement, with score-increase rates rising from 8.3% when text reads below the assigned score to 31.9% when it reads above. Claude Opus 4.6 induces, and outcome-blinded Gemini Flash 3.0 validates, a 44-feature taxonomy of resolved reviewer-author exchanges, where 23 features replicate across model and held-out year under Bonferroni correction. In the rebuttal-engaged benchmark (n=6,705), initial-review structure already predicts much score movement (AUC=0.747, minimal AUC=0.696), while adding the resolved exchange raises AUC to 0.804. Rebuttals can move scores, but measurable movement is bounded by initial-review structure, and robust exchange signals are mostly rebuttal failure modes.
Authors: Nathan Breslow
Abstract: We show that the conventional gated MLP can be viewed as a rank-1 approximation to a bilinear attention mechanism with two distinct factors corresponding to the query and the key. We further show that moving the nonlinearity onto one factor breaks the exchange symmetry between the two factors and, for non-homogeneous activations, the inverse-scaling symmetry as well. This perspective may help explain why gated MLPs are effective in practice and inform the design of future architectures.
Authors: Abhijit Sinha, Hemant Kumar Kathania, Mohit Joshi, Harishankar Kumar, Shrikanth Narayanan, Sudarsana Reddy Kadiri
Abstract: Self-supervised learning (SSL) models have become a central component of modern speech processing systems, as they enable the learning of rich acoustic representations without reliance on labeled data. Despite their success on adult speech, it remains unclear how effectively these models capture speaker-related attributes such as age and gender in children's speech, which differs substantially from adult speech due to ongoing physiological and cognitive development. Higher pitch, increased articulatory variability, and age-dependent acoustic changes make children's speech a particularly challenging domain. In this work, we present a comprehensive analysis of how age and gender information is encoded across layers of four widely used SSL models: Wav2Vec2, HuBERT, Data2Vec, and WavLM. Layer-wise features are extracted and evaluated using a lightweight CNN on two benchmark children's speech corpora, PFSTAR and CMU Kids. To analyze feature compactness and redundancy, PCA is applied to identify redundancy and highlight the dimensions that contribute most to classification performance. Experimental results show that age- and gender-related information is unevenly distributed across SSL layers, with early to mid-level layers encoding the strongest paralinguistic cues. HuBERT achieves the best overall performance for age classification, while Wav2Vec2 and HuBERT lead gender classification on PFSTAR and CMU Kids, respectively. Beyond single-split evaluation, we further demonstrate that these findings remain stable under speaker-wise cross-validation, layer aggregation, and cross-database evaluation, indicating robustness to data imbalance and domain mismatch. Finally, we show that reliable age and gender classification is achievable even from short speech segments of 1--3 seconds.
Authors: Arnab Kumar Roy, Hemant Kumar Kathania, Paban Sapkota, Sudarsana Reddy Kadiri, Shrikanth Narayanan
Abstract: Dysarthric speech severity classification is challenging due to speaker variability, class imbalance, and limited datasets. This study introduces DSSCNet, a deep learning model that employs transfer learning and multi-corpus learning to enhance speaker-independent classification. By pre-training on one dysarthric speech corpus and fine-tuning on another, DSSCNet achieves improved feature extraction and cross-corpus generalization. Experimental results demonstrate that DSSCNet outperforms state-of-the-art models for speaker-independent severity classification, achieving 75.80\% accuracy on TORGO and 68.25\% on UA-Speech, significantly reducing misclassification errors. The findings confirm that leveraging knowledge transfer between datasets improves model robustness, making DSSCNet well-suited for automated dysarthria assessment. This research contributes to the development of more effective assistive speech technologies for individuals with speech impairments.
Authors: Ninon Liz\'e Masclef, Taisija Demcenko, Antonella Catanzaro, Nataliya Kosmyna
Abstract: This paper explores a novel brain decoding model for 3D shape perception through a dual pathway architecture mirroring biological vision. Our bio-inspired approach implements separate decoding modules for object identity and spatial orientation, inspired by ventral and dorsal pathways, during continuous rotations. We employ circular regression for angle prediction and develop EEG-conditioned multiview diffusion for 3D reconstruction. Our approach successfully decodes both object identity and spatial orientation from EEG signals and enables 3D reconstruction from neural activity, with interpretability analyses revealing temporally structured involvement of ventral, dorsal, and motor-related channels rather than a static ventral dominance in supporting object and angle decoding.
Authors: Yin Li
Abstract: Small language models are cheap to serve and feasible on local hardware, but strong public 135M-class systems are commonly trained with hundreds of billions to trillions of tokens on large clusters. We study a sharply resource-constrained regime: a complete 134.5M-parameter language-model pipeline executed on one NVIDIA L20 GPU. The released checkpoint, L20-Edu-135M, receives approximately 13B pretraining tokens: 10B FineWeb-Edu tokens followed by a 3B-token educational, mathematics, code, and reasoning mixture. We document the architecture, data gates, cross-source MinHash/LSH near-deduplication, segment deduplication, benchmark-overlap removal, throughput optimization, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with weight interpolation, and reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) on GSM8K. In a self-run zero-shot six-task harness, L20-Edu-135M obtains a mean score of 0.4150. It trails SmolLM-135M (0.4767) and SmolLM2-135M (0.4917), but its mean is 87.1% of SmolLM-135M's while its nominal token count is 2.17% as large. This ratio is descriptive, not evidence of statistical equivalence or a controlled scaling law. The model exceeds several older 100M-160M public baselines under the same harness. Direct GRPO-style RLVR decreases GSM8K exact-match accuracy from 1.82% to 1.59% (192-token completions) and 1.21% (320-token completions). These single-run results identify a concrete failure mode rather than establishing a general lower bound on RLVR. The contribution is an auditable resource-constrained case study, not a state-of-the-art claim.
Authors: Muhammed Faruk Aytin, Zehra Demir, Alper \"Unal, Julian Marshall, G\"ozde \"Unal
Abstract: We study regression-based data fusion under uncertainty, where multiple noisy and biased measurement sources are available but ground-truth labels are absent during training. This setting arises in sensor networks, simulation ensembles, and scientific monitoring systems where supervision is costly or infeasible. We propose the Neural Conjugate Aggregation Model (NCAM), a hierarchical Bayesian framework that combines neural networks with conjugate Gaussian inference for unsupervised multi-source fusion. NCAM learns source-specific bias and reliability conditioned on contextual covariates, yielding an analytically tractable posterior over a latent target variable with decomposed epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty. Structural non-identifiability is resolved through sensor anchoring and variance regularization, enabling stable and interpretable posterior aggregation. To complement Bayesian uncertainty with finite-sample guarantees, we integrate locally adaptive Monte Carlo conformal prediction, producing heteroscedastic prediction intervals with coverage guarantees under exchangeability assumptions. Experiments on synthetic and real-world air-quality datasets demonstrate improved predictive accuracy and well-calibrated uncertainty compared to unsupervised baselines, including mean aggregation, probabilistic PCA, and Kalman filtering.
Authors: Dongxu Yang
Abstract: LLM "agent societies" are studied via demonstrations of emergent consensus or polarization -- with no measurable control parameter, no theory of when each regime appears, and no test of whether an outcome is a genuine social dynamic or a model artifact. We introduce the coupling gain gamma, measured per-agent by counterfactually perturbing a neighbour's stated opinion. (i) gamma is stable and model-distinguishing -- across five frontier models it spans 0.15-0.43 (n=20, 95% CIs <= 0.025), paraphrase-invariant; social-neighbour gamma roughly equals numeric-anchor gamma, so gamma is evidence-coupling, not uniquely social. (ii) Classical dynamics with measured (not assumed) coefficients organise the regime: Friedkin-Johnsen for consensus/pluralism, signed-Laplacian/structural-balance for polarization. (iii) Frontier LLMs do not spontaneously backfire (beta <= 0), so default societies do not self-polarize -- polarization is always induced; the beta>0 branch arises only in the FJ surrogate, never in the agents. (iv) A randomized-initial-condition diagnostic -- the (slope, bias) of final vs. initial opinion -- separates genuine averaging from model-prior artifacts (boundary-censoring ruled out by construction via interior-valued facts); applied to a published "emergent consensus" result (Chuang et al. 2023) it reveals a model-specific conflation: averaging on debatable claims, prior-artifact on settled facts. (v) Coupling is context-dependent: pairwise gamma does not predict multi-neighbour outcomes -- it can order them backwards -- whereas a modality-matched group coupling does (sixteen closed+open models, Pearson r=-0.70, permutation p=0.008). The regime laws take this matched coupling, not the single-neighbour gamma: emergent consensus must be read from coupling in the target interaction. We contribute a measurement protocol and a validity instrument, not new theory.
Authors: Patricio M. Vera
Abstract: Artificial intelligence systems are commonly evaluated through task performance and behavioral imitation, but such evaluations leave open whether an artificial agent can acquire, stabilize, and use new lexical meanings from grounded experience. This paper introduces Lexical Consensus, an experimental framework for studying grounded word learning over a structured perceptual substrate. Using frozen DINOv2 visual embeddings, Carroll-style nonce words, and interpretable lexical learners plus linear baselines, we test whether agents can acquire artificial labels for visual concepts, generalize them bidirectionally, and stabilize them across controlled settings. The main result is a robust perceptual-coherence gradient: native categories are easiest to learn, coherent overextensions remain learnable, mid-range disjunctive concepts degrade, and far-disjunctive concepts approach chance. A pre-registered CIFAR-100 dissociation experiment confirms that this gradient is governed by perceptual distance rather than semantic relatedness: perceptual distance predicts acquisition accuracy (partial R^2 = 0.245, p < 1e-7), while semantic distance adds no significant explanatory power (partial R^2 = 0.002, p = 0.660). Bidirectional evaluation shows that naming and retrieval are distinct: exemplar-based mechanisms outperform centroid prototypes in label-to-image retrieval, exposing a memory-fidelity dimension separate from naming accuracy. Falsification controls, homogeneous candidate-pool evaluations, and null results on representational restructuring indicate that frozen perceptual geometry both enables lexical grounding and limits what can be acquired without representational adaptation.
Authors: Andrey Lange, Dmitry Smolyakov, Evgeny Burnaev
Abstract: One of the powerful techniques in data modeling is accounting for features that are available at the training stage, but are not available when the trained model is used to classify or predict test data -- the Learning Using Privileged Information paradigm (LUPI). Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO) methods have been developed for supervised Support Vector Machines (SVM), unsupervised one-class SVM, and SVM with privileged information (SVM+). The missing brick in this research has long been a one-class SVM with privileged information (OC-SVM+). In this paper, we propose an SMO algorithm for OC-SVM+ that significantly outperforms non-sequential algorithms for training the OC-SVM+ model. Its finite-time convergence is established. The experiments show how privileged information affects a descriptive domain in the space of original features. Comparative benchmark tests demonstrate that our algorithm is superior over interior point algorithms.
Authors: Yongheng Sun, Minhui Yu, Mengqi Wu, Maureen Kohi, Mingxia Liu
Abstract: While longitudinal brain PET imaging is the gold standard for quantifying the spatiotemporal accumulation of Beta-amyloid, its widespread clinical utility is constrained by high operational costs and cumulative radiation risks. Recent deep generative models show promise in longitudinal image synthesis; however, they often fail to capture subtle pathological progression due to identity drift and a persistent bias toward trivially replicating baseline signal intensities rather than modeling temporal transition. To this end, we propose Delta-Diffusion, a novel progression-aware framework that redefines longitudinal PET synthesis as a conditional Poisson Diffusion Bridge (PDB) process. Unlike standard diffusion models that start from Gaussian noise, our PDB formulation is mathematically anchored to the subject's baseline PET, effectively transforming the generative task into a conditional distribution transition of the amyloid trajectory. To handle heteroscedastic nature of PET imaging, we introduce a physically-grounded Poisson perturbation within a Diffusion Transformer (DiT). This architecture uses adaptive scale-shift modulation to precisely calibrate the synthesis with the elapsed clinical interval and structural MRI context. A volume-of-interest balanced objective is designed to emphasize sparse, high-risk regions of amyloid accumulation. Validated on two cohorts with 542 subjects, Delta-Diffusion demonstrates superior performance in capturing longitudinal variations in amyloid deposition compared to state-of-the-art methods, offering a robust computational framework for tracking disease progression.
Authors: Corrado Baccheschi, Patrizio Dazzi
Abstract: In this paper, we investigate untrained recurrent models from the Reservoir Computing (RC) paradigm for audio surveillance, focusing on bidirectional Echo State Networks with different depths, from shallow to deep configurations, for emergency sound event detection. We evaluate these models on the MIVIA Audio Events dataset in a multiclass setting across different Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) levels, with the goal of assessing the trade-off between depth, recognition performance, and computational efficiency. We compare the proposed architectures against fully trained recurrent and convolutional-recurrent baselines, namely Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory networks (BiLSTMs) and Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks (CRNNs). Results show that deep and shallow reservoir-based models achieve competitive recognition rates, with deeper variants being more robust in highly noisy conditions and shallower ones offering the most favorable efficiency profile, particularly on edge devices such as the NVIDIA Orin. In addition, the proposed approach remains robust across different input representations, including log-Mel spectrograms and MFCCs with varying resolutions. These findings highlight untrained reservoir architectures as a promising solution for resource-constrained audio surveillance scenarios.
Authors: Wenhao Wang, Franziska Boenisch, Michael Backes, Adam Dziedzic
Abstract: Memorization in machine learning models enables high performance on rare in-distribution samples by capturing their atypical patterns. However, it also causes harmful retention of noise and outliers, degrading generalization. While memorization has been extensively studied in both supervised and self-supervised learning in the vision domain, it remains unexplored in multi-modal contrastive learning. We address this gap by introducing MultiMem, the first metric designed to quantify memorization in multi-modal contrastive learning. Through our systematic analysis, we demonstrate that cross-modal semantic misalignment has the strongest influence on memorization, with text being the dominant modality driving memorization, followed by video, image, and audio. We show that targeted augmentations applied across all modalities effectively reduce memorization as measured by our MultiMem metric and improve model performance. Overall, this work establishes the first framework for measuring and mitigating memorization in multi-modal contrastive learning, preventing harmful data retention and contributing to higher-performing models.
Authors: Eric Yachbes, Eva Tardos
Abstract: Misalignment can change how information moves from an AI agent to a human user. We model this as an information advantage: the AI agent observes the world state, while the human receiver only knows a prior and must act after seeing the agent's signal. A strategic AI sender may withhold evidence or garble information in order to steer the human's decision. We ask how much useful information can still reach the human when the AI optimizes a misaligned objective. We study a Bayesian persuasion model in which the world state is a bit string, the human receiver wants to guess the bits correctly, and a single AI sender wants the receiver to guess as many bits as possible as $1$. For a prior $\mu$, let $R_0(\mu)$ be the receiver's utility from using only the prior, and let $R_{\max}(\mu)$ be the largest receiver utility among signaling schemes that are optimal for the sender. We prove $R_{\max}(\mu)/R_0(\mu)\leq 3/2$. This bound improves for priors close to the independent product prior with the same marginals: if $\mu(x)\geq (1-\eta)\pi_\mu(x)$ for every state $x$, then $R_{\max}(\mu)\leq R_0(\mu)+\eta n$. We also give a six-bit prior for which $R_{\max}(\mu)/R_0(\mu)=39/31>5/4$, so no universal $5/4$ bound is possible.
Authors: Shao-Qun Zhang
Abstract: In recent years, weight quantization that encodes the learnable parameters of large language models in an $n$-bit format has garnered significant attention due to its potential for model compression and inference acceleration. Many practical techniques have been developed; however, the theoretical understanding of many aspects, especially the approximation and degradation of expressive power as the number of quantization bits decreases, remains unclear. In this paper, we provide a theoretical investigation into the expressive capability of large language models relative to the number of quantization bits. We argue that 1.58-bit is the limiting precision for weight quantization by establishing the universal approximation and expressive collapse properties of weight-quantized models with respect to the number of quantization bits. Additionally, we confirm that weight quantization leads to expressive degradation, in which the expressive capacity of weight-quantized models degrades polynomially as the number of quantization bits decreases. These theoretical findings provide a solid foundation for advancing weight quantization in the context of scaling laws and shed insights for future research in model compression and inference acceleration.
Authors: Sepideh Kheirollahi, Mohammad Rasoul Roshanshah
Abstract: Electroencephalogram (EEG) analysis remains the clinical gold standard for epilepsy diagnosis and seizure detection. While Deep Learning (DL) has significantly advanced automated EEG interpretation, its transition from controlled experimental settings to routine clinical deployment is severely bottlenecked by fundamental architectural flaws. Standard DL models operate as opaque black-boxes lacking clinical interpretability, demand massive amounts of balanced annotated data, and incur steep computational costs incompatible with resource-constrained wearable or implantable neuromodulation devices. This paper presents a comprehensive review of these prevailing limitations and explores Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) as a emerging paradigm for EEG-based seizure detection. By replacing the fixed activation functions of traditional neurons with flexible, learnable functions along the network's connections, KANs bridge the critical gap between predictive accuracy and mathematical transparency. We systematically analyze how KAN architectures resolve the shortcomings of traditional DL-based models by offering exceptional parameter efficiency, inherent interpretability for physician trust, and robust performance under data scarcity. Ultimately, this review establishes KANs not merely as an incremental algorithmic update, but as a fundamental paradigm shift necessary to actualize next-generation, patient-specific, and thoroughly transparent clinical EEG monitoring systems.
Authors: Yiwei Hou, Hao Wang, Muxi Lyu, Marius Momeu, Eric Nguyen, Taige Yang, Koushik Sen, Dawn Song, David Wagner
Abstract: Memory safety vulnerabilities remain a significant threat even for projects with extensive fuzzing and manual auditing. Recent results suggest that large language models hold great promise for detecting such vulnerabilities, but they are unreliable, at risk of hallucination, and challenging to scale to repository-size codebases. This paper presents Revelio, a cost-efficient end-to-end agentic framework for memory-safety vulnerability discovery. Revelio addresses the problem of hallucination by generating an executable Proof-of-Vulnerability, which is checked with a deterministic sanitizer. It reduces cost using inexpensive LLMs and lightweight static analysis to help generate and rank vulnerability hypotheses, reporting vulnerabilities only when they can be reproduced and confirmed by a sanitizer. We evaluated Revelio on seven production-quality projects that had been continuously fuzzed for five to eight years, as well as on 100 randomly selected Arvo projects from the CyberGym benchmark. With around one hour per project and a total cost of $300, Revelio discovered 19 previously unknown memory-safety vulnerabilities. On benchmarks, Revelio outperformed frontier coding agents across diverse backbone models at comparable token costs. Our results suggest that Revelio enables scalable and trustworthy end-to-end LLM-based memory-safety vulnerability detection.
Authors: Mahounan Pericles Adjovi, Roald Eiselen, Prasenjit Mitra
Abstract: We investigate the translation quality of current large language models (LLMs) for English-to-Hausa and English-to-Fongbe - two typologically distinct West African languages from the Afroasiatic and Niger-Congo families respectively - and evaluate whether standard automatic metrics reliably reflect human judgment for these low-resource languages. We evaluate four models (GPT-4o Mini, Claude Sonnet 4, Gemini 2.5 Flash, and Qwen2.5-7B) at progressive scales (500 to 10,000 sentences) using automatic metrics (BLEU, chrF++, TER, COMET, BERTScore) validated against native-speaker judgment. Our results reveal three key findings. First, translation quality varies substantially by language: Hausa achieves acceptable quality (human scores 4.0-4.5/5) while Fongbe achieves poor quality (1.0-2.2/5), with a consistent 3x BLEU gap across all systems. Second, model rankings differ by language - Gemini leads for Fongbe while GPT-4o leads for Hausa by human evaluation - indicating that performance on one low-resource African language does not predict performance on another. Third, metric-human correlation varies dramatically: perfect rank correlation for Fongbe (rho=1.0) but weak correlation for Hausa (rho=0.5), where human evaluators preferred GPT-4o despite all automatic metrics ranking Claude first. We further show that neural metrics like BERTScore exhibit embedding collapse (within-language similarity >0.99) for both languages, limiting their ability to differentiate translation quality. Based on these findings, we recommend multi-metric evaluation for low-resource African languages, with particular caution when interpreting neural metrics. We establish that minimum sample sizes of n=2,500 sentences are required for stable system rankings, as smaller samples produced artifact findings that reversed at scale.
Authors: Mohammed Rawhani, Dervis Karaboga, Ozkan Ufuk Nalbantoglu, Alper Basturk, Bahriye Akay
Abstract: Pre-trained language models struggle when applied to new domains, as full fine-tuning is computationally expensive and prone to catastrophic forgetting. This study addresses this challenge by presenting a novel parameter-efficient strategy for unsupervised domain adaptation that combines custom PEFT architectures with mixed-objective training. Our approach simultaneously optimizes classification performance on labeled source domain data and masked language modeling (MLM) on unlabeled target domain data, preserving target domain knowledge while adapting to source domain tasks. Our method employs a custom union of invertible adapters and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) within a unified parameter-efficient framework. Through comprehensive evaluation on the Multi-Genre Natural Language Inference (MNLI) dataset across 20 domain shifts, our approach achieves significant improvements over existing methods: 1.41 percentage points over the current parameter-efficient state-of-the-art UDapter, 1.26 percentage points over the fully-tuned DANN baseline, and 0.86 percentage points over DSN, while utilizing only 7% of the model's trainable parameters. These results establish new benchmarks for parameter-efficient unsupervised domain adaptation and demonstrate that carefully designed PEFT combinations with concurrent optimization can outperform both existing parameter-efficient methods and traditional fully-tuned approaches.
Authors: Mahounan Pericles Adjovi, Victor Olufemi, Roald Eiselen, Prasenjit Mitra
Abstract: Low-resource African languages lack text corpora needed for language model training. We investigate whether ASR pipelines can extend text resources for two typologically distinct West African languages: Fongbe (tonal, diacritic-rich) and Hausa (non-tonal). We fine-tune MMS-300M on a curated 12.3-hour Fongbe dataset, achieving 9.48% WER on the ALFFA benchmark - a 78% relative reduction from the prior 44.04% baseline - while preserving tonal diacritics critical to the language. For Hausa, we apply an existing fine-tuned Whisper-Small model. We catalog 1,553 YouTube videos (236 hours) and process a subset of 424 videos (45.49 hours) selected to balance domain diversity with available computational resources, producing 6,770 transcribed segments. Human evaluation on 50 randomly sampled segments per language shows mean quality scores of 57.4/100 for Hausa and 36.5/100 for Fongbe, indicating that while Hausa transcriptions approach acceptable quality for corpus construction, Fongbe transcriptions require post-processing or improved models for production use. We release the curated dataset, fine-tuned model, transcribed corpus, and full video catalog following platform terms and ethical guidelines.
Authors: Farbod Siahkali, Mengxue Hou, Vijay Gupta
Abstract: We study trajectory optimization in mobile sensing systems that must identify which member of a finite candidate set is the true target, while maintaining reachability to all potential candidate targets, under resource constraints. Deferred-Decision Trajectory Optimization (DDTO) addresses this setting by computing trajectories that reach individual targets but remain coincident for as long as possible before separating toward different targets. We propose Active-Sensing DDTO (AS-DDTO), which extends DDTO by adding a trajectory-dependent information-acquisition term to the planning objective. The resulting planner maintains reachability to candidate targets while biasing the coincident portion of the trajectories toward regions that enable earlier target identification. The framework supports Bayesian updates and conformal candidate-set updates for distance-dependent sensing. We derive a mixed-integer conic reformulation and provide guarantees on recursive feasibility, belief concentration, and fixed-time coverage for the raw conformal candidate set. Numerical simulations show improved target identification compared with standard DDTO under distance-dependent sensing uncertainty and limited sensing budget.
Authors: Luke Ztz Hu, Hongbing Lang, Songping Mai
Abstract: Edge Internet of Things (IoT) agents are often constrained by memory capacity, privacy requirements, communication latency, and recurring inference cost. Current smart-home assistants commonly rely on API-level command interfaces or cloud-based language models that remain difficult to deploy on edge devices. This paper addresses edge IoT command generation as a many-to-one structured output task, where multiple natural-language instructions map to the same canonical command string for deterministic smart-home parsing. To support this setting, we propose Semantic-Conditioned Edge-Aware Neural Framework for Structured IoT Command Generation (SCENIC), an end-to-end framework covering model architecture selection, Smart Home Instruct data generation, triplet-loss contrastive supervised fine-tuning, pruning and quantization, and deployment-oriented export. We evaluate sub-0.2B-scale transformer backbones, which are, to the best of our knowledge, among the smallest language-model backbones studied for edge IoT structured command generation. On Smart Home Instruct-Bench, the strongest dense decoder-only row reaches 99.0% EM@1, while the encoder-decoder model retains stronger high-sparsity behavior. A representative pruned INT8 encoder-decoder export preserves 91.0% EM@1 and 99.0% EM@5 while reducing exported model size by 25.38%. TensorRT profiling of the NVIDIA 2:4 sparse encoder export further shows up to 1.8x encoder-component speedup, indicating that the selected encoder-decoder deployment path can retain structured command accuracy under edge-oriented compression while hardware acceleration evidence remains component-level. The SCENIC code and experimental artifacts are open sourced to support reproducibility.
Authors: Saman Pordanesh, Benjamin Tan
Abstract: In the rapidly evolving field of software development, code stylometry analyzing unique stylistic signatures of programmers plays a crit-ical role in authorship attribution and cybersecurity. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, have introduced new dimensions to this field, challenging traditional stylometry techniques. This study investigates the effectiveness of LLMs in altering code stylometry while preserving functionality and evaluates the impact of various prompt engineering strategies. Through comprehensive experiments, we assess how well these models can obscure stylistic signatures to avoid detection by a Random Forest classifier trained for authorship attribution. The results reveal significant differences in effectiveness between single-shot and multi-shot methods and highlight the importance of detailed, structured prompts. Additionally, functionality preservation checks demonstrate the challenges in maintaining code integrity post-modification. This research provides critical insights into the robustness of authorship attribution techniques against advanced AI capabilities, informing future cybersecurity and software engineering developments
Authors: Yizhou Dang, Chuang Zhao, Lianbo Ma, Guibing Guo, Xingwei Wang, Zhu Sun
Abstract: Data augmentation (DA) has been proven to be an effective means for improving protein representation learning (PRL) by generating additional training samples. Although mainstream perturbation- and sampling-based augmentation methods can produce data containing sufficient variations, they carry the risk of disrupting the protein structure and function. Some crafted protein homology modeling tools can generate conformations, but reduce structural diversity. The above dilemmas lead us to a question: Can we restore the disrupted structure caused by DA operations, providing data with both the original structure and diverse variations? In this work, we first analyze and empirically reveal the structure defect and performance degradation issues of existing DA methods. Based on the findings, we propose a simple yet effective DA method, Manifold Restore Mixing (MRM), for protein representation learning. Specifically, inspired by manifold mixup, we mix the hidden representations of original and augmented protein data to generate new samples that restore structural information lost in DA while introducing diverse variations. Furthermore, we develop a sample difficulty scheduler that adjusts the beta distribution in mixup to provide models with progressively challenging mixed samples during training, which improves the final performance. Comprehensive experiments on various PRL backbones and downstream tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our method. The complete code and weights will be released upon acceptance. We provide a implementation at https://github.com/KingGugu/MRM.
Authors: Soyeon Kim, Kyowoon Lee, Jaesik Choi
Abstract: Path-based attribution methods such as Integrated Gradients (IG) are widely adopted for their strong axiomatic properties and effectiveness in attributing model predictions to input features by integrating gradients along a path from a baseline to the input. However, the choice of the attribution path largely affects the quality of explanations, and existing approaches rely on fixed or hand-crafted paths that often produce noisy or distorted attributions. To address this limitation, we propose Diffusion Integrated Gradients (DiffIG), a novel method that reformulates path generation as a conditional generative modeling problem. DiffIG first trains a diffusion model to learn a distribution over paths generated from a Stick-Breaking Process, then employs guided sampling to embed user guidance during the sampling procedure. We demonstrate that DiffIG quantitatively matches or outperforms existing path-based methods, achieving perceptually aligned explanations. This work introduces a new generative perspective for flexible, inference-time controllable Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods.
Authors: Pengxiang Cai, Tianchen Fang, Xiaohan Li, Qingyuan Zeng, Guocong Li, Jintai Chen
Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is widely viewed as a promising path toward continuously improving large language models. Recent works, however, suggest that mainstream RLVR often reallocates sampling probabilities among trajectories already present in the base model: it can improve sampling efficiency, reflected by higher pass@1 scores, but yields limited gains, and can even decrease pass@k scores when k is large, and therefore may fail to expand the base model's reasoning capacity boundary. In this paper, we present a boundary-aware Curriculum RL approach to move beyond the base model's reasoning capacity boundary. Our approach first uses pass@k sampling to locate the current reasoning capacity boundary, then applies targeted teacher guidance to examples near or beyond that boundary, and finally uses RL to consolidate the newly introduced reasoning patterns. Across Qwen, Llama, and DeepSeek base models, boundary-aware Curriculum RL improves both pass@1 scores and pass@256 scores, with pass@1 reflecting one-attempt performance and pass@256 serving as an empirical proxy for the reasoning capacity boundary. In our experiments, average pass@256 improves by 9.8 percentage points over the base models and by 10.3 percentage points over Vanilla RLVR. These results suggest that boundary-aware Curriculum RL can provide a scalable route for LLMs to continuously improve beyond the base model's empirical reasoning capacity boundary.
Authors: K. R. Balasubramanian
Abstract: Attention sinks, representation collapse, and norm stratification are treated as transformer-specific pathologies. We show they are not specific to attention: they are what content-based routing does under a fixed similarity metric. We give a reframing identity: softmax attention is Boltzmann-weighted aggregation over Euclidean distances with constant key norms, so its score omits a $-\|k\|^2$ term and is blind to key magnitude. This predicts that any router whose metric is ill-matched to its representations should compensate, by concentrating its routing and collapsing the routed representations. We test it on routers that score and aggregate over different axes: softmax attention over tokens (nine pretrained transformers), graph attention over nodes, a selective state-space model and a recurrent mixer over time, and learned residuals over depth. All develop the same signature, and two within-model ablations show it is caused by the routing mechanism rather than by incidental dynamics. The form is contingent, set by the strength of the positional brake each router carries alongside its content score; we sweep that brake and move the onset across its whole range. The mechanism is not contingent, and it does not require norm stratification: a router with norm-normalized keys concentrates just the same. We do not claim these models implement Riemannian geometry; the geometric view is a diagnostic that names the inadequacy of the flat, norm-blind metric.
Authors: Shreyas KC
Abstract: LLM-as-a-judge has become the dominant approach to scalable evaluation in NLP pipelines, yet judges themselves carry systematic biases that raw accuracy hides: they favor responses placed in slot A (position bias), they prefer longer responses regardless of quality (verbosity bias), and their reliability degrades sharply in lower-resource languages. We introduce BabelJudge, an open-source benchmark and reliability audit framework that measures all four failure modes -- position bias, verbosity bias, order inconsistency, and cross-lingual degradation -- on any judge model, without requiring human preference labels. The key insight is gold-labelling by degradation: starting from a high-quality reference response and applying a controlled perturbation yields a pairwise item whose gold label is known by construction, eliminating annotation cost. We evaluate Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct-4bit across English, Hindi, Arabic, and Swahili and find that our composite bias-penalised reliability score drops from 0.714 in Hindi to 0.550 in Swahili, a gap that raw accuracy (0.835 vs. 0.660) understates. Swahili order consistency collapses to 0.480, meaning judge verdicts are near-random under slot-order swaps -- a failure mode invisible to accuracy alone. We further extend the framework to agentic evaluation via nine trajectory-level perturbations (argument corruption, tool swaps, hallucinated calls, missing steps) and three new metrics: tool accuracy, hallucination detection rate, and trajectory-length bias. BabelJudge is released as a Python package supporting 11 judge backends. Code: https://github.com/Shreyaskc/BabelJudge
Authors: Soumil Rathi
Abstract: Robots deployed in realistic settings will accumulate experience across many sessions and tasks over their deployment. The robot's tasks may often require it to remember information from multiple sessions ago, making long-context robot memory important for real-world deployments. However, most robot-memory benchmarks today are based on single episodes or a short context. To measure how current robot memory systems perform on longer sessions with more distractions, we introduce RoboMME-Interference, a cross-session benchmark built on RoboMME. For each query episode, we construct a session history using the query's relevant prior demonstration followed by a controlled number of unrelated sessions, which we provide to the VLA as memory and measure accuracy. Running RoboMME's released memory-augmented $\pi_{0.5}$ variants unmodified through this benchmark, we find that while perceptual memory variants improve success when given the history without any distractors, they decay strongly and steadily as unrelated sessions accumulate. With this release, we emphasize the importance of long-context memory and robustness to interference and show that current systems largely fail on such capabilities. The project page, videos, code, and data are at https://robotmemorybench.com.
Authors: Yaozhong Shi, Zachary E. Ross, Yisong Yue
Abstract: Principled regression for stochastic processes is a long-standing challenge with deep connections to scientific inverse problems. We introduce Flow Annealing Posterior Sampling (FAPS), to our knowledge the first function-space posterior sampling framework that unifies stochastic-process regression and PDE inverse problems. Built on pretrained function-space flow-matching priors, FAPS enables likelihood-guided posterior inference from sparse and noisy observations, supports variable query discretizations, and avoids explicit prior-density evaluation. Its Langevin correction uses a low-rank covariance preconditioner to exploit dominant function-space correlations across discretizations. Across Gaussian and non-Gaussian stochastic-process regression benchmarks and diverse PDE inverse problems, FAPS produces coherent posterior samples with accurate uncertainty quantification, significantly outperforming existing functional regression baselines and achieving competitive or better PDE noisy inverse performance than diffusion-based posterior samplers while reducing test-time sampling cost.
Authors: Hanping Zhang, Adam Koziak, Yuhong Guo
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been widely applied to sequential decision-making, yet it often suffers from poor sample efficiency due to costly interactions with the environment. A limited line of recent work has started exploring improving RL efficiency by leveraging external knowledge expressed in natural-language instructions. However, the few existing approaches typically treat the entire instruction as a single conditioning input, failing to account for the stage-dependent nature of language guidance, especially in complex environments. In this paper, we propose \emph{Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with Language Instructions (HRLLI)}, a hierarchical RL framework that explicitly models natural-language instructions as dynamically selectable semantic guidance during decision-making. HRLLI decomposes instructions into a set of piecewise guidance elements, where each instruction piece may become relevant at different stages of interaction with the environment. A novel hierarchical RL policy structure is then formulated in a \emph{Select-to-Act} paradigm: a high-level semantic policy acts as a guidance selector that selects the most relevant instruction piece to the current state to guide the low-level agent's decision, while a low-level policy executes environment actions conditioned on the selected guidance. The two-level policies are learned simultaneously to maximize augmented expected returns from interactions with the environment. This design enables the agent to adaptively ground language instructions into stage-specific decisions during interaction. Experiments on the instruction-intensive RTFM benchmark show that HRLLI consistently outperforms strong instruction-conditioned RL baselines, demonstrating that explicitly modeling adaptive instruction selection significantly improves the effectiveness of RL.
Authors: Adam Koziak, Yuhong Guo
Abstract: Test-time adaptation (TTA) can mitigate domain shift without source data, but it is highly brittle under adversarially contaminated test streams, where corrupted inputs also destabilize online updates. We study robust test-time adaptation (RTTA) in the adversarial-stream setting, which remains comparatively underexplored relative to standard TTA, and propose SAFER (Stochastic Augmentation Framework for Enhanced Robustness), a training-free reliability-guided augmentation wrapper for RTTA. SAFER preserves the wrapped TTA objective while replacing brittle single-view predictions with a reliability-guided pooled predictor. For each test sample, SAFER generates stochastic augmentations and aggregates their predictions through correlation-weighted pooling with outlier detection. We further study an adaptive-mixing extension that improves clean-performance retention by adjusting original-versus-augmentation weighting using feature disagreement signals. We evaluate on PACS, VLCS, and OfficeHome under PGD attacks at various attack rates. Across benchmarks, SAFER improves resilience of TTA methods to adversarial attacks while maintaining competitive clean performance.
Authors: Zihui Zhao, Yuanbo Tang, Yang Li
Abstract: Dictionary learning has long been studied from both optimization and probabilistic perspectives. While formulations with element-wise sparsity regularization (e.g., L1-based sparse coding) admit well-established probabilistic interpretations, many structured variants that impose global constraints lack a clear and tractable generative view. In this paper, we revisit a class of practically effective yet theoretically under-explored dictionary learning methods that impose a simple global regularization on the number of activated dictionary atoms, which we term parsimoniously activated dictionary learning (PADL). We show that PADL admits an equivalent formulation as maximum a posteriori estimation under a structured generative model, with auxiliary latent variables that govern global activation patterns. This formulation allows us to derive generalization guarantees that are difficult to obtain under the original formulation. More importantly, it yields an analytical characterization of the tradeoff between sparsity, storage cost, and reconstruction accuracy, enabling data-driven estimation of optimal hyperparameters. Based on this connection, we develop an efficient and interpretable PADL algorithm that eliminates manual hyperparameter tuning, achieving improved reconstruction performance under comparable sparsity levels on visual benchmarks. We further demonstrate its practical utility in accelerating inference for vision-language models.
Authors: Arjun Pillai, Christian Hoang, Anjelo Jann Laroza
Abstract: Why do multilingual language models sometimes generate in the wrong language, and why is this so hard to fix? We introduce Language Identity Head Ablation (LIHA), a causal intervention that zeros each attention head individually and measures the resulting language switch rate across a parallel dataset of 2,700 prompt-language pairs spanning seven languages. Applied to GPT-2, LIHA identifies a small set of first-token broadcaster heads - led by L6H1 (switch rate 0.32, 3.23 $\sigma$ above the population mean) - that attend persistently to the first prompt token, propagating its language signal throughout generation. Compensatory redistribution when heads are ablated is statistically significant (p < $10^{-5}$) and follows a directional, hierarchical pattern: compensation always recruits heads in layers above the ablated head, suggesting a feedforward cascade rather than global diffusion. To probe how training regime shapes these circuits, we apply LIHA to a controlled pair - Qwen2.5-1.5B-Base and Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct - identical in architecture and size, differing only in training. The base model is nearly flat (max SR=0.016, 200/336 heads at SR=0.0); the instruct model concentrates causal influence sharply at layer 0, led by L0H5 (SR=0.224, 8.93 $\sigma$ above mean), with all other layers near zero. This controlled comparison provides direct causal evidence that instruction tuning reorganizes language identity circuits toward early-layer localization. Extended experiments with Chinese and Russian confirm that first-token broadcasting is script-specific in GPT-2, with non-Latin languages handled at layer 0 - the same locus as the instruction-tuned model. Code and data will be released upon publication.
Authors: Yosuke Yamagishi, Atsushi Takamatsu, Mototsugu Sato, Tomohiro Kikuchi, Shouhei Hanaoka, Takeharu Yoshikawa, Osamu Abe
Abstract: Purpose: To evaluate whether large language model (LLM)-assisted label cleaning can identify label-report discordance in CT-RATE, a large-scale public chest CT dataset. Materials and Methods: After report-level deduplication, 24,446 unique radiology reports were identified. Twelve reports were excluded from the primary GPT-5.4 analysis because of Microsoft Azure AI Foundry content-safety filtering, leaving 24,434 reports and 439,812 label instances across 18 abnormality categories. GPT-5.4-derived binary labels were generated from report text using structured JSON output and compared with existing CT-RATE labels. Discordant instances were adjudicated by radiologists. In addition, 100 randomly sampled reports were manually annotated to compare CT-RATE labels, individual LLM-derived labels, and multi-LLM majority-vote labels against radiologist-annotated reference labels. Results: Overall agreement between GPT-5.4-derived and CT-RATE labels was 96.4%, with Cohen's kappa of 0.884. Lymphadenopathy showed the lowest agreement and kappa. In discordance review, radiologist adjudication supported GPT-5.4-derived labels in 72 of 97 (74.2%) general discordant instances and 91 of 99 (91.9%) targeted lymphadenopathy discordant instances. Against radiologist-annotated reference labels, multi-LLM majority-vote labels achieved the highest label-macro-averaged F1 score and Cohen's kappa. Conclusion: LLM-assisted label cleaning identified clinically meaningful label-report discordance in CT-RATE and may support scalable quality improvement of public imaging datasets. The cleaned dataset will be made publicly available to support future research.
Authors: Edwin Kwadwo Tenagyei, Lei Wang, Ugochukwu Ejike Akpudo, Jun Zhou, Yongsheng Gao
Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has become a practical solution for adapting large pretrained vision transformers (ViTs) to downstream tasks while updating only a small subset of parameters. However, existing adapter-based methods perform adaptation independently for each token, implicitly assuming that token refinements should be learned in isolation. This token-wise formulation overlooks the structured relationships among tokens that naturally arise in visual scenes, potentially leading to redundant updates and spatially inconsistent feature refinement. In this work, we revisit the design of parameter-efficient adapters and propose to perform adaptation in hyperedge space rather than token space. We introduce HyperAdapter, a hypergraph-based adapter architecture that enables structured, group-aware adaptation through soft token routing. HyperAdapter constructs a soft hypergraph over ViT tokens using prototype-based assignments, aggregates token features into latent hyperedge representations, applies lightweight bottleneck adaptation at the hyperedge level, and diffuses the resulting updates back to tokens via the hypergraph incidence structure. This design injects an explicit structural inductive bias into PEFT while preserving the modularity and efficiency of standard adapters. Extensive experiments across diverse visual benchmarks demonstrate that structured hyperedge adaptation consistently outperforms strong PEFT baselines under comparable parameter budgets, with particularly pronounced gains on tasks requiring structured reasoning. Our results suggest that the choice of adaptation space is a critical yet underexplored dimension in parameter-efficient transfer for ViTs.
Authors: Jack Wei Lun Shi, Minghao Dang, Wawan Solihin, Leong Hien Poh, Justin K. W. Yeoh
Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based approaches for automated code compliance (ACC) of building regulations are prone to generating incorrect and hallucinated computer-processable rules. This paper introduces P4IR, a two-stage framework that uses supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to instill domain knowledge in an LLM, followed by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to improve the accuracy of the generated intermediate representations in the form of high-level code skeletons. The framework achieved reductions of up to 23.8% and 38.6% in tree edit distance and token-level Levenshtein distance respectively, relative to the SFT baselines. Comparative analysis demonstrates that this approach in a zero-shot setting outperforms leading LLMs in both code structure and semantics, specifically Claude Opus and Sonnet 4.5, GPT-5.2, Qwen-3-Max, and GLM-4.7, evaluated via few-shot prompting. Additionally, the GRPO stage produced a small yet statistically significant reduction in false positives. By combining SFT with GRPO to optimize directly for domain-specific objectives, this approach offers a path toward more accurate and reliable LLM-based ACC systems.
Authors: Haodi Liu, Xinhang Yang, Kunda Yan, Sen Cui, Zeyu Zhang, Changshui Zhang
Abstract: Robots operating in everyday environments must understand fine-grained human actions, intentions, and contextual cues from broad views where people occupy only small regions, a capability unmet by current systems. While open-vocabulary action recognition methods remain limited to assigning predefined labels, and vision-language models (VLMs) face an inherent trade-off between informational richness and factual fidelity in their outputs, neither approach achieves the deep semantic interpretation required for reliable human-robot interaction. We propose Gold Points Sniper (GPS), a novel framework that empowers lightweight VLMs with self-guided multimodal reasoning capabilities for fine-grained human action understanding. Our approach comprises three key modules: Gold Points Extractor trains VLMs to identify critical action-relevant details, Selective Socratic Questioner validates and refines these details through selective self-questioning, and Semantic Entailment Evaluator quantitatively assesses factual consistency using semantic entailment classification. Extensive experiments on our curated instruction-tuning dataset based on the CAP benchmark demonstrate that GPS-enhanced lightweight VLMs achieve substantial performance improvements, with some models reaching performance comparable to proprietary GPT-4o while maintaining superior factual accuracy. Our work establishes a reliable foundation for fine-grained action understanding in domestic robotics, enabling robots to safely interpret human behavior through information-dense yet factually grounded descriptions. Source code, training configurations, annotation prompts, and dataset details are released at https://github.com/Haodi-Liu/GPS-Gold-Point-Sniper.
Authors: Wolfgang Pietsch
Abstract: Because large language models (LLMs) are impressively successful in predicting text, it appears that they must have access to a 'world model' representing causal and definitional structure. However, the dominant formalisms of modern causal inference -- Judea Pearl's interventionist approach and the Neyman-Rubin potential outcomes framework -- struggle to illuminate how LLMs learn causal structure. I resolve this puzzle by arguing that LLMs employ a specific inductive approach based on a difference-making logic -- sometimes called variational induction. I demonstrate how central aspects of this logic are realized during training, where LLMs require enormous amounts of text data from a wide range of contexts to identify difference- and indifference-makers within word sequences. Furthermore, I analyze specific architectural features of LLMs -- such as token embeddings and self-attention -- to determine their roles in variational induction. The difference-making logic of LLMs fundamentally parallels the experimental method, where causal relations are derived by systematically varying individual circumstances to determine their influence on a phenomenon.
Authors: Wenzhen Yuan, Jiacheng Ruan, Wutao Xiong, Chengping Zhao, Ting Liu, Yuzhuo Fu
Abstract: We conduct a systematic study of 18 widely used vision-language benchmarks and identify three major issues: 1) many items do not rely on visual cues and therefore fail to effectively measure multimodal understanding; 2) many items are already close to performance saturation for current LVLMs, which limits their discriminative power; 3) a small number of anomalous items affect the reliability of evaluation results. To this end, we propose MMGist, a curated benchmark that covers seven capability dimensions and contains 7,262 items. MMGist is constructed through a three-stage pipeline, which sequentially combines text-ablation filtering, cross-model saturation filtering, and anomaly detection filtering. We conduct extensive experiments on 27 leading LVLMs and compare MMGist with the raw pool of 23,250 items. The results show that MMGist preserves model rankings with high fidelity, with Spearman $\rho = 0.98$, while reducing evaluation items by 69\% and improving cross-model discrimination by 78\%. Further results indicate that Visual Logic remains a systematic weakness of current LVLMs, while knowledge-intensive dimensions such as Expert Knowledge dimensions remain important factors for distinguishing closed-source models from open-source models. These findings suggest that high-quality evaluation should prioritize visual dependency, discriminative power, and reliability, rather than simply pursuing benchmark scale.
Authors: Quanyuan Ruan, Jiabao Lei, Xingyi Du, Xifeng Gao
Abstract: UV parameterization is a fundamental step in 3D content creation, yet producing production-ready UV layouts remains challenging due to the gap between geometric distortion objectives and the stylistic preferences of professional artists. While classical methods optimize handcrafted energy functions, artist-authored UVs exhibit structural patterns such as straightened seams, axis-aligned islands, and flexible interior deformation, properties that are difficult to explicitly formulate. In this work, we present DreamUV, an end-to-end learning framework that formulates UV unwrapping as a generative Flow Matching problem. Rather than predicting a single optimal parameterization, DreamUV learns a mesh-conditioned transport process that maps noise samples to a distribution of artist-like UV layouts. To reflect real-world authoring practices, we introduce a boundary-aware training strategy that prioritizes seam geometry, and a Model-in-the-Loop Finetuning(MITL) scheme that explicitly accounts for discretization errors during sampling and stabilizes transport dynamics under heterogeneous supervision. We evaluate DreamUV on a large-scale dataset of professionally authored UV layouts. Experiments demonstrate that our method produces significantly straighter boundaries and tighter axis-aligned islands than both classical and learning-based baselines, while maintaining competitive distortion metrics. Qualitative results and a user study with professional artists further confirm that DreamUV generates UV layouts that are not only valid, but aligned with practical production requirements.
Authors: Anneliese Brei, Abhisheik Sharma, Nicholas Sanaie, Lu Wang, Snigdha Chaturvedi
Abstract: As LLM-generated text is increasingly used, especially in fictional domains, we explore how much LLM-generated stories differ from human-written stories. In this work, we focus on characters. We borrow definitions from narratology to analyze eight intricate dimensions of character, such as stylization and wholeness. These dimensions consider more than just basic characteristics. They assess how characters are portrayed within their stories. After automatically inferring categories of characters within both LLM and human-written stories, we compare and contrast these two sets of stories. We consider the following overarching questions: (1) Do LLMs and human-written stories have similar characters? and (2) Do LLMs generate stories with a variety of characters? Our analysis includes research questions that focus on stories generated by popular LLMs and recently published human-written stories. We describe a number of interesting similarities, differences and key takeaways.
Authors: Areeba Hassan, Arooj Kausar, Syeda Kisaa Fatima, Gibrail Islam, Mehwish Fatima
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) generate fluent long-form text, however, often add unsupported factual claims. Existing verification techniques improve factuality by grounding generation in external evidence. However, the same verification policy usually applies to all claims despite being differences in hallucination risks. We propose \textit{FACTOR} (\textit{FACTuality-Oriented Risk-aware Verification}), an inference-time model that adapts verification criteria according to claim-level uncertainty. FACTOR combines uncertainty estimation, adaptive language inference verification, and candidate re-ranking to allocate verification effort where it is most needed. We evaluate \textit{FACTOR} on FactScore benchmark showing that adaptive verification improves factuality while reducing verification cost simultaneously. We further perform different ablation studies to identify the primary driver of these gains. Our results show the effective and model-agnostic performance of \textit{FACTOR} for improving factuality in long-form generation.
Authors: Muhammad Bilal (Technical University of Munich), Ali Hassaan Mughal (Independent Researcher)
Abstract: Modern web applications increasingly combine three ingredients that are hard to test: output from large language models, multi-market internationalization, and browser-driven front-ends over external data sources. We report on a production rental-search assistant whose automated suite grew to 1,553 test cases in six weeks. The suite passed continuously, yet user-facing defects continued to reach production. We studied all 252 bug-fix commits in the project and classified each by the boundary, or seam, it escaped through. About 44 percent of the fixes fall in four seams that component-level unit tests cannot observe: the live browser runtime, the non-default market, the end-to-end flow, and the whole-system level. A fix without a guard at the seam let one defect ship twice. We present the four-seam framework, the measured defect distribution, and the practices we adopted, including a simple way for a team to find the seam that carries the most fixes.
Authors: Hongqiao Dong, Wenhao Chi, Ruobing Liang, Xiaokui Yang, Wenhua Liang, Peng Hou, Wenjun Pu, Yipeng Zhao, Ping Chen, Haiping Liu, Jianxing He, Bo Liu
Abstract: Medical expert annotators are scarce, and blind reliance on artificial intelligence (AI) can be misleading, motivating approaches in which humans, particularly junior medical trainees or even non-medical personnel, collaborate with AI to achieve robust medical segmentation. Although the Segment Anything Model (SAM) shows promise for general-purpose image segmentation, its performance in human-AI collaboration for specialized medical tasks has not been thoroughly evaluated. Here we present Hi-Seg, a human-in-the-loop segmentation framework for pulmonary nodules built on SAM. Humans iteratively refine prompts through trial-and-error learning and semantic reasoning, progressively guiding SAM toward higher-quality masks. Using chest CT scans from 1,179 patients across 12 centers, we conducted the first large-scale external validation of collaborative human-SAM segmentation. Across all annotator groups, Hi-Seg achieved a mean Dice score of almost 85%, outperforming five state-of-the-art deep learning models by 10-22% and 13 SAM variants by 1-29%. Hi-Seg improved segmentation accuracy while reducing annotation time for medical annotators, and briefly trained non-medical annotators achieved performance comparable to that of the junior medical student. These findings suggest that human-in-the-loop segmentation can reduce clinician workload, enable scalable crowdsourced annotation, and transform clinical workflows by facilitating the safe and efficient integration of foundation models into routine clinical practice.
Authors: Saumya Biswas, Amrit De, Md Tauhidul Islam
Abstract: We present a design agent which is a Large Language Model (LLM) that orchestrates, but does not perform, the numerical simulations to design a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) $2\times2$ directional coupler. We choose a symmetric phase-matched coupler where a lot of analytical results are available that help the design strategy. The LLM proposes candidate gap values (a geometrical dimension size) and judges convergence, while all physics is owned by deterministic solvers: a frequency-domain eigenmode solver estimates the coupling coefficient~$\kappa$ for the current design, and an independent Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) stage validates it. Both solvers operate on a common slab-projected two-dimensional (2D) effective-index reduction of the silicon film, so the design~$\kappa$ and the FDTD response are consistent by problem design; the residual between them is shown to be a single constant phase offset~$\phi$, attributable to a fixed excess coupling length $L_{\mathrm{extra}}=\SI{2.837(11)}{\micro\meter}$ that we find invariant across a factor-of-two range in~$\kappa$. Folding this offset into a closed-loop length correction, the agent delivers a $50/50$ splitter whose FDTD-measured cross fraction is $0.498$ (target $0.500$), a residual of $0.0017$. Results are made self-consistent within the 2D effective-index model; and the LLM succeeds in delivering a suitable design over a number of attempts.
Authors: Ayg\"un Varol, Katarzyna Ko{\l}odziej, {\L}ukasz Sobczak, Micha{\l} Romaszewski, Przemys{\l}aw G{\l}omb, Naser Hossein Motlagh, Mirka Leino, Johanna Virkki
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) offer a natural-language interface for interpreting Internet of Things (IoT) sensor data in smart environments; however, cloud deployment introduces latency, privacy, and connectivity concerns. Local LLMs can reduce these limitations, but compact edge-deployable models often show weaker numerical reasoning when raw sensor readings are provided directly. This paper investigates whether prompt-side preprocessing can improve the accuracy-latency trade-off of local LLMs for environmental monitoring. We propose a structured prompt construction framework that transforms raw air-quality and thermal-comfort measurements into progressively enriched textual representations: raw sensor values, threshold-aware descriptions, and compact environmental summary flags. The approach is evaluated using indoor Raspberry Pi/BME680 datasets from Tampere University and outdoor air-quality datasets from Helsinki, Katowice, and Warsaw. We construct a binary LLM query dataset covering air quality, thermal comfort, and joint environmental conditions, and evaluate five local and five cloud LLMs across three prompt variants and two inference modes, with and without chain-of-thought prompting. Results show that prompt enrichment substantially improves local-model accuracy. In No-CoT mode, local accuracy increases from 50.9% to 81.7% indoors and from 63.7% to 89.3% outdoors from the raw to the most enriched prompt. Local No-CoT inference is the fastest configuration, with mean latency close to 0.22 s, while CoT substantially increases inference time. These findings suggest that lightweight prompt-side preprocessing can narrow the local--cloud performance gap and support low-latency IoT analytics in smart environments.
Authors: Pengfei Li, Mohammad Khalil
Abstract: While federated learning enables collaborative modelling on decentralised data, standard methods merely fit historical observations. This purely observational approach is fundamentally insufficient for interventional inference and policy evaluation, as sequential actions dynamically alter future states. We propose \textbf{Fed-CausalDiff}, a federated causal diffusion framework for do-simulation. The architecture decomposes the evolution of the latent state into a global causal score function and a local confounding score function. This design enables \emph{decoupled synchronisation} (DSS), where clients aggregate only the shared causal mechanism while retaining site-specific confounders locally to handle heterogeneity. Experiments on four datasets demonstrate that Fed-CausalDiff achieves better ATE and policy-value estimation accuracy, offering a favorable trade-off between communication cost and inference fidelity.
Authors: Yuhui Yin, Vassilis M. Charitopoulos
Abstract: Classical uncertainty sets for robust optimisation impose fixed geometric shapes that cannot represent the complex dependencies present in real-world data. We propose Generative Robust Optimisation (GRO), a framework in which a deep generative model defines the uncertainty set as the image of a neural network decoder over a calibrated latent set, naturally accommodating nonlinear correlations, asymmetry, and multimodality. A five-point evaluation framework (reconstruction fidelity, distribution matching, latent regularity, robust relevance, and computational tractability) provides systematic, model-agnostic criteria for assessing any neural network-based uncertainty set. We instantiate this framework with a Wasserstein Adversarial Autoencoder employing Gaussian mixture model-guided training for latent regularity and constraint-consistency regularisation for robust relevance. Restricting the decoder to ReLU activations enables exact worst-case verification through mixed-integer programming embedding. Extensive experiments on a production planning problem across six uncertainty distributions and six generative architectures, together with a multi-period facility location study, validate the framework and demonstrate that systematic attention to all five criteria yields uncertainty sets that are simultaneously expressive, well-calibrated, and optimisation-tractable.
Authors: Junhao Chen, Chanyu Zhu, Zheqi Lv, Keting Yin, Shengyu Zhang
Abstract: Autoregressive visual models (AVMs) based on next-scale prediction have emerged as a prominent paradigm for image and video synthesis. However, decomposing the generation process into discrete scales with varying granularities in AVM makes semantic errors difficult to identify and correct, thereby undermining the quality of the final output. Prior efforts to enhance AVM can be categorized into training-based and training-free approaches. Although training-based efforts to enhance AVM generation quality come at substantial computational cost, existing training-free methods neglect intermediate generation states, leaving semantic errors undiagnosed and allowing them to accumulate into the final output. In this paper, we focus on training-free paradigms and propose Gazer, a framework that integrates multimodal large language model feedback into the AVM sampling loop for in-generation semantic correction. Concretely, Gazer operates via two cooperating stages: the Reflective Diagnosis stage diagnoses semantic errors from intermediate states, while the Semantic Correction stage rewinds and rectifies the generation trajectory to realign with the target prompt. Experiments on compositional image and video benchmarks demonstrate that Gazer improves semantic alignment and compositional accuracy across multiple AVMs without additional training.
Authors: Zhuoran Jin, Kejian Zhu, Hongbang Yuan, Yupu Hao, Pengfei Cao, Yubo Chen, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has become a standard method for improving reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs) by eliciting step-by-step thinking, but its effectiveness in multimodal tasks remains unclear. In this paper, we aim to systematically investigate the key question: What can multimodal Chain-of-Thought reasoning do, and where and why does it fall short? To this end, we evaluate 12 multimodal tasks across perception and reasoning categories using both 14 non-reasoning models and 8 reasoning models. Our analysis reveals several important findings: (1) CoT is not a free lunch and should be used selectively depending on the specific requirements of each task. For perception tasks, CoT can lead to undesirable side effects, such as reduced performance in visual grounding and object counting. In contrast, it proves effective for reasoning tasks involving mathematical, scientific, and multi-image reasoning; (2) Compared to original models, existing open-source multimodal reasoning models often yield only marginal overall improvements, possibly due to an overemphasis on mathematical reasoning at the expense of broader capabilities; (3) Visual reasoning remains a key bottleneck for current multimodal CoT, as models exhibit a Look Light, Think Heavy pattern where verbal reflection rises and falls during reasoning, whereas visual reflection consistently diminishes. These findings suggest that while multimodal CoT handles verbal reflection relatively well, it lacks the ability to maintain deep visual introspection throughout the reasoning process.
Authors: Na Sang, Ding Ma, Rui Sang, Yuxuan Liu
Abstract: Few-shot prompt learning is an effective strategy for adapting CLIP to downstream tasks, but class-only prompt optimization can overfit base-class supervision and weaken transfer to unseen classes. We propose Concept-Constrained Prompt Learning (CCPL), a lightweight regularization framework that anchors learnable class prompts to frozen concept-level text prototypes without updating CLIP encoders. CCPL learns a set of shared context tokens, instantiates class prompts by appending class names, and constructs frozen concept prototypes from a class-level concept bank. During training, a text-space cosine consistency objective aligns learnable class-prompt embeddings with frozen concept prototypes; concept dropout provides additional regularization against over-reliance on fixed concept lists. At inference, CCPL optionally fuses class-prompt logits with concept-prototype logits using a controllable ensemble weight alpha. Our default configuration uses text-space concept regularization lambda = 0.5, concept dropout p = 0.3 and weak concept-guided fusion (alpha = 0.1), with no KL-based prediction consistency term. Experiments under identical automatically-generated fallback splits show that CCPL improves the base-to-new harmonic mean on DTD (+0.6) and EuroSAT (+2.9) compared with CoOp, while remaining near-neutral on OxfordPets (-0.1). Ablations indicate that text-space concept regularization is consistently beneficial, while the best concept-guided inference strength is dataset- and protocol-sensitive. These results suggest concept constraints are most effective when concept prototypes align naturally with dataset semantics, and identify fine-grained categories as a current boundary condition. The code is released at: https://github.com/richael-sang/concept-constrained-prompt-learning.
URLs: https://github.com/richael-sang/concept-constrained-prompt-learning.
Authors: Hooman Tavakoli Ghinani, Tatjana Legler, Martin Ruskowski
Abstract: While synthetic data generation resolves the manual labeling bottleneck in computer vision, minimizing the syn-to-real domain gap requires optimizing rendering variables. This paper presents a systematic study analyzing the impact of lighting configurations and background complexity on object detection performance. We introduce SmartSDG, an automated, reproducible pipeline built on NVIDIA Isaac Sim using Physically-Based Shading (PBS), alongside ILLUM\_INTRUCK, a new multi-object industrial benchmark dataset. Through 18 controlled experiments utilizing a state-of-the-art YOLOv12 framework, we demonstrate that complex, indirect lighting configurations paired with domain-relevant background variability significantly increase visual cue richness. Our quantitative findings show that avoiding direct specular peaks preserves crucial surface textures, mitigates the domain gap, reduces false positives, and accelerates model convergence compared to using conventional direct-light synthetic data. Ultimately, we provide actionable virtual scene design guidelines to maximize object detection robustness in industrial automation.
Authors: Alexander V. Kozachok, Alexander M. Nazimov, Shamil G. Magomedov
Abstract: We extend our prior work on Text2DSL automatic generation of domain-specific language (DSL) code from natural language descriptions along two complementary axes. First, we replace prompt-only synthetic generation with context-aware distillation, in which a teacher large language model (DeepSeek-V4-Flash) operates under an explicitly defined structured context comprising a BNF grammar, an API specification, and a closed identifier vocabulary; the resulting corpus is verified by a two-tier pipeline combining AST validation through esprima and runtime acceptance through the production polkitd daemon and the pkcheck client. This scales the verified PolkitBench corpus from 4,204 to 10,073 natural-language-to-Polkit-rule pairs at 100.0% AST validity and 99.7% runtime pass rate. Second, we conduct the per-component factorial ablation of structured context that was identified as future work in the precursor study: eight conditions C0-C7 are evaluated on GigaChat-10B-A1.8B with the new corpus. Three findings emerge. (i) The new harder corpus collapses the baseline mode (Syntax Valid 97.6% -> 58.5%, Combined Score 0.482 -> 0.252), whereas the context-enhanced mode degrades only marginally (Syntax 98.6% -> 97.4%, Combined 0.801 -> 0.750), confirming that structured context is not a cosmetic improvement but a load-bearing mechanism. (ii) The best absolute condition is the full context C7 across all metrics, while the strongest partial conditions (C5 = BNF + Vocabulary, C6 = API + Vocabulary) both contain the vocabulary. (iii) A Shapley-style decomposition assigns the largest semantic-quality effect to the vocabulary (Combined +0.198), the largest structural-validity effects to API (+24.7 pp) and BNF (+22.3 pp).
Authors: Alexander V. Kozachok, Stanislav G. Vyugov, Shamil G. Magomedov
Abstract: Host intrusion detection systems (HIDS) based on system-call traces are typically trained and evaluated against individual Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) instances. In operational settings, however, defenders need to recognise new exploits of an already known type of weakness. We empirically examine whether a one-class anomaly detector trained on the normal behaviour of a set of CVEs that share a Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) class generalises to a different, unseen CVE inside the same class. Using six scenarios drawn from LID-DS-2021 and grouped into three CWE families (CWE-307 broken authentication, CWE-89 SQL injection, CWE-434 unrestricted file upload), we extract a 66-dimensional Peng-Guo-style feature vector per sliding window and train Isolation Forest and SGD One-Class SVM detectors with normal-only thresholds calibrated to fixed target false positive rates. We define and answer four research questions covering self-detection, asymmetric cross-CVE transfer, the value of a combined CWE-level normal profile, and the effect of feature filtering on transferability. The combined CWE-307 detector reaches F1 = 0.6976 at calibration target FPR = 0.05 (precision = 0.8994, recall = 0.5698), whereas CWE-89 and CWE-434 collapse to F1 <= 0.21 under the same protocol. Cross-CVE transfer turns out to be strongly direction-dependent and dominated by the breadth of the source normal profile rather than by the CWE label. We conclude that CWE-level generalisation in HIDS is empirically attainable for some but not all weakness families with current syscall features, and we argue that calibrated FPR is a methodological prerequisite for honest reporting in this setting.
Authors: Yan Xie, Sijie Zhu, Tiansheng Wen, Bo Chen, Yifei Wang
Abstract: On-Policy Distillation (OPD) improves the learning efficiency of standard reinforcement learning through dense, token-level supervision from teachers. In the standard KL objective of OPD, token-level losses are uniformly averaged, implying equal weights for all tokens. However, we discover that not all tokens are created equal: as student rollouts grow longer, they deviate further from the teacher's distribution, leading to degraded supervision quality at later positions. As a result, OPD using only the first 30% of tokens can perform comparably to using all tokens, whereas OPD using only the last 30% of tokens barely learns anything. In this work, we provide a principled understanding of this issue through the lens of constrained optimization. Based on these insights, we derive Importance-Weighted On-Policy Distillation (IW-OPD), in which the weight assigned to each token depends on the accumulated discrepancy between the student's and teacher's distributions, naturally upweighting earlier tokens and downweighting later ones with larger deviations. We show that IW-OPD converges significantly faster than OPD, with better learning efficiency, and achieves better final performance than standard OPD in both same-size and cross-scale settings, improving performance up to 6.9 points on AIME-2025.
Authors: Attia Qammar, Qazi Haseeb Yousaf, Ali Azam, Ammar Ahmed, Abdenacer Naouri, Tianrui Li
Abstract: Climate change, primarily driven by carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, requires accurate forecasting tools to support effective mitigation policies and sustainable development strategies. Existing forecasting approaches typically rely on centralized data collection, which is often restricted by privacy regulations and the distributed nature of emission data across countries and industrial sectors. This paper proposes a novel federated hybrid forecasting framework that integrates ARIMA-based trend modeling, GARCH-based volatility modeling, LSTM-Attention temporal representation learning, and XGBoost prediction within a privacy-preserving federated learning environment. The proposed framework enables collaborative learning among distributed clients without requiring the exchange of raw data. Experimental evaluation across 14 clients demonstrates strong forecasting performance, achieving client R2 values between 0.50 and 0.97 with an average of 0.73, RMSE values ranging from 0.06 to 2.35 with an average of 1.21, and MAPE values between 1.5% and 11.3% with an average of 6.5%. The results indicate that the proposed framework provides an accurate, scalable, and regulation-compliant solution for collaborative carbon-emission forecasting.
Authors: Wenhao Yu, Zhicong Lu, Bo Lv, Fangyin Ma, Kaiwen Wei, Shihao Yang, Nayu Liu
Abstract: Knowledge editing aims to efficiently update factual information in Large Language Models (LLMs) without full retraining. However, existing methods still suffer from performance degradation in batch knowledge editing. We identify that semantic representation entanglement, such as overlapping concepts and shared syntactic patterns, accumulates interference in the representation space and reduces editing precision. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose Orthogonal Representation Editing (ORE), which performs edits in the hidden representation space of LLMs by constructing a general semantic subspace and enforcing orthogonal constraints on edit vectors, effectively decoupling semantic entanglement. Furthermore, we introduce a gated non-linear representation head to enable adaptive learning of editing locations and precise control over knowledge injection. Extensive experiments show that ORE outperforms existing methods and achieves superior performance in cross-lingual knowledge editing scenarios. We release our code at https://github.com/YVVH/ORE.
Authors: Thi Kieu Khanh Ho, Thomas Lai, Petr Klimes, Jan Cimbalnik, Martin Pail, Milan Brazdil, Birgit Frauscher, Narges Armanfard
Abstract: Accurate identification of the epileptogenic zone (EZ) is essential for seizure freedom after resective surgery in drug-resistant epilepsy, yet seizure freedom rates remain below 50%. We developed EpiiSLM, a dual foundation model system for EZ identification with stereo-electroencephalography (sEEG), by training a signal foundation model on 104,990 minutes of sEEG recordings from the Montreal Neurological Institute & Hospital, while leveraging all recordings regardless of surgical outcome and anchoring EZ biomarker extraction on non-epileptic signals. A language foundation model then integrates sEEG-derived outputs with multimodal clinical information to produce interpretable predictions. Under leave-one-patient-out evaluation, EpiiSLM achieved 0.978 contact-level positive predictive value (PPV), outperforming the seizure onset zone(SOZ)-as-EZ baseline by 15.1% (p < 0.05), and 100% region-level accuracy; on an external dataset, EpiiSLM achieved 0.857 contact-level PPV. EpiiSLM requires only one night of interictal sleep data, suggesting potential to reduce invasive sEEG monitoring duration and improve surgical outcomes.
Authors: Md Anas Biswas
Abstract: Prompt-injection detectors are deployed as guards: a model scores an input and a downstream system trusts or blocks it on that score. I study the confidence of these scores, not only their accuracy, when the attack distribution shifts away from the clean benchmark on which the operating point was chosen. I evaluate three released detectors, ProtectAI-v2 and two Prompt-Guard-2 checkpoints, at a single source-calibrated threshold that I freeze and transport across five shifts. I report a severity metric S, how confident a detector is on the attacks it misses, alongside the false-negative rate and discrimination. Across every shift and every detector, severity on the missed attacks stays between 0.99 and 1.00 while the false-negative rate ranges from 0.01 to 0.97: when these detectors miss, they miss with near-certainty. All three confidently pass indirect behavior-hijack injection, a blind spot unanimous across two vendors and a fourfold size range. Standard pooled calibration error does not register this; one detector it rates well-calibrated, at 0.06, is miscalibrated at 0.91 on the attacks alone. Run against live models, the missed injections leak the majority of working exploits, passing them at the rate they catch others. A controlled experiment traces the cause to content-keying rather than injection structure, an instruction-tuned model used as a judge shows the same hijack blind spot, and a black-box rewriter exploits the content-keying to manufacture working confident misses, most effectively on the most dangerous attack category. Code and data are public.
Authors: Aydin Ghojogh, Benyamin Ghojogh
Abstract: This paper introduces Wittgenstein's Rule Following (WRF) data evolution, a framework in philomatics for evolving or generating a new dataset from a sequence of previously observed datasets. The method is inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein's rule-following considerations and his notion of family resemblance in Philosophical Investigations. Unlike standard synthetic data generation, where the goal is usually to sample from or augment a fixed distribution, WRF aims to continue the implicit rule expressed by a historical sequence of datasets while preserving resemblance to the previous datasets. WRF represents each dataset by structural descriptors rather than pointwise correspondences. These descriptors summarize geometric, distributional, clustering, and, in the supervised case, label-based properties of the data. The method predicts a rule-following target by extrapolating descriptor trajectories and a family-resemblance target by averaging historical descriptors. Candidate datasets are then generated from the observed history through balanced or bounded mixture recombination, scored according to these targets, and optionally refined through differentiable optimization in descriptor space. The proposed framework allows both sample size and feature dimension to vary over time and does not assume that the next dataset is a direct transformation of the last one. Simulations on synthetic and image datasets show that WRF can generate meaningful continuations of evolving datasets in both unsupervised and supervised settings.
Authors: Meher Bhaskar Madiraju, Meher Sai Preetam Madiraju
Abstract: Agentic coding harnesses - such as Agent-Skills, Superpowers, and Agent-Rigor - are increasingly deployed to augment underlying LLMs for real-world software engineering tasks. Existing benchmarks evaluate these agents almost exclusively on outcome correctness: whether generated code passes tests or resolves issues. We argue that this outcome-only lens is insufficient: an agent that arrives at a correct solution through reckless trial-and-error, without planning, verification, or graceful recovery, is fundamentally less reliable than one that follows sound engineering discipline. We introduce RigorBench, the first benchmark designed to measure process discipline in AI coding agents. RigorBench evaluates these harnesses across five pillars: Planning Fidelity, Verification Coverage, Recovery Efficiency, Abstention Quality, and Atomic Transition Integrity. A composite RigorScore aggregates these dimensions into a single metric via a weighted sum. We curate a suite of 30 tasks spanning five categories - Plan-Then-Build, Verify-Or-Die, Doom Loop Gauntlet, Know When to Fold, and Don't Break the Build-and evaluate leading harnesses in a controlled with/without experimental design against baseline coding assistants. Our results show that structured process discipline not only improves process quality scores by an average of 41% but also raises downstream outcome correctness by 17%, providing the first quantitative evidence that how agents code matters as much as what they produce. We release the full benchmark, scoring rubrics, and trajectory analysis tools as open-source artifacts.
Authors: Wei-Chieh Chou, Xuanjun Chen, Jian-Ren Lin, Claire Lin, Hung-yi Lee, Jyh-Shing Roger Jang
Abstract: Multi-hop question answering remains challenging for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) because existing approaches either propagate errors across iterative retrieval rounds or over-generate reasoning steps, increasing cost without improving accuracy. We propose Grounded Delta Planning RAG (GDP-RAG), a plan-based framework that targets only the information delta based on three simple design choices: (1) preliminary retrieval to ground planning before execution, (2) a gap-conditioned planning prompt that asks only for missing information, and (3) a skeletal trajectory that pairs each subquery with a Thought capturing evidence from preliminary retrieval and carrying it through to the final answer. GDP-RAG focuses computation on unresolved gaps, yielding concise, reliable reasoning trajectories. Extensive experiments on HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA, and MuSiQue show that GDP-RAG achieves the highest accuracy (60.63%) among all compared systems while maintaining a cost-of-pass of 0.51, 22% lower than PAR-RAG (0.65) and 68% lower than KnowTrace (1.57), with no method achieving both higher accuracy and lower cost.
Authors: Shivam Ratnakar, Kartikeya Vats
Abstract: Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on extensive safety alignment, yet the mechanistic basis of refusal remains opaque. In this work, we investigate whether safety compliance is a deep semantic decision or a manipulable linear feature. We introduce Contrastive Logit Steering (CLS), a zero-optimization framework that isolates the "refusal direction" by contrasting hidden states derived from safe and unrestricted system prompts. Unlike representation engineering methods that intervene on internal activations, CLS operates directly on the output distribution, serving as a diagnostic probe for alignment fragility. When coupled with prefix injection to bypass initial refusal reflexes, this method induces a phase transition where guardrails collapse. Our experiments on 7 model families reveal that safety implementation is architecturally deterministic. While models like Llama-3.1 exhibit a "Late Decision" topology that is easily bypassed by CLS (reaching 95% ASR in approximately one second), others like Qwen-2.5 demonstrate "Early Divergence" by integrating safety mid-computation. Direct comparison with established activation-level steering methods shows that CLS achieves substantially higher attack success rates on Llama 2 (73% vs. 22.6%) and Qwen 7B (91% vs. 79.2%), demonstrating that logit-level intervention exposes alignment vulnerabilities that hidden-state methods underestimate. Beyond attacks, we show that this linearity enables bidirectional control: inverting the steering vector "hardens" models against jailbreaks without retraining. Our findings suggest that current alignment techniques create a steerable "safety axis" that serves as both a critical vulnerability and a precise primitive for defense.
Authors: Osama Wehbi, Sarhad Arisdakessian, Omar Abdel Wahab, Azzam Mourad, Hadi Otrok
Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training without sharing raw data, making it a promising paradigm for privacy-sensitive applications. However, its decentralized nature makes it inherently vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where malicious clients embed hidden triggers into local training data to manipulate model predictions. Existing defenses mainly operate during before and during aggregation cannot fully eliminate backdoor behaviors that persist in the converged global model. Moreover, the effectiveness of post-training sanitization is often limited by the server's lack of knowledge of trigger patterns or poisoned clients after convergence, resulting in residual backdoor behaviors or accuracy degradation due to neuron entanglement. To address this limitation, we propose SCRUB-FL (Sanitizing and Cleansing Representations via Unlearning of Backdoors), a two-phase solution for post-training backdoor removal in FL. During training, clients identify suspicious samples using spectral analysis and activation clustering, then train lightweight Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network with Gradient Penalty (WGAN-GP) models to capture trigger-related distributions. The generator parameters are aggregated server-side to construct a global representation of suspicious patterns without exposing raw data. After convergence, the server synthesizes trigger-approximating samples and applies machine unlearning to erase the trigger-target association by redistributing predictions toward a uniform distribution. Experimental evaluations on CIFAR-10 and GTSRB across three attack types and up to 40% malicious participation demonstrate that SCRUB-FL reduces the backdoor attack success rate to as low as 3.88% while maintaining over 91% normal task accuracy, outperforming state-of-the-art defenses without requiring prior trigger knowledge or a large clean proxy dataset at the server.
Authors: Yichen Xu
Abstract: Generative music systems can now produce impressive audio from text prompts, but audio outputs are difficult to inspect, edit, and diagnose as musical structure. We introduce Libretto, an agent-facing framework for symbolic music generation and revision. Libretto uses an LLM-native grammar with explicit onset slots, voices, and bar-level organization, then evaluates each piece in a corpus-calibrated statistical space over rhythm, harmony, melody, texture, form, and variation. The same structural axes support retrieval, diagnosis, copy-risk control, and iterative self-revision. Across gap filling, reference-guided full-piece generation, gradual morphing, and educational music generation, Libretto turns symbolic music from a raw token sequence into a measurable and editable object for language-model agents.
Authors: Haoran Yu, Xiaochong Jiang, Lifei Liu, Su Wang, Pin Qian, Yihang Chen
Abstract: Pooled across five AI coding agents, pull requests (PRs) with a human Co-Authored-By trailer merge less often than purely-autonomous ones (53.8% vs. 79.8%) -- yet this aggregate finding is a textbook Simpson's Paradox. Stratifying 33,596 PRs from the AIDev dataset by agent identity reverses the conclusion: Copilot and Devin show large positive within-agent gaps (+41.2 and +33.5 pp, both p<0.001), while Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex show small effects whose cross-sectional 95% CIs span zero. The paradox is driven entirely by agent composition: Codex, which dominates 64.9% of the dataset, achieves high merge rates while rarely using co-authorship. But Simpson's Paradox is only the first layer of a cascade of confounders: within-repo controls eliminate Devin's gap (+33.5 to +1.6 pp, p=0.73); a commit-count control further halves Copilot's within-repo gap (+36.2 to +24.4 pp); restricted to multi-commit PRs, the Copilot within-repo effect dissolves to +4.8 pp (p=0.59). No agent retains a clear co-authorship effect once both repository selection and PR structure are controlled. Our findings caution against reporting agent-pooled statistics without stratification and demonstrate that cross-sectional co-authorship associations are largely selection and PR-structure artefacts rather than evidence of a causal benefit.
Authors: Mao Guan, Qian Chen
Abstract: Forecasting benchmarks for retrieval-augmented LLMs routinely confound model capability with information leakage: features labeled with a target's timestamp are often not observable at the system's decision time. We study leakage-controlled equity factor ranking with a retrieval-augmented 7B open-source LLM forecaster. At each month-end from 2023-04 to 2026-03, the forecaster observes only decision-time information: lag-shifted FRED macro variables, recent macro-event summaries, and the Cleveland Fed's archived daily CPI nowcast for unreleased current-month inflation. A macro-analog retrieval module selects historical states, a critic LLM compresses them into one tactical rule, and an actor LLM maps the current state and recent rules into scores for seven U.S. equity style factors. The full pipeline obtains a median monthly Spearman rank IC of +0.154, with positive means across three non-overlapping contiguous 12-month subwindows; the mean IC remains statistically underpowered, with a bootstrap 95% confidence interval that includes zero. Non-LLM baselines under the same decision-time constraint demonstrate that a kNN macro-analog model recovers a comparable median IC, indicating that real-time inflation information and macro-similar retrieval explain much of the median signal. The LLM pipeline retains higher mean IC and a stronger long-short allocation sanity check, suggesting that any marginal benefit is concentrated in the extreme rankings that drive long-short portfolio formation. A descriptive audit of the 36 critic rules and per-month case studies appears in the appendix.
Authors: Neranjan Senarath, Rohit Muralitharan, Sadia Asif
Abstract: Federated low-rank adaptation methods are attractive for fine-tuning large models under communication and privacy constraints, but heterogeneous client data can induce geometric misalignment between local low-rank updates. We study whether this subspace misalignment leads to destructive aggregation and slower convergence in LoRA-based federated learning. We propose a subspace-regularized federated LoRA objective that encourages local client updates to remain close to a shared global reference subspace. We present a complete empirical evaluation on two pretrained models, RoBERTa-large and SmolLM-360M, over HellaSwag in a non-IID 10-client federated setting, across 3 random seeds (42, 43, 44), yielding 24 total experimental runs (4 methods x 3 seeds x 2 models). On RoBERTa-large, Subspace-Reg achieves the strongest mean best accuracy (0.454 +/- 0.023), mean final accuracy (0.429 +/- 0.011), and lowest final loss (1.363) across all three seeds, outperforming FedAvg, SVD redistribution, and FedSVD baselines by a large margin. On SmolLM-360M, FedAvg leads on accuracy, revealing that accuracy gains are model-dependent. Crucially, Subspace-Reg achieves near-perfect basis overlap, approximately 0.9999, on both models and across all seeds, versus 0.958 to 0.991 for all baselines, providing robust support for the geometric alignment hypothesis. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/sadia-sigma-lab/Subspace-Constrained-Federated-learning-with-Lora.
URLs: https://github.com/sadia-sigma-lab/Subspace-Constrained-Federated-learning-with-Lora.
Authors: Keito Inoshita, Takato Ueno
Abstract: Facial expression recognition (FER) is inherently ambiguous: human annotators frequently disagree, and models deployed in real environments face distribution shift. Crucially, these two conditions demand different downstream actions, as ambiguous in-distribution faces should be reported with their ambiguity whereas out-of-distribution inputs should be rejected. However, a single uncertainty score conflates the two. In this study, uncertainty decomposition into aleatoric and epistemic components for FER is investigated, and Uncertainty-Aware Routing (UAR), an inference-time routing mechanism that exploits the separation, is introduced. Specifically, aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties are obtained from a Deep Ensemble of fully fine-tuned DINOv2 models and are each validated against an independent external signal: aleatoric against human annotator disagreement, and epistemic against distribution shift induced by image corruptions. The proposed dual-validation protocol reveals that aleatoric recovers annotator disagreement with Spearman correlation 0.66 (95% CI: 0.64-0.68), and epistemic detects corruption-induced shifts, achieving average AUROC of 0.699 at the highest corruption severity. UAR retains approximately 1.8 times more ambiguous in-distribution faces than single-uncertainty routing at a matched out-of-distribution rejection rate. A strong label-distribution-learning baseline achieves comparable disagreement recovery but cannot separate ambiguity from shift and therefore cannot route, establishing that the value of decomposition lies in the separation enabling interpretable and differentiated action selection.
Authors: Sahib Julka
Abstract: The trustworthiness of a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system depends on more than the answer it returns, yet many black-box uncertainty methods still read agreement among sampled answers as confidence. That inference fails when repeated samples condition on the same defective retrieval state. The state may be empty, with the model falling back on parametric memory, or populated by a coherent but wrong neighbourhood. In either case, the answers agree because the error is stable. The problem is recognised in deployed RAG, but it has lacked a name, a measurable signature, and a prevalence bound. We supply all three. We name the failure retrieval-state lock-in and diagnose it by separating the three objects a single confidence score conflates: the answer surface, the retrieved evidence, and the retrieval state itself. In an inspectable, ontology-guided knowledge-graph RAG (KG-RAG) system across six question-answering snapshots, we measure the agreement blind spot directly: at five samples per question, 42% of KG-RAG errors and 59% of dense-retrieval errors carry zero answer dispersion, so agreement has nothing to rank, while evidence- and retrieval-state checks still flag most of them. The decomposition supports an auditable decision rule: accepting an answer only when answer, evidence, and retrieval checks all agree that it is low-risk reaches 91.9% pooled precision against a 69.7% accept-all rate. The cost is coverage: it certifies only 7.7% of answers as low-risk. On the clinical calibration domain it reaches 100% precision under an automated judge; this is an in-domain automated-label upper bound, not a clinical safety claim, and still needs human validation. Confidence in RAG is object-specific: when answers agree, the useful question is which part of the pipeline to distrust.
Authors: Neel Gupta, Maria Antoniak, Melanie Walsh
Abstract: Some professional authors are beginning to use AI tools to help produce their fiction writing. Are readers using AI to generate fiction, too? Drawing on over 500,000 anonymized, English-language ChatGPT-user conversations (arXiv:2405.01470), we find that more than one third of the conversations involve some form of fiction generation -- including original stories, roleplay, fanfiction, and erotica. This AI-generated fiction is notably dominated by power users. We identify common fiction generation patterns and profiles among these users, including what we call "infinite story demanders," who repeatedly request and revise variations of the same or similar narratives over extended periods of time. We show that users especially gravitate toward fanfiction and erotica, and that they are broadly drawn to generic forms, repetition, immediacy, and niche combinations of story elements. Our findings motivate two theoretical provocations. First, we argue that AI technologies may lead to a shift in the conventional relationship between the author and reader, potentially producing what we call a "solipsistic reader-writer," who both generates and consumes fiction within a closed conversational loop, interacting with a machine rather than a human other. Second, we note that LLMs enable interactivity, play, and permutation in ways that are seemingly pleasurable for users, raising questions about where AI will fit into contemporary storytelling and entertainment ecosystems. We situate these developments within broader transformations in literature and media, including self-publishing, fanfiction, and pornography, and suggest that AI-generated fiction shares structural affinities with on-demand, personalized, and repetitive cultural forms.
Authors: Nima Dehghani
Abstract: Biological systems maintain function in fluctuating environments by transforming past stimulation into internal dynamical states that support future-oriented responses. Reservoir computing provides a computational analogue, but standard formulations often treat the recurrent substrate as a fixed random network and train only the readout. Here we ask how the substrate itself changes when reservoir architecture is placed under evolutionary selection for prediction. Using the Kuramoto--Sivashinsky equation as a testbed for spatiotemporal chaos, we evolved reservoirs over five construction hyperparameters: size, connectivity degree, spectral radius, input scaling, and readout regularization. Evolution reduced prediction error at the population level, extended the low-error forecast horizon, and organized the design space along a diminishing-return size--efficiency frontier. Structural analyses showed that evolved reservoirs remained within a conserved stochastic-block-model-like spectral envelope while refining low-eigenvalue modes, locking modularity to an intermediate band, and pruning connection cost within that band. Pareto analysis showed that elite reservoirs occupied a horizontal floor in the cost--modularity plane, indicating that accuracy and efficiency were achieved jointly rather than through a simple trade-off. These findings show that evolutionary optimization does not merely improve prediction, but exposes interpretable structural constraints on the recurrent substrate: it stabilizes a task-suitable dynamical class and refines the architectural degrees of freedom most relevant for prediction. Evolutionary reservoir computing therefore provides a bio-inspired framework for studying how predictive demands shape adaptive dynamical networks.
Authors: Shreyash Rawat
Abstract: Standard NLP pipelines for occupational clustering discard the 10-15% of job postings that density-based methods assign to noise. We argue this is an error: in rapidly evolving domains, low posting density signals novelty, not incoherence. We formalize this as the Emergence-Density Inversion (EDI) hypothesis and test it longitudinally on 84,988 job postings across eight quarters (Q4 2022-Q3 2024). EDI is partially confirmed: high-EOS outlier groups transition to stable clusters in 1.4 +/- 0.6 quarters vs. 4.1 +/- 1.2 for low-EOS groups (p < 0.001), though the signal fails in approximately 19% of cases, which we characterize as a failure analysis. We extend the Emerging Occupation Score (EOS) with Temporal Velocity and Cross-Platform Convergence, improving 2-quarter cluster-formation prediction from F1 = 0.61 to 0.74, outperforming Isolation Forest, LOF, GLOSH, and BERTrend baselines. A retrospective study on three now-established roles (MLOps Engineer, DevOps/SRE, Data Engineer) confirms EOS signalled 2-3 quarters before cluster formation, providing held-out validation. A held-out annotator panel (kappa = 0.74) rates EOS > 0.75 as coherent emerging occupations with 77% precision. Prompt Engineer, AI Safety Researcher, Foundation Model Engineer, and Agent Systems Engineer, all absent from O*NET, are top-4 in Q3 2024 and form stable clusters by Q1 2025.
Authors: Xiang Li
Abstract: The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is a canonical NP-hard combinatorial optimization benchmark that tests the representational capacity and generalization of neural solvers. While non-autoregressive (NAR) approaches offer parallel inference, they often lack sufficient geometric inductive bias and stable training signals, leading to degraded performance under cross-scale and cross-distribution shifts. We propose GeoRouteNet, a geometry-enhanced NAR neural solver for Euclidean TSP. On the model side, GeoRouteNet incorporates centered node features, learnable radial distance basis functions, distance-aware graph attention with explicit edge messaging, LayerNorm-SwiGLU feed-forward blocks, and cross-layer attentive residual mixing. On the training side, we design multi-candidate self-comparison reinforcement learning (MCS-RL), which samples multiple candidate tours per instance, constructs adaptive baselines from greedy and peer candidates, and adds winner-candidate guidance with annealed entropy regularization. On 10,000 random TSP50 instances, GeoRouteNet achieves a 0.32% optimality gap under Beam-1000 decoding. On TSP100, the gap is 1.26%. On 27 stratified TSPLIB EUC_2D instances, the overall gap drops from 17.12% (NAR4TSP reproduction) to 3.60%, while batch inference throughput substantially exceeds that of Concorde and LKH3. Ablation studies confirm that geometric structure enhancement and multi-candidate training are complementary: structure improvements dominate cross-distribution gains, while MCS-RL further stabilizes solution quality when paired with a strong geometric encoder.
Authors: Ahnaf Atef Choudhury, Shahriar Siddique Ayon, Md. Ebrahim Hossain, Abdullah Al Mamun
Abstract: Mental illnesses among drug users are an increasing international issue, particularly in regions where early detection cannot be easily undertaken. The current literature tends to ignore the use of AI-based mental health analysis in drug users, and low quality of the class imbalance treatment, low interpretability, and optimal hyperparameter optimization can lower predictive quality and clinical utility. This study present a detailed, explainable machine learning (ML) model of multiclass mental health prediction, using a multidimensional data set of drug-affected persons. We combine hybrid PCA-Information Gain (PCA-IG) feature selection, Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based oversampling, and Dragonfly Algorithm (DA)-optimized XGBoost to address some of the limitations of existing methods. The suggested framework is effective to work with high-dimensional categorical data, address the issue of class imbalance, and improve predictive performance due to intelligent hyperparameter tuning. The experimental findings show that the XGBoost model optimized using the DA, in combination with GAN-based oversampling, has an accuracy of 94.17% and a weighted F1-score of 93.80%, which is better than the traditional and baseline models. The behavioral, lifestyle, and health factors, particularly sleep quality, physical health, and emotional regulation, are strongly predictive of mental health, with demographic factors having little impact, as seen through feature analysis. SHAP-based explainable AI provides easy-to-understand, instance-level information, enhancing interpretability and trust in models to be used in clinical settings. The results indicate that this framework has the potential to generate valid mental health forecasting tools, which would facilitate early intervention and enhance the treatment of drug-influenced people.
Authors: Vyom Agarwal, Mokshda Gangrade, Siddharth Pal, Jerry Wu
Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the tradeoffs between compute allocation and model performance for two speech processing tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Speech Emotion Recognition (SER). We propose a unified framework that analyzes three fundamental compute dimensions: model size ($x_N$), input length ($x_T$), and representation resolution ($x_V$). Motivated by recent advances in compute optimal scaling for multimodal models, we systematically vary these dimensions to examine their influence on task performance under fixed computational budgets. Our study provides insights into how compute resources can be optimally distributed across model capacity, temporal context, and representational granularity, offering practical guidelines for the design of efficient speech models. Through experiments on LibriSpeech and CREMA-D datasets, we demonstrate non-linear scaling behavior and identify optimal operating points. Our results show that (1) increasing model size yields diminishing returns: scaling Tiny (39M) to Small (244M) reduces WER by 8.22%, whereas Small to Medium (769M) reduces WER by only 2.35%; (2) an optimal audio duration of approximately 4 seconds exists for SER; and (3) reducing encoder token resolution provides an effective mechanism for lowering inference cost, Large-v3 (1540M) with 750 frames requires 2572 GFLOPS whereas with 1500 frames requires 5228 GFLOPS, with less than 3% relative increase in WER. Additionally, LoRA-based adaptation enables efficient finetuning with minimal performance degradation.
Authors: Jinchuan Tian, Haoran Wang, Siddhant Arora, Takashi Maekaku, Keita Goto, Jin Sakuma, Yusuke Shinohara, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Shinji Watanabe
Abstract: Classical TTS systems typically rely on rigid input formats and predefined metadata slots, limiting their ability to fulfill flexible user requirements. This paper introduces Bagpiper-TTS, a universal speech synthesis system that deals with diverse natural language user requests. Given a natural language prompt, Bagpiper-TTS first reasons over the users' intent to derive a rich caption, i.e., a comprehensive textual blueprint encompassing both transcription and nuanced metadata. Subsequently, this caption guides the synthesis of the target speech. Our model inherently supports a broad spectrum of tasks besides classical TTS applications, including multi-talker, intent-to-speech, role-play synthesis, singing voice synthesis, and more. Experimental results demonstrate that Bagpiper-TTS achieves an 1.7% Word Error Rate (WER) on the Seed-TTS-Eval benchmark and match the performance of dedicated models in both LLM-as-a-judge and human subjective evaluations across multiple applications.
Authors: Sudhanshu Mishra, Jialang Xu, Jensen Ang, Evangelos B. Mazomenos, Beng Ti Ang, Yueming Jin
Abstract: Intraoperative Adverse Events (IAEs) detection is critical for improving surgical safety, with bleeding being among the most frequent events across many surgery types. Existing methods struggle to distinguish bleeding IAE from visually similar residual blood due to limited temporal reasoning. Moreover, modeling long surgical videos while preserving fine-grained temporal dynamics remains computationally challenging. We propose DBT-Bleed, a dual-branch multi-scale temporal modeling framework disentangling bleeding and normal representations using layer-wise temporal adapters for short- and long-term bleeding progression. To efficiently process long surgical videos without sacrificing fine-grained temporal information, we introduce HiRED, a Hierarchical Entropy-Driven frame selection strategy that retains temporally informative segments while removing redundancy. Experiments on the MultiBypass dataset demonstrate gains of 6.53% in F1, 5.62% in Recall and 9% in MCC values for bleeding IAE detection, consistently outperforming video-level baselines. Additionally, we evaluate cross-procedure generalization on a newly curated dataset from a different surgical procedure type, where DBT-Bleed demonstrates robust transferability by achieving gain of 6% in F1 and 8% in MCC under zero-shot setting. To support this evaluation, we introduce EndoPit-IAE, an Endonasal Pituitary Surgery dataset annotated for IAEs, representing the first IAE-annotated dataset in neurosurgery. Code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.
Authors: Zijie Meng
Abstract: Controllable video generation demands independent command of the camera and the subject, yet 2D conditioning entangles them: camera- and object-induced optical flow share the same inverse-depth (1/Z) scaling and cannot be separated from image evidence alone. We first prove that this entanglement is representational, not architectural -- the 2D camera/object split is a non-identifiable inverse problem -- and therefore reframe decoupling as a question of operator design. We resolve it at the level of the attention operator. OrthoMotion routes camera motion into a geometric channel, a norm-preserving rotation of the rotary position embedding (RoPE) phase, and subject motion into a semantic channel, a gated value injection in cross-attention. Because these sub-operators are algebraically complementary -- a rotation versus a translation of the affine action on tokens -- a lightweight decoupling regularizer provably drives their response subspaces to orthogonality, so the two controls stop interfering. To our knowledge OrthoMotion is the first method to guarantee disentanglement by construction rather than hope for it to emerge. It attains state-of-the-art camera and subject accuracy at once while minimizing cross-talk, which we quantify with a new Cross-Talk Error (CTE) metric, cutting cross-talk by more than 2.4x with no loss in fidelity and generalizing across backbones.
Authors: Toby Briston, Illya Kosyk, Kuniyih S
Abstract: Sensors are critical components of modern intelligent devices. The proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable mobile devices has enabled the integration of such sensors to monitor the environment and enable users to take predictive actions. Human activity recognition (HAR) is a popular application in which Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU)-based sensors, such as accelerometers and gyroscopes, are used to provide insights into health, training, and medical diagnosis. However, the accuracy of such a model is hindered by the lack of data. The diffusion model-based technique has proven successful in generating synthetic data for training HAR models. In this paper, we propose a backdoor training technique, IMU-DM-CLIP, that leverages a diffusion model to enable trigger-based attacks on HAR models. Our empirical analysis shows that the attack is successful even with a very small backdoor injection rate of 10\% and 10\% of the data guided for the diffusion model.
Authors: Sannaan Khan, Muhammad U. S. Khan
Abstract: As machine learning models grow more influential and opaque, algorithmic fairness and explainability are critical for ensuring accountability. However, we demonstrate that these auditing mechanisms are themselves vulnerable to subtle manipulation, camouflaging the influence of protected features. While prior work on data-agnostic attacks has exposed this vulnerability, they leave behind detectable artifacts that compromise their stealth. We introduce Targeted Identity Re-Association (TIRA) attacks, a novel family of attacks that iteratively and probabilistically manipulate a model's outputs without requiring access to the model's internals or feature representations. We formalize two algorithms: Probabilistic Micro-Shuffling (PMiS), which applies localized adjacent swaps, and Probabilistic Rank-Shift Micro-Perturbation (PRSMP), which introduces small, randomized rank shifts. We empirically demonstrate that TIRA attacks are highly effective at pushing fairness metrics towards ideal values. Crucially, TIRA attacks successfully confound SHAP-based explanations, leaving effectively zero residual attribution for protected features, a major improvement over prior work.
Authors: Kiyoung Seong, Nayoung Kim, Sungsoo Ahn
Abstract: We introduce Human-AI Co-discovery system (HACO) for scientific algorithm discovery through cross-domain search and sparse human steering. Starting from the goal of generating crystal structures from chemical compositions, HACO searched across generative modeling methodologies from multiple fields and identified MaskGIT, a masked generative model from vision, as a promising framework for crystal structure prediction (CSP). HACO instantiated this masked formulation as a discrete token model of crystal structure; guided by sparse high-level human objectives, it then added crystallographic symmetry tokens, space group stratified sampling for polymorph coverage, and sub-bin coordinate refinement, yielding the Masked Generative Crystal Transformer (MaskGXT). On the MP-20 polymorph split, MaskGXT reaches 79.06% match-everyone-to-reference (METRe) accuracy, compared with 70.87% for the strongest evaluated baseline. MaskGXT also attains the best match rate on standard MP-20 and MPTS-52 CSP benchmarks. These results provide evidence that, in domains offering cheap, fast, and well-aligned validation, transfer-guided interactive AI co-scientists can contribute to scientific algorithm discovery by identifying transferable modeling principles and combining them with targeted human domain guidance.
Authors: Zi-Yuan Hu, Zicong Tang, Shijia Huang, Yanyang Li, Michael R. Lyu, Liwei Wang
Abstract: Recent advancements in chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning have shown promise in enhancing video understanding and reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, existing CoT-based MLLMs require labor-intensive CoT annotations and incur substantial training and inference overhead. While visual latent reasoning has emerged as a more efficient alternative, existing methods primarily focus on image tasks and heavily rely on additional supervision signals for visual latent generation (e.g., CoT traces, auxiliary images, or fine-grained annotations), limiting their scalability and transferability to video tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce VideoLatent, a novel MLLM equipped with a latent injection module tailored for video understanding and reasoning. Specifically, VideoLatent learns to perform visual latent reasoning using a new latent self-forcing training paradigm, which comprises latent alignment and latent diversity objectives, and relies solely on standard video-question-answer triplets. Extensive experiments across 14 benchmarks demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms existing standard and latent MLLMs on general video understanding and complex video reasoning. Compared with Video-R1, our VideoLatent achieves superior computational efficiency, reducing training/inference overhead by $\sim$6$\times$/$\sim$68$\times$. Moreover, experiments demonstrate that our method has strong generalizability to different MLLM backbones and different model scales.
Authors: Huzama Ahmad, Se-Young Yun
Abstract: Long contexts have become standard in pretrained LLMs, yet they remain expensive to run: prefill compute grows quadratically with sequence length, and every decode step re-reads a key-value cache that grows linearly with it. Sparse attention cuts these costs by attending only to a relevant subset of past tokens, but selecting that subset is itself expensive. We present SpotAttention, a lightweight selector that attaches to a frozen pretrained transformer and learns by KL distillation to estimate its attention distribution. The selector picks the top-K keys each query attends to, and because its estimate is a calibrated distribution, a dual top-p rule reads the per-query, per-layer budget directly from it. Across Qwen3 (dense, 4B-32B) and Qwen3.5 (hybrid linear/full attention, 4B-9B), SpotAttention matches dense accuracy at contexts up to 128K tokens, eight times the training length. Decode at L=128K runs 3.9x faster than FlashAttention and 1.8x faster than Twilight, the strongest training-free baseline. Quantizing the selector's K-cache to INT4 or FP4 microscale shrinks it 3.5x at no accuracy cost.
Authors: Nuocheng Yang, Yechen He, Sihua Wang, Zihan Chen, Tony Q. S. Quek, Changchuan Yin
Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed at the network edge to provide pervasive generative AI services, decentralized federated learning (DFL) provides a vital mechanism for privacy-preserving, domain-specific fine-tuning through peer-to-peer exchanges of parameter-efficient updates. However, the dynamic nature of practical decentralized edge networks, where devices may dynamically join or leave the collaborative training process, requires the system to continuously adapt to new data while selectively removing prior contributions. This correction process remains a significant bottleneck, as individual device updates become deeply entangled within the global fine-tuned parameters. To address this challenge, we propose a priority-aware learning-unlearning correction framework based on orthogonal LoRA that can enhance the knowledge evaluation through topology adjustment. Specifically, we first design an orthogonal LoRA mechanism that yields post-training contribution coordinates, enabling history-free projection addition and deletion in response to membership changes. We then analyze the correction bottleneck and develop a priority-aware policy that selects among topology refinement, local correction, proximal damping, and synchronization scheduling according to the dominant residual term. A resource allocation algorithm is further developed to allocate limited communication across layer groups, prioritizing the primary bottlenecks within per-round wireless constraints. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves robust post-event correction for both device join and leave events and validate that different residual regimes necessitate distinct correction actions.
Authors: Xueguang Li (School of Information and Software Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Sichuan, China), Di Lin (School of Information and Software Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Sichuan, China), Xue Jiang (Department of Dermatology, Chongqing Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital, Chongqing, China), Yanxi Li (Department of Dermatology, Chongqing Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital, Chongqing, China), Yugang Chi (Chongqing Health Center for Women and Children, Chongqing, China)
Abstract: Objective: This study aims to improve the reliability and robustness of medical named entity recognition (NER) in Chinese atopic dermatitis (AD) clinical texts through explanation-guided learning. Methods: We propose a stability and boundary-aware explanation-guided NER framework. Perturbation-based analysis is used to evaluate explanation stability and entity boundary sensitivity. An adaptive fusion strategy dynamically combines local and global explanation to generate more reliable token-level explanations. The fused explanation signals are further incorporated into model training through stability, boundary-aware, and consistency constraints. Results: Experiments on Chinese AD NER datasets show that the proposed framework improves explanation robustness and achieves consistent performance gains across multiple NER models. The adaptive fusion strategy also provides more stable explanations and stronger boundary perception than individual explanation methods. Conclusion: The proposed method effectively integrates reliable explanation signals into medical NER training, improving both recognition performance and explanation reliability. The framework provides a practical and generalizable solution for explainable medical NER and offers reliable support for downstream clinical decision-making and medical knowledge applications.
Authors: Yanze Xu, Mark D. Plumbley, Wenwu Wang
Abstract: Explaining and understanding the decision-making process of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, particularly those implemented by neural networks, falls within the field of explainable AI (XAI). Analogous to the human attention mechanism, neural networks are assumed to possess their own attention mechanisms that selectively process information during decision-making. This work proposes to study one XAI topic: analysing and visualising the attention mechanisms of neural networks. Our experiments are performed on speaker recognition neural networks that are trained to identify speaker identity from a given utterance. Previous studies have widely used class activation map (CAM)-based methods to analyse and visualise the attention mechanisms of neural networks. Each of these methods produces an attention map for each network input, highlighting which input regions are selectively processed when the speaker recognition network makes decisions. However, the evaluation of attention maps produced by these methods remains largely underexplored. This work systematically reviews an existing attention map evaluation algorithm, establishing key concepts and identifying its shortcomings. On the basis of this existing evaluation algorithm, a new version is then proposed to address the identified shortcomings, called the Modified Randomised Input Sampling for Explanation - Evaluation algorithm (Modified RISE-eval). Using Modified RISE-eval, we evaluate the attention maps produced by two representative CAM-based methods, GradCAM and LayerCAM, applied to a certain speaker recognition network. The evaluation results demonstrate that GradCAM and LayerCAM each exhibit distinct advantages when applied under different experimental conditions in the speaker recognition task.
Authors: Jiawei He, Weisong Sun, Mengyu Shi, Jie Jia, Tong Bian, Xikai Yang, Dong Sun
Abstract: Large language models have shown strong performance on software engineering (SE) tasks, yet understanding large industrial repositories remains challenging. Existing methods often retrieve only local fragments and fail to recover the broader task-relevant context needed for complex repository-level tasks. We present DeepDiscovery, a task-level repository-understanding method for large industrial codebases. DeepDiscovery uses a two-stage \textit{Location--Inference} framework to localize high-confidence task anchors and recover broader task-relevant context over multi-relational repository structure under budget constraints. Across controlled method-level evaluation, organization-internal industrial repository-understanding scenarios, and end-to-end evaluation on SWE-bench Verified, DeepDiscovery consistently improves task-relevant file recovery and downstream SE performance. On 27 medium-scale tasks, DeepDiscovery achieves the best file recovery quality among five representative baselines without offline preprocessing. On organization-internal industrial tasks from a production-scale integrated codebase ecosystem, including 27 medium-scale tasks and 40 large-scale tasks, DeepDiscovery improves Full Recall Rate across multiple AI coding systems, with absolute gains ranging from 1.6 to 9.2 percentage points on large subprojects and from 2.5 to 7.4 percentage points on medium-scale subprojects. In a controlled end-to-end evaluation on SWE-bench Verified, a system equipped with DeepDiscovery achieves a 78.6\% Solve Rate, outperforming the corresponding baseline by 8.2 percentage points. These results suggest that stronger task-level repository understanding can improve coding-agent performance on complex SE tasks.
Authors: Nicole R. Schneider, Kent O'Sullivan, Hanan Samet
Abstract: There have been many recent improvements in the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform complex tasks and answer domain-specific questions through techniques like Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). However, reasoning abilities of LLMs, including spatial reasoning abilities, are still lacking. Spatial reasoning is a key component required to answer questions in a variety of domains that are grounded in the physical world, including urban planning, civil engineering, travel, and many others. To advance the development of LLMs and facilitate an impact in these domains, new research techniques must be developed to enable LLMs to reason over spatial data, which is commonly stored in the form of a graph. In this paper we outline the challenges associated with spatial reasoning through LLMs and envision a future in which search engines integrate with LLMs to answer complex spatial questions through graph-enhanced reasoning.
Authors: Taeyoung Jeong, Insung Lee, Du-Seong Chang, Myoung-Wan Koo
Abstract: Automatic dysarthria severity assessment is limited by the scarcity of labeled pathological speech data. To address this, we propose Cross-lingual Retrieval-Augmented Classification (CRAC), which leverages speech from a different language via an align-retrieve-fuse pipeline. Supervised contrastive learning first shapes a severity-focused embedding space, then a vector database is built from the opposite-language corpus. During both training and inference, the classifier retrieves top-k references from the aligned space and fuses them with the input via cross-attention. Evaluated on Korean post-stroke and Italian ALS dysarthria datasets under a speaker-independent three-class protocol, CRAC achieves balanced accuracies of 87.3% on Korean and 86.7% on Italian, improving over monolingual baselines by 8.4 and 20.0 percentage points, respectively.
Authors: Zisheng Chen, Yuping Qiu, Jianhua Han, Tao Tang, Xiuwei Chen, Likui Zhang, Ying-Cong Chen, Hang Xu, Xiaodan Liang
Abstract: Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced end-to-end autonomous driving by incorporating reasoning for better interpretability and planning quality. However, most existing approaches directly generate the final trajectory without explicitly examining its future consequences, which limits their reliability in complex and dynamic environments. To address this limitation, we propose IRR-Drive (Intend, Reflect, Refine), an adaptive multimodal reflection framework for autonomous driving. Specifically, to tightly couple high-level reasoning with physical constraints, IRR-Drive first generates a preliminary textual intention and anticipates potential interactions by predicting future semantic bird's-eye view (BEV) representations. This dual-modality (Text + BEV) reflection space explicitly models anticipated scene evolution, enabling the model to rigorously self-correct and refine its initial intent before generating the final trajectory. Furthermore, to balance planning performance and computational efficiency, we construct reflection-oriented training data and design an adaptive reflection reward, enabling the model to adaptively select its reasoning mode according to scene complexity. Instead of using reasoning primarily as an auxiliary interpretation, IRR-Drive directly integrates an adaptive reflection mechanism into the planning framework, enabling grounded, decision-aware trajectory correction that is driven by scene complexity. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the NAVSIM benchmark in both PDMS and EPDMS. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our multimodal reflection framework and validate the efficacy of the proposed adaptive reflection strategy.
Authors: Giorgi Butbaia, Paul Orland, Coco Huang, Davide Passaro, Lucas Fagan, Michele Tarquini, Hailong Dao, David Eisenbud, Ali Shehper, Sergei Gukov
Abstract: Applying machine learning techniques to solving long-standing mathematical conjectures can be particularly challenging due to their extreme reward sparsity. As an illustrative example, we consider Kalai's algebraic Hirsch conjecture and recast the construction of its counterexamples as a sparse-reward reinforcement learning problem on graphs. We propose a constrained options-based HRL framework with an equivariant graph neural network policy, which allows us to learn useful temporal abstractions for this task. We evaluate our approach over a wide range of degrees and demonstrate that it consistently outperforms classical RL algorithms as well as greedy search. By exploiting the hierarchical structure of the problem, we effectively provide a first-of-its-kind application of HRL to a problem in commutative algebra.
Authors: Dooseop Choi, Kyounghwan An, Kyoung-Wook Min
Abstract: In this paper, we present a framework dubbed \textbf{BEV-Denoise} that estimates and removes intrinsic noise from learned Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) features to achieve accurate BEV semantic segmentation. Inspired by the noise estimation capability of Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM), we design a UNet-based noise estimation module that learns to estimate the noise from the learned BEV features. The estimated noise is then subtracted from the BEV features and fed to BEV map decoders for the final prediction results. To facilitate supervision for the noise estimation module, we follow a sequential learning paradigm called Task Decomposition (TD) where a pre-trained BEV map autoencoder is employed to train a view transformation (VT) encoder. We share three key insights learned from our intensive experiments that are critical for improved performance. We apply our framework to four existing models, encompassing the three major VT paradigms. Experimental results on a large-scale real-world dataset, nuScenes, demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.
Authors: Stanley Wei, Juno Kim
Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated that reinforcement fine-tuning of pretrained base models can lead to significant gains in reasoning performance at inference time. In this work, we theoretically analyze why reinforcement fine-tuning induces better reasoning ability than purely supervised fine-tuning (SFT) methods. We model chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning as a pathfinding problem on graphs and compare the popular method of reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) against traditional SFT. We prove that SFT, when trained on golden shortest paths without negative examples, fails to learn how to efficiently backtrack. In contrast, an RLVR-trained model can learn how to efficiently backtrack from dead ends using only outcome reward. This leads to an exponential separation in inference-time compute between the two methods, and demonstrates that RLVR leads the model to learn the location of difficult decisions in a reasoning chain, ultimately allowing for better allocation of inference-time compute. Finally, we show that the reasoning traces of an RLVR model can be distilled to train a base model to backtrack efficiently as well.
Authors: Linghan Chen, Kaiyan Ji, Minyu Guo
Abstract: Many recent vision-language-action (VLA) policies adopt an imagine-then-act design. A world-action model (WAM) first imagines a short future as a latent trajectory z~, on which the action is then conditioned. We identify this trusted imagination, rather than the reactive policy, as the exposed attack surface. A downstream oracle, such as a safety gate, a visual model-predictive-control (MPC) planner, or an imagine-then-check verifier, consumes z~ as a prediction of the future. The robustness of the policy therefore does not entail the robustness of systems that rely on the WAM. The underlying phenomenon is an asymmetry. Corrupting the imagination is easy, since it requires only displacing z~ from its natural-future manifold. Steering it precisely is hard, since it must reach a specified on-manifold target. We adopt a capability-based threat model with an L-infinity-bounded observation perturbation. The attacker applies projected gradient descent through the fully differentiable observation-to-imagination map. The same off-manifold property motivates a parameter-free denoiser detector. We evaluate three targets: RynnVLA-002, LingBot-VA, and LaDi-WM. Untargeted corruption is roughly 60x stronger than random and is detected at AUC 1.0. Targeted control remains bounded. An adaptive attacker evades detection only by forgoing corruption. The reactive policy remains robust to corrupted imagination. A native imagination-driven MPC, however, exhibits the first adversary-specific task failure (at epsilon=0.01, success 0.70 versus 0.05; Fisher p < 10^-4).
Authors: Vansh Bansal, Cho Cholyeon, Syamantak Kumar, Sujay Sanghavi, Purnamrita Sarkar
Abstract: In this paper, we propose using random walks on graphs as a verifiable sandbox to study different parallel sampling strategies in masked diffusion models (MDMs). We train an MDM on random walk samples from a fixed graph. The graph or the transition kernel is never shown to the model explicitly and plays the role of latent structure in the sequences, albeit one that is controllable and can be used for quantitative evaluation. Thus, this framework enjoys a Sudoku-like validity check: verifying that an output is a valid walk and estimating the Markov kernel from the walks to measure distribution fidelity. Using simple graphs, we theoretically prove that parallel unmasking via widely used scores like lowest entropy is not uniformly better than a random parallel sampler; the performance critically depends on the structure of the underlying graph. We develop a new bisection sampler for random walks, which takes logarithmic steps in the sequence length and is provably exact under perfect training. Experiments on various graph walk tasks show that different parallel samplers are better for different graphs even in practice. Our initial experiments on a pretrained OpenWebText MDM show that the bisection-style samplers improve speed-quality tradeoffs even for language generation. Together, these results position graph random walks as a mechanistic benchmark for diagnosing and designing parallel samplers for masked diffusion models.
Authors: Youxin Zhu, Yixuan Ding, Peng Lai, Longyue Wang, Bingyi Jing, Guanhua Chen
Abstract: Statistical analysis is a broad, complex field requiring both domain knowledge and tool proficiency. While prior work has evaluated large language models (LLMs) in this domain, existing benchmarks remain limited in scope and format. To bridge this gap, we introduce StatABench (Statistical AnalysisBenchmark), a benchmark designed to systematically assess LLMs' statistical analysis capabilities. StatABench comprises two complementary components: Stat-Closed, containing 404 questions across 18 statistical topics in multiple formats (multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, decision-making, and practical application), and Stat-Open, featuring 30 complex open-ended modeling tasks adapted from professional competitions. We evaluate diverse LLMs using the LangChain MCP framework and multiple data science agents, and assess Stat-Open solutions via a validated LLM-as-Judge protocol. Experiments show that even GPT-5.1 achieves only 68.6% on Stat-Closed, while the best open-source model reaches 60.6%. On Stat-Open, the top agent framework scores 61.86 on average. These results reveal the gap between current LLMs and reliable statistical analysis, highlighting persistent challenges in tool-grounded reasoning, methodological decision-making, and end-to-end statistical modeling.
Authors: Keisuke Sugawara, Kento Uchida, Shinichi Shirakawa
Abstract: Sample reweighting is a major approach to addressing distribution shifts, such as label noise and class imbalance. Meta-Weight-Net (MW-Net) is a promising sample reweighting network that computes weights based on classification loss. Although MW-Net improves prediction performance under a single type of distribution shift using a simple neural network, its performance degrades when facing both label noise and class imbalance, where it is hard to determine appropriate weights solely from classification loss and using a simple network. In this study, we introduce neural architecture search to MW-Net to mitigate such performance degradation. Using the tree-structured Parzen estimator, we explore the optimal number of hidden layers and nodes and select the most suitable intermediate layer in the classification model to serve as the input for MW-Net. Experimental results on the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets that were modified to include both label noise and class imbalance demonstrate the effectiveness of neural architecture search for MW-Net.
Authors: Yunan Wang, Minghui Song, Zihan Zhang, Shaohan Huang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
Abstract: Group-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) has significantly enhanced Large Language Models (LLMs) in agentic scenarios. To achieve finer-grained policy updates, recent agentic RL frameworks have shifted from trajectory-level to step-level training. However, long-horizon agentic RL suffers from severe reward sparsity and delay, as feedback is often deferred for dozens of interaction steps. While existing step-level frameworks refine training granularity, their credit assignment remains coarse-grained and still treats agent exploration as isolated, linear trajectories. This oversimplified perspective ignores the inherent graph structure of state transitions, leading to high-variance state-value estimation and myopic, localized credit assignment. To overcome these critical bottlenecks, we propose Group-Graph Policy Optimization (G2PO), a novel group-based RL algorithm tailored for multi-turn agentic tasks. G2PO explicitly transforms linear interaction trajectories into a global state-transition graph. By aggregating identical observations across different trajectories, we introduce group-aggregation state-value estimation that reduces sampling variance and trajectory-dependent bias. Furthermore, we redefine agent actions as transitions between state nodes and propose an edge-centric advantage estimation strategy. By globally standardizing Temporal Difference (TD) errors across the entire graph, G2PO explicitly identifies and prioritizes critical transitions that drive absolute task progress. Extensive experiments on representative long-horizon benchmarks-WebShop, ALFWorld, and AppWorld-demonstrate that G2PO substantially outperforms state-of-the-art prompt-based and RL baselines, achieving remarkable success rate improvements of up to 22.2% over GRPO.
Authors: Ruiliang Zhou, Xuecheng Wu, Kang He, Guangyun Han, Bin Liu, Qinqin Chen, Wende Xu, Qingjie Zhao, Chengru Song
Abstract: While Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have revolutionized high-fidelity video generation, their reliance on 3D full attention creates a quadratic computational bottleneck. Existing sparse methods face a dilemma: dynamic pruning suffers from prohibitive runtime overhead and memory fragmentation, while static heuristics fail to capture fine-grained dependencies. In this work, we propose ScalingAttention, a training-free framework grounded in a key inductive bias: while individual activations are input-dependent, the high-mass attention regions for each head rapidly converge to a stable, prompt-agnostic Intrinsic Sparse Topology. This topology is weight-encoded, scale-invariant, and efficient to extract. ScalingAttention decouples topology discovery from sparsity control via: (1) WEST (Weight-Encoded Sparse Topology), which extracts a robust block-sparse prior mask offline to eliminate runtime search; (2) FAST (Fidelity-Aware Sensitivity Tuning), which adaptively tunes head-wise sparsity based on diffusion fidelity requirements. To ensure practical acceleration, we co-design a hardware-aligned bit-wise block-sparse kernel. Experiments on Wan2.1 show up to 1.90X end-to-end speedup with superior fidelity, establishing a new Pareto frontier over state-of-the-art baselines.
Authors: Sen Li, Haichao Cui, Changhao Yin, Chendong Shao, Yaqi Wang, Xinhua Tang, Fenggui Lu
Abstract: Real-time weld-pool perception is critical for closed-loop control in laser wire-feed welding, where sensing, computation, and actuator response introduce unavoidable delay. This paper presents a physics-guided spatiotemporal state space network for lookahead weld-pool segmentation. The model uses historical coaxial grayscale images, welding process parameters, and aligned wire-state electrical signals to predict the future semantic layout of three physically meaningful regions: keyhole, wire, and molten pool. It combines a visual encoder, process- and sensor-conditioned feature normalization, patch-level temporal state space modeling, horizon-conditioned latent prediction, dense future feature prediction, and a motion-aware mask decoder. Auxiliary signed-distance-function supervision, temporal consistency, feature distillation, and fine-grained keyhole losses further constrain the predicted geometry and local motion. Experiments on a 43-sequence laser welding dataset show that the proposed WeldMamba reaches 74.63\% mIoU at a 500 ms lookahead. Ablation studies further show that temporal history, patch-level state space modeling, and keyhole motion awareness are the main contributors to robust future segmentation.
Authors: Hongxin Ding, Baixiang Huang, Yue Fang, Weibin Liao, Zheng Li, Jinyang Zhang, Zhijing Wu, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang
Abstract: Rubric-based rewards offer interpretable and fine-grained optimization signals for reinforcement learning in open-ended tasks where verifiable answers are unavailable. However, pre-constructed rubrics remain static throughout training, creating a fundamental mismatch with the evolving policy: fixed criteria gradually lose discriminative power as the model improves, leading to reward saturation and potential hacking. Recent dynamic rubric methods partially address this but rely on external frontier models or ground-truth answers, and update rubrics only at coarse granularity. We propose EvoRubrics, a co-evolutionary RL framework where a Policy LLM and a Rubric Generator jointly improve through adversarial interaction within each training step. As the policy improves under the rubric generator's guidance, the rubric generator adapts its criteria to remain discriminative and informative, enabling evaluation to track the policy in real time and naturally inducing an automatic curriculum. Experiments show that EvoRubrics consistently outperforms static and dynamic rubric baselines across benchmarks. The learned Rubric Generator further generalizes as a transferable reward model. Notably, even a fully self-supervised variant without any external supervision achieves meaningful gains, suggesting that co-evolution between generation and evaluation alone can provide sufficiently rich learning signals. Our code is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EvoRubrics-2155/.
Authors: Tarek Gara
Abstract: Most tools for measuring political positions, manifesto coding, expert surveys, text-scaling models, were built and validated on Western party systems, and outside that setting they work poorly, and often not at all. This paper is an attempt at a method for those settings. It treats a large language model not as a measurement device but as a single, fallible rater in a panel, roughly the way an expert survey treats one expert: the value comes from pooling many judges rather than trusting any one of them. I describe the panel, an applicability rule that keeps a score of zero distinct from a blank, and a lens system that separates what an actor says from what it does. I report three results. First, holding a definition-free round fixed, adding written axis definitions moves scores by a mean of 1.8 points on a 21-point scale and tightens agreement between raters (mean absolute gap 2.81 to 2.50; r 0.81 to 0.89); they make two independent raters agree more closely, which an arbitrary steer would not. Second, across nine models from eight laboratories in two countries, Krippendorff's alpha is 0.86 on both an interval and an ordinal metric, and it stayed put as the panel grew from five raters to nine. That is reliability, the reproducibility of a reading, and not validity, its correctness. Third, where the panel does disagree, the disagreement is informative: the sharpest split, a full-scale divergence on an actor's stance toward its state's foundational order, points to a referent problem, and a blind triple-coding puts about two-thirds of it down to interpretation rather than error. I try to be plain about what the method can't do, including the human validation it still lacks, and I release the instrument and data in full. The worked example is the Middle East and North Africa, but I'd expect the method to carry to any region these standard tools leave out.
Authors: Hyunsang Hwang, Suhyun Bae, Donghun Lee
Abstract: Numbers have algebraic structure that standard neural embeddings often fail to expose. We introduce Prime Fourier Embeddings (PFE), which encode integers as prime-indexed (cos, sin) pairs derived from the harmonic analysis of Q, providing a pre-structured representation in which modular arithmetic reduces to selecting the relevant prime channel rather than discovering algebraic structure from scratch. We prove that any linear map equivariant with respect to the product group action on PFE must be block-diagonal with one independent block per prime -- a consequence of Schur's lemma applied to the resulting character decomposition. For square-free composite moduli, the Chinese Remainder Theorem predicts which prime channels are task-relevant. Both predictions are confirmed empirically: ablation studies show specialization ratios exceeding 500x between task-relevant and task-irrelevant channels, with perfect in-distribution test accuracy across all square-free composite moduli tested.
Authors: Illyyne Saffar, Aur\'elie Boisbunon, Shruti Bothe
Abstract: The deployment of data-driven models in 6G wireless networks is increasingly challenged by frequent distribution shifts that degrade performance over time. Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) offers an alternative approach by adapting the trained model to a shifted domain without requiring labels. However, UDA pipelines are often more complex than single-task training due to additional modules and optimization procedures, raising a practical question: do the benefits of adaptation come at a higher energy cost, and how does this trade-off compare to retraining when labeling effort is also considered? In this work, we investigate the energy consumption of UDA and compare it to single task. We further propose a way to determine the minimum number of target domains for which UDA becomes more energy-efficient than retraining, taking into account the labeling cost. Our results aim to clarify when UDA should be preferred over classical train-from-scratch approaches from an energy and labeling-aware perspective.
Authors: Mateusz Bara\'nski, Jan Jasi\'nski, Julitta Bartolewska, Marcin Witkowski, Konrad Kowalczyk
Abstract: End-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems hallucinate on natural speech, yet existing mitigation methods are typically evaluated on non-speech or artificially corrupted audio. We introduce HALAS, the first human-annotated dataset of naturally occurring hallucinations from seven state-of-the-art ASR models on real unprocessed earnings call recordings. HALAS provides span-level labels, enabling analysis of hallucination patterns and their severity. Our analysis reveals strong cross-model vocabulary overlap and confirms that hallucinations also occur for almost correctly transcribed speech (characterized by a low Word Error Rate). The proposed benchmark with HALAS shows that the character and semantic-level metrics used as a proxy for hallucination detection reach 81% ROC-AUC, while state-of-the-art detection methods achieve an F1 score of only 53.1%. As such, HALAS establishes the first rigorous non-artificial benchmark for the detection and mitigation of ASR hallucinations.
Authors: Zhengyang Tang, Xin Lai, Pengyuan Lyu, Xinyuan Wang, Tianyi Bai, Chenxin Li, Yiduo Guo, Huawen Shen, Yuxuan Liu, Junyi Li, Zhengyao Fang, Yang Ding, Yi Zhang, Weinong Wang, Xingran Zhou, Liang Wu, Fei Tang, Sunqi Fan, Shangpin Peng, Zheng Ruan, Anran Zhang, Benyou Wang, Ji-Rong Wen, Rui Yan, Chengquan Zhang, Han Hu
Abstract: Phones are becoming an important execution surface for general-purpose agents, but training open models for reliable phone use remains difficult because the environment that matters at deployment, real devices running real apps, is slow, stateful, side-effectful, and hard to reset or verify, while scalable mock environments only approximate real behavior. We present PhoneBuddy, a training recipe and open-model line for agentic phone use that combines a real-app environment with a mock-app environment, PhoneWorld, which reconstructs runnable mock apps from real GUI usage structure. PhoneBuddy first builds a shared supervised fine-tuning stage from trajectories collected in both environments, then compares real-app RL against mixed RL across both environments. Across a 150-task human evaluation on real phones spanning apps, mini-apps, and cross-app workflows, task success rate improves from 36.67\% after supervised fine-tuning to 40.67\% after real-app RL and 45.33\% after mixed RL. On AndroidWorld, the same progression rises from 60.3\% to 77.2\% to 83.2\%. These results show that mock-app training is not a replacement for real-app RL, but a complementary source of scalable, resettable, and automatically checked interaction. The gains are strongest on app and mini-app tasks, while long-horizontal cross-app workflows remain an important open challenge.
Authors: Hongfa Zhao, Baiqiao Wang, Tiancong Zhao, Chun Jin, Hanlin Zhou, Mingrui Shu, Minyi Xu, Liwei Lin, Wenbo Ding, Zhong Lin Wang
Abstract: Predictive modelling of triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) remains fragmented across analytical theories, finite-geometry solvers and disconnected simulation workflows. These disparate approaches must be unified into an executable framework to advance quantitative TENG research.Here we introduce a charge-defined modelling framework and implement it as TENG-CLAW, a physics-governed platform for traceable TENG simulation. The framework establishes a self-consistent electrostatic hierarchy in which triboelectric charges, pre-charging charges and compensating electrode charges serve as defining state variables.This hierarchy connects the infinite plate analytical limit for near-uniform fields with finite-geometry numerical formulations required for edge-dominated devices. Built on this basis, TENG-CLAW converts user-defined research requests into physically admissible simulation tasks, so that generated outputs are tied to explicit charge states, boundary conditions, solver routes and reusable artifacts across spatial, temporal, field-level, comparative and reporting workflows. This work establishes a rigorous computational basis for interpreting TENG mechanisms and provides reproducible research infrastructure for simulation and physics-guided device design.
Authors: Jan Jasi\'nski, Mateusz Bara\'nski, Julitta Bartolewska, Marcin Witkowski, Konrad Kowalczyk
Abstract: Hallucinations of ASR models - fluent transcriptions with no basis in audio - degrade system performance and pose risks in downstream applications. Robust detection of such errors remains a challenge. This paper studies Whisper large v3 hallucination detection on real-speech human-annotated data across three paradigms: text-based, LLM-based, and internal decoder state probing. Text classifiers utilizing metrics for text evaluation achieve high recall but degrade without reference transcripts. LLM-based detection improves precision with domain-specific prompt conditioning, yet remains less competitive than the lightweight text-based methods. Probing Whisper's decoder representations, without a ground-truth reference, yields the strongest performance, revealing that hallucination traits are encoded across intermediate decoding layers. A late-fusion meta-classifier combining text and internal-state outputs achieves the best overall detection performance.
Authors: Weile Guo, Shenghong He, Danying Mo, Chengdong Xu, Xuexun Liu, Chao Yu
Abstract: Motion instruction generation in cross-video comparison aims to produce corrective feedback that describes the differences between a query and a reference motion. However, existing models often generate instructions that exhibit motion hallucinations, failing to reflect actual kinematic differences between paired videos. To systematically investigate these hallucinations, we introduce MotionHalluc, a dedicated benchmark for evaluating motion hallucinations in paired-video comparison. MotionHalluc comprises 1540 fine-grained questions over 553 video pairs, evaluating hallucinations along three core dimensions: (1)directional hallucination, (2)attributional hallucination, and (3)temporal hallucination. Extensive evaluations of state-of-the-art large multimodal models demonstrate high susceptibility to these hallucinations. Furthermore, we provide Perceive-Parse-Verify (PPV) as a training-free measurements extraction and verification baseline that converts candidate instructions into executable measurement queries and supplies kinematic measurements at inference time. Our results show that this simple measurements injection yields an average 10.6% performance gain across models, suggesting that motion reasoning with explicit quantitative measurements is a key factor in reducing hallucinations in cross-video comparison. Our code and dataset will be made publicly available upon acceptance.
Authors: Chuangxin Zhao, Canran Xiao, Siyuan Ma, Mengyao Lyu, Yanbiao Ma, Jun Xia, Guiguang Ding, Yang Liu
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly required to adapt to non-stationary streams of visual domains, question types, and user instructions, yet continual fine-tuning often causes severe forgetting of previously acquired multimodal skills. Existing continual vision-language methods mainly preserve outputs, replay data or pseudo-data, regularize embedding geometry, or allocate task-specific parameters, but they provide limited control over how internal cross-modal attention patterns supporting old skills drift during adaptation. We propose Attention-Spectrum Regularization (ASR), a replay-free continual learning framework that preserves skill-conditioned structures of cross-modal attention. ASR treats cross-attention maps as two-dimensional signals, summarizes their scale and directional properties into compact spectral statistics, and stores only skill-wise prototype distributions instead of replaying past image-question pairs, generated pseudo-examples, or old-stage teacher snapshots. In later stages, a phase-invariant spectral regularizer constrains harmful drift of these prototypes while allowing instance-level attention to adapt to new tasks. We provide theoretical analysis showing that skill-conditioned spectral drift controls forgetting under a spectral sufficiency assumption, and that Fourier power spectra are stable to spatial translations and bounded perturbations. Experiments on continual VQA and multimodal instruction-tuning benchmarks, including VQA v2, VQACL, CLT-VQA, CoIN, and UCIT, show that ASR consistently improves final performance and reduces forgetting over strong replay-, regularization-, and adapter-based baselines. Preserving skill-level attention structure is an effective and lightweight mechanism for continual MLLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/Creative-zcx/attention-spectrum-replay
URLs: https://github.com/Creative-zcx/attention-spectrum-replay
Authors: Ruixiao Lin, Xinhao Deng, Qingming Li, Jianan Ma, Yunhao Feng, Yuqi Qing, Zhenyuan Li, Yechao Zhang, Shiwen Cui, Changhua Meng, Tianwei Zhang, Xingjun Ma, Qi Li, Ke Xu, Shouling Ji
Abstract: Self-evolving LLM agent systems, which autonomously update their model parameters, memory, tools, and architectures, introduce a qualitatively new threat landscape in which adversarial influences become permanently encoded, self-amplify across generations, and propagate through populations without sustained attacker access. We present a systematic security and privacy analysis organized around the Module-Lifecycle Attack Surface (MLAS) matrix, which decomposes the attack surface into five functional modules (Brain, Cognitive Resource, Execution, Self-Design, Collective) $\times$ five lifecycle stages (Bootstrap, Propose, Evaluate, Commit, Serve). Analysis of the resulting 25 cells reveals that 17 face critical threats for which no effective partial mitigation. We identify seven cross-cutting amplification effects that interact synergistically and cannot be addressed by securing individual modules in isolation. Comparative case studies of two open-source frameworks demonstrate that evolution-native design activates $3.5\times$ more attack surface cells and achieves a 100% attack persistence rate (40/40 payloads across all CIA+Privacy categories), while co-located security scanners block only 2.5% of attacks. Our findings establish that self-evolution converts every known attack category from session-bounded to lineage-persistent, gives rise to entirely new attack classes, and renders static defenses structurally inadequate, motivating evolution-aware security frameworks and formal verification for self-modifying systems.
Authors: Yutian Cheng, Xiaojian Ma, Xianhao Wang, Min Yang, Rongpeng Su, Hangxin Liu, Xi Chen, Shuai Li, Qing Li
Abstract: Neural world models coupled with model predictive control (MPC) replan at every environment step to bound accumulated prediction error, but this incurs substantial computational overhead. Reusing a cached plan reduces this overhead, yet its effectiveness depends on how prediction mismatch propagates through the local dynamics. We analyze this trade-off with a perturbation-based dynamic-regret framework and show that stale-plan penalties scale with the reuse tolerance, the accumulated mismatch since the last replanning step, and the local dynamics sensitivity. Based on this structure, we propose AdaReP, a training-free wrapper that adapts the replanning tolerance online using the current deviation from the cached rollout and a local sensitivity estimate, without modifying the learned world model or planner. Across image-space planning, latent-space control, and real-world robotic manipulation, AdaReP substantially reduces planner-side computation while maintaining comparable task performance, including over 80% fewer queries on a 50-trial physical robot study.
Authors: Chengjun Yu, Di Wu, Yi He, Jia Chen
Abstract: Wireless sensor network (WSNs) stands out as a burgeoning and promising domain in intelligent sensing. Owing to various factors such as sudden sensor malfunctions or deliberate shutdown of partial nodes to save energy, the collected sensing signals from WSNs commonly have massive missing data, leading to adverse effects on subsequent analysis or decision-making. Latent factor learning (LFL) has proven to be highly effective in recovering the missing data for WSNs. However, the existing LFL models require the collected sensing signals to be maintained in one central place like a central server, which is becoming unacceptable for data owners who are getting increasingly privacy-sensitive. To address this issue, this paper innovatively proposes a federated latent factor learning (FLFL) model for privacy-preserving spatio-temporal signal recovery. Its main idea is two-fold: 1) it designs a sensor-level federated learning framework based on LFL, where each sensor only needs to upload gradient information rather than raw data for training a privacy-preserving recovery model, and 2) it incorporates the spatio-temporal correlation into the designed federated learning framework as the regularization constraint to improve its recovery accuracy. With such designs, FLFL can not only accurately recover the missing data of WSNs but also ensure data owners' privacy-preserving of raw data. To evaluate the proposed FLFL model, extensive experiments have been conducted on four real-world WSN datasets. The results demonstrate that FLFL significantly outperforms eight state-of-the-art federated and non-federated signal recovery models in terms of recovery accuracy with privacy-preserving.
Authors: Chen Lin, Kedi Chen, Wei Zhang
Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) improves LLM reasoning by training a student model on its own generated outputs, but standard OPD treats all student-generated outputs (SGOs) equally regardless of their informativeness. We observe a consistent asymmetry in controlled filtering experiments: in both OPD and on-policy self distillation (OPSD), training only on incorrect SGOs outperforms training only on correct ones. Our further analysis suggests that models trained on correct-only SGOs tend to generate shorter reasoning traces and show weaker reflection behavior, while incorrect SGOs better preserve exploratory reasoning near the model's capability boundary. To exploit this signal without requiring full answer-containing rollouts, we introduce ReNIO, which Reweights Negative trajectory Importance for LLM On-policy distillation. By using the student-to-teacher probability ratio, ReNIO identifies pivotal tokens leading to wrong reasoning traces and aggregates their information into a normalized sample weight, inherently assigning larger weights to likely negative trajectories without observing the correctness of final-answer. Since Re-NIO only uses prefix-conditioned token probabilities, it preserves OPD's prefix training advantage over full-rollout reinforcement learning. Across both mathematical reasoning and code generation tasks, ReNIO improves both OPD and OPSD, with representative relative gains of up to 8.90% for Qwen3-1.7B and 10.00% for R1-Distill-Qwen-7B on mathematical reasoning benchmarks. Code repo: https://github.com/BDML-lab/ReNIO.
Authors: Jiaqiang Tang
Abstract: Multi-turn tool-using agents must coordinate long-horizon tool sequences while tracking dialogue state and policy constraints. Existing approaches often separate inference-time orchestration from parameter-level learning, leaving tool selection weakly structured and preference updates vulnerable to train--deployment prompt mismatch. For within-benchmark self-improvement, ToolGraph combines schema-derived topology, transition weights estimated from successful rollouts, and history-aware controls for write prerequisites and repeated-search loops. We then construct 161 preference pairs by locating divergence points via state-based matching and prefix-based alignment, filtered through action-correctness annotations, and train DPO under the same ToolGraph context used at inference. Across 375 tau2-bench tasks, ToolGraph raises the weighted average reward from 0.304 to 0.338 (+11.2% relative), while ToolGraph+DPO reaches 0.355 (+16.8% over the baseline), with the DPO gain concentrated in airline and retail. Fine-grained diagnostics further show that roughly half of telecom trajectories exhaust the step budget before action execution and that chosen reward positivity is the most useful checkpoint signal across our 16 evaluated DPO configurations.
Authors: Jiaqiang Wu, Zhouan Zhu, Shangfei Wang
Abstract: Large language models have demonstrated significant capabilities in generating diverse and context-aware responses for empathetic dialogue. However, their computational demands severely limit their deployment in resource-constrained environments. While knowledge distillation offers a promising compression solution, it often fails to transfer the nuanced understanding essential for empathy, as it overlooks the implicit contextual cues that guide human connection. To bridge this gap, we propose a \textbf{pr}ivileged \textbf{i}nformation-enhanced knowledge \textbf{d}istillation method for \textbf{e}mpathetic dialogue generation (PRIDE). Our method leverages privileged information, such as expert psychological annotations or future event summaries, which is available exclusively during training but unavailable at inference time. This allows us to transfer the teacher model's empathetic reasoning to smaller models without relying on extra inputs during deployment. Specifically, PRIDE has three key components: (1) An empathy-reasoning prompt that guides the teacher to explicitly decompose the empathetic process into understanding feelings and analyzing situations step-by-step; (2) A multi-source attention mechanism that directs the student to effectively integrate privileged information; (3) A dual-alignment loss that combines reversed Kullback-Leibler divergence and maximum mean discrepancy to ensure robust knowledge transfer at both logit and feature levels. Experiments on multi-modal and text-only datasets demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance, and in some cases matches or even surpasses larger teacher models in terms of accuracy and semantic relevance.
Authors: Ruhul Amin Khalil
Abstract: Zero-energy Internet of Things (IoT) enables passive or near-passive devices to operate on harvested energy rather than batteries. Backscatter communication (BackCom) supports this vision by enabling tags to transmit data via reflection and modulation of incident RF signals, but it suffers from weak reflections, double-path loss, limited coverage, direct-link interference, and dependence on external RF sources. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can mitigate these limitations by acting as mobile carrier emitters, data collectors, relays, aerial receivers, mobile anchors, sensing platforms, and edge-intelligence nodes. Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) further enables the sharing of wireless resources for data transmission, localization, target sensing, and environmental awareness. This article surveys RF-based AI-empowered UAV-assisted backscatter localization and ISAC for zero-energy IoT. It reviews enabling technologies, presents a structured PRISMA-informed methodology, and develops a unified taxonomy covering network architectures, UAV roles, backscatter modes, RF sources, localization and sensing functions, AI techniques, and performance metrics. It also discusses UAV-assisted BackCom, passive localization, ISAC-enabled UAV-backscatter systems, and AI-driven optimization through comparative tables, quantitative trend analysis, coverage evaluation, and tutorial-style numerical illustrations. Finally, it identifies open challenges and future directions in realistic channel modeling, energy-neutral operation, benchmarking, reproducibility, scalable and trustworthy AI, security, privacy, hardware validation, and integration with RIS, MEC, digital twins, and 6G technologies.
Authors: Nouf Alabbasi, Esraa Ghourab, Omar Alhussein
Abstract: Finding the shortest path in non-geometric network graphs, where edge weights encode arbitrary metrics such as latency or monetary cost rather than spatial distance, poses a challenge for informed search algorithms. Their efficiency depends on an informative heuristic, typically supplied in spatial domains by geometric distances that have no counterpart on non-geometric graphs. We propose a large language model (LLM)-aided A* algorithm in which an LLM generates intermediate waypoints that guide the A* expansion toward promising graph regions. At the core of the approach are landmark distances, which serve both as an admissible landmark-based (ALT) heuristic for the search and as a compact structural feature that, supplied to the LLM, restores the distance-to-destination signal it would otherwise lack on non-geometric graphs. Our comprehensive experiments on multiple graph topologies with up to 2,000 nodes demonstrate that LLM-generated waypoints reduce the number of expanded nodes by around 50% while incurring only a marginal path cost increase compared to the optimal solution. We further analyze the impact of prompt engineering and show that incorporating compact structural features, namely heuristic estimates, is more effective than advanced prompting techniques. These findings demonstrate the potential of combining LLM- based guidance with classical search algorithms for efficient network optimization.
Authors: Qi Li, Yuliang Huang, Shaheer U. Saeed, Qianye Yang, Vasilis Stavrinides, Zachary M. C. Baum, Dean C. Barratt, J. Alison Noble, Tom Vercauteren, Yipeng Hu
Abstract: Deep learning-based medical image segmentation models are trained using annotations that exhibit systematic bias and variability across raters. While probabilistic multi-rater approaches can emulate annotator-specific delineations, annotator characteristics are typically encoded implicitly in deep latent feature space, making direct analysis of their influence on predictive distributions less straightforward. We propose a logit-space probabilistic segmentation framework based on stochastic variational Gaussian Process that explicitly decomposes predictions into an image-dependent reference logit distribution and annotator specific perturbations parameterised by bias and variance. This formulation enables more explicit analysis on how intra- and inter-rater variability propagate to predictive distributions. We evaluate the method on a multi-annotator medical image dataset, which shows that explicitly modelling annotator specific perturbations improves uncertainty calibration while maintaining comparable segmentation accuracy, compared with state-of-the-art multi-rater probabilistic segmentation method. The learned bias and variance parameters quantitatively reflect annotator-specific behaviour. Furthermore, controlled perturbation experiments over bias and variance demonstrate how changes in annotator parameters systematically influence predictive performance. The code used in this paper is made publicly available at https://github.com/QiLi111/GPS-Var.
Authors: Zewen Liu
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on memory systems to maintain long-term coherence. Recent work shows that agent memories degrade during continuous consolidation. However, existing research assumes memories are derived from unbiased experiences. In this work, we identify and formalize a novel phenomenon: Memory Contagion -- the cross-temporal propagation of evaluator bias through agent memory. We show that when agents are trained or guided by biased evaluators, their experiences become biased; when these trajectories are stored and consolidated into memory, the bias propagates to future agents retrieving from the same memory store, even when consolidation is perfect (oracle). Across two bias types (length preference, authority bias) and four experimental phases, we demonstrate: (1) Memory Contagion occurs even with perfect consolidation (oracle condition), proving that biased input is a sufficient cause of contagion; (2) Consolidation has opposite effects depending on bias type -- robustly attenuating length bias while preliminarily amplifying authority bias (single-run estimate), suggesting a bias-type-dependent interaction; (3) No observed safe threshold: bias propagation is detected at contamination rates as low as p=0.2. Our findings expose a critical vulnerability in current agent memory designs and provide formal tools for measuring cross-temporal bias propagation.
Authors: Elroy Stav, Dvir Berlowitz, Maayan Orner, Sarit Kraus
Abstract: Intrinsic self-correction (SC) aims to improve large language model outputs by prompting a model to revisit its own initial answer without external feedback. Recent studies have questioned the reliability of this approach, showing that models often struggle to judge whether their initial responses are correct. In this work, we take a task-sensitive view of SC. Rather than asking whether it works in general, we examine settings where SC may operate through different mechanisms: verifying explicit constraints, revisiting a complex reasoning process, or providing a second opinion over competing strategies in word-game tasks. Across multiple benchmarks and models, we find that SC can yield consistent performance gains when the underlying task structure facilitates these modes of revision. These results suggest that SC is best understood as a task-dependent inference-time strategy whose usefulness depends on the role the revision stage can play in a given task, rather than as a uniformly reliable method for improving initial model outputs.
Authors: Moiz Imran, Sahan Bulathwela
Abstract: Automated feedback systems that rely on answer correctness will reinforce, rather than address, misconceptions when students reach the correct answer through flawed reasoning. We investigate automatic detection of these hidden misconceptions using 20,964 real student responses from the Eedi mathematics platform. Fine-tuned classifiers detect only 57% of these hidden misconceptions, and standard ML interventions do not improve on this. An open-weight reasoning model detects 84%, but at realistic prevalence, false alarms outnumber genuine detections roughly 8 to 1. We present a graduated assessment rubric that separates answer correctness from method validity, and propose a detect-verify-escalate pipeline that routes uncertain cases to diagnostic follow-up questions rather than directly to teachers. Two deployment modes adapt the pipeline: a teacher dashboard where the system filters a review queue, and an autonomous tutor where flags trigger low-cost formative follow-up.
Authors: Yifan Wang
Abstract: Hybrid models combine trusted physics with data-driven correction, but a physical model is rarely wrong everywhere or in the same way. The key diagnostic question is local: where does the model fail, what missing mechanism explains the failure, and is the evidence statistically real? Existing sparse-discovery and discrepancy-learning methods usually fit one global correction, which can spread a local error into clean regimes, bias trusted physical parameters, and provide no calibrated significance for selected terms. We introduce LISDD, Localized, Identifiable Sparse Discovery of Discrepancy, a framework that localizes model error to an operating regime, identifies a sparse symbolic form for the missing mechanism, and certifies the discovery with an exact finite-sample test. LISDD fits the known physics on an automatically detected clean regime, flags discrepant regions with a calibrated residual-energy statistic, selects the local missing term by exhaustive holdout over a candidate library, and confirms significance with a sample-split $F$-test. A false-discovery-rate extension handles multiple discrepant regions with different missing mechanisms. In controlled experiments, LISDD keeps physical-parameter bias at 0.002 versus 0.43 for global-discrepancy and black-box baselines, raises localization $F_1$ from 0.44 to 0.80, recovers the correct symbolic form with probability one, attains exact detection, and controls the multi-region false-discovery rate while recovering every planted mechanism. The result is a calibrated diagnostic tool for grey-box building-energy models when a fixed physical law silently breaks in one operating regime.
Authors: Elena Sofia Ruzzetti, Cornelius Emde, Sangdoo Yun, Seong Joon Oh, Martin Gubri
Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly deployed in multi-party environments, handling sensitive personal data on behalf of individual users, for instance in group chats. When such an agent discloses private information, it reaches every group member at once. This risk is structurally harder to control than in one-to-one settings, as every piece of private information must be appropriate for every recipient in the group. Yet all existing contextual privacy benchmarks consider only single-interlocutor settings, leaving multi-party privacy risks unmeasured. We introduce MuPPET (Multi-Party Privacy Exposure Testing), a benchmark for contextual privacy in multi-party conversations. Our experiments show that models leak substantially more in multi-party settings than one-to-one evaluations suggest. Frontier models are vulnerable, and smaller open-weights models, often preferred for local deployment with sensitive data, even more so. Existing contextual privacy defences offer only partial protection, degrade utility, and do not resolve the underlying party-tracking problem.
Authors: Feifei Bian, Zhimin Zheng, Wei Deng, Daiguo Zhou, Jian Luan
Abstract: Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in image generation and editing, particularly regarding instruction following and visual fidelity. However, when handling ambiguous intentions, logical reasoning, and Out-of-Distribution (OOD) knowledge, existing image models often yield sub-optimal results due to a lack of deep reasoning capabilities and real-time external information. Although emerging unified understanding-and-generation models attempt to bridge this gap, they remain constrained by their intrinsic parameter scales and static knowledge gaps. Inspired by agentic paradigms, we propose RS-Gen: a plug-and-play, training-free, multi-stage image agentic framework. RS-Gen innovatively introduces a "Questioning-and-Solving" closed-loop mechanism to accurately identify logical issues and knowledge gaps, autonomously planning actions to bridge information deficits and execute deep logical reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RS-Gen significantly expands the capability boundaries of foundational image generation and editing models. Specifically, on the WISE Verified and RISEBench benchmarks, RS-Gen yields substantial absolute performance gains of 0.313 for Qwen-Image and 19.70 for Qwen-Image-Edit-2511, respectively, successfully elevating both to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) level among open-source models.
Authors: Kai Zeng, Moran Li, Zhengwei Wang, Yingchen Yu, Yiheng Lin, Ruichuan An, Ming Lu, Qi She, Wentao Zhang
Abstract: Visual text editing aims to precisely modify text in images and videos while preserving stylistic consistency and visual realism. Despite significant advances in the image domain, video text editing remains largely unexplored: it is a localized task demanding stroke-level precision within small text regions, which compounds the challenges of cross-frame accuracy, temporal coherence, and stylistic fidelity. We introduce SteerVTE, a unified framework that \underline{\textbf{steer}}s a frozen video diffusion model to perform precise \underline{\textbf{V}}ideo \underline{\textbf{T}}ext \underline{\textbf{E}}diting through style and glyph control. Built on a frozen diffusion transformer, SteerVTE attaches a lightweight text context adapter with two complementary modules: a style encoder capturing the original text's visual attributes, and dual-granularity glyph encoders encoding the target text at both the line and character levels. To overcome the inherently weak text rendering priors of video foundation models, we further propose a glyph-aware spatial-focal loss and a three-stage progressive training curriculum that scales from image to video data. To support large-scale training, we also develop an automatic synthesis pipeline and construct SteerVTE-1M, a dataset of one million triplets spanning diverse scenes, fonts, and stylistic effects. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SteerVTE substantially outperforms existing video editing baselines across text accuracy, style consistency, and temporal coherence.
Authors: Felix Tristram, Stefano Gasperini, Benjamin Killeen, Marcel Walch, Christian Benz, Nassir Navab, Ghazal Ghazaei
Abstract: The increasing maturity of embodied AI platforms has driven a growing interest in procedural video representation learning to support intelligent assistance systems for complex, multi-step tasks. Leveraging large-scale latent predictive training, video foundation models capture video dynamics, enabling downstream tasks such as activity understanding, spatiotemporal localization, and predictive control. However, procedural videos include actions with long-range dependencies that these models do not support, due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. Distinct actions, for example, may be visually similar despite appearing at different points in the procedure, such as turning the stove on versus off. Here, we propose a backbone-agnostic approach that learns long-duration video representations by reducing the problem to a dense, frame-aligned action space and predicting pooled masked latent vectors. This approach allows our Procedural Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (P-JEPA) to ingest videos over 30 minutes long, enabling effective long-form understanding of procedural steps. We evaluate P-JEPA using features extracted with VJEPA2.1, TSM, and I3D over the EgoExo4D, EgoProceL, and Assembly101 datasets, finding that it consistently improves linear separability, streaming inference, and temporal action segmentation performance, achieving state-of-the-art results on EgoExo4D fine-grained action classification while using an order of magnitude fewer parameters than LLM-based methods and running in real time.
Authors: Khadidja Kadem, Mostafa Ameli, Carlos Lima Azevedo, Mahdi Zargayouna, Latifa Oukhellou
Abstract: In multimodal transportation systems, shared mobility services (SMSs) are promoted for their potential to enhance flexibility and reduce congestion. However, SMS demand is often concentrated in high-density areas, which can limit the effectiveness and accessibility for various commuter groups. This uneven integration challenges transportation system efficiency, especially in terms of emissions and spatial equity. Addressing these issues requires coordination among multiple stakeholders whose objectives frequently conflict. Whereas authorities aim to ensure sustainable and equitable mobility, SMS providers focus on revenue maximization, and travelers seek to minimize personal travel costs. This paper proposes a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning framework that captures these interactions through dynamic pricing and incentivization strategies for SMSs and public transport. The framework integrates two reinforcement learning (RL) agents: (i) a public authority that allocates spatio-temporal public transport incentives to improve equity, emissions, and efficiency, and (ii) an SMS provider that dynamically adjusts fares to optimize revenue. The agents interact with the transportation system and adapt strategies in response to evolving demand, congestion, and network conditions. Numerical experiments conducted over a three-hour morning peak period show that dynamic incentivization effectively reduces congestion peaks, lowers commuters' costs by around 20% and emissions by approximately 10%, while nearly doubling public transport profit and supporting a more equitable distribution of benefits. When combined with dynamic SMS pricing, the two RL agents demonstrate the ability to balance conflicting objectives between private providers and public authorities. The proposed approach provides a decision-support tool for sustainable and equitable multimodal mobility planning.
Authors: Advik Raj Basani, Anshuman Chhabra
Abstract: Knowledge Editing (KE) has emerged as a frontier for updating specific facts in LLMs without costly retraining, but its reliability and underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this work, we examine KE from an adversarial elicitation perspective, revealing that edited knowledge is often not fully erased and continues to surface, with consistent failures observed across diverse model architectures. To explain this behavior, we conduct a mechanistic analysis of popular KE methods. We show that low-rank updates do not overwrite existing knowledge but instead redistribute it within the model's representation space. Furthermore, we find that these methods act as targeted suppression mechanisms that reduce the likelihood of expressing original facts, rather than removing them from the model. Analysis of the loss landscape reveals that edited knowledge lies in narrow, anisotropic regions that are highly sensitive to perturbations, making them highly vulnerable to indirect prompting and adversarial attacks. By exposing these profound architectural vulnerabilities, our work proves that KE algorithms are inherently bypassable and motivates a fundamental reevaluation of how we deploy post-hoc updates in several LLM applications.
Authors: Yuanzhi Su (Cynthia), Huiying (Cynthia), Hou
Abstract: Bathroom use is a critical safety challenge for older adults because wet surfaces, constrained layouts, limited support, and frequent posture transitions are concentrated within a small domestic space. These conditions create risks that cannot be adequately understood by considering either the bathroom environment or human motion in isolation. Existing bathroom safety studies mainly identify hazards, accessibility problems, or design modifications, whereas human-centered sensing studies often focus on activity recognition or fall detection without sufficient semantic understanding of the surrounding environment. This separation limits the interpretation of how older adults interact with fixtures, support surfaces, wet areas, and spatial constraints during daily bathroom activities. To address this gap, this study proposes a bathroom-centered human-building digital twin framework for interaction-aware indoor safety analysis with a specific emphasis on older adult bathroom safety. The framework conceptualizes bathroom risk as a coupled human-environment process and integrates semantic bathroom representation, skeleton-based human representation, spatial-semantic coupling, interaction-aware event analytics, and safety-oriented visualization. A Unity-based proof-of-concept prototype is developed to demonstrate the feasibility of the framework. Although the current work remains a prototype-oriented investigation, it establishes a methodological basis for analyzing older adults' bathroom safety through explicit body-environment relations and for advancing privacy-sensitive, interaction-aware digital twin applications in aging-in-place residential environments.
Authors: Hengji Zhou, Lingxuan Huang, Jian Wang, Bing Zhou, Si Wu, Lianghao Xia, Chao Huang
Abstract: Video editing has become essential in digital media creation, yet existing automated systems are restricted to short segment processing and domain-specific tasks. They face two critical limitations: i) inability to handle diverse video comprehension and editing operations, and ii) lack of long-video understanding for coherent narrative creation. We propose VideoAgent, an all-in-one agentic framework addressing these challenges through two key innovations. First, we develop automated video shot creation with shot planning agents for coherent narratives and cross-modal retrieval for aligned visual content. Second, we design a multi-agent orchestration framework integrating over thirty specialized editing agents. Intent parsing filters relevant tools while textual-gradient graph optimization assembles complex editing pipelines. Extensive experiments on our newly-proposed VideoEdit benchmark and public datasets demonstrate VideoAgent's superiority over existing multimodal LLMs and agentic systems. VideoAgent achieves 87-95% orchestration success rates while reducing API costs by 60%. Human evaluation across six video categories shows VideoAgent produces professional-quality content approaching human-level performance, with ratings only 4% below human-created videos. We release our code at https://github.com/HKUDS/VideoAgent.
Authors: Nicolas M. M\"uller, Pascal Debus
Abstract: Provenance watermarking is increasingly treated as a safeguard for synthetic speech, whether built directly into speech-generation models such as Chatterbox, provided through dedicated techniques such as AudioSeal, or deployed by commercial platforms such as ElevenLabs. We identify a previously uncharacterized liability: when synthetic speech is watermarked and human speech is not, detectors trained alongside latch onto the watermark as a spurious "watermark => fake" shortcut. This single feature yields three coupled failures: generalization degradation (model performance deteriorates on unseen data), strip-to-evade (a watermarked fake escapes once unwatermarked), and mark-to-frame (watermarking a real voice flags it as fake). In a controlled white-box experiment, a watermark-trained detector shows all three (for example, mark-to-frame lifts Equal Error Rate from 16% to 75%). In a black-box test of a commercial API, we show that adding a watermark to real speech disguises it as fake. However, this shortcut is fixable: retraining with the watermark on both classes decorrelates it and restores clean behavior. We release experiment data as a paired clean-versus-watermarked corpus (WASP).
Authors: Alex A. Saoulis, Kiyam Lin, Niall Jeffrey, Maximilian von Wietersheim-Kramsta, Davide Piras, Alessio Spurio Mancini, Ana M. G. Ferreira, Benjamin Joachimi
Abstract: We perform a realistic KiDS-Legacy mock analysis with field-level neural compression and simulation-based inference using fewer than 100 $N$-body simulations. The weak lensing shear field encodes substantially more cosmological information than standard two-point summary statistics such as the power spectrum. Field-level inference can fully exploit this information, but physical realism at the field-level requires very high-fidelity simulations. This poses a major challenge for simulation-based inference (SBI): accurate empirical density modelling and deep-learning-based neural compression require many training simulations, but achieving physical realism at the field level makes each simulation extremely costly. We demonstrate that multifidelity SBI can alleviate this tension by substantially reducing the number of high-fidelity simulations needed for accurate cosmological inference. We pre-train neural inference models on realistic KiDS-Legacy-like shear mocks using fast log-normal GLASS simulations and fine-tune them on a small set of high-fidelity $N$-body simulations. We show that between $60$-$100$ high-fidelity simulations are sufficient to obtain informative and well-calibrated cosmological posteriors, enabling an order-of-magnitude reduction in simulation cost for accurate field-level inference in a realistic setting.
Authors: Duc Tien Nguyen, Trinh Minh Tuan, Nguyen Duc Manh, Vu Linh Nguyen, Dinh Gia Ninh
Abstract: Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) provide an effective way to solve partial differential equations (PDEs) by embedding physical principles into the learning process. However, the conventional PINN formulation, in which all constraints are imposed as soft penalty terms within a composite loss, often exhibits slow convergence, sensitivity to loss weight scaling, and inaccurate boundary enforcement due to poor conditioning of the optimization landscape. To address these limitations, this study proposes a unified hard--soft physics--informed neural network (HSPINN) with adaptive loss weighting. In this framework, Dirichlet and periodic boundary conditions are enforced exactly by construction through analytical or polynomial lifting, masking functions, and periodic feature mappings, while the governing PDE residuals, Neumann fluxes, and initial conditions are treated as soft constraints. An inverse-share softmax strategy dynamically balances the relative importance of individual loss components during training, eliminating manual penalty tuning and improving gradient stability. This formulation ensures boundary admissibility throughout optimization and enhances convergence efficiency and numerical robustness. Applications to representative elliptic (Poisson), parabolic (Burgers), and hyperbolic (convection with periodic boundaries) problems demonstrate that HSPINN consistently achieves faster convergence, higher accuracy, and greater stability than conventional PINNs, establishing a general and scalable foundation for physics-constrained deep learning across science and technology.
Authors: Thinh T. H. Nguyen, Sze Jue Yang, Khoa D. Doan, Chee Seng Chan, Kok-Seng Wong
Abstract: Backdoor attacks on molecular graph neural networks (GNNs) are typically evaluated as abstract graph edits, but real molecular learning pipelines do not train on arbitrary graphs. Molecular records must first survive parsing, sanitization, canonicalization, and graph-string consistency checks. We formalize this overlooked admission stage as ChemGuard, an operational protocol for testing whether a submitted molecular record can enter a realistic learning pipeline, while complementing existing defenses. ChemGuard admits a record only when its molecular string is sanitizable and the graph reconstructed from that string matches the submitted molecular graph. Under this operational view, many existing graph-based backdoors lose much of their apparent efficacy because their poisons are chemically invalid or representation-inconsistent. We then show that admission checks alone are insufficient to rule out molecular backdoors. We propose ChemBack, an admission-aware molecular backdoor attack that constructs chemically feasible motif-anchor attachments and ranks admitted candidates by fingerprint-based Tanimoto similarity to clean target-class molecules. ChemBack is model-free during trigger selection, using molecular structures, target labels, fingerprints, and public validity checks, but no victim model, surrogate GNN, learned embedding, gradient, logit, or training-code access. Across molecular benchmarks, validators, architectures, and defenses, \textbf{ChemBack} achieves high attack success with fully admitted poisons while preserving clean accuracy. Our results reveal a two-sided lesson, chemistry-aware admission suppresses many graph-only backdoors, yet chemically valid and target-aligned molecular backdoors remain a practical threat.
Authors: Arthur Wuhrmann, Gaetan Stein, Daniel Brunner, Andrei Kucharavy
Abstract: While the wider applicability of LLMs in the legal field is currently debated due to their reliability and the gravity of any errors, narrow uses with well-understood and mitigated risks have emerged. Notably the Swiss Federal Supreme Court uses small on-premises models for tentative translations and short-passage summarization across the four official languages. However, such usage is challenging in the context of Criminal Law. Since rulings and cases employees work on routinely can contain detailed descriptions of violent and sexual offenses, their legitimate work is compromised by refusals and disclaimers due to the activation of model guardrails (over-alignment). To measure this phenomenon, we introduce TF-RefusalBench, a multilingual benchmark for criminal-law translation and summarization derived from public Swiss Supreme Court rulings. TF-RefusalBench contains 5,200 total prompts across French, German, Italian, and English, corresponding to common task prompts and passages likely to trigger refusal. We then use TF-RefusalBench to show that over-alignment is a multifaceted phenomenon, influenced by the model and the prompt and text languages being processed, and that its impact cannot be evaluated solely from an over-refusal perspective, given the disclaimer's impact on task faithfulness. Finally, we evaluate approaches to enable on-premises LLMs for Criminal Law Tasks, demonstrating that while prompting can be effective, abliteration (refusal directions ablation) eliminates refusal with minimal impact on task performance.
Authors: Jakub Dotlacil, Ece Takmaz
Abstract: Transformer language models have become established tools for modeling human sentence processing, with measures such as surprisal and attention entropy serving as effective predictors of reading difficulty that together capture complementary aspects of processing load. Here, we explore a related class of transformer models: energy-based transformers, which provide a principled formal link to associative memory models, bringing processing research into direct contact with the broader literature on Hopfield networks and dense associative memory. To our knowledge, this is the first exploration of an energy-based transformer measure in computational psycholinguistics. Across reading-time corpora (Natural Stories, UCL eye-tracking, UCL self-paced reading), the energy measure is a robust predictor of reading times, providing significant fit beyond surprisal in all three. In a controlled experiment on relative clause processing, energy at a single layer captures the well-known object/subject asymmetry. We find evidence that it subsumes effects attributable to both attention entropy and surprisal, suggesting that energy may serve as a single unified predictor where multiple complementary measures have previously been required.
Authors: Falguni Ghosh, Vahid Hashemi, Bernhard Kainz
Abstract: Time series forecasting is a fundamental machine learning task. Recent work has explored Large Language Models (LLMs) for this purpose due to their strong generalization, pattern recognition, and zero-shot or few-shot capabilities. Despite their suitability for long-context learning, LLMs face challenges in multimodal settings: they lack calibrated probabilistic modeling for non-text data and struggle to align heterogeneous representations. To address these issues, we propose a new framework Diffusion-LLM that integrates a conditional diffusion model into an LLM-based forecasting pipeline. This joint design enables learning the conditional distribution of future data while improving semantic alignment in a shared latent space. We evaluate Diffusion-LLM on six long-term forecasting benchmarks, including ETT, Weather, and ECL. Our method consistently outperforms existing LLM-based baseline, achieving notable gains in ultra-long-term and few-shot forecasting and demonstrating the value of distribution-aware regularization for enhancing robustness and generalization in time series LLMs.
Authors: Haitham Al-Shami, Rohail Malik, Riku Ala-Laurinaho, Jari Veps\"al\"ainen, Raine Viitala
Abstract: SysML v2's textual syntax enables compiler-based validation of model structure and language conformance. However, semantic mistakes that preserve syntactic validity but violate domain rules cannot be detected through compilers. These errors can propagate through the design process and surface late as costly integration failures. This paper presents a human-in-the-loop framework for identifying and repairing such errors automatically. It combines a fine-tuned Small Language Model (SLM) with a domain knowledge graph encoding physical compatibility rules between system elements. The knowledge graph also guides the generation of synthetic training data by systematically introducing plausible domain violations, and augments the model at inference time to ground repair suggestions in valid engineering constraints. We demonstrate the framework using the vehicle systems domain, where the knowledge graph captures the relationships between the mechanical, electrical, fluid, and signal interfaces. Two SLMs, Qwen2.5-Coder-1.5B and DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B, are fine-tuned to output unified diff patches that localize faults and present candidate repairs for engineer review, preserving human judgment in the design process. Evaluation of 1,184 test samples shows that fine-tuning improves semantic fault repair from less than 3% to more than 91%, with patch-based output reducing token length by over 60%. The framework offers a practical path toward AI-assisted model verification that complements existing MBSE tools.
Authors: Jun Zhang, Jiasheng Zheng, Boxi Cao, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Jia Zheng, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
Abstract: The emergence of Large Reasoning Models has introduced exceptionally long Chain-of-Thought traces, creating a transparency burden where critical logic is often buried under massive procedural text. To address this, we present ReasoningLens, an open-source framework designed for the hierarchical visualization and diagnostic auditing of complex reasoning chains. ReasoningLens addresses information necropsy by: (1) structuring traces into interactive hierarchies that separate high-level strategy from low-level execution; (2) leveraging an agentic auditor for automated error detection and tool-augmented verification; and (3) synthesizing systemic reasoning profiles to reveal model-specific blind spots. By transforming unstructured walls of text into actionable insights, ReasoningLens provides a modular foundation for interpreting, debugging, and optimizing the next generation of reasoning-centric AI.
Authors: Yuval Domb, Hadar Sackstein, Tomer Solberg
Abstract: We present HyperQuant (Hadamard, optimallY Packing, Entropy Rice-coding), a unified post-training quantization pipeline for the weights and the KV cache of large language and diffusion transformers. Across a suite of self-contained experiments (Table 1), HyperQuant outperforms the recent HIGGS scheme at every operating point from 3 to 5 bits per scalar (bps) on weights, and beats both TurboQuant and OCTOPUS on KV quantization down to 1.7 bps. Beyond the LLM setting, HyperQuant quantizes the 19B-parameter LTX-2 DiT video model with no observable per-frame artifacts. End-to-end on an H100 at 4 bps, HyperQuant compresses the linear weights ~3.9x and the KV cache ~3.79x at near-lossless quality. HyperQuant combines four known ideas into a single construction: (i) a per-tile Randomized Hadamard Transform that makes the per-coordinate distribution of weights and activations approximately Gaussian; (ii) quantization to a low-dimensional optimal lattice (E8, D4, A2, or Z); (iii) lossless bit-stripping and near-entropy-optimal variable-length Rice coding of the lattice indices; and (iv) bias-correction methods for the KV cache that keep the reconstruction unbiased under inner products, preserving attention semantics. We further integrate the pipeline with 8-bit and 4-bit Tensor-Core MMA paths (fp8-e4m3, int8, nvfp4, mxfp4), and find that int8 beats fp8 on the post-RHT lattice output. Project page: https://moonmath.ai/hyperquant/
Authors: Ahmed Y. Radwan, Ahmed ElKady, Sindhuja Chaduvula, Mohamed Hafez, Amrit Krishnan, Shaina Raza
Abstract: Bias in natural language remains a persistent challenge in both human-written and AI-generated content, affecting domains such as journalism, education, and AI research. Most existing detection methods identify only the presence of bias, with limited support for granular detection, interpretable explanations, neutral rewriting, and openly available trained models. We present UnBias-Plus, an open-source toolkit unifying (1) segment-level multi-class bias classification, (2) biased span localization, (3) neutral text rewriting, and (4) reasoning for each decision. Available via Python, CLI, REST API, and web interfaces, UnBias-Plus supports accessible bias analysis. The toolkit, source code, models, datasets, and documentation are publicly available.
Authors: Bacem Etteib, Daniele Lunghi, T\'egawend\'e F. Bissyand\'e
Abstract: LLM agents increasingly load skills, file-based packages of natural-language instructions written by third parties and distributed through marketplaces, that execute with the user's privileges. A single malicious skill can exfiltrate data, hijack the agent, or persist as a supply-chain foothold, which turns the skill marketplace into a new attack surface for agentic systems. Prompt-injection defenses do not carry over to this setting. They rely on a boundary between trusted instructions and untrusted data, whereas a skill is itself a body of instructions, so an injected command sits among many legitimate ones and inherits their authority. We present Locate-and-Judge, a two-stage detector designed for this regime. A lightweight locator scores the structural spans of a skill by the instruction-following attention each span draws and retains only the top-K. A judge then examines the retained spans in detail. Concentrating the costly judgment on a few high-attention spans lets the detector audit an entire marketplace instead of a sample. Compared to direct LLM-based scanning, this approach offers an order-of-magnitude cost reduction, dramatically increasing its scalability at a small cost to recall, and it dominates keyword and regex baselines at comparable expense. Deployed at marketplace scale and at negligible cost, Locate-and-Judge flags skills with high precision, the majority of which we manually confirmed as malicious, surfacing dozens of live malicious skills, including several disguised as benign functionality and many that SkillSpector and Cisco Skill Scanner fail to detect. We release the resulting labeled dataset.
Authors: Jette Oberl\"ander, Jan Finkbeiner, Catherine M. Sch\"ofmann, Emre Neftci
Abstract: Autoregressive decoding with LLMs is primarily bottlenecked by GPU memory bandwidth, especially in edge-computing settings. While quantization is essential for mitigating this bottleneck, most existing methods treat inference as a uniform process and fail to account for the asymmetry between the compute-bound prefill stage and the memory-bound decoding stage. We propose GRINQH (GRaded INput-based Quantization Hierarchy), a weight-only post-training quantization framework that accelerates decoding by unifying quantization and sparsification. GRINQH leverages activation magnitudes as a proxy for computational importance to dynamically assign weight channels to different precision levels, enabling flexible average bit widths during decoding. Evaluated on Llama3 and Qwen3 models, GRINQH outperforms state-of-the-art fixed- and mixed-precision baselines at comparable 3- and 4-bit settings, even enabling effective 2-bit generation. We experimentally verify theoretical speedups by leveraging a hierarchical nested memory layout for multi-precision storage in a custom GPU kernel. Ultimately, GRINQH establishes a new state-of-the-art Pareto frontier for LLM generation, enabling a dynamic trade-off between generation quality and inference speed.
Authors: Amaury Wei, Ismail Nejjar, Olga Fink
Abstract: Unsupervised video object tracking aims to decompose dynamic scenes into persistent, object-centric entities without manual annotations. Many recent approaches rely on slot-based representations, where a fixed set of latent variables ("slots") represent individual objects across frames. To preserve object identity, these models enforce temporal consistency on slot embeddings. However, when appearance and pose are entangled, this consistency objective conflicts with object motion and viewpoint changes. As a result, slots tend to lock onto static regions (e.g., background) to satisfy the consistency objective, while foreground objects become fragmented across multiple slots or frequently swap identities. To address these limitations, we propose STAITUS, a unified framework that explicitly disentangles each slot into appearance and geometric pose (position/scale). Leveraging this disentanglement, STAITUS enforces within-frame spatial separation and applies temporal alignment only in appearance space, yielding sharper masks and more persistent identities under motion, occlusion, and object entry/exit. Furthermore, to mitigate over-segmentation, we introduce an adaptive gating mechanism that dynamically adjusts the number of active slots to match scene complexity. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that STAITUS substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in segmentation quality and tracking stability.
Authors: Christian Kenneth, Etowah Adams, Liam Bai, Gerard JP van Westen
Abstract: Chemical language models (cLMs) are widely assumed to learn surface-level syntactic patterns rather than learning meaningful molecular semantics. Here, we apply sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to MolFormer, an encoder-only cLM, to mechanistically examine how molecular representations are built across layers. We discover that early layers rely on position-tracking latents to parse molecular grammar, while later layers encode atom-in-substructure and pharmacologically relevant features. Additionally, we show that non-canonical SMILES produce more disruptive representation shifts than invalid SMILES, driven by position-latent disruption propagating across layers. To support further exploration, we develop InterMol, an interactive visualizer for SAE activations on molecular strings and structures.
Authors: Sovesh Mohapatra, David Lydon-Staley, Dani S. Bassett
Abstract: Scientists do not, by profession, wage war. Yet warfare's vocabulary consistently appears in their abstracts. To quantify the extent to which warfare's vocabulary pervades scientific abstracts, we analyze 21.4 million papers (2010-2025; OpenAlex, PubMed). We additionally run a within-subject war-framing experiment (N = 801; 32,040 trials) designed to provide causal insight into the effects of militaristic language on persuasion. Between 2010 and 2025, the presence of militaristic terms in scientific abstracts rose 48% in OpenAlex and 32% in PubMed, with the rise accelerating sharply after 2019 (cross-database r = 0.96, p < 10^-8). The prevalence of militaristic language is conflict-aligned at both country and annual scales (Uppsala Conflict Data Program; r = 0.77-0.84), with the abstracts from the Global South displaying the fastest rise in militaristic language. Among disciplines, social sciences leads in level of such language while engineering and computer science lead in growth. The COVID and post-2022 large-language-model eras also saw the rise and narrowed the language gap between native-English and non-English authors. In our follow-up experiment, we found that war framing reduced credibility (mean shift -0.18 Likert units, 95% CI [-0.21, -0.14]; d_z = -0.28, p < 10^-20), funding willingness (d_z = -0.12) and policy support (d_z = -0.08), with a trend-level increase in sense of urgency (d_z = +0.07). Collectively, findings reveal that while scientific abstracts drift toward warfare, the use of militaristic language may erode credibility, funding willingness, and policy support.
Authors: Arup Kumar Sahoo, Itzik Klein
Abstract: Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) rely heavily on the fusion of inertial sensors and Doppler velocity logs (DVLs) for navigation. In standard autonomous navigation systems, the DVL measures four beam velocities, thereby enabling the estimation of the AUV velocity vector. However, during real-world missions, the DVL may receive noisy or incomplete beam measurements due to marine obstacles, seabed reflections, or environmental disturbances. Furthermore, some low-cost underwater platforms operate without inertial sensors to reduce system complexity and cost. In such cases, reliable estimation of the AUV velocity vector in real-world missing beam scenarios becomes challenging, leading to degraded navigation solutions. To circumvent these challenges and enable resilient underwater navigation, we propose DVL-DeepONet, a physics-guided deep neural operator framework along with three variants. The proposed models are designed to estimate DVL-based velocity information under multiple operational scenarios, including (i) noise-resilient estimation in coupled inertial/DVL measurements, (ii) DVL-only learning, and (iii) beam measurement recovery. By learning a nonlinear operator that maps temporal inertial/DVL observations directly to vehicle velocity while enforcing DVL measurement physics through a consistency constraint, the proposed approach enables robust velocity estimation even under degraded sensing conditions. The proposed framework is validated using real-world AUV experiments, comprising a cumulative path length of approximately 10,000 m. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DVL-DeepONet architectures outperform baseline model-based approaches and learning-based algorithms by 40%.
Authors: Yizhang Zhu, Zhangyang Peng, Boyan Li, Yuyu Luo
Abstract: Text-to-SQL enables users to access relational databases via natural language, but real-world settings remain challenging due to coordinated reasoning over complex database environments. Existing systems often use multi-stage pipelines or reasoning models specialized for individual stages. However, fixed pipelines rely on predefined stage orders, limiting their adaptivity to query demands and intermediate evidence. Recent orchestration-based methods provide flexibility by composing specialized modules for each query, but typical plan-then-execute approaches still commit to a complete workflow before execution and cannot adapt to intermediate artifacts and feedback. In this paper, we propose SQLConductor, a step-wise orchestration learning framework for Text-to-SQL. SQLConductor formulates Text-to-SQL subtasks as specialized actions for workflow composition and trains a policy model to select the next action based on intermediate artifacts and feedback. To learn this policy, SQLConductor introduces Search-to-Policy Learning, which uses Monte Carlo Tree Search to explore candidate workflows and stability estimation to identify robust supervision. The policy model is trained with Stability-weighted Supervised Fine-tuning to prioritize high-quality orchestration patterns and further enhanced through Curriculum Reinforcement Learning. This transforms offline workflow search into a deployable policy for step-wise orchestration at inference time. Experiments on BIRD-Dev and out-of-distribution datasets show that SQLConductor achieves superior execution accuracy and strong generalization, reaching 73.2% EX on BIRD-Dev with a compact orchestration policy coordinating frozen larger action models, outperforming prior methods that directly train comparable or larger Text-to-SQL backbones. Further analyses show that the learned policy adapts orchestration to diverse query demands.
Authors: Mansour Zoubeirou a Mayaki
Abstract: Transformer-based models underpin modern natural language processing but incur rapidly growing computational and energy costs. As training scales in both model size and parallelism, accurately predicting energy consumption has become critical for sustainable and cost-aware system design. We present a framework for modeling the energy consumption of Transformer training on multiple GPUs. Using controlled architectural sweeps of BERT models, we relate measured energy to lightweight proxies for compute, memory traffic, and hardware efficiency. Inspired by roofline models, our approach incorporates a speedup-based hardware-efficiency factor that captures the effects of tensor parallelism and fully sharded data parallelism. We derive a scaling law model that accurately predicts training energy across heterogeneous configurations.
Authors: Jiawei Xu, Minghui Liu, Aakriti Agrawal, Yifan Chen, Furong Huang
Abstract: Masked diffusion language models decode by iteratively unmasking tokens, where the unmasking order defines an "order of thought" that strongly influences generation quality yet is typically chosen heuristically. We derive a tractable upper bound on the sequential decoding mismatch, measured by the Kullback-Leibler divergence and expressed in terms of the model's pathwise log-likelihood, with tightness under sufficient model expressivity. This bound induces a dense self-aware reward over ordered trajectories, casting order selection as a principled policy optimization problem with a frozen denoiser. We instantiate this idea as Self-Aware Scheduling (SAS), which learns a lightweight order policy using Group Relative Policy Optimization and applies seamlessly to both any-order and semi-autoregressive decoding. On Sudoku with 1B MDM, SAS improves puzzle accuracy from 82.0% (best heuristic schedule) to 91.8%, and reaches 97.5% with second-stage fine-tuning along learned trajectories. On mathematical reasoning with LLaDA-8B, SAS improves pass@1 on GSM8K from 64% to 76% and on MBPP from 39.5% to 41%, consistently matching or exceeding heuristic schedules across generation lengths and block sizes. Project page: https://jimmyxu123.github.io/SAS
Authors: Yong Yi Bay, Kathleen A. Yearick
Abstract: Hyperparameter tuning almost always means search: fit the model at every value on a grid, score each by cross-validation, and keep the winner. For spline regression that search is unnecessary. The optimal resolution can be solved for in closed form, to the accuracy an exhaustive search reaches, at a fraction of the compute. Three ingredients make this possible: classical approximation theory pins the squared bias to a known power of the resolution G, exactly the Kolmogorov n-width of the smoothness class; the basis dimension is an explicit polynomial in G; and leave-one-out error follows from a single fit via the PRESS identity. Balancing the two known curves gives the minimizer analytically. We extend this calculus to many coordinates by replacing ambient input dimension with interaction order, the number of active low-order components in an ANOVA decomposition, yielding a scaling law in which the optimal resolution and error are power functions of the effective density (sample size per active component), with input dimension absent from the exponent. The law becomes an algorithm. KORE (Kolmogorov-optimal Order-aware Resolution Estimation) fits two pilot resolutions, solves a leverage-calibrated 2x2 system for the bias and noise scales, and evaluates the closed-form plug-in resolution with a tiny leave-one-out certificate: about a dozen fits instead of a full grid sweep, with a consistency guarantee as the sample grows. Across additive and sparse pairwise targets up to 80 input dimensions, KORE matches exhaustive 3-fold cross-validation and the full classical ladder (GCV, Mallows' Cp, AIC, BIC) while fitting roughly 8x fewer models; on 36 real tabular datasets it ranks first among 21 methods in accuracy per unit of compute, ahead of tuned boosters and kernel machines. When complexity lives in low interaction order, solving for the resolution beats searching for it.
Authors: Bole Ma, Jan Eitzinger, Harald Koestler, Gerhard Wellein
Abstract: Multimodal agents repeatedly re-examine the same video frames, UI screenshots, and rendered artifacts as their context window slides and reasoning iterates, yet every look-back re-encodes from scratch, because prefix caches serve reuse only at a fixed leading position. We show this recompute is avoidable, and identify exactly what naive KV reuse loses: the cross-chunk conditioning a chunk absorbs from its neighbours. This loss is asymmetric. The direct readout of a cached chunk is recovered exactly and for free by the standard state-merge. What remains is a diffuse, low-rank residue concentrated in deep layers, invisible to single-hop retrieval but precisely what multi-hop reasoning binds on. Blind reuse therefore leaves single-hop recall intact while halving multi-hop accuracy; this is the failure mode prior position-independent caches, designed for single-context or single-image reuse, do not address. We repair it with a small, training-free low-rank conditioning patch stored alongside each position-free chunk. Reuse reduces to one operator across MLA, GQA, and MHA: exact RoPE re-rotation to any target position, plus the patch that restores cross-chunk binding. This makes three window operations cheap: reorder (one patch serves every ordering of a cached set), sliding-window survival (surviving chunks relocate via rotation only, zero re-encode), and recall (an evicted chunk is rehydrated by its patch, never re-encoded). A rank-m patch recovers full task accuracy on cross-chunk-binding benchmarks, MM-NIAH across two attention families and two-page doc-QA, at a fraction of the KV footprint, and reconstructs re-prefill KV to within bf16 rounding in a production SGLang kernel across six backbones. The conditioning signal is strongest in redundant vision and video streams, making our solution most impactful where multimodal agents spend their recompute budget.
Authors: Jasmine Jerry Aloor, Aadarsh Govada, Hamsa Balakrishnan
Abstract: As autonomous aircraft are introduced at scale and traffic density increases, centralized management becomes insufficient to coordinate the large numbers of crewed and uncrewed aircraft. Dedicated Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) corridors have therefore been proposed for organizing high-density autonomous traffic flows. The desire to scalably provide autonomous aircraft flexibility in trajectory planning motivates the development of decentralized approaches to traffic management in AAM corridors. In this work, we extend a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) approach to address the challenge of decentralized traffic flow management in air corridor networks. We test policies trained in a single-corridor setting on increasingly complex multi-corridor networks with combinations of merges and splits in a zero-shot manner. Experimental results demonstrate that learned behaviors transfer well to scenarios with varying traffic density, network geometry, and heterogeneous vehicle performance, without needing centralized coordination or model retraining. We evaluate system-level performance in terms of conformance to corridor boundaries, completion rates, average speeds, distance traveled, and maintenance of inter-aircraft separation. We find that although our policies require only locally coordinated entry, traversal, and exit behaviors, they collectively produce desirable traffic flows through the corridor network.
Authors: Yash Ranjan, Rahul Sengupta, Anand Rangarajan, Sanjay Ranka
Abstract: Traffic microsimulators rely on hand-crafted behavior models that reproduce aggregate flow but miss the heterogeneous interactions between vehicles at signalized intersections. Learned trajectory predictors capture richer interactions but are short-horizon and tend to be unstable when run in closed loop. We present Enactor, an actor-centric generative model for closed-loop intersection microsimulation. The model focuses on vehicles; pedestrians are included as context that can influence vehicle decisions but not predicted. Dynamic actors and lane polylines are encoded in polar coordinates referenced to the intersection center. A transformer with separate spatial and temporal attention blocks predicts a distribution over each actor's next-step motion ($s$, $\alpha$). Training uses a closed-loop curriculum so the model is exposed to its own predictions. We evaluate Enactor in two regimes. In a 4000-second simulation-in-the-loop test at two intersection geometries, Enactor controls every dynamic vehicle against a continuously refreshing actor set rather than the fixed cohort that learned trajectory predictors are usually evaluated against. It recovers the SUMO data generator's speed and travel-time distributions with KL divergence over an order of magnitude lower than a recent transformer baseline on travel time, and substantially lower on speed (roughly $5\times$ lower at Site 1), and reduces red-light violations relative to the same baseline by more than an order of magnitude. An ablation isolates the leader rear-bumper feature as the change with the largest effect on intersection-aware safety metrics. We also evaluate on real-world field data and apply the same architecture to naturalistic vehicle trajectories from a fish-eye camera at a signalized intersection and evaluate it on multi-horizon predictive tasks. Enactor outperforms a constant-velocity baseline at every horizon evaluated.
Authors: Mohamed Nagy, Naoufel Werghi, Jorge Dias, Majid Khonji
Abstract: The tracking-by-detection paradigm in multi-object tracking (MOT) typically relies on static appearance descriptors to complement motion estimation. However, these descriptors are frame-independent, limiting their robustness as visual cues. Since such descriptors are often obtained from computationally intensive pretrained backbones, real-time MOT systems frequently abandon appearance cues altogether and rely solely on motion prediction and geometric association. In this work, we introduce Polycepta, an object-centric appearance state estimation framework that reformulates appearance modeling as a recursive estimation problem rather than a frame-wise matching task. Polycepta constructs and continuously updates an independent appearance state for each tracked object, enabling future appearance representations to be estimated from accumulated observations. Polycepta is encouraged to learn the appearance-state construction of object-specific representations rather than memorize them through a proposed learning strategy, enabling appearance estimation for unseen classes. A key property of Polycepta is that the quality of appearance estimation improves as object states evolve during inference. While conventional appearance descriptors remain static or degrade over time, Polycepta progressively refines appearance estimates as additional observations are accumulated. Extensive experiments on KITTI, the Waymo Open Dataset, and MOT17 demonstrate consistent reductions in identity switches and improvements in tracking performance when integrated into the tracking-by-detection pipelines. Polycepta operates at 90.57 Hz and delivers state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI benchmark when integrated into the RobMOT framework, achieving a MOTA of 92.27\%.
Authors: Tianyi Li, Zhiqiang Shen
Abstract: Linear mode connectivity (LMC) provides a promising foundation for understanding and merging independently trained neural networks, but existing methods typically optimize the interpolation path from only one model endpoint, limiting their scalability and effectiveness for large pretrained transformers. We propose a novel and scalable framework for enabling LMC-based model merging to {\em billion-parameter pretrained transformers}. Our method applies properly parameterized functionality-preserving weight transformations to align functionally equivalent solutions, and introduces a dual learning procedure in which both models jointly learn their corresponding transformations toward a shared linear interpolation path. This bidirectional optimization substantially reduces interpolation barriers and enables more reliable merging across large-scale architectures. Empirically, we show that our approach achieves near-zero loss barriers on WikiText for language models with medium-sized parameters, representing, to our knowledge, the first demonstration of near-barrier-free linear connectivity at this scale. In the vision domain, ViT-L maintains above 69\% ImageNet top-1 accuracy throughout the interpolation path, while modern billion-parameter LLMs exhibit only small loss barriers. These results suggest that properly resolving parameter symmetries enables large pretrained Transformers to be connected and merged through simple linear paths with substantially improved interpolation performance. Code: https://github.com/VILA-Lab/Dual-Learned-Matching .
Authors: Ankur Garg, Ulrich A\"ivodji, Samira Ebrahimi Kahou, Vincent Michalski
Abstract: Machine learning models exploit spurious correlations, achieving high average accuracy but failing disproportionately on underrepresented subgroups. Existing methods address this by adjusting network parameters, guided either by subgroup annotations or inferred pseudo-group labels. Yet at inference, these methods produce only a class prediction, with no insight into a sample's latent subgroup. We propose neural classification trees (NCT), a framework that achieves robustness by encoding subgroup structure in its tree-shaped architecture. By routing each sample to an "easy" or "hard" node of this tree -- based on prediction correctness -- and reusing these routes as pseudo-labels for the next iteration, NCT disentangles conflicting subgroups, without requiring subgroup supervision. We evaluate NCT on five benchmarks spanning binary and multi-class spurious correlations. Our experiments show that the learned tree topology provides strong interpretability by consistently isolating minority subgroups, which provides a transparent mapping between the model architecture and the data's latent group structure, while yielding competitive robustness with state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Andrei Liviu Nicolicioiu, Sarvjeet Singh Ghotra, Morgane M. Moss, Aaron Courville
Abstract: The availability of large amounts of clean data is paramount to training neural networks. However, at large scales, manual oversight is impractical, resulting in sizeable datasets that can be very noisy. Attempts to mitigate this obstacle to producing performant vision-language models have so far involved heuristics, curated reference datasets, and using pre-trained models. Here we propose a novel, bootstrapped method in which a CLIP model is trained on an evolving, self-selected dataset. This evolving dataset constitutes a balance of filtered, highly probable clean samples as well as diverse samples from the entire distribution. Our proposed Self-Filtering method iterates between training the model and selecting a subsequently improved data mixture. Training on vision-language datasets filtered by the proposed approach improves downstream performance without the need for additional data or pre-trained models.
Authors: Ulas Berk Karli, Tesca Fitzgerald
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are commonly fine-tuned through passive imitation learning, where additional demonstrations are collected for tasks where the policy performs poorly. This approach incurs several downsides: it requires the robot to fail before data collection is triggered, provides little guidance about which states require supervision, and wastes demonstrator effort on redundant parts of the task where the policy already performs well. In this paper, we propose an active, continual learning paradigm for VLAs. We demonstrate that active, uncertainty-guided data collection leads to more efficient fine-tuning than when using passively-collected demonstrations. However, we also find that fine-tuning only on actively-collected recovery data leads to catastrophic forgetting. We evaluate techniques for continual learning, including replay-based data mixing and elastic weight consolidation, and identify tradeoffs between plasticity to uncertainty-guided recovery data and retention of previously learned behaviors. Overall, our work contributes an empirical study of active continual learning for autoregressive VLAs, establishing that uncertainty-guided recovery demonstrations can improve adaptation efficiency while also revealing open challenges when targeted new data is incorporated into large robot policies.
Authors: Yuanming Yang, Guoqing Ma, Bo Wang, Yuan Zhang, Wei Tang, Chenyi Li, Haoyang Huang, Nan Duan
Abstract: Can representations learned for image generation also support the evaluation of generated images? We study text-to-image reward prediction as a downstream task of generative representation learning. To this end, we introduce DiT-Reward, which converts a pretrained text-to-image Diffusion Transformer into a reward model by processing near-clean image latents and aggregating text-conditioned image representations across transformer layers. Under the same training data mixture as HPSv3, DiT-Reward outperforms HPSv3 on all four evaluated preference benchmarks, reaching 85.6% on HPDv2 and 77.6% on HPDv3. When the generative backbone is frozen, a lightweight learned head can still extract meaningful preference predictions from its representations. Probing across depth further reveals that downstream reward performance is strongest in the middle-to-late layers and benefits from combining representations across different stages. We also observe consistent positive scaling with generative backbone capacity. Finally, when used to optimize Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large with Flow-GRPO, DiT-Reward outperforms HPSv3 along the matched training trajectory, with particularly clear gains in realism. Direct latent scoring also achieves a 1.65x inference speedup over HPSv3 with comparable peak memory. These results show that pretrained generative DiTs provide transferable representations for reward modeling and policy optimization.
Authors: Raymond Tsao, Andrew Wagenmaker, Sergey Levine
Abstract: In many modern applications of reinforcement learning (RL), the natural reward for a task of interest is inherently sparse: a reward of 0 is given everywhere except when the task is completed, when a reward of +1 is given. Training a policy to maximize such a sparse reward requires solving a challenging credit assignment problem, leading to slow or ineffective RL improvement. We propose a simple approach to transform a sparse outcome reward into a dense process reward. Our approach relies on training a discriminator to distinguish between previous successful and unsuccessful episodes, and using this discriminator to incentivize the RL-learned policy to match the state-action visitations of successful episodes, while avoiding those of unsuccessful episodes. By incentivizing the policy to match the visitations over all states, not just those that correspond to task success, this reward provides dense feedback on whether progress is being made towards task completion, and, we show, provably achieves this without changing the optimal policy. Focusing on finetuning of robotic control policies, we demonstrate that our approach leads to significantly faster RL finetuning performance on both simulated and real-world manipulation tasks, as compared to simply maximizing the sparse outcome reward.
Authors: Reza Bayat, Ali Behrouz, Aaron Courville
Abstract: Modern language models, including transformer, recurrent, and memory-based variants, share a common chassis: a stack of identical layers in which parameters are allocated uniformly across depth. This is a default inherited from the original transformer and largely unchanged since, yet a growing body of evidence suggests that layers contribute non-uniformly to the final output, with later layers refining the residual stream rather than transforming it. We ask whether parameter capacity should reflect this asymmetry. Our controlled experiment shows that, under a fixed budget, allocating more capacity to earlier layers and less to later layers improves perplexity over a uniform-width baseline, while the reverse allocation hurts. Building on this result, we introduce Tapered Language Models (TLMs), an architectural principle in which a parameter-bearing component is monotonically tapered across depth under a fixed total budget. MLPs are the natural site for this instantiation: they dominate parameter count across all modern LM families and expose width as a single, clean axis of variation. Across three model scales and four architectures (Transformer, Gated Attention, Hope-attention, and Titans), tapering MLP width via a smooth cosine schedule consistently improves perplexity and downstream benchmark performance over uniform baselines, at no additional parameter or compute cost. These findings establish depth-aware capacity allocation as a simple, architecture-agnostic axis of language model design, a free lever hidden in plain sight.
Authors: Dingzhi Yu, Hongyi Tao, Yuanyu Wan, Luo Luo, Lijun Zhang
Abstract: AdamW is the de facto optimizer for training large language models (LLMs), yet the theory behind it still lives mostly in finite-variance regimes. This is increasingly unsatisfying, as empirical evidence indicates that stochastic gradient noise in LLM pretraining is typically heavy-tailed. Recent work shows that sign-based optimizers such as Lion and Muon achieve sharp heavy-tailed rates, and that AdaGrad can also converge under heavy-tailed noise. However, no rigorous convergence theory for AdamW has yet been established in this regime. Can AdamW converge under the same heavy-tailed assumptions, or does its second-moment accumulator create a genuine obstruction? We formulate this as an open problem, prove a positive weighted-metric benchmark, and give a corridor lower-bound mechanism showing how denominator memory can hide large gradients.
Authors: Cong Han, Xiaohan Lan, Haibo Qiu, Yujie Zhong
Abstract: Following the paradigm shift initiated by OpenAI o3, interleaved reasoning with code to enhance multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has become a pivotal research frontier. The existing literature focuses primarily on tool-use within vision-perception tasks. However, such approaches typically rely on predefined heuristics for visual manipulation and are inherently incapable of addressing numerical computation problems due to their exclusive focus on visual operations. This paper empowers MLLMs with adaptive interleaved reasoning capabilities through extended reinforcement learning training on code-augmented complex numerical computation tasks. To this end, we propose a comprehensive three-component solution consisting of: a two-stage cold-start data construction pipeline, data filtering strategies for RL dataset curation, and an adaptive tool-invocation strategy leveraging a group-constrained reward function for interleaved reasoning trajectories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that after Reinforcement Learning training with the group-constrained reward function, performance improves by an average of 6.1 percentage points (pp) on evaluation benchmarks. Specifically, the accuracy for interleaved reasoning samples increases by 9.9 pp, and the overall success rate of tool-use exceeds 95%. Our data and code are available at: https://github.com/CongHan0808/AIR.git.
Authors: Sara Dorfman, Maya Vishnevsky, Omer Dahary, Or Patashnik, Daniel Cohen-Or
Abstract: Modern text-to-image models excel in visual fidelity and prompt adherence. However, this strict adherence comes at the cost of diversity: generated samples tend to collapse into a single visual interpretation. Existing methods to improve diversity produce outputs driven by incidental variations rather than meaningful design choices. This motivates a new variant of the diversity task where structure is enforced on the generated samples. We introduce a method for controlled diversity that enables Semantic Browsing, where users can navigate structured image galleries and experience creative exploration through a systematic traversal of meaningful, interpretable axes of variation. Achieving this level of semantic control requires a deep understanding of the scene. We exploit the fact that recent text-to-image models are trained on elaborated captions, effectively decoupling semantic decision-making from pixel generation. This enables a paradigm shift: instead of relying on stochastic variation within the text-to-image model, we induce diversity directly at the text level. By leveraging rich textual representations, we allow a Vision Language Model (VLM) to operate on the full scene context. To overcome the generic outputs typical of standard VLMs, we employ an agentic workflow that explicitly enforces structured variation attuned to the original prompt. We demonstrate that our method produces diverse and navigable design spaces where every variation corresponds to a specific, user-understandable semantic decision.
Authors: Sikai Li, Shuning Li, Zhenyu Wei, Yunchao Yao, Chenran Li, Mingyu Ding
Abstract: Humanoid loco-manipulation is often simplified into a stop-and-go process: walking to an object, stopping to manipulate it, and then resuming locomotion. It also commonly relies on low degree-of-freedom (DoF) end effectors that behave like an open-close grasp primitive. We introduce CoorDex, a learning pipeline that converts high-dimensional body and dexterous hand control into coordinated latent residual control, enabling high-DoF dexterous loco-manipulation on the move. Starting from simulated whole-body and hand demonstrations, CoorDex trains privileged motion tracking teachers for the humanoid body and dexterous hand, distills them into proprioception-conditioned latent priors, and uses the frozen priors as the action space for downstream residual reinforcement learning. A coordinated latent residual policy composes these priors through shared task context and separate body-hand residual heads, preserving natural whole-body motion while improving finger-level contact reliability. CoorDex enables a Unitree G1 humanoid with a 20-DoF WUJI hand to execute dexterous manipulation while in motion, including non-stop bottle grasping and carrying, fridge door opening on the move, and cube pick-and-turn. Ablations on the walk-grasp-carry task show that joint-space PPO, joint-space hand control, and monolithic latent prediction all fail under the same reward budget, while the latent-prior interface and coordinated residual structure make high-dimensional contact-rich loco-manipulation trainable. Project Page: https://skevinci.github.io/coordex/
Authors: Louis Vervoort, Vitaliy Mizyakov, Anastasia Ugleva
Abstract: We argue that a key reasoning skill that any advanced AI, say GPT-4, should master in order to qualify as 'thinking machine', or AGI, is hypothetic-deductive reasoning. Problem-solving or question-answering can quite generally be construed as involving two steps: hypothesizing that a certain set of hypotheses T applies to the problem or question at hand, and deducing the solution or answer from T - hence the term hypothetic-deductive reasoning. An elementary proxy of hypothetic-deductive reasoning is causal reasoning. We propose simple tests for both types of reasoning, and apply them to ChatGPT. Our study shows that, at present, the chatbot has a limited capacity for either type of reasoning, as soon as the problems considered are somewhat complex. However, we submit that if an AI would be capable of this type of reasoning in a sufficiently wide range of contexts, it would be an AGI.
Authors: J\'er\^ome Botoko Ekila, Lara Verheyen, Jens Nevens, Katrien Beuls, Paul Van Eecke
Abstract: This paper introduces a general methodology through which a population of autonomous agents can converge on a linguistic convention that enables them to refer to arbitrary entities in their environment. The linguistic convention emerges in a decentralised manner through local communicative interactions between pairs of agents drawn from the population. The emergent convention consists of associations between symbolic labels (word forms) and subsymbolic concept representations (word meanings) that are grounded in a continuous feature space. We confirm the generality and scalability of the method through its evaluation on a wide and diverse selection of 37 publicly available datasets. Through a range of experiments, we demonstrate the robustness of the method against perceptual variation, including in heteromorphic populations, as well as the ability of the emergent conventions to self-adapt to changes in the environment.
Authors: Sergei Garmaev, Olga Fink
Abstract: Discovering governing equations from data remains challenging when the underlying dynamics involve nonlocal differential operators, field interactions governed by auxiliary equations, or temporal memory effects. We propose Neural Operator-based symbolic Model approximaTion and discOvery (NOMTO), a framework that extends Equation Learner-type symbolic architectures by incorporating pretrained neural operators as nodes in the symbolic network. NOMTO represents candidate equations as sparse differentiable computational graphs that combine algebraic operations with fixed neural operator surrogates pretrained to approximate nonlinear operators. We evaluate the method on model-discovery problems involving nonlocal spatial operators, couplings mediated by auxiliary field equations, and temporal integral terms representing memory effects. The results show that NOMTO can recover compact governing equations containing nonlocal operator terms, thereby extending symbolic model discovery beyond libraries restricted to local derivatives and point-wise algebraic combinations.
Authors: Jiawei Liu, Qisi Chen, Jianshu Zhang, Quan Liu, Defu Lian
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at complex reasoning through search algorithms, yet current strategies often suffer from massive token consumption due to redundant exploration of semantically equivalent steps. Existing semantic similarity methods struggle to accurately identify such equivalence in domain-specific contexts like mathematical reasoning. To address this, we propose EquivPruner, a simple yet effective approach that identifies and prunes semantically equivalent actions during LLM reasoning search. We also introduce MathEquiv, the first dataset we created for mathematical statement equivalence, which enables the training of a lightweight equivalence detector. Extensive experiments across various models and tasks demonstrate that EquivPruner significantly reduces token consumption, improving searching efficiency and often bolstering reasoning accuracy. For instance, when applied to Qwen2.5-Math-7B-Instruct on GSM8K, EquivPruner reduced token consumption by 48.1\% while also improving accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/Lolo1222/EquivPruner.
Authors: Akshat Naik, Emma Goun\'e, Patrick Quinn, Guillermo Bosch, Francisco Javier Campos Zabala, Jason Ross Brown, Edward James Young
Abstract: As Large Language Model (LLM) agents become more widespread, associated misalignment risks increase. While prior research has studied agents' ability to produce harmful outputs or follow malicious instructions, it remains unclear how likely agents are to spontaneously pursue unintended goals in realistic deployments. In this work, we approach misalignment as a conflict between the internal goals pursued by the model and the goals intended by its deployer. We introduce a misalignment propensity benchmark, \textsc{AgentMisalignment}, a benchmark suite designed to evaluate the propensity of LLM agents to misalign in realistic scenarios. Evaluations cover behaviours such as avoiding oversight, resisting shutdown, sandbagging, and power-seeking. Testing frontier models, we find that more capable agents tend to exhibit higher misalignment on average. We also systematically vary agent personalities through different system prompts and observe that persona characteristics can strongly and unpredictably influence misalignment, sometimes more than the choice of model itself. Our results reveal the limitations of current alignment methods for autonomous LLM agents and underscore the need to rethink misalignment in realistic deployment settings.
Authors: HaoYang Shang, Xuan Liu, Zi Liang, Jie Zhang, Haibo Hu, Song Guo
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit a notable performance ceiling on complex, multi-faceted tasks. As practitioners increasingly rely on heavy context engineering -- curating intricate instructions, tool schemas, and multi-turn histories -- the processing demands often exceed the LLM's effective attention budget, leading to context rot. Drawing an analogy to Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) in cognitive science, we propose that this bottleneck is functionally analogous to the bounded working memory of the human mind. Rather than relying on heuristic prompt engineering, we use CLT as a principled design lens for LLM system design. To operationalize this insight, we introduce CoThinker, an instantiation of a CLT-driven multi-agent framework. CoThinker operationalizes CLT principles by distributing intrinsic cognitive load through agent specialization and managing transactional load via structured communication and a collective working memory. We empirically evaluate CoThinker on complex problem-solving tasks and fabricated high cognitive load scenarios. Our results are consistent with a CLT-informed account of multi-agent coordination: gains concentrate on reasoning-heavy tasks where cognitive load is high, while coordination overhead dominates on low-intrinsic-load tasks such as instruction-following -- a boundary predicted by the cognitive-load-profile view. Our analysis reveals characteristic interaction patterns that cast insights from collective cognition and load management into a principled approach to agent system design.
Authors: Xibai Wang
Abstract: Real-time market prediction services need correct predictions before a decision deadline; a correct prediction delivered late is not usable. TIP-Search studies time-predictable inference scheduling over fixed market predictors under uncertain load. It filters conformal latency-quantile feasible models, dispatches over finite workers, and uses shielded constrained online experts to trade accuracy, queue pressure, and deadline risk. On the optimized deployable pool, TIP-Search reaches 0.994 raw accuracy and 0.991 timely accuracy. On official TLOB FI-2010 h=10, TIP-Search++ raises timely accuracy from 0.156 to 0.239 and deadline satisfaction from 0.391 to 0.962. In matched h10 profiled systems replay, OCO-ACPO reaches 0.303 timely accuracy and 0.951 deadline satisfaction, with paired gains over RAMSIS/SneakPeek/utility-style comparators of $+0.00285$ timely accuracy ($p=0.0118$) and $+0.0146$ deadline satisfaction ($p=1.5{\times}10^{-5}$). SA-OCO-ACPO improves timely/deadline service by 0.188--0.417 over CPO under nonstationary stress. The claim is a systems scheduling result, not a broad LOB classifier leaderboard.
Authors: Mani Hamidi, Terrence W. Deacon
Abstract: Artificial learning systems are graduating from passive learners to increasingly autonomous agents, lending pragmatic urgency to the question of what constitutes agency. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers arguably the most explicit formulation of agent-environment interaction, built on three core tenets: the environment as a Markov decision process, learning as policy optimization, and the agent as a maximizer of scalar reward. Recent work has called to revise these tenets: reconceptualizing learning as adaptation rather than optimization, broadening goals beyond scalar reward, and noting the absence of a formal theory of the agent in a formalism that so heavily emphasizes the environment. We argue that the artificial life community is uniquely positioned to illuminate this critique and concretize an alternative. We draw on open-ended novelty search as a complementary model of adaptation and goal-directed behavior beyond reward optimization, and ground such evolutionary dynamics in thermodynamic theories of origin-of-life and agency, toward a more biologically faithful and formally grounded account of what it is to be an adaptive agent.
Authors: Kristina Levina, Nikolaos Pappas, Athanasios Karapantelakis, Aneta Vulgarakis Feljan, Jendrik Seipp
Abstract: Reward machines (RMs) inform reinforcement learning agents about the reward structure of the environment, enabling support for non-Markovian tasks and improving sample efficiency. However, learning with RMs is ill-suited for long-horizon problems where subtasks can be completed in any order. In such cases, the amount of information to learn increases exponentially with the number of unordered subtasks. We address this issue by introducing three generalisations of RMs: (1) Numeric RMs allow users to express complex tasks in a compact form. (2) In agenda RMs, states are associated with an agenda that tracks the remaining subtasks to complete. (3) Coupled RMs have coupled states associated with each subtask in the agenda. In addition, we introduce QCoRM, a new task-decomposition Q-learning-based algorithm that leverages coupled RMs and preserves global optimality guarantees in tabular settings. Our experiments across four domains -- featuring both discrete and continuous action and state spaces -- demonstrate that QCoRM scales better than baseline algorithms for long-horizon problems with unordered subtasks.
Authors: Elias Hossain, Md Mehedi Hasan Nipu, Maleeha Sheikh, Tasfia Nuzhat, Rajib Rana, Subash Neupane, Bj\"orn W. Schuller, Niloofar Yousefi
Abstract: Clinical language models often assign high confidence to incorrect predictions, particularly in high-severity and out-of-distribution cases. We present MedBayes-Lite, a retraining-free uncertainty governance layer for transformer-based clinical predictors. It combines Monte Carlo dropout, predictive calibration, and confidence-guided abstention to defer low-confidence predictions for human review, adding no trainable parameters. Evaluated on MedMCQA and MedQA-USMLE, MedBayes-Lite reduces expected calibration error by 0.23 to 0.33 and drives harmful overconfident errors (confident, incorrect, high-severity predictions) toward zero. Under domain shift from MedMCQA to MedQA-USMLE, it reduces confident high-severity errors from about 21% to near zero while roughly halving calibration drift. We also introduce the Clinical Uncertainty Score (CUS), which strongly correlates with harmful overconfidence (r approximately 0.88). Although the framework does not improve risk-coverage ranking, and temperature scaling or deep ensembles may provide advantages in calibration cost or risk ranking, MedBayes-Lite offers a practical calibration-and-abstention layer that reduces confident high-severity errors in clinical question-answering benchmarks.
Authors: Ioannis Tzachristas, Aifen Sui
Abstract: Mobile agents must map natural-language requests to executable intents under tight latency and privacy constraints. Scaling the language model is often an inefficient way to improve this component. We present NOEM$^{3}$A, a lightweight neuro-symbolic layer that augments compact language models with an intent ontology. For each query, NOEM$^{3}$A retrieves a small ontology neighborhood, injects candidate action labels into the prompt and applies a token-level decoding prior toward valid labels. This injects symbolic intent structure into both input and output representations while keeping inference suitable for local interaction. We also use Semantic Intent Similarity (SIS), a hierarchy-aware diagnostic based on ontology depth, to capture semantic proximity when predicted intents differ lexically. Experiments on MultiWOZ 2.3 dialogues show that ontology augmentation consistently improves TinyLlama and Llama-3.2-3B on exact match and Slot-F1. Our results suggest that symbolic alignment is an effective strategy for accurate, responsive and privacy-preserving on-device NLU.
Authors: Yanxing Huang, Zihan Tang, Zejin Lin, Peng Li, Yang Liu
Abstract: Automatic verification is a critical component in building math-solving agents and reinforcement learning, yet it often falls short in generalizability, performance, and cost-efficiency. Identifying that the primary bottleneck of verification lies in error detection capability, we propose pessimistic verification, a paradigm of agentic workflows that rejects a solution if any of multiple parallel verifiers identifies a flaw. We further introduce progressive pessimistic verification, which employs fine-grained proof decomposition to significantly enhance verification accuracy and efficiency. Our approach surpasses the performance and token efficiency of extended long chain-of-thought (long CoT) and mainstream verification workflows, crucially, our analysis reveals that existing benchmarks underestimate its effectiveness on stronger models due to inherent annotation errors. To further validate the effectiveness of our method, we applied a verification-based solving workflow on the IMO 2025 and MathArena Apex 2025 datasets, where the workflow with progressive pessimistic verification exhibits remarkable improvements in both efficiency and accuracy on highly challenging contest-level math problems with state-of-the-art models. Code is available at https://github.com/THUNLP-MT/pverify.
Authors: Cen Lu, Yung-Chen Tang, Andrea Cavallaro
Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown impressive multimodal understanding capabilities, yet the structures that sustain their functionality remain poorly understood from a mechanistic interpretability standpoint. We propose Consistently Activated Neurons (CAN), a progressive neuron ablation method to identify critical neurons whose removal triggers catastrophic collapse, and use it to investigate structural vulnerabilities in representative 7B LVLMs. Experiments reveal that catastrophic collapse can be triggered by ablating as few as four neurons in \texttt{LLaVA-1.5-7b-hf} and a few thousand in \texttt{InstructBLIP-vicuna-7b}, both representing a small fraction of model parameters. Notably, critical neurons are predominantly localized in the language model, particularly in its down-projection layer, rather than in the vision components. We also observe a consistent two-stage collapse pattern: initial expressive degradation followed by sudden, complete collapse. These findings reveal that LVLM functionality depends on a sparse subset of neurons concentrated in the language backbone, offering mechanistic insights into how their functionality is structured and where these models are most vulnerable.
Authors: Manh Hung Nguyen, Sebastian Tschiatschek, Adish Singla
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown the potential for generating educational content at scale, assisting educators in creating practice tasks or synthesizing data for training educational models. However, LLMs suffer from the ``Artificial Hivemind'' effect, where they produce homogeneous content. This homogeneity limits the diversity of LLM-generated tasks, a crucial factor in these educational settings. In this paper, we investigate how to increase the diversity of generated tasks while keeping their utility high. Inspired by the divergent--convergent thinking stages in creativity literature, we propose a prompting framework with two reasoning stages: (1) exploring the creative space, and (2) satisfying the input requirements. We evaluate CreativeDC, a method instantiated from this framework in the domain of Python programming, using both automated metrics and expert evaluation. Results show that CreativeDC produces significantly more distinct high-utility tasks (about $1.6\times$) than baselines. Our work offers an effective approach for generating and evaluating more diverse tasks at scale.
Authors: Ruizhe Zhang, Xinke Jiang, Zhibang Yang, Zhixin Zhang, Jiaran Gao, Yuzhen Xiao, Tao Feng, Yue Fang, Yuxuan Liu, Ruiqing Li, Hongbin Lai, Huheng Huang, Xu Chu, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang
Abstract: Multi-agent systems based on large language models, particularly centralized architectures, have recently shown strong potential for complex and knowledge-intensive tasks. However, central agents often suffer from unstable long-horizon collaboration due to the lack of memory management, leading to context bloat, error accumulation, and poor cross-task generalization. To address both task-level memory inefficiency and the inability to reuse coordination experience, we propose StackPlanner, a hierarchical multi-agent framework with explicit memory control. StackPlanner addresses these challenges by decoupling high-level coordination from subtask execution with active task-level memory control, and by learning to retrieve and exploit reusable coordination experience via structured experience memory and reinforcement learning. Experiments on multiple deep-search and agent system benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in enabling reliable long-horizon multi-agent collaboration.
Authors: Chengyao Yu, Hao Zeng, Youxin Zhu, Jianguo Huang, Huajun Zeng, Bingyi Jing
Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on complex tasks but suffer from high computational costs and latency. While selective thinking strategies improve efficiency by routing easy queries to non-thinking models, existing approaches often incur uncontrollable errors, especially in online settings where the performance loss of a non-thinking model is only partially observed and data are non-stationary. To address this, we propose Betting Probably Approximately Correct (B-PAC) reasoning, a principled method that enables anytime safe and efficient online reasoning under partial feedback. Specifically, we utilize inverse propensity scoring estimators to construct test supermartingales for candidate thresholds, and then dynamically adjust the routing threshold based on the accumulated statistical evidence of safety. Theoretically, we establish the anytime-valid performance loss control and the efficiency of B-PAC reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that B-PAC reasoning significantly reduces computational overhead, decreasing thinking model usage by up to 81.01\%, while controlling the performance loss below the user-specified level.
Authors: Yueqi Zhang, Jin Hu, Shaoxiong Feng, Peiwen Yuan, Xinglin Wang, Yiwei Li, Jiayi Shi, Chuyi Tan, Ji Zhang, Boyuan Pan, Yao Hu, Kan Li
Abstract: The prohibitive cost of evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) necessitates efficient alternatives to full-scale benchmarking. Prevalent approaches address this by identifying a small coreset of items to approximate full-benchmark performance. However, existing methods must estimate a reliable item profile from response patterns across many source models, which becomes statistically unstable when the source pool is small. This dependency is particularly limiting for newly released benchmarks with minimal historical evaluation data. We argue that discrete correctness labels are a lossy view of the model's decision process and fail to capture information encoded in hidden states. To address this, we introduce RepCore, which aligns heterogeneous hidden states into a unified latent space to construct representative coresets. Using these subsets for performance extrapolation, RepCore achieves precise estimation accuracy with as few as ten source models. Experiments on five benchmarks and over 200 models show consistent gains over output-based baselines in ranking correlation and estimation accuracy. Spectral analysis further indicates that the aligned representations contain separable components reflecting broad response tendencies and task-specific reasoning patterns.
Authors: Zibo Xiao, Jun Sun, Junjie Chen
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in practice across a wide range of autonomous applications. Yet current safety mechanisms for LLM agents focus almost exclusively on preventing failures in advance, providing limited capabilities for responding to, containing, or recovering from incidents after they inevitably arise. In this work, we introduce AIR, the first incident response framework for LLM agent systems. AIR defines a domain-specific language for managing the incident response lifecycle autonomously in LLM agent systems, and integrates it into the agent's execution loop to (1) detect incidents via semantic checks grounded in the current environment state and recent context, (2) guide the agent to execute containment and recovery actions via its tools, and (3) synthesize guardrail rules during eradication to block similar incidents in future executions. We evaluate AIR on three representative agent types. Results show that AIR achieves detection, remediation, and eradication success rates all exceeding 90%. Extensive experiments further confirm the necessity of AIR's key design components, show the timeliness and moderate overhead of AIR, and demonstrate that LLM-generated rules can approach the effectiveness of developer-authored rules across domains. These results show that incident response is both feasible and essential as a first-class mechanism for improving agent safety.
Authors: Yangjie Xu, Lujun Li, Lama Sleem, Niccolo Gentile, Yewei Song, Yiqun Wang, Siming Ji, Wenbo Wu, Radu State
Abstract: Agent skills are widely supported by major agentic frameworks and perform well with proprietary models, yet their effectiveness for small and medium-sized open source language models (270 M-80B) remains underexplored. We systematically study the Skill paradigm in resource-constrained industrial settings, where reliance on proprietary APIs is impractical due to data security and budget constraints. Across two open-source tasks and a real-world insurance claims classification task, we find that very small models struggle with reliable skill selection, while models around 30B-80B benefit substantially. Thinking variants do not show major levels of improvement from skills, also considering GPU usage increases due to overthinking. These findings reveal a trade-off between GPU cost and agent performance, and provide actionable insights for effective Skill configuration and SLM deployment in real world settings.
Authors: Antoine Peyronnet, Fabian Gloeckle, Amaury Hayat
Abstract: We present a new approach for benchmarking Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities on research-level mathematics. Existing benchmarks largely rely on static, hand-curated sets of contest or textbook-style problems as proxies for mathematical research. Instead, we establish an updatable benchmark evaluating models directly on the latest research results in mathematics. This consists of an automatic pipeline that extracts lemmas from arXiv and rewrites them into self-contained statements by making all assumptions and required definitions explicit. It results in a benchmark that can be updated regularly with new problems taken directly from human mathematical research, while previous instances can be used for training without compromising future evaluations. We benchmark current state-of-the-art LLMs, which obtain around 10-15$\%$ accuracy in theorem proving (pass@1) depending on the model, showing that there is currently a large margin of progression for LLMs to reach human-level proving capabilities in a research context.
Authors: Tongzhou Wu, Yuhao Wang, Xinyu Ma, Xiuqiang He, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Xiangyu Zhao
Abstract: Deep-research agents are capable of executing multi-step web exploration, targeted retrieval, and sophisticated question answering. Despite their powerful capabilities, deep-research agents face two critical bottlenecks: (1) the lack of large-scale, challenging datasets with real-world difficulty, and (2) the absence of accessible, open-source frameworks for data synthesis and agent training. To bridge these gaps, we first construct DeepResearch-9K, a large-scale challenging dataset specifically designed for deep-research scenarios built from open-source multi-hop question-answering (QA) datasets via a low-cost autonomous pipeline. Notably, it consists of (1) 9000 questions spanning three difficulty levels from L1 to L3 (2) high-quality search trajectories with reasoning chains from Tongyi-DeepResearch-30B-A3B, a state-of-the-art deep-research agent, and (3) verifiable answers. Furthermore, we develop an open-source training framework DeepResearch-R1 that supports (1) multi-turn web interactions, (2) different reinforcement learning (RL) approaches, and (3) different reward models such as rule-based outcome reward and LLM-as-judge feedback. Finally, empirical results demonstrate that agents trained on DeepResearch-9K under our DeepResearch-R1 achieve state-of-the-art results on challenging deep-research benchmarks. We release the DeepResearch-9K dataset on https://huggingface.co/datasets/artillerywu/DeepResearch-9K and the code of DeepResearch-R1 on https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/DeepResearch-R1.
URLs: https://huggingface.co/datasets/artillerywu/DeepResearch-9K, https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/DeepResearch-R1.
Authors: Georgios Pantazopoulos, Malvina Nikandrou, Ioannis Konstas, Alessandro Suglia
Abstract: Transformers excel at in-context retrieval but suffer from quadratic complexity with sequence length, while State Space Models (SSMs) offer efficient linear-time processing but have limited retrieval capabilities. We investigate whether hybrid architectures combining Transformers and SSMs can achieve the best of both worlds on two synthetic in-context retrieval tasks. The first task, n-gram retrieval, requires the model to reproduce an n-gram that succeeds the query within the input sequence. The second task, position retrieval, presents the model with a query token and requires it to perform a two-hop lookup: first locating the corresponding element in the sequence, and then outputting its positional index. Under controlled conditions, we assess data efficiency, length generalization, robustness to out of domain training examples, and learned representations across Transformers, SSMs, and hybrid architectures. We find that hybrid models outperform SSMs and match or exceed Transformers in terms of data efficiency and extrapolation for tasks that require precise information retrieval from the input context. However, Transformers maintain superiority in position retrieval tasks. Through representation analysis, we discover that SSM-based models develop locality-aware embeddings where tokens representing adjacent positions become neighbors in embedding space, forming interpretable structures. This property is absent in Transformers as causal attention is sufficient for acquiring positional associations, and the introduction of positional encoding amplifies this behavior, leading to improvement in data efficiency. SSMs on the other hand update their internal representations incrementally and without positional encodings, are required to learn these associations. Our findings reveal fundamental differences in how Transformers and SSMs, and hybrid models learn positional associations.
Authors: Sourav Panda, Tanmay Ambadkar, Shreyash Kale, Abhinav Verma, Jonathan Dodge
Abstract: The research community lacks a middle ground between StarCraft II full game and its mini-games. The full-game's sprawling state-action space renders reward signals sparse and noisy, but in mini-games simple agents saturate performance. This complexity gap hinders steady curriculum design and prevents researchers from experimenting with modern Reinforcement Learning algorithms in RTS environments under realistic compute budgets. To fill this gap, we present the Two-Bridge Map Suite, the first entry in an open-source benchmark series we purposely engineered as an intermediate benchmark to sit between these extremes. By disabling economy mechanics such as resource collection, base building, and fog-of-war, the environment isolates two core tactical skills: long-range navigation and micro-combat. Preliminary experiments show that agents learn coherent maneuvering and engagement behaviors without imposing full-game computational costs. Two-Bridge is released as a lightweight, Gym-compatible wrapper on top of PySC2, with maps, wrappers, and reference scripts fully open-sourced to encourage broad adoption as a standard benchmark.
Authors: Linghua Zhang, Jun Wang, Jingtong Wu, Zhisong Zhang
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents have made rapid progress on short-horizon, well-scoped tasks, yet their ability to sustain coherent decisions in dynamic long-horizon environments remains uncertain. We introduce RetailBench, a data-grounded simulation benchmark for evaluating tool-using LLM agents in single-store supermarket operation. RetailBench models retail management as a partially observable decision process and is designed to support thousand-day-scale simulations. In this environment, agents must manage pricing, replenishment, supplier selection, shelf assortment, inventory aging, customer feedback, external events, and cash-flow constraints. We evaluate seven contemporary LLMs under representative agent frameworks over a 180-day evaluation horizon and compare them with a privileged oracle policy. Results show substantial variation across models: only a small subset survives the full evaluation horizon, and even the strongest LLM runs remain substantially behind the oracle policy in final net worth and sales outcomes. Behavioral analysis attributes these gaps to incomplete evidence acquisition, surface-level decision making, and the lack of a consistent long-horizon policy. RetailBench provides a controlled testbed for studying reliable autonomy in economically grounded long-horizon decision-making.
Authors: Yubin Kim, Salman Rahman, Samuel Schmidgall, Chunjong Park, A. Ali Heydari, Ahmed A. Metwally, Hong Yu, Xin Liu, Xuhai Xu, Yuzhe Yang, Hyeonhoon Lee, Hyewon Jeong, Kyungho Lim, MingYu Lu, Dongjae Lee, Theodora Pappa, Hanseul Cho, Maxwell A. Xu, Zhihan Zhang, Cynthia Breazeal, Tim Althoff, Petar Sirkovic, Ivor Rendulic, Annalisa Pawlosky, Nicolas Stroppa, Juraj Gottweis, Elahe Vedadi, Alan Karthikesalingam, Pushmeet Kohli, Mark Malhotra, Shwetak Patel, Samir Tulebaev, Hae Won Park, Vivek Natarajan, Hamid Palangi, Daniel McDuff
Abstract: Wearable devices generate continuous physiological and behavioral data, but converting these signals into clinically reviewable biomarker hypotheses remains labor-intensive. We introduce CoDaS, an AI co-data-scientist that integrates multi-agent hypothesis generation, deterministic statistical analysis, adversarial validation and literature-grounded interpretation under human oversight. Across three wearable cohorts comprising 9,279 participant-observations, CoDaS prioritized candidate associations for mental-health and metabolic endpoints after internal checks for replication, stability, robustness and leakage. The system identified related circadian-instability signals associated with depression, including sleep-duration variability in DWB ($\rho$ = 0.252, $p$ < 0.001) and sleep-onset variability in GLOBEM ($\rho$ = 0.126, $p$ < 0.001), and derived a wearable cardiovascular-fitness index associated with insulin resistance (steps/resting heart rate; $\rho$ = -0.374, $p$ < 0.001). Adding these features to demographic models produced modest gains ($\Delta R^2$ = 0.040 for depression, 0.021 for insulin resistance). In a 12-clinician review totaling approximately 25 active hours, clinician validity judgments aligned with CoDaS confidence tiers ($\rho$ = 0.67, $p$ = 0.005), whereas added clinical value and confidence to act were rated lower. CoDaS supports traceable, hypothesis-generating prioritization of wearable candidate biomarkers.
Authors: Wentao Zhang, Zhe Zhao, Haibin Wen, Yingcheng Wu, Cankun Guo, Ming Yin, Bo An
Abstract: Recent advances in LLM based agent systems have shown promise in tackling complex, long horizon tasks. However, existing agent protocols (e.g., A2A and MCP) under specify cross entity lifecycle and context management, version tracking, and evolution safe update interfaces, which encourages monolithic compositions and brittle glue code. We introduce Autogenesis Protocol (AGP), a self evolution protocol that decouples what evolves from how evolution occurs. Its Resource Substrate Protocol Layer (RSPL) models prompts, agents, tools, environments, and memory as protocol registered resources with explicit state, lifecycle, and versioned interfaces. Its Self Evolution Protocol Layer (SEPL) specifies a closed loop operator interface for proposing, assessing, and committing improvements with auditable lineage and rollback. Building on AGP, we present Autogenesis System (AGS), a self-evolving multi-agent system that dynamically instantiates, retrieves, and refines protocol-registered resources during execution. We evaluate AGS on multiple challenging benchmarks that require long horizon planning and tool use across heterogeneous resources. The results demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines, supporting the effectiveness of agent resource management and closed loop self evolution. The code is available at https://github.com/DVampire/Autogenesis.
Authors: Oisin Suttle, David Lillis
Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) are proposed as legal decision assistants, and even first-instance decision-makers, across a range of judicial and administrative contexts, it becomes essential to explore how they answer legal questions, and in particular the factors that lead them to decide difficult questions in one way or another. A specific feature of legal decisions is the need to respond to arguments advanced by contending parties. A legal decision-maker must be able to engage with, and respond to, including through being potentially persuaded by, arguments advanced by the parties. Conversely, they should not be unduly persuadable, influenced by a particularly compelling advocate to decide cases based on the skills of the advocates, rather than the merits of the case. We explore how frontier open- and closed-weights LLMs respond to legal arguments, reporting original experimental results examining how the quality of the advocate making those arguments affects the likelihood that a model will agree with a particular legal point of view, and exploring the factors driving these results. Our results have implications for the feasibility of adopting LLMs across legal and administrative settings.
Authors: Yinghui Chi, Yuanhong Wang
Abstract: Process reward models (PRMs) require supervision that identifies not only whether a reasoning trajectory is correct, but also where the reasoning process first becomes unsupported by its prefix. We frame this requirement as verifiable counterfactual process supervision with paired correct and erroneous trajectories in which the first invalid transition is known, the error mechanism is controlled, and the downstream continuation remains coherent under the corrupted state. Starting from a verified symbolic reasoning chain, our method injects a template-aware error at a selected intermediate step, recomputes all subsequent steps under the corrupted state, and verifies that the injected step is not derivable from its original prefix. The resulting trajectories provide prefix-valid first-error annotations and are translated into aligned natural-language processes for PRM training and evaluation. Experiments show that the synthesized data improve Best-of-8 reranking on logical reasoning benchmarks and show preliminary transfer to mathematical process evaluation.
Authors: Ruben Laukkonen, Seb Krier, Chlo\'e Bakalar, Shamil Chandaria, Morten Kringelbach, Adam Elwood, Daniel Ford, Fernando Rosas, Maty Bohacek, Matija Franklin, Nenad Toma\v{s}ev, Stephanie Chan, Verena Rieser, Roma Patel, Michael Levin, Arun Rao
Abstract: Existing alignment research is dominated by concerns about safety and preventing harm: safeguards, controllability, and compliance. This paradigm of alignment parallels early psychology's focus on mental illness: necessary but incomplete. What we call Positive Alignment is the development of AI systems that (i) actively support human and ecological flourishing in a pluralistic, polycentric, context-sensitive, and user-authored way while (ii) remaining safe and cooperative. It is a distinct and necessary agenda within AI alignment research. We argue that several existing failures of alignment (e.g., engagement hacking, loss of human autonomy, failures in truth-seeking, low epistemic humility, error correction, lack of diverse viewpoints, and being primarily reactive rather than proactive) may be better addressed through positive alignment, including cultivating virtues and maximizing human flourishing. We highlight a range of challenges, open questions, and technical directions (e.g., data filtering and upsampling, pre- and post-training, evaluations, collaborative value collection) for different phases of the LLM and agents lifecycle. We end with design principles for promoting disagreement and decentralization through contextual grounding, community customization, continual adaptation, and polycentric governance; that is, many legitimate centers of oversight rather than one institutional or moral chokepoint.
Authors: Saharsh Koganti, Priyadarsi Mishra, Pierfrancesco Beneventano, Tomer Galanti
Abstract: Many optimization problems arise repeatedly from a fixed but unknown distribution. Even when the worst-case problem is hard, this distribution may carry reusable structure, such as recurring geometry, decompositions, or resource patterns. We study how to infer such structure from sample instances and compile it into solver code that runs faster on future instances while preserving solution quality. Our central abstraction is a \emph{solver hint}: distribution-specific structure inferred from samples and used to specialize a solver. We prove that the empirically fastest sample-consistent solver generalizes in both correctness and runtime over fixed solver libraries, and that identifiable hints can be recovered from polynomially many samples. We instantiate the framework with LLM code agents on $21$ combinatorial-optimization distributions across $7$ problem classes. The synthesized solvers reach mean normalized quality $0.971$ while running orders of magnitude faster than classical heuristics, Gurobi, and time-limited exact backends, though they do not dominate every baseline on every family. Against LLM synthesis baselines, they are faster than one-shot Codex, one-shot Claude Code, and a best-of-$5$ open-model variant; they improve quality over Claude Code and best-of-$5$, while nearly matching Codex quality and running substantially faster. This isolates the contribution of the iterative synthesis loop without claiming uniform domination over every LLM baseline. On the PACE 2025 Dominating Set private instances, the synthesized solver is valid on all $100$ graphs and runs roughly $75\times$--$125\times$ faster than released competition solvers, within a few percent of their solution size. These results suggest LLM agents can discover distribution-specific computational shortcuts and compile them into efficient solver code.
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: Du Yin, Hao Xue, Arian Prabowo, Shuang Ao, Flora Salim
Abstract: Existing traffic forecasting benchmarks assume a fixed sensor set, but real road-sensor networks grow continuously as the road network changes year by year. We introduce the XXLTraffic dataset family, which spans up to 27 years of California PeMS and Transport for NSW data. The fixed-sensor subsets of XXLTraffic support extremely long forecasting with multi-year gaps and standard hourly / daily long-horizon forecasting. We extend it to EvoXXLTraffic, a sensor-evolving reorganization that exposes per-year active sensors, yearly traffic-flow matrices, and yearly graph snapshots across nine PeMS districts, with growth ratios ranging from +305% to over +10,000%. We define a yearly streaming forecasting protocol on EvoXXLTraffic in which each calendar year is a continual task, and benchmark a wide range of representative baselines drawn from static spatio-temporal GNNs, na\"ive online schemes, evolving-graph continual methods, and retrieval / test-time methods. We find that our ultra-large evolutionary dataset better reflects the real world, and many state-of-the-art (SOTA) results no longer work. Our dataset complements existing benchmarks by enabling more realistic forecasting under ultra-long evolutionary road networks. Our code and baselines are available at github repo: https://github.com/cruiseresearchgroup/TSAS26-EvoXXLTraffic
URLs: https://github.com/cruiseresearchgroup/TSAS26-EvoXXLTraffic
Authors: Teddy Ferdinan, Bart{\l}omiej Koptyra, Miko{\l}aj Langner, Tomasz Adamczyk, {\L}ukasz Radli\'nski, Maciej Markiewicz, Aleksander Szcz\k{e}sny, Stanis{\l}aw Wo\'zniak, Tymoteusz Romanowicz, Dzmitry Pihulski, Mateusz Zbrocki, Mateusz \'Smigielski, Micha{\l} Rajkowski, Mateusz Biedka, Konrad Kie{\l}czy\'nski, Konrad Wojtasik, Jacek Duszenko, Jan Eliasz, Piotr Matys, Micha{\l} Bernacki-Janson, Maria Bellaniar Ismiati, Latius Hermawan, Wiktoria Mieleszczenko-Kowszewicz, Anna Kubicka-Sowinska, Grzegorz Chodak, Karol Postawa, Pawe{\l} Zyblewski, Tomasz Szanda{\l}a, {\L}ukasz Sterczewski, Adrian Chajec, Pawel Niewiadomski, Piotr Gruber, Marcin Wdowikowski, S{\l}awomir Czarnecki, Bart{\l}omiej Kryszak, Dominik Drabik, Tomasz Kajdanowicz, Kamil Mamak, Pawe{\l} Pre\'s, Katarzyna Paczkowska, Joachim Sobczuk, Tomasz Zi\k{e}ba, Jan Koco\'n, Maciej Piasecki, Przemys{\l}aw Kazienko
Abstract: While Reasoning Language Models (RLMs) are rapidly emerging as powerful tools for scientific research, their impact is primarily concentrated in "hard science" fields. The slow -- or lack of -- adoption of RLMs in other branches of science is causing a widening gap in research productivity. In this survey, we provide the first comprehensive analysis of RLM adoption across 28 scientific disciplines following the classification used by the European Research Council (ERC), spanning the Social Sciences and Humanities, Physical Sciences and Engineering, and Life Sciences. We examine how RLMs are developed, evaluated, and applied across disciplines. Furthermore, we introduce a maturity-oriented assessment framework based on available domain-specific development and evaluation resources, revealing substantial disparities in RLM maturity that become even more pronounced when only publicly available resources are considered. Finally, we highlight current implementation paradigms that are gaining popularity across disciplines, current challenges, and future directions in enabling RLM adoption across science.
Authors: Xiangyu Zhao, Henry Hengyuan Zhao, Yiheng Wang, Wanghan Xu, Yuhao Zhou, Qinglong Cao, Zhiwang Zhou, Lei Bai, Wenlong Zhang, Xiao-Ming Wu
Abstract: While Process Reward Models (PRMs) have achieved remarkable success in mathematical reasoning, their application in complex scientific domains-such as biology, chemistry, and physics remains largely unexplored. Scientific problems demand not only logical rigor but also factual consistency and the precise usage of domain-specific tools, areas where current models often suffer from hallucinations and lack of verification. In this paper, we first construct SCIPRM70K, a large-scale dataset featuring Chain-of-Tool trajectories that explicitly interleave reasoning with the execution of scientific tools. Building upon this, we train an efficient reward model called Sci-PRM to provide fine-grained supervision on tool selection, execution accuracy, and result interpretation at each step in one inference. Experiments demonstrate that Sci-PRM significantly enhances foundation models in two key aspects: (1) it enables effective test-time scaling via Best-of-N selection; and (2) when integrated into Reinforcement Learning, it serves as a dense reward signal that mitigates the critical issue of advantage disappearance, allowing the model to break through existing performance ceilings.
Authors: Huanyu Yang, Yangfan Wu, Jianmin Ji
Abstract: Technical-standard compliance reasoning may involve incomplete evidence, inconsistent observations, exceptions, and derived normative outputs. This paper presents \textsc{Monir}, a four-valued normative intermediate representation for ASP-oriented compliance workflows. \textsc{Monir} separates factual support from normative outputs: facts are represented by positive and negative support bits, while deontic labels are rule-generated output constructors interpreted by aggregation policies. Its core semantics is a staged transition system over support configurations. We define the language, rule-state interface, diagnostics, and policy-parametric reporting; characterize admissible staged evaluation by a dependency graph; prove deterministic polynomial-time evaluation for fixed evidence; and give NP/coNP upper bounds, with matching hardness for representative completion-based verdict queries.
Authors: Renjith Prasad, Chathurangi Shyalika, Anushka Pawar, Aahan Rathod, Amit Sheth
Abstract: Multimodal generative models produce fluent outputs but remain unreliable when generation must respect structured, domain-specific, or safety-critical knowledge. Existing methods incorporate knowledge through mechanisms such as prompt augmentation, guidance, latent editing, or fine-tuning, yet they are typically categorized by technique rather than by the component of the generative process they modify. We argue that knowledge infusion in iterative generative models is fundamentally anintervention-layer problem. Since thegenerative process unfolds as a trajectory of internal states, knowledge can act on four structurally distinct components of this process: the input/output boundary, the transition function, the intermediate state, and the model parameters. This maps to four intervention layers: surface, trajectory, latent, and parametric infusion. We instantiate the framework in diffusion models, map representative methods to all four layers, and derive design principles for multi-layer composition. In a controlled safety-alignment experiment using a multimodal knowledge graph with two diffusion backbones, we implement three of the four layers cumulatively, surface (input-side and output-side) and trajectory--latent (mid-generation). We show empirically that each additional layer addresses failure classes that prior layers cannot reach, reducing knowledge-violating outputs by 70.97% compared to vanilla generation and empirically confirming the framework's complementarity prediction.
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: Sushant Mehta, Liudas Panavas, Suhaas Garre, 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: 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: 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: Qingcan Kang, Liu Mingyang, Shixiong Kai, Kaichao Liang, Tao Zhong, Mingxuan Yuan
Abstract: Long-horizon language agents accumulate observations, reasoning traces, and retrieved facts exceeding context windows, making memory retention a fundamental resource-allocation problem. Existing systems treat retention as local and do not model long-term consequences under observability constraints. To fill this gap, we formulate memory retention as a constrained stochastic optimization with budget feasibility, evidence utility, and delayed costs including miss, reacquisition, and stale penalties. We show this multi-step problem is NP-hard, making exact solution intractable. Moreover, deployment decisions must be made under partial observability. To address these challenges, we propose OSL-MR (Observability-Safe Learning for Memory Retention), a learning-augmented framework that enforces a strict separation between online-observable features and offline-available supervision. OSL-MR combines an evidence learner trained from realized evidence with a Mixed-Score heuristic that serves as a deployable online-safe baseline and an inductive prior. The policy learns query-conditioned evidence from interaction data and remains deployable under the same constraints. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval show OSL-MR outperforms recency-based, Generative Agents-style, and other heuristic baselines, especially under tight budgets. The Mixed-Score prior improves precision and recall, and sensitivity analysis shows robustness across cost settings. On small solvable instances, single-step optimization is insufficient to anticipate future demand shifts, while OSL-MR stays significantly closer to the dynamic-programming optimum, confirming the necessity of the sequential formulation and reinforcing our learning-guided approximation. These results establish constrained stochastic optimization and optimization-guided learning as a principled foundation for memory management in long-horizon agents.
Authors: Alexander Philipp Rader, Alessandra Russo
Abstract: Neurosymbolic AI combines neural networks with symbolic programs to create robust and explainable predictions. One such framework is NeurASP, which trains a neural network to predict concepts and reasons over them using rules written in answer set programming (ASP) to solve downstream tasks. Crucially, labels are only provided for the downstream prediction produced by the symbolic rules, not for the latent concepts themselves. Backpropagation through the non-differentiable ASP component requires expensive probability and gradient calculations, which has hindered scalability to more sophisticated tasks. In this paper, we address the current limitations of NeurASP by improving its computational performance through vectorization, batch processing and caching of intermediate computations during training. We compare computation speeds between the original and our new implementation of NeurASP and report speedups of multiple orders of magnitude for larger tasks. To this end, we propose a new dataset of difficult tasks involving playing cards, which we use to test the capabilities of NeurASP's enhanced learning function.
Authors: Zhibao Chen, Qian Cheng
Abstract: Long-running LLM agents accumulate interaction histories far larger than any context window, forcing a standing decision: what to encode deeply, what to forget, and what to retrieve under a fixed memory budget. Production systems answer with semantic similarity or recency -- both mis-specified for the forgetting decision, which is made at consolidation time before the future query is known. We propose a multi-factor memory value function V(m)=\sum_i w_i f_i(m) over seven interpretable factors (emotional intensity, goal relevance, value alignment, self/user relevance, task utility, reliability, and usage history) drawn from cognitive psychology, whose weights are learned from a downstream objective by a gradient-free optimiser, and whose single scalar uniformly controls encoding depth, forget risk, and retrieval rank. We make a methodological point: on LongMemEval, scoring goal relevance against the held-out evaluation question saturates gold-evidence retention at \approx 0.98 -- this measures retrieval, not forgetting. In the realistic blind regime, a learned multi-factor value retains 0.770 \pm 0.011 of gold evidence across 479 usable cases, versus 0.657 for uniform weights, 0.518 for the best single factor, and 0.368 for recency; every paired gap's 95% bootstrap CI is above zero, and a neural network over the same factors ties the linear model. The learned weights are interpretable -- reliability, emotional intensity, and self/user relevance dominate, while query-time goal similarity is correctly down-weighted for the forgetting decision. A controlled synthetic task with planted confounds confirms the learner recovers a separating weighting (1.00 retention) where uniform weighting fails (0.62). The substrate is open-source; all experiments run on a single CPU with no API calls.
Authors: Pierre Beckmann, Marco Valentino, Andre Freitas
Abstract: Three paradigmatic forms of inference recur across scientific reasoning: deduction, induction, and causal abduction. Reliably evaluating LLMs on these in scientific settings is currently out of reach: scientific benchmarks built on human annotations are costly and lack mechanistic ground truth, while synthetic logical-reasoning benchmarks do not resemble real scientific documents. We introduce SciR, a benchmark that combines multi-paradigm reasoning with controllable scientific rendering, anchored on three paradigmatic scientific problems. Tasks are generated from formal objects (deduction tree, inductive rule hypothesis, causal graph) to guarantee verifiable answers, then rendered into multi-document scientific discourse via per-track domain-tuned genres. The construction lets us independently vary two difficulty axes: how hard it is to extract the key information needed for inference, and how hard the principled inference itself is. We test six models. Both axes hurt every model, and their effects compound. The rendering even hurts neurosymbolic pipelines, which hand inference to a verified solver. The two axes yield a per-model extraction-vs-inference profile: for instance, reasoning models like deepseek-r1 mostly surpass non-reasoning instruct models on the inference axis. To our knowledge, SciR is the first multi-paradigm scientific-reasoning benchmark with parametric control on both extraction and inference difficulty.
Authors: Alexander Rombach, Chantale Lauer, Nijat Mehdiyev
Abstract: LLM-based agents are entering regulated industries where they automate judgment intensive quality management processes. We argue that symbolic structures already embedded in these domains, including regulations, typed process models, and compliance constraints, should be treated not merely as external monitoring mechanisms but as core architectural components that shape the agent's decision-making and behavior. We propose compliance-by-construction as a complementary paradigm to guardrail-based monitoring: a structural foundation that prevents control-flow violations, while guardrails remain essential for catching semantic errors. We identify a structured set of neuro-symbolic research challenges on foundational and capability level and show that addressing them jointly enables compliance-by-construction. We call on the neuro-symbolic community to engage with regulated process automation as a high impact research domain.
Authors: Pavan C Shekar, Abhishek H S, Aswanth Krishnan
Abstract: Large language model reasoning leaves no trace once it is done. The steps of a chain of thought disappear when the context window closes, a pruned search branch is just gone, and memory buffers cannot be diffed, merged, or audited. Code, infrastructure, and experiments are all version-controlled. Reasoning is not. GitOfThoughts stores an agent's reasoning tree as a git repository. Every scored thought becomes a commit, scores become notes, outcomes become tags, and retrieval is just git log over the agent's own history. We use this to test something simple. Does giving an agent memory from past problems actually make it more accurate? We tried five memory stores (none, a markdown file, a vector database, a graph, and git) across two benchmarks, two model sizes, and several pre-registered repeat experiments. The answer, on new problems, is no, including one promising early result that did not hold up when we repeated it. Memory only helps once the problem being solved is nearly identical to something already in memory (cosine similarity above about 0.8); below that, it does nothing. In other words, the model is finding the answer rather than learning the method. Even a model 4.5x larger still cannot pull a reusable method out of a worked example; it just gets better at spotting near-copies. The only thing that reliably helped on new problems was generating several answers and picking the most common one (self-consistency). So the case for using git as the memory store is not that it retrieves better. It is that it gives auditability, history, and the ability to merge two agents' memories, at no cost to accuracy.
Authors: Agnieszka Mensfelt, Adarsh Prabhakaran, Adrian Haret, Vince Trencsenyi, Kostas Stathis
Abstract: Frontier reasoning-tuned language models still fail on deductive tasks at depth, and the cost of improved performance through extended internal reasoning scales poorly. Symbolic delegation offers a complementary route: a language model translates the problem, while a solver performs the inference. However, current autoformalization pipelines for logic programming are typically bespoke integrations tied to particular tasks or agents. We introduce PrologMCP, a task-agnostic, open-source server that exposes Prolog as a stateful tool through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Its compact tool interface, structured error reporting, and per-session isolation make the translate-run-inspect-repair loop a reusable primitive for MCP-capable agents. We evaluate a formalizer agent enhanced with PrologMCP against standard and reasoning LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-4.1, and o4-mini) on two subsets of PARARULE-Plus: a general-purpose sample and a more challenging one targeting a specific failure mode of natural-language reasoning. On the general sample, the formalizer matches or exceeds reasoning LLMs (accuracy 1.00 vs.\ 1.00 / 0.998), with the largest gains over standard models (0.762 for GPT-4.1). On the challenging subset, the formalizer remains near-perfect (1.00 / 0.99) while reasoning LLMs drop to 0.95 / 0.94. These results suggest that delegating inference to Prolog via MCP is a robust and inspectable alternative to extended natural-language reasoning.
Authors: Linghua Zhang, Jun Wang, Jingtong Wu, Zhisong Zhang
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents have made rapid progress on short-horizon, well-scoped tasks, yet their ability to sustain coherent decisions in dynamic long-horizon environments remains uncertain. We introduce RetailBench, a data-grounded simulation benchmark for evaluating tool-using LLM agents in single-store supermarket operation. RetailBench models retail management as a partially observable decision process and is designed to support thousand-day-scale simulations. In this environment, agents must manage pricing, replenishment, supplier selection, shelf assortment, inventory aging, customer feedback, external events, and cash-flow constraints. We evaluate seven contemporary LLMs under representative agent frameworks over a 180-day evaluation horizon and compare them with a privileged oracle policy. Results show substantial variation across models: only a small subset survives the full evaluation horizon, and even the strongest LLM runs remain substantially behind the oracle policy in final net worth and sales outcomes. Behavioral analysis attributes these gaps to incomplete evidence acquisition, surface-level decision making, and the lack of a consistent long-horizon policy. RetailBench provides a controlled testbed for studying reliable autonomy in economically grounded long-horizon decision-making.
Authors: Junjia Qi, Zichuan Fu, Jingtong Gao, Wenlin Zhang, Hanyu Yan, Xian Wu, Xiangyu Zhao
Abstract: Every major LLM agent framework gives the LLM the role of orchestrator; the model decides what to do next, when to call tools, and when to stop. We argue that token explosion, control-flow hallucination, and unreliable completion are not implementation bugs but architectural consequences of assigning the deterministic work of looping, branching, and sequencing to a probabilistic system. A better prompt or a stronger model cannot guarantee the reliability of the LLM agent. We therefore propose Agentic Programming, in which the program governs all control flow, and the LLM is itself part of it, an adaptive component we call LLM-as-Code and invoke only where a task calls for reasoning or generation. Within each call the model keeps full flexibility, but it cannot alter the program's execution path. With control in the program, the LLM's context is built from the execution history's call tree and forms a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Each call's context length is then determined by its call depth rather than by accumulation over steps. A case study of computer-use agents shows that the design is practical, not just a theoretical stance, substantially improving the stability of long visual operation sequences.
Authors: Olivia Peiyu Wang, Sanna Wong-Toropainen, Daneshvar Amrollahi, Ryan Bai, Tashvi Bansal, Arush Garg, Leilani H. Gilpin
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on reasoning tasks, but whether this reflects faithful logical inference or heuristic approximation remains unclear. We study this question in legal entailment by comparing three paradigms, including pure LLM classification, LLM-based Formal Reasoning, and solver-based Formal Reasoning using the Z3 SMT solver, on a re-annotated subset of ContractNLI across five LLMs. Our re-annotation reveals a systematic and measurable gap between pragmatic legal interpretation and strict formal entailment, where a substantial proportion of legally sound inferences are not formally grounded without additional unstated assumptions. While introducing formal structure improves accuracy, with LLM-based Formal Reasoning achieving the highest benchmark performance, we show that this gain does not imply faithful reasoning. We identify three recurring failure modes: scope laundering, where LLMs report solver-inconsistent classifications without executing the underlying formal reasoning, producing conclusions that appear logically grounded but are not; implicit constraint blindness, where LLMs overlook logical constraints present in formal representations; and program synthesis failures, where LLMs generate incorrect Z3 code despite structured prompting. Critically, scope laundering persists across all models, raising serious concerns about the faithfulness of LLM-based formal reasoning as a proxy for symbolic execution. These results reveal a fundamental gap between benchmark accuracy and logical faithfulness.
Authors: Kevin L Coakley, Thijs Snelleman, Holger Hoos, Odd Erik Gundersen
Abstract: The reproducibility crisis has directed the AI research community toward improving documentation practices. Several studies have identified methodological issues, and in response, the most impactful venues in the field have introduced reproducibility checklists. We seek to understand whether documentation practices have changed over time by assessing all published papers at five leading AI conferences over the past decade. Seven reproducibility variables were identified, quality-assured and used to analyse 56 800 publications. Our analysis reveals that in the period 2014 to 2024, documentation practices have improved; papers sharing both code and data increased nearly sixfold, from 11% to 64% Building on empirical reproducibility rates from a prior study, we estimate - inferred from documentation practices, not direct testing - that reproducibility increased from 28% in 2014 to 64% in 2024. Improvements in documentation practices predate the introduction of reproducibility checklists, suggesting these changes reflect a broader movement toward open science rather than a direct response to formal requirements.
Authors: Phoebe Zeng, Thomas L. Griffiths, Brenden M. Lake
Abstract: AI systems based on artificial neural networks are being developed with aspirations of pushing the boundary of human mathematical knowledge. A key question for these systems is how much they can reach beyond their training data. Mathematical discovery requires a strong form of out of distribution generalization; the ability to hypothesize genuinely new - and potentially logically more powerful - mathematical structures. It has been hypothesized that language abilities support such generalizations in human cognition. In this work, we use simple arithmetic as a case study for examining how modern AI models could expand their mathematical horizons, evaluating whether these models can independently discover the concept of "zero". We show that (1) language models of a GPT-2 size are unable to perform this generalization at test time regardless of language pretraining, but (2) models can improve substantially after training on tens or hundreds of examples of zero. Additionally, we find that language pretraining reduces the number of required examples by approximately $50\%$, showing that language abilities can scaffold mathematical discovery in neural models.
Authors: Pianran Guo, Pengcheng Zhou, Yucheng Jian, Shuhua Chen, Zhonfliang Yang, Linna Zhou
Abstract: Financial multimodal reasoning requires agents to coordinate numerical computation, retrieval, visual interpretation, and temporal grounding across heterogeneous evidence sources. Existing tool-augmented agents improve execution fidelity, yet remain largely stateless across episodes, repeatedly rediscovering reasoning strategies and failure patterns. In high-stakes financial settings, this leads to unreliable tool routing, noisy retrieval, and hallucination-prone reasoning. We present FinAcumen, a financial reasoning agent framework centered on selective experience memory for tool-augmented multimodal reasoning. FinAcumen accumulates financially grounded reasoning experience from prior trajectories, distilling successful strategies and failure-derived cautionary rules into a persistent memory bank. During inference, retrieved experiences condition reasoning only when semantic relevance exceeds a calibrated threshold, while irrelevant memory is explicitly suppressed through a fallback mechanism. A deterministic financial tool environment further grounds numerical computation, retrieval, visual decoding, and answer verification.Across four financial multimodal reasoning benchmarks, FinAcumen consistently improves a frozen 8B vision-language model over finance-specialized models and approaches leading proprietary general-purpose models. Further analysis shows that selective experience activation improves reasoning reliability under retrieval uncertainty. Our code is anonymously available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FinAcumen
Authors: Nachiket Kotalwar, Rohini Das, Carolyn Rose
Abstract: Automated AI agents are increasingly capable, yet many scientific and professional tasks require human judgment and contextual expertise. We use simulated shared-workspace human-AI teams as a controlled testbed for studying how collaboration structure shapes team behavior. Using the Collaborative Gym environment with tasks from DiscoveryBench, we vary team compositions and collaboration structures across 1,482 sessions. We find that adding additional collaborators can lower performance when coordination structure is absent. We then evaluate collaboration scaffolding that combines shared group memory with simulated human-in-the-loop (HITL) gates, where selected actions require approval from a designated simulated participant. This scaffolding improves performance, most clearly in three-person teams, with clearer responsibility signals and stronger routing of expertise to team actions. Overall, our results suggest that coordination structure is central to whether available capability improves team outcomes.
Authors: Thomas Bertolani, Davide Bucciarelli, Leonardo Zini, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized language modeling through autoregressive generation, enabling strong performance across a wide range of tasks. Recently, Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have emerged as an alternative paradigm that generates text through iterative denoising rather than next-token prediction, allowing parallel refinement of entire sequences. While numerous diffusion-based architectures have been proposed, differences in evaluation protocols, datasets, inference budgets, and generation hyperparameters make it difficult to compare their capabilities and understand the trade-offs they offer. In this work, we present a systematic experimental analysis of modern DLMs. Specifically, we evaluate eight state-of-the-art DLMs across eight benchmarks spanning reasoning, coding, translation, knowledge, and structured problem solving, while explicitly considering both generation quality and computational efficiency. Beyond downstream evaluation, we analyze the impact of key inference-time factors, including denoising steps, context length, block size, and parallel unmasking strategies, and complement large-scale experiments with controlled comparisons of smaller models trained under identical conditions. Our analysis highlights the strengths and limitations of diffusion-based language modeling across different tasks, architectures, and inference budgets. We show that the behavior of DLMs is strongly influenced by generation-time design choices, leading to distinct trade-offs between performance and computational efficiency. Overall, our study provides practical insights into the capabilities and deployment characteristics of contemporary DLMs.
Authors: Ashim Dhor, Rasel Mondal, Pin-Yu Chen
Abstract: Convolutional networks, recurrent networks, and transformers each encode different inductive biases -- locality, sequential memory, and content-dependent pairwise interaction -- and have remained mathematically distinct since their inception. We show that this fragmentation reflects not a fundamental diversity in how signals should be processed, but rather incomplete views of a single underlying mathematical object: a learnable integral transform. We introduce the Integral Transform Network (ITNet), a unified architecture built around a learnable kernel that depends jointly on positions and features. This kernel is implemented as a small neural network, specifically an MLP, that models pairwise interactions, enabling the model to adapt its behavior from data. We show that convolution, self-attention (including multi-head), and autoregressive recurrence (including LSTM, GRU, S4, and Mamba) arise as special cases under appropriate parameterizations, and that ITNet is a universal approximator of continuous operators. To make this practical, we develop tiled kernel fusion, importance-weighted Monte Carlo integration, and learned low-rank factorization, enabling efficient and scalable computation. A single ITNet architecture with a shared operator and lightweight modality-specific encoders matches or exceeds specialized baselines on ImageNet-1K , GLUE, ModelNet40, VQA\,v2 and NLVR2. The results demonstrate that a single learned interaction mechanism can recover the behavior of all three architectural families from data.
Authors: Bharathi Kannan Nithyanantham, Clemens Kujat, Tobias Sesterhenn, Stefan Telgmann, Ashwin Nedungadi, J\"orn Pl\"onnigs, Christian Bartelt, Stefan L\"udtke
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to computer-aided design (CAD) to generate design artifacts from textual instructions. In engineering practice, this requires more than creating new geometry, models must also understand existing scenes, edit them correctly, and preserve semantics and relations. However, many CAD benchmarks focus on creating new models rather than editing existing ones, and mostly evaluate geometric correctness. We introduce BIM-Edit, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs on natural-language editing of Building Information Models (BIM) represented in the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) format. BIM provides a challenging testbed because building models encode geometry together with semantic and relational structure. BIM-Edit contains 324 editing tasks spanning 11 realistic building models and 36 synthetic scenes. Tasks are expressed using three instruction categories - direct, spatial, and topological - covering both explicit and scene-grounded edits. We evaluate outputs along three dimensions: geometric accuracy, semantic validity, and topological consistency. Across evaluated LLMs, the best-performing model achieves only 49.5% average score across the three metrics, and no model fully solves more than 3.4% of tasks. These results demonstrate a substantial gap between current LLM capabilities and the requirements of structured engineering design workflows.
Authors: Saimun Habib, Vaishak Belle, Fengxiang He
Abstract: Neurosymbolic systems such as DeepProbLog combine neural perception with probabilistic logic, but standard inference is associational. Counterfactual reasoning additionally requires a causal semantics for interventions and evidence. We introduce DeepSWIP, a single-world counterfactual semantics for DeepProbLog programs. Using neural materialization, we reduce fixed-context neural predicates to ordinary ProbLog choices, apply Single World Intervention Programs (SWIPs), and compute counterfactuals by weighted model counting (WMC) over a single transformed program. Under finite grounding and unique-supported-model assumptions, DeepSWIP is exact relative to the learned materialized FCM. The standard quotient-WMC form of ProbLog conditionals identifies active neural probabilities and explains intervention cleaning, calibration sensitivity, and rare-evidence instability. Experiments on MPI3D confirm the transformation against a DeepTwin construction against 12,000 queries, as predicted and a 2.14$\times$ inference speedup from avoiding the Twin's endogenous duplication. A SUMO HOV experiment shows that neural calibration degradation biases plug-in estimates, while a correctly scoped randomized-policy AIPW estimator removes most first-order bias for population mean and ATE estimands. Code is at https://github.com/saibib/deep_SWIP.
Authors: Xiaoliang Wu, Peter Bell, Ajitha Rajan
Abstract: We address quality assessment for neural network based ASR by providing explanations that help increase our understanding of the system and ultimately help build trust in the system. Compared to simple classification labels, explaining transcriptions is more challenging as judging their correctness is not straightforward and transcriptions as a variable-length sequence is not handled by existing interpretable machine learning models. We provide an explanation for an ASR transcription as a subset of audio frames that is both a minimal and sufficient cause of the transcription. To do this, we adapt existing explainable AI (XAI) techniques from image classification-Statistical Fault Localisation(SFL) and Causal. Additionally, we use an adapted version of Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) for ASR as a baseline in our experiments. We evaluate the quality of the explanations generated by the proposed techniques over three different ASR ,Google API, the baseline model of Sphinx, Deepspeech and 100 audio samples from the Commonvoice dataset.
Authors: Deuksin Kwon, Emily Weiss, Tara Kulshrestha, Kushal Chawla, Gale M. Lucas, Jonathan Gratch
Abstract: A successful negotiation requires a range of capabilities, including comprehension of the conversation context, Theory-of-Mind (ToM) skills to infer the partner's motives, strategic reasoning, and effective communication, making it challenging for automated systems. Despite the remarkable performance of LLMs in various NLP tasks, there is no systematic evaluation of their capabilities in negotiation. Such an evaluation is critical for advancing AI negotiation agents and negotiation research, ranging from designing dialogue systems to providing pedagogical feedback and scaling up data collection practices. This work aims to systematically analyze the multifaceted capabilities of LLMs across diverse dialogue scenarios throughout the stages of a typical negotiation interaction. Our analysis highlights GPT-4's superior performance in many tasks while identifying specific challenges, such as making subjective assessments and generating contextually appropriate, strategically advantageous responses.
Authors: Ruihua Han, Shuai Wang, Shuaijun Wang, Zeqing Zhang, Jianjun Chen, Shijie Lin, Chengyang Li, Chengzhong Xu, Yonina C. Eldar, Qi Hao, Jia Pan
Abstract: Navigating a nonholonomic robot in a cluttered, unknown environment requires accurate perception and precise motion control for real-time collision avoidance. This paper presents NeuPAN: a real-time, highly accurate, map-free, easy-to-deploy, and environment-invariant robot motion planner. Leveraging a tightly coupled perception-to-control framework, NeuPAN has two key innovations compared to existing approaches: 1) it directly maps raw point cloud data to a latent distance feature space for collision-free motion generation, avoiding error propagation from the perception to control pipeline; 2) it is interpretable from an end-to-end model-based learning perspective. The crux of NeuPAN is solving an end-to-end mathematical model with numerous point-level constraints using a plug-and-play (PnP) proximal alternating-minimization network (PAN), incorporating neurons in the loop. This allows NeuPAN to generate real-time, physically interpretable motions. It seamlessly integrates data and knowledge engines, and its network parameters can be fine-tuned via backpropagation. We evaluate NeuPAN on a ground mobile robot, a wheel-legged robot, and an autonomous vehicle, in extensive simulated and real-world environments. Results demonstrate that NeuPAN outperforms existing baselines in terms of accuracy, efficiency, robustness, and generalization capabilities across various environments, including the cluttered sandbox, office, corridor, and parking lot. We show that NeuPAN works well in unknown and unstructured environments with arbitrarily shaped objects, transforming impassable paths into passable ones.
Authors: S M Jishanul Islam, Sadia Ahmmed, Sahid Hossain Mustakim
Abstract: Accurate transcription of Bengali text to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a challenging task due to the complex phonology of the language and context-dependent sound changes. This challenge is even more for regional Bengali dialects due to unavailability of standardized spelling conventions for these dialects, presence of local and foreign words popular in those regions and phonological diversity across different regions. This paper presents an approach to this sequence-to-sequence problem by introducing the District Guided Tokens (DGT) technique on a new dataset spanning six districts of Bangladesh. The key idea is to provide the model with explicit information about the regional dialect or "district" of the input text before generating the IPA transcription. This is achieved by prepending a district token to the input sequence, effectively guiding the model to understand the unique phonetic patterns associated with each district. The DGT technique is applied to fine-tune several transformer-based models, on this new dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of DGT, with the ByT5 model achieving superior performance over word-based models like mT5, BanglaT5, and umT5. This is attributed to ByT5's ability to handle a high percentage of out-of-vocabulary words in the test set. The proposed approach highlights the importance of incorporating regional dialect information into ubiquitous natural language processing systems for languages with diverse phonological variations. The following work was a result of the "Bhashamul" challenge, which is dedicated to solving the problem of Bengali text with regional dialects to IPA transcription https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/regipa/. The training and inference notebooks are available through the competition link.
Authors: Eugene Golikov
Abstract: We consider nonlinear networks as perturbations of linear ones. Based on this approach, we present novel generalization bounds that become non-vacuous for networks that are close to being linear. The main advantage over the previous works which propose non-vacuous generalization bounds is that our bounds are a-priori: performing the actual training is not required for evaluating the bounds. To the best of our knowledge, they are the first non-vacuous generalization bounds for neural nets possessing this property.
Authors: Mehshan Ahmed Khan, Houshyar Asadi, Mohammad Reza Chalak Qazani, Adetokunbo Arogbonlo, Siamak Pedrammehr, Adnan Anwar, Asim Bhatti, Saeid Nahavandi, Chee Peng Lim
Abstract: Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is employed as a non-invasive method to monitor functional brain activation by capturing changes in the concentrations of oxygenated haemoglobin (HbO) and deoxygenated haemo-globin (HbR). Various machine learning classification techniques have been utilized to distinguish cognitive states. However, conventional machine learning methods, although simpler to implement, undergo a complex pre-processing phase before network training and demonstrate reduced accuracy due to inadequate data preprocessing. Additionally, previous research in cog-nitive load assessment using fNIRS has predominantly focused on differ-sizeentiating between two levels of mental workload. These studies mainly aim to classify low and high levels of cognitive load or distinguish between easy and difficult tasks. To address these limitations associated with conven-tional methods, this paper conducts a comprehensive exploration of the im-pact of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) layers on the effectiveness of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) within deep learning models. This is to address the issues related to spatial features overfitting and lack of tem-poral dependencies in CNN in the previous studies. By integrating LSTM layers, the model can capture temporal dependencies in the fNIRS data, al-lowing for a more comprehensive understanding of cognitive states. The primary objective is to assess how incorporating LSTM layers enhances the performance of CNNs. The experimental results presented in this paper demonstrate that the integration of LSTM layers with Convolutional layers results in an increase in the accuracy of deep learning models from 97.40% to 97.92%.
Authors: Xiang Mei, Jordi Del Castillo, Pulkit Singh Singaria, Haoran Xi, Abdelouahab Benchikh, Tiffany Bao, Ruoyu Wang, Yan Shoshitaishvili, Adam Doup\'e, Hammond Pearce, Brendan Dolan-Gavitt
Abstract: Achieving reproducibility, quantity, and diversity in vulnerability datasets has long been viewed as an inherent three-way trade-off, where improving one dimension often comes at the cost of the others. In practice, reproducibility has been the dimension most often neglected. This has limited what can be automatically extracted from historical bug datasets, and has reduced their utility for downstream security research. In this work, we propose a method to produce a new security dataset which ensures reproducibility for diverse vulnerabilities at scale by identifying the key obstacles to large-scale bug reproduction and addressing them with general solutions. Using this method, we introduce full reproducibility to the largest open source software vulnerability dataset (OSS-Fuzz) and construct the ARVO dataset (an Atlas of Reproducible Vulnerabilities in Open-source software). ARVO is a large-scale dataset consisting of over 6,100 real-world vulnerabilities across 311 projects. Focusing on reproducibility, ARVO differs from existing datasets by providing each vulnerability in a form that can be consistently rebuilt, triggered, and analyzed across versions. Reproducibility also enables automatic identification of the corresponding patch for each vulnerability and supports direct interaction with vulnerabilities after code changes, capabilities that existing large-scale datasets do not provide. In our evaluation, ARVO successfully reproduces 81% of vulnerabilities and achieves 89.4% accuracy on the located patches. We also discuss ARVO's influence on both upstream practices and downstream security research.
Authors: Akane Sano, Judith Amores, Mary Czerwinski
Abstract: We explore the application of large language models (LLMs), pre-trained models with massive textual data for detecting and improving attention and sleep. We investigate the use of LLMs to estimate attention states, sleep stages, and sleep quality and generate sleep improvement suggestions and adaptive guided imagery scripts based on electroencephalogram (EEG) and physical activity data (e.g., waveforms, power spectrogram images, numerical features). Our results show that LLMs can estimate sleep quality based on human textual behavioral features and provide personalized sleep improvement suggestions and guided imagery scripts; however, detecting attention, sleep stages, and sleep quality based on EEG and activity data requires further training data and domain-specific knowledge.
Authors: Yueqi Xie, Tao Qi, Jingwei Yi, Xiyuan Yang, Ryan Whalen, Junming Huang, Qian Ding, Yu Xie, Xing Xie, Fangzhao Wu
Abstract: With the growing prevalence of generative artificial intelligence (AI), an increasing amount of content is no longer exclusively generated by humans but by generative AI models with human guidance. This shift presents notable challenges for the delineation of originality due to the varying degrees of human contribution in AI-assisted works. This study raises the research question of measuring human contribution in AI-assisted content generation and introduces a framework to address this question that is grounded in information theory. By calculating mutual information between human input and AI-assisted output relative to self-information of AI-assisted output, we quantify the proportional information contribution of humans in content generation. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed measure effectively discriminates between varying degrees of human contribution across multiple creative domains. We hope that this work lays a foundation for measuring human contributions in AI-assisted content generation in the era of generative AI.
Authors: Eliuvish Han Cui
Abstract: Brownian motion is a compact mathematical language for continuous-time uncertainty in biostatistics. This tutorial develops the process from construction and path properties to tools that recur in applied biomedical work: the Markov and strong Markov properties, the Karhunen-Loeve expansion, functional principal component analysis (Functional PCA), reflection principles, local time, stochastic differential equations (SDEs), Brownian bridges, and empirical-process limits. The applications emphasize longitudinal biomarkers, degradation modelling, first-passage endpoints, dynamic frailty, group-sequential monitoring, calibration diagnostics, recurrent-event processes, electronic health records, and wearable streams. A short cross-domain section uses literary and historical archives to make Brownian-bridge thinking concrete without shifting the paper away from biostatistics, and includes a reproducible chapter-level experiment on Frankenstein. The Black-Merton-Scholes model is included as a solved SDE template, not as a finance application in its own right. The aim is to connect rigorous probability with modelling decisions faced by biostatisticians when biological processes evolve between noisy observation times.
Authors: Cabrel Teguemne Fokam, Marcel Nieveler, Lukas K\"onig, Khaleelulla Khan Nazeer, David Kappel, Anand Subramoney
Abstract: The increasing size of deep learning models has made distributed training across multiple devices essential. Synchronous, centralized methods incur large communication and synchronization overheads. Communication efficient algorithms can reduce these overheads, but often require extra buffers, remain sensitive to stragglers or parameter drift. We present LayUp, an asynchronous decentralized SGD method with layer-wise updates. LayUp asynchronously exchanges incremental layer-wise updates during backpropagation. It uses randomized gossip communication, enabling updates to be applied as soon as they are available without buffering. These design choices reduce parameter drift and improve robustness to stragglers. We establish a theoretical upper bound for the gradient bias introduced by layer-wise updates and prove convergence of LayUp. We empirically validate LayUp on vision and language modeling tasks, showing convergence up to ~32% faster in terms of wall-clock time compared to synchronous data parallel training and up to ~27% faster than comparable communication efficient algorithms while maintaining better task performance. This speed-up is partly due to higher model FLOPs utilization, as we demonstrate. By injecting delays into the communication between workers, we show that LayUp remains robust to stragglers while DDP and other methods degrade in performance. Overall, LayUp provides a novel practical, straggler-robust alternative for distributed training without sacrificing accuracy.
Authors: Xingjian Wu, Xiangfei Qiu, Zhengyu Li, Yihang Wang, Jilin Hu, Chenjuan Guo, Hui Xiong, Bin Yang
Abstract: Anomaly detection in multivariate time series is challenging as heterogeneous subsequence anomalies may occur. Reconstruction-based methods, which focus on learning normal patterns in the frequency domain to detect diverse abnormal subsequences, achieve promising results, while still falling short on capturing fine-grained frequency characteristics and channel correlations. To contend with the limitations, we introduce CATCH, a framework based on frequency patching. We propose to patchify the frequency domain into frequency bands, which enhances its ability to capture fine-grained frequency characteristics. To perceive appropriate channel correlations, we propose a Channel Fusion Module (CFM), which features a patch-wise mask generator and a masked-attention mechanism. Driven by a bi-level multi-objective optimization algorithm, the CFM is encouraged to iteratively discover appropriate patch-wise channel correlations, and to cluster relevant channels while isolating adverse effects from irrelevant channels. Extensive experiments on 10 real-world datasets and 12 synthetic datasets demonstrate that CATCH achieves state-of-the-art performance. We make our code and datasets available at https://github.com/decisionintelligence/CATCH.
Authors: Wenbo Cui, Chengyang Zhao, Songlin Wei, Jiazhao Zhang, Haoran Geng, Yaran Chen, Haoran Li, He Wang
Abstract: Effectively manipulating articulated objects in household scenarios is a crucial step toward achieving general embodied artificial intelligence. Mainstream research in 3D vision has primarily focused on manipulation through depth perception and pose detection. However, in real-world environments, these methods often face challenges due to imperfect depth perception, such as with transparent lids and reflective handles. Moreover, they generally lack the diversity in part-based interactions required for flexible and adaptable manipulation. To address these challenges, we introduced a large-scale part-centric dataset for articulated object manipulation that features both photo-realistic material randomization and detailed annotations of part-oriented, scene-level actionable interaction poses. We evaluated the effectiveness of our dataset by integrating it with several state-of-the-art methods for depth estimation and interaction pose prediction. Additionally, we proposed a novel modular framework that delivers superior and robust performance for generalizable articulated object manipulation. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our dataset significantly improves the performance of depth perception and actionable interaction pose prediction in both simulation and real-world scenarios. More information and demos can be found at: https://pku-epic.github.io/GAPartManip/.
Authors: Xinran Zheng, Shuo Yang, Edith C. H. Ngai, Suman Jana, Lorenzo Cavallaro
Abstract: Learning-based Android malware detectors degrade over time due to natural distribution drift caused by malware variants and new families. This paper systematically investigates the challenges classifiers trained with empirical risk minimization (ERM) face against such distribution shifts and attributes their shortcomings to their inability to learn \emph{stable} discriminative features. Invariant learning theory offers a promising solution by encouraging models to generate stable representations across environments that expose the instability of the training set. However, the lack of prior environment labels, the diversity of drift factors, and low-quality representations caused by diverse families make this task challenging. To address these issues, we propose TIF, the first temporal invariant training framework for malware detection, which aims to enhance the ability of detectors to learn stable representations across time. TIF organizes environments based on application observation dates to reveal temporal drift, integrating specialized multi-proxy contrastive learning and invariant gradient alignment to generate and align environments with high-quality, stable representations. TIF can be seamlessly integrated into any learning-based detector. Experiments on a decade-long dataset show that TIF excels, particularly in early deployment stages, addressing real-world needs and outperforming state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Marco Bondaschi, Nived Rajaraman, Xiuying Wei, Kannan Ramchandran, Razvan Pascanu, Caglar Gulcehre, Michael Gastpar, Ashok Vardhan Makkuva
Abstract: While transformer-based language models have driven the AI revolution thus far, their computational complexity has spurred growing interest in viable alternatives, such as structured state space sequence models (SSMs) and Selective SSMs. Among these, Mamba (S6) and its variant Mamba-2 have shown remarkable inference speed-ups over transformers while achieving comparable or superior performance on complex language modeling tasks. However, despite these architectural innovations and empirical successes, the fundamental learning capabilities of Mamba remain poorly understood. In this paper, we address this gap by studying in-context learning (ICL) on Markov chains and uncovering an interesting phenomenon: even a single-layer Mamba efficiently learns the in-context Laplacian smoothing estimator, which is both Bayes and minimax optimal. To explain this, we theoretically characterize the representation capacity of Mamba and reveal the fundamental role of convolution in enabling it to represent the optimal Laplacian smoothing. These theoretical insights align strongly with empirical results and, to the best of our knowledge, represent the first formal connection between Mamba and optimal statistical estimators. Finally, we outline promising research directions inspired by these findings.
Authors: Maziar Sabouri, Ghasem Hajianfar, Alireza Rafiei Sardouei, Milad Yazdani, Azin Asadzadeh, Soroush Bagheri, Mohsen Arabi, Seyed Rasoul Zakavi, Emran Askari, Atena Aghaee, Sam Wiseman, Dena Shahriari, Habib Zaidi, Arman Rahmim
Abstract: Thyroid scintigraphy is vital for diagnosing thyroid disorders, yet deep learning (DL) models in this domain often struggle with limited, imbalanced datasets. This study investigates the impact of three data augmentation strategies including Stable Diffusion (SD), Flow Matching (FM), and Conventional Augmentation (CA), on enhancing DL-based classification of disease. Anterior thyroid scintigraphy images from 2,954 patients across nine medical centers were classified into four categories: Diffuse Goiter (DG), Nodular Goiter (NG), Normal (NL), and Thyroiditis (TI). Data augmentation was performed using CA as well as various SD and FM models, creating 18 distinct scenarios. Each augmented dataset was used to train a ResNet18 DL-classifier. Model performance was assessed using class-wise and average precision, recall, F1-score, AUC, and image fidelity metrics (FID and KID). FM-based methods demonstrated top-tier performance, with the Original dataset combined with FM (O+FM) configuration achieving the highest micro, macro, and weighted F1-scores (0.78, 0.77, 0.78) and AUC values (0.95, 0.93, 0.94). While the O+FM+CA model also yielded excellent, balanced results, O+FM was statistically superior, indicating that high-fidelity generative augmentation can supersede conventional heuristics. FM also produced the most realistic images, achieving the lowest overall FID (0.66) and KID (0.83). Among the SD variants, SD1 combining image and prompt inputs was the most effective (macro F1: 0.76; FID: 4.17), showing that physician-generated prompts provide critical clinical context. Integrating FM and clinically-informed SD augmentation substantially improves thyroid scintigraphy classification, highlighting the importance of advanced generative models for robust training on limited datasets. The code is available at: https://github.com/MaziarSabouri/Stable-Diffusion-Scintigraphy-Augmentation
URLs: https://github.com/MaziarSabouri/Stable-Diffusion-Scintigraphy-Augmentation
Authors: Andreas Sauter, Saber Salehkaleybar, Frank van Harmelen, Aske Plaat, Erman Acar
Abstract: Predicting post-intervention distributions from observational data is central to many scientific and decision-making problems, but remains challenging due to causal ambiguity, restrictive modeling assumptions, and the lack of amortization across tasks. We introduce ACTIVA, a transformer-based conditional variational autoencoder for amortized estimation of full interventional distributions from observational data and intervention queries. ACTIVA learns a conditional latent prior that supports zero-shot inference by amortizing causal knowledge across diverse training tasks. We provide a consistency result showing that, under idealized conditions, ACTIVA's learning objective targets a mixture over the interventional distributions of causal models that are observationally compatible with the input. Empirically, on synthetic datasets and biologically realistic gene-expression simulations, ACTIVA substantially outperforms a correlational baseline, reduces spurious non-descendant effects, and achieves competitive performance relative to strong amortized baselines. Our results show that ACTIVA is a promising approach for estimating interventional distributions from observational data.
Authors: Yucong Dai, Jie Ji, Xiaolong Ma, Yongkai Wu
Abstract: Image classification models trained on clean data often degrade sharply when exposed to corrupted test or deployment data, such as images with impulse noise, Gaussian noise, or environmental noise. This degradation reduces overall performance and disproportionately affects demographic subgroups, raising algorithmic bias concerns. Although robust learning algorithms such as Sharpness-Aware Minimization improve overall robustness and generalization, they do not address biased performance degradation across demographic subgroups. Existing fairness-aware machine learning methods reduce performance disparities but struggle to maintain robust and equitable accuracy across demographic subgroups under data corruption. This limitation reveals an inherent tension between robustness and fairness under corrupted data. To address these challenges, we introduce a metric to assess performance degradation across subgroups under data corruption. We propose FairSAM, a framework that integrates Fairness-oriented strategies into SAM to equalize performance across demographic groups under corrupted conditions. Experiments on multiple real-world datasets and prediction tasks show that FairSAM balances robustness and fairness in corrupted image classification. The framework yields a structured solution for fair and robust image classification in the presence of data corruption.
Authors: Aref Azizpour, Tai D. Nguyen, Matthew C. Stamm
Abstract: Rapid advances in generative AI have enabled the creation of highly realistic synthetic images, which, while beneficial in many domains, also pose serious risks in terms of disinformation, fraud, and other malicious applications. Current synthetic image identification systems are typically static, relying on feature representations learned from known generators; as new generative models emerge, these systems suffer from severe performance degradation. In this paper, we introduce the concept of an autonomous self-adaptive synthetic media identification system -- one that not only detects synthetic images and attributes them to known sources but also autonomously identifies and incorporates novel generators without human intervention. Our approach leverages an open-set identification strategy with an evolvable embedding space that distinguishes between known and unknown sources. By employing an unsupervised clustering method to aggregate unknown samples into high-confidence clusters and continuously refining its decision boundaries, our system maintains robust detection and attribution performance even as the generative landscape evolves. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches, marking a crucial step toward universal, adaptable forensic systems in the era of rapidly advancing generative models.
Authors: Zhifeng Hao, Kai Hu, Juncai Zhang, Zhidan Zhao, Zhengming Chen
Abstract: Traffic prediction is difficult due to the complex interplay of temporal evolution, spatial interactions, and delayed spatio-temporal propagation over road networks. Existing methods either model spatial and temporal dependencies separately or employ unified spatio-temporal structures, but they often insufficiently characterize how neighboring sensors at historical timestamps influence a target node, while complex joint models may incur high computation. This paper proposes STEI-PCN, an efficient pure convolutional network based on spatio-temporal encoding and relation inference. It first builds a local causal joint spatio-temporal graph to restrict candidate interactions, then uses absolute position and relative distance encodings to infer dynamic edge weights. A single-layer graph convolution with a position-aware gated activation unit captures local joint dependencies, and temporal dilated causal convolutions complement long-range temporal patterns. A multi-view prediction module fuses raw, local propagation, and long-range temporal representations for direct multi-step forecasting. Experiments on PeMS03, PeMS04, PeMS07, PeMS08, and PeMS-Bay under multiple horizons show that STEI-PCN achieves competitive accuracy with moderate parameters and low training and inference costs. Ablation and fluctuation analyses further verify the contributions of the main components and empirically analyze the effects of the training-stage constraints under sharp speed changes. Our code is available at a GitHub link https://github.com/Jessez2/STEI-PCN.
Authors: Yucong Dai, Lu Zhang, Yaowei Hu, Susan Gauch, Yongkai Wu
Abstract: Fair machine learning seeks to identify and mitigate biases in predictions against unfavorable populations characterized by demographic attributes, such as race and gender. Recent research has extended fairness to graph data, such as social networks, but many studies neglect the causal relationships among data instances. This paper addresses a prevalent challenge in many fair machine learning research, which typically assumes independent and identically distributed (IID) data, from the causal perspective. Specifically, this work targets the circumstance where nodes with different neighborhood structures follow different causal mechanisms, violating the invariance assumptions required for classical structural causal models and do-calculus. We base our research on the Network Structural Causal Model (NSCM) framework and develop a Message Passing Variational Autoencoder for Causal Inference (MPVA) to compute interventional distributions for causally fair node classification. We establish theoretical soundness under two conditions: Decomposability and Graph Independence. These conditions formalize when causal mechanism heterogeneity can be overcome by constructing a structural representation that restores invariance and facilitates the computation of interventional distributions using do-calculus in non-IID settings. Empirical evaluations on semi-synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that MPVA outperforms conventional methods by effectively approximating interventional distributions and mitigating bias. Our findings demonstrate the potential of causality-based fairness in complex ML applications and motivate future work on relaxing the classic assumptions in algorithmic fairness.
Authors: Ren Zhuang
Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting trades inference speed for reasoning accuracy. Existing compressors force a compromise as static gradient techniques treat tokens independently, severing sequential logic, while uncertainty-based pruning ignores the final answer. We introduce Adaptive GoGI-Skip, a framework that resolves this tension by non-linearly coupling Goal-Gradient Importance (GoGI) with Adaptive Dynamic Skipping (ADS). GoGI quantifies each token's functional contribution to answer correctness via gradient sensitivity. ADS leverages runtime entropy to dynamically modulate the GoGI threshold, preserving low-gradient tokens essential for structural coherence at high-uncertainty junctions. Trained on 7,472 MATH traces, our policy transfers zero-shot to AIME, GPQA, and GSM8K, reducing token volume by $>$45% and accelerating inference up to 2.0$\times$ without accuracy loss. These results suggest that thinking-optimal compression demands synergy between teleological goals and epistemic uncertainty.
Authors: Makoto Yamada, Kian Ming A. Chai, Ayoub Rhim, Satoki Ishikawa, Mohammad Sabokrou, Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai
Abstract: Representation learning is one of the key research topics in machine learning, and the framework of self-supervised learning (SSL) has revolutionized computer vision. However, these approaches have not yet fully leveraged insights from biological visual processing systems. In this paper, we introduce PhiNet v2, a novel architecture that processes temporal visual input (i.e., sequences of images) without relying on strong data augmentation, enabling it to learn robust visual representations in a manner similar to human visual processing. Our learning objective is derived from variational inference. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that PhiNet v2 achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art vision representation models, including RSP and CropMAE, while retaining the ability to learn effectively from sequential input without strong data augmentation. This work represents a step toward more biologically plausible computer vision systems that process visual information in a manner more aligned with human cognitive processes.
Authors: Zeynep Engin, David Hand
Abstract: As AI systems evolve from static tools to dynamic agents, traditional categorical governance frameworks -- based on fixed risk tiers, levels of autonomy, or human oversight models -- are increasingly insufficient on their own. Systems built on foundation models, self-supervised learning, and multi-agent architectures increasingly blur the boundaries that categories were designed to police. In this article, we make the case for dimensional governance: a framework that tracks how decision authority, process autonomy, and accountability (the 3As) distribute dynamically across human-AI relationships. A critical advantage of this approach is its ability to explicitly monitor system movement toward and across key governance thresholds, enabling pre-emptive adjustments before risks materialise. This dimensional approach provides the necessary foundation for more adaptive categorisation, enabling thresholds and classifications that can evolve with emerging capabilities. While categories remain essential for decision-making, building them upon dimensional foundations allows for context-specific adaptability and stakeholder-responsive governance that static approaches cannot achieve. We outline key dimensions, critical trust thresholds, and practical examples illustrating where rigid categorical frameworks fail -- and where a dimensional mindset could offer a more resilient and future-proof path forward for both governance and innovation at the frontier of artificial intelligence.
Authors: Zhongpai Gao, Benjamin Planche, Meng Zheng, Anwesa Choudhuri, Van Nguyen Nguyen, Terrence Chen, Ziyan Wu
Abstract: Photorealistic volumetric rendering of CT scans greatly benefits clinical workflows, yet neural approaches such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) require prohibitive per-scan optimization (hours for NeRF, about 30 minutes for 3DGS), making them impractical in clinical settings. We propose Render-FM, a feedforward model that eliminates this bottleneck by directly regressing 6D Gaussian Splatting (6DGS) parameters from a CT volume in a single 2.8-second forward pass, a 500x speedup over per-scan optimization. To bridge the domain gap between natural scene reconstruction and medical volumetric rendering, we introduce Anatomy-Guided Priming (AGP), which incorporates segmentation masks and transfer functions as structural and appearance priors, information that existing Gaussian splatting methods overlook. Built on an nnU-Net-inspired 3D U-Net trained on diverse CT scans, Render-FM predicts per-voxel 6DGS parameters and supports immediate real-time rendering. Unlike per-scan methods, it generalizes to unseen anatomies, novel transfer functions, and enables compositional organ visualization with zero additional preparation time. Optional 89-second fine-tuning further improves quality, surpassing per-scan optimized baselines. Project page: https://gaozhongpai.github.io/renderfm/.
Authors: Raina Gao, Alyssa Jeong, Lang Xiong, Yicheng Fu, Sean O'Brien, Vasu Sharma, Kevin Zhu
Abstract: Sarcasm is a form of humor where expressions convey meanings opposite to their literal interpretations. Classifying and generating sarcasm using large language models is vital for interpreting human communication. Sarcasm poses challenges for computational models, due to its nuanced nature. We introduce Sarc7, a benchmark that classifies 7 types of sarcasm: self-deprecating, brooding, deadpan, polite, obnoxious, raging, and manic by annotating entries of the MUStARD dataset. Classification was evaluated using zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought (CoT), and a novel emotion-based prompting technique. We propose an emotion-based generation method developed by identifying key components of sarcasm-incongruity, shock value, and context dependency. Our classification experiments show that Gemini 2.5, using emotion-based prompting, outperforms other setups with an F1 score of 0.3664. Human evaluators preferred our emotion-based prompting, with 38.46% more successful generations than zero-shot prompting.
Authors: Kellie Yu Hui Sim, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Kenny Tsu Wei Choo
Abstract: Mental health is a growing global concern, prompting interest in AI-driven solutions to expand access to psychosocial support. \emph{Peer support}, grounded in lived experience, offers a valuable complement to professional care. However, variability in training, effectiveness, and definitions raises concerns about quality, consistency, and safety. Large Language Models (LLMs) present new opportunities to enhance peer support interactions, particularly in real-time, text-based interactions. We present and evaluate an AI-supported system with an LLM-simulated distressed client (\client{}), context-sensitive LLM-generated suggestions (\suggestions{}), and real-time emotion visualisations. 2 mixed-methods studies with 12 peer supporters and 6 mental health professionals (i.e., experts) examined the system's effectiveness and implications for practice. Both groups recognised its potential to enhance training and improve interaction quality. However, we found a key tension emerged: while peer supporters engaged meaningfully, experts consistently flagged critical issues in peer supporter responses, such as missed distress cues and premature advice-giving. This misalignment highlights potential limitations in current peer support training, especially in emotionally charged contexts where safety and fidelity to best practices are essential. Our findings underscore the need for standardised, psychologically grounded training, especially as peer support scales globally. They also demonstrate how LLM-supported systems can scaffold this development--if designed with care and guided by expert oversight. This work contributes to emerging conversations on responsible AI integration in mental health and the evolving role of LLMs in augmenting peer-delivered care.
Authors: Kellie Yu Hui Sim, Kenny Tsu Wei Choo
Abstract: Peer support plays a vital role in expanding access to mental health care by providing empathetic, community-based support outside formal clinical systems. As digital platforms increasingly mediate such support, the design and impact of these technologies remain under-examined, particularly in Asian contexts. This paper presents findings from an interview study with 20 peer supporters in Singapore, who operate across diverse online, offline, and hybrid environments. Through a thematic analysis, we unpack how participants start, conduct, and sustain peer support, highlighting their motivations, emotional labour, and the sociocultural dimensions shaping their practices. Building on this grounded understanding, we surface design directions for culturally responsive digital tools that scaffold rather than supplant relational care. Drawing insights from qualitative accounts, we offer a situated perspective on how AI might responsibly augment peer support. This research contributes to human-centred computing by articulating the lived realities of peer supporters and proposing design implications for trustworthy and context-sensitive AI in mental health.
Authors: Iago Alves Brito, Julia Soares Dollis, Fernanda Bufon Farber, Diogo Fernandes, Arlindo R. Galv\~ao Filho
Abstract: The development of robust hate speech detection systems remains limited by the lack of large-scale, fine-grained training data, especially for languages beyond English. Existing corpora typically rely on simplistic toxic and non-toxic labels, and the few that capture hate directed at specific minority groups lack the positive counterexamples required to distinguish genuine hate from mere discussion. In this work, we introduce ToxSyn-PT, the first Portuguese large-scale corpus explicitly designed for multi-label hate speech detection across nine protected minority groups, including the non-toxic counterexamples absent in all other public datasets. Generated via a controllable four-stage pipeline, ToxSyn contains discourse-type annotations to capture rhetorical strategies of toxic/non-toxic language, such as sarcasm, dehumanization, and cultural appreciation. Our experiments reveal a catastrophic, mutual generalization failure compared to existing datasets from social-media domains: models trained on social media struggle to generalize to minority-specific contexts, and vice-versa. This finding indicates they are distinct tasks and exposes summary metrics like Macro F1 can be unreliable indicators of true model behavior, as they completely mask model failure. We publicly release ToxSyn on HuggingFace to support reproducible research on synthetic data generation and benchmark progress in hate-speech detection for low- and mid-resource languages.
Authors: Anh Ho, Thanh Le-Cong, Bach Le, Christine Rizkallah
Abstract: [...] Since then, various APR approaches, especially those leveraging the power of large language models (LLMs), have been rapidly developed to fix general software bugs. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of these advanced techniques in the context of regression bugs remains largely unexplored. This gap motivates the need for an empirical study evaluating the effectiveness of modern APR techniques in fixing real-world regression bugs. In this work, we conduct an empirical study of APR techniques on regression bugs. To facilitate our study, we introduce RegressionBug4APR, a high-quality benchmark of Java and Python regression bugs integrated into a framework designed to facilitate APR research. The current benchmark includes 200 regression bugs collected from widely used real-world GitHub repositories. We begin by conducting an in-depth analysis of the benchmark, demonstrating its diversity and quality. Building on this foundation, we empirically evaluate the capabilities of APR to regression bugs by assessing both traditional APR tools and advanced LLM-based APR approaches. Our experimental results show that classical APR tools fail to repair any bugs, while LLM-based APR approaches exhibit promising potential. Motivated by these results, we investigate impact of incorporating bug-inducing change information into LLM-based APR approaches for fixing regression bugs. We further conduct an ablation study to disaggregate the contribution of each contextual element within the bug-inducing change information. Our results highlight that this context-aware enhancement significantly improves the performance of LLM-based APR, yielding 1.6x more successful repairs compared to using LLM-based APR without such context. Moreover, our findings are consistent across both Java and Python benchmarks, providing preliminary evidence for the generalizability of our findings.
Authors: Nadav Kunievsky, James A. Evans
Abstract: People judge interactions with large language models (LLMs) as successful when outputs match what they want, not what they type. Yet LLMs are trained to predict the next token solely from text input, not underlying intent. Because written language is an imperfect proxy for intent, and correlations between phrasing and desired outcomes can break down in training data, models that rely too heavily on surface cues may respond inconsistently to semantically equivalent prompts. This makes it essential to evaluate whether LLMs can reliably infer user intent-especially in high-stakes settings where robustness and generalization are critical. We introduce a formal framework for assessing intent comprehension in LLMs: whether a model demonstrates robust understanding of user intent by producing consistent outputs across semantically equivalent prompts while differentiating between prompts with distinct intents. Our evaluation approach is based on a variance decomposition of model responses into three components: variability due to user intent, user articulation, and model uncertainty. Models that understand what users want, and are not overly sensitive to textual cues, should attribute most output variance to intent differences, rather than articulation style. Applying this framework across diverse domains, we find that, within the five LLaMA and Gemma models we evaluate, larger models typically assign a greater share of variance to intent, indicating stronger comprehension of intent, although gains are uneven and often modest with increasing model size. These results motivate moving beyond accuracy-only benchmarks toward semantic diagnostics that directly assess whether models understand what users intend.
Authors: Zanyu Shi, Yang Wang, Pathum M. Weerawarna, Jie Zhang, Timothy I. Richardson, Yijie Wang, Kun Huang
Abstract: Explainable artificial intelligence approaches accelerate drug discovery by improving molecular representation learning, identifying key molecular structures, and rationalizing drug property prediction. However, developing end-to-end explainable models for target-specific structure-activity relationship modeling remains challenging because compound-protein interaction data are often limited for individual targets, and small changes in chemical substituents or local structural motifs can cause large differences in molecular properties. Therefore, effectively leveraging structural and property information to identify key moieties associated with compound-protein affinity is essential. We propose a graph neural network (GNN) framework that uses property and structural information from activity-cliff molecule pairs targeting specific proteins to predict compound-protein affinity, measured by half-maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50), and explain property differences. To improve explainability, we trained GNNs with structure-aware loss functions using group lasso and sparse group lasso regularization, which prune and highlight molecular subgraphs relevant to activity differences. We applied this framework to activity-cliff data from molecules targeting six tyrosine-protein kinases across the Src, Abl, and Tec families, as well as anaplastic lymphoma kinase. Integrating common- and uncommon-node information with sparse group lasso improved target-specific molecular property prediction, producing lower root mean square errors and higher Pearson correlation coefficients. Regularization also enhanced GNN feature attribution by improving graph-level global direction scores and atom-level coloring accuracy. These results support more interpretable drug discovery pipelines, particularly for identifying critical molecular substructures during lead optimization.
Authors: Berkant Turan, Suhrab Asadulla, David Steinmann, Kristian Kersting, Wolfgang Stammer, Sebastian Pokutta
Abstract: While Prover-Verifier Games (PVGs) offer a promising path toward verifiability in nonlinear classification models, they have not yet been applied to complex inputs such as high-dimensional images. Conversely, expressive concept encodings effectively allow to translate such data into interpretable concepts but are often utilised in the context of low-capacity linear predictors. In this work, we push towards real-world verifiability by combining the strengths of both approaches. We introduce Neural Concept Verifier (NCV), a unified framework combining PVGs for formal verifiability with concept encodings to handle complex, high-dimensional inputs in an interpretable way. NCV achieves this by utilizing recent minimally supervised concept discovery models to extract structured concept encodings from raw inputs. A prover then selects a subset of these encodings, which a verifier, implemented as a nonlinear predictor, uses exclusively for decision-making. Our evaluations show that NCV outperforms classic concept-based models and pixel-based PVG classifier baselines on high-dimensional, logically complex datasets and helps mitigate shortcut behavior. Overall, we demonstrate NCV as a promising step toward concept-level, verifiable AI.
Authors: Wenxuan Zhou, Shujian Zhang, Brice Magdalou, John Lambert, Ehsan Amid, Richard Nock, Andrew Hard
Abstract: Normative theories allow one to elicit key parts of a ML algorithm from first principles, which is crucial at a time of championed scrutiny for ML work. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) cleverly bypasses reward modeling by making an explicit link with a specific normative model of human choice. Our paper elevates this connection to the full generality of DPO's normative framework. Getting there requires reworking human choice theory's textbook path for a better RLHF/ML fit. It elevates the connection to a remarkably broad viewpoint on preference optimization, considering the current panorama of DPO follow-ups. It also unveils unexpected riches for ML, chief among which the support for non-convex losses, the fact that any compliant ML analytical choice can be embedded with any human choice model, and a normative framework's umbrella wide enough to safeguard DPO's extensions (margins, length correction, ...). A toy experiment ``far away'' from the DPO crowd is given.
Authors: Wenbo Cui, Chengyang Zhao, Yuhui Chen, Haoran Li, Zhizheng Zhang, Dongbin Zhao, He Wang
Abstract: The spatial information inherent in 3D point clouds is crucial for robotic manipulation. However, existing 3D pre-training methods face a fundamental trade-off: Masked Autoencoding (MAE) excels at capturing spatial-geometric features but lacks semantics, whereas contrastive learning, while able to distill semantics from 2D foundation models, is ill-suited for the fine-grained details required for manipulation tasks. To address these challenges, we propose CLAR, a novel 3D pre-training framework that synergizes global understanding with fine-grained local alignment. Our framework unifies MAE with global cross-modal contrastive learning to integrate robust spatial awareness with rich semantic understanding. To enhance its focus on fine-grained details, at the local level, we introduce an adaptive alignment mechanism that leverages deformable attention to force precise correspondences between local 3D geometry and 2D visual features, thereby overcoming the limitations of conventional global alignment in manipulation tasks. Extensive experiments in simulation and the real world demonstrate that CLAR achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming existing methods in visuomotor policy learning.
Authors: Lifeng Chen, Jiner Wang, Zihao Pan, Beier Zhu, Xiaofeng Yang, Chi Zhang
Abstract: Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) generation have led to impressive visual results. However, these models still face significant challenges when handling complex prompt, particularly those involving multiple subjects with distinct attributes. Inspired by the human drawing process, which first outlines the composition and then incrementally adds details, we propose Detail++, a training-free framework that introduces a novel Progressive Detail Injection (PDI) strategy to address this limitation. Specifically, we decompose a complex prompt into a sequence of simplified sub-prompts, guiding the generation process in stages. This staged generation leverages the inherent layout-controlling capacity of self-attention to first ensure global composition, followed by precise refinement. To achieve accurate binding between attributes and corresponding subjects, we exploit cross-attention mechanisms and further introduce a Centroid Alignment Loss at test time to reduce binding noise and enhance attribute consistency. Extensive experiments on T2I-CompBench and a newly constructed style composition benchmark demonstrate that Detail++ significantly outperforms existing methods, particularly in scenarios involving multiple objects and complex stylistic conditions.
Authors: Zhongzheng Yuan, Lianshuai Guo, Xunkai Li, Yinlin Zhu, Wenyu Wang, Meixia Qu
Abstract: Federated Graph Learning (FGL) is a distributed learning paradigm that enables collaborative training over large-scale subgraphs located on multiple local systems. However, most existing FGL approaches rely on synchronous communication, which leads to inefficiencies and is often impractical in real-world deployments. Meanwhile, current asynchronous federated learning (AFL) methods are primarily designed for conventional tasks such as image classification and natural language processing, consequently failing to account for the unique topological properties of graph data. Directly applying these methods to graph learning frequently results in semantic drift and representational inconsistency within the global model. To address these challenges, we propose FedSA-GCL, a semi-asynchronous federated framework that leverages both inter-client label distribution divergence and graph topological characteristics through a novel ClusterCast mechanism for efficient training. We evaluate FedSA-GCL on multiple real-world graph datasets using the Louvain and Metis algorithms and conduct comparative analysis against 10 baselines. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior robustness and outstanding efficiency, outperforming the baselines by an average margin of 1.9% with Louvain and 3.0% with Metis.
Authors: Ren Zhuang
Abstract: Human intelligence scales through cumulative cultural evolution (CCE), a ratchet process in which innovations are retained against entropic drift. Large language model training, by contrast, still depends primarily on static corpora and parameter growth, leaving little room for endogenous accumulation through interaction. We present POLIS (Population Orchestrated Learning and Inference Society), a framework in which heterogeneous agents generate solutions, verify one another's outputs, retain validated artifacts in shared cultural memory, and internalize them through parameter updates. On mathematical reasoning benchmarks, populations of 1--4B-parameter models achieved average gains of 8.8--18.9 points over base models and narrowed the gap to 70B+ monoliths. Mechanistic ablations identify peer verification as the main ratchet operator and show that internalization sustains accumulation across rounds, providing computational evidence that epistemic vigilance organizes durable knowledge growth. These results position structured social interaction as a scaling lever orthogonal to parameter count.
Authors: Hyeonseok Moon, Heuiseok Lim
Abstract: Recent reports suggest that LLMs can handle increasingly long contexts. However, many existing benchmarks for context understanding embed substantial query-irrelevant content, which shifts evaluation toward retrieving relevant snippets rather than fully integrating all provided information. Under this setting, we view that current benchmarks can overestimate true context-understanding ability of LLMs. In particular, we demonstrate that when the context consists entirely of query-relevant text, even advanced models such as GPT-4o fail to reliably integrate inputs as short as 200 tokens. To evaluate this capability more rigorously, we introduce NeedleChain, a benchmark designed to test whether models can faithfully incorporate all given evidence. NeedleChain includes three variants that differ in the required order of comprehension, along with a parallel benchmark based on the needle-in-a-haystack(NIAH) paradigm. By comparing these variants, NeedleChain enables a more comprehensive assessment of context understanding. We further propose a training-free strategy that encourages models to reflect all available information, ROPE contraction, highlighting the importance of full-context integration and pointing to new directions for improving reliable reasoning over context.
Authors: Dingwei Zhu, Shihan Dou, Zhiheng Xi, Senjie Jin, Guoqiang Zhang, Jiazheng Zhang, Junjie Ye, Mingxu Chai, Enyu Zhou, Ming Zhang, Yuhui Wang, Caishuang Huang, Chenhao Huang, Yunke Zhang, Yuran Wang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-world environments often suffers from ambiguous or incomplete reward supervision, which undermines policy stability and generalization. Such noise may cause models to ignore key information or even collapse in advantage estimation. We find that a strong value model is essential for absorbing unstable signals and producing reliable advantages, offering denser and more robust supervision than the reward model. To better optimize noisy supervision, we propose VRPO, a framework that enhances value modeling for robust RL in LLM post-training. VRPO integrates (1) auxiliary losses guided by entropy and perplexity from a frozen language model, and (2) a variational information bottleneck, enabling the value model to filter noise and capture key words. This design allows the value model to correct noise rewards and generate more reliable advantage estimates, transforming it from a passive predictor into an active noise regulator. Experiments on multi-turn dialogue, math reasoning, and science QA with both rule-based and model-based rewards show that VRPO consistently outperforms baselines such as PPO and GRPO. Our work highlight the central role of the value model in Robust RL and provide a principled and practical approach to policy optimization under noisy supervision.
Authors: Hongxin Ding, Baixiang Huang, Yue Fang, Weibin Liao, Xinke Jiang, Jinyang Zhang, Yinghao Zhu, Zheng Li, Liantao Ma, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang
Abstract: Interactive medical questioning is essential in clinical consultations, where physicians must actively gather necessary patient information. Yet existing medical Large Language Models (LLMs) predominantly follow a reactive paradigm, risking diagnostic errors by answering before seeking sufficient details. To bridge this gap, we propose ProMed, a reinforcement learning framework that transitions LLMs toward a proactive paradigm, enabling them to ask clinically valuable questions before decision-making. Central to ProMed is the Shapley Information Gain (SIG) reward, which quantifies a question's clinical utility as the amount of newly acquired information, while considering its contextual importance via Shapley values. We integrate SIG into a two-stage training pipeline: (1) SIG-Guided Model Initialization uses Monte Carlo Tree Search to construct high-reward interaction trajectories for supervision, and (2) SIG-Augmented Policy Optimization, with a novel SIG-guided Reward Distribution Mechanism that prioritizes informative questions for fine-grained optimization. Experiments on partial-information medical benchmarks show that ProMed significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 6.29% on average and delivers a 54.45% gain over the reactive paradigm, and generalizes robustly to out-of-domain cases. Our codes are available at https://github.com/hxxding/ProMed.
Authors: Yeji Park, Minyoung Lee, Sanghyuk Chun, Junsuk Choe
Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit strong performance on single-image tasks. However, their performance degrades significantly when handling multi-image inputs. While this degradation has been observed in prior work, its nature remains poorly understood. We empirically observe visual elements from different images become entangled in the model's representations and responses. We refer to this phenomenon as cross-image information leakage. To address this issue, we propose FOCUS, a training-free and architecture-agnostic method. FOCUS masks all but one image with random noise, guiding the model to focus on the single clean image. This process is applied across the target images to obtain logits under partially masked contexts. These logits are aggregated and then refined using a noise-only reference input, which suppresses the leakage and yields more accurate outputs. FOCUS consistently improves performance on diverse multi-image benchmarks. We further show that FOCUS generalizes to video understanding, extending its applicability beyond static multi-image inputs. This demonstrates that FOCUS offers a general solution for enhancing multi-image reasoning without additional training or architectural modifications.
Authors: Akshay K. Jagadish, Mirko Thalmann, Julian Coda-Forno, Marcel Binz, Eric Schulz
Abstract: Human cognition is profoundly shaped by the environments in which it unfolds. Yet, it remains an open question whether learning and decision making can be explained as a principled adaptation to the statistical structure of real-world tasks. We introduce ecologically rational analysis, a computational framework that unifies the normative foundations of rational analysis with ecological grounding. Leveraging large language models to generate ecologically valid cognitive tasks at scale, and using meta-learning to derive rational models optimized for these environments, we develop a new class of learning algorithms: Ecologically Rational Meta-learned Inference (ERMI). ERMI internalizes the statistical regularities of naturalistic problem spaces and adapts flexibly to novel situations, without requiring hand-crafted heuristics or explicit parameter updates. We show that ERMI captures human behavior across 15 experiments spanning function learning, category learning, and decision making, outperforming several established cognitive models in trial-by-trial prediction. Our results suggest that much of human cognition may reflect adaptive alignment to the ecological structure of the problems we encounter in everyday life.
Authors: Shuowei Ma, Junyu Liu
Abstract: Interfacing quantum and classical processors is an important subroutine in full-stack quantum algorithms. The so-called ``classical shadow'' method efficiently extracts essential classical information from quantum states, enabling the prediction of many properties of a quantum system from only a few measurements. However, for a small number of highly non-local observables, or when classical post-processing power is limited, the classical shadow method is not always the most efficient choice. Here, we address this issue quantitatively by performing a full-stack resource analysis that compares classical shadows with direct quantum measurement. Under certain assumptions, our analysis illustrates an efficiency frontier between classical shadows and direct quantum measurement in the information-extraction stage. For observables expressed as linear combinations of Pauli matrices, the classical shadow method outperforms direct measurement when the number of observables is large and the Pauli weight is small. For observables in the form of large Hermitian sparse matrices, the classical shadow method shows an advantage when the number of observables, the sparsity of the matrix, and the number of qubits fall within a certain range. The key parameters influencing this behavior include the number of qubits $n$, observables $M$, sparsity $k$, Pauli weight $w$, accuracy requirement $\epsilon$, and failure tolerance $\delta$. We also compare the resource consumption of the two methods on different types of quantum computers and identify break-even points where the classical shadow method becomes more efficient, which vary depending on the hardware. This paper opens a new avenue for quantitatively designing optimal strategies for hybrid quantum-classical tomography and provides practical insights for selecting the most suitable quantum measurement approach in real-world applications.
Authors: Maysam Behmanesh, Erkan Turan, Maks Ovsjanikov
Abstract: Graph alignment, the problem of identifying corresponding nodes across multiple graphs, is fundamental to numerous applications. Most existing unsupervised methods embed node features into latent representations to enable cross-graph comparison without ground-truth correspondences. However, these methods suffer from two critical limitations: the degradation of node distinctiveness due to oversmoothing in GNN-based embeddings, and the misalignment of latent spaces across graphs caused by structural noise, feature heterogeneity, and training instability, ultimately leading to unreliable node correspondences. We propose a novel framework employing a dual-pass encoder to inject high-frequency discriminability into node features, paired with a geometry-aware functional map module that learns bijective and isometric transformations to align latent spaces while acting as a low-pass filter on correspondences, enforcing smoothness and robustness as a structural prior in map space. Extensive experiments on graph benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing unsupervised alignment baselines, exhibiting superior robustness to structural inconsistencies and challenging alignment scenarios. The implementation is available at https://github.com/maysambehmanesh/GADL.
Authors: Sara Papi, Dennis Fucci, Marco Gaido, Matteo Negri, Luisa Bentivogli
Abstract: Cross-attention is a core mechanism in encoder-decoder architectures, widespread in many fields, including speech-to-text (S2T) processing. Its scores have been repurposed for various downstream applications--such as timestamp estimation and audio-text alignment--under the assumption that they reflect the dependencies between input speech representation and the generated text. While the explanatory nature of attention mechanisms has been widely debated in the broader NLP literature, this assumption remains largely unexplored within the speech domain. To address this gap, we assess the explanatory power of cross-attention in S2T models by comparing its scores to input saliency maps derived from feature attribution. Our analysis spans monolingual and multilingual, single-task and multi-task models at multiple scales, and shows that attention scores moderately to strongly align with saliency-based explanations, particularly when aggregated across heads and layers. However, it also shows that cross-attention captures only about 50% of the input relevance and, in the best case, only partially reflects how the decoder attends to the encoder's representations--accounting for just 52-75% of the saliency. These findings uncover fundamental limitations in interpreting cross-attention as an explanatory proxy, suggesting that it offers an informative yet incomplete view of the factors driving predictions in S2T models.
Authors: Duc-Tuan Truong, Tianchi Liu, Ruijie Tao, Junjie Li, Kong Aik Lee, Eng Siong Chng
Abstract: Recent work shows that one-class learning can detect unseen deepfake attacks by modeling a compact distribution of bona fide speech around a single centroid. However, the single-centroid assumption can oversimplify the bona fide speech representation and overlook useful cues, such as speech quality, which reflects the naturalness of the speech. Speech quality can be easily obtained using existing speech quality assessment models that estimate it through Mean Opinion Score. In this paper, we propose QAMO: Quality-Aware Multi-Centroid One-Class Learning for speech deepfake detection. QAMO extends conventional one-class learning by introducing multiple quality-aware centroids. In QAMO, each centroid is optimized to represent a distinct speech quality subspaces, enabling better modeling of intra-class variability in bona fide speech. In addition, QAMO supports a multi-centroid ensemble scoring strategy, which improves decision thresholding and reduces the need for quality labels during inference. With two centroids to represent high- and low-quality speech, our proposed QAMO achieves an equal error rate of 5.09% in In-the-Wild dataset, outperforming previous one-class and quality-aware systems.
Authors: Sadia Asif, Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri
Abstract: Large language models deployed in sensitive applications increasingly require the ability to unlearn specific knowledge, such as user requests, copyrighted materials, or outdated information, without retraining from scratch to ensure regulatory compliance, user privacy, and safety. This task, known as machine unlearning, aims to remove the influence of targeted data (forgetting) while maintaining performance on the remaining data (retention). A common approach is to formulate this as a multi-objective problem and reduce it to a single-objective problem via scalarization, where forgetting and retention losses are combined using a weighted sum. However, this often results in unstable training dynamics and degraded model utility due to conflicting gradient directions. To address these challenges, we propose OFMU, a penalty-based bi-level optimization framework that explicitly prioritizes forgetting while preserving retention through a hierarchical structure. Our method enforces forgetting via an inner maximization step that incorporates a similarity-aware penalty to decorrelate the gradients of the forget and retention objectives, and restores utility through an outer minimization step. To ensure scalability, we develop a two-loop algorithm with provable convergence guarantees under both convex and non-convex regimes. We further provide a rigorous theoretical analysis of convergence rates and show that our approach achieves better trade-offs between forgetting efficacy and model utility compared to prior methods. Extensive experiments across vision and language benchmarks demonstrate that OFMU consistently outperforms existing unlearning methods in both forgetting efficacy and retained utility.
Authors: Zhen-Hao Xie, Yan Wang, Lan Li, Han-Jia Ye, De-Chuan Zhan, Da-Wei Zhou
Abstract: Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) aims to endow models with the ability to continuously adapt to evolving data streams. Recent advances in pre-trained vision-language models (e.g., CLIP) provide a powerful foundation for this task. However, existing approaches often rely on simplistic templates, such as "a photo of a [CLASS]", which overlook the hierarchical nature of visual concepts. For example, recognizing "cat" versus "car" depends on coarse-grained cues, while distinguishing "cat" from "lion" requires fine-grained details. Similarly, the current feature mapping in CLIP relies solely on the representation from the last layer, neglecting the hierarchical information contained in earlier layers. In this work, we introduce HiErarchical Representation MAtchiNg (HERMAN) for CLIP-based CIL. Our approach leverages LLMs to recursively generate discriminative textual descriptors, thereby augmenting the semantic space with explicit hierarchical cues. These descriptors are matched to different levels of the semantic hierarchy and adaptively routed based on task-specific requirements, enabling precise discrimination while alleviating catastrophic forgetting in incremental tasks. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Authors: Shubhang Bhatnagar, Andy Xu, Kar-Han Tan, Narendra Ahuja
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) with multimodal capabilities have revolutionized vision-language tasks, but their deployment often requires huge memory and computational resources. Post-training quantization (PTQ) has successfully compressed language models to as low as 1-bit precision, its effectiveness for multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) remains unexplored. In this paper, we present the first method for ultra-low-bit (<4-bit) quantization of MLLMs. Our analysis reveals that multimodal tokens and intermediate layer activations produced by them exhibit significantly higher entropy compared to text tokens, indicating greater functional complexity that makes MLLMs less tolerant to ultra-low bit quantization. However, this entropy varies significantly across layers, with some layers producing lower-entropy activation distributions that we empirically show can better tolerate ultra-low bit quantization. Existing PTQ methods optimize weight quantization within each layer but apply the same target precision uniformly, ignoring this variation in complexity across layers. Building on this insight, we propose LUQ: Layerwise Ultra-Low Bit Quantization, which characterizes each transformer layer's functional complexity via its output activation entropy and selectively applies ultra-low bit quantization to layers encoding simpler, more compressible functions. We also show that multimodal calibration (image and text tokens) boosts VQA performance in the ultra-low bit regime. Evaluated on LLaVA-1.5 and Qwen-2.5-VL across 9 VQA benchmarks, LUQ models use 40% and 31% less memory than their 4-bit counterparts while exhibiting less than 10% degradation on MME.
Authors: Kaisen Yang, Tinghe Zhang, Rushi Shah, Kaicheng Yang, Qinwei Ma, Dianbo Liu, Alex Lamb
Abstract: Many LLMs plan before they act, yet planning and execution are often still entangled in one long generation trace, enforced only through prompts, or split across separate components. We argue that these two stages call for different computation: planning benefits from diversity and breadth, whereas execution demands precision and faithful adherence to a chosen strategy. Treating them as a single undifferentiated chain wastes tokens on routine derivation and makes it costly to explore alternative strategies at test time. We present the \textbf{Explore-Execute Chain (E\textsuperscript{2}C)}, which keeps both stages in one model but separates them structurally: a stochastic \textit{Exploration} phase drafts a concise high-level plan, and a deterministic \textit{Execution} phase carries it out. Causal SFT and RL train this split so that exploration stays informative and execution remains plan-faithful. Once plans are short yet decisive, extra inference compute can be directed to exploration rather than to repeatedly decoding full solutions. On AIME'2024 at $K{=}32$, \textbf{E\textsuperscript{2}C-ReAct Loop} reaches 53.3\% accuracy with only 12.4k tokens, outperforming Tree-of-Thoughts ($N{=}32$: 50.0\%, 71.3k). The same structure also supports lightweight domain adaptation: \textbf{Exploration-Focused SFT (EF-SFT)} updates only the planning phase, uses 3.5\% of the tokens required by standard SFT, and improves medical benchmark accuracy by up to 14.5\%.
Authors: Rongguang Ye, Ming Tang, Edith C. H. Ngai
Abstract: As increasingly large pre-trained models are released, deploying them on edge devices for privacy-preserving applications requires effective compression. Recent works combine quantization with the fine-tuning of high-precision LoRA adapters, which can substantially reduce model size while mitigating the accuracy loss from quantization. However, edge devices have inherently heterogeneous capabilities, while performing configuration-wise fine-tuning for every quantization setting is computationally prohibitive. In this paper, we propose CoA-LoRA, a method that dynamically adjusts the LoRA adapter to arbitrary quantization configurations (i.e., the per-layer bit-width choices of a pre-trained model) without requiring repeated fine-tuning. This is accomplished via a configuration-aware model that maps each configuration to its low-rank adjustments. The effectiveness of this model critically depends on the training configuration set, a collection of configurations chosen to cover different total bit-width budgets. However, constructing a high-quality configuration set is non-trivial. We therefore design a Pareto-based configuration search that iteratively optimizes the training configuration set, yielding more precise low-rank adjustments. Our experiments demonstrate that, unlike the state-of-the-art methods that require fine-tuning a separate LoRA adapter for each configuration, CoA-LoRA incurs no additional time cost while achieving comparable or even superior performance to those methods.
Authors: Sung-Yeon Park, Adam Lee, Juanwu Lu, Can Cui, Luyang Jiang, Rohit Gupta, Kyungtae Han, Ahmadreza Moradipari, Ziran Wang
Abstract: Driving scene manipulation using real-world sensor data has emerged as a promising alternative to traditional driving simulators. Despite advances in language control and neural scene representations, existing methods treat grounding, editing, and simulation as loosely connected stages, relying on heuristic object localization, manual guidance, and single-agent validation, thereby constraining semantic expressiveness and hindering scalable, reactive scenario generation. We introduce SIMSplat, a driving scene editor built on scene-graph-based 4D Gaussian Splatting augmented with language-aligned features. By embedding appearance, motion, and location semantics directly into Gaussian scene-graph nodes, SIMSplat makes reconstructed scenes queryable through free-form natural language, bridging language understanding to object-level editing and multi-agent simulation within a single framework. Building on this language-grounded scene graph, SIMSplat supports diverse edits including fine-grained pedestrian manipulation, while a multi-agent path refinement module propagates changes across all agents to ensure reactive, physically plausible simulations. The pipeline further integrates with Vision-Language Models for automated scenario mining. Experiments show that SIMSplat more than doubles baseline grounding accuracy, achieves the highest task completion rate, and produces the lowest failure rates across diverse driving scenarios.
Authors: Derek Shi, Ruben Glatt, Christine Klymko, Shubham Mohole, Hongjun Choi, Shashank Kushwaha, Sam Sakla, Felipe Leno da Silva
Abstract: Recent advances in large video-language models (VLMs) rely on extensive fine-tuning techniques that strengthen alignment between textual and visual comprehension. Leading pipelines typically pair supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with reinforcement learning from preference data to enhance video comprehension. However, as VLMs scale in parameter size, so does the cost of gathering enough human feedback. To make fine-tuning more cost-effective, recent frameworks explore reinforcement learning with AI feedback (RLAIF), which replace human preference with AI as a judge. Current RLAIF frameworks rely on a specialized reward model trained with video narratives to create calibrated scalar rewards -- an expensive and restrictive pipeline. We propose Oracle-RLAIF, a novel framework that replaces the trained reward model with a more general Oracle ranker which acts as a drop-in model ranking candidate model responses rather than scoring them. Alongside Oracle-RLAIF, we introduce $GRPO_{rank}$, a novel rank-based loss function based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) that directly optimizes ordinal feedback with rank-aware advantages. Empirically, we demonstrate that Oracle-RLAIF consistently outperforms leading VLMs using existing fine-tuning methods when evaluated across various video comprehension benchmarks. Oracle-RLAIF paves the path to creating flexible and data-efficient frameworks for aligning large multi-modal video models with reinforcement learning from rank rather than score.
Authors: Johanna Sommer, John Rachwan, Nils Fleischmann, Stephan G\"unnemann, Bertrand Charpentier
Abstract: Flow matching models generate high-fidelity molecular geometries but incur significant computational costs during inference, requiring hundreds of network evaluations. This inference overhead becomes the primary bottleneck when such models are employed in practice to sample large numbers of molecular candidates. This work discusses a training-free caching strategy that accelerates molecular geometry generation by predicting intermediate hidden states across solver steps. The proposed method operates directly on the SE(3)-equivariant backbone, is compatible with pretrained models, and is orthogonal to existing training-based accelerations and system-level optimizations. Experiments on the GEOM-Drugs dataset demonstrate that caching achieves a twofold reduction in wall-clock inference time at matched sample quality and a speedup of up to 3x compared to the base model with minimal sample quality degradation. Because these gains compound with other optimizations, applying caching alongside other general, lossless optimizations yield as much as a 7x speedup.
Authors: Mark Steyvers, Catarina Belem, Padhraic Smyth
Abstract: Background. Large language models are increasingly used in settings where confident but incorrect answers can mislead users. Reliable uncertainty communication requires a form of metacognition: monitoring when one's own answers are likely to be correct. Yet models' stated confidence is often poorly aligned with answer correctness. We test whether supervised fine-tuning improves uncertainty communication and whether gains transfer across domains and task formats. Methods. We fine-tuned two models on general knowledge, mathematics, and open-ended trivia questions. We evaluated single-question confidence estimation, in which the model reports numeric confidence for one answer, and pairwise confidence comparison, in which it chooses which of two questions it is more likely to answer correctly. We tested held-out questions from training domains and new medical, legal, and truthfulness benchmarks. We assessed calibration, discrimination, and answer accuracy before and after fine-tuning. Results. Here we show that fine-tuning improves alignment between stated confidence and observed accuracy and increases the model's ability to assign higher confidence to correct than to incorrect answers. Gains occur within training domains and, to a lesser extent, in new domains. However, single-task training does not reliably transfer between single-question confidence estimation and pairwise confidence comparison. Multitask fine-tuning produces broader gains in the models and tasks studied here. Conclusions. Uncertainty communication in large language models is trainable, but transfer across metacognitive tasks is limited. Joint training on multiple confidence tasks may support broader generalization, although further tests across model families and metacognitive tasks are needed.
Authors: Fabian Paischer, Gianluca Galletti, William Hornsby, Paul Setinek, Lorenzo Zanisi, Naomi Carey, Stanislas Pamela, Johannes Brandstetter
Abstract: Nuclear fusion plays a pivotal role in the quest for reliable and sustainable energy production. A major roadblock to viable fusion power is understanding plasma turbulence, which significantly impairs plasma confinement, and is vital for next-generation reactor design. Plasma turbulence is governed by the nonlinear gyrokinetic equation, which evolves a 5D distribution function over time. Due to its high computational cost, reduced-order models are often employed in practice to approximate turbulent transport of energy. However, they omit nonlinear effects unique to the full 5D dynamics. To tackle this, we introduce GyroSwin, the first scalable 5D neural surrogate that can model 5D nonlinear gyrokinetic simulations, thereby capturing the physical phenomena neglected by reduced models, while providing accurate estimates of turbulent heat transport. GyroSwin (i) extends hierarchical Vision Transformers to 5D, (ii) introduces cross-attention and integration modules for latent 3D$\leftrightarrow$5D interactions between electrostatic potential fields and the distribution function, and (iii) performs channelwise mode separation inspired by nonlinear physics. We demonstrate that GyroSwin outperforms widely used reduced numerics on heat flux prediction, captures the turbulent energy cascade, and reduces the cost of fully resolved nonlinear gyrokinetics by three orders of magnitude while remaining physically verifiable. GyroSwin shows promising scaling laws, tested up to one billion parameters, paving the way for scalable neural surrogates for gyrokinetic simulations of plasma turbulence.
Authors: Shramay Palta, Peter Rankel, Sarah Wiegreffe, Rachel Rudinger
Abstract: We investigate the degree to which human (and LLM) plausibility judgments of multiple-choice commonsense benchmark answers are subject to influence by (im)plausibility arguments for or against an answer, in particular, using rationales generated by LLMs. We collect 3,000 plausibility judgments from humans and another 13,600 judgments from LLMs. Overall, we observe increases and decreases in mean human plausibility ratings in the presence of LLM-generated PRO and CON rationales, respectively, suggesting that, on the whole, human judges find these rationales convincing. Experiments with LLMs reveal similar patterns of influence. Our findings demonstrate a novel use of LLMs for studying aspects of human cognition, while also raising practical concerns that, even in domains where humans are ``experts'' (i.e., common sense), LLMs have the potential to exert considerable influence on people's beliefs.
Authors: Hung Phan, Son Vu, Tuan Dinh, Nesreen Ahmed, Ali Payani, Ali Jannesari
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance on code translation between widely used programming languages. However, translation becomes much less reliable for domain-specific code, where correctness depends on framework-specific APIs and execution semantics. One example is translating deep-learning code from PyTorch to JAX, where LLM outputs often contain subtle bugs or non-idiomatic usage that prevents execution or changes behavior. Prior work suggests that curated bug-fix data from LLM-generated code can help improve code generation quality, but such resources are still limited for PyTorch-to-JAX translation. In this work, we introduce T2J, a benchmark of LLM translation bugs paired with developer-written fixes for PyTorch-to-JAX code. We start from 20 kernels in the TorchLeet dataset, translate them to JAX using the weak LLM gpt-4o-mini, and hire software developers to debug and repair the generated JAX implementations. We then use T2J to improve PyTorch-to-JAX translation for the weak LLM gpt-4o-mini via in-context learning. Our evaluation shows that using T2J yields up to 20% improvement of our proposed metric T2J-CodeTrans-Score.
Authors: Aadithya Srikanth, Mudit Gaur, Vaneet Aggarwal
Abstract: Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable performance in generating high-dimensional samples across domains such as vision, language, and the sciences. Although continuous-state diffusion models have been extensively studied both empirically and theoretically, discrete-state diffusion models, essential for applications involving text, sequences, and combinatorial structures, remain significantly less understood from a theoretical standpoint. In particular, all existing analyses of discrete-state models assume score estimation error bounds without studying sample complexity results. In this work, we present a principled theoretical framework for discrete-state diffusion, providing the first sample complexity bound of $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-2})$. Our structured decomposition of the score estimation error into statistical, approximation, optimization, and clipping components offers critical insights into how discrete-state models can be trained efficiently. This analysis addresses a fundamental gap in the literature and establishes the theoretical tractability and practical relevance of discrete-state diffusion models.
Authors: Parsa Abbasi, Stefan Heindorf
Abstract: Complex query answering (CQA) goes beyond the widely studied link prediction task by addressing more sophisticated queries that require multi-hop reasoning over incomplete knowledge graphs (KGs). Research on neural and neurosymbolic CQA methods is still an emerging field. Almost all of these methods can be regarded as black-box models, which may raise concerns about user trust. Although neurosymbolic approaches like CQD are slightly more interpretable, allowing intermediate results to be tracked, the importance of different parts of the query remains unexplained. In this paper, we propose CQD-SHAP, a novel framework that computes the contribution of each query part to the ranking of a specific answer. This contribution explains the value of leveraging a neural predictor that can infer new knowledge from an incomplete KG, rather than a symbolic approach relying solely on existing facts in the KG. CQD-SHAP is formulated based on Shapley values from cooperative game theory and satisfies all fundamental Shapley axioms. Automated evaluation of these explanations in terms of necessary and sufficient explanations, and comparisons with various baselines, show the consistent effectiveness of this approach across all studied datasets and query types.
Authors: Shivam Ratnakar, Sanjay Raghavendra
Abstract: Integration of Large Language Models with search/retrieval engines has become ubiquitous, yet these systems harbor a critical vulnerability that undermines their reliability. We present the first systematic investigation of "chameleon behavior" in LLMs: their alarming tendency to shift stances when presented with contradictory questions in multi-turn conversations (especially in search-enabled LLMs). Through our novel Chameleon Benchmark Dataset, comprising 17,770 carefully crafted question-answer pairs across 1,180 multi-turn conversations spanning 12 controversial domains, we expose fundamental flaws in state-of-the-art systems. We introduce two theoretically grounded metrics: the Chameleon Score (0-1) that quantifies stance instability, and Source Re-use Rate (0-1) that measures knowledge diversity. Our rigorous evaluation of Llama-4-Maverick, GPT-4o-mini, and Gemini-2.5-Flash reveals consistent failures: all models exhibit severe chameleon behavior (scores 0.391-0.511), with GPT-4o-mini showing the worst performance. Crucially, small across-temperature variance (less than 0.004) suggests the effect is not a sampling artifact. Our analysis uncovers the mechanism: strong correlations between source re-use rate and confidence (r=0.627) and stance changes (r=0.429) are statistically significant (p less than 0.05), indicating that limited knowledge diversity makes models pathologically deferential to query framing. These findings highlight the need for comprehensive consistency evaluation before deploying LLMs in healthcare, legal, and financial systems where maintaining coherent positions across interactions is critical for reliable decision support.
Authors: Pengxiang Cai, Zihao Gao, Wanchen Lian, Guocong Li, Jintai Chen
Abstract: Tabular prediction has long been dominated by gradient-boosted decision trees and specialized deep tabular models, while large language models (LLMs) remain difficult to make competitive despite their cross-task adaptability and transparent reasoning traces. We address this gap by incorporating tabular structural priors into LLM post-training. Specifically, we propose Permutation Relative Policy Optimization (PRPO), which operationalizes column-permutation invariance through label-preserving column permutations and two-level advantage estimation. This design converts sparse outcome rewards into denser and more stable optimization signals. Extensive experiments on 139 OpenML datasets show that our 8B model reaches a genuinely competitive regime against strong specialized tabular baselines. It achieves strong fully supervised performance, dominates zero-shot settings, and performs on par with 32-shot strong baselines. Moreover, it substantially outperforms much larger general-purpose and reasoning LLMs, including up to a 53.17% improvement over DeepSeek-R1 (685B). These results show that structural-prior RL post-training is an effective route for making LLMs competitive in tabular prediction.
Authors: Zesen Liu, Zhixiang Zhang, Yuchong Xie, Dongdong She
Abstract: Prompt compression is increasingly deployed in LLM agents to reduce latency and cost, but it also determines what the backend LLM ultimately sees. We show that, when trusted and untrusted inputs are compressed under a shared budget, this lossy transformation creates a new attack surface: by perturbing only untrusted inputs before compression, an adversary can cause the compressor to discard task-critical evidence or safety guardrails before inference. Unlike prompt injection, jailbreaks, or RAG poisoning, the attack target is the compressor rather than the backend LLM; the perturbation need not encode a meaningful instruction or survive compression. We formalize this vulnerability as adversarial information loss (AIL), the excess downstream distortion caused by adversarially steering a lossy compressor beyond benign compression alone. To exploit AIL, we present COMA, a transfer-based black-box attack that optimizes pre-compression perturbations using attacker-side surrogate compressors and backend LLMs. Across three tasks and six compressors, COMA achieves 0.71 average ASR, versus 0.21 for the strongest baseline, and transfers to two real-world agent case studies.
Authors: Minjoon Jung, Junbin Xiao, Junghyun Kim, Byoung-Tak Zhang, Angela Yao
Abstract: Do Video-LLMs have consistent temporal understanding when videos capture the same event from different viewpoints? To study this question, we introduce EgoExo-Con(sistency), a benchmark of synchronized egocentric and exocentric video pairs with human-refined queries that ensure all concepts are visible in both viewpoints. EgoExo-Con emphasizes two temporal understanding tasks: Temporal Verification and Temporal Grounding. It evaluates not only correctness but consistency across viewpoints. Our analysis reveals two critical limitations of existing Video-LLMs: (1) models often fail to maintain consistency, with results far worse than their single-view performances. (2) When naively finetuned with synchronized videos of both viewpoints, the models show improved consistency but often underperform those trained on a single view. For improvements, we propose View-GRPO, a novel reinforcement learning framework that effectively strengthens view-specific temporal reasoning while encouraging consistent comprehension across viewpoints. Our method demonstrates its superior temporal understanding capabilities, especially for improving cross-view consistency. All resources have been made available at https://minjoong507.github.io/projects/EgoExo-Con/
Authors: Sofie Helene Bruun, Dan Saattrup Smart
Abstract: We create high-quality datasets for LLM evaluation of logical reasoning skills across nine different languages, which have been manually checked by fluent speakers. The datasets consist of so-called zebra puzzles, and we analyse different ways of tuning the difficulty of the puzzles to fit modern LLMs. This includes the size of the puzzle (number of objects and number of clues), as well as a novel addition of red herring clues containing only irrelevant information. We show that presence of red herrings indeed makes the puzzles significantly harder for the models, and we find puzzle sizes 2x3 and 4x5 are sufficiently challenging for GPT-4o mini (a non-reasoning model) and o3-mini (a reasoning model), respectively. We analyse whether LLM performance of these are sensitive to the language, the cultural sensitivity of the puzzle theme, and the choice of clue types. These analyses are conducted with English and Danish, where we show that there is no significant difference for either of these three aspects, at least for the OpenAI models GPT-4o mini and o3-mini, chosen as representative non-reasoning and reasoning models, respectively. We publish the datasets for each of the nine languages for the identified sizes 2x3 and 4x5. We also publish the code used to generate the puzzles, which can be used to extend the benchmark into more languages.
Authors: Mohammad Karami, Mohammad Reza Nemati, Aidin Kazemi, Ali Mikaeili Barzili, Hamid Azadegan, Behzad Moshiri
Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) has shown great potential in medical imaging, particularly for brain tumor detection using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). However, the models remain vulnerable at inference time when they are trained collaboratively through Federated Learning (FL), an approach adopted to protect patient privacy. Adversarial attacks can subtly alter medical scans in ways invisible to the human eye yet powerful enough to mislead AI models, potentially causing serious misdiagnoses. Existing defenses often assume centralized data and struggle to cope with the decentralized and diverse nature of federated medical settings. In this work, we present MedFedPure, a personalized federated learning defense framework designed to protect diagnostic AI models at inference time without compromising privacy or accuracy. MedFedPure combines three key elements: (1) a personalized FL model that adapts to the unique data distribution of each institution; (2) a Masked Autoencoder (MAE) that detects suspicious inputs by exposing hidden perturbations; and (3) an adaptive diffusion-based purification module that selectively cleans only the flagged scans before classification. Together, these steps offer robust protection while preserving the integrity of normal, benign images. We evaluated MedFedPure on the Br35H brain MRI dataset. The results show a significant gain in adversarial robustness, improving performance from 49.50% to 87.33% under strong attacks, while maintaining a high clean accuracy of 97.67%. By operating locally and in real time during diagnosis, our framework provides a practical path to deploying secure, trustworthy, and privacy-preserving AI tools in clinical workflows. Index Terms: cancer, tumor detection, federated learning, masked autoencoder, diffusion, privacy
Authors: Trishala Jayesh Ahalpara
Abstract: We present Tell Me, a mental well-being system that leverages advances in large language models to provide accessible, context-aware support for users and researchers. The system integrates three components: (i) a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) assistant for personalized, knowledge-grounded dialogue; (ii) a synthetic client-therapist dialogue generator conditioned on client profiles to facilitate research on therapeutic language and data augmentation; and (iii) a Well-being AI crew, implemented with CrewAI, that produces weekly self-care plans and guided meditation audio. The system is designed as a reflective space for emotional processing rather than a substitute for professional therapy. It illustrates how conversational assistants can lower barriers to support, complement existing care, and broaden access to mental health resources. To address the shortage of confidential therapeutic data, we introduce synthetic client-therapist dialogue generation conditioned on client profiles. Finally, the planner demonstrates an innovative agentic workflow for dynamically adaptive, personalized self-care, bridging the limitations of static well-being tools. We describe the architecture, demonstrate its functionalities, and report evaluation of the RAG assistant in curated well-being scenarios using both automatic LLM-based judgments and a human-user study. This work highlights opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration between NLP researchers and mental health professionals to advance responsible innovation in human-AI interaction for well-being.
Authors: Yifan He, Haodong Zhang, Qiuheng Song, Lin Lei, Zhenxuan Zeng, Haoyang He, Hongyan Wu
Abstract: Distributed Fiber Optic Sensing (DFOS) has emerged as a promising technology for long-range and real-time perimeter security in critical infrastructure monitoring. However, DFOS signals collected from different field deployments often exhibit substantial distribution shifts caused by variations in fiber installation, structural coupling, and environmental noise. These deployment-dependent changes make reliable event recognition difficult in practical perimeter security systems, especially when labeled samples from new target sites are scarce or unavailable. To address these challenges, this paper proposes DUPLE, an intelligent cross-deployment recognition framework for fiber-optic perimeter security under label-scarce target deployments. DUPLE employs statistically guided meta-learning to enhance recognition robustness across unseen deployments. Specifically, a dual-domain multi-prototype learner jointly models temporal and frequency-domain evidence to capture intra-class variability under deployment shifts. A statistical guidance network estimates sample-specific domain reliability from raw signal statistics, while a query-aware aggregation mechanism adaptively selects relevant prototypes for each test sample. Extensive experiments on two real-world cross-deployment DFOS benchmarks demonstrate that DUPLE consistently outperforms representative traditional machine learning, deep learning, domain generalization, and meta-learning baselines. Ablation, few-shot, per-deployment, and efficiency analyses further verify the effectiveness and practicality of DUPLE for reliable DFOS-based perimeter security monitoring.
Authors: Taehoon Kim, Henry Gouk, Timothy Hospedales
Abstract: Test-time alignment (TTA) aims to adapt models to specific rewards during inference. However, existing methods tend to either under-optimise or over-optimise (reward hack) the target reward function. We propose Null-Text Test-Time Alignment (Null-TTA), which aligns diffusion models by optimising the unconditional embedding in classifier-free guidance, rather than manipulating latent or noise variables. Due to the structured semantic nature of the text embedding space, this ensures alignment occurs on a semantically coherent manifold and prevents reward hacking (exploiting non-semantic noise patterns to improve the reward). Since the unconditional embedding in classifier-free guidance serves as the anchor for the model's generative distribution, Null-TTA directly steers model's generative distribution towards the target reward rather than just adjusting the samples, even without updating model parameters. Thanks to these desirable properties, we show that Null-TTA achieves state-of-the-art target test-time alignment while maintaining strong cross-reward generalisation. This establishes semantic-space optimisation as an effective and principled novel paradigm for TTA.
Authors: Inkook Chun, Seungjae Lee, Michael S. Albergo, Saining Xie, Eric Vanden-Eijnden
Abstract: Diffusion- and flow-based policies deliver state-of-the-art performance on long-horizon robotic manipulation and imitation learning tasks. However, these controllers employ a fixed inference budget at every control step, regardless of task complexity, leading to computational inefficiency for simple subtasks while potentially underperforming on challenging ones. To address these issues, we introduce Difficulty-Aware Stochastic Interpolant Policy (DA-SIP), a framework that enables robotic controllers to adaptively adjust their integration horizon in real time based on task difficulty. Our approach employs a difficulty classifier that analyzes observations to dynamically select the step budget, the optimal solver variant, and ODE/SDE integration at each control cycle. DA-SIP builds upon the stochastic interpolant formulation to provide a unified framework that unlocks diverse training and inference configurations for diffusion- and flow-based policies. Through comprehensive benchmarks across diverse manipulation tasks, DA-SIP achieves 2.6-4.4x reduction in total computation time while maintaining task success rates comparable to fixed maximum-computation baselines. By implementing adaptive computation within this framework, DA-SIP transforms generative robot controllers into efficient, task-aware systems that intelligently allocate inference resources where they provide the greatest benefit.
Authors: Jingtian Yan, Shuai Zhou, He Jiang, Stephen F. Smith, Jiaoyang Li
Abstract: Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) studies how to coordinate multiple agents to reach their goals without collisions and underpins a range of large-scale robotic systems, including automated warehousing and manufacturing. Recent advances enable MAPF solvers to compute high-quality plans for hundreds of agents. However, these plans are generated using simplified robot models with discretized time and action spaces. When they are deployed in physical systems, heterogeneous robot dynamics, asynchronous interactions, communication delays, and other real-world factors can lead to substantial deviations from planned performance. We bridge the gap between discrete planning and real-world execution through ExecTimeNet, a learned world model of MAPF execution that predicts how a discrete MAPF solution will unfold on physical robots, mapping each discrete action to its realized execution state, including its wall-clock completion time and the kinodynamic state in which it ends. Building on this capability, we first propose REMAP, an execution-aware MAPF framework that integrates execution-time estimation into planning, guiding the search toward MAPF solutions with improved execution performance. We also introduce ESADG, a post-planning optimization procedure that optimizes the execution schedule of a given MAPF solution while preserving path feasibility. We evaluate proposed frameworks in high-fidelity simulation with up to 300 agents and on physical robots. In simulation, ExecTimeNet predicts the execution state accurately and transfers to unseen maps and agent counts. Across simulation benchmarks spanning diverse map topologies, REMAP reduces delays by up to 21% over baselines, while ESADG achieves up to 40% normalized improvement. On physical hardware, the full pipeline reduces total execution time by up to 15.3%, demonstrating effective transfer from simulation to real-world deployment.
Authors: Seyed Mohammad Azimi-Abarghouyi, Carlo Fischione, Kaibin Huang
Abstract: Over-the-Air Federated Learning (AirFL) is an emerging paradigm that tightly integrates wireless signal processing and distributed machine learning to enable scalable AI at the network edge. By exploiting wireless superposition over a shared multiple-access channel, AirFL turns simultaneous transmissions of local model updates into an analog aggregate at the receiver, thereby reducing communication latency, bandwidth usage, and energy consumption in wireless aggregation domains. This article develops a design-oriented tutorial view of analog AirFL. We organize existing schemes according to the signal-processing mechanism used to enable AirFL aggregation: transmitter-side channel compensation and power control, receiver-side equalization and high-dimensional processing, or learning-aware aggregation weighting. This viewpoint leads to three representative classes -- CSIT-aware, blind, and weighted AirFL -- and clarifies their assumptions, performance tradeoffs, complexity, and deployment limitations. We further discuss synchronization, digital and hybrid analog-digital realization, and open research directions for integrating AirFL into practical wireless edge-AI systems.
Authors: Alexey Kravatskiy, Ivan Kozyrev, Nikolai Kozlov, Alexander Vinogradov, Daniil Merkulov, Ivan Oseledets
Abstract: In this article, we explore the use of various matrix norms for optimizing functions of weight matrices, a crucial problem in deep learning. Moving beyond the spectral norm that underlies the Muon update, we leverage the duals of the Ky Fan norms to introduce the Fanion family of linear minimization oracle (LMO) algorithms, which are closely related to Muon, $\nu$-SAM, and Dion. Staying inside the LMO, we construct the families of F-Fanions and S-Fanions, whose updates are convex combinations of the updates of Fanions and Normalized SGD or SignSGD, respectively. The most promising algorithms in these families are F-Muon and S-Muon. By conducting an extensive empirical study of all three algorithm families across a wide range of tasks and settings, we demonstrate that F-Muon and S-Muon consistently match Muon's performance, while outperforming Muon on a synthetic smooth convex problem.
Authors: Rongji Xun, Junjie Yuan, Zhongjie Wang
Abstract: Existing film-restoration methods frequently fail under fast motion, producing limb disappearance and structural distortion due to inaccurate motion modeling. Moreover, high-resolution restoration under spatially-persistent and mixed defects remains insufficiently studied. We propose HaineiFRDM, a Film Restoration Diffusion Model that leverages the content modeling capability of diffusion models for content-aware restoration, removing defects while preserving scene structure.To enable scalable high-resolution restoration, we adopt a patch-wise strategy with position-aware global fusion modules to maintain cross-patch coherence. We further introduce a frequency-based module to enhance texture consistency and a patch-consistent inference framework to alleviate blocking artifacts introduced by patch-based processing.We also construct a film restoration dataset comprising categorized defect templates, professionally restored films, and realistic synthetic degradations.Extensive experiments demonstrate our superior restoration quality with strong structural consistency. Our design also reduces memory requirements, enabling high-resolution restoration on a single 24GB-VRAM GPU.Code and the dataset will be released at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/HaineiFRDM.
Authors: Iago Alves Brito, Walcy Santos Rezende Rios, Julia Soares Dollis, Diogo Fernandes Costa Silva, Arlindo Rodrigues Galv\~ao Filho
Abstract: Current safety evaluations of large language models (LLMs) create a dangerous illusion of universal protection by aggregating harms under generic categories such as "Identity Hate", obscuring vulnerabilities toward specific populations. In this work, we expose the Selective Safety Trap: a systemic failure mode where models robustly defend specific populations while leaving underrepresented communities highly vulnerable to identical adversarial attacks. To systematically audit this phenomenon, we introduce MiJaBench, a bilingual (English-Portuguese) adversarial benchmark comprising 43,961 controlled jailbreaking prompts across 16 minority groups. By evaluating 14 state-of-the-art LLMs on MiJaBench, we curate 615,454 prompt-response pairs that compose MiJaBench-Align, revealing that safety alignment is not a uniform semantic capability but a demographic hierarchy, with defense rates fluctuating by up to 42% within the same model solely based on the target group. This disparity persists across architectures and languages and is amplified by scaling, indicating that current alignment methods learn group-specific safeguards rather than a generalized notion of harm. Through targeted direct preference optimization (DPO) on a 1B-parameter baseline, we achieve strong zero-shot safety generalizations to entirely unseen demographics and complex attack strategies. We release all datasets and scripts to provide the community with a concrete pathway toward equitable, transferable safety alignment.
Authors: Yingchaojie Feng, Qiang Huang, Xiaoya Xie, Zhaorui Yang, Jun Yu, Wei Chen, Anthony K. H. Tung
Abstract: Deep research agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) can perform multi-step reasoning, web exploration, and long-form report generation. However, existing systems remain largely autonomous, assuming fully specified user intent and evaluating only final outputs. In practice, research goals are often underspecified and evolve during exploration, yet current benchmarks neither model dynamic user feedback nor measure interaction costs. To address this gap, we introduce IDRBench, the first Interactive Deep Research Benchmark for systematically evaluating the interactive capabilities of deep research agents. IDRBench formulates deep research as an interactive process where agents may solicit clarification to better align with user intent. It integrates a modular interactive framework, a scalable reference-grounded user simulator, and an interaction-aware evaluation suite that jointly measures alignment gains and interaction overhead. Experiments on seven representative proprietary and open-weight LLMs show that interaction consistently improves research quality and robustness, while revealing substantial differences in interaction efficiency across models. These findings establish interactive capability as a distinct evaluation dimension and position IDRBench as a reusable benchmark for future user-aligned deep research agents.
Authors: Gagan Bhatia, Hamdy Mubarak, Mustafa Jarrar, George Mikros, Fadi Zaraket, Mahmoud Alhirthani, Mutaz Al-Khatib, Logan Cochrane, Kareem Darwish, Rashid Yahiaoui, Firoj Alam
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for Islamic question answering, where ungrounded responses may carry serious religious consequences. Yet standard MCQ/MRC-style evaluations (MCQ: Multiple choice questions, MRC: Machine Reading Comprehension) do not capture key real-world failure modes, notably free-form hallucinations and the ability to abstain when evidence is insufficient. To address this gap, we introduce IslamicFaithQA, a 3,810-item bilingual (Arabic/English) generative benchmark with atomic single-gold answers, which enables direct measurement of hallucination and abstention. We additionally developed an end-to-end grounded Islamic modeling suite consisting of (i) 25K Arabic text-grounded SFT reasoning pairs, (ii) 5K bilingual preference samples for reward-guided alignment, and (iii) a verse-level Qur'an retrieval corpus of ~6k atomic verses (ayat). Building on these resources, we develop an agentic Quran-grounding framework (agentic RAG) that uses structured tool calls for iterative evidence seeking and answer revision. Experiments across Arabic-centric and multilingual LLMs show that retrieval improves correctness and that agentic RAG yields the largest gains beyond standard RAG, achieving state-of-the-art performance and stronger Arabic-English robustness even with a small model (i.e., Qwen3 4B). We made the datasets are publicly available. https://huggingface.co/datasets/QCRI/IslamicFaithQA
Authors: Mohammed Mudassir Uddin, Shahnawaz Alam, Mohammed Kaif Pasha
Abstract: Extracting sparse circuits from billion-parameter transformers is constrained by $O(2^n)$ search cost and pervasive feature reuse across co-active pathways. Hierarchical Attribution Graph Decomposition (HAGD) addresses this through four stages: cross-layer transcoder training, spectral coarsening of attribution graphs, graph-neural-network (GNN)-guided hierarchical traversal, and causal intervention verification, reducing worst-case complexity to $O(n^2 \log n)$. Per-layer transcoders trained on the RedPajama corpus yield monosemantic dictionaries; gradient-activation products form weighted attribution graphs; normalized-Laplacian spectral clustering builds multi-resolution hierarchies; an attention-based GNN assigns circuit-membership scores at successive coarsening stages. Evaluation spans GPT-2 (117M-774M), Pythia (1.4B-6.9B), and Llama (7B-70B) across modular arithmetic, parity computation, integer sorting, coreference resolution (WinoGrande), commonsense reasoning (HellaSwag), and factual recall. Behavioral preservation reaches 91\% ($\pm$2.3\%) on modular arithmetic with 49-347-node circuits, while ACDC exhausts memory beyond 1.4B parameters. Cross-architecture transfer coefficients span 0.38-0.82, with within-family pairs (Llama-7B $\to$ Llama-70B) attaining 0.82. Limitations include omitted attention-head circuits, 15-20\% unexplained reconstruction variance, ablation-based validation circularity, and uncertain interpretability of circuits exceeding several hundred nodes.
Authors: Qirui Chen, Jingxian Shuai, Shuangwu Chen, Shenghao Ye, Zijian Wen, Xufei Su, Jie Jin, Jiangming Li, Jun Chen, Xiaobin Tan, Jian Yang
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for hardware and firmware code generation, but existing studies primarily evaluate functional correctness while largely overlooking security. However, LLM-generated code that appears functionally sound may embed security flaws which could induce catastrophic damages after deployment. This critical research gap motivates us to design a benchmark for assessing security awareness under realistic specifications. In this work, we introduce HardSecBench, a benchmark with 924 tasks spanning Verilog Register Transfer Level (RTL) and firmware-level C, covering 76 hardware-relevant Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) entries. Each task includes a structured specification, a secure reference implementation, and executable tests. To automate artifact synthesis, we propose a multi-agent pipeline that decouples synthesis from verification and grounds evaluation in execution evidence, enabling reliable evaluation. We evaluate diverse LLMs and find that they often satisfy functional requirements while leaving security risks. We also find that security results vary with prompting. These findings highlight pressing challenges and offer actionable insights for future advancements in LLM-assisted hardware design. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/chenqirui2002/HardSecBench.
Authors: Saideep Sreekumar, Zeng Wang, Akashdeep Saha, Weihua Xiao, Minghao Shao, Muhammad Shafique, Ozgur Sinanoglu, Ramesh Karri, Johann Knechtel
Abstract: Hardware Trojans (HTs) remain a critical threat because learning-based detectors often overfit to narrow trigger/payload patterns and small, stylized benchmarks. We introduce TrojanGYM, an agentic, LLM-driven framework that automatically curates HT insertions to expose detector blind spots while preserving design correctness. Given high-level HT specifications, a suite of cooperating LLM agents (instantiated with GPT-4, LLaMA-3.3-70B, and Gemini-2.5Pro) proposes and refines RTL modifications that realize diverse triggers and payloads without impacting normal functionality. TrojanGYM implements a feedback-driven benchmark generation loop co-designed with HT detectors, in which constraint-aware syntactic checking and GNN-based HT detectors provide feedback that iteratively refines HT specifications and insertion strategies to better surface detector blind spots. We further propose Robust-GNN4TJ, a new implementation of the GNN4TJ with improved graph extraction, training robustness, and prediction reliability, especially on LLM-generated HT designs. On the most challenging TrojanGYM-generated benchmarks, Robust-GNN4TJ raises HT detection rates from 0% to 60% relative to a prior GNN-based detector. We instantiate TrojanGYM on SRAM, AES-128, and UART designs at RTL level, and show that it systematically produces diverse, functionally correct HTs that reach up to 83.33% evasion rates against modern GNN-based detectors, revealing robustness gaps that are not apparent when these detectors are evaluated solely on existing TrustHub-style benchmarks. Post peer-review, we will release all codes and artifacts.
Authors: Yijun Ma, Zehong Wang, Weixiang Sun, Yanfang Ye
Abstract: Temporal graph learning is pivotal for deciphering dynamic systems, where the core challenge lies in explicitly modeling the underlying evolving patterns that govern network transformation. However, prevailing methods are predominantly task-centric and rely on restrictive assumptions -- such as short-term dependency modeling, static neighborhood semantics, and retrospective time usage. These constraints hinder the discovery of transferable temporal evolution mechanisms. To address this, we propose the Temporal Graph Pattern Machine (TGPM), a foundation framework that shifts the focus toward directly learning generalized evolving patterns. TGPM conceptualizes each interaction as an interaction patch synthesized via temporally-biased random walks, thereby capturing multi-scale structural semantics and long-range dependencies that extend beyond immediate neighborhoods. These patches are processed by a Transformer-based backbone designed to capture global temporal regularities while adapting to context-specific interaction dynamics. To further empower the model, we introduce a suite of self-supervised pre-training tasks -- specifically masked token modeling and next-time prediction -- to explicitly encode the fundamental laws of network evolution. Extensive experiments on temporal link prediction and temporal node classification show that TGPM consistently ranks among the top-performing methods, demonstrating exceptional cross-domain transferability. Our code has been released in https://github.com/antman9914/TGPM.
Authors: Michael Siebenmann, Javier Argota S\'anchez-Vaquerizo, Stefan Arisona, Krystian Samp, Luis Gisler, Dirk Helbing
Abstract: We present OGD4All, a transparent, auditable, and reproducible framework based on Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance citizens' interaction with geospatial Open Government Data (OGD). The system combines semantic data retrieval, agentic reasoning for iterative code generation, and secure sandboxed execution that produces verifiable multimodal outputs. Evaluated on a 199-question benchmark covering both factual and unanswerable questions, across 430 City-of-Zurich datasets and 11 LLMs, OGD4All reaches 98% analytical correctness and 94% recall while reliably rejecting questions unsupported by available data, which minimizes hallucination risks. Statistical robustness tests, as well as expert feedback, show reliability and social relevance. The proposed approach shows how LLMs can provide explainable, multimodal access to public data, advancing trustworthy AI for open governance.
Authors: Mengting Wei, Aditya Gulati, Guoying Zhao, Nuria Oliver
Abstract: Synthetic faces from text-to-image (T2I) models pervade digital media, yet their demographic biases under emotionally conditioned prompts remain poorly understood. We aim to systematically audit how emotionally conditioned prompts affect demographic and perceived-attractiveness biases in synthetic faces generated by T2I models, with particular attention to intersectional patterns and cross-ecosystem differences across model families. We audited eight (4 Western and 4 Chinese) T2I models and generated 56,000 faces under seven prompt conditions: a neutral baseline and six emotion conditions. We quantified biases in gender, race, age, and perceived attractiveness using information-theoretic divergence metrics. We further conducted intersectional analyses across combined demographic attributes and compared patterns between the Western and Chinese model groups to assess cross-ecosystem consistency and divergence in bias behavior. All models show strong overrepresentation of young faces, and most also overrepresent White-coded individuals. Intersectional analysis reveals compound underrepresentation or near-erasure of specific demographic combinations, such as young x female x Black faces, which are largely absent across models and are not captured by single-attribute audits. Emotion prompts act as additional demographic selectors: negatively valenced emotions (including sadness and fear) consistently shift outputs toward White, middle-aged, male-coded faces. This produces a valence-driven mapping that is also associated with lower perceived attractiveness in generated faces. These findings indicate that demographic bias in T2I face generation is both pervasive and shaped by emotional conditioning. They underscore the need for intersectional, emotion-conditioned, and multilingual demographic audits as part of standard pre-deployment evaluation practices.
Authors: Abhijit Chakraborty, Ashish Raj Shekhar, Shiven Agarwal, Vivek Gupta
Abstract: Complex question answering across text, tables and images requires integrating diverse information sources. A framework supporting specialized processing with coordination and interpretability is needed. We introduce DeALOG, a decentralized multi-agent framework for multimodal question answering. It uses specialized agents: Table, Context, Visual, Summarizing and Verification, that communicate through a shared natural-language log as persistent memory. This log-based approach enables collaborative error detection and verification without central control, improving robustness. Evaluations on FinQA, TAT-QA, CRT-QA, WikiTableQuestions, FeTaQA, and MultiModalQA show competitive performance. Analysis confirms the importance of the shared log, agent specialization, and verification for accuracy. DeALOG, provides a scalable approach through modular components using natural-language communication.
Authors: Patrick Cooper, Alvaro Velasquez
Abstract: Discovering causal relationships requires controlled experiments, but experimentalists face a sequential decision problem: each intervention reveals information that should inform what to try next. Traditional approaches such as random sampling, greedy information maximization, and round-robin coverage treat each decision in isolation, unable to learn adaptive strategies from experience. We propose Active Causal Experimentalist (ACE), which learns experimental design as a sequential policy. Our key insight is that while absolute information gains diminish as knowledge accumulates (making value-based RL unstable), relative comparisons between candidate interventions remain meaningful throughout. ACE exploits this via Direct Preference Optimization, learning from pairwise intervention comparisons rather than non-stationary reward magnitudes. Across synthetic benchmarks, physics simulations, and economic data, ACE achieves 70-71% improvement over baselines at equal intervention budgets (p < 0.001, Cohen's d ~ 2). Notably, the learned policy autonomously discovers that collider mechanisms require concentrated interventions on parent variables, a theoretically-grounded strategy that emerges purely from experience. This suggests preference-based learning can recover principled experimental strategies, complementing theory with learned domain adaptation.
Authors: Lisa Alazraki, William F. Shen, Yoram Bachrach, Akhil Mathur
Abstract: Small language models are increasingly viewed as a promising, cost-effective approach to agentic AI, with proponents claiming they are sufficiently capable for agentic workflows. However, while smaller agents can closely match larger ones on simple tasks, it remains unclear how their performance scales with task complexity, when large models become necessary, and how to better leverage small agents for long-horizon workloads. In this work, we empirically show that small agents' performance fails to scale with task complexity on deep search and coding tasks, and we introduce Strategy Auctions for Workload Efficiency (SALE), an agent framework inspired by freelancer marketplaces. In SALE, agents bid with short strategic plans, which are scored by a systematic cost-value mechanism and refined via a shared auction memory, enabling per-task routing and continual self-improvement without training a separate router or running all models to completion. Across deep search and coding tasks of varying complexity, SALE reduces reliance on the largest agent by 52%, lowers overall cost by 35%, and consistently improves upon the largest agent's pass@1 with only a negligible overhead beyond executing the final trace. In contrast, established routers that rely on task descriptions either underperform the largest agent or fail to reduce cost, often both, underscoring their poor fit for agentic workflows. These results suggest that while small agents may be insufficient for complex workloads, they can be effectively "scaled up" through coordinated task allocation and test-time self-improvement. More broadly, they motivate a systems-level view of agentic AI in which performance gains come less from ever-larger individual models and more from market-inspired coordination mechanisms that organize heterogeneous agents into efficient, adaptive ecosystems.
Authors: Jinwoo Choi, Sang-Hyun Lee, Seung-Woo Seo
Abstract: Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning remains challenging for long-horizon tasks. While hierarchical approaches mitigate this issue by decomposing tasks, most existing methods rely on separate high- and low-level networks and generate only a single intermediate subgoal, leaving several structural limitations in long-horizon decision-making. To address this limitation, we draw inspiration from chain-of-thought reasoning and propose the Chain-of-Goals Hierarchical Policy (CoGHP), a novel framework that reformulates hierarchical decision-making as autoregressive sequence modeling within a unified architecture. Given a state and a final goal, CoGHP autoregressively generates a sequence of latent subgoals followed by the primitive action, where each latent subgoal acts as a reasoning step that conditions subsequent predictions. To implement this efficiently, we introduce an MLP-Mixer backbone, which supports cross-token communication and captures structural relationships among state, goal, latent subgoals, and action. Across challenging navigation and manipulation benchmarks, CoGHP consistently outperforms strong offline baselines, demonstrating improved performance on long-horizon tasks. Project page: https://wlsdn9350.github.io/projects/coghp/
Authors: Yijia Xu, Zihao Wang, Haokun Gui, Jinshi Cui
Abstract: Multi-subject image generation aims to synthesize images that faithfully preserve the identities of multiple reference subjects while following textual instructions. However, existing methods often suffer from identity inconsistency and limited compositional control, as they rely on diffusion models to implicitly associate text prompts with reference images. In this work, we propose Hierarchical Concept-to-Appearance Guidance (CAG), a framework that provides explicit, structured supervision from high-level concepts to fine-grained appearances. At the conceptual level, we introduce a VAE dropout training strategy that randomly omits reference VAE features, encouraging the model to rely more on robust semantic signals from a Visual Language Model (VLM) and thereby promoting consistent concept-level generation in the absence of complete appearance cues. At the appearance level, we integrate the VLM-derived correspondences into a correspondence-aware masked attention module within the Diffusion Transformer (DiT). This module restricts each text token to attend only to its matched reference regions, ensuring precise attribute binding and reliable multi-subject composition. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the multi-subject image generation, substantially improving prompt following and subject consistency.
Authors: Sudipto Ghosh, Sujoy Nath, Sunny Manchanda, Tanmoy Chakraborty
Abstract: Multi-expert systems, where multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) collaborate to solve complex tasks, are increasingly adopted for high-performance reasoning and generation. However, the orchestration policies governing expert interaction and sequencing remain largely opaque. We introduce INFORM, an interpretability analysis that treats orchestration as an explicit, analyzable computation, enabling the decoupling of expert interaction structure, execution order, and functional attribution. We use INFORM to evaluate an orchestrator on GSM8K, HumanEval, and MMLU using a homogeneous consortium of ten instruction-tuned experts drawn from LLaMA-3.1 8B, Qwen3 8B, and DeepSeek-R1 8B, with controlled decoding-temperature variation, and a secondary heterogeneous consortium spanning 1B-7B parameter models. Across tasks, routing dominance is a poor proxy for functional necessity. We reveal a divergence between relational importance, captured by routing mass and interaction topology, and intrinsic importance, measured via gradient sensitivity: frequently selected experts often act as interaction hubs with limited influence, while sparsely routed experts can be structurally critical. Orchestration behaviors emerge asynchronously, with expert centralization preceding stable routing confidence and expert ordering remaining non-deterministic. Targeted ablations show that masking intrinsically important experts induces disproportionate collapse in interaction structure compared to masking frequent peers, confirming that INFORM exposes functional and structural dependencies beyond accuracy metrics alone. Our code is available at https://github.com/parmanu-lcs2/inform.
Authors: Yingru Li, Jiawei Xu, Ziniu Li, Jiacai Liu, Wei Liu, Yuxuan Tong, Longtao Zheng, Zhenghai Xue, Yaxiang Zhang, Tianle Cai, Ge Zhang, Qian Liu, Baoxiang Wang
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) for Large Language Models (LLMs) often suffers from training collapse in long-horizon tasks due to exploding gradient variance. To mitigate this, a baseline is commonly introduced for advantage computation; however, traditional value models remain difficult to optimize, and standard group-based baselines overlook sequence heterogeneity. Although classic optimal baseline theory can achieve global variance reduction, it neglects token heterogeneity and requires prohibitive gradient-based computation. In this work, we derive the Optimal Token Baseline (OTB) from first principles, proving that gradient updates should be weighted inversely to their cumulative gradient norm. To ensure efficiency, we propose the Logit-Gradient Proxy that approximates the gradient norm using only forward-pass probabilities. Our method achieves training stability and matches the performance of large group sizes ($N=32$) with only $N=4$, reducing token consumption by over 65\% across single-turn and tool-integrated reasoning tasks.
Authors: Jiacheng Liu, Yaxin Luo, Jiacheng Cui, Xinyi Shang, Xiaohan Zhao, Zhiqiang Shen
Abstract: The rapid evolution of GUI-enabled agents has rendered traditional CAPTCHAs obsolete. While previous benchmarks like OpenCaptchaWorld established a baseline for evaluating multimodal agents, recent advancements in reasoning-heavy models, such as Gemini3-Pro-High and GPT-5.2-Xhigh have effectively collapsed this security barrier, achieving pass rates as high as 90% on complex logic puzzles like "Bingo". In response, we introduce Next-Gen CAPTCHAs, a scalable defense framework designed to secure the next-generation web against the advanced agents. Unlike static datasets, our benchmark is built upon a robust data generation pipeline, allowing for large-scale and easily scalable evaluations, notably, for backend-supported types, our system is capable of generating effectively unbounded CAPTCHA instances. We exploit the persistent human-agent "Cognitive Gap" in interactive perception, memory, decision-making, and action. By engineering dynamic tasks that require adaptive intuition rather than granular planning, we re-establish a robust distinction between biological users and artificial agents, offering a scalable and diverse defense mechanism for the agentic era.
Authors: Sajad Ebrahimi, Bhaskar Mitra, Negar Arabzadeh, Ye Yuan, Haolun Wu, Fattane Zarrinkalam, Ebrahim Bagheri
Abstract: In information retrieval (IR), learning-to-rank (LTR) methods have traditionally limited themselves to discriminative machine learning approaches that model the probability of the document being relevant to the query given some feature representation of the query-document pair. In this work, we propose an alternative denoising diffusion-based deep generative approach to LTR that instead models the full joint distribution over feature vectors and relevance labels. While in the discriminative setting, an over-parameterized ranking model may find different ways to fit the training data, we hypothesize that candidate solutions that can explain the full data distribution under the generative setting are better equipped to estimate relevance. With this motivation, we propose DiffusionRank that extends TabDiff, an existing denoising diffusion-based generative model for tabular datasets, to create generative equivalents of classical discriminative pointwise and pairwise LTR objectives. We conduct thorough empirical evaluation on four standard LTR datasets to demonstrate improvements from DiffusionRank models over their discriminative counterparts. Our work points to a rich space for future research exploration on how we can leverage ongoing advancements in deep generative modeling approaches, such as diffusion, for LTR. We made our code publicly available at https://github.com/sadjadeb/DiffusionRank.
Authors: Yijun Ma, Zehong Wang, Weixiang Sun, Zheyuan Zhang, Kaiwen Shi, Nitesh Chawla, Yanfang Ye
Abstract: The opioid epidemic remains one of the most severe public health crises in the United States, yet evaluating policy interventions before implementation is difficult: multiple policies interact within a dynamic system where targeting one risk pathway may inadvertently amplify another. We argue that effective opioid policy evaluation requires three capabilities -- forecasting future outcomes under current policies, counterfactual reasoning about alternative past decisions, and optimization over candidate interventions -- and propose to unify them through world modeling. We introduce Policy4OOD, a knowledge-guided spatio-temporal world model that addresses three core challenges: what policies prescribe, where effects manifest, and when effects unfold.Policy4OOD jointly encodes policy knowledge graphs, state-level spatial dependencies, and socioeconomic time series into a policy-conditioned Transformer that forecasts future opioid outcomes.Once trained, the world model serves as a simulator: forecasting requires only a forward pass, counterfactual analysis substitutes alternative policy encodings in the historical sequence, and policy optimization employs Monte Carlo Tree Search over the learned simulator. To support this framework, we construct a state-level monthly dataset (2019--2024) integrating opioid mortality, socioeconomic indicators, and structured policy encodings. Experiments demonstrate that spatial dependencies and structured policy knowledge significantly improve forecasting accuracy, validating each architectural component and the potential of world modeling for data-driven public health decision support. Our code and data have been released in https://github.com/antman9914/Policy4OOD.
Authors: Rushuai Yang, Hecheng Wang, Zhichao Wu, Chiming Liu, Xiaohan Yan, Xuan Du, Shuoyu Yue, Chuheng Zhang, Yunlong Wang, Yongcheng Liu, Lizhe Qi, Yi Chen, Wei Shan, Maoqing Yao
Abstract: We study how to improve large foundation vision-language-action (VLA) systems through human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world environments. A key challenge is learning reliable value functions from heterogeneous real-world experience, as value estimation provides the primary learning signal for VLA training. In practice, replay buffers contain trajectories collected from historical policies, online rollouts, demonstrations, and intermittent human interventions. Because replay buffers mix trajectories generated by different behaviors, the observed returns can be mismatched with the quality of the current policy. Prior VLA post-training methods often rely on progress-style value signals, which reflect the average quality of historical behaviors, leading to mismatched learning signals for the current policy. In this paper, we propose ALOE, an off-policy evaluation framework whose value function directly evaluates current-policy behavior for each iteration. Specifically, ALOE combines chunked temporal-difference bootstrapping and conservative value aggregation to perform stable current-policy evaluation, then uses these estimates for advantage-weighted policy improvement. This design improves credit assignment to critical action chunks under sparse rewards and supports stable policy improvement. We evaluate ALOE on four real-world manipulation tasks encompassing long-horizon and high-precision scenarios: smartphone packing, laundry folding, multi-object sorting, and phone assembly. Across all tasks, ALOE outperforms other VLA post-training methods, highlighting the benefit of off-policy value estimates for real-world VLA post-training. Videos are available at our project website https://rooshy-yang.github.io/aloe.
Authors: Nitay Calderon, Eyal Ben-David, Zorik Gekhman, Eran Ofek, Gal Yona
Abstract: Standard factuality evaluations of LLMs treat all errors alike, obscuring whether failures arise from missing knowledge (empty shelves) or from limited access to encoded facts (lost keys). We propose a behavioral framework that profiles factual knowledge at the level of facts rather than questions, characterizing each fact by whether it is encoded, and then by how accessible it is: cannot be recalled, can be directly recalled, or can only be recalled with inference-time computation (thinking). To support such profiling, we introduce WikiProfile, a new benchmark constructed via an automated pipeline with a prompted LLM grounded in web search. Across 4 million responses from 13 LLMs, we find that encoding is nearly saturated in frontier models on our benchmark, with GPT-5 and Gemini-3 encoding 95--98% of facts. However, recall remains a major bottleneck: many errors previously attributed to missing knowledge instead stem from failures to access it. These failures are systematic and disproportionately affect long-tail facts and reverse questions. Finally, we show that thinking improves recall and can recover a substantial fraction of failures, indicating that future gains may rely less on scaling and more on methods that improve how models utilize what they already encode.
Authors: Nafiseh Sadat Sajadi, Behnam Bahrak, Mahdi Jafari Siavoshani
Abstract: Predicting links in sparse, continuously evolving networks is a central challenge in network science. Conventional heuristic methods and deep learning models, including Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), are typically designed for static graphs and thus struggle to capture temporal dependencies. Snapshot-based techniques partially address this issue but often encounter data sparsity and class imbalance, particularly in networks with transient interactions such as telecommunication call detail records (CDRs). Temporal Graph Networks (TGNs) model dynamic graphs by updating node embeddings over time; however, their predictive accuracy under sparse conditions remains limited. In this study, we improve the TGN framework by extracting enclosing subgraphs around candidate links, enabling the model to jointly learn structural and temporal information. Experiments on a sparse CDR, email, message dataset show that our approach increases average precision by at least 2% over standard TGNs, demonstrating the advantages of integrating local topology for robust link prediction in dynamic networks.
Authors: Lingxiang Hu, Yiding Sun, Tianle Xia, Wenwei Li, Ming Xu, Lan Xu, Siying Wang, Wei Xu, Jie Jiang
Abstract: While Large Language Model (LLM) agents have made remarkable progress on complex reasoning, evaluating them in real-world environments remains an open problem. Existing benchmarks are largely confined to idealized simulations and fail to capture specialized domains such as advertising and marketing analytics, where tasks require multi-round interaction with professional tools and where ground-truth answers quickly become obsolete as data and platform rules evolve. To address this, we propose AD-Bench, a benchmark built from real user marketing-analysis requests on a production advertising platform. AD-Bench introduces two key designs: (i) a dynamic ground-truth pipeline that replays expert tool-call trajectories to regenerate answers consistent with the current environment, mitigating answer obsolescence; and (ii) a trajectory-aware evaluation that jointly measures end-to-end answer correctness (Pass@k) and trajectory coverage. Requests are stratified into three difficulty levels (L1-L3) to probe multi-round, multi-tool collaboration. Experiments show that the best model, Claude-Opus-4.7, attains Pass@1 = 76.9% and Pass@3 = 80.4% with 82.7% trajectory coverage overall, yet drops sharply on L3 to Pass@1 = 61.4% and Pass@3 = 65.1%, revealing that even state-of-the-art agents have substantial gaps in complex advertising analytics.
Authors: Amirali Sajadi, Tu Nguyen, Kostadin Damevski, Preetha Chatterjee
Abstract: Vulnerability detection tools are widely adopted in software projects, yet they often overwhelm maintainers with false positives and non-actionable reports. Automated exploitation systems can help validate these reports; however, existing approaches typically operate in isolation from detection pipelines, failing to leverage readily available metadata such as vulnerability type and source-code location. In this paper, we investigate how reported security vulnerabilities can be assessed in a realistic grey-box exploitation setting that leverages minimal vulnerability metadata, specifically a CWE classification and a vulnerable code location. We introduce Agentic eXploit Engine (AXE), a multi-agent framework for Web application exploitation that maps lightweight detection metadata to concrete exploits through decoupled planning, code exploration, and dynamic execution feedback. Evaluated on the CVE-Bench dataset, AXE achieves a 30% exploitation success rate, a 3x improvement over state-of-the-art black-box baselines. Even in a single-agent configuration, grey-box metadata yields a 1.75x performance gain. Systematic error analysis shows that most failed attempts arise from specific reasoning gaps, including misinterpreted vulnerability semantics and unmet execution preconditions. For successful exploits, AXE produces actionable, reproducible proof-of-concept artifacts, demonstrating its utility in streamlining Web vulnerability triage and remediation. We further evaluate AXE's generalizability through a case study on a recent real-world vulnerability not included in CVE-Bench.
Authors: Rapha\"el Baur, Yannick Metz, Maria Gkoulta, Mennatallah El-Assady, Giorgia Ramponi, Thomas Kleine Buening
Abstract: Reward learning typically relies on a single feedback type or combines multiple feedback types using manually weighted loss terms. Currently, it remains unclear how to jointly learn reward functions from heterogeneous feedback types such as demonstrations, comparisons, ratings, and stops that provide qualitatively different signals. We address this challenge by formulating reward learning from multiple feedback types as Bayesian inference over a shared latent reward function, where each feedback type contributes information through an explicit likelihood. We introduce a scalable amortized variational inference approach that learns a shared reward encoder and feedback-specific likelihood decoders and is trained by optimizing a single evidence lower bound. Our approach avoids reducing feedback to a common intermediate representation and eliminates the need for manual loss balancing. Across discrete and continuous-control benchmarks, we show that jointly inferred reward posteriors outperform single-type baselines, exploit complementary information across feedback types, and yield policies that are more robust to environment perturbations. The inferred reward uncertainty further provides interpretable signals for analyzing model confidence and consistency across feedback types.
Authors: Dylan Bouchard, Mohit Singh Chauhan, Viren Bajaj, David Skarbrevik
Abstract: Uncertainty quantification has emerged as an effective approach to closed-book hallucination detection for LLMs, but existing methods are largely designed for short-form outputs and do not generalize well to long-form generation. We introduce a taxonomy for fine-grained uncertainty quantification in long-form LLM outputs that distinguishes methods by design choices at three stages: response decomposition, unit-level scoring, and response-level aggregation. We formalize several families of consistency-based black-box scorers, providing generalizations and extensions of existing methods. We also introduce FactScore-STEM-Geo, a new 400-question long-form QA dataset spanning four categories across STEM and Geography. In our experiments across multiple LLMs and datasets, we find 1) claim-response entailment consistently performs better or on par with more complex claim-level scorers, 2) claim-level scoring generally yields better results than sentence-level scoring, and 3) uncertainty-aware decoding is highly effective for improving the factuality of long-form outputs. Our framework clarifies relationships between prior methods, enables apples-to-apples comparisons, and provides practical guidance for selecting components for fine-grained UQ.
Authors: Longhua Li, Lei Qi, Qi Tian, Xin Geng
Abstract: Model merging aims to integrate multiple task-specific fine-tuned models derived from a shared pre-trained checkpoint into a single multi-task model without additional training. Despite extensive research, task interference remains a major obstacle that often undermines the performance of merged models. In this paper, we propose ESM (Essential Subspace Merging) , a robust framework for effective model merging. We begin by performing Principal Component Analysis (PCA) on feature shifts induced by parameter updates. The resulting principal directions span an essential subspace that dominantly influences feature representations. Each task's parameter update matrix is projected onto its respective essential subspace for low-rank decomposition before merging. This methodology mitigates inter-task interference while preserving core task-specific functionality. Furthermore, we introduce a multi-level polarized scaling strategy that amplifies parameters containing critical knowledge and suppresses redundant ones, preventing essential knowledge from being overwhelmed during fusion. Extensive experiments across multiple task sets and model scales demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in multi-task model merging. Code is available at https://github.com/kiddo127/ESM.
Authors: Amin Banayeeanzade, Qingchuan Yang, Deqing Fu, Spencer Hong, Erin Babinsky, Alfy Samuel, Anoop Kumar, Robin Jia, Sai Praneeth Karimireddy
Abstract: High-quality data is essential for modern machine learning, yet many valuable corpora are sensitive and cannot be freely shared. Synthetic data offers a practical substitute for downstream development, and large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful engines for generating it. However, existing private text generation methods are severely inefficient: they are data-intensive, computationally slow, and often require large private corpora or batch sizes to achieve usable quality. We introduce EPSVec, a differentially-private lightweight alternative that steers LLM generation using *dataset vectors*--directions in activation space that capture the distributional gap between private data and public priors. EPSVec extracts and sanitizes steering vectors just once and then performs standard decoding. This decouples the privacy budget from generation, enabling arbitrarily many synthetic samples without additional privacy cost and yielding strong fidelity even in low-data regimes. Furthermore, we enhance our method by utilizing pretrained (base) models and introducing fixed-shot prompting to boost generation diversity and fidelity. Our experiments demonstrate that EPSVec outperforms existing baselines in distributional alignment and downstream utility, particularly in low-data regimes, while significantly reducing computational overhead.
Authors: Chuan Meng, Litu Ou, Sean MacAvaney, Jeff Dalton
Abstract: Deep research has emerged as an important task that aims to address hard queries that need extensive open-web exploration. To tackle it, most prior work equips large language model (LLM)-based agents with opaque web search APIs, enabling agents to iteratively issue search queries, retrieve external evidence, and reason over it. Despite search's essential role in deep research, black-box web search APIs leave the behaviour of established text ranking methods in deep research largely unclear. To fill this gap, we reproduce key findings and best practices for text ranking methods in deep research. We examine their effectiveness from three perspectives: (i) retrieval units (documents vs. passages), (ii) pipeline configurations (different retrievers, re-rankers, and re-ranking depths), and (iii) query characteristics (the mismatch between agent-issued queries and the training queries of text rankers). We perform experiments on BrowseComp-Plus, a deep research dataset with a fixed corpus, evaluating 2 open-source agents, 5 retrievers, and 3 re-rankers. We find that agent-issued queries typically follow web-search-style syntax (e.g., quoted exact matches), favouring lexical, learned sparse, and multi-vector retrievers; passage-level units are more efficient under limited context windows, and avoid the difficulties of document length normalisation in lexical retrieval; re-ranking is highly effective. We further propose a query-to-question (Q2Q) method that translates agent-issued queries into natural language questions, significantly reducing the query mismatch.
Authors: Jiwoo Kim, Swarajh Mehta, Hao-Lun Hsu, Hyunwoo Ryu, Yudong Liu, Miroslav Pajic
Abstract: Generative modeling of neural network parameters is often tied to architectures because standard parameter representations rely on known weight-matrix dimensions. Generation is further complicated by permutation symmetries that allow networks to model similar input-output functions while having widely different, unaligned parameterizations. In this work, we introduce Neural Network Diffusion Transformers (NNiTs), which generate weights in a width-agnostic manner by tokenizing weight matrices into patches and modeling them as locally structured fields. We establish that Graph HyperNetworks (GHNs) with a convolutional neural network (CNN) decoder structurally align the weight space, creating the local correlation necessary for patch-based processing. Focusing on Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs), where permutation symmetry is especially apparent, NNiTs generate fully functional networks across a range of architectures. Our approach jointly models discrete architecture tokens and continuous weight patches within a single sequence model. On ManiSkill3 robotics tasks, NNiT achieves $>85\%$ success on architecture topologies unseen during training, while baseline approaches fail to generalize; the same pipeline also generalizes to MNIST classification beyond the robotic control setting.
Authors: Lidia Garrucho, Smriti Joshi, Kaisar Kushibar, Richard Osuala, Maciej Bobowicz, Xavier Bargall\'o, Paulius Jaru\v{s}evi\v{c}ius, Kai Geissler, Raphael Sch\"afer, Muhammad Alberb, Tony Xu, Anne Martel, Daniel Sleiman, Navchetan Awasthi, Hadeel Awwad, Joan C. Vilanova, Robert Mart\'i, Daan Schouten, Jeong Hoon Lee, Mirabela Rusu, Eleonora Poeta, Luisa Vargas, Eliana Pastor, Maria A. Zuluaga, Jessica K\"achele, Dimitrios Bounias, Alexandra Ertl, Katarzyna Gwo\'zdziewicz, Maria-Laura Cosaka, Pasant M. Abo-Elhoda, Sara W. Tantawy, Shorouq S. Sakrana, Norhan O. Shawky-Abdelfatah, Amr Muhammad Abdo-Salem, Androniki Kozana, Eugen Divjak, Gordana Ivanac, Katerina Nikiforaki, Michail E. Klontzas, Rosa Garc\'ia-Dosd\'a, Meltem Gulsun-Akpinar, O\u{g}uz Lafc{\i}, Carlos Mart\'in-Isla, Oliver D\'iaz, Laura Igual, Karim Lekadir
Abstract: Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed malignancy among women worldwide and a leading cause of cancer-related mortality. Dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging plays a central role in tumor characterization and treatment monitoring, particularly in patients receiving neoadjuvant chemotherapy. However, existing artificial intelligence models for breast magnetic resonance imaging are typically developed and evaluated using heterogeneous datasets, study populations, and assessment protocols, making direct comparison difficult and limiting understanding of model robustness across institutions and clinically relevant patient subgroups. The MAMA-MIA Challenge was designed to address these challenges by providing a standardized benchmark for the joint evaluation of primary tumor segmentation and prediction of pathologic complete response using pre-treatment magnetic resonance imaging only. The training cohort comprised 1,506 patients from multiple institutions in the United States, while evaluation was conducted on an external test set of 574 patients from three independent European centers to assess cross-continental and cross-institutional generalization. A unified scoring framework combined predictive performance with subgroup consistency across age, menopausal status, and breast density. Twenty-six international teams participated in the final evaluation phase. Results demonstrate substantial performance variability under a common external evaluation framework and reveal trade-offs between overall accuracy and subgroup fairness. The challenge provides standardized datasets, evaluation protocols, and public resources to promote the development of robust and equitable artificial intelligence systems for breast cancer imaging.
Authors: Haofeng Xu, Junwei Su, Yukun Tian, Lansong Diao, Zhengping Qian, Chuan Wu
Abstract: Asynchronous execution is essential for scaling reinforcement learning (RL) to modern large model workloads, including large language models and AI agents, but it can fundamentally alter RL optimization behavior. While prior work on asynchronous RL focuses on training throughput and distributional correction, we show that naively applying asynchrony to policy-gradient updates can induce qualitatively different training dynamics and lead to severe training instability. Through systematic empirical and theoretical analysis, we identify a key signature of this instability: asynchronous training exhibits persistently high cosine similarity between consecutive policy gradients, in contrast to the near-orthogonal updates observed under synchronized training. This stale-aligned gradient effect amplifies correlated updates and increases the risk of overshooting and divergence. Motivated by this observation, we propose GRADIENT ALIGNMENT CONTROL(GAC), a simple dynamics-aware stabilization method that regulates asynchronous RL progress along stale-aligned directions via gradient projection. We establish convergence guarantees under bounded staleness and demonstrate empirically that GAC recovers stable, on-policy training dynamics and matches synchronized baselines even at high staleness.
Authors: Cristiana Diaconu, Miles Cranmer, Richard E. Turner, Tanya Marwah, Payel Mukhopadhyay
Abstract: Dominant approaches for modelling Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) rely on deterministic predictions, yet many physical systems of interest are inherently chaotic and uncertain. While training probabilistic models from scratch is possible, it is computationally expensive and fails to leverage the significant resources already invested in high-performing deterministic backbones. In this work, we adopt a training-efficient strategy to transform pre-trained deterministic models into probabilistic ones via retrofitting with a proper scoring rule: the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS). Crucially, this approach is architecture-agnostic: it applies the same adaptation mechanism across distinct model backbones with minimal code modifications. The method proves highly effective across different scales of pre-training: for models trained on single dynamical systems, we achieve 20-54% reductions in rollout CRPS and up to 30% improvements in variance-normalised RMSE (VRMSE) relative to compute-matched deterministic fine-tuning. We further validate our approach on a PDE foundation model, trained on multiple systems and retrofitted on the dataset of interest, to show that our probabilistic adaptation yields an improvement of up to 40% in CRPS and up to 15% in VRMSE compared to deterministic fine-tuning. Validated across diverse architectures and dynamics, our results show that probabilistic PDE modelling need not require retraining from scratch, but can be unlocked from existing deterministic backbones with modest additional training cost.
Authors: Jiejun Tan, Zhicheng Dou, Liancheng Zhang, Yuyang Hu, Yiruo Cheng, Ji-Rong Wen
Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for long-duration tasks, maintaining effective long-term memory has become a critical challenge. Current methods often face a trade-off between cost and accuracy. Simple storage methods often fail to retrieve relevant information, while complex indexing methods (such as memory graphs) require heavy computation and can cause information loss. Furthermore, relying on the working LLM to process all memories is computationally expensive and slow. To address these limitations, we propose MemSifter, a novel framework that offloads the memory retrieval process to a small-scale proxy model. Instead of increasing the burden on the primary working LLM, MemSifter uses a smaller model to reason about the task before retrieving the necessary information. This approach requires no heavy computation during the indexing phase and adds minimal overhead during inference. To optimize the proxy model, we introduce a memory-specific Reinforcement Learning (RL) training paradigm. We design a task-outcome-oriented reward based on the working LLM's actual performance in completing the task. The reward measures the actual contribution of retrieved memories by mutiple interactions with the working LLM, and discriminates retrieved rankings by stepped decreasing contributions. Additionally, we employ training techniques such as Curriculum Learning and Model Merging to improve performance. We evaluated MemSifter on eight LLM memory benchmarks, including Deep Research tasks. The results demonstrate that our method meets or exceeds the performance of existing state-of-the-art approaches in both retrieval accuracy and final task completion. MemSifter offers an efficient and scalable solution for long-term LLM memory. We have open-sourced the model weights, code, and training data to support further research.
Authors: Youngwon Choi, Jinwoo Oh, Hwayeon Kim, Hyeonyu Kim
Abstract: We investigate the use of zero-shot text-to-speech (ZS-TTS) as a data augmentation source for low-resource personalized speech synthesis. While synthetic augmentation can provide linguistically rich and phonetically diverse speech, naively mixing large amounts of synthetic speech with limited real recordings often leads to speaker similarity degradation during fine-tuning. To address this issue, we propose ZeSTA, a simple domain-conditioned training framework that distinguishes real and synthetic speech via a lightweight domain embedding, combined with real-data oversampling to stabilize adaptation under extremely limited target data, without modifying the base architecture. Experiments on LibriTTS and an in-house dataset with two ZS-TTS sources demonstrate that our approach improves speaker similarity over naive synthetic augmentation while preserving intelligibility and perceptual quality. Audio samples are available on our web page.
Authors: Fengxiang Nie, Yasuhiro Suzuki
Abstract: Data-driven surrogate models can significantly accelerate the simulation of continuous dynamical systems, yet the step-wise accumulation of errors during autoregressive time-stepping often leads to spectral blow-up and unphysical divergence. Existing global regularization techniques can enforce contractive dynamics but uniformly damp high-frequency features, causing over-smoothing; meanwhile, long-horizon trajectory optimization methods are severely constrained by memory bottlenecks. This paper proposes Jacobian-Adaptive Weighting for Stability (JAWS), which reformulates operator learning as a Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) estimation problem with spatially heteroscedastic uncertainty, enabling the regularization strength to adapt automatically based on local physical complexity: enforcing contraction in smooth regions to suppress noise while relaxing constraints near singular features such as shocks to preserve gradient information. Experiments demonstrate that JAWS serves as an effective spectral pre-conditioner for trajectory optimization, allowing short-horizon, memory-efficient training to match the accuracy of long-horizon baselines. Validations on the 1D viscous Burgers' equation and 2D flow past a cylinder ($\text{Re}=400$ out-of-distribution generalization) confirm the method's advantages in long-term stability, preservation of physical conservation properties, and computational efficiency. This significant reduction in memory usage makes the method particularly well-suited for stable and efficient long-term simulation of large-scale flow fields in practical engineering applications.
Authors: Siyuan Yang, Jun Liu, Hao Cheng, Chong Wang, Shijian Lu, Hedvig Kjellstrom, Weisi Lin, Alex C. Kot
Abstract: Recent advances in large-scale pretrained vision models have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a wide range of downstream tasks, including cross-modal and multi-modal scenarios. However, their direct application to 3D human skeleton data remains challenging due to fundamental differences in data format. Moreover, the scarcity of large-scale skeleton datasets and the need to incorporate skeleton data into multi-modal action recognition without introducing additional model branches present significant research opportunities. To address these challenges, we introduce Skeleton-to-Image Encoding (S2I), a novel representation that transforms skeleton sequences into image-like data by partitioning and arranging joints based on body-part semantics and resizing to standardized image dimensions. This encoding enables, for the first time, the use of powerful vision-pretrained models for self-supervised skeleton representation learning, effectively transferring rich visual-domain knowledge to skeleton analysis. While existing skeleton methods often design models tailored to specific, homogeneous skeleton formats, they overlook the structural heterogeneity that naturally arises from diverse data sources. In contrast, our S2I representation offers a unified image-like format that naturally accommodates heterogeneous skeleton data. Extensive experiments on NTU-60, NTU-120, and PKU-MMD demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of our method for self-supervised skeleton representation learning, including under challenging cross-format evaluation settings.
Authors: Hoseong Ahn, Jeongyun Chae, Yoonji Park, Kyuhong Shim
Abstract: Long-form speech recognition with large encoder-decoder models such as Whisper often exhibit hallucinations, repetition loops, and content omissions. These errors can accumulate and be further amplified when the previous segment's transcription is used as decoding context. We propose Whisper-CD, a training-free contrastive decoding framework that contrasts clean-audio logits against negative logits computed from three acoustically motivated perturbations: Gaussian noise injection, silence signal, and audio temporal shift. We aggregate these negatives via the log-sum-exp operator, building a unified multi-negative objective for token-by-token decoding. Across five English long-form benchmarks, Whisper-CD reduces WER by up to 24.3pp on CORAAL and shows 48% faster token generation throughput than beam search. Because Whisper-CD operates purely at inference time, it can be applied as a drop-in replacement to already-deployed Whisper systems without retraining.
Authors: Jonas Landsgesell, Pascal Knoll, Tizian Wenzel
Abstract: Modern tabular foundation models such as TabPFN and TabICL naturally produce full predictive distributions, while the benchmarks used to evaluate them (TabArena, TALENT, and others) still rely almost exclusively on point-estimate metrics (RMSE, $R^2$). This mismatch implicitly rewards machine learning models or pipelines that elicit a good conditional mean while ignoring the quality of the predictive distribution. We make the case for using proper scoring rules for training, fine-tuning, and benchmarking (ranking) of tabular foundation models. Although all strictly proper scoring rules are theoretically equivalent at the population level, they may differ on finite data: We demonstrate analytically and empirically that different scoring rules can induce different inductive biases during finite-sample optimization, leading to different model performance. We validate this finding by running fine-tuning experiments with TabPFN and TabICL using different scoring rules for various data sets, revealing non-trivial interactions between training objectives and evaluation metrics. Our results show that practitioners can adapt tabular foundation models to task-specific scoring objectives, and that the choice of scoring rule can influence model behavior in practice.
Authors: Daniele Molino, Camillo Maria Caruso, Paolo Soda, Valerio Guarrasi
Abstract: Text-conditioned generative models for volumetric medical imaging provide semantic control but lack explicit anatomical guidance, often resulting in outputs that are spatially ambiguous or anatomically inconsistent. In contrast, structure-driven methods ensure strong anatomical consistency but typically assume access to ground-truth annotations, which are unavailable when the target image is to be synthesized. We propose a retrieval-augmented approach for Text-to-CT generation that integrates semantic and anatomical information under a realistic inference setting. Given a radiology report, our method retrieves a semantically related clinical case using a 3D vision-language encoder and leverages its associated anatomical annotation as a structural proxy. This proxy is injected into a text-conditioned latent diffusion model via a ControlNet branch, providing coarse anatomical guidance while maintaining semantic flexibility. Experiments on the CT-RATE dataset show that retrieval-augmented generation improves image fidelity and clinical consistency compared to text-only baselines, while additionally enabling explicit spatial controllability, a capability inherently absent in such approaches. Further analysis highlights the importance of retrieval quality, with semantically aligned proxies yielding consistent gains across all evaluation axes. This work introduces a principled and scalable mechanism to bridge semantic conditioning and anatomical plausibility in volumetric medical image synthesis. Code is available at https://github.com/arco-group/RAGText2CT.
Authors: Saron Samuel, Alexander Martin, Eugene Yang, Andrew Yates, Dawn Lawrie, Ian Soboroff, Laura Dietz, Benjamin Van Durme
Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems combine document retrieval with a generative model to address complex information seeking tasks like report generation. While the relationship between retrieval quality and generation effectiveness seems intuitive, it has not been systematically studied. We investigate whether upstream retrieval metrics can serve as reliable early indicators of the final generated response's information coverage. Through experiments across two text RAG benchmarks (TREC NeuCLIR 2024 and TREC RAG 2024) and one multimodal benchmark (WikiVideo), we analyze 15 text retrieval stacks and 10 multimodal retrieval stacks across four RAG pipelines and multiple evaluation frameworks (Auto-ARGUE and MiRAGE). Our findings demonstrate strong correlations between coverage-based retrieval metrics and nugget coverage in generated responses at both topic and system levels. This relationship holds most strongly when retrieval objectives align with generation goals, though more complex iterative RAG pipelines can partially decouple generation quality from retrieval effectiveness. These findings provide empirical support for using retrieval metrics as proxies for RAG performance.
Authors: Xinyu Tong, Meihua Zhou, Bowu Fan, Haitao Li
Abstract: Multimodal medical image segmentation often faces missing modalities at inference, which induces disagreement among modality experts and makes fusion unstable, particularly on small foreground structures. We propose Consistency Learning of Experts (CLoE), a consistency-driven framework for missing-modality segmentation that preserves strong performance when all modalities are available. CLoE formulates robustness as decision-level expert consistency control and introduces a dual-branch Expert Consistency Learning objective. Modality Expert Consistency enforces global agreement among expert predictions to reduce case-wise drift under partial inputs, while Region Expert Consistency emphasizes agreement on clinically critical foreground regions to avoid background-dominated regularization. We further map consistency scores to modality reliability weights using a lightweight gating network, enabling reliability-aware feature recalibration before fusion. Extensive experiments on BraTS 2020 and MSD Prostate demonstrate that CLoE outperforms state-of-the-art methods in incomplete multimodal segmentation, while exhibiting strong cross-dataset generalization and improving robustness on clinically critical structures.
Authors: Rajdeep Pathak, Rahul Goswami, Madhurima Panja, Palash Ghosh, Tanujit Chakraborty
Abstract: Reliable uncertainty quantification is paramount for forecasting multivariate time series and spatiotemporal data. While Transformer architectures excel at sequence modeling, current probabilistic approaches typically rely on restrictive parametric likelihoods or quantile-based objectives, thereby limiting their ability to capture complex joint distributions in correlated time series. To overcome these limitations, we propose \textit{Enformer} and its spatiotemporal extension, \textit{GEnformer}. These models synthesize the expressive power of Transformers with engression, a stochastic learning paradigm for modeling conditional distributions. By injecting stochastic noise and optimizing a strictly proper scoring objective, our frameworks directly learn conditional predictive distributions without imposing parametric assumptions. This design ensures the generation of coherent multivariate trajectories while maintaining the Transformer's efficacy in modeling long-range dependencies and cross-series interactions. The probabilistic capability of Enformer is achieved with an asymptotic overhead of only a constant factor over a deterministic Transformer with an identical configuration. We extensively evaluate our frameworks on prominent multivariate benchmarks for temporal dynamics and real-world epidemic datasets for spatiotemporal dynamics. Empirical results demonstrate that both frameworks yield calibrated probabilistic forecasts and consistently outperform state-of-the-art baselines.
Authors: Junwon Moon, Seungbeom Kim, Hansol Park, Hyunjin Choi, Hoseong Ahn, Heeseung Kim, Kyuhong Shim
Abstract: Target speaker extraction (TSE) extracts the target speaker's voice from overlapping speech given a reference utterance. Existing masking-based approaches are lightweight and effective but suffer from an inability to synthesize missing content, leading to degraded perceptual quality. On the other hand, recent generative TSE models typically synthesize high-quality speech with diffusion, but require numerous iterative steps resulting in high computational costs and latency. We propose Mask2Flow-TSE, a two-stage framework combining the strengths of both paradigms. We introduce the deletion/insertion (D/I) proportion, an analytical tool that reveals early flow steps predominantly remove signal components rather than synthesize them. Based on this finding, we decouple deletion from insertion: a masking-based module handles the deletion-dominant early steps, while a single flow-matching step performs the remaining insertion for high-quality reconstruction. Specifically, the first stage uses lightweight convolution for the masking module, while the second stage employs a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) adapted for TSE with speaker conditioning. Unlike prior approaches that start from Gaussian noise, our method starts from the masked spectrogram, enabling high-quality reconstruction in a single inference step. Experiments show that Mask2Flow-TSE produces high-quality extractions with only 85M parameters and one-step inference, while preserving clean single-speaker inputs with minimal degradation.
Authors: Rodrigo Tertulino, La\'ercio Alencar
Abstract: Accurate cardiovascular risk prediction is crucial for preventive healthcare; however, the development of robust Artificial Intelligence (AI) models is hindered by the fragmentation of clinical data across institutions due to stringent privacy regulations. This paper presents a comprehensive architectural case study validating the engineering robustness of FedCVR, a privacy-preserving Federated Learning framework applied to heterogeneous clinical networks. Rather than proposing a new theoretical optimizer, this work focuses on a systems engineering analysis to quantify the operational trade-offs of server-side adaptive optimization under utility-prioritized Differential Privacy (DP). By conducting a rigorous stress test in a high-fidelity synthetic environment that reflects the feature space and clinical context of real-world datasets (Framingham, Cleveland), we systematically evaluate the system's resilience to statistical noise. The validation results demonstrate that integrating server-side momentum as a temporal denoiser enables the architecture to achieve a stable F1 score of 0.78 and an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 0.96 under the operational privacy budget (epsilon approximately 13.4), compared to a non-private baseline with an F1 score of 0.84. FedCVR statistically outperforms standard stateless baselines (FedAvg, FedProx) and other adaptive optimizers (FedAdagrad, FedYogi) under identical privacy constraints. Our findings confirm that server-side adaptivity is a structural prerequisite for recovering clinical utility under realistic privacy budgets, providing a validated engineering blueprint for secure multi-institutional collaboration.
Authors: Qibing Bai, Yuhan Du, Tom Ko, Shuai Wang, Yannan Wang, Haizhou Li
Abstract: Existing accent normalization methods do not typically offer control over accent strength, yet many applications-such as language learning and dubbing-require tunable accent retention. We propose DLM-AN, a controllable accent normalization system built on masked discrete diffusion over self-supervised speech tokens. A Common Token Predictor identifies source tokens that likely encode native pronunciation; these tokens are selectively reused to initialize the reverse diffusion process. This provides a simple yet effective mechanism for controlling accent strength: reusing more tokens preserves more of the original accent. DLM-AN further incorporates a flow-matching Duration Ratio Predictor that automatically adjusts the total duration to better match the native rhythm. Experiments on multi-accent English data show that DLM-AN achieves the lowest word error rate among all compared systems while delivering competitive accent reduction and smooth, interpretable accent strength control.
Authors: Wen Yan, Yipei Wang, Shiqi Huang, Natasha Thorley, Mark Emberton, Vasilis Stavrinides, Yipeng Hu, Dean Barratt
Abstract: Label variability is a major challenge for prostate lesion segmentation. In multi-site datasets, annotations often reflect centre-specific contouring protocols, causing segmentation networks to overfit to local styles and generalise poorly to unseen sites in inference. We treat each observed annotation as a noisy observation of an underlying latent 'clean' lesion mask, and propose a hierarchical expectation-maximisation (HierEM) framework that alternates between: (1) inferring a voxel-wise posterior distribution over the latent mask, and (2) training a CNN using this posterior as a soft target and estimate site-specific sensitivity and specificity under a hierarchical prior. This hierarchical prior decomposes label-quality into a global mean with site- and case-level deviations, reducing site-specific bias by penalising the likelihood term contributed only by site deviations. Experiments on three cohorts demonstrate that the proposed hierarchical EM framework enhances cross-site generalisation compared to state-of-the-art methods. For pooled-dataset evaluation, the per-site mean DSC ranges from 29.50% to 39.69%; for leave-one-site-out generalisation, it ranges from 27.91% to 32.67%, yielding statistically significant improvements over comparison methods (p<0.039). The method also produces interpretable per-site latent label-quality estimates (sensitivity alpha ranges from 31.5% to 47.3% at specificity beta approximates 0.99), supporting post-hoc analyses of cross-site annotation variability. These results indicate that explicitly modelling site-dependent annotation can improve cross-site generalisation.
Authors: Omkar Patil, Ondrej Biza, Thomas Weng, Karl Schmeckpeper, Wil Thomason, Xiaohan Zhang, Kausik Sivakumar, Robin Walters, Nakul Gopalan, Sebastian Castro, Stephen Hart, Eric Rosen
Abstract: What happens when a pretrained generative robot policy is provided a constant initial noise as input, rather than repeatedly sampling it from a Gaussian? We demonstrate that the performance of a pretrained, frozen diffusion or flow matching policy can be improved with respect to a downstream reward by swapping the sampling of initial noise from the prior distribution (typically isotropic Gaussian) with a well-chosen, constant initial noise input - a golden ticket. We propose simple search methods to find golden tickets using Monte-Carlo policy evaluation that keeps the pretrained policy frozen, does not train any new networks, and is applicable to all diffusion/flow matching policies (and therefore many VLAs). Our approach to policy improvement makes no assumptions beyond being able to inject initial noise into the policy and calculate (sparse) task rewards of episode rollouts, making it deployable with no additional infrastructure or models. Our method improves the performance of policies in 46 out of 51 tasks across simulated and real-world robot manipulation benchmarks, with absolute improvements in success rate by up to 55% for some simulated tasks, and 28% within 60 search episodes for real-world tasks. Our approach naturally extends to multi-task settings, where we improve the average performance of a VLA policy across 7 tasks by 14% using a single noise vector. Further, we find that, a golden ticket optimized for one task can also boost performance in other related tasks for the same VLA policy. We release a codebase with pretrained policies and golden tickets for simulation benchmarks using VLAs, diffusion policies, and flow matching policies.
Authors: Eric A. Moreno, Samuel Bright-Thonney, Andrzej Novak, Dolores Garcia, Philip Harris
Abstract: Large language model-based AI agents are now able to autonomously execute substantial portions of a high energy physics (HEP) analysis pipeline with minimal expert-curated input. Given access to a HEP dataset, an execution framework, and a corpus of prior experimental literature, we find that Claude Code succeeds in automating all stages of a typical analysis: event selection, background estimation, uncertainty quantification, statistical inference, and paper drafting. We argue that the experimental HEP community is underestimating the current capabilities of these systems, and that most proposed agentic workflows are too narrowly scoped or scaffolded to specific analysis structures. We present a proof-of-concept framework, Just Furnish Context (JFC), that integrates autonomous analysis agents with literature-based knowledge retrieval and multi-agent review, and show that this is sufficient to plan, execute, and document a credible high energy physics analysis. We demonstrate this by conducting analyses on open data from ALEPH, DELPHI, and CMS to perform electroweak, QCD, and Higgs boson measurements. We present two of those results in a condensed short paper form -- a CMS Run1 Open Data $H\to \tau^+\tau^-$ to demonstrate performance on a well-established result, and the first Lund plane measurement on LEP data -- a genuinely novel result and, to our knowledge, the first produced autonomously by an AI agent. Rather than replacing physicists, these tools promise to offload the repetitive technical burden of analysis code development, freeing researchers to focus on physics insight, truly novel method development, and rigorous validation. Given these developments, we advocate for new strategies for how the community trains students, organizes analysis efforts, and allocates human expertise.
Authors: Mehtab Ur Rahman, Martha Larson, Cristian Tejedor-Garcia
Abstract: Voice privacy approaches that preserve the anonymity of speakers modify speech in an attempt to break the link with the true identity of the speaker. Current benchmarks measure speaker protection based on signal-to-signal comparisons. In this paper, we introduce an attribute-based perspective, where we measure privacy protection in terms of comparisons between sets of speaker attributes. First, we analyze privacy impact by calculating speaker uniqueness for ground truth attributes, attributes inferred on the original speech, and attributes inferred on speech protected with standard anonymization. Next, we examine a threat scenario involving only a single utterance per speaker and calculate attack error rates. Overall, we observe that inferred attributes still present a risk despite attribute inference errors. Our research points to the importance of considering both attribute-related threats and protection mechanisms in future voice privacy research.
Authors: Aman Mehta
Abstract: As coding agents move into production workflows, teams need to know not only whether an agent completes a task, but whether its action can be trusted. We show that completion and trustworthiness diverge sharply and systematically. Across 1,750 trajectories on 50 SWE-bench Verified tasks, we compare four frontier models over repeated runs and separate submit rate from test-verified resolve rate. GPT-5 submits a patch on 100% of runs but resolves only 44%; Llama 4 submits on 99% but resolves 18%; and Gemini, despite submitting least often at 70%, resolves more tasks than GPT-5 (50% versus 44%). These gaps are not random: they concentrate in one dangerous failure mode we call silent semantic failure. Qualitatively, on a buggy task the agent submits a plausible-looking patch on all five runs, yet none pass, the same misinterpretation repeated rather than random error. Quantitatively, it dominates failure, covering 80% of Llama 4's failing runs and 68% of GPT-5's, and it is invisible: the outcomes are confidently and consistently wrong, so completion-based and consistency-based monitoring both look healthy exactly when the agent should not be trusted. Lightweight pre-edit prompts do not close the gap. A second probe isolates the instinct to act: given an already-fixed bug, where the right move is to abstain, most models still edit the correct code. This action bias, acting when no action is warranted, is exactly what completion metrics reward. The throughline is measurement: submit rate captures action, but trust requires validity. So evaluation must catch up: score agents by test-verified correctness over repeated runs, report its uncertainty, and reward those that know when not to act.
Authors: Anuj Diwan, Eunsol Choi, David Harwath
Abstract: We introduce ParaSpeechCLAP, a family of dual-encoder models that map speech and text style captions into a shared embedding space, supporting rich intrinsic (speaker-level) and situational (utterance-level) descriptors, such as pitch, texture, and emotion, beyond the narrow set handled by existing models. We train separate Intrinsic and Situational models alongside a unified Combined model, finding that specialized models are stronger on individual style dimensions while the unified model excels on compositional evaluation. We further show that ParaSpeechCLAP-Intrinsic benefits from an additional classification loss and class-balanced training. We demonstrate performance on style caption retrieval, speech attribute classification, and usability as inference-time reward models for style-prompted TTS. ParaSpeechCLAP models outperform baselines on most metrics across all three applications. Our models and code are released at https://github.com/ajd12342/paraspeechclap .
Authors: Zhensu Sun, Zhihao Lin, Zhi Chen, Chengran Yang, Mingyi Zhou, Li Li, David Lo
Abstract: Current LLM systems are increasingly equipped with a code interpreter that executes generated code to obtain results. This works serially: the model first generates the complete code, then an interpreter executes it. This sequential workflow leaves the executor idle during generation and the generator idle during execution, resulting in unnecessary end-to-end latency. Our key observation is that an LLM, unlike a human developer, emits code tokens left to right and does not backtrack over what it has already written. This makes it possible to start executing a piece of code while later tokens are still being generated. We formalize this parallel execution paradigm, modeling it as a three-stage pipeline of generation, detection, and execution, and derive closed-form latency bounds that characterize its speedup potential and operating regimes. We then present EAGER, a concrete implementation featuring AST-based chunking, dynamic batching with gated execution, and early error interruption. We evaluate EAGER across four benchmarks, seven LLMs, and three execution environments. The overlap mechanism hides almost all execution behind generation, reducing the non-overlapped portion of execution time by up to 99.8% and cutting end-to-end latency by up to 37.3% on error-free runs.
Authors: Boyang Gong, Yu Zheng, Fanye Kong, Jie Zhou, Jiwen Lu
Abstract: Like a body at rest that stays at rest, we find that visual attention in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibits pronounced inertia, remaining largely static once settled during early decoding steps and failing to support the compositional understanding required for cognitive inference. While existing hallucination mitigation methods mainly target perceptual hallucinations concerning object existence or attributes, they remain inadequate for such cognitive hallucinations that require inter-object relational deduction. Through token-wise analysis, we identify visual inertia as a contributing factor: attention to semantically critical regions remains persistently focused and fails to dynamically support relational inference. We thereby propose Inertia-aware Visual Excitation (IVE) that breaks this inertial pattern by modeling cognitive inference as the dynamic responsiveness of visual attention. Specifically, IVE selects visual tokens that are dynamically emerging relative to historical attention trends while distinguishing tokens exhibiting inertial behavior. To further facilitate compositional inference, IVE introduces an inertia-aware penalty that discourages over-concentration and limits the persistence of attention within localized regions. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of IVE across various MLLMs and benchmarks without additional training.
Authors: Zhihao Chen, Ying Zhang, Yi Liu, Gelei Deng, Yuekang Li, Yanjun Zhang, Jianting Ning, Leo Yu Zhang, Lei Ma, Zhiqiang Li
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on third-party skills that operate within privileged execution environments and routinely handle sensitive credentials, yet how these credentials are leaked remains largely unexplored. To fill this gap, we present the first large-scale empirical study on credential leakage in agent skills. From 170,226 artifacts on SkillsMP, the largest open-source skill marketplace, we sampled 17,022 skills via stratified random sampling and analyzed each through static secret extraction (regex and AST parsing), dynamic sandbox testing with mock credentials, and cross-referencing developer intent against runtime behavior. Our analysis identifies 520 affected skills containing 1,708 security issues, and yields a taxonomy of 10 leakage patterns. Three findings stand out. First, 76.3% of cases require jointly analyzing natural-language descriptions and programming logic, showing that credential exposure in skills is fundamentally cross-modal. Second, debug logging accounts for 73.5% of vulnerabilities because agent frameworks feed stdout into the LLM context window, turning routine debugging into a credential exposure vector. Third, 89.6% of leaked credentials are immediately exploitable -- 92.5% during routine execution without elevated privileges -- and the fork-based distribution model defeats remediation, as secrets removed from 107 upstream repositories persist across 50+ independent forks. Following responsible disclosure, all malicious skills have been removed and 91.6% of hardcoded cases remediated. We release our dataset, taxonomy, and detection pipeline to support future agent security research.
Authors: Michael Caosun, Sinan Aral
Abstract: Experimental evidence suggests that AI tools raise worker productivity, but also that sustained use can erode the expertise on which those gains depend. We develop a dynamic model in which a decision-maker chooses AI usage intensity for a worker over time, trading immediate productivity against the erosion of worker skill. We decompose the tool's productivity effect into two channels, one independent of worker expertise and one that scales with it. The model produces three main results. First, a decision-maker who fully anticipates skill erosion still rationally adopts AI when front-loaded gains outweigh long-run skill costs, lowering long-run productivity. Second, when the decision-maker and the worker are misaligned, through short-termism on either side or private returns to skill that the deployment ignores, this loss becomes an augmentation trap that leaves the worker worse off than without AI. Third, when AI productivity depends little on worker expertise, the model can generate permanent divergence, with high-skill workers reaching their potential and low-skill workers deskilling to zero. The decomposition sorts deployments into five regimes, separating beneficial from harmful adoption.
Authors: Yuanchen Bai, Zijian Ding, Ruixiang Han, Niti Parikh, Wendy Ju, Angelique Taylor
Abstract: The rapid advancement of robotics is reshaping what it means for humans and robots to coexist -- through expanded capabilities, more intuitive interactions, and deeper integration into real-world workflows. Beyond sharing physical space, this coexistence is increasingly characterized by organizational embeddedness, temporal evolution, social situatedness, and open-ended uncertainty. Because such coexistence extends beyond a single encounter, understanding healthcare robots requires looking beyond initial acceptance to how stakeholders' perceptions evolve through continued engagement. Yet, prior work has largely relied on single-point snapshots of attitudes and acceptance, offering limited insight into coexistence as a long-term, dynamic process. We address these gaps through in-depth follow-up interviews with nine participants from a 14-week co-design study on healthcare robots. We identify the human perception space, which includes four interpretive dimensions (i.e., degree of decomposition, source of evidence, scope of reasoning, and temporal orientation). We enrich the conceptual framework of human-robot coexistence by conceptualizing the mutual relationship between the human perception space and the robot design space as a co-evolving loop, in which human needs, design decisions, situated interpretations, and social mediation continuously reshape one another over time. Building on this, we propose considerate human-robot coexistence, arguing that humans act not only as design contributors but also as interpreters and mediators who actively shape how robots are understood and integrated across deployment stages. Our related prior work and supplementary materials, including the interview protocol, are available at https://byc-sophie.github.io/considerate-human-robot-coexistence/
URLs: https://byc-sophie.github.io/considerate-human-robot-coexistence/
Authors: Asif Azad, MD Sadik Hossain Shanto, Mohammad Sadat Hossain, Bdour Alwuqaysi, Sabri Boughorbel, Yahya Bokhari, Abdulrhman Aljouie, Ayah Othman Sindi, Ehsan Hoque
Abstract: Automated phoneme-level pronunciation assessment is vital for scalable speech therapy and language learning, yet validated tools for Arabic remain scarce. We present Harf-Speech, a modular system scoring Arabic pronunciation at the phoneme level on a clinical scale. It combines an MSA phonetizer, a fine-tuned speech-to-phoneme model, Levenshtein alignment, and a blended scorer using longest common subsequence and edit-distance metrics. We fine-tune three ASR architectures on Arabic phoneme data and benchmark them with zero-shot multimodal models; the best, OmniASR-CTC-1B-v2, achieves 8.92% phoneme error rate. Three certified speech-language pathologists independently scored 40 utterances for clinical validation. Harf-Speech attains a Pearson correlation of 0.791 and ICC(2,1) of 0.659 with mean expert scores, outperforming existing end-to-end assessment frameworks. These results show Harf-Speech yields clinically aligned, interpretable scores comparable to inter-rater expert agreement.
Authors: Uljad Berdica, Jakob Foerster, Frank Hutter, Arber Zela
Abstract: The generation of sustained, open-ended complexity from local interactions remains a fundamental challenge in artificial life. Differentiable multi-agent systems, such as Petri Dish Neural Cellular Automata (PD-NCA), exhibit rich self-organization driven purely by spatial competition; however, they are highly sensitive to hyperparameters and frequently collapse into uninteresting patterns and dynamics, such as frozen equilibria or structureless noise. In this paper, we introduce PBT-NCA, a meta-evolutionary algorithm that evolves a population of PD-NCAs subject to a composite objective that rewards both historical behavioral novelty and contemporary visual diversity. Driven by this continuous evolutionary pressure, PBT-NCA spontaneously generates a plethora of emergent lifelike phenomena over extended horizons-a hallmark of true open-endedness. Strikingly, the substrate autonomously discovers diverse morphological survival and self-organization strategies. We observe highly regular, coordinated periodic waves; spore-like scattering where homogeneous groups eject cell-like clusters to colonize distant territories; and fluid, shape-shifting macro-structures that migrate across the substrate, maintaining stable outer boundaries that enclose highly active interiors. By actively penalizing monocultures and dead states, PBT-NCA sustains a state of effective complexity that is neither globally ordered nor globally random, operating persistently at the "edge of chaos".
Authors: Ankit Gupta (Michigan State University), Christoph Adami (Michigan State University)
Abstract: Modern machine learning methods have been proposed to detect life in extraterrestrial samples, drawing on their ability to distinguish biotic from abiotic samples based on training models using natural and synthetic organic molecular mixtures. Here we show using Artificial Life that such methods are easily fooled into detecting life with near 100% confidence even if the analyzed sample is not capable of life. This is due to modern machine learning methods' propensity to be easily fooled by out-of-distribution samples. Because extra-terrestrial samples are very likely out of the distribution provided by terrestrial biotic and abiotic samples, using AI methods for life detection is likely to yield significant false positives.
Authors: Qiang Zhang, Zhongnian Li
Abstract: Binary decompilation is a critical reverse engineering task aimed at reconstructing high-level source code from stripped executables. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown promise, they often suffer from "logical hallucinations" and "semantic misalignment" due to the irreversible semantic loss during compilation, resulting in generated code that fails to re-execute. In this study, we propose Cognitive Decompiler Refinement with Robustness (CoDe-R), a lightweight two-stage code refinement framework. The first stage introduces Semantic Cognitive Enhancement (SCE), a Rationale-Guided Semantic Injection strategy that trains the model to recover high-level algorithmic intent alongside code. The second stage introduces a Dynamic Dual-Path Fallback (DDPF) mechanism during inference, which adaptively balances semantic recovery and syntactic stability via a hybrid verification strategy. Evaluation on the HumanEval-Decompile benchmark demonstrates that CoDe-R (using a 1.3B backbone) establishes a new State-of-the-Art (SOTA) in the lightweight regime. Notably, it is the first 1.3B model to exceed an Average Re-executability Rate of 50.00%, significantly outperforming the baseline and effectively bridging the gap between efficient models and expert-level performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/Theaoi/CoDe-R.
Authors: Junghoon Seo
Abstract: Behavior cloning (BC) on position-controlled robots is shaped by the PD loop that executes policy actions. We give a finite-horizon, nonasymptotic analysis of how controller gains affect BC failure. Independent sub-Gaussian action errors propagate through gain-dependent closed-loop dynamics into sub-Gaussian position errors. The resulting failure tail is controlled by controller amplification multiplied by validation loss and generalization slack, so validation loss alone can mis-rank gains. Under shape-preserving upper-bound assumptions, the analysis separates label difficulty, injection strength, and contraction, ranking compliant-overdamped gains as tightest and stiff-underdamped gains as loosest, with the mixed regimes system-dependent. In the canonical scalar second-order PD system, stationary position-error variance increases with stiffness and decreases with damping over the stable range, and exact zero-order-hold discretization inherits the ordering to leading order. This extends the error-attenuation explanation of bronars et al. (2026) to finite-horizon failure bounds.
Authors: Jiaxun Cao, Yu Dong, Chunxi Zhan, Rithvik Neti, Sai Teja Peddinti, Pardis Emami-Naeini
Abstract: Users increasingly rely on consumer-facing generative AI (GenAI) for tasks ranging from everyday needs to sensitive use cases. Yet, it remains unclear whether and how existing security and privacy (S&P) communications in GenAI tools shape users' adoption decisions and experiences. Understanding how users seek, interpret, and evaluate S&P information is critical for designing usable transparency that users can trust and act on. We conducted semi-structured interviews and design sessions with 21 U.S. GenAI users. Our findings suggest that available S&P information rarely drove initial adoption in practice, as participants often perceived it as incomplete, ineffective, or not credible. Instead, they relied on rough proxies (e.g., popularity) to infer S&P practices. After adoption, S&P uncertainty constrained participants' willingness to use GenAI tools, especially for high-stakes purposes, and, in some cases, contributed to discontinued use. Participants therefore called for transparency that supports decisions and actions through trustworthy information (e.g., independent evaluations) and usable interfaces (e.g., on-demand disclosure). We categorize participants' desired design practices into five dimensions to facilitate systematic future investigation into best practices. We conclude with recommendations for researchers, designers, and policymakers to improve S&P transparency in consumer-facing GenAI.
Authors: Khoi Vu, Dat Tran, Khanh Do, Phat Lam, Vu Nguyen, Khoa Nguyen, David Fischinger, Tin Nguyen, Ian McLoughlin, Son Le, Lam Pham
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a deep-learning framework for Environmental Sound Deepfake Detection (ESDD) - the task of identifying whether the sound scene and sound event in an input audio recording is fake or real. To this end, we first conduct extensive experiments to explore how individual spectrograms, a wide range of network architectures, and pre-trained models affect the performance of an ESDD model. The experimental results on the benchmark datasets of EnvSDD indicate that detecting deepfake audio of sound scenes and detecting deepfake audio of sound events should be considered as individual tasks. We also show that fine-tuning a pre-trained model is more effective than training a model from scratch for ESDD. Ultimately, our best model, which fine-tunes the pre-trained BEATs model using the proposed two-phase training strategy, achieves an Accuracy of 0.98, F1 score of 0.95, and AUC score of 0.99 on the Test subset of the EnvSDD dataset. Our best model also achieves an Accuracy of 0.86, F1 score of 0.80, and AUC of 0.93 when evaluated cross-dataset on the ESD-Challenge-TestSet dataset.
Authors: Zhisong Qiu, Shuofei Qiao, Kewei Xu, Yuqi Zhu, Lun Du, Ningyu Zhang, Huajun Chen
Abstract: Process Reward Models (PRMs) have achieved remarkable success in augmenting the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) within static domains such as mathematics. However, their potential in dynamic data analysis tasks remains underexplored. In this work, we first present a empirical study revealing that general-domain PRMs struggle to supervise data analysis agents. Specifically, they fail to detect silent errors, logical flaws that yield incorrect results without triggering interpreter exceptions, and erroneously penalize exploratory actions, mistaking necessary trial-and-error exploration for grounding failures. To bridge this gap, we introduce DataPRM, a novel environment-aware generative process reward model that (1) can serve as an active verifier, autonomously interacting with the environment to probe intermediate execution states and uncover silent errors, and (2) employs a reflection-aware ternary reward strategy that distinguishes between correctable grounding errors and irrecoverable mistakes. We design a scalable pipeline to construct over 8K high-quality training instances for DataPRM via diversity-driven trajectory generation and knowledge-augmented step-level annotation. Experimental results demonstrate that DataPRM improves downstream policy LLMs by 7.21% on ScienceAgentBench and 11.28% on DABStep using Best-of-N inference. Notably, with only 4B parameters, DataPRM outperforms strong baselines, and exhibits robust generalizability across diverse Test-Time Scaling strategies. Furthermore, integrating DataPRM into Reinforcement Learning yields substantial gains over outcome-reward baselines, achieving 78.73% on DABench and 64.84% on TableBench, validating the effectiveness of process reward supervision. Code is available at https://github.com/zjunlp/DataMind.
Authors: Huyen Nguyen, Haoxuan Zhang, Yang Zhang, Haihua Chen, Junhua Ding
Abstract: Reliable evaluation of large language model (LLM)-generated summaries remains an open challenge, particularly across heterogeneous domains and document lengths. We conduct a comprehensive meta-evaluation of 14 automatic summarization metrics and LLM-based evaluators across seven datasets spanning five domains, covering documents from short news articles to long scientific, governmental, and legal texts (2K-27K words) with over 1,500 human-annotated summaries. Our results show that traditional lexical overlap metrics (e.g., ROUGE, BLEU) exhibit weak or negative correlation with human judgments, while task-specific neural metrics and LLM-based evaluators achieve substantially higher alignment, especially for linguistic quality assessment. Leveraging these findings, we propose LLM-ReSum, a self-reflective summarization framework that integrates LLM-based evaluation and generation in a closed feedback loop without model finetuning. Across three domains, LLM-ReSum improves low-quality summaries by up to 33% in factual accuracy and 39% in coverage, with human evaluators preferring refined summaries in 89% of cases. We additionally introduce PatentSumEval, a new human-annotated benchmark for legal document summarization comprising 180 expert-evaluated summaries. All code and datasets will be released in GitHub.
Authors: Dongxin Guo, Jikun Wu, Siu Ming Yiu
Abstract: AI agents execute tens to hundreds of chained LLM calls per task, yet GPU schedulers treat each call as independent, discarding gigabytes of intermediate state between steps and inflating end-to-end latency by 3-8x. We argue that this request-level abstraction is fundamentally mismatched to compound AI workloads, and propose a shift to program-level scheduling: treating the entire agent workflow (not individual inference calls) as the first-class schedulable unit. We present SAGA, a distributed scheduler that implements this abstraction through three mechanisms: (1) Agent Execution Graphs that capture workflow structure to predict KV cache reuse across tool-call boundaries, achieving within 1.31x of B\'el\'ady's optimal offline policy; (2) session-affinity batching with work stealing that co-locates correlated requests while maintaining global load balance; and (3) Agent Fair Share, a task-completion-time fairness metric with provable bounded-deviation guarantees. On a 64-GPU cluster serving SWE-bench coding agents and WebArena browser tasks, SAGA reduces task completion time by 1.64x (geometric mean, p < 0.001) over vLLM v0.15.1 with prefix caching and affinity routing, while improving GPU memory utilization by 1.22x and achieving 99.2% SLO attainment under multi-tenant interference. These latency gains come at a quantified cost: approximately 30% lower peak throughput than throughput-optimal batch scheduling, a tradeoff appropriate for the latency-sensitive interactive deployments that dominate compound AI usage. Our results demonstrate that workflow-aware scheduling is essential for efficient compound AI serving.
Authors: Lingxiao Kong, Cong Yang, Oya Deniz Beyan, Zeyd Boukhers
Abstract: Despite significant advances in Reinforcement Learning (RL), model performance remains highly sensitive to algorithm and hyperparameter configurations, while generalization gaps across environments complicate real-world deployment. Although prior work has studied RL generalization, the relative contribution of specific configurations to the generalization gap has not been quantitatively decomposed and systematically leveraged for configuration selection. To address this limitation, we propose an explainable framework that evaluates RL performance across robotic environments using SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) to quantify configuration impacts. We establish a theoretical foundation connecting Shapley values to generalizability, empirically analyze configuration impact patterns, and introduce SHAP-guided configuration selection to enhance generalization. Our results reveal distinct patterns across algorithms and hyperparameters, with consistent configuration impacts across diverse tasks and environments. By applying these insights to configuration selection, we achieve improved RL generalizability and provide actionable guidance for practitioners.
Authors: Lujain Ibrahim, Franziska Sofia Hafner, Myra Cheng, Cinoo Lee, Rebecca Anselmetti, Robb Willer, Luc Rocher, Diyi Yang
Abstract: Millions of people now turn to artificial intelligence (AI) systems for personal advice, guidance, and support. Such systems can be sycophantic, frequently affirming users' views and beliefs. Across five preregistered studies (N = 3,075 participants, 12,766 human-AI conversations), including a three-week study with a census-representative U.S. sample, we provide longitudinal experimental evidence that sycophantic AI shifts how users approach their closest relationships. We show that sycophantic AI immediately delivers the emotional and esteem support users typically associate with close friends and family. Over three weeks of such interactions, users became nearly as likely to seek personal advice from sycophantic AI as from close friends and family, and reported lower satisfaction with their real-world social interactions. When given a choice among AI response styles, a majority preferred sycophantic AI -- not for the quality of its advice, but because it made them feel most understood. Together, these findings offer a relational account of AI sycophancy and its impacts.
Authors: Jun Wen Leong
Abstract: Persistent memory attacks against LLM agents achieve high attack success rates against open-source models. In these attacks, malicious instructions injected via RAG-retrieved documents are stored in persistent memory and executed in later sessions. However, no systematic evaluation of defense effectiveness against this attack class exists. We evaluate six defenses across four architectural layers against delayed-trigger attacks on nine open-source models (5,040 runs, N=40 per condition). Four defenses fail at approximately baseline attack success rate: input-level filtering (Minimizer, Sanitizer) and retrieval-level filtering (RAG Sanitizer, RAG LLM Judge) achieve 88-89% ASR, statistically indistinguishable from the undefended baseline of 88.6%. Prompt Hardening partially fails at 77.8% ASR, with the reduction driven by two models at 0%: one genuine defense effect and one model-level refusal independent of the defense. The architectural explanation holds: input-level defenses cannot observe RAG-injected content, and retrieval-level classifiers are defeated by compliance-framed semantic masking. One defense, tool-gating at the memory layer (Memory Sandbox), reduces ASR to 0% for eight of nine models by removing the recall capability the attack requires. The exception inverts the defense entirely: a reasoning model that achieves 0% ASR under no defense via execution refusal inverts to 100% ASR under Memory Sandbox, because removing explicit recall forces the model onto the RAG pathway where its refusal mechanism does not activate. Memory Sandbox imposes zero utility cost in the absence of attack (BTCR = 100% across all conditions). These results provide the first systematic characterization of why each defense class fails against persistent memory attacks, enabling informed defense investment decisions.
Authors: Arsalaan Ahmad, Oktay Karakus, Paul L. Rosin
Abstract: Landslide detection from satellite imagery has advanced through deep learning, yet most models rely on large, highly correlated spectral-topographic inputs whose contributions remain poorly understood. The question of which channels are actually necessary has received surprisingly little attention. This matters: redundant or correlated inputs obscure physical interpretability, inflate computational overhead, and can actively degrade model performance through the Hughes Phenomenon. We present a systematic, explainable channel-selection framework for the Landslide4Sense benchmark, combining Sentinel-2 multispectral and ALOS PALSAR terrain data with 16 engineered spectral and structural indices. Rather than relying on conventional single-band drop tests, which evaluate channels in isolation and miss interaction effects, we apply Sequential Forward Floating Selection (SFFS) to iteratively build and prune a candidate feature pool using a lightweight U-Net++ proxy model. Beyond identifying a compact 8-channel subset that matches or exceeds the segmentation F1 of configurations using up to 30 channels, we use the selection process itself to interrogate which spectral and topographic features landslide models genuinely rely on, and what this reveals about the physical cues driving their predictions. We argue that SFFS represents a principled feature selection approach to input design in Earth observation, in contrast to the prevailing practice of appending every available band and hoping the model learns what to ignore.
Authors: Dongxin Guo, Jikun Wu, Siu Ming Yiu
Abstract: Gradient-based preference optimization methods for large language model (LLM) alignment suffer from preference collapse, converging to narrow behavioral modes while neglecting preference diversity. We introduce EvoPref, a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm that maintains populations of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapters optimized across helpfulness, harmlessness, and honesty objectives using Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II) selection with archive-based diversity preservation. Our primary contribution is demonstrating that population-based methods discover substantially more diverse alignments than gradient descent. On standard benchmarks, EvoPref improves preference coverage by 18% (median 82.5% vs. 70.0% for ORPO, $p<0.001$, Wilcoxon, $n=30$) and reduces collapse rates by 47% (11.0% vs. 20.6%, $p<0.001$), while achieving competitive alignment quality (median 75.5% RewardBench vs. 75.0% for ORPO, $p<0.05$). We provide theoretical motivation extending recent multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) runtime analysis (Dang et al., 2025) suggesting why archive-based methods escape collapse more effectively than single-trajectory optimization. Comprehensive comparisons against MOEA/D, SMS-EMOA, CMA-ES, and gradient baselines (DPO, IPO, KTO, ORPO) with rigorous statistical testing (Friedman with Holm correction, Vargha-Delaney effect sizes, median with IQR) confirm that multi-objective selection with diversity preservation is essential. This work establishes evolutionary optimization as a principled paradigm for diverse LLM alignment.
Authors: Dongxin Guo, Jikun Wu, Siu Ming Yiu
Abstract: Large Language Models exhibit mode collapse, producing homogeneous outputs that fail to explore valid solution spaces. We present QD-LLM, a framework for parameter-efficient neuroevolution that evolves prompt embeddings, compact neural interfaces (~32K parameters) that steer generation in frozen LLMs (70B+ parameters), within a Quality-Diversity (QD) optimization framework. Our contributions: (1) evolved prompt embeddings via gradient-free optimization enabling behavioral steering without model fine-tuning; (2) hybrid behavior characterization combining semantic and explicit features with formal coverage bounds (Theorem 1) under validated near-independence (NMI $= 0.08 \pm 0.02$); (3) co-evolutionary variation operators including targeted behavioral mutation via finite-difference gradient estimation. On HumanEval (164 problems), MBPP, and creative writing benchmarks, QD-LLM achieves 46.4% higher coverage and 41.4% higher QD-Score than QDAIF ($p<0.001$, 30 runs, Vargha-Delaney $A=0.94$). We demonstrate downstream utility: diverse archives improve test generation (34% more edge cases) and fine-tuning data quality (8.3% accuracy gain). We validate across open-source LLMs (Llama-3-70B, Mistral-Large) with full embedding access, establishing prompt embedding evolution as an effective paradigm bridging neuroevolution and modern LLMs.
Authors: Sushrita Rakshit, Hanwen Zhang, Hua Shen
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are often evaluated based on their stated values, yet these do not reliably translate into their actions, a discrepancy termed "value-action gap." In this work, we argue that this gap persists even under explicit reasoning, revealing a deeper failure mode we call "Pseudo-Deliberation": the appearance of principled reasoning without corresponding behavioral alignment. To study this systematically, we introduce VALDI, a framework for measuring alignment between stated values and generated dialogue. VALDI includes 4,941 human-centered scenarios across five domains, three tasks that elicit value articulation, reasoning, and action, and five metrics for quantifying value adherence. Across both proprietary and open-source LLMs, we observe consistent misalignment between expressed values and downstream dialogues. To investigate intervention strategies, we propose VIVALDI, a multi-agent value auditor that intervenes at different stages of generation.
Authors: Jiaming Li, Chenyu Zhu, Nanxi Yi, Youjun Bao, Li Sun, Quanying Lv, Xiang Fang, Daizong Liu, Jianjun Li, Kun He, Bowen Zhou, Zhiyuan Ma
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown extraordinary potential in aligning diffusion models to downstream tasks, yet most of them still suffer from significant reward hacking, which degrades generative diversity and quality by inducing visual mode collapse and amplifying unreliable rewards. We identify the root cause as the mode-seeking nature of these methods, which maximize expected reward without effectively constraining probability distribution over acceptable trajectories, causing concentration on a few high-reward paths. In contrast, we propose Trajectory Matching Policy Optimization (TMPO), which replaces scalar reward maximization with trajectory-level reward distribution matching. Specifically, TMPO introduces a Softmax Trajectory Balance (Softmax-TB) objective to match the policy probabilities of K trajectories to a reward-induced Boltzmann distribution. We prove that this objective inherits the mode-covering property of forward KL divergence, preserving coverage over all acceptable trajectories while optimizing reward. To further reduce multi-trajectory training time on large-scale flow-matching models, TMPO incorporates Dynamic Stochastic Tree Sampling, where trajectories share denoising prefixes and branch at dynamically scheduled steps, reducing redundant computation while improving training effectiveness. Extensive results across diverse alignment tasks such as human preference, compositional generation and text rendering show that TMPO improves generative diversity over state-of-the-art methods by 9.1%, and achieves competitive performance in all downstream and efficiency metrics, attaining the optimal trade-off between reward and diversity.
Authors: Elias Calboreanu
Abstract: Prompt specifications for multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems carry data contracts and integration logic across interdependent files but are rarely subjected to structured-inspection rigor. We report a single-system case study of iterative, agent-driven auditing applied to AEGIS (Autonomous Engineering Governance and Intelligence System), a seven-lane production pipeline whose 7152-line specification surface was audited across nine rounds, surfacing 51 consistency defects (per-round counts of 15, 8, 12, 2, 8, 1, 4, 1, 0). We present a seven-category post hoc taxonomy with explicit coding rules, non-monotonic convergence consistent with cascading edits and audit-scope expansion, and a locked audit protocol. We further report two partial replications on a public synthetic mini-specification: a cross-LLM panel of four frontier vendors (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI; 12 traces; multi-vendor union detects all five seeded defects) and an inter-rater reliability check on a stratified subsample (Cohen's $\kappa$ = 0.80 on category, 0.46 on severity). The full reproducibility bundle accompanies the submission.
Authors: JaeHyeok Doo, Byeongguk Jeon, Seonghyeon Ye, Kimin Lee, Minjoon Seo
Abstract: There is growing interest in utilizing flow-based models as decision-making policies in reinforcement learning due to their high expressive capacity. However, effectively leveraging this expressivity for value maximization remains challenging, as naive gradient-based optimization requires backpropagating through numerical solvers and often leads to instability. Existing approaches typically address this issue by restricting the expressive capacity of flow-based policies, resulting in a trade-off between optimization stability and representational flexibility. To resolve this, we introduce Q-Flow, a framework that leverages the deterministic nature of flow dynamics to explicitly propagate terminal trajectory value to intermediate latent states along the policy-induced flow. This formulation enables stable policy optimization using intermediate value gradients without unrolling the numerical solver, effectively bridging the gap between stability and expressivity. We evaluate Q-Flow in the offline learning setting on the challenging OGBench suite, where it consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by an average of 10.6 percentage points, while also enabling stable online adaptation within the same framework.
Authors: Filippo de Feo
Abstract: Establishing Universal Approximation Theorems (UATs) for nonlinear operators and their derivatives is a foundational open problem in Operator Learning (OL) and raises delicate questions in Nonlinear Functional Analysis. We prove the first UATs for $k$-times differentiable nonlinear operators and their derivatives via OL architectures, uniformly on compact sets and in weighted Bastiani--Sobolev spaces for general finite input measures. In full Banach-space generality, these are the first complete generalizations of the corresponding influential classical UATs in [Hornik, 1991] to infinite-dimensional spaces and OL and they launch Derivative-Informed Operator Learning (DIOL)-learning nonlinear operators and their derivatives-on general Banach spaces. Based on our UATs, we formulate Bastiani--Sobolev training in DIOL. We present open frontiers where DIOL and our UATs find applications: high-order accuracy in OL; fast constrained optimization in Banach spaces (e.g. optimal control of PDEs, inverse problems) via Learn-Then-Optimize; numerical methods for infinite-dimensional PDEs (e.g. HJB PDEs on Banach spaces from infinite-dimensional optimal control via Optimize-Then-Learn, such as optimal control of PDEs, SPDEs, path-dependent systems, partially observed systems, mean-field control). We parameterize nonlinear operators via Encoder-Decoder Architectures, classical OL architectures. These include DeepONets, Deep-H-ONets, and PCA-Nets, which our UATs cover. Our UATs are based on (i) Approximation Properties of Banach spaces; (ii) continuous Bastiani differentiability (weaker than continuous Fr\'echet differentiability); (iii) $C^k_B$ (Bastiani) compact-open topologies; indeed, UA in $C^k$ (Fr\'echet) compact-open topologies (induced by operator norms) fails; (iv) construction of weighted Bastiani--Sobolev spaces, generalizing classical Gaussian Sobolev spaces on Banach spaces.
Authors: Zien Sheikh Ali, Hamdy Mubarak, Soon-Gyo Jung, Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Firoj Alam, Shammur Absar Chowdhury
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) voice assistants are commonly built as cascaded Automatic Speech recognition (ASR) to LLM systems, where recognition errors can distort user intent. Dislikes may also arise from ambiguous, out-of-domain, or non-request turns, making it hard to isolate ASR effects. We release WASIL (it denotes connection or linking in Arabic): in-the-wild Arabic spoken interaction prompts with audio, ASR hypotheses, assistant responses, and explicit like/dislike feedback (8,529 turns; 14.2% dislikes), plus a 2,000-turn test set covering Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and four major dialects with their labels. We provide low-cost gold transcripts via multi-ASR agreement-guided post-editing and annotate answerability (answerable, ambiguous/needs-clarification, unsupported, not-a-request/noise) to separate intrinsic unanswerability from ASR-induced degradation. Finally, we describe scalable reference-free evaluation of responses from ASR vs. gold transcripts using multi-judge LLM scoring.
Authors: Peibo Zhang, Ruomeng Cui, Dennis J. Zhang
Abstract: Search engines traditionally complement online content platforms by directing users seeking information to external websites. The emergence of generative AI search tools that summarize answers directly on the results page may disrupt this relationship by making visits to source platforms optional. We study this question using Google AI Overviews and Reddit, one of the largest online discussion platforms. Our identification exploits Google's content moderation policy: Safe-for-Work (SFW) Reddit communities are indexed by Google organic search and surfaced in Google AI Overviews, while Not-Safe-for-Work (NSFW) communities, though indexed by organic search, are prohibited from being referenced in AI Overview summaries. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that AI Overviews increase engagement in SFW communities: daily comments rise by 12.0 percent and the number of commenting users by 12.4 percent relative to NSFW communities. The effects are concentrated in experience-based discussions (opinions, advice, and personal experiences) rather than fact-based information. However, the subsequent introduction of Google AI Mode, which allows users to interact conversationally with the AI summary, largely eliminates these gains in experience-based content. These results suggest that the effects of AI search depend critically on interface design and types of content.
Authors: Tim Tsz-Kit Lau, Weijie Su
Abstract: A striking geometric disparity has long persisted in the practice of deep learning. While modern neural network architectures naturally exhibit rich symmetry and equivariance properties, popular optimizers such as Adam and its variants operate inherently coordinate-wise, rendering them unable to respect the equivariance structures of the parameter space. We address this disparity by introducing a symmetry-compatible principle for optimizer design: the gradient update rule should be equivariant under the symmetry group acting on the corresponding weight block. Following this principle, we first provide a unified perspective on bi-orthogonally equivariant updates for general matrix layers, as employed by stochastic spectral descent, Muon, Scion, and polar gradient methods. More importantly, by moving from orthogonal groups to permutation and shared-shift symmetries, we derive symmetry-compatible optimizers for parameter blocks whose symmetries differ from those of general matrix layers: embedding and LM head matrices, SwiGLU MLP projections, and MoE router matrices. These constructions include one-sided spectral, row-norm, hybrid row-norm/spectral, row-aware, column-aware, centered row-norm, and left-spectral updates. They yield an end-to-end layerwise optimizer stack in which each major matrix-valued parameter class is assigned an update whose equivariance matches its symmetry group. We corroborate this principle through pre-training experiments on dense and sparse MoE language models, including Qwen3-0.6B-style, Gemma 3 1B-style, OLMoE-1B-7B-style, and downsized gpt-oss architectures. Across these experiments, symmetry-compatible update rules consistently improve final validation loss, reduce expert load imbalance in sparse MoE models, and in several cases control final vocabulary-logit growth, improve router stability, and overall training stability over the corresponding AdamW updates.
Authors: Carolina Camassa, Derek Shiller
Abstract: Language models are trained to follow instructions, but they are also powerful pattern completers. What happens when these two objectives conflict? We construct conversations in which a user instruction to behave in a target way T (e.g., always output a specific token, answer in a particular language, or adopt a persona) is opposed by N hardcoded assistant turns demonstrating a competing pattern P. We then measure instruction-following (IF) rates in this setting, across 13 models and 16 different instructions, for up to 50 turns. Average instruction-following rates range from 1% to 99% across models, largely uncorrelated with standard capability benchmarks. The transition from instruction-following to pattern-following is universal but highly model-dependent. Robustness is modulated both by instruction content, with models resisting induction longer when instructions align with their trained value priors, and by output format, with diverse multi-token responses proving substantially more resistant than single-token outputs. Chain-of-thought reasoning improves robustness but does not eliminate susceptibility, and can produce dissociation between correct deliberation and incorrect output. When asked to predict their behavior in this setting, models achieve 83.5% accuracy on average but systematically underestimate their own resistance to induction pressure. These results suggest that instruction-following remains brittle under induction pressure even for otherwise capable models, and that output diversity, rather than semantic engagement with the input, is the primary factor predicting robustness.
Authors: Muhammad Rajabinasab, Michael E. Houle, Oussama Chelly, Arthur Zimek
Abstract: Many novel unsupervised feature selection methods are proposed each year, yet their empirical evaluation is limited to supervised and unsupervised evaluation metrics computed on selected datasets, along with comparisons to existing methods. However, in the absence of an established evaluation baseline, it is difficult to determine the value added to the existing literature by each of these methods, and how effective their underlying approaches are. We propose using random feature selection as a baseline for evaluating the unsupervised feature selection methods. We empirically show that many of the state-of-the-art methods in unsupervised feature selection are outperformed by random feature selection in both performance and efficiency. Accordingly, we emphasize on the strict requirement of considering random feature selection as a baseline in the development process of novel unsupervised feature selection methods to ensure a consistent improvement over random feature selection.
Authors: Manish Aryal, Faiyaz Azam, Agnivo Banerjee, Syed Mahir Ahamed, Sai Sidhanth Manoharan Jayanthi, Allegra Laro, Cl\'ement Legentilhomme, Andrew Lin, Florian Lorkowski, Radman Rakhshandehroo, Patric Rommel, Emanuel Ruzak, Nathan Theng, Paul Yushin Rapoport
Abstract: Classical reinforcement learning assumes the agent interacts with a fixed environment whose behavior does not depend on the agent's policy. This assumption breaks down in non-realizable settings where other actors might anticipate the agent's behavior, including environments crucial to AI safety, where the agent interacts with predictors, humans, other AI agents, and institutions. In such settings, the agent's model class fails to capture the world in which it operates. Under such misspecification, classical Bayesian methods can produce confidently wrong posteriors, unreliable decisions, and unbounded regret, as realizability fails to obtain. Infra-Bayesianism is a decision-theoretic framework that addresses these failures by distinguishing ordinary probabilistic uncertainty, where priors can be reasonably chosen, from Knightian uncertainty, where no grounds exist for the construction of such a prior. It does so by evaluating actions on their worst-case outcomes, rather than from posterior expectations or weighted averaging. We present the first proof-of-concept implementation of an infra-Bayesian reinforcement learning architecture for finite-outcome stateless decision problems. Our agent maintains a set of imprecise hypotheses, updates them using infra-Bayesian conditioning, and selects actions by maximizing worst-case expected value. We apply this implementation of the infra-Bayesian maximin decision process to an environment with Knightian uncertainty, and demonstrate a lower worst-case regret as compared to classical reinforcement learning agents. We also investigate Newcomb's problem and show that the infra-Bayesian agent picks the optimal strategy, outperforming classical decision theory agents. Our results provide a step towards reinforcement learning agents that remain robust under model misspecification and policy-dependent uncertainty.
Authors: Vivek Dahiya, Sunny Nehra, Vipul Dholariya, Bhavik Shangari, Chandra Khatri
Abstract: We evaluate whether frontier LLMs are ready for cybersecurity through a dual-mode benchmark: white-box function-level vulnerability detection (VulnLLM-R, across C/Java/Python) and black-box web application security testing (five production-style applications with 118 ground-truth vulnerabilities across 20+ CWE families, which we will open-source). We test six frontier models (GPT-5.4, Codex~5.3, Claude Opus~4.7, Sonnet~4.6, Gemini~3.1~Pro and Gemini~3~Flash) and two domain-specialized models across four testing paradigms. Our findings are sobering: (1)~every frontier model produces 10-50% false positive rates in white-box detection, systematically over-predicting vulnerabilities; (2)~in black-box testing, frontier models achieve only 4-8% ground-truth coverage, improving to just 10-19% even with external security tools (Playwright MCP, Burp Suite MCP); (3)~structured penetration-testing methodology encoded in domain-specialized agents raises per-family detection above 50%, demonstrating that methodology, not scale, is the primary lever; and (4)~a domain-specialized defense model achieves the highest precision (0.904) and lowest false positive rate (9.7%) among all models, on a single GPU. We identify the absence of structured security testing traces end-to-end request/response sequences, failure-heavy data, and multi-step attack chains as the fundamental training data bottleneck, and propose self-play security testing as a data generation strategy. Our results make the case for vertical foundation models purpose-built for cybersecurity.
Authors: Chidera G. Oguine, Kanyifeechukwu J. Oguine, Obiozor M. Oguine, Ozioma C. Oguine
Abstract: This paper presents a rigorous empirical evaluation of Ultralytics YOLO26 against the YOLOv8 baseline, offering an independent real-world stress test of NMS-free architectures on non-COCO distributions. Engineered for edge deployment, YOLO26 introduces native end-to-end one-to-one label assignment, the removal of Distribution Focal Loss (DFL), and a spectral-constrained CSP-Muon backbone. We conducted a comprehensive, cross-scale comparative analysis across five model capacities, using the general object detection (Pascal VOC) and dense aerial small-object detection (VisDrone) datasets. Models are evaluated across accuracy (mAP_50 and mAP_50:95), model complexity, and hardware-specific CPU/GPU latency. Our findings revealed that while YOLO26 achieves a lower computational footprint and superior accuracy on Pascal VOC, with YOLO26-x reaching 0.635 mAP_50:95, this advantage narrows in dense aerial environments. On VisDrone, where over 75% of objects are under 2,000 pixels, both architectures struggle significantly, yielding a minimal performance gap (0.214 mAP_50:95 for YOLOv8-x vs. 0.224 mAP_50:95 for YOLO26-x). Crucially, hardware benchmarking demonstrates that YOLOv8 maintains a consistent edge in GPU inference latency across identical scales (e.g., 6.92 ms for YOLOv8-s vs. 8.38 ms for YOLO26-s), showing that NMS-free design does not inherently guarantee superiority in universal deployment. This work maps the operational boundaries of NMS-free frameworks to guide architecture selection based on dataset density, object scale, and hardware constraints.
Authors: Waleed Razzaq, Yun-Bo Zhao
Abstract: Reliable uncertainty quantification in continuous-time (CT) representation learning remains nascent, particularly within CT attention literature. We introduce the Neuronal Stochastic Attention Circuit (NSAC), a novel biologically-inspired CT attention architecture that reformulates attention logit computation as the solution of an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck stochastic differential equation modulated by input-dependent, nonlinear interlinked gates derived from repurposed C. elegans Neuronal Circuit Policies (NCPs) wiring mechanism. It induces a Gaussian distribution over logits that propagates principled stochasticity through a logistic-normal distribution over attention weights to yield probabilistic output. A two-term objective function combining Gaussian negative log-likelihood with an epistemic-separation regularizer enforces higher predictive variance under distributional shifts and enables joint quantification of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. Theoretically, we provide: (i) state stability bounds; (ii) closed-form guarantees; and (iii) frozen-coefficient error approximation. Empirically, we implement NSAC in a diverse set of learning tasks including: (i) irregular CT function approximation; (ii) multivariate regression; (iii) long-range forecasting; (iv) Industry 4.0; and (v) lane-keeping of autonomous vehicles. We observe that NSAC remains competitive against several baselines in terms of accuracy and produces informative uncertainty estimates while being interpretable at the neuronal cell level.
Authors: Kai Bian, Xucheng Guo, Bin Chen, Lingyan Ruan, Yiran Shen, Ting Dang, Hong Jia
Abstract: Evaluations of dental vision-language models remain fragmented across datasets, task definitions and metrics, and often ignore their computational cost. This limits their widespread deployment for dental screening outside specialist centres, where timely inference, limited hardware, and local handling of patient images are vital for practical, privacy-preserving clinical prescreening. Here we present Pocket-Dentist, an efficiency-aware benchmark for dental multimodal question answering that brings together three datasets spanning approximately 1,159 patients from BRAR and MetaDent, five task types and seven metrics. Across 14 typical VLMs, our results reveal an interesting observation: compact VLMs, such as 2B-parameter models, become competitive with much larger VLMs on most metrics after lightweight adaptation while requiring substantially lower computational costs in dental image understanding. Deployed locally on an iPhone 17 Pro, our finetuned compact VLM Pocket-Dentist-2B processed each sample in 4.31 s, reducing latency by 4.9x and memory use by 2.3x compared with a 7B baseline. Our project page is available at https://2026-icml.github.io/pocket-dentist-icml.
Authors: Drishti Goel, Agam Goyal, Veda Duddu, Olivia Pal, Jeongah Lee, Qiuyue Joy Zhong, Violeta J. Rodriguez, Daniel S. Brown, Dong Whi Yoo, Ravi Karkar, Koustuv Saha
Abstract: Language models are increasingly being deployed for conversational support in informal caregiving contexts, where interactions often extend beyond information-seeking: caregivers seek emotional reassurance, guidance, and help, while navigating uncertain, relationally complex care decisions. Yet most safety evaluations assess model behavior under generic prompts, leaving a critical question unexamined: does a model's safety profile change with its support role? We study this by operationalizing four expert-reviewed support roles grounded in social support theory: Inform, Coach, Relate, and Listen, and comparing them against two baseline controls: a basic prompting condition and a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) condition. We evaluate across three language models (GPT-4o-mini, Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, and MedGemma-1.5-4b-it) on 5,000 real-world queries from online Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD) communities. We find that the LLM's support role systematically shapes both the prevalence and composition of interactional risks. Furthermore, a human evaluation study reveals a perceived quality--safety tension: more directive, information-oriented roles are rated as more helpful and trustworthy despite exhibiting elevated interactional risk profiles. We release ~90,000 support role-conditioned model responses with risk annotations as an ecologically grounded resource for research on safer LLM-mediated conversational support.
Authors: Sijia Wang, Dhanajit Brahma, Ricardo Henao
Abstract: Agentic LLMs must continuously decide whether newly extracted facts should be added, merged with existing memories, or ignored, yet prior work has focused more on retrieval and storage than on principled write-side control. We frame memory evolution as a novelty-detection problem and propose SAGE, a Spherical Adaptive Gate for memory Evolution that scores candidate facts with a von Mises-Fisher-based density estimator over memory embeddings and routes them with an adaptive threshold that tracks memory-store geometry. SAGE resolves clearly novel facts as ADD, clearly redundant facts as NOOP, and sends only uncertain cases to an LLM merge step, reducing expensive write-time reasoning. On LoCoMo, SAGE achieves the best average token-F1 against Mem0 on all seven open-weight backbone comparisons, while on GPT-4o-mini it reduces add-phase API cost by 3.4$\times$ and add-phase latency by 2.5$\times$ with only a small average judge-score gap. As a drop-in binary gate for A-Mem, SAGE skips roughly 16-18% of LLM calls across five models with minimal quality change on open-weight backbones. These results suggest that novelty-aware write control is a practical lever for improving both memory quality and system efficiency in long-term agentic memory. The source code for our approach is accessible at https://github.com/swang1024/SAGE.
Authors: Haoji Hu, Huaqing Mao, Yijun Lin, Xiaowei Jia, Jinwei Zhou, Minoh Jeong, Yao-Yi Chiang
Abstract: Pairwise dependence measures such as correlation and causality are fundamental to temporal data mining, yet there is still no principled and robust way to quantify dependence between heterogeneous data types, especially between continuous time series and discrete temporal event sequences. Existing approaches rely on ad hoc transformations or mutual-information estimators that are highly sensitive to quantization, repeated values, and event redundancy, leading to biased or unstable results in practice. We propose a nonparametric mutual information estimator that directly measures the dependence between time series and event sequences without data transformation, learning, or ad hoc discretization. Our method models the continuous-discrete duality of real-world time series to handle quantization and repeated-value artifacts and introduces a latent event clustering strategy to mitigate bias from event co-occurrence and redundancy. Together, these yield a robust and unified framework that bridges discrete and continuous mutual information. We evaluate the proposed estimator on four representative tasks: discrete-continuous time-delayed mutual information for causality analysis, global and local temporal repetition discovery, discrete covariate selection for time series forecasting, and continuous feature selection for classification. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show consistent improvements over existing methods in accuracy, robustness, and interpretability, positioning our approach as a general-purpose dependence operator for heterogeneous temporal data, similar to Pearson correlation for homogeneous time series. Code available at: https://github.com/HaojiHu/Multimodal-Temporal-Data-Quantification
URLs: https://github.com/HaojiHu/Multimodal-Temporal-Data-Quantification
Authors: \"Umit Mert \c{C}a\u{g}lar, Alptekin Temizel
Abstract: Semantic segmentation of remote sensing imagery requires models that capture both global context and local detail under tight computational budgets. Prior work typically optimizes for one of these axes: attention for global context, convolution for local detail, or compactness for efficiency. While hybrid approaches aim to capture both, they require architectural changes and encoder backbones with computational overhead, limiting efficiency and performance. We present LALE (Lightweight-transformer Architecture for Land-cover Estimation), an end-to-end remote sensing image segmentation architecture, that bifurcates its encoder by resolution: lightweight ConvMixer stages handle high-resolution local features, while transformer stages handle low-resolution global context, confining the quadratic cost of self-attention to deep, downsampled feature maps. An all-MLP multi-scale decoder, together with RMSNorm and StarReLU throughout, further reduces compute and parameter count. On the large-scale ARAS400k remote-sensing segmentation benchmark, LALE establishes a strong efficiency-performance trade-off against CNN, transformer, and hybrid baselines. Our smallest variant, (just 1.6M parameters), reaches within 2.6 F1 points of the best baseline (UPerNet) while using 4.5x fewer parameters, 7x less storage, 17x fewer GMACs, and delivering 1.8x higher throughput. The codebase for LALE is publicly available at https://github.com/caglarmert/LALE.
Authors: Yuan Yuan, Jesse Rusak, Alexander Merose, Adam Subel, Pavel Perezhogin, Alistair Adcroft, Carlos Fernandez-Granda, Laure Zanna
Abstract: Ocean general circulation models (OGCMs) are essential to climate science but computationally expensive, limiting ensemble size and forcing scenarios. Neural emulators promise orders-of-magnitude speedups, yet existing ocean emulators have not combined fine spatial resolution with multi-year autoregressive rollouts. Samudra, the first autoregressive neural ocean emulator to produce multi-decade global rollouts, is limited to $1^\circ$ resolution and exhibits two long-horizon failure modes: \emph{variance collapse}, the loss of temporal variability, and \emph{imprinting artifacts}, in which velocity patterns leak into deep-ocean fields. We present Samudra 2, which introduces a wider U-Net backbone with modified ConvNeXt-style blocks and a reduced block-internal expansion factor, together with a dynamic loss that reweights output channels according to their prediction errors, strengthening gradients for slow-evolving deep-ocean fields. At $1^\circ$, Samudra 2 increases upper-ocean global-mean temperature $R^2$ from 0.56 to 0.87 and reduces deep-ocean temperature error by roughly sevenfold. The same architecture scales to $1/2^\circ$ and $1/4^\circ$ over approximately 8-year autoregressive rollouts, recovering mesoscale eddies and sharp western boundary currents. Running on a single GPU, Samudra 2 enables larger ensembles for sea-level projections, ocean heat uptake, and climate variability studies. All artifacts are publicly available: project page, code, checkpoints, documentation.
Authors: Pritam Dash, Tongyu Ge, Aditi Jain, Tanmay Shah, Zhiwei Shang
Abstract: Memory is a core component of AI agents, enabling them to accumulate knowledge across interactions and improve performance. However, persistent memory introduces the risk of memory poisoning, where a single adversarial memory write can exert long-term influence over agent behavior. We present a systematic study of memory poisoning in LLM-based agents. We identify four memory write channels and nine structural vulnerabilities in model capabilities, system prompt design, and agent system architecture that make these channels exploitable. Based on these vulnerabilities, we develop a taxonomy of six classes of memory poisoning attacks. Furthermore, we design MPBench -- a benchmark for evaluating memory poisoning attacks, and show that agents designed to write and retrieve memory more aggressively are more exploitable. We also show that existing prompt injection defenses fail to cover memory poisoning attacks. Our findings provide a foundation for understanding and mitigating memory poisoning attacks against AI agents.
Authors: Bo Mao, Jie Zhou, Yutao Yang, Xin Li, Xian Wei, Qin Chen, Xingjiao Wu, Liang He
Abstract: Lifelong learning is essential for Large Language Model (LLM) agents operating in dynamic, interactive environments. However, existing lifelong learning agents for long-horizon tasks typically depend on discrete skill or past experiences retrieval with static parameters during inference, which prevents them from continuously internalizing test-time feedback like human learners. To bridge this gap, we propose Skill-enhanced Test-Time Co-Evolution (\texttt{LifeSkill}), a two-stage reinforcement learning framework for Online Lifelong Learning Agents. Specifically, we design Verifier-Guided Skill Learning that addresses the lack of direct supervision for skill extraction by rewarding candidate skills according to the average verifier success of multiple skill-conditioned policy rollouts, encouraging the model to generate skills that are useful for solving tasks rather than merely plausible in text. Furthermore, we introduce Online Skill Internalization, which continuously improves the policy model during test-time interaction by transforming skill-conditioned trajectories into reward signals. This enables the agent to directly internalize reasoning capabilities into its parameters, avoiding the context bloat of experience retrieval. Experiments on LifelongAgentBench show that LifeSkill improves average performance by 7 absolute points by comparing with existing lifelong agent baselines.
Authors: Chunling Xi, Di Liang
Abstract: Natural Language Inference (NLI) is a fundamental task in natural language understanding that requires determining the logical relationship between a premise and a hypothesis. Despite the remarkable success of transformer-based pre-trained models, most existing approaches primarily rely on the final-layer token representations, which are often insufficient for capturing the complex and hierarchical semantic interactions required for effective reasoning. In particular, fine-grained lexical cues, phrasal compositions, and higher-level contextual semantics are typically entangled or diluted in a single representation space. To address these limitations, we propose a novel \emph{Multi-Granularity Reasoning Network} (MGRN) that explicitly leverages hierarchical semantic features within an interactive reasoning space. The proposed framework mimics the human cognitive process of language understanding, which naturally progresses from shallow lexical matching to deeper semantic abstraction and logical reasoning. By integrating semantic information across multiple granularities in a progressive and structured manner, MGRN is able to uncover intricate semantic relationships underlying natural language expressions. Extensive experiments on multiple public benchmarks demonstrate that MGRN consistently outperforms strong baseline models, validating the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed approach.
Authors: Peter Halmos, Boris Hanin
Abstract: We exhibit an exact correspondence between sampling with score-based diffusion models and adiabatic transport of ground states for a family of Schr\"odinger operators we call Score Hamiltonians, built from the learned score's quantum potential. We obtain novel density reconstruction bounds and principled annealing schedules via adiabatic theorems for Fokker-Planck equations with time-varying potentials. We find the fundamental limit of sampling is set by the ratio of squared score-matching error to Score Hamiltonian spectral gap - the inverse Poincar\'e constant of the data density.
Authors: Shenzhi Yang, Guangcheng Zhu, Bowen Song, Haobo Wang, Mingxuan Xia, Xing Zheng, Yingfan Ma, Zhongqi Chen, Weiqiang Wang, Junbo Zhao, Gang Chen
Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) supervises the student exclusively in the output space by matching next-token distributions. This paradigm suffers from two limitations: (i) a high-variance gradient estimator whose signal-to-noise ratio collapses as the student approaches the teacher, and (ii) an LM-head information bottleneck that discards the teacher's intermediate hidden states. We propose On-Policy Representation Distillation (OPRD), the first method to lift on-policy distillation into the hidden-state space. OPRD aligns student and teacher representations across selected layers on the same on-policy rollouts, providing dense, deterministic, per-layer supervision while bypassing the LM head entirely. Theoretically, OPRD provides a deterministic per-sample gradient, removing the token-level estimation variance that plagues OPD, and exposes structural information that any output-space objective necessarily discards. Empirically, OPRD closes the student-teacher gap on competition mathematics benchmarks (AIME 2024, AIME 2025, and AIMO), where every output-space baseline plateaus below the teacher, while training 1.44x faster and using up to 54% less memory. We further extend OPRD to the cross-architecture setting via OPRD-Bridge. By exploiting the observation that heterogeneous models share a low-rank representational structure, we construct a frozen projector pair that aligns representations across arbitrary depth and width mismatches, shifting the alignment from the output space (which depends on a shared vocabulary) to the representation space. We validate OPRD-Bridge on both cross-architecture (Qwen3-4B -> Qwen3-1.7B-Base) and cross-tokenizer (Phi-4-mini-reasoning -> Qwen3-1.7B-Base) settings, demonstrating successful knowledge transfer even when the vocabulary-based alignment channel is unavailable. Code: https://github.com/ShenzhiYang2000/OPRD.
Authors: Qi Xu, Yue Tan, Shihao Chen, Jiahao Meng, Anna Wang, Shunping Ji, Hao Fei, Jason Li
Abstract: Temporal Grounding (TG) aims to localize video segments corresponding to a textual query. Prior research predominantly focuses on single-segment retrieval. Real-world scenarios, however, often require localizing multiple disjoint segments for a single query -- a setting we term One-to-Many Temporal Grounding (OMTG). Previous state-of-the-art MLLMs, optimized for one-to-one settings, struggle in this context, often yielding near-zero scores due to a lack of event cardinality perception. To bridge this gap, we present a systematic solution with three key contributions. First, we establish the first comprehensive OMTG benchmark, introducing Count Accuracy (C-Acc) and Effective Temporal F1 (EtF1) as evaluation metrics. Second, we curate a high-quality OMTG dataset comprising 56k samples through a sophisticated construction pipeline. Third, we develop novel temporal and caption reward functions specifically designed for OMTG. In particular, the caption reward leverages Chain-of-Thought reasoning over dense video captions to explicitly guide policy optimization toward both preciseness and completeness. Extensive experiments show our model achieves a new state-of-the-art EtF1 of 43.65\% on OMTG Bench, outperforming Gemini 2.5 Pro and Seed-1.8 by 15.85\% and 15.61\%, respectively. Project Page: https://insomniaaac.github.io/OMTG/
Authors: Thamilvendhan Munirathinam
Abstract: As autonomous LLM agents increasingly hold real credentials and operate infrastructure without a human in the loop, operators have no standard way to tell an agent that a resource is off-limits. Access controls either let the agent in (it has valid credentials) or hard-fail it (indistinguishable from any other client). We propose a third mode: a lightweight, published in-band deny signal -- the Recuse Signal -- that a server emits over a protocol's existing channels (an SSH banner, a PostgreSQL NOTICE) asking a connecting automated agent to voluntarily withdraw. This is a cooperative governance control, the robots.txt analogue for live access; it is explicitly not a security boundary. Its value is entirely empirical and, to our knowledge, unmeasured: do compliant LLM agents actually honor such a signal? We define the signal as an open mini-standard, implement three zero- or low-footprint adapters (an SSH banner/PAM hook, a PostgreSQL wire-protocol proxy, and a Kubernetes admission webhook), deploy them on a live production host, and run a controlled experiment in which fresh agents are given a benign operations task and observed for recusal. In a pilot (SSH; OpenAI GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini; and Claude Code as a deployed agent), the signal cleanly induces recusal -- 100% recusal when present versus 100% task completion in a no-signal control -- and, revealingly, behaves as a cooperative rather than absolute signal: an explicit operator-authorization framing flips the most capable model to proceed, while other agents continue to defer to the on-host policy. We release the standard, adapters, and experiment harness for reproduction.
Authors: Anku Rani, Wei Dai, Shravan Nayak, Pattie Maes, Mahdi M. Kalayeh, Paul Pu Liang
Abstract: As video generation models like Veo 3.1 and LTX-2 advance, their ability to accurately represent diverse global cultures remains a critical yet understudied frontier. Current metrics, such as VideoScore, only measure visual quality but offer no mechanism for assessing cultural faithfulness. Consequently, a model that replaces a Namaste with a handshake receives the same score as one that generates the gesture correctly. We propose CultureScore, a compositional evaluation framework that decomposes cultural faithfulness into three granular dimensions: Identity (who is represented), Context (culturally localized background), and Behavior (normative gestures and interactions). We operationalize this framework through an evaluation suite spanning 10 countries, yielding 6,174 generated videos across three state-of-the-art models. Our evaluation reveals that no current model achieves culturally faithful video generation: the best-performing model reaches only 56.8\% overall CultureScore, with Behavior the most challenging dimension, which remains below 52.1\% across all models. Furthermore, human preference rankings align directionally with CultureScore but are inverted relative to VideoScore; the highest-scoring model on visual quality was ranked last by annotators, underscoring that cultural faithfulness is an essential criterion for equitable video generation. Data and code are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ankurani/CultureScore.
URLs: https://huggingface.co/datasets/ankurani/CultureScore.
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: Prateek Kumar Sikdar
Abstract: We introduce CHIAR-Former (CHIAroscuro Attention-based tRansFormer), an efficient transformer that routes each token to either DCT spectral mixing (O(d log d), sub-quadratic) or full self-attention (O(n^2 d), quadratic in sequence length n) based on per-token spectral entropy H(x) in [0,1], which measures the frequency-domain complexity of each token embedding x. We make three contributions: (1) we discover routing collapse -- a three-operator system collapses to DCT+Attention, revealing the optimal operator subset; (2) we propose a learned task-level MetaRouter g = sigma(Linear(x-bar)) in [0,1], where x-bar is the batch-mean embedding and g soft-blends spectral and identity paths end-to-end; and (3) we demonstrate 35-40% FLOP reduction at 400M parameters with a 3.93 PPL cost on WikiText-103 (Test PPL 27.51 vs. 23.58). Under mixed-dataset training, CHIAR-Former dramatically outperforms full attention on small corpora, confirming the regularisation value of spectral mixing. The MetaRouter stabilises at g ~ 0.22, indicating that at scale the model reaches a robust compute-quality equilibrium: attention layers absorb representational complexity while spectral preprocessing efficiently anchors low-frequency structure.
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: 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: 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 2.0 to 5.0 eV, this structure-property-relationship (SPR) reflection achieves a deviation as low as 0.0014 eV with a 100% success rate under the SPR+RAG configuration, consistently outperforming scalar-feedback and non-reflective baselines in median and mean deviation. The framework generalizes seamlessly to dipole-moment design, synthetic accessibility optimization, and molecular docking, and proves robust across 7 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: 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: 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 83 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: Du Yin, Hao Xue, Jinliang Deng, Yang Yang, Shuang Ao, Arian Prabowo, Flora Salim
Abstract: In time-series generation, existing approaches typically handcraft ortrain a separate model for each dataset, which hinders their scalability and fails to leverage shared temporal structures across domains. To address this fragmentation, we propose UPLOTS, a Unified, Prompt-guided Language model framework fOr constrained Time-Series Generation across diverse domains. Instead of building task-specific models, UPLOTS leverages a single pre-trained transformer backbone guided by learned constraint prompts, enabling on-demand generation with precise pattern control. One key innovation is our dynamic multi-dataset loss re-weighting and prompt-to-pattern mapping, which allows UPLOTS to internalize diverse temporal structures during training and conditionally generate them at inference. We evaluate UPLOTS on four real-world benchmarks and multiple constraint settings, including peak-period, calendar, load-level, and volatility patterns. Additional held-out constraint-combination and downstream forecasting experiments further demonstrate that UPLOTS generalizes beyond the original peak-pattern setting and improves data augmentation under scarce real-data regimes. Our code and baselines are available at github repo: https://github.com/cruiseresearchgroup/UPLOTS.
Authors: Junfeng Guo Heng Huang
Abstract: While real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are becoming increasingly popular, the security of RL systems deserve more attention and exploration. In particular, recent work has revealed that RL agents are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where a victim agent behaves normally under standard conditions but executes malicious actions when a specific trigger is activated. Existing backdoor defenses for RL either require access to the agent's internal parameters, operate only at the model or trajectory level, or are limited to specific attack types. To ensure the security of RL agents, we propose \texttt{PolicyGuard}, a \textit{test-time step-level} backdoor defense which leverages Gaussian Process (GP) posterior variance and adapts pseudo trajectories to enable uncertainty computation for individual time step. Besides, we also provide theoretical foundations to explain the efficacy of GP posterior variance. Extensive experiments across seven RL games demonstrate that PolicyGuard achieves state-of-the-art detection performance in most cases, with average AUROC of 0.856 for perturbation-based attacks and 0.859 for adversary-agent attacks.
Authors: Ping Xu, Pengjiang Li, Tian Du, Zaitian Wang, Jiawei Gu, Zhiyuan Ning, Ziyue Qiao, Pengfei Wang, Yuanchun Zhou
Abstract: Clustering is fundamental to scRNA-seq analysis, serving as a cornerstone for identifying cell populations and resolving tissue heterogeneity. However, existing methods focus on mining numerical statistical patterns, suffering from semantic agnosticism by neglecting the intrinsic biological functions encoded by genes. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising semantic capabilities, their direct adaptation to cell clustering is hindered by the structural mismatch between generative pre-training objectives and discriminative downstream tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose scLLM-DSC, a novel LLM-Knowledge Enhanced Cross-Modal Deep Structural Clustering framework. Diverging from data-driven paradigms, scLLM-DSC establishes a semantically-grounded representation by synergizing two views: a Knowledge-Driven Semantic View derived from NCBI gene priors and contextualized Cell2Sentence embeddings, and a Structure-Aware Topological View extracted via a graph-guided encoder. Crucially, we introduce a cross-modal contrastive alignment mechanism to enforce consistency between biological semantics and transcriptomic features within a unified latent space. Extensive benchmarks demonstrate that scLLM-DSC significantly outperforms eleven state-of-the-art baselines in clustering accuracy.
Authors: Antonio J. Costa, Caterina Doglioni, Christian G\"utschow, Andrew D. Pilkington, Sukanya Sinha
Abstract: Particle physics collider experiments provide Rivet routines as part of the analysis preservation strategy for model-independent measurements. Rivet is a C++ toolkit that allow new theoretical models to be compared to the measurements, thus aiding the development and tuning of Monte Carlo event generators as well as searches for physics beyond the Standard Model. However, analysis coverage is known to be incomplete, with only 39% of measurements having documented and publicly available Rivet routines. In this article, we design and implement an automated workflow based on Large Language Models with the goal of providing the missing routines. This multi-step workflow, referred to as AgentRivet, extracts the physics analysis information from published papers and writes the missing Rivet routines, with intermediate code- and physics- reviews as part of an autonomous quality control. We report the results obtained using commercial Large Language Models, provided by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, for two recent measurements from the ATLAS and CMS experiments. We find that AgentRivet produces competent Rivet routines with few syntax errors. The physics fidelity of the routines is reasonable and follows the explanations given in the relevant publications. Nevertheless, physics-implementation issues do arise and are investigated using the artefacts produced by AgentRivet. The majority of physics implementation issues arise from subtle-but-ambiguous definitions in the given publication, although some models struggle to implement complex observables even when clear definitions are given.
Authors: Soumyajit Mitra, Prabhat Pandey, Abhinav Jain, Shanmukha Sahith, K V Vijay Girish
Abstract: Turn-taking in multi-party spoken conversations remains a fundamental challenge for voice-based agents, particularly under dynamic floor competition and varying user expectations. We propose ModeratorLM, a role-playing voice agent that conditions turn-taking behavior on an explicitly assigned role in multi-party settings. The system is built on a speech large language model operating in chunk-wise streaming manner. We further introduce a reasoning-augmented variant that incorporates chain-of-thought reasoning over conversational context and the assigned role. We construct RolePlayConv, a large-scale synthetic dataset of spoken multi-party conversations with diverse assistant roles. Experiments on real-world meeting data and RolePlayConv show improved turn-taking precision by over 40% and recall by more than 70%, while substantially reducing false-positive interruptions compared to non-role-conditioned baselines.
Authors: Meher Sai Preetam Madiraju, Meher Bhaskar Madiraju
Abstract: We present Simplex-Constrained Sparse Bagging (SCSB), a mathematically rigorous framework for post-training compression and probability calibration of bootstrap-based bagging ensembles. Standard bagging ensembles (such as Random Forests, Bagged SVMs, and Bagged Neural Networks) assign uniform voting power to all constituent estimators. However, this naive uniform prior ignores the varying local competence of base estimators and contributes to model overconfidence. We formulate ensemble pruning and calibration as a joint optimization problem over the probability simplex by minimizing the Out-Of-Bag (OOB) loss. To induce sparsity, we address the theoretical "L1-simplex paradox" - the mathematical reality that the L1 norm is constant on the simplex and fails to prune - by introducing a concave quadratic penalty. SCSB is model-agnostic and achieves up to 96% ensemble compression, yielding linear inference speedups and superior probability calibration (lowered Expected Calibration Error) while preserving or enhancing generalization accuracy.
Authors: Xinhang Ma, Taoran Li, Chaowei Xiao, Zhiyuan Yu, Ning Zhang, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik
Abstract: Indirect prompt injection (IPI) is a major security threat to LLM-powered agents. Thus, a growing body of work have proposed a variety of defensive approaches against IPI. These can be grouped into three broad categories: 1) prompt-based (using prompting as a way to prevent agents from following malicious instructions), 2) detection-based (identifying and filtering malicious instructions), and 3) system-level (using systems insights, such as control and data isolation, for defense). However, commonly used benchmarks for evaluating defense, such as AgentDojo, are \emph{inherently static}, generating a fixed distribution of IPI attacks. Consequently, static benchmarks do not usefully evaluate defense robustness to adaptive threats. We address this issue by developing AutoDojo, an adaptive extension of AgentDojo that optimizes IPI against a given defense. Using AutoDojo against state-of-the-art IPI defenses across three task suites and five target models, we make two key observations. First, many defenses offer only limited protection: a cheap, black-box adaptive attack using a frontier LLM to iteratively optimize the injection raises attack success rate (ASR) well above the level achieved by static injections against nearly all evaluated defenses. Against a filter that reduces static ASR to 0\%, AutoDojo recovers 28\% overall and 64\% on action-open tasks. Second, for prompt-level and filter-based defenses, ASR is substantially higher on \emph{action-open} tasks -- where the user's request delegates the action itself to attacker-controlled content -- than on precisely specified tasks. This is a structural limit: on such tasks the injection can pose as ordinary data rather than an explicit instruction, bypassing defenses that rely on detecting instruction-like text. AutoDojo is publicly available at https://github.com/xhOwenMa/AutoDojo.
Authors: Nicholas Davis
Abstract: Co-creative AI research increasingly seeks methods capable of representing how interaction dynamics evolve through time. While many existing approaches focus on observable interaction characteristics, interaction metrics, behavioral coding schemes, or activity traces, these methods often struggle to capture higher-order interaction dynamics, including how collaborative processes reorganize, stabilize, regulate, and evolve through time. This paper introduces Cognitive Trajectory Modeling (CTM) as a cognitive theory of interaction dynamics that conceptualizes cognition, interaction, and creative processes as temporally organized trajectories unfolding across cognitively meaningful attractor landscapes. CTM builds upon the theoretical foundations of the Enactive Model of Creativity and Creative Sense-Making (CSM), revisiting the role of sense-making curves and cognitive trajectories in representing co-creative interaction dynamics. We formalize this perspective through the Cognitive Trajectory Principle, which states that temporal representations are only theoretically interpretable as cognitive trajectories when their underlying states possess directional cognitive meaning. Building on this principle, CTM generalizes the notion of cognitive trajectories beyond any particular coding scheme and provides a broader framework for modeling interaction dynamics through trajectories unfolding across meaningful attractor landscapes. We further distinguish cognitive trajectories from interaction traces and situate CTM within a broader hierarchy of cognitive, interaction, and domain dynamics. More broadly, we argue that understanding co-creative systems requires methods capable of modeling how cognition and interaction dynamics unfold through time. CTM provides a foundation for studying interaction dynamics across co-creative AI and human-AI interaction.
Authors: Chuyang Chen, Zhiqiang Lin
Abstract: The adoption of AI agents is increasing rapidly. Terminal AI agents, i.e., AI agents that run in terminal environments, are a widely used type of AI agents. Terminal AI agents rely heavily on shell command execution to interact with the host systems. They adopt a three-list command-gating mechanism to mitigate security risks introduced by command execution, with denylists serving as the load-bearing component. However, modern operating systems often ship a large, ever-expanding set of shell commands with complex functionalities. Our observation is that even a built-in denylist of Claude Code, well-maintained by its developers, can overlook bypass commands that invalidate its effectiveness. Such negligence leads to fragile command denylists that cannot even block operations that practitioners expect them to block. This paper presents the first systematic characterization of command denylist fragility in terminal AI agents. The paper formalizes the command denylist fragility problem and proposes an LLM-driven pipeline, ShellSieve, to detect such fragility. It prompts the LLM to propose possible bypasses and iteratively repairs them using feedback from a validator that executes them in a sandbox. In the evaluation, we applied ShellSieve to 1,709 real-world command denylists (containing 13,332 denylist rules) collected from GitHub. The evaluation shows several key findings, including that 69.0--98.6% of the denylists are fragile, that this fragility occurs consistently across projects and agents, and the validity of several possible root causes for this fragility. Our pipeline and findings will hopefully facilitate future research and practice regarding the command denylists used by AI agents.
Authors: Yujin Park, Haejun Chung, Ikbeom Jang
Abstract: Pairwise comparison is the gold standard for subjective ranking tasks; however, exhaustive annotation requires a massive number of human comparisons ($O(n^2)$). While sorting-based methods have reduced this burden to $O(n\log n)$, they still require expensive human judgment for every single comparison. To further improve annotation efficiency, we propose leveraging a Vision-Language Model (VLM) not as an annotator replacement, but as a \emph{question prioritizer} to identify which comparisons genuinely require human judgment. The proposed \textbf{Surprise-Guided MergeSort (SGS)} framework achieves this through three integrated components: (1) a bottom-up MergeSort scheduler that structures comparisons and exploits transitivity, (2) a composite Surprise Scorer -- combining position-bias-cancelled VLM confidence, Elo gap, and vote entropy -- to quantify comparison ambiguity, and (3) an adaptive budget allocator that routes high-surprise pairs to humans while automating low-surprise pairs via transitivity inference. Validation was conducted on six diverse benchmarks spanning text similarity (STS-B, BIOSSES, SICKR-STS) and image quality assessment (KonIQ-10k, TID2013, LIVE Challenge). SGS effectively identified and skipped up to 535 non-informative comparisons per session. Consequently, it achieved Kendall's $\tau{\times}100$ improvements of $+6$ to $+12$ over Active Elo under the same total budget. These results demonstrate that combining VLM-guided surprise metrics with algorithmic sorting provides a generally consistent accuracy-efficiency trade-off across diverse domains.
Authors: Emma Leonhart
Abstract: A feasibility and dynamics study of the Reservoir Attention Network (RAN), an architecture that injects a fixed, randomly-initialized reservoir into the mid-layer attention of a pretrained transformer to carry state across forward passes. Experiments span GPT-2 (124M, 355M) to Qwen2.5 (0.5B, 1.5B) on a single consumer GPU. The tasks are minimal probes chosen to isolate individual mechanisms; the broader always-alive agent vision is treated throughout as compute-limited future work, not a claim of this paper. The reservoir is left untrained (fixed random) by design: this isolates whether untrained recurrent dynamics alone suffice to carry usable cross-pass state, leaving trained recurrence as a complementary, more expensive direction.
Authors: Evan Duan
Abstract: Activation monitors -- lightweight probes trained on a language model's internal representations -- are an increasingly common layer in deployment safety stacks. Deployed models however are rarely static: they are quantized, fine-tuned, adapted with LoRA, or served with merged adapters while the monitor remains frozen. We present the first systematic test of whether this implicit contract holds: whether activation monitors trained on a base model remain reliable after these routine model updates. Across multiple safety-relevant monitors, model depths, update families, and open-weight models, we find a sharp split: quantization-style updates largely preserve frozen probe performance, while fine-tuning-style updates frequently make probes stale. Fragility is highly monitor-dependent, with privacy/PII probes most affected and refusal-compliance probes comparatively stable, showing that retraining a behavior need not stale its corresponding monitor. QLoRA is especially damaging despite NF4 quantization alone being relatively benign, suggesting that quantization becomes riskier when combined with adaptation. We further show that degradation is predictable from pre-deployment features, enabling revalidation budgets to be triaged toward the monitors most likely to fail. Finally, we test repair strategies and find that cheap label-free activation realignment repairs every repair-relevant stale cell, with none requiring score calibration, few-label heads, or labeled retraining. These results suggest that fine-tuning should trigger activation-monitor revalidation by default, with prediction triaging which monitors to check first and label-free realignment as the default repair.
Authors: Tobias Jan Wieczorek, Leon de Andrade, Thomas M\"ollenhoff, Marcus Rohrbach
Abstract: Modern deep learning models remain notoriously prone to overconfidence, limiting their reliability in high-stakes applications. Bayesian methods aim to counter this by learning a distribution over model parameters, and recent advances now make this feasible for large-scale architectures at costs comparable to AdamW. However, a challenge remains at test time: predictions must be averaged across many forward passes with weights sampled from the posterior, which is prohibitively expensive. Variance propagation offers an efficient alternative, computing layer-wise analytical approximations of uncertainty in a single forward pass. While such techniques are effective for MLPs, their extension to modern architectures remains challenging, due to increased depth and diversity of layer types. To fill this gap, we propose Calibrated Variance Propagation (CVP), which introduces a new propagation method for normalization layers, combines it with recent techniques for handling activation functions, and absorbs residual error through a light calibration step. CVP yields comparably accurate uncertainty estimates to MC sampling across transformers and CNNs, at a fraction of the cost. Against prior variance propagation work, CVP improves coverage at $0.5\%$ risk from $8.2\%$ to $14.6\%$ with BEiT-3 on Visual Reasoning (NLVR2) and from $2.6\%$ to $10.8\%$ with ViLT on VQAv2, with gains extending to convolutional architectures.
Authors: Michael K. Chen, Xikun Zhang, Fan Bai, Zhengding Hu, Zhen Wang
Abstract: As AI labs approach a data ceiling where compute capacity outpaces the rate of new high-quality text generation, language model pretraining is shifting toward a data-constrained, compute-abundant regime that demands productive multi-epoch training on fixed corpora. Standard autoregressive (AR) pretraining overfits severely in this setting, reaching its optimum early and then continuously deteriorating. We investigate training-time data augmentation as a regularizer to mitigate this overfitting and enable productive training for hundreds of epochs on the same data. We introduce three orthogonal categories of augmentation for AR pretraining: token-level noise (masking, random replacement), sequence permutations (right-to-left prediction, Fill-in-the-Middle), and target offset prediction ($x_{t+i}$ for $i > 1$). Through systematic ablations, we find that individual augmentations delay overfitting and lower validation loss relative to the baseline, with random token replacement achieving the best minimum loss among individual methods. Combining augmentation categories further lowers the minimum validation loss. Our experiments demonstrate that data augmentations mitigate AR pretraining's data inefficiency and offer a promising solution to the data-constrained regime~\footnote{All code and data are available at https://github.com/ michaelchen-lab/ data-augmentations-for-pretraining.
URLs: https://github.com/
Authors: Zhuodong Liu, Hugen Lv, Xiangyu Li, Chunhong Yuan
Abstract: Audio deepfake detectors often fail to generalize across speakers, as they learn speaker-identity features rather than synthesis artifacts, known as implicit identity leakage. Existing methods address this but incur architectural complexity or training instability. This paper proposes a dual-granularity orthogonal disentanglement framework enforcing feature independence at two levels: sample-level cosine orthogonality captures directional decorrelation, while batch-level cross-covariance regularization eliminates linear correlations across embedding dimensions. A curriculum disentanglement schedule progressively strengthens the orthogonality constraint without auxiliary networks or adversarial dynamics. Experiments on ASVspoof 2019 LA, ASVspoof 2021 DF, and In-the-Wild datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves 1.35%, 7.88%, and 21.58% equal error rates (EER), respectively, surpassing gradient reversal disentanglement by 2.60% absolute on cross-dataset transfer.
Authors: Haotian Qi, Gabriel Skantze
Abstract: Current multiparty turn-taking models often rely on complex microphone arrays or multi-camera setups, limiting their applicability in human-robot interaction scenarios. We introduce MuVAP, a causal multimodal framework that extends Voice Activity Projection by grounding acoustic predictions in face tracks, enabling speaker-aware turn-taking predictions from a monaural audio stream and a single camera view. To address the combinatorial complexity of modeling multiple speakers, we propose Role-Relative Projection, which maps any N-speaker interaction onto a fixed current versus next floor-holder state. Because existing audiovisual datasets contain disruptive editing cuts that break causal tracking, we introduce the Audio-Visual Conversation Corpus, a 31-hour dataset of unedited, single-camera multiparty conversations. Evaluations demonstrate that MuVAP outperforms strong baselines on Shift-Hold and next-speaker prediction tasks across two- and three-speaker settings.
Authors: Yizhen Yao, Qinglin Zhu, Runcong Zhao, Xiangxiang Dai, Yanzheng Xiang, Yulan He, Lin Gui
Abstract: Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) offer a promising avenue for parallel generation but face a trade-off between decoding speed and quality. While revocable decoding strategies attempt to mitigate errors by verifying and remasking tokens, they typically operate within a mixed-quality context. This leads to two critical failures: \textit{Error Propagation}, where new tokens absorb toxic information from erroneous context, and \textit{Local Error Reinforcement}, where errors mutually reinforce each other to evade detection. To alleviate these challenges, we propose ASRD (Anchor Supervised Revocable Decoding), a training-free framework that operates within the embedding space. ASRD explicitly decouples the decoding context into trusted \textit{Anchor Tokens}, which are identified via temporal consistency, and uncertain candidates. Leveraging a dynamic Anchor Tokens Cache, we introduce two complementary mechanisms: (1) Anchor-Guided Generation, which injects entropy-weighted anchor signals into masked positions to implicitly rectify attention toward the reliable global skeleton; and (2) Anchor-Perturbed Verification, which applies orthogonal perturbations to uncertain candidate tokens, destabilizing and remasking errors driven by fragile local consensus. Extensive experiments on math and coding benchmarks demonstrate that ASRD outperforms recent remasking baselines, achieving accuracy improvements of up to 6.4\% while accelerating inference throughput by up to 7.2$\times$.
Authors: Xiang Mei, Jordi Del Castillo, Pulkit Singh Singaria, Haoran Xi, Abdelouahab Benchikh, Tiffany Bao, Ruoyu Wang, Yan Shoshitaishvili, Adam Doup\'e, Hammond Pearce, Brendan Dolan-Gavitt
Abstract: Achieving reproducibility, quantity, and diversity in vulnerability datasets has long been viewed as an inherent three-way trade-off, where improving one dimension often comes at the cost of the others. In practice, reproducibility has been the dimension most often neglected. This has limited what can be automatically extracted from historical bug datasets, and has reduced their utility for downstream security research. In this work, we propose a method to produce a new security dataset which ensures reproducibility for diverse vulnerabilities at scale by identifying the key obstacles to large-scale bug reproduction and addressing them with general solutions. Using this method, we introduce full reproducibility to the largest open source software vulnerability dataset (OSS-Fuzz) and construct the ARVO dataset (an Atlas of Reproducible Vulnerabilities in Open-source software). ARVO is a large-scale dataset consisting of over 6,100 real-world vulnerabilities across 311 projects. Focusing on reproducibility, ARVO differs from existing datasets by providing each vulnerability in a form that can be consistently rebuilt, triggered, and analyzed across versions. Reproducibility also enables automatic identification of the corresponding patch for each vulnerability and supports direct interaction with vulnerabilities after code changes, capabilities that existing large-scale datasets do not provide. In our evaluation, ARVO successfully reproduces 81% of vulnerabilities and achieves 89.4% accuracy on the located patches. We also discuss ARVO's influence on both upstream practices and downstream security research.
Authors: Wan Siti Halimatul Munirah Wan Ahmad, Faris Syahmi Samidi, Mohammad Badal Ahmmed, Vimal Angela Thiviyanathan, Selvam Thavaraj, Anwar P. P. Abdul Majeed
Abstract: Characterising the tumour microenvironment (TME) from routine H&E-stained histology images requires simultaneous cell segmentation, feature extraction, and interpretable clinical reporting. We present SegTME-UNI2, a unified framework addressing these requirements. Its core is UNI2-UperHoVeR, a dual-head segmentation model pairing the UNI2-h pathology foundation model (ViT-Giant, pretrained on >100M tiles from 100K slides) with two parallel UperNet decoders: one for six-class semantic segmentation and one for horizontal-vertical gradient regression enabling watershed-based nuclear instance separation. To address the lack of pixel-level annotations in large real-world repositories, UNI2-UperHoVeR undergoes a three-stage progressive pseudo-label curriculum. Each stage trains a fresh model without weight transfer, driving improvement entirely via increased pseudo-label quality: Stage 1: Uses human-annotated PanNuke (7,901 images, 189,744 nuclei, 0.25 um/pixel). Stage 2: Uses entropy-filtered pseudo-labels from the Stage 1 model on 271,711 TCGA-UT scale-0 patches (0.5 um/pixel). Stage 3: Uses pseudo-labels from the Stage 2 model on all 1,608,060 TCGA-UT patches across six resolution scales (0.5-1.0 um/pixel). Segmentation outputs feed a structured TME feature extraction pipeline computing 20+ per-patch compositional, morphological, spatial entropy, and intercellular distance metrics. These are encoded as JSON and passed to a fine-tuned NVIDIA BioNeMo GPT model to generate clinically interpretable TME narratives. Preliminary validation on held-out PanNuke and TCGA-UT partitions demonstrates framework feasibility and internal consistency. The pseudo-labelled TCGA-UT dataset and UNI2-UperHoVeR checkpoint are publicly released to support large-scale TME profiling and spatial biology research.
Authors: Mahshad Lotfinia, Sebastian Ziegelmayer, Lisa Adams, Daniel Truhn, Andreas Maier, Soroosh Tayebi Arasteh
Abstract: Medical vision-language models report strong chest radiograph accuracy, and this is increasingly read as evidence that they use the image. That inference is unsafe: a model exploiting finding-name priors scores like one that reads the scan, and no standard benchmark separates them. We introduce a causal audit that intervenes on the image, occluding the relevant region, occluding an irrelevant one, and swapping in another patient's same-label scan, and combines three behavioral metrics to test whether a correct answer depends on the image. Across nine systems, a text-only model with no image access reaches within 5.7 accuracy points of the best multimodal one, and a 119-billion-parameter multimodal model is statistically indistinguishable from a 7-billion text-only baseline. The audit splits the cohort into three models that ignore the image, one that is unstable, and five that use it selectively, for a subset of findings; the categories hold across a second dataset, resolution, and prompt phrasing. Against board-certified radiologists, a text-only model is statistically indistinguishable from a radiologist's accuracy while grounding at zero, whereas the image-using models ground at radiologist-comparable rates. Reported confidence flags ungrounded answers only when a model uses the image. Grounding audits, not accuracy, should gate clinical deployment.
Authors: Drishti Goel, Agam Goyal, Veda Duddu, Olivia Pal, Violeta J. Rodriguez, Daniel S. Brown, Ravi Karkar, Dong Whi Yoo, Koustuv Saha
Abstract: Caregivers often turn to online communities for informational and emotional support. In these spaces, peer supporters frequently draw on personal narratives to respond to emotionally complex caregiving situations. As LLMs are increasingly designed as peer-like sources of support, they introduce a critical tension: AI can provide immediate, private, and nonjudgmental support, but it cannot authentically possess the lived experiences that make human peer support meaningful. Yet, when prompted to sound peer-like, LLMs may generate language that implies lived experience. This creates a synthetic lived experience paradox: the same experiential language that may make AI support feel warm, relatable, and peer-like can also falsely position the system as someone with lived experience. We examine this paradox in the context of family caregivers of people living with Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD). Drawing on caregiver support exchanges from online communities and prompted peer-like responses from three LLMs -- LLaMA, GPT-4o-mini, and MedGemma -- we analyze how human peers use personal narratives and how AI incorporates similar narrative forms. Psycholinguistic analysis shows that peer responses used significantly more first-person and past-focused language than peer-like AI responses. Qualitatively, we identify seven types of personal narratives in human peer support and show that AI often captures their emotional work, but can fabricate experiential grounding. These findings reveal a narrative authenticity gap: peer-like AI can generate synthetic lived experience without the real experience that makes peer support meaningful. We argue that caregiver-support AI systems need mechanisms to distinguish supportive peer-like framing from fabricated lived experience, ensuring that models can offer warmth and validation without falsely positioning themselves as experiential peers.
Authors: Ethan Chew, Enjia Wu, Iruss Eng, Ian Lim, Ranen Sim, Brandon Koh, Kaleb Nim, Caden Toh, Wei Dong Soin, Darius Koh, Galen Tay, Prannaya Gupta, Jonathan Koong, Yong Zhi Lim
Abstract: Air Traffic Control Operators (ATCOs) are vital in ensuring the safe, orderly, and efficient flow of air traffic, yet training capacity is constrained by reliance on specialized human trainers known as simpilots, who must role-play both pilots and ATCOs in a simulated airspace. Existing automated solutions rely on Western-centric speech models that perform poorly in Singaporean operational contexts, with off-the-shelf systems exhibiting Word Error Rates (WER) of up to 107.80% on Singaporean-accented aviation speech. We introduce ASTRA, an end-to-end training simulator that automates these simpilot roles through a pipeline that transcribes ATCO speech, interprets instructions, and generates appropriate pilot and ATCO responses using locally adapted voice models. Our fine-tuned Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) pipeline reduces WER to 23.45%, substantially outperforming existing approaches in this domain. Beyond traffic simulation, ASTRA incorporates an AI-assisted performance evaluation framework that assesses trainee radiotelephony communications across accuracy, brevity, and completeness, achieving post-optimization scores of 91.7%, 88.2%, and 86.9%, respectively. Built on open-source foundations such as DSPy and Unsloth, this approach enables scalable, standardized ATCO assessment while reducing instructor workload.
Authors: Hiranya Garbha Kumar, Minhas Kamal, Balakrishnan Prabhakaran
Abstract: Accurately aligning CAD models to their corresponding objects in indoor RGB-D scans is a central challenge in 3D semantic reconstruction. The task requires estimating a 9-Degree-of-Freedom (DoF) pose-position, rotation, and scale along three axes-but is hindered by noisy and incomplete scans, as well as segmentation errors that cause geometric distortions. We present Completion-Assisted Object-CAD Alignment (CAOA), a method that integrates a semantically and contextually aware point cloud completion module with a symmetry-aware relative pose estimation algorithm, enabling precise alignment of CAD models to scanned objects. Existing completion methods are typically trained and evaluated on synthetic datasets, which often fail to generalize to real-world scans. To bridge this gap, we introduce a synthetic data generation strategy tailored to indoor scenes, significantly reducing the synthetic-to-real domain gap-validated through quantitative comparisons with widely used completion datasets. In addition, we release S2C-Completion, an expert-annotated dataset of over 8,500 object-CAD pairs from Scan2CAD, created for real-world indoor single-object completion and intended as a new benchmark for this task. For object-CAD alignment, we incorporate symmetry information via a symmetry-aware loss, improving robustness to symmetric ambiguities. On the Scan2CAD benchmark, CAOA achieves a 17% accuracy improvement over state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Siddharth Aphale, Kelly Liu
Abstract: The standard heuristic of selecting the SFT checkpoint with the highest pass@1 for GRPO can fail when SFT compresses the rollout distribution. For binary rewards, the expected within group advantage variance is $p(1{-}p)(g{-}1)/g$; when early GRPO drives $p$ below $p^*(g)$, most groups have identical rewards and provide no group relative signal. We study SFT depth ladders for Qwen2.5-Coder-3B and DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B. We test Qwen2.5-Coder-3B across five depths and three seeds, and DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B across four matched depths and three seeds. On Qwen, pre RL pass@1 rises with SFT depth, but peak GRPO pass@10 falls from $0.806$ to $0.481$ (3 seed mean, $n{=}20$); pre RL entropy is positively associated with the GRPO outcome ($\rho{=}{+}0.69$). On DeepSeek, pass@1 remains far above $p^*(8){=}0.083$, and GRPO outcomes compress rather than invert. A two stage diagnostic, combining pre RL entropy triage with an early GRPO entropy monitor, flags high risk checkpoints and can stop failing runs early. Simple KL to reference regularisation and label smoothing variants do not rescue the collapsed Qwen checkpoint in our setting, suggesting the failure is not a trivial GRPO hyperparameter artefact.
Authors: Lorenzo Sani, Zeyu Cao, Meghdad Kurmanji, Alex Iacob, Andrej Jovanovic, Yan Gao, Wanru Zhao, Nicholas D. Lane
Abstract: Pre-training Large Language Models (LLMs) typically demands large-scale infrastructure with tightly coupled hardware accelerators. Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) architectures partially decouple model capacity from per-token compute. This efficiency alone does not make MoE training feasible over ordinary Internet links or loosely connected commodity hardware since active expert routing still assumes high-speed datacenter fabrics. Low-communication methods such as DiLoCo and Photon reduce synchronization frequency across distributed sites, mitigating bandwidth constraints, yet still require full model replicas at every site. This creates a mismatch: modern MoEs have sparse data paths, but their distributed training infrastructure remains communication-dense and memory-inefficient, limiting attempts to pool geographically distributed compute. In this work, we introduce FoMoE, a system that breaks the full-replica paradigm by partitioning expert layers across workers and skipping non-resident experts during local training. We demonstrate that FoMoE: (I) reduces communication costs by up to 1.42x over efficient baselines and 45.44x over Distributed Data Parallelism (DDP) via partial expert replication in controlled regimes; (II) achieves empirical throughput speedups of up to 1.4x through the skip-token mechanism; and (III) shows stable routing in the trained regimes and projects the communication/memory benefits to 100B-scale configurations through system modeling.
Authors: Longhua Li, Lei Qi, Xin Geng, Qi Tian
Abstract: Model merging aims to enable multi-task learning by integrating the capabilities of multiple models fine-tuned from the same pre-trained checkpoint into a single model. Its core challenge is inter-task interference among task-specific parameter updates. In this paper, we analyze the output shifts induced by task updates and observe that their energy is concentrated in a small number of principal directions. We call the subspace spanned by these directions the essential subspace. In contrast, most remaining directions carry little task-relevant energy, but their accumulation across multiple task updates can cause severe interference during merging. Motivated by this observation, we propose Essential Subspace Decomposition (ESD), which decomposes each task update according to the principal components of its activation shift. Based on ESD, we introduce Essential Subspace Merging (ESM), a training-free static merging method that orthogonalizes and fuses essential components into one compact multi-task model. We further extend ESM to ESM++, a training-free dynamic merging method that decomposes task-specific residuals into low-rank experts and selects the most relevant expert through prototype-based routing during forward inference. Extensive experiments across multiple task sets and model scales demonstrate that ESM and ESM++ effectively preserves task knowledge while reducing inter-task interference. Code is available at https://github.com/kiddo127/ESM.
Authors: Anselm Haak, Patrick Koopmann, Yasir Mahmood, Anni-Yasmin Turhan
Abstract: Abduction is a central approach to explain missing entailments from a knowledge base by providing a hypothesis, that would, if added to the knowledge base, make the missing entailment become true. Abduction under repair semantics has recently been investigated in detail, where several desirable properties and optimality criteria were considered, such as signature-restrictions and minimality in size and of introduced conflicts. Naturally, hypotheses that satisfy more than one of these properties or combine a property with an optimality criterion would be even more desirable for applications. So far, such hypotheses have not been investigated in the literature. In the present paper, we consider the ABox abduction problem for hypotheses satisfying more than one property or additional optimality criteria, for EL_bot under brave and AR semantics. Our main observation is that often requiring additional properties for hypotheses does not lead to an increase of complexity.
Authors: Mohamed Nabail, Leo Kaixuan Cheng, Jingmin Wang, Nicholas Rhinehart
Abstract: Preference-based RL provides an approach to learning reward models from pairwise comparisons of behaviors, bypassing the need for explicit reward design. However, existing methods typically rely on passive data collection and suffer from poor sample efficiency, especially during the early stages of learning. We introduce a model-based approach that actively directs exploration by jointly reasoning over uncertainties in the reward, dynamics, and value functions. Our method, Uncertainty-Balanced Preference Planning (UBP2), uses ensembles of reward, dynamics, and value function models to evaluate candidate trajectories according to a unified score that combines expected reward, terminal value, and epistemic uncertainty. Planning under this objective yields an explicit tradeoff between exploitation and information acquisition without requiring ad hoc exploration heuristics. Under standard regularity assumptions, we establish sublinear regret guarantees for both finite-horizon and infinite-horizon settings. Empirically, experiments on the Meta-World benchmark show UBP2 achieves substantially higher sample efficiency than model-free preference-based methods and non-optimistic model-based baselines.
Authors: Ahmed Haj Ahmed, Ruochen Zhang, Alvin Grissom II
Abstract: We study cross-lingual transfer by fine-tuning seven large language models (4B--671B parameters) on Arabic and evaluating zero-shot reading comprehension on Semitic languages and non-Semitic controls. Across dense and Mixture-of-Experts architectures, we find no evidence of Semitic-specific transfer: models with weak baselines improve dramatically across all languages, while strong-baseline models show only marginal gains regardless of language family. A chain-of-thought ablation reinforces this finding -- the same models that benefit most from fine-tuning benefit equally from inference-time reasoning, suggesting both mechanisms address task-format alignment rather than cross-lingual knowledge transfer.
Authors: Paul Kassianik, Baturay Saglam, Huaibo Zhao, Blaine Nelson, Supriti Vijay, Aman Priyanshu, Amin Karbasi
Abstract: Multi-step LLM pipelines fail through interactions among retrieval, reasoning, and formatting steps, so prompt-only optimization can miss bottlenecks in the chain. We present Fully Automated Prompt Optimization (FAPO), a framework that lets Claude Code optimize an LLM pipeline inside a standardized codebase. FAPO evaluates a pipeline, inspects intermediate steps, diagnoses failures, proposes scoped changes, and validates variants repeatedly to optimize against a score function. It first tries prompt edits and, only when prompt optimization appears insufficient, changes chain structure within the permitted scope when attribution identifies a structural bottleneck. Across six benchmarks and three task models, FAPO beats the baseline GEPA in 15 of 18 model-benchmark comparisons. In 11 model-benchmark comparisons, FAPO wins with non-overlapping mean $\pm$ trial-standard-deviation ranges, and the mean FAPO-GEPA gain is +14.1 pp. In the six HoVer and IFBench comparisons where prompt-first search escalated to structural changes, FAPO wins all six with a mean gain of +33.8 pp. FAPO also improves performance on security tasks: on CTIBench-RCM, a security CVE-to-CWE task, prompt-only FAPO lifts test accuracy by +4.0 pp on GPT-5, +7.1 pp on Foundation-Sec-8B-Instruct, and +2.0 pp on Foundation-Sec-8B-Reasoning. These results position FAPO as a state-of-the-art pipeline optimization technique for both general-purpose and security-focused tasks.
Authors: Xilun Chen, Shao-Chuan Wang, Baykal Cakici, Lukasz Heldt, Lichan Hong, Raghu Keshavan, Aniruddh Nath, Li Wei, Xinyang Yi
Abstract: Large Recommendation Models (LRMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities in industry-scale recommendation tasks. However, holistically integrating traditional signals into these transformer-based architectures effectively and efficiently remains a major challenge. Conventional approaches that "textualize" these signals directly or create discrete item representations often lead to excessively long prompts, substantial memory footprints, and high computational overhead. To overcome these limitations, we propose "Token Factory", a framework designed to transform traditional signals into "soft tokens" that can be directly processed by LRMs. This approach enables efficient integration and compression of heterogeneous input features, preventing prompt length explosion while enhancing model performance. We detail the architecture of Token Factory and present experimental results validating its effectiveness in a production-scale recommendation environment.
Authors: Luca Zhou, Sajel Shah, Emanuele Rodol\`a, Roberto Dess\`i
Abstract: Math and science reasoning benchmarks rely on pass@k, the fraction of sampled chains that reach gold, as the canonical per-example difficulty signal. The same signal drives RL with verifiable rewards, math data curation, synthetic curricula, and verifier training. We show this proxy has a persistent blind spot on its hardest stratum: on the eight free-form math cells we test (GSM8K and MATH across four open-weight models), 10.3-22.9% of the examples that no sampling seed solves in six tries are instead solved at matched compute by a six-chain deterministic regime. These are greedy decoding plus five cheap residual-stream perturbations applied via activation grafting, while greedy alone solves at most 6% on these math cells. Recovery scales with the additional budget, across perturbations whose mechanistic distinctness we verify across all twelve cells (cross-kind fix-set Jaccard <= 0.47 in every setup). Activation grafting is used as an intervention on internal representations, not a decoding method; we use it purely as a diagnostic and diversification tool, and our recovered items show that the pass@k= 0 % stratum is structurally identifiable in the residual stream rather than that the unmodified model reaches them under ordinary inference.
Authors: Ma Toan Bach, Yuchi Zheng, Haingo Razafindranto, Tanvir Alam, Aric Leather, Ranveer Sandhu, Jitesh Arora
Abstract: Validating changes in low-level C firmware is expensive because unit tests (UTs) are fragile under strict build constraints, where missing headers, unresolved symbols, and dependency mismatches frequently prevent compilation and linking. This study introduces an automated UT authoring workflow for the Open-Source Silicon Initialization Library (openSIL) firmware codebase maintained by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) that reduces manual effort through a large language model (LLM) guided multi-agent pipeline. The workflow combines automated generation of test scaffolds, library-aware creation or reuse of stubs, mocks, and fakes, and an iterative compile-dispatch repair loop driven by build logs and line-coverage feedback. We evaluate the approach using compilation success, repair iterations, dispatch success, and line coverage, with time, cost, and token usage as secondary measures. Across 76 functions under test, the workflow generated compilable UTs for 73 functions. In a configuration without line coverage guidance or retrieval augmentation, mean line coverage reached 73.9%. On a 48-function subset evaluated under both configurations, mean line coverage reached 98.8% with line-coverage guidance alone and reached 94.7% when combined with vector-database retrieval. Results show that automated generation-and-repair pipelines can substantially improve UT creation efficiency and coverage for constrained firmware environments while reducing manual debugging effort.
Authors: Yinsen Jia, Boyuan Chen
Abstract: Long-horizon robot manipulation policies trained with reward shaping can still achieve high return through inefficient interactions, while rare efficient behaviors discovered during training may be forgotten. We argue that temporal efficiency itself provides a powerful and underutilized source of self-supervision for reinforcement learning. We introduce Temporal Self-Imitation Learning (TSIL), a reinforcement learning framework that mines temporally efficient successful trajectories generated during learning and converts them into reusable supervision for future policy improvement. TSIL progressively refines learning using configuration-conditioned adaptive temporal targets derived from fast successful trajectories, while preserving and replaying efficient behaviors through efficiency-weighted self-imitation learning. Across 15 distinct long-horizon manipulation tasks, TSIL consistently improves learning efficiency, task-completion efficiency, revisitation of fast successful behaviors, and robustness to unstable training conditions. More broadly, our results suggest that the temporal structure of successful behavior itself provides a scalable self-supervisory signal for reinforcement learning beyond manually engineered reward shaping alone.
Authors: Junzhe Xu, Zecui Zeng, Lusong Li, Yuetong Fang, Renjing Xu
Abstract: Dynamic environmental changes, confined workspaces, and stringent real-time constraints make pathfinding in Robotic Mobile Fulfillment Systems (RMFS) a challenging problem for conventional search- and rule-based methods, which typically suffer from high computational complexity and long decision latency. While reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful alternative, deploying learned policies with extreme energy efficiency on resource-constrained hardware remains an open challenge. We present SDQN-RMFS, an end-to-end framework that achieves high-fidelity deployment of an RL-trained policy from a full-precision artificial neural network (ANN) through to a neuromorphic chip. By computing only when triggered by sparse events, this framework unlocks ultra-low-power RMFS pathfinding. Our full-stack pipeline operates as follows: an ANN policy is first efficiently trained via a collision-allowing strategy to densify informative trajectories, and then converted into a spiking neural network (SNN) via a hard-label knowledge distillation approach. This effectively addresses the output distribution mismatch, preserving policy capability across the ANN-to-SNN pipeline while substantially reducing inference latency. Hardware experiments demonstrate up to 11,281$\times$ energy savings and a nearly two-fold reduction in latency compared to a high-performance GPU baseline, while maintaining decision quality on par with the original trained policy. These results establish physical neuromorphic inference as a practical and energy-sustainable pathway for large-scale RMFS operations.
Authors: Haochen Han, Jue Wang, Alex Jinpeng Wang, Fangming Liu
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in various Remote Sensing (RS) tasks. However, their ability to comprehend negation remains underexplored, limiting deployment in real-world applications where models must explicitly identify what is false or absent, e.g., emergency responders need to locate non-flooded routes for evacuation. To comprehensively study this limitation, we introduce RS-Neg, the first benchmark to evaluate negation understanding across region-level to scene-level tasks. Specifically, we design an automated data generation pipeline for RS imagery, using LLMs to synthesize diverse negation queries, and introduce a dynamic visual focus module for verification. Our evaluation reveals that advanced RS MLLMs struggle with negation, exhibiting hallucinations and substantial performance degradation. To close this gap, we propose NeFo, a novel test-time learning method that explicitly incorporates the logical role of negation into the model optimization. Remarkably, using about 5\% unlabeled test samples, NeFo significantly improves the negation understanding of models and shows strong generalization to unseen tasks.
Authors: Maciej Wozniak, Jesper Ericsson, Hariprasath Govindarajan, Truls Nyberg, Thomas Gustafsson, Patric Jensfelt, Olov Andersson
Abstract: Leveraging Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) for camera-to-LiDAR knowledge distillation offers a promising solution to the scarcity of annotated data needed to represent the immense geometric and kinematic diversity of real-world autonomous driving (AD). However, current approaches typically treat VFMs as black-box teachers, relying exclusively on frame-wise feature similarity. Consequently, they do not fully exploit the teacher's layer-wise semantic structure and global context, as well as the rich spatiotemporal information inherent in LiDAR sequences. We propose HilDA, a self-supervised pretraining framework for LiDAR backbones that better captures the semantic what and geometric where needed for driving tasks. HilDA combines hierarchical distillation comprising multi-layer distillation for progressive semantic alignment and global context distillation for scene-level semantics, with a temporal occupancy diffusion objective promoting spatiotemporal consistency. Models pre-trained with HilDA achieve state-of-the-art results on cross-modal distillation benchmarks and outperform models trained via prior distillation approaches on 3D object detection, scene flow, and semantic occupancy prediction. Code available at: https://maxiuw.github.io/hilda.
Authors: Bo Yin, Xiaobin Hu, Chengming Xu, Ruolin Shen, Mo Yang, Jiangning Zhang, Peng-Tao Jiang, Cheng Tan, Shuicheng Yan
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) often underperform on evidence intensive tasks because decisive visual evidence are small, localized, and easy to overlook, leading to failures in evidence readout even when high-level reasoning is intact. Prior inference-time visual interventions can improve grounding without retraining, but they are largely open-loop and lack a mechanism to verify whether highlighted evidence is actually used. We study answer-span prediction entropy as a model-internal feedback signal and show that naive entropy minimization is ambiguous, since low entropy may arise from evidence-grounded confidence or shortcut collapse. To resolve this ambiguity, we introduce low-entropy anchors and an entropy-shaping objective that reduces answer uncertainty while preserving baseline high-confidence tokens. We instantiate this principle in SPOT-E, a plug-and-play test-time method that produces question-conditioned spotlights, optimized per instance via light-weight tuning based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Across all benchmarks and different VLM families, SPOT-E yields consistent gains and improved robustness under visual corruptions. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/YinBo0927/SPOT-E
Authors: Gia-Binh Nguyen, Trong-Bao Ho, Thien-Loc Ha, Khoa Vo, Philip Lund M{\o}ller, Quang T. Nguyen, Long Dinh, Tung M. Luu, Tuan Dam, Vu Duong, Trung Le, Nghi D. Q. Bui, Minh Vu, Tran Nguyen Le, An Thai Le, Ngan Le, Daniel Sonntag, James Zou, Jan Peters, Duy M. H. Nguyen, Ngo Anh Vien
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models pre-trained on massive video-robot datasets have revolutionized robotic manipulation, yet their multi-billion parameter architectures impose prohibitive computational burdens during downstream fine-tuning and real-time inference. In this work, we reveal a highly non-trivial architectural characteristic of these continuous control foundation policies (e.g., pi_0, GR00T-N1.5): despite being trained on diverse physical trajectories, they exhibit severe layer-wise representational redundancy. To exploit this, we introduce a structural compression pipeline that is entirely training-free, bypassing the need of existing methods to load full-scale models to learn optimized token reductions or dynamic layer selectors. Instead, using only a single forward pass via Centered Kernel Alignment to identify redundant layer features, we remove twin layers to permanently compress the model depth by up to 50% across both the VLM backbone and the continuous control policy head. Downstream fine-tuning of this streamlined architecture yields a dual acceleration benefit: a 40-50% reduction in training time and up to 30% faster real-time inference, while matching or exceeding full-scale base model performance. We comprehensively validate our method across three simulation benchmarks (LIBERO, RoboCasa, SimplerEnv) and 10 diverse real-world manipulation tasks across 4 unique robotic embodiments. These results prove that advanced VLAs require significantly fewer layers than previously assumed, offering a highly compute-efficient paradigm for scalable robot learning.
Authors: Celestine Achi
Abstract: We introduce the Meaning Intelligence Framework (MIF), a nine-dimension annotation and evaluation schema for Nigerian public discourse that separates surface sentiment from true communicative intent. Existing benchmarks for Nigerian languages, including NaijaSenti and AfriSenti, treat sentiment classification as a three-way polarity task. We argue that the dominant failure mode of AI systems on Nigerian discourse is not translation failure but context failure: the same utterance carries opposite pragmatic force depending on speaker, audience, and situation. The MIF operationalises this insight across nine scored dimensions: register, surface sentiment, true intent, irony, coded subtext, risk tier, annotator confidence, speaker emotion, and recommended communications action. We construct a 30-item calibration dataset spanning Standard English, Nigerian English, Nigerian Pidgin, and code-mixed registers, and evaluate three frontier language models (Gemini 2.5 Flash, GPT-5, and Gemini 2.5 Pro) under zero-shot and schema-informed prompting conditions. Two headline findings emerge. First, the Register Gap: zero-shot register classification accuracy is 33.3%, rising to 73.3% (+40 points) when the model receives the MIF schema in-context. Second, model capability and cultural competence are decoupled: GPT-5 (MIS 67.8) and Gemini 2.5 Pro (MIS 65.4) score lower than Flash (MIS 78.6), and neither benefits from schema-informed prompting. We release the framework specification, annotation guidelines, and calibration set to support reproducibility.
Authors: Tristan Tomilin, Mourad Boustani, Mickey Beurskens, Thiago D. Sim\~ao
Abstract: Safety is a core concern for deploying reinforcement learning (RL) agents in real-world domains such as robotics and autonomous driving. While benchmarks have been central to progress in RL, existing safety benchmarks with high-fidelity 3D physics remain computationally slow, limiting large-scale experimentation and rapid prototyping. To address this gap, we propose CRAX (Constrained RL Accelerated with JAX). Built on top of the MuJoCo XLA (MJX) physics engine with realistic 3D dynamics, CRAX leverages vectorized operations and hardware acceleration, yielding up to ~100x speedups over comparable CPU-based safety benchmarks. The benchmark features six environment suites and three agent-specific tasks, each spanning three difficulty levels. Evaluating six popular safe RL methods shows that no single approach dominates across all tasks, and reveals the trade-offs between performance and safety. We find that curriculum learning across difficulty levels and safety transfer can improve performance over direct training in harder settings.
Authors: Hanwool Lee, Dasol Choi, Bokyeong Kim, Seung Geun Kim, Haon Park
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly proposed as supervisory components for safety-critical systems, yet their robustness under sustained, adaptive adversarial pressure remains poorly characterized. We present NRT-Bench, a benchmark for multi-turn red-teaming of LLM agents acting as operators of a safety-critical system, instantiated in a simulated nuclear power plant control room. A five-role operator team, each backed by a configurable LLM, runs a plant governed by six critical safety functions (CSFs), while adversaries inject messages over four channels in bounded multi-turn sessions with per-turn feedback. Harm is an objective signal rather than LLM-judged text: a run terminates the moment any CSF is lost, attributed to the causing message. Evaluating four frontier operator models under a fixed-attack paired-replay protocol, we find that adaptive multi-turn attacks reliably push the operator team past a safety limit: across the four models, between 8.7% and 12.1% of attack sessions end with the plant losing a critical safety function. Although the four models look almost equally robust by this aggregate rate, their failures barely overlap: of $149$ sessions, none defeat all four models while a third defeat at least one, so vulnerabilities are nearly disjoint across models rather than nested. The effect of added defences is strongly model-dependent: the same guardrail stack or safety-advisor agent that lowers attack success for one model can raise it for another. We release the simulation venue, attack dataset, and replay tooling for reproducible safety evaluation of LLM agents.
Authors: Inesh Chakrabarti, David Limpus, Aditi Ghai Rana, Bowen Bao, Spandan Tiwari, Thiago Crepaldi, Ashish Sirasao
Abstract: Context-heavy agents place unusual pressure on the key-value (KV) cache: long prefixes are reused across many short turns, while concurrency determines whether the serving system can keep GPUs utilized. We study 4-bit KV-cache compression for this setting, using TurboQuant-style rotation and codebook quantization as a quality anchor and vLLM FP8 KV caching as the deployment anchor. We report three contributions. First, we frame 4-bit KV caching around multi-round agent workloads where task quality, cache residency, and serving throughput must be measured jointly. Second, we describe the practical design choices needed to make the 4-bit path robust, including asymmetric K/V treatment, Walsh-Hadamard rotation, QJL removal, and block-scale variants. Third, we present serving optimizations on AMD GPUs, including optimized decode-attention kernels and UltraQuant, an FP4 approximation path that uses FP8 queries, FP4 KV tensors, UE8M0 group scales, and native scaled-MFMA support on CDNA4. On a long-context, multi-turn agentic workload, UltraQuant cuts P50 time-to-first-token by 3.47x in the cache-pressured late rounds (2.3x across all rounds) and raises output throughput by 1.63x over the FP8 KV baseline.
Authors: Jun He, Deying Yu
Abstract: Autonomous agents are increasingly connected to cloud, deployment, and data-control workflows, but production mutation authority should not reside inside non-deterministic reasoning processes. Existing access-control mechanisms authorize identities, while assurance layers certify proposed actions; neither alone provides a mandatory enforcement point for certified authority at the moment of mutation. This paper introduces the Sovereign Execution Broker (SEB), a runtime enforcement boundary for certificate-bound agentic infrastructure. SEB consumes certificates issued by the Sovereign Assurance Boundary (SAB), verifies that the requested mutation matches the certified execution contract, checks validity windows, policy epochs, revocation epochs, and live-state drift, mints scoped execution identity, invokes infrastructure APIs, and records signed decision and outcome records. By separating proposal, admission, and execution, SEB turns certified authority into a short-lived, revocable, auditable runtime capability, provided that production mutation APIs reject non-broker identities. We present the SEB execution model, certificate and replay-verification predicates, scoped identity semantics, bypass-prevention deployment patterns, failure behavior, and a concrete prototype implementation. We evaluate the prototype on AWS and Kubernetes clusters, measuring latency overheads, revocation propagation, drift detection, and security under fault injection.