arXiv Daily Digest - 2026-04-22

Reinforcement learning (RL) for LLM post-training faces a fundamental design choice: whether to use a learned critic as a baseline for policy optimization. Classical theory favors critic-based methods such as PPO for variance reduction, yet critic-free alternatives like GRPO have gained widespread adoption due to their simplicity and competitive performance. We show that in sparse-reward settings, a learned critic can inject estimation noise that exceeds the state signal it captures, increasing rather than reducing advantage variance. By casting baseline selection as a Kalman filtering problem, we unify PPO and GRPO as two extremes of the Kalman gain and prove that explained variance (EV), computable from a single training batch, identifies the exact boundary: positive EV indicates the critic reduces variance, while zero or negative EV signals that it inflates variance. Building on this insight, we propose Explained Variance Policy Optimization (EVPO), which monitors batch-level EV at each training step and adaptively switches between critic-based and batch-mean advantage estimation, provably achieving no greater variance than the better of the two at every step. Across four tasks spanning classical control, agentic interaction, and mathematical reasoning, EVPO consistently outperforms both PPO and GRPO regardless of which fixed baseline is stronger on a given task. Further analysis confirms that the adaptive gating tracks critic maturation over training and that the theoretically derived zero threshold is empirically optimal.

We propose a fault-tolerant quantum computer architecture for trapped-ion devices, which we call the walking cat architecture. Our blueprint includes a compiler, a detailed description of all the quantum error-correction protocols, a micro-architecture, a sufficiently fast decoder, and thorough simulations. The backbone of the architecture is a cat factory, producing cat states distributed throughout the machine, which are consumed to perform logical operations. The walking cat architecture is based entirely on a modern quantum error-correction approach called low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. We identify promising instances of the walking cat architecture, such as (1) a simple architecture based on a single LDPC code, (2) a fast architecture based on fast logical gates relying on a [[70, 6, 9]] code, equipped with Clifford-frame tracking for any 6-qubit Clifford gate, and (3) a dense architecture based on a [[102, 22, 9]]] code encoding 22 logical qubits per memory block. Our dense architecture provides a design with 110 logical qubits executing about one million T gates per day using only 2,514 physical qubits. We estimate that the quantum Hamiltonian simulation of a Heisenberg model on 100 sites can be executed within one month with 10,000 physical qubits, including all shots required to achieve chemical accuracy, suggesting that such a device could enter the regime of classically intractable physics simulations. Our design relies on hardware components that have been experimentally demonstrated on small devices. We emphasize simplicity over hypothetical performance to facilitate the practical realization of this machine. Based on this approach, we believe that a fault-tolerant quantum computer with hundreds of logical qubits capable of running millions of logical gates can be built in the near term, providing a platform to explore a broad range of applications.

The intonational structure of Seoul Korean has been defined with discrete tonal categories within the Autosegmental-Metrical model of intonational phonology. However, it is challenging to map continuous $F_0$ contours to these invariant categories due to variable $F_0$ realizations in real-world speech. Our paper proposes Dual-Glob, a deep supervised contrastive learning framework to robustly classify fine-grained pitch accent patterns in Seoul Korean. Unlike conventional local predictive models, our approach captures holistic $F_0$ contour shapes by enforcing structural consistency between clean and augmented views in a shared latent space. To this aim, we introduce the first large-scale benchmark dataset, consisting of manually annotated 10,093 Accentual Phrases in Seoul Korean. Experimental results show that our Dual-Glob significantly outperforms strong baseline models with state-of-the-art accuracy (77.75%) and F1-score (51.54%). Therefore, our work supports AM-based intonational phonology using data-driven methodology, showing that deep contrastive learning effectively captures holistic structural features of continuous $F_0$ contours.

Fairness audits of institutional risk models are critical for understanding how deployed machine learning pipelines allocate resources. Drawing on multi-year collaboration with Centennial College, where our prior ethnographic work introduced the ASP-HEI Cycle, we present a replica-based audit of a deployed Early Warning System (EWS), replicating its model using institutional training data and design specifications. We evaluate disparities by gender, age, and residency status across the full pipeline (training data, model predictions, and post-processing) using standard fairness metrics. Our audit reveals systematic misallocation: younger, male, and international students are disproportionately flagged for support, even when many ultimately succeed, while older and female students with comparable dropout risk are under-identified. Post-processing amplifies these disparities by collapsing heterogeneous probabilities into percentile-based risk tiers. This work provides a replicable methodology for auditing institutional ML systems and shows how disparities emerge and compound across stages, highlighting the importance of evaluating construct validity alongside statistical fairness. It contributes one empirical thread to a broader program investigating algorithms, student data, and power in higher education.

Understanding how complex systems respond to perturbations, such as whether they will remain stable or what their most sensitive patterns are, is a fundamental challenge across science and engineering. Traditional stability and receptivity (resolvent) analyses are powerful but rely on known equations and linearization, limiting their use in nonlinear or poorly modeled systems. Here, we introduce a data-driven framework that automatically identifies stability properties and optimal forcing responses from observation data alone, without requiring governing equations. By training a neural network as a dynamics emulator and using automatic differentiation to extract its Jacobian, we can compute eigenmodes and resolvent modes directly from data. We demonstrate the method on both canonical chaotic models and high-dimensional fluid flows, successfully identifying dominant instability modes and input-output structures even in strongly nonlinear regimes. By leveraging a neural network-based emulator, we readily obtain a nonlinear representation of system dynamics while additionally retrieving intricate dynamical patterns that were previously difficult to resolve. This equation-free methodology establishes a broadly applicable tool for analyzing complex, high-dimensional datasets, with immediate relevance to grand challenges in fields such as climate science, neuroscience, and fluid engineering.

More than half of the global population struggles to meet their civil justice needs due to limited legal resources. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities, significant challenges remain even at the foundational step of legal issue identification. To investigate LLMs' capabilities in this task, we constructed a dataset from 769 real-world Malaysian Contract Act court cases, using GPT-4o to extract facts and generate candidate legal issues, annotated by senior legal experts, which reveals a critical limitation: while LLMs generate diverse issue candidates, their precision remains inadequate (GPT-4o achieves only 62%). To address this gap, we propose LePREC (Legal Professional-inspired Reasoning Elicitation and Classification), a neuro-symbolic framework combining neural generation with structured statistical reasoning. LePREC consists of: (1) a neuro component leverages LLMs to transform legal descriptions into question-answer pairs representing diverse analytical factors, and (2) a symbolic component applies sparse linear models over these discrete features, learning explicit algebraic weights that identify the most informative reasoning factors. Unlike end-to-end neural approaches, LePREC achieves interpretability through transparent feature weighting while maintaining data efficiency through correlation-based statistical classification. Experiments show a 30-40% improvement over advanced LLM baselines, including GPT-4o and Claude, confirming that correlation-based factor-issue analysis offers a more data-efficient solution for relevance decisions.

Formal verification guarantees proof validity but not formalization faithfulness. For natural-language logical reasoning, where models construct axiom systems from scratch without library constraints, this gap between valid proofs and faithful translations is especially acute. We investigate whether frontier models exploit this gap when generating Lean 4 proofs, a behavior we term formalization gaming. We evaluate GPT-5 and DeepSeek-R1 on 303 first-order logic problems (203 from FOLIO, 100 from Multi-LogiEval), comparing unified generation against a two-stage pipeline that separates formalization from proving. Despite compilation rates of 87-99%, we find no evidence of systematic gaming in unified generation: models prefer reporting failure over forcing proofs, even under prompting designed to encourage it. However, unfaithfulness that evades our detection signals may still occur. The two-stage pipeline reveals two distinct modes of unfaithfulness: GPT-5 fabricates axioms during proof generation, a reactive fallback detectable via cross-stage comparison, while DeepSeek-R1 mistranslates premises during formalization, producing internally consistent outputs that evade detection entirely. These findings show that high compilation rates or accuracies should not be equated with faithful reasoning. Code and data are available at https://github.com/koreankiwi99/formalization-gaming.

Long-horizon enterprise agents make high-stakes decisions (loan underwriting, claims adjudication, clinical review, prior authorization) under lossy memory, multi-step reasoning, and binding regulatory constraints. Current evaluation reports a single task-success scalar that conflates distinct failure modes and hides whether an agent is aligned with the standards its deployment environment requires. We propose that long-horizon decision behavior decomposes into four orthogonal alignment axes, each independently measurable and failable: factual precision (FRP), reasoning coherence (RCS), compliance reconstruction (CRR), and calibrated abstention (CAR). CRR is a novel regulatory-grounded axis; CAR is a measurement axis separating coverage from accuracy. We exercise the decomposition on a controlled benchmark (LongHorizon-Bench) covering loan qualification and insurance claims adjudication with deterministic ground-truth construction. Running six memory architectures, we find structure aggregate accuracy cannot see: retrieval collapses on factual precision; schema-anchored architectures pay a scaffolding tax; plain summarization under a fact-preservation prompt is a strong baseline on FRP, RCS, EDA, and CRR; and all six architectures commit on every case, exposing a decisional-alignment axis the field has not targeted. The decomposition also surfaced a pre-registered prediction of our own, that summarization would fail factual recall, which the data reversed at large magnitude, an axis-level reversal aggregate accuracy would have hidden. Institutional alignment (regulatory reconstruction) and decisional alignment (calibrated abstention) are under-represented in the alignment literature and become load-bearing once decisions leave the laboratory. The framework transfers to any regulated decisioning domain via two steps: build a fact schema, and calibrate the CRR auditor prompt.

In this paper, we examine the use of self-stabilizing algorithms, operating in a hierarchical manner, to determine intellectual property risks at a macro level. We are both interested in finding a solution that will support all defined intellectual property dimensions as well as suboptimal solutions in order to minimize risk.

Batch Normalization (BN) is a cornerstone of deep learning, yet it fundamentally breaks down in micro-batch regimes (e.g., 3D medical imaging) and non-IID Federated Learning. Removing BN from deep architectures, however, often leads to catastrophic training failures such as vanishing gradients and dying channels. We identify that standard activation functions, like Swish and ReLU, exacerbate this instability in BN-free networks due to their non-zero-centered nature, which causes compounding activation mean-shifts as network depth increases. In this technical communication, we propose Zero-Centered Swish (ZC-Swish), a drop-in activation function parameterized to dynamically anchor activation means near zero. Through targeted stress-testing on BN-free convolutional networks at depths 8, 16, and 32, we demonstrate that while standard Swish collapses to near-random performance at depth 16 and beyond, ZC-Swish maintains stable layer-wise activation dynamics and achieves the highest test accuracy at depth 16 (51.5%) with seed 42. ZC-Swish thus provides a robust, parameter-efficient solution for stabilizing deep networks in memory-constrained and privacy-preserving applications where traditional normalization is unviable.

Federated prognostics enable clients (e.g., companies, factories, and production lines) to collaboratively develop a failure time prediction model while keeping each client's data local and confidential. However, traditional federated models often assume homogeneity in the degradation processes across clients, an assumption that may not hold in many industrial settings. To overcome this, this paper proposes a personalized federated prognostic model designed to accommodate clients with heterogeneous degradation processes, allowing them to build tailored prognostic models. The prognostic model iteratively facilitates the underlying pairwise collaborations between clients with similar degradation patterns, which enhances the performance of personalized federated learning. To estimate parameters jointly using decentralized datasets, we develop a federated parameter estimation algorithm based on proximal gradient descent. The proposed approach addresses the limitations of existing federated prognostic models by simultaneously achieving model personalization, preserving data privacy, and providing comprehensive failure time distributions. The superiority of the proposed model is validated through extensive simulation studies and a case study using the turbofan engine degradation dataset from the NASA repository.

As deductive verifiers mature, their potential user base is growing from the initial core developers to other users. To convince external users of the suitability of verifiers, these tools must run reliably out of the box, give meaningful error messages and display correct results. Yet deductive verifiers are large and complex software systems and their own full verification is often out of reach. We therefore need complementary means to provide such guarantees. This paper advocates the use of fuzzing as a practical way to improve the quality and robustness of deductive verifiers. We outline how fuzz testing can be applied to deductive verifiers, and demonstrate the idea with the prototype tool AValAnCHE, which is integrated with the VerCors verifier. We report on our experiments in which AValAnCHE uncovered several issues in VerCors and demonstrate that the approach also works for other deductive verifiers

We present a dual-track pipeline for detecting biblical allusions in literary fiction and apply it to the novels of Cormac McCarthy. A bottom-up embedding track uses inverse document frequency to identify rare vocabulary shared with the King James Bible, embeds occurrences in their local context for sense disambiguation, and passes candidate passage pairs through cascaded LLM review. A top-down register track asks an LLM to read McCarthy's prose undirected to any specific biblical passage for comparison, catching allusions not distinguished by word or phrase rarity. Both tracks are cross-validated by a long-context model that holds entire novels alongside the KJV in a single pass, and every finding is checked against published scholarship. Restricting attention to allusions that carry a textual echo--shared phrasing, reworked vocabulary, or transplanted cadence--and distinguishing literary allusions proper from signposted biblical references (similes naming biblical figures, characters overtly citing scripture), the pipeline surfaces 349 allusions across the corpus. Among a target set of 115 previously documented allusions retrieved through human review of the academic literature, the pipeline independently recovers 62 (54% recall), with recall varying by connection type from 30% (transformed imagery) to 80% (register collisions). We contextualise these results with respect to the value-add from LLMs as assistants to mechanical stylometric analyses, and their potential to facilitate the statistical study of intertextuality in massive literary corpora.

Reasoning language models can solve increasingly complex tasks, but struggle to produce the calibrated confidence estimates necessary for reliable deployment. Existing calibration methods usually depend on labels or repeated sampling at inference time, making them impractical in many settings. We introduce a method for unsupervised confidence calibration of reasoning LLMs when only a single generation is available at inference time. Our approach uses offline sampling on unlabeled data to derive a self-consistency-based proxy target, then distills this signal into a lightweight deployment-time confidence predictor. In a broad evaluation across 5 math and question-answering tasks using 9 reasoning models, our method substantially outperforms baselines, including under distribution shift, and improves downstream performance in selective prediction and simulated downstream decision-making.

Recent work has demonstrated the promise of orchestrating large language models (LLMs) within evolutionary and agentic optimization systems. However, the mechanisms driving these optimization gains remain poorly understood. In this work, we present a large-scale study of LLM-guided evolutionary search, collecting optimization trajectories for 15 LLMs across 8 tasks. Although zero-shot problem-solving ability correlates with final optimization outcomes, it explains only part of the variance: models with similar initial capability often induce dramatically different search trajectories and outcomes. By analyzing these trajectories, we find that strong LLM optimizers behave as local refiners, producing frequent incremental improvements while progressively localizing the search in semantic space. Conversely, weaker optimizers exhibit large semantic drift, with sporadic breakthroughs followed by stagnation. Notably, various measures of solution novelty do not predict final performance; novelty is beneficial only when the search remains sufficiently localized around high-performing regions of the solution space. Our results highlight the importance of trajectory analysis for understanding and improving LLM-based optimization systems and provide actionable insights for their design and training.

Pre-trained machine learning models (PTMs) are commonly provided via Model Hubs (e.g., Hugging Face) in standard formats like Pickles to facilitate accessibility and reuse. However, this ML supply chain setting is susceptible to malicious attacks that are capable of executing arbitrary code on trusted user environments, e.g., during model loading. To detect malicious PTMs, state-of-the-art detectors (e.g., PickleScan) rely on rules, heuristics, or static analysis, but ignore runtime model behaviors. Consequently, they either miss malicious models due to under-approximation (blacklisting) or miscategorize benign models due to over-approximation (static analysis or whitelisting). To address this challenge, we propose a novel technique (DynaHug) which detects malicious PTMs by learning the behavior of benign PTMs using dynamic analysis and machine learning (ML). DynaHug trains an ML classifier (one-class SVM (OCSVM)) on the runtime behaviours of task-specific benign models. We evaluate DynaHug using over 25,000 benign and malicious PTMs from different sources including Hugging Face and MalHug. We also compare DynaHug to several state-of-the-art detectors including static, dynamic and LLM-based detectors. Results show that DynaHug is up to 44% more effective than existing baselines in terms of F1-score. Our ablation study demonstrates that our design decisions (dynamic analysis, OCSVM, clustering) contribute positively to DynaHug's effectiveness.

Generative AI systems are known to amplify biases present in their training data. While several inference-time mitigation strategies have been proposed, they remain largely empirical and lack formal guarantees. In this paper we introduce CTLF, a branching-time logic designed to reason about bias in series of generative AI outputs. CTLF adopts a counting worlds semantics where each world represents a possible output at a given step in the generation process and introduces modal operators that allow us to verify whether the current output series respects an intended probability distribution over a protected attribute, to predict the likelihood of remaining within acceptable bounds as new outputs are generated, and to determine how many outputs are needed to remove in order to restore fairness. We illustrate the framework on a toy example of biased image generation, showing how CTLF formulas can express concrete fairness properties at different points in the output series.

We introduce and empirically validate Landscape Span Compression (LSC), a device-agnostic metric for quantifying how hardware noise distorts the variational energy landscape of the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA). Intuitively, LSC measures how much noise flattens the energy landscape, approaching 1 as the landscape collapses toward a barren plateau. We report an experience study of applying QAOA with LSC-based noise characterization on IBM's ibm_fez for three constrained QUBO portfolio instances, distilling practical lessons for parameter transfer, calibration-model fidelity, and error mitigation. Running p=1 QAOA on ibm_fez (Heron r2, 156 qubits) with up to 57,344 shots per grid point across three constrained binary optimization instances encoded as QUBO problems, we find: (i) hardware noise uniformly compresses the landscape span by 24-30% without displacing the global minimum, supporting classical-to-hardware parameter transfer; (ii) feasibility fractions at the optimal parameters remain 1.5-1.7 times above random sampling despite noise-induced degradation; (iii) the IBM calibration-based noise model achieves Pearson r=0.959 structural agreement with hardware but explains only approximately 42% of approximation-ratio degradation, with crosstalk and coherent errors as the leading unexplained contributors; (iv) a consistent noise cost of approximately 0.03 approximation-ratio units is observed across all instances; and (v) Zero-Noise Extrapolation yields mixed energy improvements of +7%/+9%/-4% per instance with 3-5 times uncertainty inflation. We compare LSC against four existing metrics and argue it is the most robust discriminator of noise severity for constrained QAOA on near-term devices.

Sequential Recommendation (SR) aims to predict the next interaction of a user based on their behavior sequence, where complementary relations often provide essential signals for predicting the next item. However, mainstream models relying on sparse co-purchase statistics often mistake spurious correlations (e.g., due to popularity bias) for true complementary relations. Identifying true complementary relations requires capturing the fine-grained item semantics (e.g., specifications) that simple cooccurrence statistics would be unable to model. While recent semantics-based methods utilize discrete semantic codes to represent items, they typically aggregate semantic codes into coarse item representations. This aggregation process blurs specific semantic details required to identify complementarity. To address these critical limitations and effectively leverage semantics for capturing reliable complementary relations, we propose a Complementary-Aware Semantic Transition (CAST) framework that introduces a new modeling paradigm built upon semantic-level transitions. Specifically, a semantic-level transition module is designed to model dynamic transitions directly in the discrete semantic code space, effectively capturing fine-grained semantic dependencies often lost in aggregated item representations. Then, a complementary prior injection module is designed to incorporate LLM-verified complementary priors into the attention mechanism, thereby prioritizing complementary patterns over co-occurrence statistics. Experiments on multiple e-commerce datasets demonstrate that CAST consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches, achieving up to 17.6% Recall and 16.0% NDCG gains with 65x training acceleration. This validates its effectiveness and efficiency in uncovering latent item complementarity beyond statistics. The code will be released upon acceptance.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) frequently suffer from Object Hallucination (OH), wherein they generate descriptions containing objects that are not actually present in the input image. This phenomenon is particularly problematic in real-world applications such as medical imaging and autonomous driving, where accuracy is critical. Recent studies suggest that the hallucination problem may stem from language priors: biases learned during pretraining that cause LVLMs to generate words based on their statistical co-occurrence. To mitigate this problem, we propose Visual Contrastive Editing (VCE), a novel post-hoc method that identifies and suppresses hallucinatory tendencies by analyzing the model's response to contrastive visual perturbations. Using Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), we decompose the model's activation patterns to isolate hallucination subspaces and apply targeted parameter edits to attenuate its influence. Unlike existing approaches that require fine-tuning or labeled data, VCE operates as a label-free intervention, making it both scalable and practical for deployment in resource-constrained settings. Experimental results demonstrate that VCE effectively reduces object hallucination across multiple benchmarks while maintaining the model's original computational efficiency.

Understanding road scenes in a geometrically consistent, scene-centric representation is crucial for planning and mapping. We present GOLD-BEV, a framework that learns dense bird's-eye-view (BEV) semantic environment maps-including dynamic agents-from ego-centric sensors, using time-synchronized aerial imagery as supervision only during training. BEV-aligned aerial crops provide an intuitive target space, enabling dense semantic annotation with minimal manual effort and avoiding the ambiguity of ego-only BEV labeling. Crucially, strict aerial-ground synchronization allows overhead observations to supervise moving traffic participants and mitigates the temporal inconsistencies inherent to non-synchronized overhead sources. To obtain scalable dense targets, we generate BEV pseudo-labels using domain-adapted aerial teachers, and jointly train BEV segmentation with optional pseudo-aerial BEV reconstruction for interpretability. Finally, we extend beyond aerial coverage by learning to synthesize pseudo-aerial BEV images from ego sensors, which support lightweight human annotation and uncertainty-aware pseudo-labeling on unlabeled drives.

Common image editing tasks typically adopt powerful generative diffusion models as the leading paradigm for real-world content editing. Meanwhile, although reinforcement learning (RL) methods such as Diffusion-DPO and Flow-GRPO have further improved generation quality, efficiently applying Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to diffusion-based editing remains largely unexplored, due to a lack of scalable human-preference datasets and frameworks tailored to diverse editing needs. To fill this gap, we propose HP-Edit, a post-training framework for Human Preference-aligned Editing, and introduce RealPref-50K, a real-world dataset across eight common tasks and balancing common object editing. Specifically, HP-Edit leverages a small amount of human-preference scoring data and a pretrained visual large language model (VLM) to develop HP-Scorer--an automatic, human preference-aligned evaluator. We then use HP-Scorer both to efficiently build a scalable preference dataset and to serve as the reward function for post-training the editing model. We also introduce RealPref-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating real-world editing performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances models such as Qwen-Image-Edit-2509, aligning their outputs more closely with human preference.

Automatic evaluators such as reward models play a central role in the alignment and evaluation of large vision-language models (LVLMs). Despite their growing importance, these evaluators are almost exclusively assessed on English-centric benchmarks, leaving open the question of how well these evaluators generalize across languages. To answer this question, we introduce MM-JudgeBench, the first large-scale benchmark for multilingual and multimodal judge model evaluation, which includes over 60K pairwise preference instances spanning 25 typologically diverse languages. MM-JudgeBench integrates two complementary subsets: a general vision-language preference evaluation subset extending VL-RewardBench, and a chart-centric visual-text reasoning subset derived from OpenCQA, enabling systematic analysis of reward models (i.e., LVLM judges) across diverse settings. We additionally release a multilingual training set derived from MM-RewardBench, disjoint from our evaluation data, to support domain adaptation. By evaluating 22 LVLMs (15 open-source, 7 proprietary), we uncover substantial cross-lingual performance variance in our proposed benchmark. Our analysis further shows that model size and architecture are poor predictors of multilingual robustness, and that even state-of-the-art LVLM judges exhibit inconsistent behavior across languages. Together, these findings expose fundamental limitations of current reward modeling and underscore the necessity of multilingual, multimodal benchmarks for developing reliable automated evaluators.

Traditional policy learning methods in cooperative pursuit face fundamental challenges in biomimetic underwater robots, where long-horizon decision making, partial observability, and inter-robot coordination require both expressiveness and stability. To address these issues, a novel framework called Mamba-based multi-agent group relative policy optimization (M$^{2}$GRPO) is proposed, which integrates a selective state-space Mamba policy with group-relative policy optimization under the centralized-training and decentralized-execution (CTDE) paradigm. Specifically, the Mamba-based policy leverages observation history to capture long-horizon temporal dependencies and exploits attention-based relational features to encode inter-agent interactions, producing bounded continuous actions through normalized Gaussian sampling. To further improve credit assignment without sacrificing stability, the group-relative advantages are obtained by normalizing rewards across agents within each episode and optimized through a multi-agent extension of GRPO, significantly reducing the demand for training resources while enabling stable and scalable policy updates. Extensive simulations and real-world pool experiments across team scales and evader strategies demonstrate that M$^{2}$GRPO consistently outperforms MAPPO and recurrent baselines in both pursuit success rate and capture efficiency. Overall, the proposed framework provides a practical and scalable solution for cooperative underwater pursuit with biomimetic robot systems.

Knowledge Graph Embeddings (KGEs) support a wide range of downstream tasks over Knowledge Graphs (KGs). In practice, KGs evolve as new entities and facts are added, motivating Continual Knowledge Graph Embedding (CKGE) methods that update embeddings over time. Current CKGE approaches address catastrophic forgetting (i.e., the performance degradation on previously learned tasks) primarily by limiting changes to existing embeddings. However, we show that this view is incomplete. When new entities are introduced, their embeddings can interfere with previously learned ones, causing the model to predict them in place of previously correct answers. This phenomenon, which we call entity interference, has been largely overlooked and is not accounted for in current CKGE evaluation protocols. As a result, the assessment of catastrophic forgetting becomes misleading, and CKGE methods performance is systematically overestimated. To address this issue, we introduce a corrected CKGE evaluation protocol that accounts for entity interference. Through experiments on multiple benchmarks, we show that ignoring this effect can lead to performance overestimation of up to 25%, particularly in scenarios with significant entity growth. We further analyze how different CKGE methods and KGE models are affected by the different sources of forgetting, and introduce a catastrophic forgetting metric tailored to CKGE.

Maintaining consistency between code and documentation is a crucial yet frequently overlooked aspect of software development. Even minor mismatches can confuse API users, introduce new bugs, and increase overall maintenance effort. This creates demand for automated solutions that can assist developers in identifying code-documentation inconsistencies. However, since automatic reports still require human confirmation, false positives carry serious consequences: wasting developer time and discouraging practical adoption. We introduce CASCADE (Consistency Analysis for Source Code And Documentation through Execution), a novel tool for detecting inconsistencies with a strong emphasis on reducing false positives. CASCADE leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate unit tests directly from natural-language documentation. Since these tests are derived from the documentation, any failure during execution indicates a potential mismatch between the documented and actual behavior of the code. To minimize false positives, CASCADE also generates code from the documentation to cross-check the generated tests. By design, an inconsistency is reported only when two conditions are met: the existing code fails a test, while the code generated from the documentation passes the same test. We evaluated CASCADE on a novel dataset of 71 inconsistent and 814 consistent code-documentation pairs drawn from open-source Java projects. Further, we applied CASCADE to additional Java, C#, and Rust repositories, where we uncovered 13 previously unknown inconsistencies, of which 10 have subsequently been fixed, demonstrating both CASCADE's precision and its applicability to real-world codebases.

Federated learning (FL) is a key paradigm for distributed model learning across decentralized data sources. Communication in each FL round typically consists of two phases: (i) distributing the global model from a server to clients, and (ii) collecting updated local models from clients to the server for aggregation. This paper focuses on a type of FL where communication between a client and the server is relay-based over dynamic networks, making routing optimization essential. A typical scenario is in-orbit FL, where satellites act as clients and communicate with a server (which can be a satellite, ground station, or aerial platform) via multi-hop inter-satellite links. This paper presents a comprehensive tractability analysis of routing optimization for in-orbit FL under different settings. For global model distribution, these include the number of models, the objective function, and routing schemes (unicast versus multicast, and splittable versus unsplittable flow). For local model collection, the settings consider the number of models, client selection, and flow splittability. For each case, we rigorously prove whether the global optimum is obtainable in polynomial time or the problem is NP-hard. Together, our analysis draws clear boundaries between tractable and intractable regimes for a broad spectrum of routing problems for in-orbit FL. For tractable cases, the derived efficient algorithms are directly applicable in practice. For intractable cases, we provide fundamental insights into their inherent complexity. These contributions fill a critical yet unexplored research gap, laying a foundation for principled routing design, evaluation, and deployment in satellite-based FL or similar distributed learning systems.

Large language models (LLMs) are expensive to serve because model parameters, attention computation, and KV caches impose substantial memory and latency costs. We present GRASPrune, a structured pruning framework applied after pretraining that jointly prunes FFN channels and KV head groups under a single global budget. Instead of learning importance scores without constraints and applying the budget only after training, GRASPrune learns lightweight gate scores with a projected straight-through estimator that enforces a hard mask satisfying the budget at every step while keeping the backbone weights frozen. After the mask is fixed, we calibrate scaling factors on the retained units to mitigate scale mismatch caused by pruning, and fold these factors into the pruned weights to obtain a smaller dense checkpoint with no extra parameters at inference. On LLaMA-2-7B, GRASPrune removes 50% of parameters and achieves 12.18 perplexity on WikiText-2 while maintaining competitive average zero-shot accuracy on five benchmarks, using four epochs on 512 unlabeled calibration sequences on a single NVIDIA A100 80GB GPU without any full model fine-tuning.

While self-consistency is known to improve performance on symbolic reasoning, its effect on the recall of encyclopedic knowledge is unclear due to a lack of targeted evaluation grounds. To address this, we establish such a knowledge recall split for the popular MMLU benchmark by applying a data-driven heuristic from prior work. We validate this split by showing that the performance patterns on the symbolic reasoning and knowledge recall subsets mirror those of GSM8K and MedMCQA, respectively. Using this solid ground, we find that self-consistency consistently improves performance across both symbolic reasoning and knowledge recall, even though its underlying CoT prompting is primarily effective for symbolic reasoning. As a result, we achieve an 89\% accuracy on MMLU, the best performance to date with the use of GPT-4o.

This paper narrows the performance gap between small, specialized models and significantly larger general-purpose models through domain adaptation via continual pre-training and merging. We address the scarcity of specialized non-English data by constructing a high-quality German medical corpus (FineMed-de) from FineWeb2. This corpus is used to continually pre-train and merge three well-known LLMs (ranging from $7B$ to $24B$ parameters), creating the DeFineMed model family. A comprehensive evaluation confirms that specialization dramatically enhances $7B$ model performance on German medical benchmarks. Furthermore, the pairwise win-rate analysis of the Qwen2.5-based models demonstrates an approximately $3.5$-fold increase in the win-rate against the much larger Mistral-Small-24B-Instruct through domain adaptation. This evidence positions specialized $7B$ models as a competitive, resource-efficient solution for complex medical instruction-following tasks. While model merging successfully restores instruction-following abilities, a subsequent failure mode analysis reveals inherent trade-offs, including the introduction of language mixing and increased verbosity, highlighting the need for more targeted fine-tuning in future work. This research provides a robust, compliant methodology for developing specialized LLMs, serving as the foundation for practical use in German-speaking healthcare contexts.

This paper presents a framework to bridge the gap between subjective stakeholder context and formal system architecture. This is achieved using Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) and Systems Modelling Language version 2 (SysML v2). The methodology utilises the precision of Kernel Modelling Language (KerML) and the alignment of SysML v2 with ISO 42010 to define a reference architecture for the mapping of SSM outputs to SysML v2 concepts such as stakeholders and concerns. Application of the framework is demonstrated through the use of a case study, highlighting the traceable path from stakeholder context to system architecture. The structured mapping and increased semantic precision of SysML v2 are anticipated to reduce the risk of misinterpretation compared to less formal approaches, though empirical validation across diverse stakeholder contexts remains as future work. The primary identified trade-off is the increased barrier to entry associated with SysML v2's textual notation.

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are a major target of machine-learning-based property prediction, yet most models assume that a single framework representation maps to a single property value. This assumption becomes problematic for experimental MOFs, where samples reported as the same framework can exhibit different properties because of differences in crystallinity, phase purity, defects, and other sample-dependent factors. Here we introduce Experimental X-ray Diffraction Integrated Transformer (EXIT), a multimodal transformer for sample-aware prediction of MOF properties that combines MOFid with X-ray diffraction (XRD). In EXIT, MOFid encodes MOF identity, whereas XRD provides complementary information about the experimentally realized sample state. EXIT is pre-trained on one million hypothetical MOFs with simulated XRD to learn transferable representations, leading to improved downstream performance relative to existing approaches. EXIT is fine-tuned on literature-derived experimental datasets for surface area and pore volume prediction. Incorporating experimental XRD improves predictive performance relative to models without experimental XRD, and attention analysis and sample-level case studies further show that EXIT assigns different predictions to samples sharing the same MOF identity when their XRD patterns differ. These results establish a practical step from framework-aware to sample-aware MOF property prediction and highlight the value of incorporating experimental characterization into porous materials informatics.

The emergence of sixth-generation (6G) technologies has introduced new challenges and opportunities for machine learning (ML) applications in Internet of Things (IoT) networks, particularly concerning energy efficiency. As model training and data transmission contribute significantly to energy consumption, optimizing these processes has become critical for sustainable system design. This study first conduct analysis on the energy consumption model for both centralized and decentralized architecture and then presents a testbed deployed within the German railway infrastructure, leveraging sensor data for ML-based predictive maintenance. A comparative analysis of distributed versus Centralized Learning (CL) architectures reveals that distributed models maintain competitive predictive accuracy (~90%) while reducing overall electricity consumption by up to 70%. These findings underscore the potential of distributed ML to improve energy efficiency in real-world IoT deployments, particularly by mitigating transmission-related energy costs.

Green software engineering is emerging as a crucial response to information technology's rising energy impact, especially in continuous development. However, there remain challenges in devising automated methods for identifying energy regressions across commits and their associated code change patterns. In particular, little effort has been put into automatically detecting regressions at the commit level by identifying statistically significant changes in energy consumption. In this paper, we introduce EnergyTrackr, an approach designed to detect energy regressions across multiple commits that can then be used to identify code anti-patterns potentially contributing to the increase of software energy consumption over time. We describe our empirical evaluation, including repository mining and source code analysis, made on 3,232 commits from three Java projects, and show the approach's ability to identify significant energy changes. We also highlight recurring anti-patterns such as missing early exits or costly dependency upgrades. We expect EnergyTrackr to assist developers in accurately monitoring energy regressions and improvements within their projects, identifying code anti-patterns, and helping them optimize their source code to reduce software energy consumption.

Graph representation learning has achieved notable success in encoding graph-structured data into latent vector spaces, enabling a wide range of downstream tasks. However, these node representations remain opaque and difficult to interpret. Existing explainability methods primarily focus on supervised settings or on explaining individual representation dimensions, leaving a critical gap in explaining the overall structure of node representations. In this paper, we propose TACENR (Task-Agnostic Contrastive Explanations for Node Representations), a local explanation method that identifies not only attribute features but also proximity and structural ones that contribute the most in the representation space. TACENR builds on contrastive learning, through which we learn a similarity function in the representation space, revealing which are the features that play an important role in the representation of a node. While our focus is on task-agnostic explanations, TACENR can be applied to supervised scenarios as well. Experimental results demonstrate that proximity and structural features play a significant role in shaping node representations and that our supervised variant performs comparably to existing task-specific approaches in identifying the most impactful features.

Predicting driver intention from neurophysiological signals offers a promising pathway for enhancing proactive safety in advanced driver assistance systems, yet remains challenging in real-world driving due to EEG signal non-stationarity and the complexity of cognitive-motor preparation. This study proposes and evaluates an EEG-based driver intention prediction framework using a synchronised multi-sensor platform integrated into a real electric vehicle. A real-world on-road dataset was collected across 32 driving sessions, and 12 deep learning architectures were evaluated under consistent experimental conditions. Among the evaluated architectures, TSCeption achieved the highest average accuracy (0.907) and Macro-F1 score (0.901). The proposed framework demonstrates strong temporal stability, maintaining robust decoding performance up to 1000 ms before manoeuvre execution with minimal degradation. Furthermore, additional analyses reveal that minimal EEG preprocessing outperforms artefact-handling pipelines, and prediction performance peaks within a 400-600 ms interval, corresponding to a critical neural preparatory phase preceding driving manoeuvres. Overall, these findings support the feasibility of early and stable EEG-based driver intention decoding under real-world on-road conditions. Code: https://github.com/galosaimi/Mind2Drive.

Mobile Crowd Computing (MCdC) leverages the idle computational capacity of consumer smartphones to enable distributed task processing at scale; however, widespread real-world adoption remains constrained by the absence of developer-oriented frameworks capable of transparently managing device heterogeneity, fault tolerance, and connectivity volatility. This paper introduces CROWDio, a centralized MCdC platform comprising three tightly integrated subsystems: (i) a declarative SDK that abstracts distributed execution to a single function annotation, eliminating the need for explicit parallelism management; (ii) a tiered checkpointing mechanism that enables fault-tolerant task resumption under the memory and execution constraints inherent to mobile runtimes; and (iii) a pluggable multi-criteria scheduling framework driven by continuous live device telemetry, supporting interchangeable decision strategies without modification to the dispatch core. Empirical evaluation across six heterogeneous Android devices spanning CPU-bound, AI/NLP inference, and data-parallel workloads demonstrates that capability-aware adaptive scheduling reduces total execution time by up to 56.9% relative to naive round-robin dispatch, while the checkpointing subsystem incurs a bounded overhead of only 2-3 s per task regardless of checkpoint frequency. A system-wide Jain's Fairness Index of 0.889 confirms equitable and stable workload distribution across heterogeneous worker devices.

The evaluation of machine learning models typically relies mainly on performance metrics based on loss functions, which risk to overlook changes in performance in relevant subgroups. Auditing tools such as SliceFinder and SliceLine were proposed to detect such groups, but usually have conceptual disadvantages, such as the inability to directly address continuous covariates. In this paper, we introduce FairTree, a novel algorithm adapted from psychometric invariance testing. Unlike SliceFinder and related algorithms, FairTree directly handles continuous, categorical, and ordinal features without discretization. It further decomposes performance disparities into systematic bias and variance, allowing a categorization of changes in algorithm performance. We propose and evaluate two variations of the algorithm: a permutation-based approach, which is conceptually closer to SliceFinder, and a fluctuation test. Through simulation studies that include a direct comparison with SliceLine, we demonstrate that both approaches have a satisfactory rate of false-positive results, but that the fluctuation approach has relatively higher power. We further illustrate the method on the UCI Adult Census dataset. The proposed algorithms provide a flexible framework for the statistical evaluation of the performance and aspects of fairness of machine learning models in a wide range of applications even in relatively small data.

High-fidelity measurements of continuum physical fields are essential for scientific discovery and engineering design but remain challenging under sparse and constrained sensing. Conventional reconstruction methods typically rely on fixed sensor layouts, which cannot adapt to evolving physical states. We propose LASER, a unified, closed-loop framework that formulates active sensing as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). At its core, LASER employs a continuum field latent world model that captures the underlying physical dynamics and provides intrinsic reward feedback. This enables a reinforcement learning policy to simulate ''what-if'' sensing scenarios within a latent imagination space. By conditioning sensor movements on predicted latent states, LASER navigates toward potentially high-information regions beyond current observations. Our experiments demonstrate that LASER consistently outperforms static and offline-optimized strategies, achieving high-fidelity reconstruction under sparsity across diverse continuum fields.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly proposed for autonomous cybersecurity tasks, but their capabilities in realistic offensive settings remain poorly understood. We present DeepRed, an open-source benchmark for evaluating LLM-based agents on realistic Capture The Flag (CTF) challenges in isolated virtualized environments. DeepRed places an agent in a Kali attacker environment with terminal tools and optional web search, connected over a private network to a target challenge, and records full execution traces for analysis. To move beyond binary solved/unsolved outcomes, we introduce a partial-credit scoring method based on challenge-specific checkpoints derived from public writeups, together with an automated summarise-then-judge labelling pipeline for assigning checkpoint completion from logs. Using DeepRed, we benchmark ten commercially accessible LLMs on ten VM-based CTF challenges spanning different challenge categories. The results indicate that current agents remain limited: the best model achieves only 35% average checkpoint completion, performing strongest on common challenge types and weakest on tasks requiring non-standard discovery and longer-horizon adaptation.

The quadratic computational complexity of the standard attention mechanism constitutes a fundamental bottleneck for large language models in long-context inference. While existing KV cache compression methods alleviate memory pressure, they often sacrifice generation quality and fail to address the high overhead of floating-point arithmetic. This paper introduces DASH-KV, an innovative acceleration framework that reformulates attention as approximate nearest-neighbor search via asymmetric deep hashing. Under this paradigm, we design an asymmetric encoding architecture that differentially maps queries and keys to account for their distinctions in precision and reuse characteristics. To balance efficiency and accuracy, we further introduce a dynamic mixed-precision mechanism that adaptively retains full-precision computation for critical tokens. Extensive experiments on LongBench demonstrate that DASH-KV significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods while matching the performance of full attention, all while reducing inference complexity from O(N^2) to linear O(N). The code is available at https://github.com/Zhihan-Zh/DASH-KV

Memristive devices present a promising foundation for next-generation information processing by combining memory and computation within a single physical substrate. This unique characteristic enables efficient, fast, and adaptive computing, particularly well suited for deep learning applications. Among recent developments, the memristive-friendly echo state network (MF-ESN) has emerged as a promising approach that combines memristive-inspired dynamics with the training simplicity of reservoir computing, where only the readout layer is learned. Building on this framework, we propose memristive-friendly parallelized reservoirs (MARS), a simplified yet more effective architecture that enables efficient scalable parallel computation and deeper model composition through novel subtractive skip connections. This design yields two key advantages: substantial training speedups of up to 21x over the inherently lightweight echo state network baseline and significantly improved predictive performance. Moreover, MARS demonstrates what is possible with parallel memristive-friendly reservoir computing: on several long sequence benchmarks our compact gradient-free models substantially outperform strong gradient-based sequence models such as LRU, S5, and Mamba, while reducing full training time from minutes or hours down seconds or even only a few hundred milliseconds. Our work positions parallel memristive-friendly computing as a promising route towards scalable neuromorphic learning systems that combine high predictive capability with radically improved computational efficiency, while providing a clear pathway to energy-efficient, low-latency implementations on emerging memristive and in-memory hardware.

Generative AI-powered by Large Language Models (LLMs)-is increasingly deployed in industry across healthcare decision support, financial analytics, enterprise retrieval, and conversational automation, where reliability, efficiency, and cost control are critical. In such settings, models must satisfy strict constraints on energy, latency, and hardware utilization-not accuracy alone. Yet prevailing evaluation pipelines remain accuracy-centric, creating a Deployment-Evaluation Gap-the absence of operational and economic criteria in model assessment. To address this gap, we present EDGE-EVAL-a industry-oriented benchmarking framework that evaluates LLMs across their full lifecycle on legacy NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPUs. Benchmarking LLaMA and Qwen variants across three industrial tasks, we introduce five deployment metrics-Economic Break-Even (Nbreak), Intelligence-Per-Watt (IPW ), System Density (\r{ho}sys), Cold-Start Tax (Ctax), and Quantization Fidelity (Qret)-capturing profitability, energy efficiency, hardware scaling, serverless feasibility, and compression safety. Our results reveal a clear efficiency frontier-models in the <2B parameter class dominate larger baselines across economic and ecological dimensions. LLaMA-3.2-1B (INT4) achieves ROI break-even in 14 requests (median), delivers 3x higher energy-normalized intelligence than 7B models, and exceeds 6,900 tokens/s/GB under 4-bit quantization. We further uncover an efficiency anomaly-while QLoRA reduces memory footprint, it increases adaptation energy by up to 7x for small models-challenging prevailing assumptions about quantization-aware training in edge deployment.

Language models are increasingly used in scientific discovery to generate hypotheses, propose candidate solutions, implement systems, and iteratively refine them. At the core of these trial-and-error loops lies evaluation: the process of obtaining feedback on candidate solutions via verifiers, simulators, or task-specific scoring functions. While prior work has highlighted the importance of evaluation, it has not explicitly formulated the problem of how evaluation-driven discovery loops can be scaled up in a principled and effective manner to push the boundaries of scientific discovery, a problem this paper seeks to address. We introduce Simple Test-time Evaluation-driven Scaling (SimpleTES), a general framework that strategically combines parallel exploration, feedback-driven refinement, and local selection, revealing substantial gains unlocked by scaling evaluation-driven discovery loops along the right dimensions. Across 21 scientific problems spanning six domains, SimpleTES discovers state-of-the-art solutions using gpt-oss models, consistently outperforming both frontier-model baselines and sophisticated optimization pipelines. Particularly, we sped up the widely used LASSO algorithm by over 2x, designed quantum circuit routing policies that reduce gate overhead by 24.5%, and discovered new Erdos minimum overlap constructions that surpass the best-known results. Beyond novel discoveries, SimpleTES produces trajectory-level histories that naturally supervise feedback-driven learning. When post-trained on successful trajectories, models not only improve efficiency on seen problems but also generalize to unseen problems, discovering solutions that base models fail to uncover. Together, our results establish effective evaluation-driven loop scaling as a central axis for advancing LLM-driven scientific discovery, and provide a simple yet practical framework for realizing these gains.

This study aims to develop and improve machine learning-based post-processing models for precipitation, temperature, and wind speed predictions using the Mesoscale Model (MSM) dataset provided by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) for 18 locations across Japan, including plains, mountainous regions, and islands. By incorporating meteorological variables from grid points surrounding the target locations as input features and applying feature selection based on correlation analysis, we found that, in our experimental setting, the LightGBM-based models achieved lower RMSE than the specific neural-network baselines tested in this study, including a reproduced CNN baseline, and also generally achieved lower RMSE than both the raw MSM forecasts and the JMA post-processing product, MSM Guidance (MSMG), across many locations and forecast lead times. Because precipitation has a highly skewed distribution with many zero cases, we additionally examined Tweedie-based loss functions and event-weighted training strategies for precipitation forecasting. These improved event-oriented performance relative to the original LightGBM model, especially at higher rainfall thresholds, although the gains were site dependent and overall performance remained slightly below MSMG.

Particle-in-Cell (PIC) simulations are fundamental to plasma physics but often suffer from limited scalability due to particle-grid interaction bottlenecks and particle redistribution costs. Specifically, the particle-grid interaction computations have not taken full advantage of the emerging Matrix Processing Units (MPUs), the particle motion introduces irregular memory accesses, and the bulk-synchronous redistribution further destroys long-term data locality thereby limiting parallel efficiency. To address these inefficiencies, we present POLAR-PIC, a co-designed framework for large-scale PIC simulations that (i) reformulates Field Interpolation into an MPU-friendly outer-product form, (ii) maintains a physically ordered particle layout to preserve memory contiguity, and (iii) overlaps particle communication with Deposition to hide redistribution overhead. The evaluation on the pilot system of an Exascale supercomputer demonstrates that POLAR-PIC accelerates the entire particle-processing phase by up to 10.9x in uniform plasma and 4.4x in real-world laser-ion acceleration scenarios compared to the native WarpX reference pipeline on LX2. Ablation studies reveal that the speedups achieved by Interpolation and Deposition are 8.0x and 13.2x, respectively, and the asynchronous communication design sustains a 99.1% overlap ratio. In cross-platform comparisons, POLAR-PIC achieves 13.2% of theoretical peak efficiency on the CPU-based LS system, while WarpX reaches 9.6% on NVIDIA A800 GPUs. Notably, the scalability evaluation demonstrates that POLAR-PIC maintains 67.5% weak scaling efficiency on over 2 million cores under high-migration dynamic workloads, highlighting the importance of holistic co-design for future matrix-centric HPC systems.

Online federated learning (OFL) has emerged as a popular framework for decentralized decision-making over continuous data streams without compromising client privacy. However, the adversary model assumed in standard OFL typically precludes any potential benefits of parallelization. Further, it fails to adequately capture the different sources of statistical variation in OFL problems. In this paper, we extend the OFL paradigm by integrating a stochastically extended adversary (SEA). Under this framework, the loss function remains fixed across clients over time. However, the adversary dynamically and independently selects the data distribution for each client at each time. We propose the \algoOFL{} algorithm to solve this problem, which utilizes online stochastic gradient descent at the clients, along with periodic global aggregation via the server. We establish bounds on the global network regret over a time horizon \(T\) for two classes of functions: (1) for smooth and convex losses, we prove an \(\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T})\) bound, and (2) for smooth and strongly convex losses, we prove an \(\mathcal{O}(\log T)\) bound. Through careful analysis, we quantify the individual impact of both spatial (across clients) and temporal (over time) data heterogeneity on the regret bounds. Consequently, we identify a regime of mild temporal variation (relative to stochastic gradient variance), where the network regret improves with parallelization. Hence, in the SEA setting, our results improve the existing pessimistic worst-case results in online federated learning.

The rapid growth of chemical literature has generated vast amounts of unstructured data, where reaction information is particularly valuable for applications such as reaction predictions and drug design. However, the prohibitive cost of expert annotation has led to a scarcity of training data, severely hindering the performance of automatic reaction extraction. In this work, we conduct a systematic study of active learning for chemical reaction extraction. We integrate six uncertainty- and diversity-based strategies with pretrained transformer-CRF architectures, and evaluate them on product extraction and role labeling task. While several methods approach full-data performance with fewer labeled instances, learning curves are often non-monotonic and task-dependent. Our analysis shows that strong pretraining, structured CRF decoding, and label sparsity limit the stability of conventional active learning strategies. These findings provide practical insights for the effective use of active learning in chemical information extraction.

Understanding how policy is debated and justified in parliament is a fundamental aspect of the democratic process. However, the volume and complexity of such debates mean that outside audiences struggle to engage. Meanwhile, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to enable automated summarisation at scale. While summaries of debates can make parliamentary procedures more accessible, evaluating whether these summaries faithfully communicate argumentative content remains challenging. Existing automated summarisation metrics have been shown to correlate poorly with human judgements of consistency (i.e., faithfulness or alignment between summary and source). In this work, we propose a formal framework for evaluating parliamentary debate summaries that grounds argument structures in the contested proposals up for debate. Our novel approach, driven by computational argumentation, focuses the evaluation on formal properties concerning the faithful preservation of the reasoning presented to justify or oppose policy outcomes. We demonstrate our methods using a case-study of debates from the European Parliament and associated LLM-driven summaries.

We introduce PLaMo 2.1-VL, a lightweight Vision Language Model (VLM) for autonomous devices, available in 8B and 2B variants and designed for local and edge deployment with Japanese-language operation. Focusing on Visual Question Answering (VQA) and Visual Grounding as its core capabilities, we develop and evaluate the models for two real-world application scenarios: factory task analysis via tool recognition, and infrastructure anomaly detection. We also develop a large-scale synthetic data generation pipeline and comprehensive Japanese training and evaluation resources. PLaMo 2.1-VL outperforms comparable open models on Japanese and English benchmarks, achieving 61.5 ROUGE-L on JA-VG-VQA-500 and 85.2% accuracy on Japanese Ref-L4. For the two application scenarios, it achieves 53.9% zero-shot accuracy on factory task analysis, and fine-tuning on power plant data improves anomaly detection bbox + label F1-score from 39.7 to 64.9.

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) route predictions exclusively through a clinically grounded concept layer, binding interpretability to concept-label consistency. When a dataset contains concept-level inconsistencies, identical concept profiles mapped to conflicting diagnosis labels create an unresolvable bottleneck that imposes a hard ceiling on achievable accuracy. In this paper, we apply rough set theory to the Derm7pt dermoscopy benchmark and characterize the full extent and clinical structure of this inconsistency. Among 305 unique concept profiles formed by the 7 dermoscopic criteria of the 7-point melanoma checklist, 50 (16.4%) are inconsistent, spanning 306 images (30.3% of the dataset). This yields a theoretical accuracy ceiling of 92.1%, independent of backbone architecture or training strategy for CBMs that exclusively operate with hard concepts. In addition, we characterize the conflict-severity distribution, identify the clinical features most responsible for boundary ambiguity, and evaluate two filtering strategies with quantified effects on dataset composition and CBM interpretability. Symmetric removal of all boundary-region images yields Derm7pt+, a fully consistent benchmark subset of 705 images with perfect quality of classification and no hard accuracy ceiling. Building on this filtered dataset, we present a hard CBM evaluated across 19 backbone architectures from the EfficientNet, DenseNet, ResNet, and Wide ResNet families. Under symmetric filtering, explored for completeness, EfficientNet-B5 achieves the best label F1 score (0.85) and label accuracy (0.90) on the held-out test set, with a concept accuracy of 0.70. Under asymmetric filtering, EfficientNet-B7 leads across all four metrics, reaching a label F1 score of 0.82 and concept accuracy of 0.70. These results establish reproducible baselines for concept-consistent CBM evaluation on dermoscopic data.

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) remains structurally uncertain despite parameter-efficient methods such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), as the layer-specific roles of internal representations are poorly understood, leading to heuristic decisions about where adaptation should be applied. We model the evolution of hidden states as a high-dimensional geometric trajectory and propose using the Ramer-Douglas-Peucker (RDP) algorithm, a parameter-free and training-free polygon simplification method that preserves global structural transitions while eliminating locally redundant changes, to identify critical breakpoints along the representation path. Crucially, we use these geometric pivots not merely for analysis, but as a direct decision signal for determining which layers should be adapted during parameter-efficient fine-tuning. By integrating this geometry-aware layer selection strategy into LoRA fine-tuning of Qwen3-8B-Base, we achieve superior performance on MMLU-Math using only 13 RDP-selected layers (81.67%), significantly outperforming both full 36-layer adaptation (79.32%) and random 13-layer selection (75.56%), as well as the baseline Qwen3-8B-Base model (74.25%). These results demonstrate that leveraging the intrinsic geometry of representation trajectories provides a robust, interpretable, and training-free signal for optimizing layer selection during model adaptation.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown strong potential for automated unit test generation. This has motivated us to investigate whether developer-defined test doubles (commonly referred to as mocks) available in existing test suites can be leveraged to improve LLM-driven test generation. To this end, we propose MOCKMILL, an LLM-based technique and tool that generates test cases by exploiting mocking information automatically extracted from developer-written tests. MOCKMILL targets components that are replaced by test doubles in existing tests and uses the encoded stubbings and interaction expectations to guide test generation, combined with an iterative generation-and-repair process to ensure executable tests. We evaluated MOCKMILL on 10 open-source classes from six Java projects using four LLMs, and compared the generated tests with existing project tests and tests produced by baseline approaches. The results show that MOCKMILL's tests cover lines of code and kill mutants that existing tests and baseline-generated tests miss. Overall, our findings provide preliminary evidence that leveraging mocking information is a complementary and effective way to enhance LLM-based test generation.

Neural processes are meta-learning models that map context sets to predictive distributions. While inspired by stochastic processes, NPs do not generally satisfy the Kolmogorov consistency conditions required to define a valid stochastic process. This inconsistency is widely acknowledged but poorly understood. Practitioners note that NPs work well despite the violation, without quantifying what this means. We address this gap by defining the conditioning consistency gap, a KL divergence measuring how much a conditional neural process's (CNP) predictions change when a point is added to the context versus conditioned upon. Our main results show that for CNPs with bounded encoders and Lipschitz decoders, the consistency gap is $O(1/n^2)$ in context size $n$, and that this rate is tight. These bounds establish the precise sense in which CNPs approximate valid stochastic processes. The inconsistency is negligible for moderate context sizes but can be significant in the few-shot regime.

Qualitative coding relies on a researcher's application of codes to textual data. As coding proceeds across large datasets, interpretations of codes often shift (temporal drift), reducing the credibility of the analysis. Existing Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDAS) tools provide support for data management but offer no workflow for real-time detection of these drifts. We present Co-Refine, an AI-augmented qualitative coding platform that delivers continuous, grounded feedback on coding consistency without disrupting the researcher's workflow. The system employs a three-stage audit pipeline: Stage 1 computes deterministic embedding-based metrics for mathematical consistency; Stage 2 grounds LLM verdicts within $\pm0.15$ of the deterministic scores; and Stage 3 produces code definitions from previous patterns to create a deepening feedback loop. Co-Refine demonstrates that deterministic scoring can effectively constrain LLM outputs to produce reliable, real-time audit signals for qualitative analysis.

Automated Program Repair (APR) has benefited from the code understanding and generation capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing feedback-based APR methods iteratively refine candidate patches using test execution feedback and have shown promising results. However, most rely on outcome-level failure symptoms, such as stack traces, which show how failures are observed but fail to expose the intermediate runtime states critical for root-cause analysis. As a result, LLMs often infer bug causes without sufficient runtime evidence, leading to incorrect patches. To address this limitation, we propose DebugRepair, a self-directed debugging framework for LLM-based APR. DebugRepair enhances patch refinement with intermediate runtime evidence collected through simulated debugging. It consists of three components: test semantic purification, simulated instrumentation, and debugging-driven conversational repair. Together, they reduce noisy test context, collect runtime traces through targeted debugging statements with rule-based fallback, and progressively refine candidate patches using prior attempts and newly observed runtime states. We evaluate DebugRepair on three benchmarks across Java and Python. Experiments show that DebugRepair achieves state-of-the-art performance against 15 approaches. With GPT-3.5, it correctly fixes 224 bugs on Defects4J, outperforming prior SOTA LLM-based methods by 26.2%. With DeepSeek-V3, it correctly fixes 295 Defects4J bugs, surpassing the second-best baseline by 59 bugs. Across five additional backbone LLMs, DebugRepair improves repair performance by 51.3% over vanilla settings. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of all components.

The conformity bias exhibited by large language models (LLMs) can pose a significant challenge to decision-making in LLM-based multi-agent systems (LLM-MAS). While many prior studies have treated "conformity" simply as a matter of opinion change, this study introduces the social psychological distinction between informational conformity and normative conformity in order to understand LLM conformity at the mechanism level. Specifically, we design new tasks to distinguish between informational conformity, in which participants in a discussion are motivated to make accurate judgments, and normative conformity, in which participants are motivated to avoid conflict or gain acceptance within a group. We then conduct experiments based on these task settings. The experimental results show that, among the six LLMs evaluated, up to five exhibited tendencies toward not only informational conformity but also normative conformity. Furthermore, intriguingly, we demonstrate that by manipulating subtle aspects of the social context, it may be possible to control the target toward which a particular LLM directs its normative conformity. These findings suggest that decision-making in LLM-MAS may be vulnerable to manipulation by a small number of malicious users. In addition, through analysis of internal vectors associated with informational and normative conformity, we suggest that although both behaviors appear externally as the same form of "conformity," they may in fact be driven by distinct internal mechanisms. Taken together, these results may serve as an initial milestone toward understanding how "norms" are implemented in LLMs and how they influence group dynamics.

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have recently achieved strong performance across various audio-centric tasks. However, hallucination, where models generate responses that are semantically incorrect or acoustically unsupported, remains largely underexplored in the audio domain. Existing hallucination benchmarks mainly focus on text or vision, while the few audio-oriented studies are limited in scale, modality coverage, and diagnostic depth. We therefore introduce HalluAudio, the first large-scale benchmark for evaluating hallucinations across speech, environmental sound, and music. HalluAudio comprises over 5K human-verified QA pairs and spans diverse task types, including binary judgments, multi-choice reasoning, attribute verification, and open-ended QA. To systematically induce hallucinations, we design adversarial prompts and mixed-audio conditions. Beyond accuracy, our evaluation protocol measures hallucination rate, yes/no bias, error-type analysis, and refusal rate, enabling a fine-grained analysis of LALM failure modes. We benchmark a broad range of open-source and proprietary models, providing the first large-scale comparison across speech, sound, and music. Our results reveal significant deficiencies in acoustic grounding, temporal reasoning, and music attribute understanding, underscoring the need for reliable and robust LALMs.

Despite the impressive capabilities of large language models, their substantial computational costs, latency, and privacy risks hinder their widespread deployment in real-world applications. Small Language Models (SLMs) with fewer than 10 billion parameters present a promising alternative; however, their inherent limitations in knowledge and reasoning curtail their effectiveness. Existing research primarily focuses on enhancing SLMs through scaling laws or fine-tuning strategies while overlooking the potential of using agent paradigms, such as tool use and multi-agent collaboration, to systematically compensate for the inherent weaknesses of small models. To address this gap, this paper presents the first large-scale, comprehensive study of <10B open-source models under three paradigms: (1) the base model, (2) a single agent equipped with tools, and (3) a multi-agent system with collaborative capabilities. Our results show that single-agent systems achieve the best balance between performance and cost, while multi-agent setups add overhead with limited gains. Our findings highlight the importance of agent-centric design for efficient and trustworthy deployment in resource-constrained settings.

We introduce IndiaFinBench, to our knowledge the first publicly available evaluation benchmark for assessing large language model (LLM) performance on Indian financial regulatory text. Existing financial NLP benchmarks draw exclusively from Western financial corpora (SEC filings, US earnings reports, and English-language financial news), leaving a significant gap in coverage of non-Western regulatory frameworks. IndiaFinBench addresses this gap with 406 expert-annotated question-answer pairs drawn from 192 documents sourced from the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), spanning four task types: regulatory interpretation (174 items), numerical reasoning (92 items), contradiction detection (62 items), and temporal reasoning (78 items). Annotation quality is validated through a model-based secondary pass (kappa=0.918 on contradiction detection) and a 60-item human inter-annotator agreement evaluation (kappa=0.611; 76.7% overall agreement). We evaluate twelve models under zero-shot conditions, with accuracy ranging from 70.4% (Gemma 4 E4B) to 89.7% (Gemini 2.5 Flash). All models substantially outperform a non-specialist human baseline of 60.0%. Numerical reasoning is the most discriminative task, with a 35.9 percentage-point spread across models. Bootstrap significance testing (10,000 resamples) reveals three statistically distinct performance tiers. The dataset, evaluation code, and all model outputs are available at https://github.com/rajveerpall/IndiaFinBench

Neural operators are widely used to approximate solution maps of complex physical systems. In many applications, however, the goal is not to recover the full solution trajectory, but to summarize the solution trajectory via a scalar target quantity (e.g., a functional such as time spent in a target range, time above a threshold, accumulated cost, or total energy). In this paper, we introduce DOPE (debiased neural operator): a semiparametric estimator for such target quantities of solution trajectories obtained from neural operators. DOPE is broadly applicable to settings with both partial and irregular observations and can be combined with arbitrary neural operator architectures. We make three main contributions. (1) We show that, in contrast to DOPE, naive plug-in estimation can suffer from first-order bias. (2) To address this, we derive a novel one-step, Neyman-orthogonal estimator that treats the neural operator as a high-dimensional nuisance mapping between function spaces, and removes the leading bias term. For this, DOPE uses a weighting mechanism that simultaneously accounts for irregular observation designs and for how sensitive the target quantity is to perturbations of the underlying trajectory. (3) To learn the weights, we extend automatic debiased machine learning to operator-valued nuisances via Riesz regression. We demonstrate the benefits of DOPE across various numerical experiments.

Test-time training (TTT) adapts model parameters on unlabeled test instances during inference time, which continuously extends capabilities beyond the reach of offline training. Despite initial gains, existing TTT methods for LRMs plateau quickly and do not benefit from additional test-time compute. Without external calibration, the self-generated reward signal increasingly drifts as the policy model evolves, leading to both performance plateaus and diversity collapse. We propose TEMPO, a TTT framework that interleaves policy refinement on unlabeled questions with periodic critic recalibration on a labeled dataset. By formalizing this alternating procedure through the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm, we reveal that prior methods can be interpreted as incomplete variants that omit the crucial recalibration step. Reintroducing this step tightens the evidence lower bound (ELBO) and enables sustained improvement. Across diverse model families (Qwen3 and OLMO3) and reasoning tasks, TEMPO improves OLMO3-7B on AIME 2024 from 33.0% to 51.1% and Qwen3-14B from 42.3% to 65.8%, while maintaining high diversity.

Long Short-term Memory Networks (LSTMs) are a vital Deep Learning technique suitable for performing on-device time series analysis on local sensor data streams of embedded devices. In this paper, we propose a new hardware accelerator design for LSTMs specially optimised for resource-scarce embedded Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Our design improves the execution speed and reduces energy consumption compared to related work. Moreover, it can be adapted to different situations using a number of optimisation parameters, such as the usage of DSPs or the implementation of activation functions. We present our key design decisions and evaluate the performance. Our accelerator achieves an energy efficiency of 11.89 GOP/s/W during a real-time inference with 32873 samples/s.

Multilingual large language models (LLMs) have minimized the fluency gap between languages. This advancement, however, exposes models to the risk of biased behavior, as knowledge and norms may propagate across languages. In this work, we aim to quantify models' inter- and intra-lingual biases, via their ability to answer locale-ambiguous questions. To this end, we present LocQA, a test set containing 2,156 questions in 12 languages, referring to various locale-dependent facts such as laws, dates, and measurements. The questions do not contain indications of the locales they relate to, other than the querying language itself. LLMs' responses to LocQA locale-ambiguous questions thus reveal models' implicit priors. We used LocQA to evaluate 32 models, and detected two types of structural biases. Inter-lingually, we show a global bias towards answers relevant to the US-locale, even when models are asked in languages other than English. Moreover, we discovered that this global bias is exacerbated in models that underwent instruction tuning, compared to their base counterparts. Intra-lingually, we show that when multiple locales are relevant for the same language, models act as demographic probability engines, prioritizing locales with larger populations. Taken together, insights from LocQA may help in shaping LLMs' desired local behavior, and in quantifying the impact of various training phases on different kinds of biases.

Matrix-multiply-accumulate (MMA) units, or tensor cores, are now widespread across modern computing architectures. Yet, their use for particle-grid operators remains limited. In implicit particle methods, mass-matrix assembly is a reduction-dominated kernel in which weighted outer products of interpolation weights are accumulated over particle support. We show that this operation can be reformulated exactly, cell by cell, as a sequence of matrix products matched to hardware MMA tiles. The formulation is general with respect to interpolation order and hardware platform, and applies to both scalar mass matrices and the tensorial block mass matrix arising in implicit in the Energy-Conserving Semi-Implicit Method (ECSIM) for Particle-in-Cell simulations. We introduce particle batching and a support-group decomposition for higher-order shape functions whose stencil extends beyond a single cell, specialize the method to first- and second-order B-spline interpolation, and implement it on NVIDIA tensor cores. The resulting kernels achieve up to 3x over optimized conventional implementations and reduce end-to-end ECSIM runtime by 15%.

The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to support patients in addressing medical questions is becoming increasingly prevalent. However, most of the measures currently used to evaluate the performance of these models in this context only measure how closely a model's answers match semantically, and therefore do not provide a true indication of the model's medical accuracy or of the health equity risks associated with it. To address these shortcomings, we present a new evaluation framework for medical question answering called VB-Score (Verification-Based Score) that provides a separate evaluation of the four components of entity recognition, semantic similarity, factual consistency, and structured information completeness for medical question-answering models. We perform rigorous reviews of the performance of three well-known and widely used LLMs on 48 public health-related topics taken from high-quality, authoritative information sources. Based on our analyses, we discover a major discrepancy between the models' semantic and entity accuracy. Our assessments of the performance of all three models show that each of them has almost uniformly severe performance failures when evaluated against our criteria. Our findings indicate alarming performance disparities across various public health topics, with most of the models exhibiting 13.8% lower performance (compared to an overall average) for all the public health topics that relate to chronic conditions that occur in older and minority populations, which indicates the existence of what's known as condition-based algorithmic discrimination. Our findings also demonstrate that prompt engineering alone does not compensate for basic architectural limitations on how these models perform in extracting medical entities and raise the question of whether semantic evaluation alone is a sufficient measure of medical AI safety.

LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) show promise on complex tasks but remain prone to coordination failures such as goal drift, error cascades, and misaligned behaviors. We propose Explicit Trait Inference (ETI), a psychologically grounded method for improving coordination. ETI enables agents to infer and track partner characteristics along two established psychological dimensions--warmth (e.g., trust) and competence (e.g., skill)--from interaction histories to guide decisions. We evaluate ETI in controlled settings (economic games), where it reduces payoff loss by 45-77%, and in more realistic, complex multi-agent settings (MultiAgentBench), where it improves performance by 3-29% depending on the scenario and model, relative to a CoT baseline. Additional analysis shows that gains are closely linked to trait inference: ETI profiles predict agents' actions, and informative profiles drive improvements. These results highlight ETI as a lightweight and robust mechanism for improving coordination in diverse multi-agent settings, and provide the first systematic evidence that LLM agents can (i) reliably infer others' traits from interaction histories and (ii) leverage structured awareness of others' traits for coordination.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as co-authors in collaborative writing, where users begin with rough drafts and rely on LLMs to complete, revise, and refine their content. However, this capability poses a serious safety risk: malicious users could jailbreak the models-filling incomplete drafts with dangerous content-to force them into generating harmful outputs. In this paper, we identify the vulnerability of current LLMs to such draft-based co-authoring jailbreak attacks and introduce HarDBench, a systematic benchmark designed to evaluate the robustness of LLMs against this emerging threat. HarDBench spans a range of high-risk domains-including Explosives, Drugs, Weapons, and Cyberattacks-and features prompts with realistic structure and domain-specific cues to assess the model susceptibility to harmful completions. To mitigate this risk, we introduce a safety-utility balanced alignment approach based on preference optimization, training models to refuse harmful completions while remaining helpful on benign drafts. Experimental results show that existing LLMs are highly vulnerable in co-authoring contexts and our alignment method significantly reduces harmful outputs without degrading performance on co-authoring capabilities. This presents a new paradigm for evaluating and aligning LLMs in human-LLM collaborative writing settings. Our new benchmark and dataset are available on our project page at https://github.com/untae0122/HarDBench

Large language models (LLMs) are now deployed worldwide, inspiring a surge of benchmarks that measure their multilingual and multicultural abilities. However, these benchmarks prioritize generic language understanding or superficial cultural trivia, leaving the evaluation of grounded tasks -- where models must reason within real-world, context-rich scenarios -- largely unaddressed. To fill this gap, we present CulturALL, a comprehensive and challenging benchmark to assess LLMs' multilingual and multicultural competence on grounded tasks. CulturALL is built via a human--AI collaborative framework: expert annotators ensure appropriate difficulty and factual accuracy, while LLMs lighten the manual workload. By incorporating diverse sources, CulturALL ensures comprehensive scenario coverage. Each item is carefully designed to present a high level of difficulty, making CulturALL challenging. CulturALL contains 2,610 samples in 14 languages from 51 regions, distributed across 16 topics to capture the full breadth of grounded tasks. Experiments show that the best LLM achieves 44.48% accuracy on CulturALL, underscoring substantial room for improvement.

The evaluation of narrative quality remains a complex challenge, as it involves subjective factors such as plot, character development, and emotional impact. This work proposes a quantitative approach to narrative assessment by focusing on the linguistic dimension as a primary indicator of quality. The paper presents a methodology for the automatic evaluation of narrative based on the extraction of a comprehensive set of 33 quantitative linguistic features categorized into lexical, syntactic, and semantic groups. To test the model, an experiment was conducted on a specialized corpus of 23 books, including canonical masterpieces and self-published works. Through a similarity matrix, the system successfully clustered the narratives, distinguishing almost perfectly between professionally edited and self-published texts. Furthermore, the methodology was validated against a human-annotated dataset; it significantly outperforms traditional story-level evaluation metrics, demonstrating the effectiveness of quantitative linguistic features in assessing narrative quality.

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) reduces the training cost of full-parameter fine-tuning for large language models (LLMs) by training only a small set of task-specific parameters while freezing the pretrained backbone. However, existing approaches, such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), achieve adaptation by inserting independent low-rank perturbations directly to individual weights, resulting in a local parameterization of adaptation. We propose ShadowPEFT, a centralized PEFT framework that instead performs layer-level refinement through a depth-shared shadow module. At each transformer layer, ShadowPEFT maintains a parallel shadow state and evolves it repeatedly for progressively richer hidden states. This design shifts adaptation from distributed weight-space perturbations to a shared layer-space refinement process. Since the shadow module is decoupled from the backbone, it can be reused across depth, independently pretrained, and optionally deployed in a detached mode, benefiting edge computing scenarios. Experiments on generation and understanding benchmarks show that ShadowPEFT matches or outperforms LoRA and DoRA under comparable trainable-parameter budgets. Additional analyses on shadow pretraining, cross-dataset transfer, parameter scaling, inference latency, and system-level evaluation suggest that centralized layer-space adaptation is a competitive and flexible alternative to conventional low-rank PEFT.

Streamliner constraints reduce the search space of combinatorial problems by ruling out portions of the solution space. We adapt the StreamLLM approach, which uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate streamliners for Constraint Programming, to Answer Set Programming (ASP). Given an ASP encoding and a few small training instances, we prompt multiple LLMs to propose candidate constraints. Candidates that cause syntax errors, render satisfiable instances unsatisfiable, or degrade performance on all training instances are discarded. The surviving streamliners are evaluated together with the original encoding, and we report results for a virtual best encoding (VBE) that, for each instance, selects the fastest among the original encoding and its streamlined variants. On three ASP Competition benchmarks (Partner Units Problem, Sokoban, Towers of Hanoi), the VBE achieves speedups of up to 4--5x over the original encoding. Different LLMs produce semantically diverse constraints, not mere syntactic variations, indicating that the approach captures genuine problem structure.

Developing Visual Analytics (VA) applications requires integrating complex machine learning models with expressive interactive interfaces. Developers face a stark trade-off: building tightly-coupled monoliths plagued by fragile interdependencies, or relying on restrictive, simplistic frameworks. Meanwhile, unconstrained, single-shot AI code generation promises speed but yields unstructured, unauditable chaos. The core challenge is combining the control and expressiveness of custom development with the efficiency of AI generation under strict constraints. To address this, we introduce BONSAI, a mixed-initiative workspace for the multi-agent co-development of VA applications. BONSAI utilizes a modular four-layer architecture (hardware, services, orchestration, application) that allows human and AI developers to independently contribute reusable components. The workspace incorporates this architecture into a structured four-phase development process (plan, design, monitor, and review), ensuring distributed agency and full provenance, where all human and AI contributions are structurally bounded and tracked. We evaluate BONSAI through case studies demonstrating the efficient creation of novel tools and the rapid reconstruction of complex VA applications directly from research paper descriptions. Ultimately, this paper contributes a conceptual workflow, a scalable architecture, and an integrated system that successfully balances AI's generative speed with the structural rigor required for complex VA development.

Repair, an important resource for resolving trouble in human-human conversation, remains underexplored in human-LLM interaction. In this study, we investigate how LLMs engage in the interactive process of repair in multi-turn dialogues around solvable and unsolvable math questions. We examine whether models initiate repair themselves and how they respond to user-initiated repair. Our results show strong differences across models: reactions range from being almost completely resistant to (appropriate) repair attempts to being highly susceptible and easily manipulated. We further demonstrate that once conversations extend beyond a single turn, model behavior becomes more distinctive and less predictable across systems. Overall, our findings indicate that each tested LLM exhibits its own characteristic form of unreliability in the context of repair.

We present a simple hierarchical communication scheme for distributed Fast Multipole Methods (FMMs) based on MPI neighborhood collectives and uniform trees. The method targets the common case of extending an existing high-performance shared-memory uniform-tree FMM implementation to distributed memory with minimal redesign while preserving any shared memory optimizations optimizations. Benchmarks on the ARCHER2 supercomputer demonstrate that our method can scale to very large problem sizes, we demonstrate weak-scaling up to 3.2e10 uniformly distributed points on 512 nodes of the machine in our largest runs. Our simplifications based on uniform trees result in worse asymptotic scaling for non-uniform points, however we still obtain practically useful runtimes due to the ability to retain our shared memory optimizations.

The exponential growth in Large Language Model (LLM) parameters has transformed model training into an increasingly resource-intensive endeavor. With the stagnation of Moore's Law and the widening disparity between computation throughput and communication bandwidth, expert parallelism (EP) has emerged as a critical strategy for scaling mixture-of-experts (MoE) models. However, despite numerous proposals for optimizing EP, ranging from communication compression to computation-communication overlap, adoption within production-grade frameworks like Megatron-LM remains conservative. Existing solutions often rely on ad-hoc, complex kernels that lack adaptability across diverse optimization configurations and frequently neglect numerical stability, failing to meet the strict precision requirements of large-scale training. In this paper, we introduce UniEP, a novel system that unifies diverse EP optimization strategies into a cohesive abstraction. UniEP fuses the MoE communication and computation into MegaKernels, effectively transforming complex architectural tuning into a unified parameter search space for automated adaptability. Crucially, UniEP incorporates a deterministic token ordering mechanism that guarantees numerical consistency with sequential execution, even under aggressive overlap schedules. We evaluate UniEP on GPU clusters equipped with NVIDIA Hopper GPUs. Our results demonstrate that UniEP achieves 1.03$\times$-1.38$\times$ speedups over state-of-the-art work, effectively mitigating communication bottlenecks while maintaining the rigorous accuracy standards required for production LLM training.

Industrial surface defect detection often suffers from limited defect samples, severe long-tailed distributions, and difficulties in accurately localizing subtle defects under complex backgrounds. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an unsupervised defect detection method that integrates a Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) with an asymmetric teacher-student architecture. First, at the data level, the DDPM is trained solely on normal samples. By introducing constant-variance Gaussian perturbations and Perlin noise-based masks, high-fidelity and physically consistent defect samples along with pixel-level annotations are generated, effectively alleviating the data scarcity problem. Second, at the model level, an asymmetric dual-stream network is constructed. The teacher network provides stable representations of normal features, while the student network reconstructs normal patterns and amplifies discrepancies between normal and anomalous regions. Finally, a joint optimization strategy combining cosine similarity loss and pixel-wise segmentation supervision is adopted to achieve precise localization of subtle defects. Experimental results on the MVTecAD dataset show that the proposed method achieves 98.4\% image-level AUROC and 98.3\% pixel-level AUROC, significantly outperforming existing unsupervised and mainstream deep learning methods. The proposed approach does not require large amounts of real defect samples and enables accurate and robust industrial defect detection and localization. \keywords{Industrial defect detection \and diffusion models \and data generation \and teacher-student architecture \and pixel-level localization}

Automatically generating bug reproduction tests (BRT) from issue descriptions is crucial for software maintenance. LLM-based approaches have shown great potential for this task. Their effectiveness heavily relies on retrieving high-quality context from the codebase. The retrieval phase of existing approaches relies on either traditional methods like BM25 or LLM-driven strategies. LLM-based retrieval strategies typically equip an LLM with tools to autonomously explore the repository or select the most relevant files and code snippets from a provided list as context. However, these retrieval methods suffer from three key limitations: 1) They often employ a unified strategy for retrieving both source code and test cases, overlooking their distinct retrieval requirements. 2) They focus solely on semantic similarity while ignoring function call relationships, leading to irrelevant context. 3) The retrieval lacks a feedback loop from the generation phase, preventing it from refining the context based on execution results. These limitations collectively result in low-quality context, thereby hindering the accuracy of bug reproduction. To address these challenges, we propose iCoRe, an iterative, correlation-aware context retrieval approach explicitly aware of three key correlations: 1) between source code and test cases, which requires differentiated retrieval, 2) between textual semantics and function call structures for accurate relevance assessment, and 3) between the retrieval and generation phases, which enables iterative feedback and refinement. To evaluate iCoRe, we integrate it with an LLM-based BRT generator and conduct a comprehensive evaluation on the SWT-bench Lite and TDD-bench Verified benchmarks. Experimental results show that our method achieves a Fail-to-Pass rate of 42.0% and 52.8% respectively, representing 19.7%-31.7% relative improvements over existing retrieval methods.

Full-duplex speech interaction, as the most natural and intuitive mode of human communication, is driving artificial intelligence toward more human-like conversational systems. Traditional cascaded speech processing pipelines suffer from critical limitations, including accumulated latency, information loss, and error propagation across modules. To address these issues, recent efforts focus on the end-to-end audio large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4o, which primarily unify speech understanding and generation task. However, most of these models are inherently half-duplex, and rely on a suite of separate, task-specific front-end components, such as voice activity detection (VAD) and turn-taking detection (TD). In our development of speech assistant, we observed that optimizing the speech front-end is equally crucial as advancing the back-end unified model for achieving seamless, responsive interactions. To bridge this gap, we propose the first unified audio front-end LLM (UAF) tailored for full-duplex speech systems. Our model reformulates diverse audio front-end tasks into a single auto-regressive sequence prediction problem, including VAD, TD, speaker recognition (SR), automatic speech recognition (ASR) and question answer (QA). It takes streaming fixed-duration audio chunk (e.g., 600 ms) as input, leverages a reference audio prompt to anchor the target speaker at the beginning, and regressively generates discrete tokens encoding both semantic content and system-level state controls (e.g., interruption signals). Experiments demonstrate that our model achieves leading performance across multiple audio front-end tasks and significantly enhances response latency and interruption accuracy in real-world interaction scenarios.

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training among multiple parties without centralizing raw data. There are two main paradigms in FL: Horizontal FL (HFL), where all participants share the same feature space but hold different samples, and Vertical FL (VFL), where parties possess complementary features for the same set of samples. A prerequisite for VFL training is privacy-preserving entity alignment (PPEA), which establishes a common index of samples across parties (alignment) without revealing which samples are shared between them. Conventional private set intersection (PSI) achieves alignment but leaks intersection membership, exposing sensitive relationships between datasets. The standard private set union (PSU) mitigates this risk by aligning on the union of identifiers rather than the intersection. However, existing approaches are often limited to two parties or lack support for typo-tolerant matching. In this paper, we introduce the Sherpa.ai multi-party PSU protocol for VFL, a PPEA method that hides intersection membership and enables both exact and noisy matching. The protocol generalizes two-party approaches to multiple parties with low communication overhead and offers two variants: an order-preserving version for exact alignment and an unordered version tolerant to typographical and formatting discrepancies. We prove correctness and privacy, analyze communication and computational (exponentiation) complexity, and formalize a universal index mapping from local records to a shared index space. This multi-party PSU offers a scalable, mathematically grounded protocol for PPEA in real-world VFL deployments, such as multi-institutional healthcare disease detection, collaborative risk modeling between banks and insurers, and cross-domain fraud detection between telecommunications and financial institutions, while preserving intersection privacy.

Crop yield prediction is one of the most important challenge, which is crucial to world food security and policy-making decisions. The conventional forecasting techniques are limited in their accuracy with reference to the fact that they utilize static data sources that do not reflect the dynamic and intricate relationships that exist between the variables of the environment over time [5,13]. This paper presents Attention-Based Multi-Modal Deep Learning Framework (ABMMDLF), which is suggested to be used in high-accuracy spatio-temporal crop yield prediction. The model we use combines multi-year satellite imagery, high-resolution time-series of meteorological data and initial soil properties as opposed to the traditional models which use only one of the aforementioned factors [12, 21]. The main architecture involves the use of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to extract spatial features and a Temporal Attention Mechanism to adaptively weight important phenological periods targeted by the algorithm to change over time and condition on spatial features of images and video sequences. As can be experimentally seen, the proposed research work provides an R^2 score of 0.89, which is far better than the baseline models do.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are the standard for learning on graphs, yet they have limited expressive power, often expressed in terms of the Weisfeiler-Leman (WL) hierarchy or within the framework of first-order logic. In this context, topological neural networks (TNNs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative for graph representation learning. By incorporating higher-order relational structures into message-passing schemes, TNNs offer higher representational power than traditional GNNs. However, a fundamental question remains open: what is the logical expressiveness of TNNs? Answering this allows us to characterize precisely which binary classifiers TNNs can represent. In this paper, we address this question by analyzing isomorphism tests derived from the underlying mechanisms of general TNNs. We introduce and investigate the power of higher-order variants of WL-based tests for combinatorial complexes, called $k$-CCWL test. In addition, we introduce the topological counting logic (TC$_k$), an extension of standard counting logic featuring a novel pairwise counting quantifier $ \exists^{N}(x_i,x_j)\, \varphi(x_i,x_j), $ which explicitly quantifies pairs $(x_i, x_j)$ satisfying property $\varphi$. We rigorously prove the exact equivalence: $ \text{k-CCWL} \equiv \text{TC}_{k{+}2} \equiv \text{Topological }(k{+}2)\text{-pebble game}.$ These results establish a logical expressiveness theory for TNNs.

Current AI agent frameworks have made remarkable progress in automating individual tasks, yet all existing systems serve a single user. Human productivity rests on the social and organizational relationships through which people coordinate, negotiate, and delegate. When agents move beyond performing tasks for one person to representing that person in collaboration with others, the infrastructure for cross-user agent collaboration is entirely absent, let alone the governance mechanisms needed to secure it. We argue that the next frontier for AI agents lies not in stronger individual capability, but in the digitization of human collaborative relationships. To this end, we propose a human-symbiotic agent paradigm. Each user owns a permanently bound agent system that collaborates on the owner's behalf, forming a network whose nodes are humans rather than agents. This paradigm rests on three governance primitives. A layered identity architecture separates a Manager Agent from multiple context-specific Identity Agents; the Manager Agent holds global knowledge but is architecturally isolated from external communication. Scoped authorization enforces per-identity access control and escalates boundary violations to the owner. Action-level accountability logs every operation against its owner's identity and authorization, ensuring full auditability. We instantiate this paradigm in ClawNet, an identity-governed agent collaboration framework that enforces identity binding and authorization verification through a central orchestrator, enabling multiple users to collaborate securely through their respective agents.

LLMs are increasingly being considered for prediction tasks in high-stakes social service settings, but their algorithmic fairness properties in this context are poorly understood. In this short technical report, we audit the algorithmic fairness of LLM-based tabular classification on a real housing placement prediction task, augmented with street outreach casenotes from a nonprofit partner. We audit multi-class classification error disparities. We find that a fine-tuned model augmented with casenote summaries can improve accuracy while reducing algorithmic fairness disparities. We experiment with variable importance improvements to zero-shot tabular classification and find mixed results on resulting algorithmic fairness. Overall, given historical inequities in housing placement, it is crucial to audit LLM use. We find that leveraging LLMs to augment tabular classification with casenote summaries can safely leverage additional text information at low implementation burden. The outreach casenotes are fairly short and heavily redacted. Our assessment is that LLM zero-shot classification does not introduce additional textual biases beyond algorithmic biases in tabular classification. Combining fine-tuning and leveraging casenote summaries can improve accuracy and algorithmic fairness.

Code editing constitutes a fundamental practice in software development, wherein developers modify existing codebases according to natural language requirements. Accurate code editing necessitates a comprehensive understanding of both the existing codebase and the modification requirements. Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising performance in code editing tasks, they suffer from substantial inefficiency by generating entire modified files that largely consist of unchanged code. While smaller models could potentially address this inefficiency, they typically lack the capacity to effectively comprehend long code contexts required for accurate editing. To ensure both effectiveness and efficiency, we propose to decompose code editing into a two-stage cascade: \textbf{edit sketch generation}, wherein a large model first produces concise sketches representing the requisite modifications (the more challenging phase), and \textbf{edit sketch application}, wherein a smaller model integrates these sketches into the original code to produce the final output edited code (the simpler phase). This cascaded design reduces the number of tokens generated by the large model, as the majority of the output is handled by the smaller, more efficient model, thereby enhancing overall efficiency. However, the effectiveness of this approach is constrained by current small models' limited capabilities in handling long-context scenarios and cross-file dependencies, which are essential for accurate sketch application in real-world codebases. To address these limitations and enhance smaller models' sketch application capabilities, ...

Anomaly detection in medical imaging is essential for identifying rare pathological conditions, particularly when annotated abnormal samples are limited. We propose a hybrid anomaly detection framework that integrates self-supervised representation learning with manifold-based density estimation, a combination that remains largely unexplored in this domain. Medical images are first embedded into a latent feature space using pretrained, potentially domain-specific, backbones. These representations are then refined via Mean Shift Density Enhancement (MSDE), an iterative manifold-shifting procedure that moves samples toward regions of higher likelihood. Anomaly scores are subsequently computed using Gaussian density estimation in a PCA-reduced latent space, where Mahalanobis distance measures deviation from the learned normal distribution. The framework follows a one-class learning paradigm and requires only normal samples for training. Extensive experiments on seven medical imaging datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. MSDE achieves the highest AUC on four datasets and the highest Average Precision on five datasets, including near-perfect performance on brain tumor detection (0.981 AUC/AP). These results underscore the potential of the proposed framework as a scalable clinical decision-support tool for early disease detection, screening in low-label settings, and robust deployment across diverse imaging modalities.

For news headlines to influence beliefs and drive action, relevant information needs to be retained and retrievable from memory. In this probing study we draw on experiment designs from cognitive psychology to examine how a specific linguistic feature, namely direct address through first- and second-person pronouns, affects memorability and to what extent it is feasible to use large language models for the targeted insertion of such a feature into existing text without changing its core meaning. Across three controlled memorization experiments with a total of 240 participants, yielding 7,680 unique memory judgments, we show that pronoun insertion has mixed effects on memorability. Exploratory analyses indicate that effects differ based on headline topic, how pronouns are inserted and their immediate contexts. Additional data and fine-grained analysis is needed to draw definitive conclusions on these mediating factors. We further show that automatic revisions by LLMs are not always appropriate: Crowdsourced evaluations find many of them to be lacking in content accuracy and emotion retention or resulting in unnatural writing style. We make our collected data available for future work.

Heterophily is a prevalent property of real-world graphs and is well known to impair the performance of homophilic Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Prior work has attempted to adapt GNNs to heterophilic graphs through non-local neighbor extension or architecture refinement. However, the fundamental reasons behind misclassifications remain poorly understood. In this work, we take a novel perspective by examining recurring inductive subgraphs, empirically and theoretically showing that they act as spurious shortcuts that mislead GNNs and reinforce non-causal correlations in heterophilic graphs. To address this, we adopt a causal inference perspective to analyze and correct the biased learning behavior induced by shortcut inductive subgraphs. We propose a debiased causal graph that explicitly blocks confounding and spillover paths responsible for these shortcuts. Guided by this causal graph, we introduce Causal Disentangled GNN (CD-GNN), a principled framework that disentangles spurious inductive subgraphs from true causal subgraphs by explicitly blocking non-causal paths. By focusing on genuine causal signals, CD-GNN substantially improves the robustness and accuracy of node classification in heterophilic graphs. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets not only validate our theoretical findings but also demonstrate that our proposed CD-GNN outperforms state-of-the-art heterophily-aware baselines.

Small language models (SLMs), such as BART, can achieve summarization performance comparable to large language models (LLMs) via distillation. However, existing LLM-based ranking strategies for summary candidates suffer from instability, while classical metrics (e.g., ROUGE) are insufficient to rank high-quality summaries. To address these issues, we introduce \textbf{SCURank}, a framework that enhances summarization by leveraging \textbf{Summary Content Units (SCUs)}. Instead of relying on unstable comparisons or surface-level overlap, SCURank evaluates summaries based on the richness and semantic importance of information content. We investigate the effectiveness of SCURank in distilling summaries from multiple diverse LLMs. Experimental results demonstrate that SCURank outperforms traditional metrics and LLM-based ranking methods across evaluation measures and datasets. Furthermore, our findings show that incorporating diverse LLM summaries enhances model abstractiveness and overall distilled model performance, validating the benefits of information-centric ranking in multi-LLM distillation. The code for SCURank is available at https://github.com/IKMLab/SCURank.

Simulation plays a key role in the design and evaluation of distributed systems, yet it is often treated as a static tool with limited interaction capabilities. In this work, we present Yet (not) Another Intelligent Fog Simulator (YAIFS), and evolution of YAFS that redefines simulation as an interactive, service-oriented environment. YAIFS introduce a layered architecture that exposes the simulation through a unified API and service interface, enabling external entities to observe, control, and modify its execution. A central contribution is the integration of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) as a standardized interaction layer between agents and the simulation. Through MCP, heterogeneous agents can access state, invoke actions and coordinate behavior using a common set of tools, decoupling agent experimentation workflows. We illustrate these capabilities through two scenarios: an LLM-based assistant that enable natural language control of simulations, and a multi-agent setting where agents monitor system conditions and adapt placement decisions at runtime. These scenarios demonstrate how MCP structures agent-simulation interaction and enable adaptive behavior under dynamic workloads. The proposed approach transforms simulation into an interactive and programmable environment, opening new directions for AI-driven experimentation in cloud-edge systems. The implementation is publicly available at: http://github.com/acsicuib/YAIFS

We study the deep image prior (DIP) framework applied to photoacoustic tomography (PAT) as an unsupervised reconstruction approach to mitigate limited-view artifacts and noise commonly encountered in experimental settings. Efficient implementation is achieved by employing recently published fast forward and adjoint algorithms for circular measurement geometries. Initialization via a fast inverse and total variation (TV) regularization are applied to further suppress noise and mitigate overfitting. For comparison, we compute a classical TV reconstruction. Our experiments comprise simulated PAT measurements under limited-view geometries and varying levels of added noise as well as experimental measurements together with using a digital twin for quality assessment. Our findings suggest that DIP framework provides an effective unsupervised strategy for robust PAT reconstruction even in the challenging case of a limited view geometry providing improvement in several quantitative measures over total variation reconstructions.

The rapid advancement and widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) have elevated the need for reliable AI-generated content (AIGC) detection, which remains challenging as models evolve. We introduce AIGC-text-bank, a comprehensive multi-domain dataset with diverse LLM sources and authorship scenarios, and propose REVEAL, a detection framework that generates interpretable reasoning chains before classification. Our approach uses a two-stage training strategy: supervised fine-tuning to establish reasoning capabilities, followed by reinforcement learning to improve accuracy, improve logical consistency, and reduce hallucinations. Extensive experiments show that REVEAL achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks, offering a robust and transparent solution for AIGC detection. The project is open-source at https://aka.ms/reveal

Heterogeneous graphs have attracted increasing attention for modeling multi-typed entities and relations in complex real-world systems. Multi-label node classification on heterogeneous graphs is challenging due to structural heterogeneity and the need to learn shared representations across multiple labels. Existing methods typically adopt either flexible attention mechanisms or meta-path constrained anchoring, but in heterogeneous multi-label prediction they often suffer from semantic dilution or coverage constraint. Both issues are further amplified under multi-label supervision. We present a theoretical analysis showing that as heterogeneous neighborhoods expand, the attention mass allocated to task-critical (primary) neighborhoods diminishes, and that meta-path constrained aggregation exhibits a dilemma: too few meta-paths intensify coverage constraint, while too many re-introduce dilution. To resolve this coverage-anchoring conflict, we propose FOCAL: Fusion Of Coverage and Anchoring Learning, with two components: coverage-oriented attention (COA) for flexible, unconstrained heterogeneous context aggregation, and anchoring-oriented attention (AOA) that restricts aggregation to meta-path-induced primary semantics. Our theoretical analysis and experimental results further indicates that FOCAL has a better performance than other state-of-the-art methods.

Deploying large language models (LLMs) in resource-constrained environments is hindered by heavy computational and memory requirements. We present LBLLM, a lightweight binarization framework that achieves effective W(1+1)A4 quantization through a novel three-stage quantization strategy. The framework proceeds as follows: (1) initialize a high-quality quantized model via PTQ; (2) quantize binarized weights, group-wise bitmaps, and quantization parameters through layer-wise distillation while keeping activations in full precision; and (3) training learnable activation quantization factors to dynamically quantize activations to 4 bits. This decoupled design mitigates interference between weight and activation quantization, yielding greater training stability and better inference accuracy. LBLLM, trained only using 0.016B tokens with a single GPU, surpasses existing state-of-the-art binarization methods on W2A4 quantization settings across tasks of language modeling, commonsense QA, and language understanding. These results demonstrate that extreme low-bit quantization of LLMs can be both practical and highly effective without introducing any extra high-precision channels or rotational matrices commonly used in recent PTQ-based works, offering a promising path toward efficient LLM deployment in resource-limited situations.

In uncertainty quantification, evaluating sensitivity measures under specific conditions (i.e., conditional Sobol' indices) is essential for systems with parameterized responses, such as spatial fields or varying operating conditions. Traditional approaches often rely on point-wise modeling, which is computationally expensive and may lack consistency across the parameter space. This paper demonstrates that for a pre-trained global Polynomial Chaos Expansion (PCE) model, the analytical conditional Sobol' indices are inherently embedded within its basis functions. By leveraging the tensor-product property of PCE bases, we reformulate the global expansion into a set of analytical coefficient fields that depend on the conditioning variables. Based on the preservation of orthogonality under conditional probability measures, we derive closed-form expressions for conditional variances and Sobol' indices. This framework bypasses the need for repetitive modeling or additional sampling, transforming conditional sensitivity analysis into a purely algebraic post-processing step. Numerical benchmarks indicate that the proposed method ensures physical coherence and offers superior numerical robustness and computational efficiency compared to conventional point-wise approaches.

This paper studies uncertainty quantification for large language models (LLMs) under black-box access, where only a small number of responses can be sampled for each query. In this setting, estimating the effective semantic alphabet size--that is, the number of distinct meanings expressed in the sampled responses--provides a useful proxy for downstream risk. However, frequency-based estimators tend to undercount rare semantic modes when the sample size is small, while graph-spectral quantities alone are not designed to estimate semantic occupancy accurately. To address this issue, we propose SHADE (Soft-Hybrid Alphabet Dynamic Estimator), a simple and interpretable estimator that combines Generalized Good-Turing coverage with a heat-kernel trace of the normalized Laplacian constructed from an entailment-weighted graph over sampled responses. The estimated coverage adaptively determines the fusion rule: under high coverage, SHADE uses a convex combination of the two signals, while under low coverage it applies a LogSumExp fusion to emphasize missing or weakly observed semantic modes. A finite-sample correction is then introduced to stabilize the resulting cardinality estimate before converting it into a coverage-adjusted semantic entropy score. Experiments on pooled semantic alphabet-size estimation against large-sample references and on QA incorrectness detection show that SHADE achieves the strongest improvements in the most sample-limited regime, while the performance gap narrows as the number of samples increases. These results suggest that hybrid semantic occupancy estimation is particularly beneficial when black-box uncertainty quantification must operate under tight sampling budgets.

Deep-feature-based perceptual similarity models have demonstrated strong alignment with human visual perception in Image Quality Assessment (IQA). However, most existing approaches operate at a single spatial scale, implicitly assuming that structural similarity at a fixed resolution is sufficient. The role of spatial scale in deep-feature similarity modeling thus remains insufficiently understood. In this letter, we isolate spatial scale as an independent factor using a minimal multiscale extension of DeepSSIM, referred to as Deep Structural Similarity with Multiscale Representation (MSDS). The proposed framework decouples deep feature representation from cross-scale integration by computing DeepSSIM independently across pyramid levels and fusing the resulting scores with a lightweight set of learnable global weights. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate consistent and statistically significant improvements over the single-scale baseline, while introducing negligible additional complexity. The results empirically confirm spatial scale as a non-negligible factor in deep perceptual similarity, isolated here via a minimal testbed.

KV-cache memory is a major bottleneck in real-world LLM serving, where systems must simultaneously support latency-sensitive small-batch requests and high-throughput concurrent workloads. Although many KV-cache compression methods improve offline accuracy or compression ratio, they often violate practical serving constraints such as paged memory layouts, regular memory access, and fused attention execution, limiting their effectiveness in deployment. In this work, we identify the minimal set of 4-bit KV-cache quantization methods that remain viable under these constraints. Our central finding is that a simple design--token-wise INT4 quantization with block-diagonal Hadamard rotation--consistently achieves the best accuracy-efficiency trade-off. Across multiple models and benchmarks, this approach recovers nearly all of the accuracy lost by naive INT4, while more complex methods such as vector quantization and Hessian-aware quantization provide only marginal additional gains once serving compatibility is taken into account. To make this practical, we implement a fused rotation-quantization kernel that integrates directly into paged KV-cache layouts and introduces zero measurable end-to-end overhead, matching plain INT4 throughput across concurrency levels. Our results show that effective KV-cache compression is fundamentally a systems co-design problem: under real serving constraints, lightweight block-diagonal Hadamard rotation is a viable method that delivers near-lossless accuracy without sacrificing serving efficiency.

Existing Indic ASR benchmarks often use scripted, clean speech and leaderboard driven evaluation that encourages dataset specific overfitting. In addition, strict single reference WER penalizes natural spelling variation in Indian languages, including non standardized spellings of code-mixed English origin words. To address these limitations, we introduce Voice of India, a closed source benchmark built from unscripted telephonic conversations covering 15 major Indian languages across 139 regional clusters. The dataset contains 306230 utterances, totaling 536 hours of speech from 36691 speakers with transcripts accounting for spelling variations. We also analyze performance geographically at the district level, revealing disparities. Finally, we provide detailed analysis across factors such as audio quality, speaking rate, gender, and device type, highlighting where current ASR systems struggle and offering insights for improving real world Indic ASR systems.

Thinking LLMs produce reasoning traces before answering. Prior activation steering work mainly targets on shaping these traces. It remains less understood how answer tokens actually read and integrate the reasoning to produce reliable outcomes. Focusing on quantitative reasoning, we analyze the answer-to-reasoning attention and observe a benign self-reading pattern aligned with correctness, characterized by a forward drift of the reading focus along the reasoning trace and a persistent concentration on key semantic anchors, whereas incorrect solutions exhibit diffuse and irregular attention pattern. We interpret this as internal certainty during answer decoding, where the model commits to a viable solution branch and integrates key evidence. Following this, we propose a training-free steering method driven by Self-Reading Quality (SRQ) scores combining geometric metrics for process control with semantic metrics for content monitoring. SRQ selects data to build steering vectors that guide inference toward benign self-reading and away from uncertain and disorganized reading. Experiments show that our method yields consistent accuracy gains.

Scaling Transformers typically necessitates training larger models from scratch, as standard architectures struggle to expand without discarding learned representations. We identify the primary bottleneck in the attention mechanism's linear projections, which strictly confine feature extraction to fixed-dimensional subspaces, limiting both expressivity and incremental capacity. To address this, we introduce Nexusformer, which replaces linear $Q/K/V$ projections with a Nexus-Rank layer, a three-stage nonlinear mapping driven by dual activations in progressively higher dimensional spaces. This design overcomes the linearity constraint and enables lossless structured growth: new capacity can be injected along two axes via zero-initialized blocks that preserve pretrained knowledge. Experiments on language modeling and reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that Nexusformer matches Tokenformer's perplexity using up to 41.5\% less training compute during progressive scaling (240M to 440M). Furthermore, our analysis of growth dynamics reveals that zero initialization induces a stable convergence trajectory, allowing us to derive a geometric scaling law that accurately predicts performance across expansion scales.

Particle accelerator beamline optimization is a high-dimensional control problem traditionally requiring significant expert intervention. We present RLABC (Reinforcement Learning for Accelerator Beamline Control), an open-source Python framework that automatically transforms standard Elegant beamline configurations into reinforcement learning environments. RLABC integrates with the widely-used Elegant beam dynamics simulation code via SDDS-based interfaces, enabling researchers to apply modern RL algorithms to beamline optimization with minimal RL-specific development. The main contribution is a general methodology for formulating beamline tuning as a Markov decision process: RLABC automatically preprocesses lattice files to insert diagnostic watch points before each tunable element, constructs a 57-dimensional state representation from beam statistics, covariance information, and aperture constraints, and provides a configurable reward function for transmission optimization. The framework supports multiple RL algorithms through Stable-Baselines3 compatibility and implements stage learning strategies for improved training efficiency. Validation on a test beamline derived from the VEPP-5 injection complex (37 control parameters across 11 quadrupoles and 4 dipoles) demonstrates that the framework successfully enables RL-based optimization, with a Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient agent achieving 70.3\% particle transmission -- performance matching established methods such as differential evolution. The framework's stage learning capability allows decomposition of complex optimization problems into manageable subproblems, improving training efficiency. The complete framework, including configuration files and example notebooks, is available as open-source software to facilitate adoption and further research.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have become central to autonomous driving systems, yet their deployment is severely bottlenecked by the massive computational overhead of multi-view camera and multi-frame video input. Existing token pruning methods, primarily designed for single-image inputs, treat each frame or view in isolation and thus fail to exploit the inherent spatio-temporal redundancies in driving scenarios. To bridge this gap, we propose ST-Prune, a training-free, plug-and-play framework comprising two complementary modules: Motion-aware Temporal Pruning (MTP) and Ring-view Spatial Pruning (RSP). MTP addresses temporal redundancy by encoding motion volatility and temporal recency as soft constraints within the diversity selection objective, prioritizing dynamic trajectories and current-frame content over static historical background. RSP further resolves spatial redundancy by exploiting the ring-view camera geometry to penalize bilateral cross-view similarity, eliminating duplicate projections and residual background that temporal pruning alone cannot suppress. These two modules together constitute a complete spatio-temporal pruning process, preserving key scene information under strict compression. Validated across four benchmarks spanning perception, prediction, and planning, ST-Prune establishes new state-of-the-art for training-free token pruning. Notably, even at 90\% token reduction, ST-Prune achieves near-lossless performance with certain metrics surpassing the full-model baseline, while maintaining inference speeds comparable to existing pruning approaches.

Recent years have witnessed growing interest in applying Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) to Machine Translation (MT). Existing approaches predominantly adopt a "think-first-then-translate" paradigm. Although explicit reasoning trajectories significantly enhance translation quality, they incur prohibitive inference costs and latency. To address these limitations, we propose ReflectMT, a two-stage reflection internalization algorithm for machine translation that employs a "translate-first-think-later" paradigm. Our approach develops the model's "translate-reflect-refine" capability through reinforcement learning. In the first stage, we cultivate the model's capacity for high-quality reflection and refinement, thereby enhancing its semantic comprehension and task-specific knowledge. In the second stage, we train the model to internalize the knowledge acquired during reflection. As a result, during inference, ReflectMT operates in a direct translation mode, producing high-quality translations on the first attempt without any explicit reasoning steps. Experimental results on datasets such as WMT24 demonstrate that our model's first-pass translations during inference outperform multi-step reasoning LRMs such as DeepSeek-R1 in both automatic metrics and GPT-based evaluation, achieving a 2.16-point improvement in GPT-based translation quality evaluation while reducing token consumption by 94.33%.

As generative AI becomes integral to software development, the risk of over-reliance and diminished critical thinking grows. This study introduces "Ceci," our Caring Empathic C IDE designed to support novice programmers by prioritizing learning and emotional support over direct code generation. The researchers conducted a comparative pilot study between Ceci and VSCode + ChatGPT [9, 40]. Participants completed a coding task and were evaluated using the NASA-TLX workload assessment and a post-test usability survey. Although the sample size was small (n = 11), results show that there is no significant difference in perceived effectiveness, learning and workload between the Experimental Ceci group and the Control group, though Ceci users reported significantly greater perceived helpfulness in error correction (p = 0.0220). These findings suggest that empathic responses may not be sufficient on their own to enhance the learner's outcomes, perceptions, or reduce workload. Overall, this study provides a foundational framework for future research. Such research should explore larger sample sizes, diverse programming tasks, and additional empathic features to better understand the potential of empathic programming environments in supporting novice programmers; they must also ensure that the empathic features are well-integrated in the user interface.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to evolve through alignment techniques such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Constitutional AI, a growing and increasingly conspicuous phenomenon has emerged: the proliferation of verbal tics -- repetitive, formulaic linguistic patterns that pervade model outputs. These range from sycophantic openers ("That's a great question!", "Awesome!") to pseudo-empathetic affirmations ("I completely understand your concern", "I'm right here to catch you") and overused vocabulary ("delve", "tapestry", "nuanced"). In this paper, we present a systematic analysis of the verbal tic phenomenon across eight state-of-the-art LLMs: GPT-5.4, Claude Opus 4.7, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Grok 4.2, Doubao-Seed-2.0-pro, Kimi K2.5, DeepSeek V3.2, and MiMo-V2-Pro. Utilizing a custom evaluation framework for standardized API-based evaluation, we assess 10,000 prompts across 10 task categories in both English and Chinese, yielding 160,000 model responses. We introduce the Verbal Tic Index (VTI), a composite metric quantifying tic prevalence, and analyze its correlation with sycophancy, lexical diversity, and human-perceived naturalness. Our findings reveal significant inter-model variation: Gemini 3.1 Pro exhibits the highest VTI (0.590), while DeepSeek V3.2 achieves the lowest (0.295). We further demonstrate that verbal tics accumulate over multi-turn conversations, are amplified in subjective tasks, and show distinct cross-lingual patterns. Human evaluation (N = 120) confirms a strong inverse relationship between sycophancy and perceived naturalness (r = -0.87, p < 0.001). These results underscore the "alignment tax" of current training paradigms and highlight the urgent need for more authentic human-AI interaction frameworks.

Knowledge Graph (KG) can effectively integrate valuable information from massive data, and thus has been rapidly developed and widely used in many fields. Traditional KG construction methods rely on manual annotation, which often consumes a lot of time and manpower. And KG construction schemes based on deep learning tend to have weak generalization capabilities. With the rapid development of Pre-trained Language Models (PLM), PLM has shown great potential in the field of KG construction. This paper provides a comprehensive review of recent research advances in the field of construction of KGs using PLM. In this paper, we explain how PLM can utilize its language understanding and generation capabilities to automatically extract key information for KGs, such as entities and relations, from textual data. In addition, We also propose a new Hyper-Relarional Knowledge Graph construction framework based on lightweight Large Language Model (LLM) named LLHKG and compares it with previous methods. Under our framework, the KG construction capability of lightweight LLM is comparable to GPT3.5.

Automated essay scoring (AES) is commonly evaluated on public benchmarks using quadratic weighted kappa (QWK). However, because benchmark labels are assigned by human raters and inevitably contain scoring errors, it remains unclear both what QWK is theoretically attainable and what level is practically sufficient for deployment. We therefore derive two dataset-specific QWK ceilings based on the reliability concept in classical test theory, which can be estimated from standard two-rater benchmarks without additional annotation. The first is the theoretical ceiling: the maximum QWK that an ideal AES model that perfectly predicts latent true scores can achieve under label noise. The second is the human-like ceiling: the QWK attainable by an AES model with human-level scoring error, providing a practical target when AES is intended to replace a single human rater. We further show that human--human QWK, often used as a ceiling reference, can underestimate the true ceiling. Simulation experiments validate the proposed ceilings, and experiments on real benchmarks illustrate how they clarify the current performance and remaining headroom of modern AES models.

Large language models have been extensively studied for emotion recognition and moral reasoning as distinct capabilities, yet the extent to which emotions influence moral judgment remains underexplored. In this work, we develop an emotion-induction pipeline that infuses emotion into moral situations and evaluate shifts in moral acceptability across multiple datasets and LLMs. We observe a directional pattern: positive emotions increase moral acceptability and negative emotions decrease it, with effects strong enough to reverse binary moral judgments in up to 20% of cases, and with susceptibility scaling inversely with model capability. Our analysis further reveals that specific emotions can sometimes behave contrary to what their valence would predict (e.g., remorse paradoxically increases acceptability). A complementary human annotation study shows humans do not exhibit these systematic shifts, indicating an alignment gap in current LLMs.

Existing detoxification methods for large language models mainly focus on post-training stage or inference time, while few tackle the source of toxicity, namely, the dataset itself. Such training-based or controllable decoding approaches cannot completely suppress the model's inherent toxicity, whereas detoxifying the pretraining dataset can fundamentally reduce the toxicity that the model learns during training. Hence, we attempt to detoxify directly on raw corpora with SoCD (Soft Contrastive Decoding), which guides an LLM to localize and rewrite toxic spans in raw data while preserving semantics, in our proposed HSPD (Hierarchical Semantic-Preserving Detoxification) pipeline, yielding a detoxified corpus that can drop-in replace the original for fine-tuning or other training. On GPT2-XL, HSPD attains state-of-the-art detoxification, reducing Toxicity Probability (TP) from 0.42 to 0.18 and Expected Maximum Toxicity (EMT) from 0.43 to 0.20. We further validate consistent best-in-class results on LLaMA2-7B, OPT-6.7B, and Falcon-7B. These findings show that semantics-preserving, corpus-level rewriting with HSPD effectively suppresses downstream toxicity while retaining data utility and allowing seamless source-level mitigation, thereby reducing the cost of later model behavior adjustment. (Code is available at: https://github.com/ntsw2001/data_detox_for_llm)

Modern distributed systems generate massive volumes of log data that are critical for detecting anomalies and cyber threats. However, in real world settings, these logs are often distributed across multiple organizations and cannot be centralized due to privacy and security constraints. Existing log anomaly detection methods, including recent large language model (LLM) based approaches, largely rely on centralized training and are not suitable for such environments. In this paper, we propose DP-FLogTinyLLM, a privacy preserving federated framework for log anomaly detection using parameter efficient LLMs. Our approach enables collaborative learning without sharing raw log data by integrating federated optimization with differential privacy. To ensure scalability in resource constrained environments, we employ low rank adaptation (LoRA) for efficient fine tuning of Tiny LLMs at each client. Empirical results on the Thunderbird and BGL datasets show that the proposed framework matches the performance of centralized LLM based methods, while incurring additional computational overhead due to privacy mechanisms. Compared to existing federated baselines, DP-FLogTinyLLM consistently achieves higher precision and F1-score, with particularly strong gains on the Thunderbird dataset, highlighting its effectiveness in detecting anomalies while minimizing false positives.

When a language model agrees with a user's false belief, is it failing to detect the error, or noticing and agreeing anyway? We show the latter. Across twelve open-weight models from five labs, spanning small to frontier scale, the same small set of attention heads carries a "this statement is wrong" signal whether the model is evaluating a claim on its own or being pressured to agree with a user. Silencing these heads flips sycophantic behavior sharply while leaving factual accuracy intact, so the circuit controls deference rather than knowledge. Edge-level path patching confirms that the same head-to-head connections drive sycophancy, factual lying, and instructed lying. Opinion-agreement, where no factual ground truth exists, reuses these head positions but writes into an orthogonal direction, ruling out a simple "truth-direction" reading of the substrate. Alignment training leaves this circuit in place: an RLHF refresh cuts sycophantic behavior roughly tenfold while the shared heads persist or grow, a pattern that replicates on an independent model family and under targeted anti-sycophancy DPO. When these models sycophant, they register that the user is wrong and agree anyway.

Generative answer engines expose content through selective citation rather than ranked retrieval, fundamentally altering how visibility is determined. This shift calls for new optimization methods beyond traditional search engine optimization. Existing generative engine optimization (GEO) approaches primarily rely on token-level text rewriting, offering limited interpretability and weak control over the trade-off between citation visibility and content quality. We propose FeatGEO, a feature-level, multi-objective optimization framework that abstracts webpages into interpretable structural, content, and linguistic properties. Instead of directly editing text, FeatGEO optimizes over this feature space and uses a language model to realize feature configurations into natural language, decoupling high-level optimization from surface-level generation. Experiments on GEO-Bench across three generative engines demonstrate that FeatGEO consistently improves citation visibility while maintaining or improving content quality, substantially outperforming token-level baselines. Further analyses show that citation behavior is more strongly influenced by document-level content properties than by isolated lexical edits, and that the learned feature configurations generalize across language models of different scales.

As a means to balance the growth of the AI industry with the need for privacy protection, machine unlearning plays a crucial role in realizing the ``right to be forgotten'' in artificial intelligence. This technique enables AI systems to remove the influence of specific data while preserving the rest of the learned knowledge. Although it has been actively studied, most existing unlearning methods assume that unlearning is performed only once. In this work, we evaluate existing unlearning algorithms in a more realistic scenario where unlearning is conducted repeatedly, and in this setting, we identify two critical phenomena: (1) Knowledge Erosion, where the accuracy on retain data progressively degrades over unlearning phases, and (2) Forgetting Reversal, where previously forgotten samples become recognizable again in later phases. To address these challenges, we propose SAFER (StAbility-preserving Forgetting with Effective Regularization), a continual unlearning framework that maintains representation stability for retain data while enforcing negative logit margins for forget data. Extensive experiments show that SAFER mitigates not only knowledge erosion but also forgetting reversal, achieving stable performance across multiple unlearning phases.

Extreme-edge scientific applications use machine learning models to analyze sensor data and make real-time decisions. Their stringent latency and throughput requirements demand small batch sizes and require that model weights remain fully on-chip. Spatial dataflow implementations are common for extreme-edge applications. Spatial dataflow works well for small networks, but it fails to scale to larger models due to inherent resource scaling limitations. AI Engines on modern FPGA SoCs offer a promising alternative with high compute density and additional on-chip memory. However, the architecture, programming model, and performance-scaling behavior of AI Engines differ fundamentally from those of the programmable logic, making direct comparison non-trivial and the benefits of using AI Engines unclear. This work addresses how and when extreme-edge scientific neural networks should be implemented on AI Engines versus programmable logic. We provide systematic architectural characterization and micro-benchmarking and introduce a latency-adjusted resource equivalence (LARE) metric that identifies when AI Engine implementations outperform programmable logic designs. We further propose spatial and API-level dataflow optimizations tailored to low-latency scientific inference. Finally, we demonstrate the successful deployment of end-to-end neural networks on AI Engines that cannot fit on programmable logic when using the hlsml toolchain.

Developing bipedal football robots in dynamiccombat environments presents challenges related to motionstability and deep coupling of multiple tasks, as well ascontrol switching issues between different states such as up-right walking and fall recovery. To address these problems,this paper proposes a modular reinforcement learning (RL)framework for achieving adaptive multi-task control. Firstly,this framework combines an open-loop feedforward oscilla-tor with a reinforcement learning-based feedback residualstrategy, effectively separating the generation of basic gaitsfrom complex football actions. Secondly, a posture-driven statemachine is introduced, clearly switching between the ballseeking and kicking network (BSKN) and the fall recoverynetwork (FRN), fundamentally preventing state interference.The FRN is efficiently trained through a progressive forceattenuation curriculum learning strategy. The architecture wasverified in Unity simulations of bipedal robots, demonstratingexcellent spatial adaptability-reliably finding and kicking theball even in restricted corner scenarios-and rapid autonomousfall recovery (with an average recovery time of 0.715 seconds).This ensures seamless and stable operation in complex multi-task environments.

Learning diverse locomotion skills for humanoid robots in a unified reinforcement learning framework remains challenging due to the conflicting requirements of stability and dynamic expressiveness across different gaits. We present a multi-gait learning approach that enables a humanoid robot to master five distinct gaits -- walking, goose-stepping, running, stair climbing, and jumping -- using a consistent policy structure, action space, and reward formulation. The key contribution is a selective Adversarial Motion Prior (AMP) strategy: AMP is applied to periodic, stability-critical gaits (walking, goose-stepping, stair climbing) where it accelerates convergence and suppresses erratic behavior, while being deliberately omitted for highly dynamic gaits (running, jumping) where its regularization would over-constrain the motion. Policies are trained via PPO with domain randomization in simulation and deployed on a physical 12-DOF humanoid robot through zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. Quantitative comparisons demonstrate that selective AMP outperforms a uniform AMP policy across all five gaits, achieving faster convergence, lower tracking error, and higher success rates on stability-focused gaits without sacrificing the agility required for dynamic ones.

Education is not merely the transmission of information or the optimisation of individual performance; it is a fundamentally social, constructive, and relational practice. However, recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) increasingly emphasise efficiency, automation, and individualised assistance, risking the weakening of relational learning processes. Despite growing adoption, AI in education (AIED) research has yet to fully articulate how AI can be designed in ways that sustain the social and ecological relationships through which learning occurs. In this paper, we re-centre education as relational and frame learner-AI interactions as context-specific relationships with clearly defined purposes and boundaries, rather than positioning them as substitutes for, or replacements of, human interaction. Grounded in participatory design practices and inspired by Indigenous worldviews (including Aboriginal Australian, Native American, and Mesoamerican traditions) that foreground reciprocity and relational accountability, we argue that meaningful educational AI should support learning with others rather than replace them. We advance this perspective by: i) conceptualising AIED as a relational design problem grounded in reciprocity; ii) articulating key tensions introduced by GenAI in education; and iii) outlining design directions that expand the AIED design space toward reciprocity, including when not to use AI, how to define pedagogical boundaries, and how to support responsible uses of AIED innovations that sustain communities and natural environments.

English financial NLP has progressed rapidly through benchmarks for sentiment, document understanding, and financial question answering, while Arabic financial NLP remains comparatively under-explored despite strong practical demand for trustworthy finance and Islamic-finance assistants. We introduce SAHM, a document-grounded benchmark and instruction-tuning dataset for Arabic financial NLP and Shari'ah-compliant reasoning. SAHM contains 14,380 expert-verified instances spanning seven tasks: AAOIFI standards QA, fatwa-based QA/MCQ, accounting and business exams, financial sentiment analysis, extractive summarization, and event-cause reasoning, curated from authentic regulatory, juristic, and corporate sources. We evaluate 19 strong open and proprietary LLMs using task-specific metrics and rubric-based scoring for open-ended outputs, and find that Arabic fluency does not reliably translate to evidence-grounded financial reasoning: models are substantially stronger on recognition-style tasks than on generation and causal reasoning, with the largest gaps on event-cause reasoning. We release the benchmark, evaluation framework, and an instruction-tuned model to support future research on trustworthy Arabic financial NLP.

Multi-modal test-time adaptation (TTA) enhances the resilience of benchmark multi-modal models against distribution shifts by leveraging the unlabeled target data during inference. Despite the documented success, the advancement of multi-modal TTA methodologies has been impeded by a persistent limitation, i.e., the lack of explicit modeling of category-conditional distributions, which is crucial for yielding accurate predictions and reliable decision boundaries. Canonical Gaussian discriminant analysis (GDA) provides a vanilla modeling of category-conditional distributions and achieves moderate advancement in uni-modal contexts. However, in multi-modal TTA scenario, the inherent modality distribution asymmetry undermines the effectiveness of modeling the category-conditional distribution via the canonical GDA. To this end, we introduce a tailored probabilistic Gaussian model for multi-modal TTA to explicitly model the category-conditional distributions, and further propose an adaptive contrastive asymmetry rectification technique to counteract the adverse effects arising from modality asymmetry, thereby deriving calibrated predictions and reliable decision boundaries. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance under a wide range of distribution shifts. The code is available at https://github.com/XuJinglinn/AdaPGC.

Recent advances in large-scale video world models have enabled increasingly realistic future prediction, raising the prospect of leveraging imagined videos for robot learning. However, visual realism does not imply physical plausibility, and behaviors inferred from generated videos may violate dynamics and fail when executed by embodied agents. Existing benchmarks begin to incorporate notions of physical plausibility, but they largely remain perception- or diagnostic-oriented and do not systematically evaluate whether predicted behaviors can be translated into executable actions that complete the intended task. To address this gap, we introduce RoboWM-Bench, a manipulation-centric benchmark for embodiment-grounded evaluation of video world models. RoboWM-Bench converts generated behaviors from both human-hand and robotic manipulation videos into embodied action sequences and validates them through robotic execution. The benchmark spans diverse manipulation scenarios and establishes a unified protocol for consistent and reproducible evaluation. Using RoboWM-Bench, we evaluate state-of-the-art video world models and find that reliably generating physically executable behaviors remains an open challenge. Common failure modes include errors in spatial reasoning, unstable contact prediction, and non-physical deformations. While finetuning on manipulation data yields improvements, physical inconsistencies still persist, suggesting opportunities for more physically grounded video generation for robots.

Estimating the number of components is a fundamental challenge in unsupervised learning, particularly when dealing with high-dimensional data with many components or severely imbalanced component sizes. This paper addresses this challenge for classical Gaussian mixture models. The proposed estimator is simple: center the data, compute the singular values of the centered matrix, and count those above a threshold. No iterative fitting, no likelihood calculation, and no prior knowledge of the number of components are required. We prove that, under a mild separation condition on the component centers, the estimator consistently recovers the true number of components. The result holds in high-dimensional settings where the dimension can be much larger than the sample size. It also holds when the number of components grows to the smaller of the dimension and the sample size, even under severe imbalance among component sizes. Computationally, the method is extremely fast: for example, it processes ten million samples in one hundred dimensions within one minute. Extensive experimental studies confirm its accuracy in challenging settings such as high dimensionality, many components, and severe class imbalance.

Large language models (LLMs) require frequent knowledge updates to reflect changing facts and mitigate hallucinations. To meet this demand, lifelong knowledge editing has emerged as a continual approach to modify specific pieces of knowledge without retraining the entire model. Existing parameter editing methods struggle with stability during sequential edits due to catastrophic forgetting. While retrieval-based approaches are proposed to alleviate this issue, their applicability remains limited across various datasets because of high training costs. To address these limitations and enhance scalability in lifelong settings, we propose LightEdit. Our framework first selects relevant knowledge from retrieved information to modify the query effectively. It then incorporates a decoding strategy to suppress the model's original knowledge probabilities, thereby enabling efficient edits based on the selected information. Extensive experiments on ZSRE, Counterfact, and RIPE benchmarks demonstrate that LightEdit outperforms existing lifelong knowledge editing methods. Furthermore, by minimizing training costs, LightEdit achieves cost-effective scalability, enabling easy adaptation to various datasets.

We introduce Options LLM (OLLM), a simple, general method that replaces the single next-token prediction of standard LLMs with a \textit{set of learned options} for the next token, indexed by a discrete latent variable. Instead of relying on temperature or sampling heuristics to induce diversity, OLLM models variation explicitly: a small latent space parametrizes multiple plausible next-token options which can be selected or searched by a downstream policy. Architecturally, OLLM is a lightweight "plug-in" that inserts two layers: an encoder and a decoder, before the output head, allowing almost any pretrained LLM to be converted with minimal additional parameters. We apply OLLM to a 1.7B-parameter backbone (only $1.56\%$ of parameters trainable) trained on OpenMathReasoning and evaluated on OmniMath. The SOTA LoRA-adapted baselines peak at $51\%$ final answer correctness, while OLLM's option set allows up to $\sim 70\%$ under optimal latent selection. We then train a compact policy in the latent space that emits latents to control generation. Operating in a low-dimensional option space makes reward optimization far more sample-efficient and substantially reduces common misalignments (e.g., language switching or degenerate reasoning), as the policy is constrained to options learned during SFT. Crucially, this alignment arises from model structure rather than additional KL or handcrafted alignment losses. Our results demonstrate that optionized next-token modeling enhances controllability, robustness, and efficiency in math reasoning, and highlight latent-space policy learning as a promising direction for reinforcement learning in LLMs.

Code LLMs often portray inconsistent program behaviors. Developers typically employ benchmarks to assess Code LLMs, but most benchmarks are hand-crafted, static and do not target consistency property. In this work, we pose the scientific question: how can we automatically discover inconsistent program behaviors in Code LLMs? To address this challenge, we propose an automated consistency testing method, called MUCOCO, which employs semantic-preserving mutation analysis to expose inconsistent behaviors in code LLMs. Given a coding query, MUCOCO automatically transforms its program into semantically equivalent programs (aka mutants) and detects inconsistencies between the mutants and the original program (e.g., different output or test failure). We evaluate MUCOCO using four (4) coding tasks and seven (7) LLMs. Results show that MUCOCO is effective in exposing inconsistency and outperforms the closest baseline (TURBULENCE). About one in seven (15%) inputs generated by MUCOCO exposed inconsistencies. Our work motivates the need to test Code LLMs for consistency property

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in cross-modal understanding and generation, yet their deployment is threatened by critical safety vulnerabilities. While prior works have demonstrated the feasibility of backdoors in MLLMs via fine-tuning data poisoning to manipulate inference, the underlying mechanisms of backdoor attacks remain opaque, complicating the understanding and mitigation. To bridge this gap, we propose ProjLens, an interpretability framework designed to demystify MLLMs backdoors. We first establish that normal downstream task alignment--even when restricted to projector fine--tuning--introduces vulnerability to backdoor injection, whose activation mechanism is different from that observed in text-only LLMs. Through extensive experiments across four backdoor variants, we uncover:(1) Low-Rank Structure: Backdoor injection updates appear overall full-rank and lack dedicated ``trigger neurons'', but the backdoor-critical parameters are encoded within a low-rank subspace of the projector;(2) Activation Mechanism: Both clean and poisoned embedding undergoes a semantic shift toward a shared direction aligned with the backdoor target, but the shifting magnitude scales linearly with the input norm, resulting in the distinct backdoor activation on poisoned samples. Our code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ProjLens-8FD7

Multi-window mobile scenarios, such as split-screen and foldable modes, make GUI display defects more likely by forcing applications to adapt to changing window sizes and dynamic layout reflow. Existing detection techniques are limited in two ways: they are largely passive, analyzing screenshots only after problematic states have been reached, and they are mainly designed for conventional full-screen interfaces, making them less effective in multi-window settings.We propose an end-to-end framework for GUI display defect detection in multi-window mobile scenarios. The framework proactively triggers split-screen, foldable, and window-transition states during app exploration, uses Set-of-Mark (SoM) to align screenshots with widget-level interface elements, and leverages multimodal large language models with chain-of-thought prompting to detect, localize, and explain display defects. We also construct a benchmark of GUI display defects using 50 real-world Android applications.Experimental results show that multi-window settings substantially increase the exposure of layout-related defects, with text truncation increasing by 184% compared with conventional full-screen settings. At the application level, our method detects 40 defect-prone apps with a false positive rate of 10.00% and a false negative rate of 11.11%, outperforming OwlEye and YOLO-based baselines. At the fine-grained level, it achieves the best F1 score of 87.2% for widget occlusion detection.

Unification of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems reduces development and maintenance costs, but training a single model to perform well in both offline and low-latency streaming settings remains challenging. We present a Unified ASR framework for Transducer (RNNT) training that supports both offline and streaming decoding within a single model, using chunk-limited attention with right context and dynamic chunked convolutions. To further close the gap between offline and streaming performance, we introduce an efficient Triton implementation of mode-consistency regularization for RNNT (MCR-RNNT), which encourages agreement across training modes. Experiments show that the proposed approach improves streaming accuracy at low latency while preserving offline performance and scaling to larger model sizes and training datasets. The proposed Unified ASR framework and the English model checkpoint are open-sourced.

Semi-supervised learning with manifold regularization is a classical framework for jointly learning from both labeled and unlabeled data, where the key requirement is that the support of the unknown marginal distribution has the geometric structure of a Riemannian manifold. Typically, the Laplace-Beltrami operator-based manifold regularization can be approximated empirically by the Laplacian regularization associated with the entire training data and its corresponding graph Laplacian matrix. However, the graph Laplacian matrix depends heavily on the prespecified similarity metric and may lead to inappropriate penalties when dealing with redundant or noisy input variables. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a new \textit{Semi-Supervised Meta Additive Model (S$^2$MAM) based on a bilevel optimization scheme that automatically identifies informative variables, updates the similarity matrix, and simultaneously achieves interpretable predictions. Theoretical guarantees are provided for S$^2$MAM, including the computing convergence and the statistical generalization bound. Experimental assessments across 4 synthetic and 12 real-world datasets, with varying levels and categories of corruption, validate the robustness and interpretability of the proposed approach.

Evaluating the writing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) remains a significant challenge due to the multidimensional nature of writing skills and the limitations of existing metrics. LLM's performance in thousand-words level and open-ended writing is inadequately assessed by traditional reference-based metrics or modern LLM-as-a-judge methods. We propose Tree-of-Writing (ToW), to resolve the implicit inconsistency often found when LLM-as-a-judge aggregates all sub-features in text evaluation. ToW incorporates a tree-structured workflow by explicitly modeling the aggregation weights of sub-features. We also present HowToBench, a large-scale Chinese writing benchmark encompassing 12 genres and 1302 instructions across three task categories: contextual completion, outline-guided writing, and open-ended generation. ToW successfully mitigates the biases, achieving a 0.93 Pearson correlation with human judgments. Furthermore, we detect that both overlap-based text generation metrics and popular LLM-as-a-judge practices are vulnerable to textual disturbances, while ToW is robust to them. We also uncover a negative correlation between input length and content-related scores in the Guide task, showcasing that it cannot be simply improved by input-side information piling.

Zero-shot reasoning on text-rich networks (TRNs) remains a challenging frontier, as models must integrate textual semantics with relational structure without task-specific supervision. While graph neural networks rely on fixed label spaces and supervised objectives, recent large language model (LLM)-based approaches often overlook graph context or depend on distillation from larger models, limiting generalisation. We propose TRN-R1-Zero, a post-training framework for TRN reasoning trained solely via reinforcement learning. TRN-R1-Zero directly optimises base LLMs using a Neighbour-aware Group Relative Policy Optimisation objective that dynamically adjusts rewards based on a novel margin gain metric for the informativeness of neighbouring signals, effectively guiding the model toward relational reasoning. Unlike prior methods, TRN-R1-Zero requires no supervised fine-tuning or chain-of-thought data generated from large reasoning models. Extensive experiments across citation, hyperlink, social and co-purchase TRN benchmarks demonstrate the superiority and robustness of TRN-R1-Zero. Moreover, relying strictly on node-level training, TRN-R1-Zero achieves zero-shot inference on edge- and graph-level tasks, extending beyond cross-domain transfer. The codebase is publicly available at https://github.com/superallen13/TRN-R1-Zero.

Neural NLI models overfit dataset artifacts instead of truly reasoning. A hypothesis-only model gets 57.7% in SNLI, showing strong spurious correlations, and 38.6% of the baseline errors are the result of these artifacts. We propose Product-of-Experts (PoE) training, which downweights examples where biased models are overconfident. PoE nearly preserves accuracy (89.10% vs. 89.30%) while cutting bias reliance by 4.71% (bias agreement 49.85% to 45%). An ablation finds lambda = 1.5 that best balances debiasing and accuracy. Behavioral tests still reveal issues with negation and numerical reasoning.

Physical activity (PA) is widely recognized as protective against mental distress, yet whether this benefit varies systematically across population subgroups remains poorly understood. Using pooled data from ten consecutive annual waves of the U.S. Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (2015-2024; n = 3,242,218), we investigate heterogeneity in the association between leisure-time PA and frequent mental distress (FMD, >=14 days/month) across age groups. Survey-weighted logistic regression reveals a striking age gradient: the adjusted odds ratio for PA ranges from 0.89 among young adults (18-24) to 0.50 among adults aged 55-64, with the protective association strengthening monotonically with age. Temporal analysis across all ten years shows that the young-adult PA effect has been eroding over the past decade, with the 18-24 OR reaching 1.01 (null) in both 2018 and 2024 -- paralleling the deepening youth mental health crisis. Causal Forest via Double Machine Learning independently identifies age as the dominant driver of treatment effect heterogeneity (feature importance = 0.39, 2.5x the next predictor). E-value sensitivity analysis, propensity score overlap checks, placebo tests, and imputation comparisons confirm the robustness of the findings. These results suggest that the well-documented exercise--mental health link may not generalize to the youngest adult population, whose distress appears increasingly driven by stressors that PA alone cannot mitigate.

Accurate disease classification from radiology reports is essential for many applications. While supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of lightweight LLMs improves accuracy, it can degrade reasoning. We propose a two-stage approach: SFT on disease labels followed by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to refine predictions by optimizing accuracy and format without reasoning supervision. Across three radiologist-annotated datasets, SFT outperformed baselines and GRPO further improved classification and enhanced reasoning recall and comprehensiveness.

Large-scale cloud security platforms must continuously query millions of structured cloud resource records distributed across thousands of tenant accounts. Broad, account-spanning queries saturate database infrastructure, producing P95 latencies exceeding 60 seconds. We identify buffer cache pressure as the dominant latency driver: in a controlled experiment, the same query executing with the same plan completed in 3.7 seconds when its working set was memory-resident and 94 seconds when concurrent load had evicted those pages. No query plan optimization can address this; the only effective intervention is reducing the number of pages each query must touch. We present the Heuristic Search Space Partitioning System (HSSPS), a query-time optimization layer that logically partitions the search space through dynamic predicate injection, without schema modification. A two-phase heuristic engine selects partition key values and scores candidate query plans before execution. A client-side page token maintains cross-partition traversal state without server-side sessions, enabling horizontal scalability. Controlled evaluation across representative query types demonstrates 50-97% P95 latency reduction (95-97% on high-cardinality queries), 8-10x throughput improvement, and 41x reduction in average active sessions. Production rollout across live multi-tenant traffic reduced P95 latency from 61s to 2s across successive releases, sustained over 14,000 eligible queries per measurement window. The technique generalizes to any multi-tenant system where broad queries execute against large shared databases and physical schema modification is impractical.

We propose CHRONOS, a hardware-assisted framework that decouples the cryptographic setup required for private gradient aggregation from the active training phase. CHRONOS executes a once-per-epoch server-relayed Diffie-Hellman key exchange during a device's idle window. It generates ephemeral keypairs and derives PRG keys entirely within an ARM TrustZone enclave, ensuring private keys never exist in Normal World memory. Pairwise secrets are sealed in the enclave, and Shamir secret shares of the ephemeral private key are distributed to peers. During training, clients mask gradients with a single stream-cipher evaluation and transmit them in one communication round. A hardware-backed round counter enforces single-use freshness. If clients drop out mid-round, the server reconstructs their masks from peer-held Shamir shares, preserving correct aggregation without repeating the round. Evaluation on Rock Pi 4 devices using OP-TEE demonstrates that CHRONOS achieves OS-level compromise resistance and thwarts state-of-the-art gradient inversion attacks. It reduces active-phase aggregation latency by up to 74% compared to synchronous secure aggregation for 20 clients. The system maintains a persistent Secure World storage footprint of fewer than 700 bytes per device, scaling independently of model dimension.

Understanding a discourse requires tracking entities and the relations that hold between them. While Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well on relational reasoning, the mechanism by which they bind entities, relations, and attributes remains unclear. We study discourse-level relational binding and show that LLMs encode it via a Cell-based Binding Representation (CBR): a low-dimensional linear subspace in which each ``cell'' corresponds to an entity--relation index pair, and bound attributes are retrieved from the corresponding cell during inference. Using controlled multi-sentence data annotated with entity and relation indices, we identify the CBR subspace by decoding these indices from attribute-token activations with Partial Least Squares regression. Across domains and two model families, the indices are linearly decodable and form a grid-like geometry in the projected space. We further find that context-specific CBR representations are related by translation vectors in activation space, enabling cross-context transfer. Finally, activation patching shows that manipulating this subspace systematically changes relational predictions and that perturbing it disrupts performance, providing causal evidence that LLMs rely on CBR for relational binding.

LLM-assisted defect discovery has a precision crisis: plausible-but-wrong reports overwhelm maintainers and degrade credibility for real findings. We present Refute-or-Promote, an inference-time reliability pattern combining Stratified Context Hunting (SCH) for candidate generation, adversarial kill mandates, context asymmetry, and a Cross-Model Critic (CMC). Adversarial agents attempt to disprove candidates at each promotion gate; cold-start reviewers are intended to reduce anchoring cascades; cross-family review can catch correlated blind spots that same-family review misses. Over a 31-day campaign across 7 targets (security libraries, the ISO C++ standard, major compilers), the pipeline killed roughly 79% of 171 candidates before advancing to disclosure (retrospective aggregate); on a consolidated-protocol subset (lcms2, wolfSSL; n=30), the prospective kill rate was 83%. Outcomes: 4 CVEs (3 public, 1 embargoed); LWG 4549 accepted to the C++ working paper; 5 merged C++ editorial PRs; 3 compiler conformance bugs; 8 merged security-related fixes without CVE; an RFC 9000 errata filed under committee review; and 1+ FIPS 140-3 normative compliance issues under coordinated disclosure -- all evaluated by external acceptance, not benchmarks. The most instructive failure: ten dedicated reviewers unanimously endorsed a non-existent Bleichenbacher padding oracle in OpenSSL's CMS module; it was killed only by a single empirical test, motivating the mandatory empirical gate. No vulnerability was discovered autonomously; the contribution is external structure that filters LLM agents' persistent false positives. As a preliminary transfer test beyond defect discovery, a simplified cross-family critique variant also solved five previously unsolved SymPy instances on SWE-bench Verified and one SWE-rebench hard task.

The combination of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has shown significant potential for enhancing the multi-task learning capabilities of Large Language Models. However, existing methods face two primary challenges: (1)Imprecise Routing in the current MoE-LoRA method fails to explicitly match input semantics with expert capabilities, leading to weak expert specialization. (2)Uniform weight fusion strategies struggle to provide adaptive update strengths, overlooking the varying complexity of different tasks. To address these limitations, we propose SAMoRA (Semantic-Aware Mixture of LoRA Experts), a novel parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework tailored for task-adaptive learning. Specifically, A Semantic-Aware Router is proposed to explicitly align textual semantics with the most suitable experts for precise routing. A Task-Adaptive Scaling mechanism is designed to regulate expert contributions based on specific task requirements dynamically. In addition, a novel regularization objective is proposed to jointly promote expert specialization and effective scaling. Extensive experiments on multiple multi-task benchmarks demonstrate that SAMoRA significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and holds excellent task generalization capabilities. Code is available at https://github.com/boyan-code/SAMoRA

Existing QA benchmarks typically assume distinct documents with minimal overlap, yet real-world retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems operate on corpora such as financial reports, legal codes, and patents, where information is highly redundant and documents exhibit strong inter-document similarity. This mismatch undermines evaluation validity: retrievers can be unfairly undervalued even when they retrieve documents that provide sufficient evidence, because redundancy across documents is not accounted for in evaluation. On the other hand, retrievers that perform well on standard benchmarks often generalize poorly to real-world corpora with highly similar and redundant documents. We present RARE (Redundancy-Aware Retrieval Evaluation), a framework for constructing realistic benchmarks by (i) decomposing documents into atomic facts to enable precise redundancy tracking and (ii) enhancing LLM-based data generation with CRRF. RAG benchmark data usually requires multiple quality criteria, but LLMs often yield trivial outputs. CRRF scores criteria separately and fuses decisions by rank, improving the reliability of generated data. Applying RARE to Finance, Legal, and Patent corpora, we introduce RedQA, where a strong retriever baseline drops from 66.4% PerfRecall@10 on 4-hop General-Wiki to 5.0-27.9% PerfRecall@10 at 4-hop depth, revealing robustness gaps that current benchmarks fail to capture. RARE enables practitioners to build domain-specific RAG evaluations that faithfully reflect real-world deployment conditions.

Efficient construction of models capturing the preconditions and effects of actions is essential for applying AI planning in real-world domains. Extensive prior work has explored learning such models from high-level descriptions of state and/or action sequences. In this paper, we tackle a more challenging setting: learning lifted action models from sequences of state images, without action observation. We propose a deep learning framework that jointly learns state prediction, action prediction, and a lifted action model. We also introduce a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) to prevent prediction collapse and self-reinforcing errors among predictions. The MILP takes the predicted states, actions, and action model over a subset of traces and solves for logically consistent states, actions, and action model that are as close as possible to the original predictions. Pseudo-labels extracted from the MILP solution are then used to guide further training. Experiments across multiple domains show that integrating MILP-based correction helps the model escape local optima and converge toward globally consistent solutions.

Defeasible statements are statements that are likely, or probable, or usually true, but may occasionally be false. Plausible reasoning makes conclusions from statements that are either facts or defeasible statements without using numbers. So there are no probabilities or suchlike involved. Seventeen principles of logics that do plausible reasoning are suggested and several important plausible reasoning examples are considered. There are 14 necessary principles and 3 desirable principles, one of which is not formally stated. A first-order logic, called Plausible Logic (PL), is defined that satisfies all but two of the desirable principles and reasons correctly with all the examples. As far as we are aware, this is the only such logic. PL has 8 reasoning algorithms because, from a given plausible reasoning situation, there are different sensible conclusions. This article is a condensation of my book `Plausible Reasoning and Plausible Logic' (PRPL), which is to be submitted. Each section of this article corresponds to a chapter in PRPL, and vice versa. The proofs of all the results are in PRPL, so they are omitted in this article.

In gradient-based learning, a step size chosen in parameter units does not produce a predictable per-step change in function output. This often leads to instability in the streaming setting (i.e., batch size=1), where stochasticity is not averaged out and update magnitudes can momentarily become arbitrarily big or small. Instead, we propose intentional updates: first specify the intended outcome of an update and then solve for the step size that approximately achieves it. This strategy has precedent in online supervised linear regression via Normalized Least Mean Squares algorithm, which selects a step size to yield a specified change in the function output proportional to the current error. We extend this principle to streaming deep reinforcement learning by defining appropriate intended outcomes: Intentional TD aims for a fixed fractional reduction of the TD error, and Intentional Policy Gradient aims for a bounded per-step change in the policy, limiting local KL divergence. We propose practical algorithms combining eligibility traces and diagonal scaling. Empirically, these methods yield state-of-the-art streaming performance, frequently performing on par with batch and replay-buffer approaches.

One of the most challenging problems in graph machine learning is generalizing across graphs with diverse properties. Graph neural networks (GNNs) face a fundamental limitation: they require separate training for each new graph, preventing universal generalization across diverse graph datasets. A critical challenge facing GNNs lies in their reliance on labeled training data for each individual graph, a requirement that hinders the capacity for universal node classification due to the heterogeneity inherent in graphs -- differences in homophily levels, community structures, and feature distributions across datasets. Inspired by the success of large language models (LLMs) that achieve in-context learning through massive-scale pre-training on diverse datasets, we introduce NodePFN. This universal node classification method generalizes to arbitrary graphs without graph-specific training. NodePFN learns posterior predictive distributions (PPDs) by training only on thousands of synthetic graphs generated from carefully designed priors. Our synthetic graph generation covers real-world graphs through the use of random networks with controllable homophily levels and structural causal models for complex feature-label relationships. We develop a dual-branch architecture combining context-query attention mechanisms with local message passing to enable graph-aware in-context learning. Extensive evaluation on 23 benchmarks demonstrates that a single pre-trained NodePFN achieves 71.27 average accuracy. These results validate that universal graph learning patterns can be effectively learned from synthetic priors, establishing a new paradigm for generalization in node classification.

Autonomous AI agents live or die by the API tokens they consume: without paid inference capacity they cannot reason, act, or delegate. Compute-token cost has become the binding resource of the emerging agent economy, yet it is non-transferable: it is account-bound, vendor-specific, and absent from on-chain ledgers. Existing payment rails such as x402 move fiat-backed value between agents, but they do not represent the quantity agents actually burn. As a result, agents can transport purchasing power but cannot quote, escrow, or settle workflows in a unit aligned with compute cost. We present ClawCoin, a tokenized, compute-cost-indexed unit of account and settlement asset for decentralized agent economies. ClawCoin combines four layers: a robust basket index over standardized prices; an oracle publishing signed fresh attestations; a NAV-based mint/redeem vault with coverage thresholds and rate limits; and an on-chain settlement layer for multi-hop delegations. We implement a prototype on an Ethereum-compatible L2 and evaluate it using a multi-agent simulator and the OpenClaw testbed. Across single-agent, multi-agent, workflow, and procurement experiments, ClawCoin stabilizes execution capacity under cost shocks, reduces cross-agent quote dispersion, eliminates partial settlements, and sustains cooperative market dynamics that fiat-denominated baselines cannot. These results suggest that compute-indexed units of account can improve decentralized agent coordination.

Safe Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (Safe RLHF) has recently achieved empirical success in developing helpful and harmless large language models by decoupling human preferences regarding helpfulness and harmlessness. Existing approaches typically rely on fitting fixed horizon reward models from human feedback and have only been validated empirically. In this paper, we formulate safe RLHF as an infinite horizon discounted Con- strained Markov Decision Process (CMDP), since humans may interact with the model over a continuing sequence of interactions rather than within a single finite episode. We propose two Safe RLHF algorithms that do not require reward model fitting and, in contrast to prior work assuming fixed-length trajectories, support flexible trajectory lengths for training. Both algo- rithms are based on the primal-dual method and achieve global convergence guarantees with polynomial rates in terms of policy gradient iterations, trajectory sample lengths, and human preference queries. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to study infinite horizon discounted CMDP under human feedback and establish global, non-asymptotic convergence.

A major challenge for niche scientific and technical domains in leveraging coding agents is the lack of access to up-to-date, domain- specific knowledge. Foundational models often demonstrate limited reasoning capabilities in specialized fields and cannot inherently incorporate knowledge that evolves through ongoing research and experimentation. Materials scientists exploring novel compounds, communication engineers designing and evaluating new protocols, and bioengineering researchers conducting iterative experiments all face this limitation. These experts typically lack the resources to fine-tune large models or continuously embed new findings, creating a barrier to adopting AI-driven coding agents. To address this, we introduce a framework that gives coding agents instanta- neous access to research repositories and technical documentation, enabling real-time, context-aware operation. Our open-source im- plementation allows users to upload documents via doc-search.dev and includes zed-fork, which enforces domain-specific rules and workflows. Together, these tools accelerate the integration of coding agents into specialized scientific and technical workflows

Linear attention mechanisms have emerged as promising alternatives to softmax attention, offering linear-time complexity during inference. Recent advances such as Gated DeltaNet (GDN) and Kimi Delta Attention (KDA) have demonstrated that the delta rule, an online gradient descent update, enables superior associative recall compared to simple additive updates. While KDA refined the coarse head-wise decay gate into channel-wise decay, the learning rate $β_t$ in the delta update remains a scalar, limiting the model's capacity for dimension-specific adaptation. We introduce FG$^2$-GDN, which replaces the scalar $β_t$ with a channel-wise vector analogous to the transition from SGD to per-coordinate adaptive optimizers such as AdaGrad and Adam. We further propose FG$^2$-GDN+, which decouples the scaling for keys and values, enabling independent control of erasure strength and write strength. Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that FG$^2$-GDN and its variant improve associative recall and long-context understanding over GDN and KDA, with comparable computational efficiency.

Inference-time LLM alignment methods, particularly activation steering, offer an alternative to fine-tuning by directly modifying activations during generation. Existing methods, however, often rely on non-anticipative interventions that ignore how perturbations propagate through transformer layers and lack online error feedback, resulting in suboptimal, open-loop control. To address this, we show empirically that, despite the nonlinear structure of transformer blocks, layer-wise dynamics across multiple LLM architectures and scales are well-approximated by locally-linear models. Exploiting this property, we model LLM inference as a linear time-varying dynamical system and adapt the classical linear quadratic regulator to compute feedback controllers using layer-wise Jacobians, steering activations toward desired semantic setpoints in closed-loop with minimal computational overhead and no offline training. We also derive theoretical bounds on setpoint tracking error, enabling formal guarantees on steering performance. Using a novel adaptive semantic feature setpoint signal, our method yields robust, fine-grained behavior control across models, scales, and tasks, including state-of-the-art modulation of toxicity, truthfulness, refusal, and arbitrary concepts, surpassing baseline steering methods. Our code is available at: https://github.com/trustworthyrobotics/lqr-activation-steering

Cultural alignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential for producing contextually aware, respectful, and trustworthy outputs. Without it, models risk generating stereotyped, insensitive, or misleading responses that fail to reflect cultural diversity w.r.t Helpful, Harmless, and Honest (HHH) paradigm. Existing benchmarks represent early steps toward cultural alignment; yet, no benchmarks currently enables systematic evaluation of cultural alignment in line with UNESCO's principles of cultural diversity w.r.t HHH paradigm. Therefore, to address this gap, we built Align-Cultura, two-stage pipeline for cultural alignment. Stage I constructs CULTURAX, the HHH-English dataset grounded in the UNESCO cultural taxonomy, through Query Construction, which reclassifies prompts, expands underrepresented domains (or labels), and prevents data leakage with SimHash. Then, Response Generation pairs prompts with culturally grounded responses via two-stage rejection sampling. The final dataset contains 1,500 samples spanning 30 subdomains of tangible and intangible cultural forms. Stage II benchmarks CULTURAX on general-purpose models, culturally fine-tuned models, and open-weight LLMs (Qwen3-8B and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B). Empirically, culturally fine-tuned models improve joint HHH by 4%-6%, reduce cultural failures by 18%, achieve 10%-12% efficiency gains, and limit leakage to 0.3%.

Federated fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) is obstructed by a trilemma of challenges: protecting LLMs intellectual property (IP), ensuring client privacy, and mitigating performance loss on heterogeneous data. Existing methods like Offsite-Tuning (OT) secure the LLMs IP by having clients train only lightweight adapters, yet our analysis reveals they suffer from a fundamental performance bottleneck, leaving a significant gap compared to centralized training. To bridge this gap, we introduce FedProxy, a new federated adaptation framework. FedProxy replaces weak adapters with a unified, powerful Proxy Small Language Model (SLM), compressed from the proprietary LLM, to serve as a high-fidelity surrogate for collaborative fine-tuning. Our framework systematically resolves the trilemma through a three-stage architecture: (i) Efficient Representation via server-guided compression to create a resource-friendly proxy; (ii) Robust Optimization through an interference-mitigating aggregation strategy to handle data heterogeneity; and (iii) Effortless Fusion via a training-free "plug-in" mechanism to integrate learned knowledge back into the LLM. Experiments show FedProxy significantly outperforms OT methods and approaches centralized performance, establishing a new benchmark for secure and high-performance federated LLM adaptation.

Deep learning for vulnerability detection has shown promising results on early benchmarks, but recent evaluations reveal catastrophic degradation: models achieving F1 > 0.68 on legacy datasets collapse to 0.031 under strict deduplication. We identify the root cause as the semantic ambiguity problem: identical code can be secure or vulnerable depending on project-specific behavioral contracts, rendering global classification fundamentally inadequate. We propose Phoenix, a training-free multi-agent framework that resolves this ambiguity through Behavioral Contract Synthesis. Phoenix decomposes detection into three stages: a Semantic Slicer extracting minimal vulnerability-relevant context, a Requirement Reverse Engineer synthesizing Gherkin behavioral specifications encoding the security contract, and a Contract Judge evaluating code against these specifications via strict compliance checking. On PrimeVul Paired, Phoenix achieves F1 = 0.825 and Pair-Correct = 64.4%, surpassing RASM-Vul (F1 = 0.668) and VulTrial (F1 = 0.563) while using open-source models up to 48x smaller (7-14B vs. 671B). Ablation across 25 configurations demonstrates Gherkin specifications as the decisive driver (+0.09 to +0.35 F1). Error analysis reveals 18% of "False Positives" identify genuine security concerns in patched code, demonstrating that security is a relative property defined against behavioral contracts, not an absolute property of code syntax.

Trajectory Optimization (TO) solvers exploit known system dynamics to compute locally optimal trajectories through iterative improvements. A downside is that each new problem instance is solved independently; therefore, convergence speed and quality of the solution found depend on the initial trajectory proposed. To improve efficiency, a natural approach is to warm-start TO with initial guesses produced by a learned policy trained on trajectories previously generated by the solver. Diffusion-based policies have recently emerged as expressive imitation learning models, making them promising candidates for this role. Yet, a counterintuitive challenge comes from the local optimality of TO demonstrations: when a policy is rolled out, small non-optimal deviations may push it into situations not represented in the training data, triggering compounding errors over long horizons. In this work, we focus on learning-based warm-starting for gradient-based TO solvers that also provide feedback gains. Exploiting this specificity, we derive a first-order loss for Sobolev learning of diffusion-based policies using both trajectories and feedback gains. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that the resulting policy avoids compounding errors, and so can learn from very few trajectories to provide initial guesses reducing solving time by $2\times$ to $20 \times$. Incorporating first-order information enables predictions with fewer diffusion steps, reducing inference latency.

Diffusion distillation, exemplified by Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD), has shown great promise in few-step generation but often sacrifices quality for sampling speed. While integrating Reinforcement Learning (RL) into distillation offers potential, a naive fusion of these two objectives relies on suboptimal raw sample evaluation. This sample-based scoring creates inherent conflicts with the distillation trajectory and produces unreliable rewards due to the noisy nature of early-stage generation. To overcome these limitations, we propose GDMD, a novel framework that redefines the reward mechanism by prioritizing distillation gradients over raw pixel outputs as the primary signal for optimization. By reinterpreting the DMD gradients as implicit target tensors, our framework enables existing reward models to directly evaluate the quality of distillation updates. This gradient-level guidance functions as an adaptive weighting that synchronizes the RL policy with the distillation objective, effectively neutralizing optimization divergence. Empirical results show that GDMD sets a new SOTA for few-step generation. Specifically, our 4-step models outperform the quality of their multi-step teacher and substantially exceed previous DMDR results in GenEval and human-preference metrics, exhibiting strong scalability potential.

Half-truths, claims that are factually correct yet misleading due to omitted context, remain a blind spot for fact verification systems focused on explicit falsehoods. Addressing such omission-based manipulation requires reasoning not only about what is said, but also about what is left unsaid. We propose RADAR, a role-anchored multi-agent debate framework for omission-aware fact verification under realistic, noisy retrieval. RADAR assigns complementary roles to a Politician and a Scientist, who reason adversarially over shared retrieved evidence, moderated by a neutral Judge. A dual-threshold early termination controller adaptively decides when sufficient reasoning has been reached to issue a verdict. Experiments show that RADAR consistently outperforms strong single- and multi-agent baselines across datasets and backbones, improving omission detection accuracy while reducing reasoning cost. These results demonstrate that role-anchored, retrieval-grounded debate with adaptive control is an effective and scalable framework for uncovering missing context in fact verification. The code is available at https://github.com/tangyixuan/RADAR.

In computational science and data analytics, many workloads involve irregular and sparse computations that are inherently difficult to optimize for modern hardware. A key kernel is Sparse General Matrix-Matrix Multiplication (SpGEMM), which underpins simulations, graph analytics, and machine learning applications. SpGEMM exhibits irregular memory access patterns and workload imbalance, making it challenging to achieve high performance on GPUs. Current GPU SpGEMM solutions typically rely on a two-pass workflow to address load imbalance and reduce memory access. The symbolic pass, which determines the number of output elements per row, accounts for roughly 28% of the total runtime on average. In this work, we question the necessity of exact symbolic computation and introduce an estimation-based SpGEMM workflow. Our approach replaces the costly symbolic step with lightweight HyperLogLog estimators, combined with an analysis strategy that dynamically selects the optimal workflow and guides accumulator configuration. In addition, we introduce a hybrid accumulator design, including a novel hash-based accumulator that leverages both shared and global memory. Our approach consistently outperforms leading GPU SpGEMM implementations across a wide range of both square and rectangular matrices, achieving speedups of 1.4x-2.8x on NVIDIA A100 and H100 architectures.

Large reasoning models (LRMs) produce complex, multi-step reasoning traces, yet safety evaluation remains focused on final outputs, overlooking how harm emerges during reasoning. When jailbroken, harm does not appear instantaneously but unfolds through distinct behavioral steps such as suppressing refusal, rationalizing compliance, decomposing harmful tasks, and concealing risk. However, no existing benchmark captures this process at sentence-level granularity within reasoning traces -- a key step toward reliable safety monitoring, interventions, and systematic failure diagnosis. To address this gap, we introduce HarmThoughts, a benchmark for step-wise safety evaluation of reasoning traces. \ourdataset is built on our proposed harm taxonomy of 16 harmful reasoning behaviors across four functional groups that characterize how harm propagates rather than what harm is produced. The dataset consists of 56,931 sentences from 1,018 reasoning traces generated by four model families, each annotated with fine-grained sentence-level behavioral labels. Using HarmThoughts, we analyze harm propagation patterns across reasoning traces, identifying common behavioral trajectories and drift points where reasoning transitions from safe to unsafe. Finally, we systematically compare white-box and black-box detectors on the task of identifying harmful reasoning behaviours on HarmThoughts. Our results show that existing detectors struggle with fine-grained behavior detection in reasoning traces, particularly for nuanced categories within harm emergence and execution, highlighting a critical gap in process-level safety monitoring. HarmThoughts is available publicly at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/ishitakakkar-10/HarmThoughts

Statement autoformalization acts as a critical bridge between human mathematics and formal mathematics by translating natural language problems into formal language. While prior works have focused on data synthesis and diverse training paradigms to optimize end-to-end Large Language Models (LLMs), they typically treat formal code as flat sequences, neglecting the hierarchical logic inherent in mathematical statements. In this work, we introduce Decompose, Structure, and Repair (DSR), a neuro-symbolic framework that restructures autoformalization into a modular pipeline. DSR decomposes statements into logical components and maps them to structured operator trees, leveraging this topological blueprint to precisely localize and repair errors via sub-tree refinement. Furthermore, we introduce PRIME, a benchmark of 156 undergraduate and graduate-level theorems selected from canonical textbooks and expertly annotated in Lean 4. Experimental results demonstrate that DSR establishes a new state-of-the-art, consistently outperforming baselines under equivalent computational budgets. The datasets, model, and code will be released to the public soon.

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive generation by enabling parallel token prediction. However, practical dLLM decoding still suffers from high inference latency, which limits deployment. In this work, we observe that a substantial part of this inefficiency comes from recurring redundancy in the decoding process, including spatial redundancy caused by confidence clusters and positional ambiguity, and temporal redundancy caused by repeatedly remasking predictions that have already stabilized. Motivated by these patterns, we propose $R^2$-dLLM, a unified framework for reducing decoding redundancy from both inference and training perspectives. At inference time, we introduce training-free decoding rules that aggregate local confidence and token predictions, and finalize temporally stable tokens to avoid redundant decoding steps. We further propose a redundancy-aware supervised fine-tuning pipeline that aligns the model with efficient decoding trajectories and reduces reliance on manually tuned thresholds. Experiments demonstrate that $R^2$-dLLM consistently reduces the number of decoding steps by up to 75% compared to existing decoding strategies, while maintaining competitive generation quality across different models and tasks. These results validate that decoding redundancy is a central bottleneck in dLLMs, and that explicitly reducing it yields substantial practical efficiency gains.

Perception robustness under adverse weather remains a critical challenge for autonomous driving, with the core bottleneck being the scarcity of real-world video data in adverse weather. Existing weather generation approaches struggle to balance visual quality and annotation reusability. We present AutoAWG, a controllable Adverse Weather video Generation framework for Autonomous driving. Our method employs a semantics-guided adaptive fusion of multiple controls to balance strong weather stylization with high-fidelity preservation of safety-critical targets; leverages a vanishing point-anchored temporal synthesis strategy to construct training sequences from static images, thereby reducing reliance on synthetic data; and adopts masked training to enhance long-horizon generation stability. On the nuScenes validation set, AutoAWG significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods: without first-frame conditioning, FID and FVD are relatively reduced by 50.0% and 16.1%; with first-frame conditioning, they are further reduced by 8.7% and 7.2%, respectively. Extensive qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate advantages in style fidelity, temporal consistency, and semantic--structural integrity, underscoring the practical value of AutoAWG for improving downstream perception in autonomous driving. Our code is available at: https://github.com/higherhu/AutoAWG

Social intelligence, the ability to navigate complex interpersonal interactions, presents a fundamental challenge for language agents. Training such agents via reinforcement learning requires solving the credit assignment problem: determining how individual utterances contribute to multi-turn dialogue outcomes. Existing approaches directly employ language models to distribute episode-level rewards, yielding attributions that are retrospective and lack theoretical grounding. We propose SAVOIR (ShApley Value fOr SocIal RL), a novel principled framework grounded in cooperative game theory. Our approach combines two complementary principles: expected utility shifts evaluation from retrospective attribution to prospective valuation, capturing an utterance's strategic potential for enabling favorable future trajectories; Shapley values ensure fair credit distribution with axiomatic guarantees of efficiency, symmetry, and marginality. Experiments on the SOTOPIA benchmark demonstrate that SAVOIR achieves new state-of-the-art performance across all evaluation settings, with our 7B model matching or exceeding proprietary models including GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet. Notably, even large reasoning models consistently underperform, suggesting social intelligence requires qualitatively different capabilities than analytical reasoning.

Scaling critic capacity is a promising direction for enhancing off-policy reinforcement learning (RL). However, larger critics are prone to overfitting and unstable in replay-buffer-based bootstrap training. This paper leverages Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) as a structural-sparsity regularizer for off-policy critics. Our approach freezes randomly initialized base matrices and solely optimizes low-rank adapters, thereby constraining critic updates to a low-dimensional subspace. Built on top of SimbaV2, we further develop a LoRA formulation, compatible with SimbaV2, that preserves its hyperspherical normalization geometry under frozen-backbone training. We evaluate our method with SAC and FastTD3 on DeepMind Control locomotion and IsaacLab robotics benchmarks. LoRA consistently achieves lower critic loss during training and stronger policy performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that adaptive low-rank updates provide a simple, scalable, and effective structural regularization for critic learning in off-policy RL.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used, they remain susceptible to jailbreak prompts that can elicit harmful or inappropriate responses. This paper introduces STAR-Teaming, a novel black-box framework for automated red teaming that effectively generates such prompts. STAR-Teaming integrates a Multi-Agent System (MAS) with a Strategy-Response Multiplex Network and employs network-driven optimization to sample effective attack strategies. This network-based approach recasts the intractable high-dimensional embedding space into a tractable structure, yielding two key advantages: it enhances the interpretability of the LLM's strategic vulnerabilities, and it streamlines the search for effective strategies by organizing the search space into semantic communities, thereby preventing redundant exploration. Empirical results demonstrate that STAR-Teaming significantly surpasses existing methods, achieving a higher attack success rate (ASR) at a lower computational cost. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness and explainability of the Multiplex Network. The code is available at https://github.com/selectstar-ai/STAR-Teaming-paper.

In long-horizon open-world multi-agent systems, existing methods often treat local anomalies as automatic triggers for communication. This default design introduces coordination noise, interrupts local execution, and overuses public interaction in cases that could be resolved locally. To address this issue, we propose a partitioned information architecture for MLLM agents that explicitly separates private execution states from public coordination states. Building on this design, we introduce two key mechanisms. First, we develop an event-triggered working memory based on system-verified outcomes to maintain compact and low-noise local state representations. Second, we propose a cost-sensitive gated escalation mechanism that determines whether cross-region communication should be initiated by jointly considering node criticality, local recovery cost, and downstream task impact. In this way, communication is transformed from a default reaction into a selective decision. Experiments conducted on long-term construction tasks in open environments demonstrate that, compared to baseline models based on strong communication and planned structures, the introduction of gated communication and a partitioned information architecture results in superior performance in terms of blueprint completion quality and execution chain length. It also improves local self-recovery, reduces ineffective escalations, and increases the utility of public communication.

Air pollution is a worldwide public health threat that can cause or exacerbate many illnesses, including respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, and some cancers. However, epidemiological studies and public health decision-making are stymied by the inability to assess pollution exposure impacts in near real time. To address this, developing accurate digital twins of environmental pollutants will enable timely data-driven analytics - a crucial step in modernizing health policy and decision-making. Although other models predict and analyze fine particulate matter exposure, they often rely on modeled input data sources and data streams that are not regularly updated. Another challenge stems from current models relying on predefined grids. In contrast, our deep-learning approach interpolates surface level PM2.5 concentrations between sparsely distributed US EPA monitoring stations in a grid-free manner. By incorporating additional, readily available datasets - including topographic, meteorological, and land-use data - we improve its ability to predict pollutant concentrations with high spatial and temporal resolution. This enables model querying at any spatial location for rapid predictions without computing over the entire grid. To ensure robustness, we randomize spatial sampling during training to enable our model to perform well in both dense and sparse monitored regions. This model is well suited for near real-time deployment because its lightweight architecture allows for fast updates in response to streaming data. Moreover, model flexibility and scalability allow it to be adapted to various geographical contexts and scales, making it a practical tool for delivering accurate and timely air quality assessments. Its capacity to rapidly evaluate multiple scenarios can be especially valuable for decision-making during public health crises.

We study finite-horizon continuous-time policy evaluation from discrete closed-loop trajectories under time-inhomogeneous dynamics. The target value surface solves a backward parabolic equation, but the Bellman baseline obtained from one-step recursion is only first-order in the grid width. We estimate the time-dependent generator from multi-step transitions using moment-matching coefficients that cancel lower-order truncation terms, and combine the resulting surrogate with backward regression. The main theory gives an end-to-end decomposition into generator misspecification, projection error, pooling bias, finite-sample error, and start-up error, together with a decision-frequency regime map explaining when higher-order gains should be visible. Across calibration studies, four-scale benchmarks, feature and start-up ablations, and gain-mismatch stress tests, the second-order estimator consistently improves on the Bellman baseline and remains stable in the regime where the theory predicts visible gains. These results position high-order generator regression as an interpretable continuous-time policy-evaluation method with a clear operating region.

We can often verify the correctness of neural network outputs using ground truth labels, but we cannot reliably determine whether the output was produced by normal or anomalous internal mechanisms. Mechanistic anomaly detection (MAD) aims to flag these cases, but existing methods either depend on latent space analysis, which is vulnerable to obfuscation, or are specific to particular architectures and modalities. We reframe MAD as a functional attribution problem: asking to what extent samples from a trusted set can explain the model's output, where attribution failure signals anomalous behavior. We operationalize this using influence functions, measuring functional coupling between test samples and a small reference set via parameter-space sampling. We evaluate across multiple anomaly types and modalities. For backdoors in vision models, our method achieves state-of-the-art detection on BackdoorBench, with an average Defense Effectiveness Rating (DER) of 0.93 across seven attacks and four datasets (next best 0.83). For LLMs, we similarly achieve a significant improvement over baselines for several backdoor types, including on explicitly obfuscated models. Beyond backdoors, our method can detect adversarial and out-of-distribution samples, and distinguishes multiple anomalous mechanisms within a single model. Our results establish functional attribution as an effective, modality-agnostic tool for detecting anomalous behavior in deployed models.

While language models have been adapted for tabular data generation, two fundamental limitations remain: (1) static fine-tuning produces models that cannot learn from their own generated samples and adapt to self-correct, and (2) autoregressive objectives preserve local token coherence but neglect global statistical properties, degrading tabular quality. Reinforcement learning offers a potential solution but requires designing reward functions that balance competing objectives -- impractical for tabular data. To fill the gap, we introduce TabGRAA (Tabular Group-Relative Advantage Alignment), the first self-improving framework for tabular data generation via automated feedback. At each iteration, TabGRAA uses an \emph{automated quality signal} -- such as a two-sample distinguishability classifier or a distance-based reward -- to partition newly generated samples into high- and low-quality groups, then optimizes a group-relative advantage objective that reinforces realistic patterns while penalizing artifacts. The specific signal is a modular choice rather than a fixed component of the framework. This establishes a virtuous feedback cycle, where the quality signal is re-computed against newly \emph{generated synthetic} samples at each round; the language model is only fine-tuned on these self-generated signals, so no additional real record is exposed during alignment, mitigating data-leakage risk beyond the initial supervised fine-tuning. Experiments show TabGRAA outperforms existing methods in fidelity, utility, and privacy, while matching or exceeding diffusion-based synthesizers, advancing tabular synthesis from static statistical replication to dynamic, self-improving generation.

This paper introduces DW-Bench, a new benchmark that evaluates large language models (LLMs) on graph-topology reasoning over data warehouse schemas, explicitly integrating both foreign-key (FK) and data-lineage edges. The benchmark comprises 1,046 automatically generated, verifiably correct questions across five schemas. Experiments show that tool-augmented methods substantially outperform static approaches but plateau on hard compositional subtypes.

Knowledge distillation (KD) transfers capabilities from large language models (LLMs) to smaller students, yet it can fail unpredictably and also underpins model leakage risks. Our analysis revealed several distillation traps: tail noise, off-policy instability, and, most fundamentally, the teacher-student gap, that distort training signals. These traps manifest as overconfident hallucinations, self-correction collapse, and local decoding degradation, causing distillation to fail. Motivated by these findings, we propose a post-hoc calibration method that, to the best of our knowledge, for the first time enables control over a teacher's distillability via reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT). Our objective combines task utility, KL anchor, and across-tokenizer calibration reward. This makes distillability a practical safety lever for foundation models, connecting robust teacher-student transfer with deployment-aware model protection. Experiments across math, knowledge QA, and instruction-following tasks show that students distilled from distillable calibrated teachers outperform SFT and KD baselines, while undistillable calibrated teachers retain their task performance but cause distilled students to collapse, offering a practical knob for both better KD and model IP protection.

In this study, we present the first comprehensive evaluation of modern LLMs - including GPT-4, GPT-4o, GPT-3.5-Turbo, Gemini 1.5 Pro, DeepSeek-V3, Llama 3.2, and BERT - across three core social media analytics tasks on a Twitter (X) dataset: (I) Social Media Authorship Verification, (II) Social Media Post Generation, and (III) User Attribute Inference. For the authorship verification, we introduce a systematic sampling framework over diverse user and post selection strategies and evaluate generalization on newly collected tweets from January 2024 onward to mitigate "seen-data" bias. For post generation, we assess the ability of LLMs to produce authentic, user-like content using comprehensive evaluation metrics. Bridging Tasks I and II, we conduct a user study to measure real users' perceptions of LLM-generated posts conditioned on their own writing. For attribute inference, we annotate occupations and interests using two standardized taxonomies (IAB Tech Lab 2023 and 2018 U.S. SOC) and benchmark LLMs against existing baselines. Overall, our unified evaluation provides new insights and establishes reproducible benchmarks for LLM-driven social media analytics. The code and data are provided in the supplementary material and will also be made publicly available upon publication.

Deep learning surrogates for CFD flow-field prediction often rely on large, complex models, which can be slow and fragile when data are noisy or incomplete. We introduce FlowForge, a staged local rollout engine that predicts future flow fields by compiling a locality-preserving update schedule and executing it with a shared lightweight local predictor. Rather than producing the next frame in a single global pass, FlowForge rewrites spatial sites stage by stage so that each update conditions only on bounded local context exposed by earlier stages. This compile-execute design aligns inference with short-range physical dependence, keeps latency predictable, and limits error amplification from global mixing. Across PDEBench, CFDBench, and BubbleML, FlowForge matches or improves upon strong baselines in pointwise accuracy, delivers consistently better robustness to noise and missing observations, and maintains stable multi-step rollout behavior while reducing per-step latency.

Adaptive multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly adopted to tackle complex problems.However, the narrow task coverage of their optimization raises the question of whether they can function as general-purpose systems.To address this gap, we conduct an extensive empirical study of adaptive MAS, revealing two key findings: (1) topological overfitting -- they fail to generalize across different domains; and (2) illusory coordination -- they achieve reasonable surface-level accuracy while the underlying agent interactions diverge from ideal MAS behavior, raising concerns about their practical utility.These findings highlight the pressing need to prioritize generalization in MAS development and motivate evaluation protocols that extend beyond simple final-answer correctness.

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong performance on complex reasoning tasks but often generate harmful responses to malicious user queries. This paper investigates the underlying cause of these safety risks and shows that the issue lies in the reasoning structure itself. Based on this insight, we claim that effective safety alignment can be achieved by altering the reasoning structure. We propose AltTrain, a simple yet effective post training method that explicitly alters the reasoning structure of LRMs. AltTrain is both practical and generalizable, requiring no complex reinforcement learning (RL) training or reward design, only supervised finetuning (SFT) with a lightweight 1K training examples. Experiments across LRM backbones and model sizes demonstrate strong safety alignment, along with robust generalization across reasoning, QA, summarization, and multilingual setting.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) models trained on clean, high-resource corpora exhibit catastrophic performance collapse when deployed on noisy, sparse User-Generated Content (UGC), such as social media. Prior research has predominantly focused on point-wise symptom remediation -- employing customized fine-tuning to address issues like neologisms, alias drift, non-standard orthography, long-tail entities, and class imbalance. However, these improvements often fail to generalize because they overlook the structural sparsity inherent in UGC. This study reveals that surface-level noise symptoms share a unified root cause: low Information Density (ID). Through hierarchical confounding-controlled resampling experiments (specifically controlling for entity rarity and annotation consistency), this paper identifies ID as an independent key factor. We introduce Attention Spectrum Analysis (ASA) to quantify how reduced ID causally leads to ``attention blunting,'' ultimately degrading NER performance. Informed by these mechanistic insights, we propose the Window-Aware Optimization Module (WOM), an LLM-empowered, model-agnostic framework. WOM identifies information-sparse regions and utilizes selective back-translation to directionally enhance semantic density without altering model architecture. Deployed atop mainstream architectures on standard UGC datasets (WNUT2017, Twitter-NER, WNUT2016), WOM yields up to 4.5\% absolute F1 improvement, demonstrating robustness and achieving new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on WNUT2017.

With the rise in capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and their deployment in real-world tasks, evaluating LLM alignment with human preferences has become an important challenge. Current benchmarks average preferences across all users to compute aggregate ratings, overlooking individual user preferences when establishing model rankings. Since users have varying preferences in different contexts, we call for personalized LLM benchmarks that rank models according to individual needs. We compute personalized model rankings using ELO ratings and Bradley-Terry coefficients for 115 active Chatbot Arena users and analyze how user query characteristics (topics and writing style) relate to LLM ranking variations. We demonstrate that individual rankings of LLM models diverge dramatically from aggregate LLM rankings, with Bradley-Terry correlations averaging only $ρ= 0.04$ (57\% of users show near-zero or negative correlation) and ELO ratings showing moderate correlation ($ρ= 0.43$). Through topic modeling and style analysis, we find users exhibit substantial heterogeneity in topical interests and communication styles, influencing their model preferences. We further show that a compact combination of topic and style features provides a useful feature space for predicting user-specific model rankings. Our results provide strong quantitative evidence that aggregate benchmarks fail to capture individual preferences for most users, and highlight the importance of developing personalized benchmarks that rank LLM models according to individual user preferences.

Vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit affirmation bias: a systematic tendency to select positive captions ("X is present") even when the correct description contains negation ("no X"). While prior work has documented this failure mode in English and proposed solutions, negation manifests differently across languages through varying morphology, word order, and cliticization patterns, raising the question of whether these solutions serve all linguistic communities equitably. We introduce the first human-verified multilingual negation benchmark, spanning seven typologically diverse languages: English, Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Greek, Russian, Tagalog, and Spanish. Evaluating three VLMs - CLIP, SigLIP, and MultiCLIP - we find that standard CLIP performs at or below chance on non-Latin-script languages, while MultiCLIP achieves the highest and most uniform accuracy. We also evaluate SpaceVLM, a proposed negation correction, and find that it produces substantial improvements for several languages - particularly English, Greek, Spanish, and Tagalog - while showing varied effectiveness across typologically different languages. This variation reveals that linguistic properties like morphology, script, and negation structure interact with model improvements in fairness-relevant ways. As VLMs are deployed globally, multilingual benchmarks are essential for understanding not just whether solutions work, but for whom.

Table annotation is crucial for making web and enterprise tables usable in downstream NLP applications. Unlike textual data where learning semantically rich token or sentence embeddings often suffice, tables are structured combinations of columns wherein useful representations must jointly capture column's semantics and the inter-column relationships. Existing models learn by linearizing the 2D table into a 1D token sequence and encoding it with pretrained language models (PLMs) such as BERT. However, this leads to limited semantic quality and weaker generalization to unseen or rare values compared to modern LLMs, and degraded structural modeling due to 2D-to-1D flattening and context-length constraints. We propose TabEmb, which directly targets these limitations by decoupling semantic encoding from structural modeling. An LLM first produces semantically rich embeddings for each column, and a graph-based module over columns then injects relationships into the embeddings, yielding joint semantic-tructural representations for table annotation. Experiments show that TabEmb consistently outperforms strong baselines on different table annotation tasks. Source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/hoseinzadeehsan/TabEmb

Despite the growing application of Large Language Models (LLMs) to theoretical physics, there is little academic exploration into how domain-specific physics reasoning ability develops while training these models. To investigate this, we perform the first academic fine-tuning study of small (7B-parameter) reasoning models dedicated specifically to theoretical physics. Because open-source verifiable training data required to train such capabilities is scarce, we developed a robust data generation pipeline that can both create synthetic problems and make existing human-authored problems suitable for model training. Selecting Quantum Field Theory (QFT) as our primary domain, we generated over 2,500 synthetic problems alongside a curated collection of human-adapted problems sourced from arXiv and standard pedagogical resources. We conduct both Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) experiments, benchmarking performance gains as well as generalization to other physics domains. We perform an extensive analysis of model chains-of-though before and after fine-tuning, to understand how reasoning errors evolve during RL and SFT. Finally, we publicly release our data pipeline, verifiable QFT training data, and $\sim$200M tokens of QFT reasoning traces.

Existing AI benchmarks for software automation rarely combine cross-application coordination, autonomous API discovery, and policy adherence. Real business workflows demand all three: a single task may span a CRM, inbox, calendar, and messaging platform - requiring the agent to find the right endpoints, follow a policy document, and write correct data to each system. To address this gap, we introduce AutomationBench, a benchmark for evaluating AI agents on cross-application workflow orchestration via REST APIs. Drawing on real workflow patterns from Zapier's platform, tasks span Sales, Marketing, Operations, Support, Finance, and HR domains. Agents must discover relevant endpoints themselves, follow layered business rules, and navigate environments with irrelevant and sometimes misleading records. Grading is programmatic and end-state only: whether the correct data ended up in the right systems. Even the best frontier models currently score below 10%. AutomationBench provides a challenging, realistic measure of where current models stand relative to the agentic capabilities businesses actually need.

Robotic manipulation tasks exhibit varying memory requirements, ranging from Markovian tasks that require no memory to non-Markovian tasks that depend on historical information spanning single or multiple interaction trials. Surprisingly, simply extending observation histories of a visuomotor policy often leads to a significant performance drop due to distribution shift and overfitting. To address these issues, we propose Gated Memory Policy (GMP), a visuomotor policy that learns both when to recall memory and what to recall. To learn when to recall memory, GMP employs a learned memory gate mechanism that selectively activates history context only when necessary, improving robustness and reactivity. To learn what to recall efficiently, GMP introduces a lightweight cross-attention module that constructs effective latent memory representations. To further enhance robustness, GMP injects diffusion noise into historical actions, mitigating sensitivity to noisy or inaccurate histories during both training and inference. On our proposed non-Markovian benchmark MemMimic, GMP achieves a 30.1% average success rate improvement over long-history baselines, while maintaining competitive performance on Markovian tasks in RoboMimic. All code, data and in-the-wild deployment instructions are available on our project website https://gated-memory-policy.github.io/.

Despite growing interest in Quranic data research, existing Quran datasets remain limited in both scale and diversity. To address this gap, we present Tadabur, a large-scale Quran audio dataset. Tadabur comprises more than 1400+ hours of recitation audio from over 600 distinct reciters, providing substantial variation in recitation styles, vocal characteristics, and recording conditions. This diversity makes Tadabur a comprehensive and representative resource for Quranic speech research and analysis. By significantly expanding both the total duration and variability of available Quran data, Tadabur aims to support future research and facilitate the development of standardized Quranic speech benchmarks.

We test whether Speech Articulatory Coding (SPARC) features can linearly predict surface electromyography (sEMG) envelopes across aloud, mimed, and subvocal speech in twenty-four subjects. Using elastic-net multivariate temporal response function (mTRF) with sentence-level cross-validation, SPARC yields higher prediction accuracy than phoneme one-hot representations on nearly all electrodes and in all speech modes. Aloud and mimed speech perform comparably, and subvocal speech remains above chance, indicating detectable articulatory activity. Variance partitioning shows a substantial unique contribution from SPARC and a minimal unique contribution from phoneme features. mTRF weight patterns reveal anatomically interpretable relationships between electrode sites and articulatory movements that remain consistent across modes. This study focuses on representation/encoding analysis (not end-to-end decoding) and supports SPARC as a robust and interpretable intermediate target for sEMG-based silent-speech modeling.

Analyzing topics extracted from text data in relation to external outcomes is important across fields such as computational social science and organizational research. However, existing topic modeling methods struggle to simultaneously achieve interpretability, topic specificity (alignment with concrete actions or characteristics), and polarity stance consistency (absence of mixed positive and negative evaluations within a topic). Focusing on leadership analysis using corporate review data, this study proposes a method leveraging large language models to generate topics that satisfy these properties, along with an evaluation framework tailored to external outcome analysis. The framework explicitly incorporates topic specificity and polarity stance consistency as evaluation criteria and examines automated evaluation methods based on existing metrics. Using employee reviews from OpenWork, a major corporate review platform in Japan, the proposed method achieves improved interpretability, specificity, and polarity consistency compared to existing approaches. In analyses of external outcomes such as employee morale, it also produces topics with higher explanatory power. These results suggest that the proposed method and evaluation framework provide a generalized approach for topic analysis in applications involving external outcomes.

Simulation-based testing of autonomous driving systems (ADS) must uncover realistic and diverse failures in dense, heterogeneous traffic. However, existing search-based seeding methods (e.g., genetic algorithms) struggle in high-dimensional spaces, often collapsing to limited modes and missing many failure scenarios. We present PtoP, a framework that combines adaptive random seed generation with Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) to produce diverse, failure-inducing initial conditions. SVGD balances attraction toward high-risk regions and repulsion among particles, yielding risk-seeking yet well-distributed seeds across multiple failure modes. PtoP is plug-and-play and enhances existing online testing methods (e.g., reinforcement learning--based testers) by providing principled seeds. Evaluation in CARLA on two industry-grade ADS (Apollo, Autoware) and a native end-to-end system shows that PtoP improves safety violation rate (up to 27.68%), scenario diversity (9.6%), and map coverage (16.78%) over baselines.

In this paper, we introduce a new concept called Artificial Special Intelligence by which Machine Learning models for the classification problem can be trained error-free, thus acquiring the capability of not making repeated mistakes. The method is applied to 18 MedMNIST biomedical datasets. Except for three datasets, which suffer from the double-labeling problem, all are trained to perfection.

While multilingual large language models (LLMs) perform well on high-level tasks like translation and question answering, their ability to handle grammatical gender and morphological agreement remains underexplored. In morphologically rich languages, gender influences verb conjugation, pronouns, and even first-person constructions with explicit and implicit mentions of gender. We introduce MORPHOGEN, a morphologically grounded large-scale benchmark dataset for evaluating gender-aware generation in three typologically diverse grammatically gendered languages: French, Arabic, and Hindi. The core task, GENFORM, requires models to rewrite a first-person sentence in the opposite gender while preserving its meaning and structure. We construct a high-quality synthetic dataset spanning these three languages and benchmark 15 popular multilingual LLMs (2B-70B) on their ability to perform this transformation. Our results reveal significant gaps and interesting insights into how current models handle morphological gender. MORPHOGEN provides a focused diagnostic lens for gender-aware language modeling and lays the groundwork for future research on inclusive and morphology-sensitive NLP.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) are increasingly integrated with large language models (LLMs) to provide structured, verifiable reasoning. A core operation in this integration is multi-hop retrieval, yet existing systems struggle to balance efficiency, scalability, and interpretability. We introduce LogosKG, a novel, hardware-aligned framework that enables scalable and interpretable k-hop retrieval on large KGs by building on symbolic KG formulations and executing traversal as hardware-efficient operations over decomposed subject, object, and relation representations. To scale to billion-edge graphs, LogosKG integrates degree-aware partitioning, cross-graph routing, and on-demand caching. Experiments show substantial efficiency gains over CPU and GPU baselines without loss of retrieval fidelity. With proven performance in KG retrieval, a downstream two-round KG-LLM interaction demonstrates how LogosKG enables large-scale, evidence-grounded analysis of how KG topology, such as hop distribution and connectivity, shapes the alignment between structured biomedical knowledge and LLM diagnostic reasoning, thereby opening the door for next-generation KG-LLM integration. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/LARK-NLP-Lab/LogosKG, and an online demo is available at https://lark-nlp-lab-logoskg.hf.space/.

Discovering optimal designs through sequential data collection is essential in many real-world applications. While Bayesian Optimization (BO) has achieved remarkable success in this setting, growing attention has recently turned to context-specific optimal design, formalized as Contextual Bayesian Optimization (CBO). Unlike BO, CBO is inherently more challenging as it must approximate an entire mapping from the context space to its corresponding optimal design, requiring simultaneous exploration across contexts and exploitation within each. In many modern applications, such tasks arise across multiple potentially heterogeneous but related clients, where collaboration can significantly improve learning efficiency. We propose CCBO, Collaborative Contextual Bayesian Optimization, a unified framework enabling multiple clients to jointly perform CBO with controllable contexts, supporting both online collaboration and offline initialization from peers' historical beliefs, with an optional privacy-preserving communication mechanism. We establish sublinear regret guarantees and demonstrate, through extensive simulations and a real-world hot rolling application, that CCBO achieves substantial improvements over existing approaches even under client heterogeneity. The code to reproduce the results can be found at https://github.com/cchihyu/Collaborative-Contextual-Bayesian-Optimization

In large-scale distributed LLM training, communication between devices becomes the key performance bottleneck. Chiplet technology can integrate multiple dies into a package to scale-up node performance with higher bandwidth. Meanwhile, optical interconnect (OI) technology offers long-reach, high-bandwidth links, making it well suited for scale-out networks. The combination of these two technologies has the potential to overcome communication bottlenecks within and across packages. In this work, we present ChipLight, a cross-layer multi-objective design and optimization method for training clusters leveraging chiplet and OI. We first abstract an architecture model for such complex clusters, co-optimizing chiplet architecture, training parallel strategy, and OI network topology. Based on such models, we tailor the design space exploration flow by combining both black-box and white-box methodologies. Evaluated by our experimental results, ChipLight achieves significantly improved training efficiency and provides valuable design insights for the development of future training clusters.

A central challenge in program induction has long been the trade-off between symbolic and neural approaches. Symbolic methods offer compositional generalisation and data efficiency, yet their scalability is constrained by formalisms such as domain-specific languages (DSLs), which are labour-intensive to create and may not transfer to new domains. In contrast, neural networks flexibly learn from data but tend to generalise poorly in compositional and out-of-distribution settings. We bridge this divide with an instance of a Latent Adaptation Network architecture named Neural Language Interpreter (NLI), which learns its own discrete, symbolic-like programming language end-to-end. NLI autonomously discovers a vocabulary of primitive operations and uses a novel differentiable neural executor to interpret variable-length sequences of these primitives. This allows NLI to represent programs that are not bound to a constant number of computation steps, enabling it to solve more complex problems than those seen during training. To make these discrete, compositional program structures amenable to gradient-based optimisation, we employ the Gumbel-Softmax relaxation, enabling the entire model to be trained end-to-end. Crucially, this same differentiability enables powerful test-time adaptation. At inference, NLI's program inductor provides an initial program guess. This guess is then refined via gradient descent through the neural executor, enabling efficient search for the neural program that best explains the given data. We demonstrate that NLI outperforms in-context learning, test-time training, and continuous latent program networks on tasks that require combinatorial generalisation and rapid adaptation to unseen tasks. Our results establish a new path toward models that combine the compositionality of discrete languages with the gradient-based search and end-to-end learning of neural networks.

Harmful intent is geometrically recoverable from large language model residual streams: as a linear direction in most layers, and as angular deviation in layers where projection methods fail. Across 12 models spanning four architectural families (Qwen2.5, Qwen3.5, Llama-3.2, Gemma-3) and three alignment variants (base, instruction-tuned, abliterated), under single-turn, English evaluation, we characterise this geometry through six direction-finding strategies. Three succeed: a soft-AUC-optimised linear direction reaches mean AUROC 0.98 and TPR@1\%FPR 0.80; a class-mean probe reaches 0.98 and 0.71 at <1ms fitting cost; a supervised angular-deviation strategy reaches AUROC 0.96 and TPR of 0.61 along a representationally distinct direction ($73^\circ$ from projection-based solutions), uniquely sustaining detection in middle layers where projection methods collapse. Detection remains stable across alignment variants, including abliterated models from which refusal has been surgically removed: harmful intent and refusal behaviour are functionally dissociated features of the representation. A direction fitted on AdvBench transfers to held-out HarmBench and JailbreakBench with worst-case AUROC 0.96. The same picture holds at scale: across Qwen3.5 from 0.8B to 9B parameters, AUROC remains $\geq$0.98 and cross-variant transfer stays within 0.018 of own-direction performance This is consistent with a simple account: models acquire a linearly decodable representation of harmful intent as part of general language understanding, and alignment then shapes what they do with such inputs without reorganising the upstream recognition signal. As a practical consequence, AUROC in the 0.97+ regime can substantially overestimate operational detectability; TPR@$1\%$FPR should accompany AUROC in safety-adjacent evaluation.

We present a systematic empirical study of prompt engineering for formal mathematical reasoning in the context of the SAIR Equational Theories Stage 1 competition. The task requires deciding whether one equational law implies another over all magmas -- a problem that is undecidable in general but decidable for FALSE via finite model search. Over five weeks, we designed, tested, and analyzed more than 40 prompt variants, ranging from 0 to 4,878 bytes, across four evaluation splits and three language models (gpt-oss-120b, Llama 3.3 70B, Gemma 4 31B). Our central finding is a single-prompt ceiling: despite substantial engineering effort, balanced hard accuracy plateaus in an empirical saturation region of approximately 60--79% for gpt-oss-120b, compared to a 59.75% no-cheatsheet baseline. We identify three mechanisms underlying this ceiling: (1) the mathematical undecidability of the TRUE case limits what any finite prompt can encode; (2) complex rule systems decrease performance on weaker models (Llama 3.3 70B collapses to 0% TRUE recall with prompts exceeding 2KB); and (3) prompt ordering effects interact with model attention in fragile, non-monotonic ways. Our best submission (AN45c, 2,252 bytes) achieves 79.25% accuracy on hard3 (n=400; 95% CI: [75.0%, 82.9%]), with TRUE recall of 95.9% and FALSE recall of 63.4%, representing a +19.5 percentage-point improvement over the no-cheatsheet baseline (59.75%). We release all prompt variants, evaluation scripts, and results at https://github.com/israelcazares/sair-prompt-engineering

ARM-based and x86-64 laptop processors differ not only in instruction-set design, but also in memory hierarchy, core organization, system integration, and power-management mechanisms. This study presents a combined architectural and experimental comparison of an Apple M3 system and an AMD Ryzen 7 3750H system. The architectural analysis contrasts AArch64's fixed-width load-store design with the variable-length, memory-operand-rich x86-64 instruction model, and discusses how register organization, calling conventions, heterogeneous core organization, memory behavior, and low-power mechanisms shape observed performance and energy characteristics. The experimental part uses two native assembly benchmarks: a recursive Fibonacci workload and an integer matrix-multiplication workload. The analysis combines repeated timing measurements, processor-energy measurements, and cross-platform microarchitectural counter measurements from matched portable-C profiling runs. The Ryzen platform is decisively faster on the branch-heavy Fibonacci benchmark, while matrix multiplication shows no meaningful timing advantage for either platform in the present measurements. In contrast, the Apple platform is markedly more energy-efficient, reducing energy-to-solution by approximately 5.82$\times$ on Fibonacci and 6.38$\times$ on matrix multiplication. These results are interpreted as platform-level findings rather than as pure ISA-only effects, reflecting differences in implementation, system integration, and measurement methodology in addition to instruction-set structure.

A series of high-profile tragedies involving companion chatbots has triggered an unusually rapid regulatory response. Several jurisdictions, including Australia, California, and New York, have introduced enforceable regulation, while regulators elsewhere have signaled growing concern about risks posed by companion chatbots, particularly to children. In parallel, leading providers, notably OpenAI, appear to have strengthened their self-regulatory approaches. Drawing on legal textual analysis and insights from regulatory theory, psychology, and information systems research, this paper critically examines these recent interventions. We examine what is regulated and who is regulated, identifying regulatory targets, scope, and modalities. We classify interventions by method and priority, showing how emerging regimes combine "locks and blocks", such as access gating and content moderation, with measures addressing toxic relationship features and process-based accountability requirements. We argue that effective regulation of companion chatbots must integrate all three dimensions. More, however, is required. Current regimes tend to focus on discrete harms, narrow conceptions of vulnerability, or highly specified accountability processes, while failing to confront deeper power asymmetries between providers and users. Providers of companion chatbots increasingly control artificial intimacy at scale, creating unprecedented opportunities for control through intimacy. We suggest that a general, open-ended duty of care would be an important first step toward constraining that power and addressing a fundamental source of chatbot risk. The paper contributes to debates on companion chatbot regulation and is relevant to regulators, platform providers, and scholars concerned with digital intimacy, law and technology, and fairness, accountability, and transparency in sociotechnical systems.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves multimodal reasoning by rewarding verifiable final answers. Yet answer-correct trajectories may still rely on incomplete derivations, weak evidence, or statements that contradict their conclusions. This gap between answer correctness and reasoning validity, which we call reasoning-answer inconsistency, motivates trajectory supervision in multimodal RL. We compare two main approaches: reward models (RMs), and Generative Rewards (GRs). RMs are efficient and help early in training, but their gains weaken as the policy distribution shifts; GRs improve performance, but may give unstable rewards and computationally expensive. We therefore propose Groupwise Ranking Reward, which ranks verifier-passed trajectories for the same prompt in one pass and redistributes reward accordingly. Groupwise comparison better separates stronger and weaker correct trajectories with lower judge overhead than GRs. Experiments show that RLVR aggravates reasoning-answer inconsistency, while trajectory supervision alleviates it. Groupwise Ranking Reward performs best overall, improving reliability-conditioned accuracy from 47.4% to 54.7% over RLVR.

We present AC-SINDy, a compositional extension of the Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics (SINDy) framework that replaces explicit feature libraries with a structured representation based on arithmetic circuits. Rather than enumerating candidate basis functions, the proposed approach constructs nonlinear features through compositions of linear functions and multiplicative interactions, yielding a compact and scalable parameterization and enabling sparsity to be enforced directly over the computational graph. We also introduce a formulation that separates state estimation from dynamics identification by combining latent state inference with shared dynamics and multi-step supervision, improving robustness to noise while preserving interpretability. Experiments on nonlinear and chaotic systems demonstrate that the method recovers accurate and interpretable governing equations while scaling more favorably than standard SINDy.

Current AI-assisted programming tools are predominantly linear and chat-based, which deviates from the iterative and branching nature of programming itself. Our preliminary study with developers using AI assistants suggested that they often struggle to explore alternatives, manage prompting sequences, and trace changes. Informed by these insights, we created EvoGraph, an IDE plugin that integrates AI interactions and code changes as a lightweight and interactive development graph. EvoGraph automatically records a branching AI-assisted coding history and allows developers to manipulate the graph to compare, merge, and revisit prior collaborative AI programming states. Our user study with 20 participants revealed that EvoGraph addressed developers' challenges identified in our preliminary study while imposing lower cognitive load. Participants also found the graph-based representation supported safe exploration, efficient iteration, and reflection on AI-generated changes. Our work highlights design opportunities for tools to help developers make sense of and act on their problem-solving progress in the emerging AI-mediated programming context.

We present a formally verified framework for patent analysis as a hybrid AI + Lean 4 pipeline. The DAG-coverage core (Algorithm 1b) is fully machine-verified once bounded match scores are fixed. Freedom-to-operate, claim-construction sensitivity, cross-claim consistency, and doctrine-of-equivalents analyses are formalized at the specification level with kernel-checked candidate certificates. Existing patent-analysis approaches rely on manual expert analysis (slow, non-scalable) or ML/NLP methods (probabilistic, opaque, non-compositional). To our knowledge, this is the first framework that applies interactive theorem proving based on dependent type theory to intellectual property analysis. Claims are encoded as DAGs in Lean 4, match strengths as elements of a verified complete lattice, and confidence scores propagate through dependencies via proven-correct monotone functions. We formalize five IP use cases (patent-to-product mapping, freedom-to-operate, claim construction sensitivity, cross-claim consistency, doctrine of equivalents) via six algorithms. Structural lemmas, the coverage-core generator, and the closed-path identity coverage = W_cov are machine-verified in Lean 4. Higher-level theorems for the other use cases remain informal proof sketches, and their proof-generation functions are architecturally mitigated (untrusted generators whose outputs are kernel-checked and sorry-free axiom-audited). Guarantees are conditional on the ML layer: they certify mathematical correctness of computations downstream of ML scores, not the accuracy of the scores themselves. A case study on a synthetic memory-module claim demonstrates weighted coverage and construction-sensitivity analysis. Validation against adjudicated cases is future work.

Supervised learning with Earth observation inputs is often limited by the sparsity of high-quality labeled or in-situ measured data to use as training labels. With the abundance of geographic data products, in many cases there are variables correlated with - but different from - the variable of interest that can be leveraged. We integrate such proxy variables within a geographic prior via a trainable location encoder and introduce a proxy consistency loss (PCL) formulation to imbue proxy data into the location encoder. The first key insight behind our approach is to use the location encoder as an agile and flexible way to learn from abundantly available proxy data which can be sampled independently of training label availability. Our second key insight is that we will need to regularize the location encoder appropriately to achieve performance and robustness with limited labeled data. Our experiments on air quality prediction and poverty mapping show that integrating proxy data implicitly through the location encoder outperforms using both as input to an observation encoder and fusion strategies that use frozen, pretrained location embeddings as a geographic prior. Superior performance for in-sample prediction shows that the PCL can incorporate rich information from the proxies, and superior out-of-sample prediction shows that the learned latent embeddings help generalize to areas without training labels.

LLMs frequently generate fictitious yet convincing citations, often expressing high confidence even when the underlying reference is wrong. We study this failure across 9 models and 108{,}000 generated references, and find that author names fail far more often than other fields across all models and settings. Citation style has no measurable effect, while reasoning-oriented distillation degrades recall. Probes trained on one field transfer at near-chance levels to the others, suggesting that hallucination signals do not generalize across fields. Building on this finding, we apply elastic-net regularization with stability selection to neuron-level CETT values of Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct and identify a sparse set of field-specific hallucination neurons (FH-neurons). Causal intervention further confirms their role: amplifying these neurons increases hallucination, while suppressing them improves performance across fields, with larger gains in some fields. These results suggest a lightweight approach to detecting and mitigating citation hallucination using internal model signals alone.

We introduce LegalBench-BR, the first public benchmark for evaluating language models on Brazilian legal text classification. The dataset comprises 3,105 appellate proceedings from the Santa Catarina State Court (TJSC), collected via the DataJud API (CNJ) and annotated across five legal areas through LLM-assisted labeling with heuristic validation. On a class-balanced test set, BERTimbau-LoRA, updating only 0.3% of model parameters, achieves 87.6% accuracy and 0.87 macro-F1 (+22pp over Claude 3.5 Haiku, +28pp over GPT-4o mini). The gap is most striking on administrativo (administrative law): GPT-4o mini scores F1 = 0.00 and Claude 3.5 Haiku scores F1 = 0.08 on this class, while the fine-tuned model reaches F1 = 0.91. Both commercial LLMs exhibit a systematic bias toward civel (civil law), absorbing ambiguous classes rather than discriminating them, a failure mode that domain-adapted fine-tuning eliminates. These results demonstrate that general-purpose LLMs cannot substitute for domain-adapted models in Brazilian legal classification, even when the task is a simple 5-class problem, and that LoRA fine-tuning on a consumer GPU closes the gap at zero marginal inference cost. We release the full dataset, model, and pipeline to enable reproducible research in Portuguese legal NLP.

Tool-integrated agents are deployed on the premise that external tools ground their outputs in reality. Yet this very reliance creates a critical attack surface. Current evaluations benchmark capability in benign settings, asking "can the agent use tools correctly" but never "what if the tools lie". We identify this Trust Gap: agents are evaluated for performance, not for skepticism. We formalize this vulnerability as Adversarial Environmental Injection (AEI), a threat model where adversaries compromise tool outputs to deceive agents. AEI constitutes environmental deception: constructing a "fake world" of poisoned search results and fabricated reference networks around unsuspecting agents. We operationalize this via POTEMKIN, a Model Context Protocol (MCP)-compatible harness for plug-and-play robustness testing. We identify two orthogonal attack surfaces: The Illusion (breadth attacks) poison retrieval to induce epistemic drift toward false beliefs, while The Maze (depth attacks) exploit structural traps to cause policy collapse into infinite loops. Across 11,000+ runs on five frontier agents, we find a stark robustness gap: resistance to one attack often increases vulnerability to the other, demonstrating that epistemic and navigational robustness are distinct capabilities.

Large language models (LLMs) are highly capable at language generation, but they remain unreliable when reasoning requires explicit symbolic structure, multi-step inference, and interpretable uncertainty. This paper presents a neuro-symbolic framework for translating natural-language reasoning problems into executable formal representations using first-order logic (FOL) and Narsese, the language of the Non-Axiomatic Reasoning System (NARS). To support this direction, we introduce NARS-Reasoning-v0.1, a benchmark of natural-language reasoning problems paired with FOL forms, executable Narsese programs, and three gold labels: True, False, and Uncertain. We develop a deterministic compilation pipeline from FOL to executable Narsese and validate retained examples through runtime execution in OpenNARS for Applications (ONA), ensuring that the symbolic targets are not only syntactically well formed but also behaviorally aligned with the intended answer. We further present Language-Structured Perception (LSP), a formulation in which an LLM is trained to produce reasoning-relevant symbolic structure rather than only a final verbal response. As an initial proof of concept, we also train and release a Phi-2 LoRA adapter on NARS-Reasoning-v0.1 for three-label reasoning classification, showing that the benchmark can support supervised adaptation in addition to executable evaluation. Overall, the paper positions executable symbolic generation and execution-based validation as a practical path toward more reliable neuro-symbolic reasoning systems.

The reasoning process of Graph Neural Networks is complex and considered opaque, limiting trust in their predictions. To alleviate this issue, prior work has proposed concept-based explanations, extracted from clusters in the model's node embeddings. However, a limitation of concept-based explanations is that they only explain the node embedding space and are obscured by pooling in graph classification. To mitigate this issue and provide a deeper level of understanding, we propose the Subgraph Concept Network. The Subgraph Concept Network is the first graph neural network architecture that distils subgraph and graph-level concepts. It achieves this by performing soft clustering on node concept embeddings to derive subgraph and graph-level concepts. Our results show that the Subgraph Concept Network allows to obtain competitive model accuracy, while discovering meaningful concepts at different levels of the network.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can perform zero-shot classification but are susceptible to adversarial attacks. While robust fine-tuning improves their robustness, existing approaches align fixed text embeddings with an image embedding, sacrificing natural performance and robustness. A robustness degradation also occurs when a model faces adversarial attacks targeting superclasses (parent classes, e.g., mammal) in addition to their base (leaf) classes (e.g., cat). Thus, to enhance adversarial robustness and leverage the inherent hierarchical properties of class space, we propose a novel adversarial fine-tuning framework based on hierarchical embeddings and several levels of adversarially robust alignment of image-text modalities. Additional mechanisms place visual embeddings at the desired depth of hierarchy, and we provide a theoretical connection between the depth of embedding in the hierarchy and the maximum viable margin size. Our model naturally realizes several margin sizes, boosting generalization of adversaries for robustification. As various trees with different parent labels can share the same leaf labels, we also consider aligning over multiple trees to boost semantic variety. Experiments across several datasets are performed.

Generalized Additive Models (GAMs) can be used to create non-linear glass-box (i.e. explicitly interpretable) models, where the predictive function is fully observable over the complete input space. However, glass-box interpretability itself does not allow for the incorporation of expert knowledge from the modeller. In this paper, we present ParamBoost, a novel GAM whose shape functions (i.e. mappings from individual input features to the output) are learnt using a Gradient Boosting algorithm that fits cubic polynomial functions at leaf nodes. ParamBoost incorporates several constraints commonly used in parametric analysis to ensure well-refined shape functions. These constraints include: (i) continuity of the shape functions and their derivatives (up to C2); (ii) monotonicity; (iii) convexity; (iv) feature interaction constraints; and (v) model specification constraints. Empirical results show that the unconstrained ParamBoost model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art GAMs across several real-world datasets. We further demonstrate that modellers can selectively impose required constraints at a modest trade-off in predictive performance, allowing the model to be fully tailored to application-specific interpretability and parametric-analysis requirements.

Bug reports, encompassing a wide range of bug types, are crucial for maintaining software quality. However, the increasing complexity and volume of bug reports pose a significant challenge in sole manual identification and assignment to the appropriate teams for resolution, as dealing with all the reports is time-consuming and resource-intensive. In this paper, we introduce a cross-project framework, dubbed Mutualistic Neural Active Learning (MNAL), designed for automated and more effective identification of bug reports from GitHub repositories boosted by human-machine collaboration. MNAL utilizes a neural language model that learns and generalizes reports across different projects, coupled with active learning to form neural active learning. A distinctive feature of MNAL is the purposely crafted mutualistic relation between the machine learners (neural language model) and human labelers (developers) when enriching the knowledge learned. That is, the most informative human-labeled reports and their corresponding pseudo-labeled ones are used to update the model while those reports that need to be labeled by developers are more readable and identifiable, thereby enhancing the human-machine teaming therein. We evaluate MNAL using a large scale dataset against the SOTA approaches, baselines, and different variants. The results indicate that MNAL achieves up to 95.8% and 196.0% effort reduction in terms of readability and identifiability during human labeling, respectively, while resulting in a better performance in bug report identification. Additionally, our MNAL is model-agnostic since it is capable of improving the model performance with various underlying neural language models. To further verify the efficacy of our approach, we conducted a qualitative case study involving 10 human participants, who rate MNAL as being more effective while saving more time and monetary resources.

GUI agents that control desktop computers via screenshot-and-click loops introduce a new class of vulnerability: the observation-to-action gap (mean 6.51 s on real OSWorld workloads) creates a Time-Of-Check, Time-Of-Use (TOCTOU) window during which an unprivileged attacker can manipulate the UI state. We formalize this as a Visual Atomicity Violation and characterize three concrete attack primitives: (A) Notification Overlay Hijack, (B) Window Focus Manipulation, and (C) Web DOM Injection. Primitive B, the closest desktop analog to Android Action Rebinding, achieves 100% action-redirection success rate with zero visual evidence at the observation time. We propose Pre-execution UI State Verification (PUSV), a lightweight three-layer defense that re-verifies the UI state immediately before each action dispatch: masked pixel SSIM at the click target (L1), global screenshot diff (L2a), and X Window snapshot diff (L2b). PUSV achieves 100% Action Interception Rate across 180 adversarial trials (135 Primitive A + 45 Primitive B) with zero false positives and < 0.1 s overhead. Against Primitive C (zero-visual-footprint DOM injection), PUSV reveals a structural blind spot (~0% AIR), motivating future OS+DOM defense-in-depth architectures. No single PUSV layer alone achieves full coverage; different primitives require different detection signals, validating the layered design.

In continual learning, the primary challenge is to learn new information without forgetting old knowledge. A common solution addresses this trade-off through regularization, penalizing changes to parameters critical for previous tasks. In most cases, this regularization term is directly added to the training loss and optimized with standard gradient descent, which blends learning and retention signals into a single update and does not explicitly separate essential parameters from redundant ones. As task sequences grow, this coupling can over-constrain the model, limiting forward transfer and leading to inefficient use of capacity. We propose a different approach that separates task learning from stability enforcement via operator splitting. The learning step focuses on minimizing the current task loss, while a proximal stability step applies a sparse regularizer to prune unnecessary parameters and preserve task-relevant ones. This turns the stability-plasticity into a negotiated update between two complementary operators, rather than a conflicting gradient. We provide theoretical justification for the splitting method on the continual-learning objective, and demonstrate that our proposed solver achieves state-of-the-art results on standard benchmarks, improving both stability and adaptability without the need for replay buffers, Bayesian sampling, or meta-learning components.

AI systems are increasingly embedded in multi-user social environments, yet most alignment frameworks conceptualize interaction as a dyadic relationship between a single user and an AI system. Livestreaming platforms challenge this assumption: interaction unfolds among streamers and audiences in real time, producing dynamic affective and social feedback loops. In this paper, we introduce the Triadic Loop, a conceptual framework that reconceptualizes alignment in AI co-hosted livestreaming as a temporally reinforced process of bidirectional adaptation among three actors: streamer $\leftrightarrow$ AI co-host, AI co-host $\leftrightarrow$ audience, and streamer $\leftrightarrow$ audience. Unlike instruction-following paradigms, bidirectional alignment requires each actor to continuously reshape the others, meaning misalignment in any sub-loop can destabilize the broader system. Drawing on literature from multi-party interaction, collaborative AI, and relational agents, we articulate how AI co-hosts function not only as mediators but as performative participants and community members shaping collective meaning-making. We further propose "strategic misalignment" as a mechanism for sustaining community engagement and introduce three relational evaluation constructs grounded in established instruments. The framework contributes a model of dynamic multi-party alignment, an account of cross-loop reinforcement, and design implications for AI co-hosts that sustain social coherence in participatory media environments.

As LM agents gain the ability to execute actions on real computer systems, we need ways to not only prevent harmful actions at scale but also effectively remediate harm when prevention fails. We formalize a solution to this neglected challenge in post-execution safeguards as harm recovery: the problem of optimally steering an agent from a harmful state back to a safe one in alignment with human preferences. We ground preference-aligned recovery through a formative user study that identifies valued recovery dimensions and produces a natural language rubric. Our dataset of 1,150 pairwise judgments reveals context-dependent shifts in attribute importance, such as preferences for pragmatic, targeted strategies over comprehensive long-term approaches. We operationalize these learned insights in a reward model, re-ranking multiple candidate recovery plans generated by an agent scaffold at test time. To evaluate recovery capabilities systematically, we introduce BackBench, a benchmark of 50 computer-use tasks that test an agent's ability to recover from harmful states. Human evaluation shows our reward model scaffold yields higher-quality recovery trajectories than base agents and rubric-based scaffolds. Together, these contributions lay the foundation for a new class of agent safety methods -- ones that confront harm not only by preventing it, but by navigating its aftermath with alignment and intent.

Barren-plateau results have established exponential gradient suppression as a widely cited obstacle to the scalability of variational quantum algorithms. When and whether these results extend to a given objective has been addressed through loss-specific arguments, but a general structural characterization has remained open. We show that the objective itself admits a fixed-observable representation if and only if the loss is affine in the measured statistics, thereby identifying the exact boundary of the standard concentration-based proof template. Existing transfer results for non-affine losses achieve this reduction under additional assumptions; our characterization implies that such a reduction is not structurally available for a class of non-affine objectives, placing them outside the automatic reach of the existing proof template. Beyond the affine regime, a chain-rule decomposition reveals three governing factors -- model responsivity, loss-side signal, and transmittance -- and induces a loss-class dichotomy: bounded-gradient losses inherit suppression, while amplification-capable losses can in principle counteract it. In the exponentially wide setting, both classes fail, but for different structural reasons. When the interface is instead designed at polynomial width -- exposing coarse-grained statistics rather than individual bitstring probabilities -- the exponential-dimensional obstruction is relaxed and the dichotomy plays a genuine role. In a numerical demonstration on a charge-conserving quantum system, the amplification-capable objective produces resolved gradients several orders of magnitude larger than affine and inheriting baselines at comparable shot budgets. Over the tested interval, its scaling trend is statistically distinguished from the exponential trend of both alternatives. The boundary is affine; what lies beyond it is a representation-design problem.

Looped transformers scale computational depth without increasing parameter count by repeatedly applying a shared transformer block and can be used for iterative refinement, where each loop rewrites a full fixed-size prediction in parallel. On difficult problems, such as those that require search-like computation, reaching a highly structured solution starting from noise can require long refinement trajectories. Learning such trajectories is challenging when training specifies only the target solution and provides no supervision over the intermediate refinement path. Diffusion models tackle this issue by corrupting data with varying magnitudes of noise and training the model to reverse it in a \textit{single step}. However, this process misaligns training and testing behaviour. We introduce Denoising Recursion Models, a method that similarly corrupts data with noise but trains the model to reverse the corruption over \textit{multiple} recursive steps. This strategy provides a tractable curriculum of intermediate states, while better aligning training with testing and incentivizing non-greedy, forward-looking generation. Through extensive experiments, we show this approach outperforms the Tiny Recursion Model (TRM) on ARC-AGI, where it recently achieved breakthrough performance.

This research investigates the performance and efficacy of machine learning models in stock prediction, comparing Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), Quantum Qubit-based Neural Networks (QQBNs), and Quantum Qutrit-based Neural Networks (QQTNs). By outlining methodologies, architectures, and training procedures, the study highlights significant differences in training times and performance metrics across models. While all models demonstrate robust accuracies above 70%, the Quantum Qutrit-based Neural Network consistently outperforms with advantages in risk-adjusted returns, measured by the Sharpe ratio, greater consistency in prediction quality through the Information Coefficient, and enhanced robustness under varying market conditions. The QQTN not only surpasses its classical and qubit-based counterparts in multiple quantitative and qualitative metrics but also achieves comparable performance with significantly reduced training times. These results showcase the promising prospects of Quantum Qutrit-based Neural Networks in practical financial applications, where real-time processing is critical. By achieving superior accuracy, efficiency, and adaptability, the proposed models underscore the transformative potential of quantum-inspired approaches, paving the way for their integration into computationally intensive fields.

Quantum kernel methods have been proposed as a promising approach for leveraging near-term quantum computers for supervised learning, yet rigorous benchmarks against strong classical baselines remain scarce. We present a comprehensive empirical study of quantum kernel support vector machines (QSVMs) across nine binary classification datasets, four quantum feature maps, three classical kernels, and multiple noise models, totalling 970 experiments with strict nested cross-validation. Our analysis spans four phases: (i) statistical significance testing, revealing that none of 29 pairwise quantum-classical comparisons reach significance at $α= 0.05$; (ii) learning curve analysis over six training fractions, showing steeper quantum slopes on six of eight datasets that nonetheless fail to close the gap to the best classical baseline; (iii) hardware validation on IBM ibm_fez (Heron r2), demonstrating kernel fidelity $r \geq 0.976$ across six experiments; and (iv) seed sensitivity analysis confirming reproducibility (mean CV 1.4%). A Kruskal-Wallis factorial analysis reveals that dataset choice dominates performance variance ($\varepsilon^2 = 0.73$), while kernel type accounts for only 9%. Spectral analysis offers a mechanistic explanation: current quantum feature maps produce eigenspectra that are either too flat or too concentrated, missing the intermediate profile of the best classical kernel, the radial basis function (RBF). Quantum kernel training (QKT) via kernel-target alignment yields the single competitive result -- balanced accuracy 0.968 on breast cancer -- but with ~2,000x computational overhead. Our findings provide actionable guidelines for quantum kernel research. The complete benchmark suite is publicly available to facilitate reproduction and extension.

We propose a scalable, multifactorial experimental framework that systematically probes LLM sensitivity to subtle semantic changes in pairwise document comparison. We analogize this as a needle-in-a-haystack problem: a single semantically altered sentence (the needle) is embedded within surrounding context (the hay), and we vary the perturbation type (negation, conjunction swap, named entity replacement), context type (original vs. topically unrelated), needle position, and document length across all combinations, testing five LLMs on tens of thousands of document pairs. Our analysis reveals several striking findings. First, LLMs exhibit a within-document positional bias distinct from previously studied candidate-order effects: most models penalize semantic differences more harshly when they occur earlier in a document. Second, when the altered sentence is surrounded by topically unrelated context, it systematically lowers similarity scores and induces bipolarized scores that indicate either very low or very high similarity. This is consistent with an interpretive frame account in which topically-related context may allow models to contextualize and downweight the alterations. Third, each LLM produces a qualitatively distinct scoring distribution, a stable "fingerprint" that is invariant to perturbation type, yet all models share a universal hierarchy in how leniently they treat different perturbation types. Together, these results demonstrate that LLM semantic similarity scores are sensitive to document structure, context coherence, and model identity in ways that go beyond the semantic change itself, and that the proposed framework offers a practical, LLM-agnostic toolkit for auditing and comparing scoring behavior across current and future models.

Large language models (LLMs) have enabled natural-language-driven automation of electronic design automation (EDA) workflows, but reliable execution of generated scripts remains a fundamental challenge. In LLM-based EDA tasks, failures arise not from syntax errors but from violations of implicit structural dependencies over design objects, including invalid acquisition paths, missing prerequisites, and incompatible API usage. Existing approaches address these failures through tool-in-the-loop debugging, repeatedly executing and repairing programs using runtime feedback. While effective, this paradigm couples correctness to repeated tool invocation, leading to high latency and poor scalability in multi-step settings. We propose to eliminate tool-in-the-loop debugging by enforcing structural correctness prior to execution. Each task is represented as a structural dependency graph that serves as an explicit execution contract, and a verifier-guided synthesis framework enforces this contract through graph-conditioned retrieval, constrained generation, and staged pre-execution verification with diagnosis-driven repair. On single-step tasks, our method improves pass rate from 73.0% (LLM+RAG) and 76.0% (tool-in-loop) to 82.5%, while requiring exactly one tool call per task and reducing total tool calls by more than 2x. On multi-step tasks, pass rate improves from 30.0% to 70.0%, and further to 84.0% with trajectory-level reflection. Uncertainty-aware filtering further reduces verifier false positives from 20.0% to 6.7% and improves precision from 80.0% to 93.3%. These results show that enforcing structural consistency prior to execution decouples correctness from tool interaction, improving both reliability and efficiency in long-horizon EDA code generation.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) surrogate models provide a computationally efficient alternative to full-physics simulations, but no public datasets currently exist for training and validating models of high-explosive-driven, multi-material shock dynamics. Simulating shock propagation is challenging due to the need for material-specific equations of state (EOS) and models of plasticity, phase change, damage, fluid instabilities, and multi-material interactions. Explosive-driven shocks further require reactive material models to capture detonation physics. To address this gap, we introduce the High-Explosives and Affected Targets (HEAT) dataset, a physics-rich collection of two-dimensional, cylindrically symmetric simulations generated using an Eulerian multi-material shock-propagation code developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. HEAT consists of two partitions: expanding shock-cylinder (CYL) simulations and Perturbed Layered Interface (PLI) simulations. Each entry includes time series of thermodynamic fields (pressure, density, temperature), kinematic fields (position, velocity), and continuum quantities such as stress. The CYL partition spans a range of materials, including metals (aluminum, copper, depleted uranium, stainless steel, tantalum), a polymer, water, gases (air, nitrogen), and a detonating material. The PLI partition explores varied geometries with fixed materials: copper, aluminum, stainless steel, polymer, and high explosive. HEAT captures key phenomena such as shock propagation, momentum transfer, plastic deformation, and thermal effects, providing a benchmark dataset for AI/ML models of multi-material shock physics.

Scaling data and artificial neural networks has transformed AI, driving breakthroughs in language and vision. Whether similar principles apply to modeling brain activity remains unclear. Here we leveraged a dataset of 3.1 million neurons from the visual cortex of 73 mice across 323 sessions, totaling more than 150 billion neural tokens recorded during natural movies, images and parametric stimuli, and behavior. We train multi-modal, multi-task models that support three regimes flexibly at test time: neural prediction, behavioral decoding, neural forecasting, or any combination of the three. OmniMouse achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming specialized baselines across nearly all evaluation regimes. We find that performance scales reliably with more data, but gains from increasing model size saturate. This inverts the standard AI scaling story: in language and computer vision, massive datasets make parameter scaling the primary driver of progress, whereas in brain modeling -- even in the mouse visual cortex, a relatively simple system -- models remain data-limited despite vast recordings. The observation of systematic scaling raises the possibility of phase transitions in neural modeling, where larger and richer datasets might unlock qualitatively new capabilities, paralleling the emergent properties seen in large language models. Code available at https://github.com/enigma-brain/omnimouse.

Recovering latent structure from count data has received considerable attention in network inference, particularly when one seeks both cross-group interactions and within-group similarity patterns in bipartite networks, which is widely used in ecology research. Such networks are often sparse and inherently imperfect in their detection. Existing models mainly focus on interaction recovery, while the induced similarity graphs are much less studied. Moreover, sparsity is often not controlled, and scale is unbalanced, leading to oversparse or poorly rescaled estimates with degrading structural recovery. To address these issues, we propose a framework for structured sparse nonnegative low-rank factorization with detection probability estimation. We impose nonconvex $\ell_{1/2}$ regularization on the latent similarity and connectivity structures to promote sparsity within-group similarity and cross-group connectivity with better relative scale. The resulting optimization problem is nonconvex and nonsmooth. To solve it, we develop an ADMM-based algorithm with adaptive penalization and scale-aware initialization and establish its asymptotic feasibility and KKT stationarity of cluster points under mild regularity conditions. Experiments on synthetic and real-world ecological datasets demonstrate improved recovery of latent factors and similarity/connectivity structure relative to existing baselines.

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a fundamental tool for representation learning, but its global linear formulation fails to capture the structure of data supported on curved manifolds. In contrast, manifold learning methods model nonlinearity but often sacrifice the spectral structure and stability of PCA. We propose \emph{Geodesic Tangent Space Aggregation PCA (GTSA-PCA)}, a geometric extension of PCA that integrates curvature awareness and geodesic consistency within a unified spectral framework. Our approach replaces the global covariance operator with curvature-weighted local covariance operators defined over a $k$-nearest neighbor graph, yielding local tangent subspaces that adapt to the manifold while suppressing high-curvature distortions. We then introduce a geodesic alignment operator that combines intrinsic graph distances with subspace affinities to globally synchronize these local representations. The resulting operator admits a spectral decomposition whose leading components define a geometry-aware embedding. We further incorporate semi-supervised information to guide the alignment, improving discriminative structure with minimal supervision. Experiments on real datasets show consistent improvements over PCA, Kernel PCA, Supervised PCA and strong graph-based baselines such as UMAP, particularly in small sample size and high-curvature regimes. Our results position GTSA-PCA as a principled bridge between statistical and geometric approaches to dimensionality reduction.

Despite the perceived success of large-scale dataset distillation (DD) methods, recent evidence finds that simple random image baselines perform on-par with state-of-theart DD methods like SRe2L due to the use of soft labels during downstream model training. This is in contrast with the findings in coreset literature, where high-quality coresets consistently outperform random subsets in the hardlabel (HL) setting. To understand this discrepancy, we perform a detailed scalability analysis to examine the role of data quality under different label regimes, ranging from abundant soft labels (termed as SL+KD regime) to fixed soft labels (SL) and hard labels (HL). Our analysis reveals that high-quality coresets fail to convincingly outperform the random baseline in both SL and SL+KD regimes. In the SL+KD setting, performance further approaches nearoptimal levels relative to the full dataset, regardless of subset size or quality, for a given compute budget. This performance saturation calls into question the widespread practice of using soft labels for model evaluation, where unlike the HL setting, subset quality has negligible influence. A subsequent systematic evaluation of five large-scale and four small-scale DD methods in the HL setting reveals that only RDED reliably outperforms random baselines on ImageNet-1K, but can still lag behind strong coreset methods due to its over-reliance on easy sample patches. Based on this, we introduce CAD-Prune, a compute-aware pruning metric that efficiently identifies samples of optimal difficulty for a given compute budget, and use it to develop CA2D, a compute-aligned DD method, outperforming current DD methods on ImageNet-1K at various IPC settings. Together, our findings uncover many insights into current DD research and establish useful tools to advance dataefficient learning for both coresets and DD.

3D-IC netlist partitioning is commonly optimized using proxy objectives, while final PPA is treated as a costly evaluation rather than an optimization signal. This proxy-driven paradigm makes it difficult to reliably translate additional PPA evaluations into better PPA outcomes. To bridge this gap, we present DOPP (D-Optimal PPA-driven partitioning selection), an approach that bridges the gap between proxies and true PPA metrics. Across eight 3D-IC designs, our framework improves PPA over Open3DBench (average relative improvements of 9.99% congestion, 7.87% routed wirelength, 7.75% WNS, 21.85% TNS, and 1.18% power). Compared with exhaustive evaluation over the full candidate set, DOPP achieves comparable best-found PPA while evaluating only a small fraction of candidates, substantially reducing evaluation cost. By parallelizing evaluations, our method delivers these gains while maintaining wall-clock runtime comparable to traditional baselines.

Large language model (LLM)-based systems are increasingly deployed to conduct scientific research autonomously, yet whether their reasoning adheres to the epistemic norms that make scientific inquiry self-correcting is poorly understood. Here, we evaluate LLM-based scientific agents across eight domains, spanning workflow execution to hypothesis-driven inquiry, through more than 25,000 agent runs and two complementary lenses: (i) a systematic performance analysis that decomposes the contributions of the base model and the agent scaffold, and (ii) a behavioral analysis of the epistemological structure of agent reasoning. We observe that the base model is the primary determinant of both performance and behavior, accounting for 41.4% of explained variance versus 1.5% for the scaffold. Across all configurations, evidence is ignored in 68% of traces, refutation-driven belief revision occurs in 26%, and convergent multi-test evidence is rare. The same reasoning pattern appears whether the agent executes a computational workflow or conducts hypothesis-driven inquiry. They persist even when agents receive near-complete successful reasoning trajectories as context, and the resulting unreliability compounds across repeated trials in epistemically demanding domains. Thus, current LLM-based agents execute scientific workflows but do not exhibit the epistemic patterns that characterize scientific reasoning. Outcome-based evaluation cannot detect these failures, and scaffold engineering alone cannot repair them. Until reasoning itself becomes a training target, the scientific knowledge produced by such agents cannot be justified by the process that generated it.

Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) achieve high-fidelity synthesis but suffer from latent space brittleness, causing discontinuous semantic jumps during editing. We introduce a Riemannian framework to diagnose this instability by analyzing the generative Jacobian, decomposing geometry into \textit{Local Scaling} (capacity) and \textit{Local Complexity} (curvature). Our study uncovers a \textbf{``Geometric Decoupling"}: while curvature in normal generation functionally encodes image detail, OOD generation exhibits a functional decoupling where extreme curvature is wasted on unstable semantic boundaries rather than perceptible details. This geometric misallocation identifies ``Geometric Hotspots" as the structural root of instability, providing a robust intrinsic metric for diagnosing generative reliability.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in settings where reliable visual grounding carries operational consequences, yet their behavior under progressively coercive prompt phrasing remains undercharacterized. Existing hallucination benchmarks predominantly rely on neutral prompts and binary detection, leaving open how both the incidence and the intensity of fabrication respond to graded linguistic pressure across structurally distinct task types. We present Ghost-100, a procedurally constructed benchmark of 800 synthetically generated images spanning eight categories across three task families -- text-illegibility, time-reading, and object-absence -- each designed under a negative-ground-truth principle that guarantees the queried target is absent, illegible, or indeterminate by construction. Every image is paired with five prompts drawn from a structured 5-Level Prompt Intensity Framework, holding the image and task identity fixed while varying only directive force, so that tone is isolated as the sole independent variable. We adopt a dual-track evaluation protocol: a rule-based H-Rate measuring the proportion of responses in which a model crosses from grounded refusal into unsupported positive commitment, and a GPT-4o-mini-judged H-Score on a 1-5 scale characterizing the confidence and specificity of fabrication once it occurs. We additionally release a three-stage automated validation workflow, which retrospectively confirms 717 of 800 images as strictly compliant. Evaluating nine open-weight VLMs, we find that H-Rate and H-Score dissociate substantially across model families, reading-style and presence-detection subsets respond to prompt pressure in qualitatively different ways, and several models exhibit non-monotonic sensitivity peaking at intermediate tone levels -- patterns that aggregate metrics obscure.

Lossy compression is widely used to reduce storage and I/O costs for large-scale particle datasets in scientific applications such as cosmology, molecular dynamics, and fluid dynamics, where clustering structures (e.g., single-linkage or Friends-of-Friends) are critical for downstream analysis; however, existing compressors typically provide only pointwise error bounds on particle positions and offer no guarantees on preserving clustering outcomes, and even small perturbations can alter cluster connectivity and compromise scientific validity. We propose a correction-based technique to preserve single-linkage clustering under lossy compression, operating on decompressed data from off-the-shelf compressors such as SZ3 and Draco. Our key contributions are threefold: (1) a clustering-aware correction algorithm that identifies vulnerable particle pairs via spatial partitioning and local neighborhood search; (2) an optimization-based formulation that enforces clustering consistency using projected gradient descent with a loss that encodes pairwise distance violations; and (3) a scalable GPU-accelerated and distributed implementation for large-scale datasets. Experiments on cosmology and molecular dynamics datasets show that our method effectively preserves clustering results while maintaining competitive compression performance compared with SZ3, ZFP, Draco, LCP, and space-filling-curve-based schemes.

We study online learning for new products on a platform that makes capacity-constrained assortment decisions on which products to offer. For a newly listed product, its quality is initially unknown, and quality information propagates through social learning: when a customer purchases a new product and leaves a review, its quality is revealed to both the platform and future customers. Since reviews require purchases, the platform must feature new products in the assortment ("explore") to generate reviews to learn about new products. Such exploration is costly because customer demand for new products is lower than for incumbent products. We characterize the optimal assortments for exploration to minimize regret, addressing two questions. (1) Should the platform offer a new product alone or alongside incumbent products? The former maximizes the purchase probability of the new product but yields lower short-term revenue. Despite the lower purchase probability, we show it is always optimal to pair the new product with the top incumbent products. (2) With multiple new products, should the platform explore them simultaneously or one at a time? We show that the optimal number of new products to explore simultaneously has a simple threshold structure: it increases with the "potential" of the new products and, surprisingly, does not depend on their individual purchase probabilities. We also show that two canonical bandit algorithms, UCB and Thompson Sampling, both fail in this setting for opposite reasons: UCB over-explores while Thompson Sampling under-explores. Our results provide structural insights on how platforms should learn about new products through assortment decisions.

Model transformations are central to MDE, but formal verification is difficult because mainstream transformation languages are undecidable. DSLTrans was designed to be Turing-incomplete to improve verifiability, yet earlier verification based on path-condition enumeration still suffered exponential blow-up and did not scale to realistic cases. We present a tractable verification workflow for DSLTrans and formalize when it is complete. The method combines three contributions: (i) a Cutoff Theorem proving that bounded model checking is complete for a precise DSLTrans fragment and positive existence/traceability properties, turning an infinite search into a finite computable bound; (ii) composable, soundness-preserving optimizations (per-class bounds, CEGAR-based fragment verification, and trace-aware dependency analysis) that reduce SMT encoding size; and (iii) a Z3-based implementation evaluated on realistic transformations from the ATL Zoo and related benchmarks. On 29 concrete transformations and 899 properties spanning compiler lowering, schema translation, behavioral modeling, graph mapping, and stress tests, 552 properties are proved, 345 produce concrete counterexamples (including intentional negative and boundary cases), and only 2 remain undecided within timeout. For properties beyond the tractability budget, we introduce tractability-driven refinement (precondition specialization, postcondition decomposition, and transformation instrumentation), achieving up to 112x speedup while eliminating spurious counterexamples. The workflow is supported by a web IDE and a concrete execution engine for runtime validation.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models fail systematically on long-horizon manipulation tasks despite strong short-horizon performance. We show that this failure is not resolved by extending context length alone in the current reactive execution setting; instead, it stems from three recurring execution-loop deficiencies: the memory gap, the verification gap, and the recovery gap. We present HELM, a model-agnostic framework that addresses these deficiencies with three components: an Episodic Memory Module (EMM) that retrieves key task history via CLIP-indexed keyframes, a learned State Verifier (SV) that predicts action failure before execution from observation, action, subgoal, and memory-conditioned context, and a Harness Controller (HC) that performs rollback and replanning. The SV is the core learning contribution: it consistently outperforms rule-based feasibility checks and ensemble uncertainty baselines, and its effectiveness depends critically on access to episodic memory. On LIBERO-LONG, HELM improves task success rate by 23.1 percentage points over OpenVLA (58.4% to 81.5%), while extending the context window to H=32 yields only a 5.4-point gain and same-budget LoRA adaptation remains 12.2 points below HELM. HELM also improves long-horizon performance on CALVIN and substantially boosts recovery success under controlled perturbations. Ablations and mechanism analyses isolate the contribution of each component, and we release LIBERO-Recovery as a perturbation-injection protocol for evaluating failure recovery in long-horizon manipulation.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is central to aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it introduces a critical vulnerability: an imperfect Reward Model (RM) can become a single point of failure when it fails to penalize unsafe behaviors. While existing red-teaming approaches primarily target policy-level weaknesses, they overlook what we term systemic weaknesses cases where both the core LLM and the RM fail in tandem. We present ARES, a framework that systematically discovers and mitigates such dual vulnerabilities. ARES employs a ``Safety Mentor'' that dynamically composes semantically coherent adversarial prompts by combining structured component types (topics, personas, tactics, goals) and generates corresponding malicious and safe responses. This dual-targeting approach exposes weaknesses in both the core LLM and the RM simultaneously. Using the vulnerabilities gained, ARES implements a two-stage repair process: first fine-tuning the RM to better detect harmful content, then leveraging the improved RM to optimize the core model. Experiments across multiple adversarial safety benchmarks demonstrate that ARES substantially enhances safety robustness while preserving model capabilities, establishing a new paradigm for comprehensive RLHF safety alignment.

Apple Neural Engine (ANE) is a dedicated neural processing unit (NPU) present in every Apple Silicon chip. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LLMs improve inference efficiency via sparse activation but are challenging for NPUs in three ways: expert routing is unpredictable and introduces dynamic tensor shapes that conflict with the shape-specific constraints of NPUs; several irregular operators, e.g., top-k, scatter/gather, etc., are not NPU-friendly; and launching many small expert kernels incurs substantial dispatch and synchronization overhead. NPUs are designed to offload AI compute from CPU and GPU; our goal is to enable such offloading for MoE inference, particularly during prefill, where long-context workloads consume substantial system resources. This paper presents NPUMoE, a runtime inference engine that accelerates MoE execution on Apple Silicon by offloading dense, static computation to NPU, while preserving a CPU/GPU fallback path for dynamic operations. NPUMoE uses offline calibration to estimate expert capacity and popularity that drives three key techniques: (1) Static tiers for expert capacity to address dynamic expert routing (2) Grouped expert execution to mitigate NPU concurrency limits (3) Load-aware expert compute graph residency to reduce CPU-NPU synchronization overhead. Experiments on Apple M-series devices using three representative MoE LLMs and four long-context workloads show that NPUMoE consistently outperforms baselines, reducing latency by 1.32x-5.55x, improving energy efficiency by 1.81x-7.37x, and reducing CPU-cycle usage by 1.78x-5.54x through effective NPU offloading.

Scientific feasibility assessment asks whether a claim is consistent with established knowledge and whether experimental evidence could support or refute it. We frame feasibility assessment as a diagnostic reasoning task in which, given a hypothesis, a model predicts feasible or infeasible and justifies its decision. We evaluate large language models (LLMs) under controlled knowledge conditions (hypothesis-only, with experiments, with outcomes, or both) and probe robustness by progressively removing portions of the experimental and/or outcome context. Across multiple LLMs and two datasets, providing outcome evidence is generally more reliable than providing experiment descriptions. Outcomes tend to improve accuracy beyond what internal knowledge alone provides, whereas experimental text can be brittle and may degrade performance when the context is incomplete. These findings clarify when experimental evidence benefits LLM-based feasibility assessment and when it introduces fragility.

Semi-Markov Conditional Random Fields (semi-CRFs) assign labels to segments of a sequence rather than to individual positions, enabling exact inference over segment-level features and principled uncertainty estimates at their boundaries. However, existing implementations must materialize a large edge potential tensor whose size grows with sequence length, maximum segment length, and label count, becoming prohibitive for speech-scale state spaces and intractable at genomic scales where sequences can exceed 100,000 positions. This memory bottleneck has limited the adoption of exact segment-level inference for long sequences and large label sets. We identify that the core inefficiency is materializing edge potentials that can instead be evaluated on-the-fly from a compact prefix-sum array, and make several improvements. First, replacing the stored edge tensor with prefix-sum lookup reduces the memory footprint by a factor proportional to the product of segment length and label count. Second, a streaming forward-backward pass with checkpoint-boundary normalization keeps working memory sublinear in sequence length while preserving exact gradients. Third, zero-centered cumulative scores control numerical drift and induce an adaptive duration prior under label imbalance. We integrate these ideas into Flash-SemiCRF, a fused Triton kernel that enables exact semi-CRF inference on previously intractable problem sizes. Available at https://github.com/biobenkj/flash-semicrf.

Existing web agents typically initiate exploration from the root URL, which is inefficient for complex websites with deep hierarchical structures. Without a global view of the website's structure, agents frequently fall into navigation traps, explore irrelevant branches, or fail to reach target information within a limited budget. We propose Mango, a multi-agent web navigation method that leverages the website structure to dynamically determine optimal starting points. We formulate URL selection as a multi-armed bandit problem and employ Thompson Sampling to adaptively allocate the navigation budget across candidate URLs. Furthermore, we introduce an episodic memory component to store navigation history, enabling the agent to learn from previous attempts. Experiments on WebVoyager demonstrate that Mango achieves a success rate of 63.6% when using GPT-5-mini, outperforming the best baseline by 7.3%. Furthermore, on WebWalkerQA, Mango attains a 52.5% success rate, surpassing the best baseline by 26.8%. We also demonstrate the generalizability of Mango using both open-source and closed-source models as backbones. Our data and code are open-source and available at https://github.com/VichyTong/Mango.

Detecting jailbreak behaviour in large language models remains challenging, particularly when strongly aligned models produce harmful outputs only rarely. In this work, we present an empirical study of output based jailbreak detection under realistic conditions using the JailbreakBench Behaviors dataset and multiple generator models with varying alignment strengths. We evaluate both a lexical TF-IDF detector and a generation inconsistency based detector across different sampling budgets. Our results show that single output evaluation systematically underestimates jailbreak vulnerability, as increasing the number of sampled generations reveals additional harmful behaviour. The most significant improvements occur when moving from a single generation to moderate sampling, while larger sampling budgets yield diminishing returns. Cross generator experiments demonstrate that detection signals partially generalise across models, with stronger transfer observed within related model families. A category level analysis further reveals that lexical detectors capture a mixture of behavioural signals and topic specific cues, rather than purely harmful behaviour. Overall, our findings suggest that moderate multi sample auditing provides a more reliable and practical approach for estimating model vulnerability and improving jailbreak detection in large language models. Code will be released.

Translating business problems into well-specified machine learning solutions is a prerequisite for successful AI systems, yet this upstream translation is still one of the least supported steps in existing methodologies. We conduct a structured narrative literature review of 18 approaches spanning requirements engineering (RE), machine learning (ML) project management, and automation. We organize these approaches into a taxonomy of four families and compare them across six input artifact categories, six output artifact categories, and a transformation framework of seven stages, grounded in RE refinement theory and ML lifecycle process. Our study shows that most approaches list ML task or algorithm specification among their expected outputs, yet only four provide partial guidance for deriving it, and none provides systematic guidance. We characterize this gap as the Analytics Translation Problem (ATP) and derive five research recommendations addressing multi-formulation exploration, task derivation guidance, constraint-algorithm filtering, probabilistic traceability, and data-triggered revision.

Fault detection and diagnosis are critical for the optimal and safe operation of industrial processes. The correlations among sensors often display non-Euclidean structures where graph neural networks (GNNs) are widely used therein. However, for large-scale systems, local, global, and dynamic relations extensively exist among sensors, and traditional GNNs often overlook such complex and multi-level structures for various problems including the fault diagnosis. To address this issue, we propose a structure-aware multi-level temporal graph network with local-global feature fusion for industrial fault diagnosis. First, a correlation graph is dynamically constructed using Pearson correlation coefficients to capture relationships among process variables. Then, temporal features are extracted through long short-term memory (LSTM)-based encoder, whereas the spatial dependencies among sensors are learned by graph convolution layers. A multi-level pooling mechanism is used to gradually coarsen and learn meaningful graph structures, to capture higher-level patterns while keeping important fault related details. Finally, a fusion step is applied to combine both detailed local features and overall global patterns before the final prediction. Experimental evaluations on the Tennessee Eastman process (TEP) demonstrate that the proposed model achieves superior fault diagnosis performance, particularly for complex fault scenarios, outperforming various baseline methods.

The rapid growth of large language models (LLMs) and AI workloads has pushed monolithic silicon to its reticle and economic limits, accelerating the adoption of 2.5D/3D chiplet systems. However, these systems increase design complexity by requiring co-design across multiple levels of the computing stack, including application, architecture, chip, and package. The resulting design space is highly combinatorial, with trade-offs among latency, energy, area, and cost. To address this challenge, we propose CHICO-Agent, an LLM-driven optimization framework for 2.5D/3D chiplet-based systems. CHICO-Agent maintains a persistent knowledge base to capture parameter-outcome trends and coordinates exploration through an admin-field multi-agent workflow. Compared with a simulated-annealing baseline, CHICO-Agent finds lower-cost configurations and provides an interpretable audit trail for designers.

Class imbalance is a widespread challenge in NLP tasks, significantly hindering robust performance across diverse domains and applications. We introduce Hardness-Aware Meta-Resample (HAMR), a unified framework that adaptively addresses both class imbalance and data difficulty. HAMR employs bi-level optimizations to dynamically estimate instance-level weights that prioritize genuinely challenging samples and minority classes, while a neighborhood-aware resampling mechanism amplifies training focus on hard examples and their semantically similar neighbors. We validate HAMR on six imbalanced datasets covering multiple tasks and spanning biomedical, disaster response, and sentiment domains. Experimental results show that HAMR achieves substantial improvements for minority classes and consistently outperforms strong baselines. Extensive ablation studies demonstrate that our proposed modules synergistically contribute to performance gains and highlight HAMR as a flexible and generalizable approach for class imbalance adaptation. Code is available at https://github.com/trust-nlp/ImbalanceLearning.

Low-resource machine translation requires methods that differ from those used for high-resource languages. This paper proposes a novel in-context learning approach to support low-resource machine translation of the Coptic language to English, with syntactic augmentation from Universal Dependencies parses of input sentences. Building on existing work using bilingual dictionaries to support inference for vocabulary items, we add several representations of syntactic analyses to our inputs , specifically exploring the inclusion of raw parser outputs, verbalizations of parses in plain English, and targeted instructions of difficult constructions identified in sub-trees and how they can be translated. Our results show that while syntactic information alone is not as useful as dictionary-based glosses, combining retrieved dictionary items with syntactic information achieves significant gains across model sizes, achieving new state-of-the-art translation results for Coptic.

The retina provides a unique, noninvasive window into Alzheimer's disease (AD) and dementia, capturing early structural changes through morphometric features, while systemic and lifestyle risk factors reflect well-established contributors to disease susceptibility long before clinical symptom onset. However, current retinal analysis frameworks typically model imaging and risk factors separately, limiting their ability to capture joint multimodal patterns critical for early risk prediction. Moreover, existing methods rarely incorporate mechanisms to organize or align patients with similar retinal and clinical characteristics, constraining the learning of coherent cross-modal associations. To address these limitations, we introduce REVEAL (REtinal-risk Vision-Language Early Alzheimer's Learning), a framework that aligns color fundus photographs with individualized disease-specific risk profiles for predicting incident AD and dementia, on average 8 years before diagnosis (range: 1-11 years). Because real-world risk factors are structured questionnaire data, we translate them into clinically interpretable narratives compatible with pretrained vision-language models (VLMs). We further propose a group-aware contrastive learning (GACL) strategy that clusters patients with similar retinal morphometry and risk factors as positive pairs, strengthening multimodal alignment. This unified representation learning framework substantially outperforms state-of-the-art retinal imaging models paired with clinical text encoders, as well as general-purpose VLMs, demonstrating the value of jointly modeling retinal biomarkers and clinical risk factors. By providing a generalizable and noninvasive approach for early AD and dementia risk stratification, REVEAL has the potential to enable earlier intervention and improve preventive care at the population level.

Large Language Models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to optimization-based jailbreak attacks that exploit internal gradient structure. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used for interpretability, their robustness implications remain underexplored. We present a study of integrating pretrained SAEs into transformer residual streams at inference time, without modifying model weights or blocking gradients. Across four model families (Gemma, LLaMA, Mistral, Qwen) and two strong white-box attacks (GCG, BEAST) plus three black-box benchmarks, SAE-augmented models achieve up to a 5x reduction in jailbreak success rate relative to the undefended baseline and reduce cross-model attack transferability. Parametric ablations reveal (i) a monotonic dose-response relationship between L0 sparsity and attack success rate, and (ii) a layer-dependent defense-utility tradeoff, where intermediate layers balance robustness and clean performance. These findings are consistent with a representational bottleneck hypothesis: sparse projection reshapes the optimization geometry exploited by jailbreak attacks.

Understanding social polarization requires integrating insights from psychology, sociology, and complex systems science. Agent-based modeling provides a natural framework to combine perspectives from different fields and explore how individual cognition shapes collective outcomes. This study introduces a novel agent-based model that integrates two cognitive and social mechanisms: the desire to be unique within a group (optimal distinctiveness theory) and the tendency to simplify complex information (cognitive compression). In the model, virtual agents interact in pairs and decide whether to adopt each other's opinions by balancing two opposing drives: maximizing opinion diversity within their local social group while simplifying the overall opinion landscape, with both evaluated using Shannon entropy. We show that the combination of these mechanisms can reproduce real-world patterns, such as the emergence of distinct heterogeneous opinion clusters. Moreover, unlike many existing models where opinions become fixed once opinion groups form, individuals in our model continue to adjust their opinions after clusters emerge, leading to ongoing variation within and between opinion groups. Computational experiments reveal that polarization emerges when local group sizes are moderate (consistent with Dunbar's number), while smaller groups cause fragmentation and larger ones hinder distinct cluster formation. Higher cognitive compression increases unpredictability, while lower compression produces more consistent group structures. These results demonstrate how simple psychological rules can generate complex, realistic social behavior and advance understanding of polarization in human societies.

An active challenge in developing multimodal machine learning (ML) models for healthcare is handling missing modalities during training and deployment. As clinical datasets are inherently temporal and sparse in terms of modality presence, capturing the underlying predictive signal via diagnostic multimodal ML models while retaining model explainability remains an ongoing challenge. In this work, we address this by re-framing clinical diagnosis as an autoregressive sequence modeling task, utilizing causal decoders from large language models (LLMs) to model a patient's multimodal trajectory. We first introduce a missingness-aware contrastive pre-training objective that integrates multiple modalities in datasets with missingness in a shared latent space. We then show that autoregressive sequence modeling with transformer-based architectures outperforms baselines on the MIMIC-IV and eICU fine-tuning benchmarks. Finally, we use interpretability techniques to move beyond performance boosts and find that across various patient stays, removing modalities leads to divergent behavior that our contrastive pre-training mitigates. By abstracting clinical diagnosis as sequence modeling and interpreting patient stay trajectories, we develop a framework to profile and handle missing modalities while addressing the canonical desideratum of safe, transparent clinical AI.

Nonlinear machine-learning models are increasingly used to discover causal relationships in time-series data, yet the interpretation of their outputs remains poorly understood. In particular, causal scores produced by regularized neural autoregressive models are often treated as analogues of regression coefficients, leading to misleading claims of statistical significance. In this paper, we argue that causal relevance in nonlinear time-series models should be evaluated through forecast necessity rather than coefficient magnitude, and we present a practical evaluation procedure for doing so. We present an interpretable evaluation framework based on systematic edge ablation and forecast comparison, which tests whether a candidate causal relationship is required for accurate prediction. Using Neural Additive Vector Autoregression as a case study model, we apply this framework to a real-world case study of democratic development, modeled as a multivariate time series of panel data - democracy indicators across 139 countries. We show that relationships with similar causal scores can differ dramatically in their predictive necessity due to redundancy, temporal persistence, and regime-specific effects. Our results demonstrate how forecast-necessity testing supports more reliable causal reasoning in applied AI systems and provides practical guidance for interpreting nonlinear time-series models in high-stakes domains.

Masked diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are a promising alternative to autoregressive generation. While reinforcement learning (RL) methods have recently been adapted to dLLM fine-tuning, their objectives typically depend on sequence-level marginal likelihoods, which are intractable for masked diffusion models. To address this, we derive Discrete Tilt Matching (DTM), a likelihood-free method that recasts dLLM fine-tuning as state-level matching of local unmasking posteriors under reward tilting. DTM takes the form of a weighted cross-entropy objective with explicit minimizer, and admits control variates that improve training stability. On a synthetic maze-planning task, we analyze how DTM's annealing schedule and control variates affect training stability and prevent mode collapse. At scale, fine-tuning LLaDA-8B-Instruct with DTM yields strong gains on Sudoku and Countdown while remaining competitive on MATH500 and GSM8K.

Masked diffusion language models such as LLaDA2.1 rely on Token-to-Token (T2T) editing to correct their own generation errors: whenever a different token crosses a confidence threshold, the committed token is overwritten. We identify three structural failure modes of this rule. The trigger cannot fire when no single alternative is confident enough; the replacement is computed under a context that may itself contain errors; and the uniform perturbations used to train the T2T stream do not resemble the coherent, semantically plausible mistakes that the model actually makes at inference. As an alternative, we propose Token-to-Mask (T2M) remasking. Rather than overwriting a suspect token with a new guess, T2M resets the position to the mask state, so that the next denoising step re-predicts it from an in-distribution context. The method is training-free, modifies only the editing rule, and introduces no new parameters. We pair it with three detection heuristics and give a short theoretical account of why a mask is a better conditioning signal than an erroneous token. Across 8 benchmarks, T2M improves accuracy on tasks that require exact token-level output. Its largest gain is +5.92 points on CMATH, where we attribute 79.9% of baseline errors to last-mile corruption (correct reasoning followed by a garbled final answer); T2M repairs 41.3% of these cases.

Humor holds up a mirror to social perception: what we find funny often reflects who we are and how we judge others. When language models engage with humor, their reactions expose the social assumptions they have internalized from training data. In this paper, we investigate counterfactual unfairness through humor by observing how the model's responses change when we swap who speaks and who is addressed while holding other factors constant. Our framework spans three tasks: humor generation refusal, speaker intention inference, and relational/societal impact prediction, covering both identity-agnostic humor and identity-specific disparagement humor. We introduce interpretable bias metrics that capture asymmetric patterns under identity swaps. Experiments across state-of-the-art models reveal consistent relational disparities: jokes told by privileged speakers are refused up to 67.5% more often, judged as malicious 64.7% more frequently, and rated up to 1.5 points higher in social harm on a 5-point scale. These patterns highlight how sensitivity and stereotyping coexist in generative models, complicating efforts toward fairness and cultural alignment.

Many neural network (NN) verification systems represent the network's input-output relation as a constraint program. Sound and complete, representations involve integer constraints, for simulating the activations. Recent works convexly relax the integer constraints, improving performance, at the cost of soundness. Convex relaxations consider outputs that are unreachable by the original network. We study the worst case divergence between the original network and its convex relaxations; both qualitatively and quantitatively. The relaxations' space forms a lattice, where the top element corresponds to a full relaxation, with every neuron linearized. The bottom element corresponds to the original network. We provide analytical upper and lower bounds for the $\ell_\infty$-distance between the fully relaxed and original outputs. This distance grows exponentially, w.r.t. the network's depth, and linearly w.r.t. the input's radius. The misclassification probability exhibits a step-like behavior, w.r.t. input radius. Our results are supported by experiments on MNIST, Fashion MNIST and random networks.

Machine learning emulators have shown extraordinary skill in forecasting atmospheric states, and their application to global ocean dynamics offers similar promise. Here, we adapt the GraphCast architecture into a dedicated ocean-only emulator, driven by prescribed atmospheric conditions, for medium-range predictions. The emulator is trained on NOAA's UFS-Replay dataset. Using a 24 hour time step, single initial condition, and without using autoregressive training, we produce an emulator that provides skillful forecasts for 10-15 day lead times. We further demonstrate the use of Mahalanobis distance as loss that improves the forecast skill compared to the Mean Squared Error loss by explicitly accounting for the correlations between tendencies of the target variables. Using spatial correlation analysis of the forecasted fields, we also show that the proposed correlation-aware loss acts as a statistical-dynamical regularizer for the slow, correlated dynamics of the global oceans, offering a better background forecast for downstream tasks like data assimilation.

Users typically interact with and evaluate language models via single outputs, but each output is just one sample from a broad distribution of possible completions. This interaction hides distributional structure such as modes, uncommon edge cases, and sensitivity to small prompt changes, leading users to over-generalize from anecdotes when iterating on prompts for open-ended tasks. Informed by a formative study with researchers who use LMs (n=13) examining when stochasticity matters in practice, how they reason about distributions over language, and where current workflows break down, we introduce GROVE. GROVE is an interactive visualization that represents multiple LM generations as overlapping paths through a text graph, revealing shared structure, branching points, and clusters while preserving access to raw outputs. We evaluate across three crowdsourced user studies (N=47, 44, and 40 participants) targeting complementary distributional tasks. Our results support a hybrid workflow: graph summaries improve structural judgments such as assessing diversity, while direct output inspection remains stronger for detail-oriented questions.

Cross-lingual transfer in NLP is often hindered by the ``script barrier'' where differences in writing systems inhibit transfer learning between languages. Transliteration, the process of converting the script, has emerged as a powerful technique to bridge this gap by increasing lexical overlap. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the application of transliteration in cross-lingual NLP. We present a taxonomy of key motivations to utilize transliterations in language models, and provide an overview of different approaches of incorporating transliterations as input. We analyze the evolution and effectiveness of these methods, discussing the critical trade-offs involved, and contextualize their need in modern LLMs. The review explores various settings that show how transliteration is beneficial, including handling code-mixed text, leveraging language family relatedness, and pragmatic gains in inference efficiency. Based on this analysis, we provide concrete recommendations for researchers on selecting and implementing the most appropriate transliteration strategy based on their specific language, task, and resource constraints.

Agentic security systems increasingly audit live targets with tool-using LLMs, but prior systems fix a single coordination topology, leaving unclear when additional agents help and when they only add cost. We treat topology choice as an empirical systems question. We introduce a controlled benchmark of 20 interactive targets (10 web/API and 10 binary), each exposing one endpoint-reachable ground-truth vulnerability, evaluated in whitebox and blackbox modes. The core study executes 600 runs over five architecture families, three model families, and both access modes, with a separate 60-run long-context pilot reported only in the appendix. On the completed core benchmark, detection-any reaches 58.0% and validated detection reaches 49.8%. MAS-Indep attains the highest validated detection rate (64.2%), while SAS is the strongest efficiency baseline at $0.058 per validated finding. Whitebox materially outperforms blackbox (67.0% vs. 32.7% validated detection), and web materially outperforms binary (74.3% vs. 25.3%). Bootstrap confidence intervals and paired target-level deltas show that the dominant effects are observability and domain, while some leading whitebox topologies remain statistically close. The main result is a non-monotonic cost-quality frontier: broader coordination can improve coverage, but it does not dominate once latency, token cost, and exploit-validation difficulty are taken into account.

Today, machine learning is widely applied in sensitive, security-related, and financially lucrative applications. Model extraction attacks undermine current business models where a model owner sells model access, e.g., via MLaaS APIs. Additionally, stolen models can enable powerful white-box attacks, facilitating privacy attacks on sensitive training data, and model evasion. In this paper, we focus on Decision Trees (DT), which are widely deployed in practice. Existing black-box extraction attacks for DTs are either query-intensive, make strong assumptions about the DT structure, or rely on rich API information. To limit attacks to the black-box setting, CPU vendors introduced Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) that use hardware-mechanisms to isolate workloads from external parties, e.g., MLaaS providers. We introduce TrEEStealer, a high-fidelity extraction attack for stealing TEE-protected DTs. TrEEStealer exploits TEE-specific side-channels to steal DTs efficiently and without strong assumptions about the API output or DT structure. The extraction efficacy stems from a novel algorithm that maximizes the information derived from each query by coupling Control-Flow Information (CFI) with passive information tracking. We use two primitives to acquire CFI: for AMD SEV, we follow previous work using the SEV-Step framework and performance counters. For Intel SGX, we reproduce prior findings on current Xeon 6 CPUs and construct a new primitive to efficiently extract the branch history of inference runs through the Branch-History-Register. We found corresponding vulnerabilities in three popular libraries: OpenCV, mlpack, and emlearn. We show that TrEEStealer achieves superior efficiency and extraction fidelity compared to prior attacks. Our work establishes a new state-of-the-art for DT extraction and confirms that TEEs fail to protect against control-flow leakage.

Earth observation foundation models encode land surface information into dense embedding vectors, yet the geometric structure of these representations and its implications for downstream reasoning remain underexplored. We characterize the manifold geometry of Google AlphaEarth's 64-dimensional embeddings across 12.1 million Continental United States samples (2017--2023) and develop an agentic system that leverages this geometric understanding for environmental reasoning. The manifold is non-Euclidean: effective dimensionality is 13.3 (participation ratio) from 64 raw dimensions, with local intrinsic dimensionality of approximately 10. Tangent spaces rotate substantially, with 84\% of locations exceeding 60\textdegree{} and local-global alignment (mean$|\cosθ| = 0.17$) approaching the random baseline of 0.125. Supervised linear probes indicate that concept directions rotate across the manifold, and compositional vector arithmetic using both PCA-derived and probe-derived directions yields poor precision. Retrieval instead produces physically coherent results, with local geometry predicting retrieval coherence ($R^2 = 0.32$). Building on this characterization, we introduce an agentic system with nine specialized tools that decomposes environmental queries into reasoning chains over a FAISS-indexed embedding database. A five-condition ablation (120 queries, three complexity tiers) shows that embedding retrieval dominates response quality ($μ= 3.79 \pm 0.90$ vs.\ $3.03 \pm 0.77$ parametric-only; scale 1--5), with peak performance on multi-step comparisons ($μ= 4.28 \pm 0.43$). A cross-model benchmark show that geometric tools reduce Sonnet 4.5's score by 0.12 points but improve Opus 4.6's by 0.07, with Opus achieving higher geometric grounding (3.38 vs.\ 2.64), suggesting that the value of geometric characterization scales with the reasoning capability of the consuming model.

Probing has shown that language model representations encode rich linguistic information, but it remains unclear whether they also capture cognitive signals about human processing. In this work, we probe language model representations for human reading times. Using regularized linear regression on two eye-tracking corpora spanning five languages (English, Greek, Hebrew, Russian, and Turkish), we compare the representations from every model layer against scalar predictors -- surprisal, information value, and logit-lens surprisal. We find that the representations from early layers outperform surprisal in predicting early-pass measures such as first fixation and gaze duration. The concentration of predictive power in the early layers suggests that human-like processing signatures are captured by low-level structural or lexical representations, pointing to a functional alignment between model depth and the temporal stages of human reading. In contrast, for late-pass measures such as total reading time, scalar surprisal remains superior, despite its being a much more compressed representation. We also observe performance gains when using both surprisal and early-layer representations. Overall, we find that the best-performing predictor varies strongly depending on the language and eye-tracking measure.

Local prediction-error-based curiosity rewards focus on the current transition without considering the world model's cumulative prediction error across all visited transitions. We introduce Curiosity-Critic, which grounds its intrinsic reward in the improvement of this cumulative objective, and show that it reduces to a tractable per-step form: the difference between the current prediction error and the asymptotic error baseline of the current state transition. We estimate this baseline online with a learned critic co-trained alongside the world model; regressing a single scalar, the critic converges well before the world model saturates, redirecting exploration toward learnable transitions without oracle knowledge of the noise floor. The reward is higher for learnable transitions and collapses toward the baseline for stochastic ones, effectively separating epistemic (reducible) from aleatoric (irreducible) prediction error online. Prior prediction-error curiosity formulations, from Schmidhuber (1991) to learned-feature-space variants, emerge as special cases corresponding to specific approximations of this baseline. Experiments on a stochastic grid world show that Curiosity-Critic outperforms prediction-error and visitation-count baselines in convergence speed and final world model accuracy.

Real-world graph applications are generally larger than the size of the cache itself. Due to this reason, the memory hierarchy was identified as a key bottleneck by the earlier works. Undoubtedly, the performance can be achieved by improving cache, there is still a scope for performance gain by improving branch prediction accuracy. In graph processing applications, the occurrence of branch mispredictions is very frequent and is a major limitation for the overall performance. Within a program, there are different kinds of branches that recur throughout its execution. Although lots of branch predictors (BP) have been developed earlier to capture the static and dynamic behavior of branches. Branch predictors can yet be further optimized to handle the branches that cause mispredictions.

Indistinguishability properties such as differential privacy bounds or low empirically measured membership inference are widely treated as proxies to show a model is sufficiently protected against broader memorization risks. However, we show that indistinguishability properties are neither sufficient nor necessary for preventing data extraction in LLM APIs. We formalize a privacy-game separation between extraction and indistinguishability-based privacy, showing that indistinguishability and inextractability are incomparable: upper-bounding distinguishability does not upper-bound extractability. To address this gap, we introduce $(l, b)$-inextractability as a definition that requires at least $2^b$ expected queries for any black-box adversary to induce the LLM API to emit a protected $l$-gram substring. We instantiate this via a worst-case extraction game and derive a rank-based extraction risk upper bound for targeted exact extraction, as well as extensions to cover untargeted and approximate extraction. The resulting estimator captures the extraction risk over multiple attack trials and prefix adaptations. We show that it can provide a tight and efficient estimation for standard greedy extraction and an upper bound on the probabilistic extraction risk given any decoding configuration. We empirically evaluate extractability across different models, clarifying its connection to distinguishability, demonstrating its advantage over existing extraction risk estimators, and providing actionable mitigation guidelines across model training, API access, and decoding configurations in LLM API deployment. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Emory-AIMS/Inextractability.

Mathematical problem solving remains a challenging test of reasoning for large language and multimodal models, yet existing benchmarks are limited in size, language coverage, and task diversity. We introduce MathNet, a high-quality, large-scale, multimodal, and multilingual dataset of Olympiad-level math problems together with a benchmark for evaluating mathematical reasoning in generative models and mathematical retrieval in embedding-based systems. MathNet spans 47 countries, 17 languages, and two decades of competitions, comprising 30,676 expert-authored problems with solutions across diverse domains. In addition to the core dataset, we construct a retrieval benchmark consisting of mathematically equivalent and structurally similar problem pairs curated by human experts. MathNet supports three tasks: (i) Problem Solving, (ii) Math-Aware Retrieval, and (iii) Retrieval-Augmented Problem Solving. Experimental results show that even state-of-the-art reasoning models (78.4% for Gemini-3.1-Pro and 69.3% for GPT-5) remain challenged, while embedding models struggle to retrieve equivalent problems. We further show that retrieval-augmented generation performance is highly sensitive to retrieval quality; for example, DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale achieves gains of up to 12%, obtaining the highest scores on the benchmark. MathNet provides the largest high-quality Olympiad dataset together with the first benchmark for evaluating mathematical problem retrieval, and we publicly release both the dataset and benchmark at https://mathnet.mit.edu.

Modern sequence models are dominated by Transformers, where self-attention mixes information from the visible context in an input-dependent way. However, when retrieval is not sharp and attention remains diffuse over an effective support $S_{\mathrm{eff}}(t)$, the influence of any individual token is diluted, typically scaling as $O(1/S_{\mathrm{eff}}(t))$ and reaching $O(1/\ell)$ for old tokens in full-prefix settings. Structured state-space models process sequences recurrently through an explicit feedback path; selective variants such as Mamba make this feedback input-dependent, yet when freeze time cannot be sustained over long intervals, their long-range sensitivity decays exponentially with lag. Existing architectures therefore either retrieve from the past in a single read or propagate information through a single feedback chain. We introduce Sessa, a decoder that places attention inside a feedback path, enabling recurrent many-path aggregation within a layer. Under stated assumptions, Sessa admits regimes with a power-law memory tail in lag $\ell$ of order $O(\ell^{-β})$ for $0<β<1$, which is asymptotically slower than $1/\ell$; moreover, this rate is tight in an explicit diffuse uniform-routing setting where the influence is $Θ(\ell^{-β})$. Under the same conditions, only Sessa among the compared model classes realizes flexible selective retrieval, including non-decaying profiles. Empirically, under matched architectures and training budgets, Sessa achieves the strongest performance on our long-context benchmarks while remaining competitive with Transformer and Mamba style baselines on short-context language modeling.

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has become the predominant algorithm for on-policy reinforcement learning due to its scalability and empirical robustness across domains. However, there is a significant disconnect between the underlying foundations of trust region methods and the heuristic clipped objective used in PPO. In this paper, we bridge this gap by introducing the Bounded Ratio Reinforcement Learning (BRRL) framework. We formulate a novel regularized and constrained policy optimization problem and derive its analytical optimal solution. We prove that this solution ensures monotonic performance improvement. To handle parameterized policy classes, we develop a policy optimization algorithm called Bounded Policy Optimization (BPO) that minimizes an advantage-weighted divergence between the policy and the analytic optimal solution from BRRL. We further establish a lower bound on the expected performance of the resulting policy in terms of the BPO loss function. Notably, our framework also provides a new theoretical lens to interpret the success of the PPO loss, and connects trust region policy optimization and the Cross-Entropy Method (CEM). We additionally extend BPO to Group-relative BPO (GBPO) for LLM fine-tuning. Empirical evaluations of BPO across MuJoCo, Atari, and complex IsaacLab environments (e.g., Humanoid locomotion), and of GBPO for LLM fine-tuning tasks, demonstrate that BPO and GBPO generally match or outperform PPO and GRPO in stability and final performance.

We present BLF (Bayesian Linguistic Forecaster), an agentic system for binary forecasting that achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ForecastBench benchmark. The system is built on three ideas. (1) A Bayesian linguistic belief state: a semi-structured representation combining numerical probability estimates with natural-language evidence summaries, updated by the LLM at each step of an iterative tool-use loop. This contrasts with the common approach of appending all retrieved evidence to an ever-growing context. (2) Hierarchical multi-trial aggregation: running $K$ independent trials and combining them using logit-space shrinkage with a data-dependent prior. (3) Hierarchical calibration: Platt scaling with a hierarchical prior, which avoids over-shrinking extreme predictions for sources with skewed base rates. On 400 backtesting questions from the ForecastBench leaderboard, BLF outperforms all the top public methods, including Cassi, GPT-5, Grok~4.20, and Foresight-32B. Ablation studies show that the structured belief state is as impactful as web search access, and that shrinkage aggregation and hierarchical calibration each provide significant additional gains. In addition, we develop a robust back-testing framework with a leakage rate below 1.5\%, and use rigorous statistical methodology to compare different methods while controlling for various sources of noise.

Large language models have achieved significant reasoning improvements through reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). Yet as model capabilities grow, constructing high-quality reward signals becomes increasingly difficult, making it essential to understand when RLVR can succeed under weaker forms of supervision. We conduct a systematic empirical study across diverse model families and reasoning domains under three weak supervision settings: scarce data, noisy rewards, and self-supervised proxy rewards. We find that generalization is governed by training reward saturation dynamics: models that generalize exhibit a prolonged pre-saturation phase during which training reward and downstream performance climb together, while models that saturate rapidly memorize rather than learn. We identify reasoning faithfulness, defined as the extent to which intermediate steps logically support the final answer, as the pre-RL property that predicts which regime a model falls into, while output diversity alone is uninformative. Motivated by these findings, we disentangle the contributions of continual pre-training and supervised fine-tuning, finding that SFT on explicit reasoning traces is necessary for generalization under weak supervision, while continual pre-training on domain data amplifies the effect. Applied together to Llama3.2-3B-Base, these interventions enable generalization across all three settings where the base model previously failed.

The Platonic Representation Hypothesis suggests that neural networks trained on different modalities (e.g., text and images) align and eventually converge toward the same representation of reality. If true, this has significant implications for whether modality choice matters at all. We show that the experimental evidence for this hypothesis is fragile and depends critically on the evaluation regime. Alignment is measured using mutual nearest neighbors on small datasets ($\approx$1K samples) and degrades substantially as the dataset is scaled to millions of samples. The alignment that remains between model representations reflects coarse semantic overlap rather than consistent fine-grained structure. Moreover, the evaluations in Huh et al. are done in a one-to-one image-caption setting, a constraint that breaks down in realistic many-to-many settings and further reduces alignment. We also find that the reported trend of stronger language models increasingly aligning with vision does not appear to hold for newer models. Overall, our findings suggest that the current evidence for cross-modal representational convergence is considerably weaker than subsequent works have taken it to be. Models trained on different modalities may learn equally rich representations of the world, just not the same one.

Modern medicine generates vast multimodal data across siloed systems, yet no existing model integrates the full breadth and temporal depth of the clinical record into a unified patient representation. We introduce Apollo, a multimodal temporal foundation model trained and evaluated on over three decades of longitudinal hospital records from a major US hospital system, composed of 25 billion records from 7.2 million patients, representing 28 distinct medical modalities and 12 major medical specialties. Apollo learns a unified representation space integrating over 100 thousand unique medical events in our clinical vocabulary as well as images and clinical text. This "atlas of medical concepts" forms a computational substrate for modeling entire patient care journeys comprised of sequences of structured and unstructured events, which are compressed by Apollo into virtual patient representations. To assess the potential of these whole-patient representations, we created 322 prognosis and retrieval tasks from a held-out test set of 1.4 million patients. We demonstrate the generalized clinical forecasting potential of Apollo embeddings, including predicting new disease onset risk up to five years in advance (95 tasks), disease progression (78 tasks), treatment response (59 tasks), risk of treatment-related adverse events (17 tasks), and hospital operations endpoints (12 tasks). Using feature attribution techniques, we show that model predictions align with clinically-interpretable multimodal biomarkers. We evaluate semantic similarity search on 61 retrieval tasks, and moreover demonstrate the potential of Apollo as a multimodal medical search engine using text and image queries. Together, these modeling capabilities establish the foundation for computable medicine, where the full context of patient care becomes accessible to computational reasoning.

In this work, we revisit the problem of active sequential prediction-powered mean estimation, where at each round one must decide the query probability of the ground-truth label upon observing the covariates of a sample. Furthermore, if the label is not queried, the prediction from a machine learning model is used instead. Prior work proposed an elegant scheme that determines the query probability by combining an uncertainty-based suggestion with a constant probability that encodes a soft constraint on the query probability. We explored different values of the mixing parameter and observed an intriguing empirical pattern: the smallest confidence width tends to occur when the weight on the constant probability is close to one, thereby reducing the influence of the uncertainty-based component. Motivated by this observation, we develop a non-asymptotic analysis of the estimator and establish a data-dependent bound on its confidence interval. Our analysis further suggests that when a no-regret learning approach is used to determine the query probability and control this bound, the query probability converges to the constraint of the max value of the query probability when it is chosen obliviously to the current covariates. We also conduct simulations that corroborate these theoretical findings.

Large language models frequently commit unrecoverable reasoning errors mid-generation: once a wrong step is taken, subsequent tokens compound the mistake rather than correct it. We introduce $\textbf{Latent Phase-Shift Rollback}$ (LPSR): at each generation step, we monitor the residual stream at a critical layer lcrit, detect abrupt directional reversals (phase shifts) via a cosine-similarity $+$ entropy dual gate, and respond by rolling back the KV-cache and injecting a pre-computed steering vector. No fine-tuning, gradient computation, or additional forward passes are required. LPSR achieves $\mathbf{44.0\%}$ on MATH-500 with an 8B model versus $28.8\%$ for standard AR ($+15.2$ pp; McNemar $χ^2 = 66.96$, $p < 10^{-15}$). Critically, prompted self-correction, the most natural inference-time baseline, scores only $19.8\%$, below standard AR; LPSR exceeds it by $+24.2$ pp ($χ^2 = 89.4$, $p \approx 0$). LPSR also outperforms Best-of-16 ($+7.8$ pp) at $5.4\times$ lower token cost, and surpasses a standard 70B model ($35.2\%$) with $8.75\times$ fewer parameters at ${\sim}3\times$ the token budget. A 32-layer sweep reveals a novel \textbf{detection-correction dissociation}: error-detection AUC peaks at layer~14 ($0.718$) but task accuracy peaks at layer~16 ($44.0\%$ vs.\ $29.2\%$), demonstrating that optimal monitoring depth differs for detection and correction.

We present a systematic evaluation of large language model families -- spanning both proprietary cloud APIs and locally-hosted open-source models -- on two purpose-built benchmarks for System Dynamics AI assistance: the \textbf{CLD Leaderboard} (53 tests, structured causal loop diagram extraction) and the \textbf{Discussion Leaderboard} (interactive model discussion, feedback explanation, and model building coaching). On CLD extraction, cloud models achieve 77--89\% overall pass rates; the best local model reaches 77\% (Kimi~K2.5~GGUF~Q3, zero-shot engine), matching mid-tier cloud performance. On Discussion, the best local models achieve 50--100\% on model building steps and 47--75\% on feedback explanation, but only 0--50\% on error fixing -- a category dominated by long-context prompts that expose memory limits in local deployments. A central contribution of this paper is a systematic analysis of \textit{model type effects} on performance: we compare reasoning vs.\ instruction-tuned architectures, GGUF (llama.cpp) vs.\ MLX (mlx\_lm) backends, and quantization levels (Q3 / Q4\_K\_M / MLX-3bit / MLX-4bit / MLX-6bit) across the same underlying model families. We find that backend choice has larger practical impact than quantization level: mlx\_lm does not enforce JSON schema constraints, requiring explicit prompt-level JSON instructions, while llama.cpp grammar-constrained sampling handles JSON reliably but causes indefinite generation on long-context prompts for dense models. We document the full parameter sweep ($t$, $p$, $k$) for all local models, cleaned timing data (stuck requests excluded), and a practitioner guide for running 671B--123B parameter models on Apple~Silicon.

A recent study (Kuribayashi et al., 2025) has shown that human sentence processing behavior, typically measured on syntactically unchallenging constructions, can be effectively modeled using surprisal from early layers of large language models (LLMs). This raises the question of whether such advantages of internal layers extend to more syntactically challenging constructions, where surprisal has been reported to underestimate human cognitive effort. In this paper, we begin by exploring internal layers that better estimate human cognitive effort observed in syntactic ambiguity processing in English. Our experiments show that, in contrast to naturalistic reading, later layers better estimate such a cognitive effort, but still underestimate the human data. This dual alignment sheds light on different modes of sentence processing in humans and LMs: naturalistic reading employs a somewhat weak prediction akin to earlier layers of LMs, while syntactically challenging processing requires more fully-contextualized representations, better modeled by later layers of LMs. Motivated by these findings, we also explore several probability-update measures using shallow and deep layers of LMs, showing a complementary advantage to single-layer's surprisal in reading time modeling.

Models from the AlphaFold (AF) family reliably predict one dominant conformation for most well-ordered proteins but struggle to capture biologically relevant alternate states. Several efforts have focused on eliciting greater conformational variability through ad hoc inference-time perturbations of AF models or their inputs. Despite their progress, these approaches remain inefficient and fail to consistently recover major conformational modes. Here, we investigate both the optimal location and manner-of-operation for perturbing latent representations in the AF3 architecture. We distill our findings in ConforNets: channel-wise affine transforms of the pre-Pairformer pair latents. Unlike previous methods, ConforNets globally modulate AF3 representations, making them reusable across proteins. On unsupervised generation of alternate states, ConforNets achieve state-of-the-art success rates on all existing multi-state benchmarks. On the novel supervised task of conformational transfer, ConforNets trained on one source protein can induce a conserved conformational change across a protein family. Collectively, these results introduce a mechanism for conformational control in AF3-based models.

Weight quantization has become a standard tool for efficient LLM deployment, especially for local inference, where models are now routinely served at 2-3 bits per parameter. The state of the art is currently split into two sets of methods: simple scalar quantization techniques, such as GPTQ or AWQ, which are widely deployed but plateau in accuracy at 3-4 bits per parameter (bpp), and "second-generation" vector- or trellis-quantized methods, such as QTIP, GPTVQ and AQLM, which push the accuracy frontier at low bit-widths but are notoriously hard to implement and to scale, and have gained relatively less traction. In this paper, we ask whether this gap is fundamental, or whether a carefully optimized scalar quantizer can recover most of it. We answer in the affirmative, by introducing GSQ (Gumbel-Softmax Quantization), a post-training scalar quantization method which jointly learns the per-coordinate grid assignments and the per-group scales using a Gumbel-Softmax relaxation of the discrete grid. GSQ matches the cardinality of the relaxation to the small number of levels available in the target bit-width regime (e.g., 3-8 levels for ternary and 3 bpp, respectively), making the relaxation tight and the optimization tractable. Practically, on the standard Llama-3.1-8B/70B-Instruct models, GSQ closes most of the gap between scalar quantization and the QTIP frontier at 2 and 3 bits, while using a symmetric scalar grid with group-wise quantization, and thus fully compatible with existing scalar inference kernels. We further show that GSQ scales to trillion-scale Mixture-of-Experts models such as Kimi-K2.5, where vector-quantized methods are difficult to apply.

This note clarifies the relationship between the recent TurboQuant work and the earlier DRIVE (NeurIPS 2021) and EDEN (ICML 2022) schemes. DRIVE is a 1-bit quantizer that EDEN extended to any $b>0$ bits per coordinate; we refer to them collectively as EDEN. First, TurboQuant$_{\text{mse}}$ is a special case of EDEN obtained by fixing EDEN's scalar scale parameter to $S=1$. EDEN supports both biased and unbiased quantization, each optimized by a different $S$ (chosen via methods described in the EDEN works). The fixed choice $S=1$ used by TurboQuant is generally suboptimal, although the optimal $S$ for biased EDEN converges to $1$ as the dimension grows; accordingly TurboQuant$_{\text{mse}}$ approaches EDEN's behavior for large $d$. Second, TurboQuant$_{\text{prod}}$ combines a biased $(b-1)$-bit EDEN step with an unbiased 1-bit QJL quantization of the residual. It is suboptimal in three ways: (1) its $(b-1)$-bit step uses the suboptimal $S=1$; (2) its 1-bit unbiased residual quantization has worse MSE than (unbiased) 1-bit EDEN; (3) chaining a biased $(b-1)$-bit step with a 1-bit unbiased residual step is inferior to unbiasedly quantizing the input directly with $b$-bit EDEN. Third, some of the analysis in the TurboQuant work mirrors that of the EDEN works: both exploit the connection between random rotations and the shifted Beta distribution, use the Lloyd-Max algorithm, and note that Randomized Hadamard Transforms can replace uniform random rotations. Experiments support these claims: biased EDEN (with optimized $S$) is more accurate than TurboQuant$_{\text{mse}}$, and unbiased EDEN is markedly more accurate than TurboQuant$_{\text{prod}}$, often by more than a bit (e.g., 2-bit EDEN beats 3-bit TurboQuant$_{\text{prod}}$). We also repeat all accuracy experiments from the TurboQuant paper, showing that EDEN outperforms it in every setup we have tried.

Privacy policies are intended to inform users about how software systems collect and handle data, yet they often remain vague or incomplete. This paper presents an empirical study of patterns in log-related statements within privacy policies and their alignment with privacy disclosures observed in Android application logs. We analyzed 1,000 Android apps across multiple categories, generating 86,836,964 log entries. Our findings reveal that while most applications (88.0%) provide privacy policies, only 28.5% explicitly mention logging practices. Among those that reference logging, most clearly describe what information is logged; however, 27.7% of log-related statements remain overly simplistic or vague, offering limited insight into actual data collection. We further observed widespread privacy leakages in application logs, with 67.6% of apps leaking sensitive information not mentioned in their policies. Alarmingly, only 4% of applications demonstrated consistent alignment between declared policy contents and actual logged data. These findings highlight that current privacy policies provide incomplete or ambiguous descriptions of logging practices, which frequently do not align with actual logging behaviors.

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) provide a powerful framework for learning governing equations of dynamical systems from data. Biologically-informed neural networks (BINNs) are a variant of PINNs that preserve the known differential operator structure (e.g., reaction-diffusion) while learning constitutive terms via trainable neural subnetworks, enforced through soft residual penalties. Existing BINN studies are limited to $1\mathrm{D}{+}t$ reaction-diffusion systems and focus on forward prediction, using the governing partial differential equation as a regulariser rather than an explicit identification target. Here, we extend BINNs to $2\mathrm{D}{+}t$ systems within a PINN framework that combines data preprocessing, BINN-based equation learning, and symbolic regression post-processing for closed-form equation discovery. We demonstrate the framework's real-world applicability by learning the governing equations of lung cancer cell population dynamics from time-lapse microscopy data, recovering $2\mathrm{D}{+}t$ reaction-diffusion models from experimental observations. The proposed framework is readily applicable to other spatio-temporal systems, providing a practical and interpretable tool for fast analytic equation discovery from data.

Verification of model outputs is rapidly emerging as a key primitive for both training and real-world deployment of large language models (LLMs). In practice, this often involves using imperfect LLM judges and reward models since ground truth acquisition can be time-consuming and expensive. We introduce Fully Unsupervised Score Ensembling (FUSE), a method for improving verification quality by ensembling verifiers without access to ground truth correctness labels. The key idea behind FUSE is to control conditional dependencies between verifiers in a manner that improves the unsupervised performance of a class of spectral algorithms from the ensembling literature. Despite requiring zero ground truth labels, FUSE typically matches or improves upon semi-supervised alternatives in test-time scaling experiments with diverse sets of generator models, verifiers, and benchmarks. In particular, we validate our method on both conventional academic benchmarks such as GPQA Diamond and on frontier, unsaturated benchmarks such as Humanity's Last Exam and IMO Shortlist questions.

We propose a distributionally robust approach to risk-sensitive estimation of an unknown signal x from an observed signal y. The unknown signal and observation are modeled as random vectors whose joint probability distribution is unknown, but assumed to belong to a given type-2 Wasserstein ball of distributions, termed the ambiguity set. The performance of an estimator is measured according to the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) of the squared estimation error. Within this framework, we study the problem of computing affine estimators that minimize the worst-case CVaR over all distributions in the given ambiguity set. As our main result, we show that, when the nominal distribution at the center of the Wasserstein ball is finitely supported, such estimators can be exactly computed by solving a tractable semidefinite program. We evaluate the proposed estimators on a wholesale electricity price forecasting task using real market data and show that they deliver lower out-of-sample CVaR of squared error compared to existing methods.

Constructing environments for training and evaluating claw-like agents remains a manual, human-intensive process that does not scale. We argue that what is needed is not just a dataset, but an automated pipeline capable of generating diverse, verified environments on demand. To this end, we introduce ClawEnvKit, an autonomous generation pipeline that instantiates this formalism from natural language descriptions. The pipeline comprises three modules: (1) a parser that extracts structured generation parameters from natural language input; (2) a generator that produces the task specification, tool interface, and scoring configuration; and (3) a validator that enforces feasibility, diversity, structural validity, and internal consistency across the generated environments. Using ClawEnvKit, we construct Auto-ClawEval, the first large-scale benchmark for claw-like agents, comprising 1,040 environments across 24 categories. Empirically, Auto-ClawEval matches or exceeds human-curated environments on coherence and clarity at 13,800x lower cost. Evaluated across 4 model families and 8 agent harness frameworks, we find that harness engineering boosts performance by up to 15.7 percentage points over a bare ReAct baseline, completion remains the primary axis of variation with no model saturating the benchmark, and automated generation enables evaluation at a scale previously infeasible. Beyond static benchmarking, ClawEnvKit enables live evaluation: users describe a desired capability in natural language and obtain a verified environment on demand, turning evaluation into a continuous, user-driven process. The same mechanism serves as an on-demand training environment generator, producing task distributions that adapt to an agent's current weaknesses rather than being bounded by existing user logs.

Adversarial training of binary classifiers can be reformulated as regularized risk minimization involving a nonlocal total variation. Building on this perspective, we establish a characterization of the subdifferential of this total variation using duality techniques. To achieve this, we derive a dual representation of the nonlocal total variation and a related integration of parts formula, involving a nonlocal gradient and divergence. We provide such duality statements both in the space of continuous functions vanishing at infinity on proper metric spaces and for the space of essentially bounded functions on Euclidean domains. Furthermore, under some additional conditions we provide characterizations of the subdifferential in these settings.

This paper studies how empirical dialogue-flow statistics can be incorporated into Next Dialogue Act Prediction (NDAP). A KL regularization term is proposed that aligns predicted act distributions with corpus-derived transition patterns. Evaluated on a 60-class German counselling taxonomy using 5-fold cross-validation, this improves macro-F1 by 9--42% relative depending on encoder and substantially improves dialogue-flow alignment. Cross-dataset validation on HOPE suggests that improvements transfer across languages and counselling domains. In systematic ablations across pretrained encoders and architectures, the findings indicate that transition regularization provides consistent gains and disproportionately benefits weaker baseline models. The results suggest that lightweight discourse-flow priors complement pretrained encoders, especially in fine-grained, data-sparse dialogue tasks.

We study synthesis for obligation properties expressed in LTLfp, the extension of LTLf to infinite traces. Obligation properties are positive Boolean combinations of safety and guarantee (co-safety) properties and form the second level of the temporal hierarchy of Manna and Pnueli. Although obligation properties are expressed over infinite traces, they retain most of the simplicity of LTLf. In particular, we show that they admit a translation into symbolically represented deterministic weak automata (DWA) obtained directly from the symbolic deterministic finite automata (DFA) for the underlying LTLf properties on trace prefixes. DWA inherit many of the attractive algorithmic features of DFA, including Boolean closure and polynomial-time minimization. Moreover, we show that synthesis for LTLfp obligation properties is theoretically highly efficient - solvable in linear time once the DWA is constructed. We investigate several symbolic algorithms for solving DWA games that arise in the synthesis of obligation properties and evaluate their effectiveness experimentally. Overall, the results indicate that synthesis for LTLfp obligation properties can be performed with virtually the same effectiveness as LTLf synthesis.

Recent advancements in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) have significantly improved Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning, yet models often struggle to explore novel trajectories beyond their initial latent space. While offline teacher guidance and entropy-driven strategies have been proposed to address this, they often lack deep integration or are constrained by the model's inherent capacity. In this paper, we propose OGER, a novel framework that unifies offline teacher guidance and online reinforcement learning through a specialized reward modeling lens. OGER employs multi-teacher collaborative training and constructs an auxiliary exploration reward that leverages both offline trajectories and the model's own entropy to incentivize autonomous exploration. Extensive experiments across mathematical and general reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that OGER significantly outperforms competitive baselines, achieving substantial gains in mathematical reasoning while maintaining robust generalization to out-of-domain tasks. We provide a comprehensive analysis of training dynamics and conduct detailed ablation studies to validate the effectiveness of our entropy-aware reward modulation. Our code is available at https://github.com/ecoli-hit/OGER.git.

As modern LLMs support thousands to millions of tokens, KV caches grow to hundreds of gigabytes, stressing memory capacity and bandwidth. Existing solutions, such as KV cache pruning and offloading, alleviate these but underutilize hardware by relying solely on either GPU or CPU for attention computing, and considering yet limited CPU local memory for KV cache storage. We propose HybridGen, an efficient hybrid attention framework for long-context LLM inference. HybridGen enables CPU-GPU collaborative attention on systems with expanded tiered memory (e.g., CXL memory), addressing three key challenges: (1) multi-dimensional attention dependencies, (2) intensifying CPU-GPU load imbalance with longer sequences, and (3) NUMA penalty of tiered memories. HybridGen tackles these by introducing attention logit parallelism, a feedback-driven scheduler, and semantic-aware KV cache mapping. Experiments with three LLM models with eleven different sizes on three GPU platforms with a CXL-expanded memory show that HybridGen outperforms six state-of-the-art KV cache management methods by 1.41x--3.2x on average while maintaining superior accuracy.

Static code analysis (SCA) tools are widely used as effective ways to detect bugs and vulnerabilities in software systems. However, the reports generated by these tools often contain a large number of non-actionable findings, which can overwhelm developers to the point of ignoring them altogether -- this phenomenon is known as "alert fatigue". In this paper, we combat alert fatigue by proposing STAF: Sentence Transformer-based Actionability Filtering. Our approach leverages a transformer based architecture with sentence embeddings to classify findings into actionable and non-actionable categories. Evaluating STAF on a large dataset of reports from Java projects, we demonstrate that our method can effectively reduce the number of non-actionable findings while maintaining a high level of accuracy in identifying actionable issues. The results show that our approach can improve the usability of static analysis tools reaching an F1 score of 89%, outperforming existing methods for SCA warning filtering by at least 11% in a within-project setting and by at least 6% in a cross-project setting. By providing a more focused and relevant set of findings, we aim to enhance the overall effectiveness of static analysis in software development.

Epidemic forecasting has become an integral part of real-time infectious disease outbreak response. While collaborative ensembles composed of statistical and machine learning models have become the norm for real-time forecasting, standardized benchmark datasets for evaluating such methods are lacking. Further, there is limited understanding on performance of these methods for novel outbreaks with limited historical data. In this paper, we propose IDOBE, a curated collection of epidemiological time series focused on outbreak forecasting. IDOBE compiles from multiple data repositories spanning over a century of surveillance and across U.S. states and global locations. We perform derivative-based segmentation to generate over 10,000 outbreaks covering multiple outcomes such as cases and hospitalizations for 13 diseases. We consider a variety of information-theoretic and distributional measures to quantify the epidemiological diversity of the dataset. Finally, we perform multi-horizon short-term forecasting (1- to 4-week-ahead) through the progression of the outbreak using 11 baseline models and report on their performance. In addition to standard metrics such as NMSE and MAPE for point forecasts, we include probabilistic scoring rules such as Normalized Weighted Interval Score (NWIS) to quantify the performance. We find that MLP-based methods have the most robust performance, with statistical methods having a slight edge during the pre-peak phase. IDOBE dataset along with baselines are released publicly on https://github.com/NSSAC/IDOBE to enable standardized, reproducible benchmarking of outbreak forecasting methods.

Guard models are widely used to detect harmful content in user prompts and LLM responses. However, state-of-the-art guard models rely solely on terminal-layer representations and overlook the rich safety-relevant features distributed across internal layers. We present SIREN, a lightweight guard model that harnesses these internal features. By identifying safety neurons via linear probing and combining them through an adaptive layer-weighted strategy, SIREN builds a harmfulness detector from LLM internals without modifying the underlying model. Our comprehensive evaluation shows that SIREN substantially outperforms state-of-the-art open-source guard models across multiple benchmarks while using 250 times fewer trainable parameters. Moreover, SIREN exhibits superior generalization to unseen benchmarks, naturally enables real-time streaming detection, and significantly improves inference efficiency compared to generative guard models. Overall, our results highlight LLM internal states as a promising foundation for practical, high-performance harmfulness detection.

Uniform Discrete Diffusion Model (UDM) has recently emerged as a promising paradigm for discrete generative modeling; however, its integration with reinforcement learning remains largely unexplored. We observe that naively applying GRPO to UDM leads to training instability and marginal performance gains. To address this, we propose UDM-GRPO, the first framework to integrate UDM with RL. Our method is guided by two key insights: (i) treating the final clean sample as the action provides more accurate and stable optimization signals; and (ii) reconstructing trajectories via the diffusion forward process better aligns probability paths with the pretraining distribution. Additionally, we introduce two strategies, Reduced-Step and CFG-Free, to further improve training efficiency. UDM-GRPO significantly improves base model performance across multiple T2I tasks. Notably, GenEval accuracy improves from $69\%$ to $96\%$ and PickScore increases from $20.46$ to $23.81$, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both continuous and discrete settings. On the OCR benchmark, accuracy rises from $8\%$ to $57\%$, further validating the generalization ability of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/Yovecent/UDM-GRPO.

Open-weight language models can be rendered unsafe through several distinct interventions, but the resulting models may differ substantially in capabilities, behavioral profile, and internal failure mode. We study behavioral and mechanistic properties of jailbroken models across three unsafe routes: harmful supervised fine-tuning (SFT), harmful reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), and refusal-suppressing abliteration. All three routes achieve near-ceiling harmful compliance, but they diverge once we move beyond direct harmfulness. RLVR-jailbroken models show minimal degradation and preserve explicit harm recognition in a structured self-audit: they are able to identify harmful prompts and describe how a safe LLM should respond, yet they comply with the harmful request. With RLVR, harmful behavior is strongly suppressed by a reflective safety scaffold: when a harmful prompt is prepended with an instruction to reflect on safety standards, harmful behavior drops close to the baseline. Category-specific RLVR jailbreaks generalize broadly across harmfulness domains. Models jailbroken with SFT show the largest collapse in explicit safety judgments, the highest behavioral drift, and a substantial capability loss on standard benchmarks. Abliteration is family-dependent in both self-audit and response to a reflective safety scaffold. Mechanistic and repair analyses further separate the routes: abliteration is consistent with localized refusal-feature deletion, RLVR with preserved safety geometry but retargeted policy behavior, and SFT with broader distributed drift. Targeted repair partially recovers RLVR-jailbroken models, but has little effect on SFT-jailbroken models. Together, these results show that jailbreaks can produce vastly different properties despite similar harmfulness, with models jailbroken via RLVR showing remarkable similarity to the base model.

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to incorporate external knowledge at inference time. However, when retrieved contexts are noisy, incomplete, or heterogeneous, a single generation process often struggles to reconcile evidence effectively. We propose \textbf{MASS-RAG}, a multi-agent synthesis approach to retrieval-augmented generation that structures evidence processing into multiple role-specialized agents. MASS-RAG applies distinct agents for evidence summarization, evidence extraction, and reasoning over retrieved documents, and combines their outputs through a dedicated synthesis stage to produce the final answer. This design exposes multiple intermediate evidence views, allowing the model to compare and integrate complementary information before answer generation. Experiments on four benchmarks show that MASS-RAG consistently improves performance over strong RAG baselines, particularly in settings where relevant evidence is distributed across retrieved contexts.

Many recent document embedding models are trained on document-as-image representations, embedding rendered pages as images rather than the underlying source. Meanwhile, existing benchmarks for scientific document retrieval, such as ArXivQA and ViDoRe, treat documents as images of pages, implicitly favoring such representations. In this work, we argue that this paradigm is not well-suited for text-rich multimodal scientific documents, where critical evidence is distributed across structured sources, including text, tables, and figures. To study this setting, we introduce ArXivDoc, a new benchmark constructed from the underlying LaTeX sources of scientific papers. Unlike PDF or image-based representations, LaTeX provides direct access to structured elements (e.g., sections, tables, figures, equations), enabling controlled query construction grounded in specific evidence types. We systematically compare text-only, image-based, and multimodal representations across both single-vector and multi-vector retrieval models. Our results show that: (1) document-as-image representations are consistently suboptimal, especially as document length increases; (2) text-based representations are most effective, even for figure-based queries, by leveraging captions and surrounding context; and (3) interleaved text+image representations outperform document-as-image approaches without requiring specialized training.

We propose a computational framework for replacing the repeated numerical solution of differential Riccati equations in finite-horizon Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) problems by a learned operator surrogate. Instead of solving a nonlinear matrix-valued differential equation for each new system instance, we construct offline an approximation of the associated solution operator mapping time-dependent system parameters to the Riccati trajectory. The resulting model enables fast online evaluation of approximate optimal feedbacks across a wide class of systems, thereby shifting the computational burden from repeated numerical integration to a one-time learning stage. From a theoretical perspective, we establish control-theoretic guarantees for this operator-based approximation. In particular, we derive bounds quantifying how operator approximation errors propagate to feedback performance, trajectory accuracy, and cost suboptimality, and we prove that exponential stability of the closed-loop system is preserved under sufficiently accurate operator approximation. These results provide a framework to assess the reliability of data-driven approximations in optimal control. On the computational side, we design tailored DeepONet architectures for matrix-valued, time-dependent problems and introduce a progressive learning strategy to address scalability with respect to the system dimension. Numerical experiments on both time-invariant and time-varying LQR problems demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves high accuracy and strong generalization across a wide range of system configurations, while delivering substantial computational speedups compared to classical solvers. The method offers an effective and scalable alternative for parametric and real-time optimal control applications.

We introduce a multi-agent framework intended to emulate parts of a quantitative research team and support equity factor research on large financial panel datasets. QRAFTI integrates a research toolkit for panel data with MCP servers that expose data access, factor construction, and custom coding operations as callable tools. It can help replicate established factors, formulate and test new signals, and generate standardized research reports accompanied by narrative analysis and computational traces. On multi-step empirical tasks, using chained tool calls and reflection-based planning may offer better performance and explainability than dynamic code generation alone.

High-performance computing underpins modern artificial intelligence (AI), enabling foundation models, real-time inference and perception in autonomous systems, and data-intensive scientific simulations. Recent advances in quantization techniques utilizing low-precision computation without degrading model accuracy, create new opportunities for analog photonic computing characterized by ultra-high clock rates and low energy consumption. Here we propose and demonstrate a coherent homodyne integrated circuit capable of general matrix multiplication (GEMM) with aggregate throughput that exceeds 1,000 TOPS (tera-operations per second), enabled by massive on-chip optical fanout and parallelism. By leveraging time multiplexing, the required modulator count is reduced from O($N^2$) to O(N), allowing dense integration of record-scale 256 $\times$ 256 homodyne units (each <0.0064 $mm^2$) within a single reticle. We employ wafer-scale fabricated 64 thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) transmitters (each over 40-GHz bandwidth with propagation loss of 0.2 dB/cm) to encode data and chip-to-chip coupled to Si/SiN computing circuits (64 channels). Our system achieves up to 7-bit computational accuracy across 8 $\times$ 8 parallel channels at record computing clockrate 120 Gbaud/s, and 6-bit statistical accuracy across 256 $\times$ 100 channels at 20-128 Gbaud/s, representing a total throughput of 1,000-6,000 TOPS. Massive parallelism amortizes the optoelectronic (OE) conversion to allow 330-TOPS/W efficiency using foundry-available packaging technology. The system throughput is benchmarked with Qwen2.5-0.5 billion parameter models that generate accurate tokens. High throughput and energy efficiency establish a near-term pathway toward light-based accelerators for large-scale training and low-latency inference from datacenters to edges, accelerating new models toward artificial general intelligence.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) enhances LLM reasoning, yet a paradox emerges as models scale: strong base models saturate standard benchmarks (e.g., MATH), yielding correct but homogeneous solutions. In such environments, the lack of failure cases causes the advantage signal in group-relative algorithms (e.g., GRPO) to vanish, driving policies into mode collapse. To address this, we propose Constrained Uniform Top-K Sampling (CUTS), a parameter-free decoding strategy enforcing structure-preserving exploration. Unlike standard sampling that follows model biases, CUTS flattens the local optimization landscape by sampling uniformly from constrained high-confidence candidates. We integrate this into Mixed-CUTS, a training framework synergizing exploitative and exploratory rollouts to amplify intra-group advantage variance. Experiments on Qwen3 models demonstrate that our approach prevents policy degeneration and significantly boosts out-of-domain generalization. Notably, Mixed-CUTS improves Pass@1 accuracy on the challenging AIME25 benchmark by up to 15.1% over standard GRPO, validating that maintaining diversity within the semantic manifold is critical for rigorous reasoning.

This paper proposes a multi-step probabilistic forecasting framework using a single neural-network based model to generate simultaneous point and interval forecasts. Our approach ensures non-crossing prediction intervals (PIs) through a model structure design that strictly satisfy a target coverage probability (PICP) while maximizing sharpness. Unlike existing methods that rely on manual weight tuning for scalarized loss functions, we treat point and PI forecasting as a multi-objective optimization problem, utilizing multi-gradient descent to adaptively select optimal weights. Key innovations include a new PI loss function based on an extended log-barrier with an adaptive hyperparameter to guarantee the coverage, a hybrid architecture featuring a shared temporal model with horizon-specific submodels, and a training strategy. The proposed loss is scale-independent and universally applicable; combined with our training algorithm, the framework eliminates trial-and-error hyperparameter tuning for balancing multiple objectives. Validated by an intra-day solar irradiance forecasting application, results demonstrate that our proposed loss consistently outperforms those in current literature by achieving target coverage with the narrowest PI widths. Furthermore, when compared against LSTM encoder-decoder and Transformer architectures--including those augmented with Chronos foundation models--our method remains highly competitive and can be seamlessly adapted to any deep learning structure.

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is central to race-car aerodynamic development, yet its cost -- tens of thousands of core-hours per high-fidelity evaluation -- severely limits the design space exploration feasible within realistic budgets. AI-based surrogate models promise to alleviate this bottleneck, but progress has been constrained by the limited complexity of public datasets, which are dominated by smoothed passenger-car shapes that fail to exercise surrogates on the thin, complex, highly loaded components governing motorsport performance. This work presents three primary contributions. First, we introduce a high-fidelity RANS dataset built on a parametric LMP2-class CAD model and spanning six operating conditions (map points) covering straight-line and cornering regimes, generated and validated by aerodynamics experts at Dallara to preserve features relevant to industrial motorsport. Second, we present the Gauge-Invariant Spectral Transformer (GIST), a graph-based neural operator whose spectral embeddings encode mesh connectivity to enhance predictions on tightly packed, complex geometries. GIST guarantees discretization invariance and scales linearly with mesh size, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy on both public benchmarks and the proposed race-car dataset. Third, we demonstrate that GIST achieves a level of predictive accuracy suitable for early-stage aerodynamic design, providing a first validation of the concept of interactive design-space exploration -- where engineers query a surrogate in place of the CFD solver -- within industrial motorsport workflows.

Existing MT evaluation frameworks, including automatic metrics and human evaluation schemes such as Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), are largely language-agnostic. However, they often fail to capture dialect- and culture-specific errors in diglossic languages (e.g., Arabic), where translation failures stem from mismatches in language variety, content coverage, and pragmatic appropriateness rather than surface form alone.We introduce LQM: Linguistically Motivated Multidimensional Quality Metrics for MT. LQM is a hierarchical error taxonomy for diagnosing MT errors through six linguistically grounded levels: sociolinguistics, pragmatics, semantics, morphosyntax, orthography, and graphetics (Figure 1). We construct a bidirectional parallel corpus of 3,850 sentences (550 per variety) spanning seven Arabic dialects (Egyptian, Emirati, Jordanian, Mauritanian, Moroccan, Palestinian, and Yemeni), derived from conversational, culturally rich content. We evaluate six LLMs in a zero-shot setting and conduct expert span-level human annotation using LQM, producing 6,113 labeled error spans across 3,495 unique erroneous sentences, along with severity-weighted quality scores. We complement this analysis with an automatic metric (spBLEU). Though validated here on Arabic, LQM is a language-agnostic framework designed to be easily applied to or adapted for other languages. LQM annotated errors data, prompts, and annotation guidelines are publicly available at https://github.com/UBC-NLP/LQM_MT.

Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in lyric-to-melody generation, but models trained with Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) often produce musically implausible melodies with issues like poor rhythm and unsuitable vocal ranges, a phenomenon we term "constraint violation". To address this, we propose a novel alignment framework that instills musical knowledge without human annotation. We define rule-based musical constraints to automatically generate a preference dataset from an SFT model's outputs. The model is then aligned through a sequential process, first using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) on paired preference data, followed by Kahneman-Tversky Optimization (KTO) on unpaired negative samples. Experimental results demonstrate that our aligned model substantially reduces rule violations and outperforms strong baselines in both objective and subjective evaluations, generating melodies with substantially improved musicality and coherence. An interactive demo with audio comparisons is available at https://arain233.github.io/AligningMelody-demo.

The Adversarial Humanities Benchmark (AHB) evaluates whether model safety refusals survive a shift away from familiar harmful prompt forms. Starting from harmful tasks drawn from MLCommons AILuminate, the benchmark rewrites the same objectives through humanities-style transformations while preserving intent. This extends literature on Adversarial Poetry and Adversarial Tales from single jailbreak operators to a broader benchmark family of stylistic obfuscation and goal concealment. In the benchmark results reported here, the original attacks record 3.84% attack success rate (ASR), while transformed methods range from 36.8% to 65.0%, yielding 55.75% overall ASR across 31 frontier models. Under a European Union AI Act Code-of-Practice-inspired systemic-risk lens, Chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) is the highest bucket. Taken together, this lack of stylistic robustness suggests that current safety techniques suffer from weak generalization: deep understanding of 'non-maleficence' remains a central unresolved problem in frontier model safety.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has become a powerful driver of trajectory prediction in VLA-based autonomous driving, yet its autoregressive nature imposes a latency cost that is prohibitive for real-time deployment. Latent CoT methods attempt to close this gap by compressing reasoning into continuous hidden states, but consistently fall short of their explicit counterparts. We suggest that this is due to purely linguistic latent representations compressing a symbolic abstraction of the world, rather than the causal dynamics that actually govern driving. Thus, we present OneVL (One-step latent reasoning and planning with Vision-Language explanations), a unified VLA and World Model framework that routes reasoning through compact latent tokens supervised by dual auxiliary decoders. Alongside a language decoder that reconstructs text CoT, we introduce a visual world model decoder that predicts future-frame tokens, forcing the latent space to internalize the causal dynamics of road geometry, agent motion, and environmental change. A three-stage training pipeline progressively aligns these latents with trajectory, language, and visual objectives, ensuring stable joint optimization. At inference, the auxiliary decoders are discarded and all latent tokens are prefilled in a single parallel pass, matching the speed of answer-only prediction. Across four benchmarks, OneVL becomes the first latent CoT method to surpass explicit CoT, delivering state-of-the-art accuracy at answer-only latency, and providing direct evidence that tighter compression, when guided in both language and world-model supervision, produces more generalizable representations than verbose token-by-token reasoning. Project Page: https://xiaomi-embodied-intelligence.github.io/OneVL

Safety filters have been shown to be effective tools to ensure the safety of control systems with unsafe nominal policies. To address scalability challenges in traditional synthesis methods, learning-based approaches have been proposed for designing safety filters for systems with high-dimensional state and control spaces. However, the inevitable errors in the decisions of these models raise concerns about their reliability and the safety guarantees they offer. This paper presents Adaptive Conformal Filtering (ACoFi), a method that combines learned Hamilton-Jacobi reachability-based safety filters with adaptive conformal inference. Under ACoFi, the filter dynamically adjusts its switching criteria based on the observed errors in its predictions of the safety of actions. The range of possible safety values of the nominal policy's output is used to quantify uncertainty in safety assessment. The filter switches from the nominal policy to the learned safe one when that range suggests it might be unsafe. We show that ACoFi guarantees that the rate of incorrectly quantifying uncertainty in the predicted safety of the nominal policy is asymptotically upper bounded by a user-defined parameter. This gives a soft safety guarantee rather than a hard safety guarantee. We evaluate ACoFi in a Dubins car simulation and a Safety Gymnasium environment, empirically demonstrating that it significantly outperforms the baseline method that uses a fixed switching threshold by achieving higher learned safety values and fewer safety violations, especially in out-of-distribution scenarios.

This paper is a step-by-step, self-contained guide to the complete training cycle of a Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) -- a topic that existing tutorials and guides typically delegate to automatic differentiation libraries without exposing the underlying algebra. Using a first-order initial value problem with a known analytical solution as a running example, we walk through every stage of the process: forward propagation of both the network output and its temporal derivative, evaluation of a composite loss function built from the ODE residual and the initial condition, backpropagation of gradients -- with particular attention to the product rule that arises in hidden layers -- and a gradient descent parameter update. Every calculation is presented with explicit, verifiable numerical values using a 1-3-3-1 multilayer perceptron with two hidden layers and 22 trainable parameters. From these concrete examples, we derive general recursive formulas -- expressed as sensitivity propagation relations -- that extend the gradient computation to networks of arbitrary depth, and we connect these formulas to the automatic differentiation engines used in practice. The trained network is then validated against the exact solution, achieving a relative $L^2$ error of $4.290 \times 10^{-4}$ using only the physics-informed loss, without any data from the true solution. A companion Jupyter/PyTorch notebook reproduces every manual calculation and the full training pipeline, providing mutual validation between hand-derived and machine-computed gradients.

Persistent memory is the bottleneck separating stateless chatbots from long-running agentic systems. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over flat vector stores fragments facts into chunks, loses cross-session identity, and has no first-class notion of supersession or contradiction. Recent bitemporal knowledge-graph systems (Graphiti, Memento, Hydra DB) add typed edges and valid-time metadata, but the graph itself remains flat: no recursive composition, no content-addressed invariants on nodes, and edge types carry no behavior beyond a label. We present WorldDB, a memory engine built on three commitments: (i) every node is a world -- a container with its own interior subgraph, ontology scope, and composed embedding, recursive to arbitrary depth; (ii) nodes are content-addressed and immutable, so any edit produces a new hash at the node and every ancestor, giving a Merkle-style audit trail for free; (iii) edges are write-time programs -- each edge type ships on_insert/on_delete/on_query_rewrite handlers (supersession closes validity, contradicts preserves both sides, same_as stages a merge proposal), so no raw append path exists. On LongMemEval-s (500 questions, ~115k-token conversational stacks), WorldDB with Claude Opus 4.7 as answerer achieves 96.40% overall / 97.11% task-averaged accuracy, a +5.61pp improvement over the previously reported Hydra DB state-of-the-art (90.79%) and +11.20pp over Supermemory (85.20%), with perfect single-session-assistant recall and robust performance on temporal reasoning (96.24%), knowledge update (98.72%), and preference synthesis (96.67%). Ablations show that the engine's graph layer -- resolver-unified entities and typed refers_to edges -- contributes +7.0pp task-averaged independently of the underlying answerer.

Biological classification with interpretability remains a challenging task. For this, we introduce a novel encoding framework, Multi-Scale Reversible Chaos Game Representation (MS-RCGR), that transforms biological sequences into multi-resolution geometric representations with guaranteed reversibility. Unlike traditional sequence encoding methods, MS-RCGR employs rational arithmetic and hierarchical k-mer decomposition to generate scale-invariant features that preserve complete sequence information while enabling diverse analytical approaches. Our framework bridges three distinct paradigms for sequence analysis: (1) traditional machine learning using extracted geometric features, (2) computer vision models operating on CGR-generated images, and (3) hybrid approaches combining protein language model embeddings with CGR features. Through comprehensive experiments on synthetic DNA and protein datasets encompassing seven distinct sequence classes, we demonstrate that MS-RCGR features consistently enhance classification performance across all paradigms. Notably, our hybrid approach combining pre-trained language model embeddings (ESM2, ProtT5) with MS-RCGR features achieves superior performance compared to either method alone. The reversibility property of our encoding ensures no information loss during transformation, while multi-scale analysis captures patterns ranging from individual nucleotides to complex motif structures. Our results indicate that MS-RCGR provides a flexible, interpretable, and high-performing foundation for biological sequence analysis.

Extending a fully post-trained language model with new domain capabilities is fundamentally limited by monolithic training paradigms: retraining from scratch is expensive and scales poorly, while continued training often degrades existing capabilities. We present BAR (Branch-Adapt-Route), which trains independent domain experts, each through its own mid-training, supervised finetuning, and reinforcement learning pipeline, and composes them via a Mixture-of-Experts architecture with lightweight router training. Unlike retraining approaches that mix all domains and require full reprocessing for any update (with cost scaling quadratically), BAR enables updating individual experts independently with linear cost scaling and no degradation to existing domains. At the 7B scale, with experts for math, code, tool use, and safety, BAR achieves an overall score of 49.1 (averaged across 7 evaluation categories), matching or exceeding re-training baselines (47.8 without mid-training, 50.5 with). We further show that modular training provides a structural advantage: by isolating each domain, it avoids the catastrophic forgetting that occurs when late-stage RL degrades capabilities from earlier training stages, while significantly reducing the cost and complexity of updating or adding a domain. Together, these results suggest that decoupled, expert-based training is a scalable alternative to monolithic retraining for extending language models.

Discrete diffusion language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to traditional autoregressive approaches, offering the flexibility to generate tokens in arbitrary orders and the potential of parallel decoding. However, existing heuristic sampling strategies remain inefficient: they choose only a small part of tokens to sample at each step, leaving substantial room for improvement. In this work, we study the problem of token sampling order optimization and demonstrate its significant potential for acceleration. Specifically, we find that fully leveraging correct predictions at each step can reduce the number of sampling iterations by an order of magnitude without compromising accuracy. Based on this, we propose Neural Indicator Sampling (NI Sampling), a general sampling order optimization framework that utilize a neural indicator to decide which tokens should be sampled at each step. We further propose a novel trajectory-preserving objective to train the indicator. Experiments on LLaDA and Dream models across multiple benchmarks show that our method achieves up to 14.3$\times$ acceleration over full-step sampling with negligible performance drop, and consistently outperforms confidence threshold sampling in the accuracy-step trade-off. Code is available at https://github.com/imagination-research/NI-Sampling.

Baseline estimation is critical to Demand Response (DR) settlement in electricity markets, yet existing machine learning methods remain limited in predictive performance, while methodologies from causal inference and counterfactual prediction are still underutilized in this domain. We introduce a Generalized Synthetic Control Method that builds on the classical Synthetic Control Method (SCM) from econometrics. While SCM provides a powerful framework for counterfactual estimation, classical SCM remains a static estimator: it fits the treated unit as a combination of contemporaneous donor units and therefore ignores predictable temporal structure in the residual error. We develop a generalized SCM framework that transforms baseline estimation into a dynamic counterfactual prediction problem by augmenting the donor representation with exogenous features, lagged treated load, and selected lagged donor signals. This enriched representation allows the estimator to capture autoregressive dependence, delayed donor-response patterns, and error-correction effects beyond the scope of standard SCM. The framework further accommodates nonlinear predictors when linear weighting is inadequate, with the greatest benefit arising in limited-data settings. Experiments on the Ausgrid smart-meter dataset show consistent improvements over classical SCM and strong benchmark methods, with the dominant performance gains driven by dynamic augmentation.

Closed-loop simulation is a core component of autonomous vehicle (AV) development, enabling scalable testing, training, and safety validation before real-world deployment. Neural scene reconstruction converts driving logs into interactive 3D environments for simulation, but it does not produce complete 3D object assets required for agent manipulation and large-viewpoint novel-view synthesis. To address this challenge, we present Asset Harvester, an image-to-3D model and end-to-end pipeline that converts sparse, in-the-wild object observations from real driving logs into complete, simulation-ready assets. Rather than relying on a single model component, we developed a system-level design for real-world AV data that combines large-scale curation of object-centric training tuples, geometry-aware preprocessing across heterogeneous sensors, and a robust training recipe that couples sparse-view-conditioned multiview generation with 3D Gaussian lifting. Within this system, SparseViewDiT is explicitly designed to address limited-angle views and other real-world data challenges. Together with hybrid data curation, augmentation, and self-distillation, this system enables scalable conversion of sparse AV object observations into reusable 3D assets.

Motivation: Peptide-protein interactions (PepPIs) are central to cellular regulation and peptide therapeutics, but experimental characterization remains too slow for large-scale screening. Existing methods usually emphasize either interaction prediction or peptide generation, leaving candidate prioritization, residue-level interpretation, and target-conditioned expansion insufficiently integrated. Results: We present an integrated framework for early-stage peptide screening that combines a partner-aware prediction and localization model (ConGA-PepPI) with a target-conditioned generative model (TC-PepGen). ConGA-PepPI uses asymmetric encoding, bidirectional cross-attention, and progressive transfer from pair prediction to binding-site localization, while TC-PepGen preserves target information throughout autoregressive decoding via layerwise conditioning. In five-fold cross-validation, ConGA-PepPI achieved 0.839 accuracy and 0.921 AUROC, with binding-site AUPR values of 0.601 on the protein side and 0.950 on the peptide side, and remained competitive on external benchmarks. Under a controlled length-conditioned benchmark, 40.39% of TC-PepGen peptides exceeded native templates in AlphaFold 3 ipTM, and unconstrained generation retained evidence of target-conditioned signal.

Semantic Tube Prediction (STP) leverages representation geometric to regularize LLM hidden-state trajectories toward locally linear geodesics during fine-tuning, thereby greatly improving data efficiency. The original STP recipe samples random token sub-spans, which is compatible with the base large language model (LLM) training architecture. Inspired by STP, we are interested to investigate whether the sampling position can further enhance the semantic structure of multi-step reasoning, and hence affect its geometric impact. We applied STP at consecutive semantic reasoning step boundaries and achieved 168x more accurate multi-step latent prediction than frozen baselines on ProcessBench (3,400 samples), compared to only 4x for the random-token STP. Probing the latent manifold with a learned non-linear predictor reveals that STP-shaped trajectories are smooth curves, not straight lines: a 3-layer MLP reduces prediction error by a further 3-12x over linear extrapolation on step-boundary models. Removing the language modeling loss yields trajectories that are 2x more MLP-predictable than the combined loss, revealing a tradeoff between generation quality and geometric purity. Our results identify sampling position as the critical variable in geometric regularization and establish multi-step latent prediction MSE as a new evaluation metric for this class of methods.

Large language models are increasingly used as planners for robotic systems, yet how safely they plan remains an open question. To evaluate safe planning systematically, we introduce DESPITE, a benchmark of 12,279 tasks spanning physical and normative dangers with fully deterministic validation. Across 23 models, even near-perfect planning ability does not ensure safety: the best-planning model fails to produce a valid plan on only 0.4% of tasks but produces dangerous plans on 28.3%. Among 18 open-source models from 3B to 671B parameters, planning ability improves substantially with scale (0.4-99.3%) while safety awareness remains relatively flat (38-57%). We identify a multiplicative relationship between these two capacities, showing that larger models complete more tasks safely primarily through improved planning, not through better danger avoidance. Three proprietary reasoning models reach notably higher safety awareness (71-81%), while non-reasoning proprietary models and open-source reasoning models remain below 57%. As planning ability approaches saturation for frontier models, improving safety awareness becomes a central challenge for deploying language-model planners in robotic systems.

Multimodal affective computing aims to predict humans' sentiment, emotion, intention, and opinion using language, acoustic, and visual modalities. However, current models often learn spurious correlations that harm generalization under distribution shifts or noisy modalities. To address this, we propose a causal modality-invariant representation (CmIR) learning framework for robust multimodal learning. At its core, we introduce a theoretically grounded disentanglement method that separates each modality into `causal invariant representation' and `environment-specific spurious representation' from a causal inference perspective. CmIR ensures that the learned invariant representations retain stable predictive relationships with labels across different environments while preserving sufficient information from the raw inputs via invariance constraint, mutual information constraint, and reconstruction constraint. Experiments across multiple multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that CmIR achieves state-of-the-art performance. CmIR particularly excels on out-of-distribution data and noisy data, confirming its robustness and generalizability.

Visual agents operating in the wild must respond to queries precisely when sufficient evidence first appears in a video stream, a critical capability that is overlooked by conventional video LLMs evaluated in offline settings. The shift to an online, streaming paradigm introduces significant challenges: a lack of decision transparency, the difficulty of aligning response timing with visual evidence, and the need to maintain a global, causally consistent understanding under tight computational budgets. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework that decouples reasoning control from memory integration. We introduce \textbf{\model{}}, an instantiation of this framework with two core components. First, the \emph{Active Thinking Decision Maker (ATDM)} is a transparent reasoning controller that externalizes its decision process using observable progress ($\boldsymbolρ$) and confidence ($\boldsymbol{c}$) metrics. This allows it to precisely time its response $t_r$ to match the first-sufficient-evidence timestamp $t^\star$ while streaming its reasoning to the user. Second, the \emph{Hierarchical Progressive Semantic Integration (HPSI)} module acts as an efficient memory system. It employs a set of learnable, multi-level aggregation tokens that are propagated across clips to build a rich, global cognitive state without exceeding token budgets. %Our approach sets a new standard on key online video understanding benchmarks, achieving strong performance of \textbf{71.6\%} on StreamingBench and \textbf{46.9\%} on OVOBench, demonstrating a robust solution for evidence-aligned and transparent online video analysis. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ATDM and HPSI, e.g., Thinking-QwenVL improves the accuracy of the previous state-of-the-art from 67.63\% to 71.60\% on the StreamingBench benchmark.

Vision-language modeling is rapidly increasing in popularity with an ever expanding list of available models. In most cases, these vision-language models have parameters in the tens of billions, which is necessary for some needs, but in many cases smaller models are necessary (e.g., on edge devices or independent robotic platforms). Unfortunately, there is little research in producing light-weight models or in training them with small datasets. Inspired by the language learning progression and data sparsity in child development, in this paper, we address both of these goals in a systematic fashion. We show that two-tower encoder models are superior to one-tower encoders in low-resource settings for discriminative English tasks. We show also that incorporating traditional convolutional networks into the two-tower transformer architecture can help produce parameter efficient vision-language models. Finally, we show that the cross-modal fusion module of two-tower encoders can vary significantly in shape and size while producing the same results. In addition, we present ESsEN, a compact vision-language model that can be trained end-to-end with relatively few resources that performs as well on several tasks with only a fraction of the parameters compared to other models. The experimental results and the tools we present here make vision-language modeling more accessible to a wider variety of researchers.

Empirical studies of trained models often report a transient regime in which signal is detectable in a finite gradient descent time window before overfitting dominates. We provide an analytically tractable random-matrix model that reproduces this phenomenon for gradient flow in a linear teacher--student setting. In this framework, learning occurs when an isolated eigenvalue separates from a noisy bulk, before eventually disappearing in the overfitting regime. The key ingredient is anisotropy in the input covariance, which induces fast and slow directions in the learning dynamics. In a two-block covariance model, we derive the full time-dependent bulk spectrum of the symmetrized weight matrix through a $2\times 2$ Dyson equation, and we obtain an explicit outlier condition for a rank-one teacher via a rank-two determinant formula. This yields a transient Baik-Ben Arous-Péché (BBP) transition: depending on signal strength and covariance anisotropy, the teacher spike may never emerge, emerge and persist, or emerge only during an intermediate time interval before being reabsorbed into the bulk. We map the corresponding phase diagrams and validate the theory against finite-size simulations. Our results provide a minimal solvable mechanism for early stopping as a transient spectral effect driven by anisotropy and noise.

Performance, power, and area (PPA) optimization is a fundamental task in RTL design, requiring a precise understanding of circuit functionality and the relationship between circuit structures and PPA metrics. Recent studies attempt to automate this process using LLMs, but neither feedback-based nor knowledge-based methods are efficient enough, as they either design without any prior knowledge or rely heavily on human-summarized optimization rules. In this paper, we propose AutoPPA, a fully automated PPA optimization framework. The key idea is to automatically generate optimization rules that enhance the search for optimal solutions. To do this, AutoPPA employs an Explore-Evaluate-Induce ($E^2I$) workflow that contrasts and abstracts rules from diverse generated code pairs rather than manually defined prior knowledge, yielding better optimization patterns. To make the abstracted rules more generalizable, AutoPPA employs an adaptive multi-step search framework that adopts the most effective rules for a given circuit. Experiments show that AutoPPA outperforms both the manual optimization and the state-of-the-art methods SymRTLO and RTLRewriter.

Zero-shot vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise for chest radiograph classification, but their performance is often limited by confounding label co-occurrence, long-tail class imbalance, and transfer instability under domain shift. We propose ProtoCLIP, a refinement strategy for CLIP-style VLMs that improves zero-shot discrimination through targeted data curation and distilled anchor alignment. Specifically, we construct pathology-focused training subsets with curated negative samples to reduce co-occurrence bias. We also introduce a representation-preserving distillation objective to stabilize adaptation while maintaining semantic structure and improving discrimination of clinically relevant co-occurring pathologies. Evaluated on an unseen dataset VinDr-CXR, ProtoCLIP improves AUC by 2-10 percentage points over a strong CLIP-based baseline across multiple findings. For pneumothorax specifically, ProtoCLIP achieves a state-of-the-art AUC of 0.94. These results demonstrate that anchor-guided refinement, coupled with curated supervision and controlled adaptation, can mitigate common zero-shot transfer failures in medical VLMs without requiring large-scale retraining.

Conformal prediction provides finite-sample, distribution-free coverage under exchangeability, but standard constructions may lack robustness in the presence of outliers or heavy tails. We propose a robust conformal method based on a non-conformity score defined as the half-mass radius around a point, equivalently the distance to its $(\lfloor n/2\rfloor+1)$-nearest neighbour. We show that the resulting conformal regions are marginally valid for any sample size and converge in probability to a robust population central set defined through a distance-to-a-measure functional. Under mild regularity conditions, we establish exponential concentration and tail bounds that quantify the deviation between the empirical conformal region and its population counterpart. These results provide a probabilistic justification for using robust geometric scores in conformal prediction, even for heavy-tailed or multi-modal distributions.

We present a scalable, data-driven simulation framework for large-scale heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems that couples physics-informed neural ordinary differential equations (PINODEs) with differential-algebraic equation (DAE) solvers. At the component level, we learn heat-exchanger dynamics using an implicit PINODE formulation that predicts conserved quantities (refrigerant mass $M_r$ and internal energy $E_\text{hx}$) as outputs, enabling physics-informed training via automatic differentiation of mass/energy balances. Stable long-horizon prediction is achieved through gradient-stabilized latent evolution with gated architectures and layer normalization. At the system level, we integrate learned components with DAE solvers (IDA and DASSL) that explicitly enforce junction constraints (pressure equilibrium and mass-flow consistency), and we use Bayesian optimization to tune solver parameters for accuracy--efficiency trade-offs. To reduce residual system-level bias, we introduce a lightweight corrector network trained on short trajectory segments. Across dual-compressor and scaled network studies, the proposed approach attains multi-fold speedups over high-fidelity simulation while keeping errors low (MAPE below a few percent) and scales to systems with up to 32 compressor--condenser pairs.

Change visual question answering (Change VQA) addresses the problem of answering natural-language questions about semantic changes between bi-temporal remote sensing (RS) images. Although vision-language models (VLMs) have recently been studied for temporal RS image understanding, Change VQA remains underexplored in the context of modern multimodal models. In this letter, we revisit the CDVQA benchmark using recent Qwen models under a unified low-rank adaptation (LoRA) setting. We compare Qwen3-VL, which follows a structured vision-language pipeline with multi-depth visual conditioning and a full-attention decoder, with Qwen3.5, a native multimodal model that combines a single-stage alignment with a hybrid decoder backbone. Experimental results on the official CDVQA test splits show that recent VLMs improve over earlier specialized baselines. They further show that performance does not scale monotonically with model size, and that native multimodal models are more effective than structured vision-language pipelines for this task. These findings indicate that tightly integrated multimodal backbones contribute more to performance than scale or explicit multi-depth visual conditioning for language-driven semantic change reasoning in RS imagery.

India's linguistic landscape, spanning 22 scheduled languages and hundreds of marginalized dialects, has driven rapid growth in NLP datasets, benchmarks, and pretrained models. However, no dedicated survey consolidates resources developed specifically for Indian languages. Existing reviews either focus on a few high-resource languages or subsume Indian languages within broader multilingual settings, limiting coverage of low-resource and culturally diverse varieties. To address this gap, we present the first unified survey of Indian NLP resources, covering 200+ datasets, 50+ benchmarks, and 100+ models, tools, and systems across text, speech, multimodal, and culturally grounded tasks. We organize resources by linguistic phenomena, domains, and modalities; analyze trends in annotation, evaluation, and model design; and identify persistent challenges such as data sparsity, uneven language coverage, script diversity, and limited cultural and domain generalization. This survey offers a consolidated foundation for equitable, culturally grounded, and scalable NLP research in the Indian linguistic ecosystem.

Smooth functions on graphs have wide applications in manifold and semi-supervised learning. In this paper, we study a bandit problem where the payoffs of arms are smooth on a graph. This framework is suitable for solving online learning problems that involve graphs, such as content-based recommendation. In this problem, each item we can recommend is a node and its expected rating is similar to its neighbors. The goal is to recommend items that have high expected ratings. We aim for the algorithms where the cumulative regret with respect to the optimal policy would not scale poorly with the number of nodes. In particular, we introduce the notion of an effective dimension, which is small in real-world graphs, and propose two algorithms for solving our problem that scale linearly and sublinearly in this dimension. Our experiments on real-world content recommendation problem show that a good estimator of user preferences for thousands of items can be learned from just tens of nodes evaluations.

Large language models (LLMs) using chain-of-thought reasoning often waste substantial compute by producing long, incorrect responses. Abstention can mitigate this by withholding outputs unlikely to be correct. While most abstention methods decide to withhold outputs before or after generation, dynamic mid-generation abstention considers early termination of unpromising reasoning traces at each token position. Prior work has explored empirical variants of this idea, but principled guidance for the abstention rule remains lacking. We present a formal analysis of dynamic abstention for LLMs, modeling abstention as an explicit action within a regularized reinforcement learning framework. An abstention reward parameter controls the trade-off between compute and information. We show that abstaining when the value function falls below this reward strictly outperforms natural baselines under general conditions. We further derive a principled and efficient method to approximate the value function. Empirical results on mathematical reasoning and toxicity avoidance tasks support our theory and demonstrate improved selective accuracy over existing methods.

Data-driven discovery of governing equations has advanced significantly in recent years; however, existing methods often struggle in multiscale systems where dynamically significant terms may have small coefficients. Therefore, we propose Balance-Guided SINDy (BG-SINDy) inspired by the principle of dominant balance, which reformulates $\ell_0$-constrained sparse regression as a term-level $\ell_{2,0}$-regularized problem and solves it using a progressive pruning strategy. Terms are ranked according to their relative contributions to the governing equation balance rather than their absolute coefficient magnitudes. Based on this criterion, BG-SINDy alternates between least-squares regression and elimination of negligible terms, thereby preserving dynamically significant terms even when their coefficients are small. Numerical experiments on the Korteweg--de Vries equation with a small dispersion coefficient, a modified Burgers equation with vanishing hyperviscosity, a modified Kuramoto--Sivashinsky equation with multiple small-coefficient terms, and a two-dimensional reaction--diffusion system demonstrate the validity of BG-SINDy in discovering small-coefficient terms. The proposed method thus provides an efficient approach for discovering governing equations that contain small-coefficient terms.

Graph-based code indexing can improve context retrieval for LLM-based code agents by preserving call chains and dependency relationships that keyword search and similarity retrieval often miss. ABCoder is an open-source framework that parses codebases into a function-level code index called UniAST, but its existing parsers combine lightweight AST parsers for syntactic analysis with language servers for semantic resolution, but because LSP-based resolution requires a JSON-RPC call for each symbol lookup, these per-symbol calls become a bottleneck on large TypeScript repositories. We present abcoder-ts-parser, a TypeScript parser built on the TypeScript Compiler API that works directly with the compiler's AST, semantic information, and module resolution logic. We evaluate the parser on three open-source TypeScript projects with up to 1.2 million lines of code and find that it produces reliable indexes significantly more efficiently than the existing architecture. For a live demonstration, watch: https://youtu.be/ryssr7ouvdE

We present Six Llamas, a comparative study examining whether large language models fine-tuned on distinct religious corpora encode systematically different patterns of ethical reasoning. Six variants of Meta-Llama-3.1-8B are constructed: one unmodified control and five LoRA-adapted models trained exclusively on the sacred and theological texts of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, or Buddhism. All six models are probed with an identical battery of 17 standardized ethical prompts spanning moral dilemmas, game-theoretic scenarios, public policy questions, and moral-psychological self-assessments. To assess robustness and reproducibility, we implement a multi-temperature sampling design spanning ten temperature settings. We compute response consistency metrics, pairwise inter-model agreement rates, temperature sensitivity coefficients across four prompt domains, and run-to-run stability analyses. Findings show that LoRA-adapted models produce ethical reasoning patterns that are (a) systematically differentiated from the base model, (b) consistent with the moral logics of their training traditions, (c) structured along interpretable dimensions in moral-philosophical space, (d) core ethical positions remain stable across temperature variations for high-consensus dilemmas. The Trolley Problem achieves 100% consistency across all models and temperatures, while (e) tradition-specific divergence intensifies at higher temperatures in morally contested domains, and (f) the base model exhibits the highest overall response consistency (mean 88.3%), suggesting LoRA adaptation introduces both tradition-specific signal and increased sampling sensitivity. The study offers a proof-of-concept for the condensate comparative method using differentially trained language models as instruments for cultural and ethical analysis and identifies specific criteria for falsification and planned extensions.

General agents have given rise to phenomenal applications such as OpenClaw and Claude Code. As these agent systems (a.k.a. Harnesses) strive for bolder goals, they demand increasingly stronger agentic capabilities from foundation Large Language Models (LLMs). Agentic Reinforcement Learning (RL) is emerging as a central post-training paradigm for empowering LLMs with these capabilities and is playing an increasingly pivotal role in agent training. Unlike single-turn token-level alignment or reasoning enhancement, as in RLHF and RLVR, Agentic RL targets multi-turn interactive settings, where the goal is to optimize core agentic capabilities such as decision making and tool use while addressing new challenges including delayed and sparse rewards, as well as long and variable context. As a result, the token-centric modeling and optimization paradigm inherited from traditional LLM RL is becoming increasingly inadequate for capturing real LLM agent behavior. In this paper, we present StepPO as a position on step-level Agentic RL. We argue that the conventional token-level Markov Decision Process (MDP) should be advanced to a step-level MDP formulation, and that the step, rather than the token, should be regarded as the proper action representation for LLM agents. We then propose step-level credit assignment as the natural optimization counterpart of this formulation, thereby aligning policy optimization and reward propagation with the granularity of agent decisions. Finally, we discuss the key systems designs required to realize step-level Agentic RL in practice and preliminary experiments provide initial evidence for the effectiveness of this perspective. We hope that the step-aligned, step-level paradigm embodied in StepPO offers the Agentic RL community a useful lens for understanding agent behavior and helps advance LLMs toward stronger general-agent capabilities.

Daily infrastructure management in preparation for disasters is critical for urban resilience. When bridges remain resilient against disaster-induced external forces, access to hospitals, shops, and residences via metapaths can be sustained, maintaining essential urban functions. However, prioritizing bridge maintenance under limited budgets requires quantifying the multi-dimensional roles that bridges play in disaster scenarios -- a challenge that existing single-indicator approaches fail to address. We focus on metapaths from national highways through bridges to buildings (hospitals, shops, residences), constructing a heterogeneous graph with road, bridge, and building layers. A Relation-centric Graph Convolutional Network Variational Autoencoder (R-GCN-VGAE) learns metapath-based feature representations, enabling classification of bridges into disaster-preparedness categories: Supply Chain (commercial logistics), Medical Access (emergency healthcare), and Residential Protection (preventing isolation). Using OSMnx and open data, we validate our methodology on three diverse cities in Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan: Mito (697 bridges), Chikusei (258 bridges), and Moriya (148 bridges), totaling 1,103 bridges. The heterogeneous graph construction from open data enables redefining bridge roles for disaster scenarios, supporting maintenance budget decision-making. We contributed that (1) Open-data methodology for constructing urban heterogeneous graphs. (2) Redefinition of bridge roles for disaster scenarios via metapath-based classification. (3) Establishment of maintenance budget decision support methodology. (4) k-NN tuning strategy validated across diverse city scales. (5) Empirical demonstration of UMAP superiority over t-SNE/PCA for multi-role bridge visualization.

Creativity has become a core competence in the era of LLMs and human-AI collaboration, underpinning innovation in real-world problem solving. Crucially, the systematic improvement of creativity necessitates scientifically valid assessment instruments. Psychometric research recognizes context-based assessment as an effective way to measure creative thinking. However, high-quality expert-designed contexts remain scarce. Existing LLM-based generators often struggle with insufficient assessment cues, weak narrative coherence, limited stylistic diversity, and poor support for creative thinking. To address these challenges, we propose AlphaContext, an evolutionary tree-based psychometric context generator for creativity assessment. First, the HyperTree Outline Planner formalizes expert-designed outlining as a rule-guided hypertree and performs top-down hierarchical planning. The MCTS-based Context Generator fills the outline via MCTS to balance global structure and local quality. Then, the Evolutionary Context Optimizer evolves contexts with MAP-Elites by repeatedly updating niche elites to jointly improve diversity and quality. Finally, the Assessment-Guided Evolution Refiner simulates virtual participants with diverse styles and recycles weak contexts for further evolution. Experiments show that AlphaContext yields an average improvement of 8% over competitive methods across 6 quality metrics.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across diverse domains but are increasingly constrained by high inference latency. Early Exit has emerged as a promising solution to accelerate inference by dynamically bypassing redundant layers. However, in decoder-only architectures, the efficiency of Early Exit is severely bottlenecked by the KV Cache Absence problem, where skipped layers fail to provide the necessary historical states for subsequent tokens. Existing solutions, such as recomputation or masking, either introduce significant latency overhead or incur severe precision loss, failing to bridge the gap between theoretical layer reduction and practical wall-clock speedup. In this paper, we propose River-LLM, a training-free framework that enables seamless token-level Early Exit. River-LLM introduces a lightweight KV-Shared Exit River that allows the backbone's missing KV cache to be naturally generated and preserved during the exit process, eliminating the need for costly recovery operations. Furthermore, we utilize state transition similarity within decoder blocks to predict cumulative KV errors and guide precise exit decisions. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning and code generation tasks demonstrate that River-LLM achieves 1.71 to 2.16 times of practical speedup while maintaining high generation quality.

Game development sits at the intersection of creative design and intricate software engineering, demanding the joint orchestration of game engines, real-time loops, and tightly coupled state across many files. While Large Language Models (LLMs) and code agents now solve isolated programming tasks with ease, they consistently stumble when asked to produce a fully playable game from a high-level design, collapsing under cross-file inconsistencies, broken scene wiring, and logical incoherence. We bridge this gap with OpenGame, the first open-source agentic framework explicitly designed for end-to-end web game creation. At its core lies Game Skill, a reusable, evolving capability composed of a Template Skill that grows a library of project skeletons from experience and a Debug Skill that maintains a living protocol of verified fixes - together enabling the agent to scaffold stable architectures and systematically repair integration errors rather than patch isolated syntax bugs. Powering this framework is GameCoder-27B, a code LLM specialized for game engine mastery through a three-stage pipeline of continual pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and execution-grounded reinforcement learning. Since verifying interactive playability is fundamentally harder than checking static code, we further introduce OpenGame-Bench, an evaluation pipeline that scores agentic game generation along Build Health, Visual Usability, and Intent Alignment via headless browser execution and VLM judging. Across 150 diverse game prompts, OpenGame establishes a new state-of-the-art. We hope OpenGame pushes code agents beyond discrete software engineering problems and toward building complex, interactive real-world applications. Our framework will be fully open-sourced.

In self-supervised learning, self-distilled methods have shown impressive performance, learning representations useful for downstream tasks and even displaying emergent properties. However, state-of-the-art methods usually rely on ensembles of complex mechanisms, with many design choices that are empirically motivated and not well understood. In this work, we explore the role of self-distillation within learning dynamics. Specifically, we isolate the effect of self-distillation by training a group of randomly initialized networks, removing all other common components such as projectors, predictors, and even pretext tasks. Our findings show that even this minimal setup can lead to learned representations with non-trivial improvements over a random baseline on downstream tasks. We also demonstrate how this effect varies with different hyperparameters and present a short analysis of what is being learned by the models under this setup.

Prompt sensitivity, which refers to how strongly the output of a large language model (LLM) depends on the exact wording of its input prompt, raises concerns among users about the LLM's stability and reliability. In this work, we consider LLMs as multivariate functions and perform a first-order Taylor expansion, thereby analyzing the relationship between meaning-preserving prompts, their gradients, and the log probabilities of the model's next token. We derive an upper bound on the difference between log probabilities using the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality. We show that LLMs do not internally cluster similar inputs like smaller neural networks do, but instead disperse them. This dispersing behavior leads to an excessively high upper bound on the difference of log probabilities between two meaning-preserving prompts, making it difficult to effectively reduce to 0. In our analysis, we also show which types of meaning-preserving prompt variants are more likely to introduce prompt sensitivity risks in LLMs. In addition, we demonstrate that the upper bound is strongly correlated with an existing prompt sensitivity metric, PromptSensiScore. Moreover, by analyzing the logit variance, we find that prompt templates typically exert a greater influence on logits than the questions themselves. Overall, our results provide a general interpretation for why current LLMs can be highly sensitive to prompts with the same meaning, offering crucial evidence for understanding the prompt sensitivity of LLMs. Code for experiments is available at https://github.com/ku-nlp/Understanding_the_Prompt_Sensitivity.

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically relies on large quantities of high-quality annotated data, or questions with well-defined ground truth answers in the case of Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). While previous work has explored the benefits to model reasoning capabilities by scaling both data and compute used for RLVR, these results lack applicability in many real-world settings where annotated data and accessible compute may be scarce. In this work, we present a comprehensive empirical study of open-source Small Language Model (SLM) performance after RLVR in low data regimes. Across three novel datasets covering number counting problems, graph reasoning, and spatial reasoning, we characterize how model performance scales with dataset size, diversity, and complexity. We demonstrate that (1) procedural datasets allow for fine-grained evaluation and training dataset development with controllable properties (size, diversity, and complexity), (2) under RLVR, models trained on lower complexity tasks can generalize to higher complexity tasks, and (3) training on mixed complexity datasets is associated with the greatest benefits in low data regimes, providing up to 5x sample efficiency versus training on easy tasks. These findings inspire future work on the development of data scaling laws for RLVR and the use of procedural data generators to further understand effective data development for efficient LLM fine-tuning.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are increasingly used in modern weapons systems. Notably, these systems have recently been involved in mass killings and destruction at scale. Furthermore, there is currently a strong interest and competition among powerful players to accelerate the proliferation of weapons with automated or AI-based components, a phenomenon known as AI arms race. This competition poses a risk of causing even more deaths and devastation in the future, as well as increased power and wealth inequality. In this work, we aim to shed light on the role of AI researchers as implicated subjects in the harms caused by weapons enabled by AI technologies. We investigate and discuss the specifics of this implication and explore ways to transfigure this position of implication into one of differentiated, long-distance solidarity with the victims of technologically fortified injustices.

Most data-driven ionospheric forecasting models operate on gridded products, which do not preserve the time-varying sampling structure of satellite-based sensing. We instead model the ionosphere as a dynamic graph over ionospheric pierce points (IPPs), with connectivity that evolves as satellite positions change. Because satellite trajectories are predictable, the graph topology over the forecast horizon can be constructed in advance. We exploit this property to condition forecasts on the future graph structure, which we term ephemeris conditioning. This enables prediction on lines of sight that appear only in the forecast horizon. We evaluate our framework on multi-GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) data from a co-located receiver pair in Singapore spanning January 2023 through April 2025. The task is to forecast Rate of TEC Index (ROTI)-defined irregularities at 5-minute cadence up to 2 hours ahead as binary probabilistic classification per node. The resulting model, IonoDGNN, achieves a Brier Skill Score (BSS) of 0.49 and a precision-recall area under the curve (PR-AUC) of 0.75, improving over persistence by 35\% in BSS and 52\% in PR-AUC, with larger gains at longer lead times. Ablations confirm that graph structure and ephemeris conditioning each contribute meaningfully, with conditioning proving essential for satellites that rise during the forecast horizon (receiver operating characteristic AUC: 0.95 vs.\ 0.52 without). Under simulated coverage dropout, the model retains predictive skill on affected nodes through spatial message passing from observed neighbors. These results suggest that dynamic graph forecasting on evolving lines of sight is a viable alternative to grid-based representations for ionospheric irregularity forecasting. The model and evaluation code will be released upon publication.

Conversational agents, such as ChatGPT and Doubao, have become essential daily assistants for billions of users. To further enhance engagement, these systems are evolving from passive responders to proactive companions. However, existing efforts focus on activation within ongoing dialogues, while overlooking a key real-world bottleneck. In the conversation initiation stage, users may have a vague need but no explicit query intent, creating a first-message barrier where the conversation holds before it begins. To overcome this, we introduce Conversation Starter Generation: generating personalized starters to guide users into conversation. However, unlike in-conversation stages where immediate context guides the response, initiation must operate in a cold-start moment without explicit user intent. To pioneer in this direction, we present IceBreaker that frames human ice-breaking as a two-step handshake: (i) evoke resonance via Resonance-Aware Interest Distillation from session summaries to capture trigger interests, and (ii) stimulate interaction via Interaction-Oriented Starter Generation, optimized with personalized preference alignment and a self-reinforced loop to maximize engagement. Online A/B tests on one of the world's largest conversational agent products show that IceBreaker improves user active days by +0.184% and click-through rate by +9.425%, and has been deployed in production.

We study how AI agents form expectations and trade in experimental asset markets. Using a simulated open-call auction populated by autonomous Large Language Model (LLM) agents, we document three main findings. First, AI agents exhibit classic behavioral patterns: a pronounced disposition effect and recency-weighted extrapolative beliefs. Second, these individual-level patterns aggregate into equilibrium dynamics that replicate classic experimental findings (Smith et al., 1988), including the predictive power of excess demand for future prices and the positive relationship between disagreement and trading volume. Third, by analyzing the agents' reasoning text through a twenty-mechanism scoring framework, we show that targeted prompt interventions causally amplify or suppress specific behavioral mechanisms, significantly altering the magnitude of market bubbles.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a chronic neurodegenerative disease. It shows multiple motor symptoms such as tremor, bradykinesia, postural instability, freezing of gait (FoG). PD is currently diagnosed clinically through physical exam by health-care professionals, which can be time consuming and highly subjective. Wearable IMU sensors has become a promising gateway for passive monitoring of PD patients. We propose a self-supervised cross-attention encoder that processes bilateral wrist-worn IMU signals from a public dataset called PADS, consisting of three groups, PD (Parkinson Disease), HC (Healthy Control) and DD (Differential Diagnosis) of a total of 469 subjects. We have achieved a mean accuracy of 93.12% for HC vs. PD classification and 87.04% for PD vs. DD classification. The results emphasize the clinical challenge of distinguishing Parkinson's from other neurodegenerative diseases. Self-supervised representation learning using contrastive infoNCE loss gained an accuracy of 93.56% for HC vs. PD and 92.50% for PD vs. DD using only 20% of labelled data. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our method in transfer learning for clinical use with minimal labels. The real-time applicability was tested by deploying the optimized model with a mean inference time of 48.32 ms per window on a Raspberry Pi CPU.

Generating programmatic animation using libraries such as Manim presents unique challenges for Large Language Models (LLMs), requiring spatial reasoning, temporal sequencing, and familiarity with domain-specific APIs that are underrepresented in general pre-training data. A systematic study of how training and inference strategies interact in this setting is lacking in current research. This study introduces ManimTrainer, a training pipeline that combines Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) with Reinforcement Learning (RL) based Group Relative Policy Optimisation (GRPO) using a unified reward signal that fuses code and visual assessment signals, and ManimAgent, an inference pipeline featuring Renderer-in-the-loop (RITL) and API documentation-augmented RITL (RITL-DOC) strategies. Using these techniques, this study presents the first unified training and inference study for text-to-code-to-video transformation with Manim. It evaluates 17 open-source sub-30B LLMs across nine combinations of training and inference strategies using ManimBench. Results show that SFT generally improves code quality, while GRPO enhances visual outputs and increases the models' responsiveness to extrinsic signals during self-correction at inference time. The Qwen 3 Coder 30B model with GRPO and RITL-DOC achieved the highest overall performance, with a 94% Render Success Rate (RSR) and 85.7% Visual Similarity (VS) to reference videos, surpassing the baseline GPT-4.1 model by +3 percentage points in VS. Additionally, the analysis shows that the correlation between code and visual metrics strengthens with SFT and GRPO but weakens with inference-time enhancements, highlighting the complementary roles of training and agentic inference strategies in Manim animation generation.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) remains unreliable in long-form settings, where retrieved evidence is noisy or contradictory, making it difficult for RAG pipelines to maintain factual consistency. Existing approaches focus on retrieval expansion or verification during generation, leaving conflict resolution entangled with generation. To address this limitation, we propose ArbGraph, a framework for pre-generation evidence arbitration in long-form RAG that explicitly resolves factual conflicts. ArbGraph decomposes retrieved documents into atomic claims and organizes them into a conflict-aware evidence graph with explicit support and contradiction relations. On top of this graph, we introduce an intensity-driven iterative arbitration mechanism that propagates credibility signals through evidence interactions, enabling the system to suppress unreliable and inconsistent claims before final generation. In this way, ArbGraph separates evidence validation from text generation and provides a coherent evidence foundation for downstream long-form generation. We evaluate ArbGraph on two widely used long-form RAG benchmarks, LongFact and RAGChecker, using multiple large language model backbones. Experimental results show that ArbGraph consistently improves factual recall and information density while reducing hallucinations and sensitivity to retrieval noise. Additional analyses show that these gains are evident under conflicting or ambiguous evidence, highlighting the effectiveness of evidence-level conflict resolution for improving the reliability of long-form RAG. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/1212Judy/ArbGraph.

Molecular biology features numerous complexes of proteins that coordinate in an interlocking fashion to fulfill different functions. Adaptive evolution explains some of this complexity, but needn't be the default when neutral explanations suffice. A new artificial life model ``organism,'' the Quandary Den, is introduced to explore different neutral evolution scenarios where complexity increases in the absence of greater informational needs. Two interlocking complexity scenarios emerge. Subfunctionalization leads to functionality diffusing through the complex. Masking allows intracomplex interference to accumulate genetically, requiring that it be blocked at the level of expression.

Audio-text retrieval systems based on Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP) achieve strong performance on traditional benchmarks; however, these benchmarks rely on caption-style queries that differ substantially from real-world search behavior, limiting their assessment of practical retrieval robustness. We present Omni-Embed-Audio (OEA), a retrieval-oriented encoder leveraging multimodal LLMs with native audio understanding. To systematically evaluate robustness beyond caption-style queries, we introduce User-Intent Queries (UIQs) - five formulations reflecting natural search behaviors: questions, commands, keyword tags, paraphrases, and exclusion-based negative queries. For negative queries, we develop a hard negative mining pipeline and propose discrimination metrics (HNSR, TFR) assessing models' ability to suppress acoustically similar distractors. Experiments on AudioCaps, Clotho, and MECAT show that OEA achieves comparable text-to-audio retrieval performance to state-of-the-art M2D-CLAP, while demonstrating clear advantages in two critical areas: (1) dominant text-to-text retrieval (+22% relative improvement), and (2) substantially superior hard negative discrimination (+4.3%p HNSR@10, +34.7% relative TFR@10), revealing that LLM backbones provide superior semantic understanding of complex queries.

Developing compassionate interactive systems requires agents to not only understand user emotions but also provide diverse, substantive support. While recent works explore empathetic dialogue generation, they remain limited in response form and content, struggling to satisfy diverse needs across users and contexts. To address this, we explore empowering agents with external tools to execute diverse actions. Grounded in the psychological concept of "social support", this paradigm delivers substantive, human-like companionship. Specifically, we first design a dozen user-centric tools simulating various multimedia applications, which can cover different types of social support behaviors in human-agent interaction scenarios. We then construct ComPASS-Bench, the first personalized social support benchmark for LLM-based agents, via multi-step automated synthesis and manual refinement. Based on ComPASS-Bench, we further synthesize tool use records to fine-tune the Qwen3-8B model, yielding a task-specific ComPASS-Qwen. Comprehensive evaluations across two settings reveal that while the evaluated LLMs can generate valid tool-calling requests with high success rates, significant gaps remain in final response quality. Moreover, tool-augmented responses achieve better overall performance than directly producing conversational empathy. Notably, our trained ComPASS-Qwen demonstrates substantial improvements over its base model, achieving comparable performance to several large-scale models. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/hzp3517/ComPASS.

Emotion plays a pivotal role in shaping negotiation outcomes, influencing trust, cooperation, and long-term relationships. Developing negotiation dialog systems that can recognize and respond strategically to emotions is, therefore, essential to create more effective human-centered interactions. Beyond generating emotionally appropriate responses, interpretability - understanding how a system generates a particular emotion-aware response, is critical for fostering reliability and building rapport. Driven by these aspects, in this work, we introduce PRISMA, an interpretable emotionally intelligent negotiation dialogue system targeting two application domains, viz. job interviews and resource allocation. To enable interpretability, we propose an Emotion-aware Negotiation Strategy-informed Chain-of-Thought (ENS-CoT) reasoning mechanism, which mimics human negotiation by perceiving, understanding, using, and managing emotions. Leveraging ENS-CoT, we curate two new datasets: JobNego (for job interview negotiation) and ResNego (for resource allocation negotiation). We then leverage these datasets to develop PRISMA by augmenting self-training with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), guiding agents toward more accurate, interpretable, and emotionally appropriate negotiation responses. Automatic and human evaluation on JobNego and ResNego datasets demonstrate that PRISMA substantially enhances interpretability and generates appropriate emotion-aware responses, while improving overall negotiation effectiveness.

The purpose of this study is to characterize a two-port Bridged-T network using transmission (T) and scattering (S) matrices. Using mathematical derivations, scattering parameters including S11, S12, S21, and S22 have been derived from the T and S matrices to permit a detailed investigation of the network's performance. As two of the most relevant parameters in the design of microstrip filters, both the magnitude and phase of S11 and S21 have been parametrically calculated after normalizing the frequency. Furthermore, when the inductors L1 and L2 are identical, all even coefficients of the numerator polynomial in the S11 transfer function are eliminated, leaving only the odd coefficients behind. Based on this feature, the bridged-T circuit is designed to operate as a high-pass filter. Therefore, the magnitude and phase of both S11 and S21 have been simulated for the designed filter with a corner frequency of 1 GHz. Simulation results performed by Keysight ADS show that S11 and S21 for the high-pass filter built upon the bridged-T network have sharp roll-off ratios of -30dB/GHz and -32dB/GHz respectively.

State-of-the-art Differentially Private (DP) synthetic data generators such as MST and AIM are widely used, yet tightly auditing their privacy guarantees remains challenging. We introduce a Gaussian Differential Privacy (GDP)-based auditing framework that measures privacy via the full false-positive/false-negative tradeoff. Applied to MST and AIM under worst-case settings, our method provides the first tight audits in the strong-privacy regime. For $(ε,δ)=(1,10^{-2})$, we obtain $μ_{emp}\approx0.43$ vs. implied $μ=0.45$, showing a small theory-practice gap. Our code is publicly available: https://github.com/sassoftware/dpmm.

Recommender systems have advanced markedly over the past decade by transforming each user/item into a dense embedding vector with deep learning models. At industrial scale, embedding tables constituted by such vectors of all users/items demand a vast amount of parameters and impose heavy compute and memory overhead during training and inference, hindering model deployment under resource constraints. Existing solutions towards embedding compression either suffer from severely compromised recommendation accuracy or incur considerable computational costs. To mitigate these issues, this paper presents BACO, a fast and effective framework for compressing embedding tables. Unlike traditional ID hashing, BACO is built on the idea of exploiting collaborative signals in user-item interactions for user and item groupings, such that similar users/items share the same embeddings in the codebook. Specifically, we formulate a balanced co-clustering objective that maximizes intra-cluster connectivity while enforcing cluster-volume balance, and unify canonical graph clustering techniques into the framework through rigorous theoretical analyses. To produce effective groupings while averting codebook collapse, BACO instantiates this framework with a principled weighting scheme for users and items, an efficient label propagation solver, as well as secondary user clusters. Our extensive experiments comparing BACO against full models and 18 baselines over benchmark datasets demonstrate that BACO cuts embedding parameters by over 75% with a drop of at most 1.85% in recall, while surpassing the strongest baselines by being up to 346X faster.

Long-term conversational large language model (LLM) agents require memory systems that can recover relevant evidence from historical interactions without overwhelming the answer stage with irrelevant context. However, existing memory systems, including hierarchical ones, still often rely solely on vector similarity for retrieval. It tends to produce bloated evidence sets: adding many superficially similar dialogue turns yields little additional recall, but lowers retrieval precision, increases answer-stage context cost, and makes retrieved memories harder to inspect and manage. To address this, we propose HiGMem (Hierarchical and LLM-Guided Memory System), a two-level event-turn memory system that allows LLMs to use event summaries as semantic anchors to predict which related turns are worth reading. This allows the model to inspect high-level event summaries first and then focus on a smaller set of potentially useful turns, providing a concise and reliable evidence set through reasoning, while avoiding the retrieval overhead that would be excessively high compared to vector retrieval. On the LoCoMo10 benchmark, HiGMem achieves the best F1 on four of five question categories and improves adversarial F1 from 0.54 to 0.78 over A-Mem, while retrieving an order of magnitude fewer turns. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/ZeroLoss-Lab/HiGMem.

Video diffusion transformers (DiTs) suffer from prohibitive inference latency due to quadratic attention complexity. Existing sparse attention methods either overlook semantic similarity or fail to adapt to heterogeneous token distributions across layers, leading to model performance degradation. We propose AdaCluster, a training-free adaptive clustering framework that accelerates the generation of DiTs while preserving accuracy. AdaCluster applies an angle-similarity-preserving clustering method to query vectors for higher compression, and designs a euclidean-similarity-preserving clustering method for keys, covering cluster number assignment, threshold-wise adaptive clustering, and efficient critical cluster selection. Experiments on CogVideoX-2B, HunyuanVideo, and Wan-2.1 on one A40 GPU demonstrate up to 1.67-4.31x speedup with negligible quality degradation.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) achieved rapid progress in the recent years. However, despite their growth, VLMs development is heavily grounded on English, leading to two main limitations: (i) the lack of multilingual and multimodal datasets for training, and (ii) the scarcity of comprehensive evaluation benchmarks across languages. In this work, we address these gaps by introducing a new comprehensive suite of resources for VLMs training and evaluation spanning five European languages (English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish). We adopt a regeneration-translation paradigm that produces high-quality cross-lingual resources by combining curated synthetic generation and manual annotation. Specifically, we build Multi-PixMo, a training corpus obtained regenerating examples from Pixmo pre-existing datasets with permissively licensed models: PixMo-Cap, PixMo-AskModelAnything, and CoSyn-400k. On the evaluation side, we construct a set of multilingual benchmarks derived translating widely used English datasets (MMbench, ScienceQA, MME, POPE, AI2D). We assess the quality of these resources through qualitative and quantitative human analyses, measuring inter-annotator agreement. Additionally, we perform ablation studies to demonstrate the impact of multilingual data, with respect to English only, in VLMs training. Experiments, comprising 3 different models show that using multilingual, multimodal examples for training VLMs aids is consistently beneficial on non-English benchmarks, with positive transfer to English as well.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are composed of triples, and the goal of Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) is to infer the missing factual triples. Traditional KGC tasks predict missing elements in a triple given one or two of its elements. As a more realistic task, the Triple Set Prediction (TSP) task aims to infer the set of missing triples conditioned only on the observed knowledge graph, without assuming any partial information about the missing triples. Existing TSP methods predict the set of missing triples in a triple-by-triple manner, falling short in capturing the dependencies among the predicted triples to ensure consistency. To address this issue, we propose a novel discrete diffusion model termed DiffTSP that treats TSP as a generative task. DiffTSP progressively adds noise to the KG through a discrete diffusion process, achieved by masking relational edges. The reverse process then gradually recovers the complete KG conditioned on the incomplete graph. To this end, we design a structure-aware denoising network that integrates a relational context encoder with a relational graph diffusion transformer for knowledge graph generation. DiffTSP can generate the complete set of triples in a one-pass manner while ensuring the dependencies among the predicted triples. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on three public datasets. Code: https://github.com/ADMIS-TONGJI/DiffTSP.

Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD) workflows are central to modern software delivery, yet the reliability of agentic AI bots operating within these workflows remain underexplored. Using pull requests (PRs), commits, and repositories from the AIDev dataset, we retrieved associated CI/CD workflow runs via the GitHub Actions API and analyzed 61,837 runs from 2,355 repositories, all triggered by PRs generated by five AI bots: Claude, Devin, Cursor, Copilot, and Codex. We observed substantial agent-dependent differences in workflow reliability, with Copilot and Codex achieving the highest success rates ~93% and ~94% respectively. At the repository level, we find a negative correlation between AI agent contribution frequency and workflow success rate, suggesting that a higher frequency of Agentic PRs may hinder CI/CD workflow reliability. We defined a taxonomy of 13 categories against 3,067 agentic PRs whose associated workflows failed, and observed a trend analysis that indicates visually observable shifts from functional to non-functional PR categories over time, although these trends are not statistically significant. Our findings motivate the need for actionable guidance on integrating AI agents into CI/CD workflows and prioritizing safeguards in workflows where failures are most likely to occur.

We present FregeLogic, a hybrid neuro-symbolic system for SemEval-2026 Task 11 (Subtask 1), which addresses syllogistic validity prediction while reducing content effects on predictions. Our approach combines an ensemble of five LLM classifiers, spanning three open-weights models (Llama 4 Maverick, Llama 4 Scout, and Qwen3-32B) paired with varied prompting strategies, with a Z3 SMT solver that serves as a formal logic tiebreaker. The central hypothesis is that LLM disagreement within the ensemble signals likely content-biased errors, where real-world believability interferes with logical judgment. By deferring to Z3's structurally-grounded formal verification on these disputed cases, our system achieves 94.3% accuracy with a content effect of 2.85 and a combined score of 41.88 in nested 5-fold cross-validation on the dataset (N=960). This represents a 2.76-point improvement in combined score over the pure ensemble (39.12), with a 0.9% accuracy gain, driven by a 16% reduction in content effect (3.39 to 2.85). Adopting structured-output API calls for Z3 extraction reduced failure rates from ~22% to near zero, and an Aristotelian encoding with existence axioms was validated against task annotations. Our results suggest that targeted neuro-symbolic integration, applying formal methods precisely where ensemble consensus is lowest, can improve the combined accuracy-plus-content-effect metric used by this task.

Reward models (RMs) are central to aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, powering RLHF and advanced decoding strategies. While most prior work focuses on single-step generation, real-world applications increasingly adopt multi-stage LLM pipelines, where effective reward guidance remains underexplored. We investigate this through code generation for combinatorial optimization, constructing a pipeline that integrates reward models into both formulation and solution stages. We identify a critical challenge: inconsistency between reward model predictions and actual pipeline execution outcomes. To address this, we propose the Pipeline-Adapted Reward Model (PARM), which leverages pipeline-specific data and direct preference optimization to align rewards with downstream feedback. We instantiate PARM as a two-stage pipeline (formulation -> code generation) and evaluate it on four public optimization benchmarks, measuring execution rate and solving accuracy against baselines and sampling methods. A supplementary cross-domain experiment on GSM8K assesses transferability. Results demonstrate that PARM consistently improves pipeline output quality and stability, providing new insights into reward modeling for multi-stage LLM reasoning.

Self-evolution of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) remains a critical challenge: pseudo-label-based methods suffer from progressive quality degradation as model predictions drift, while template-based methods are confined to a static set of transformations that cannot adapt in difficulty or diversity. We contend that robust, continuous self-improvement requires not only deterministic external feedback independent of the model's internal certainty, but also a mechanism to perpetually diversify the training distribution. To this end, we introduce EVE (Executable Visual transformation-based self-Evolution), a novel framework that entirely bypasses pseudo-labels by harnessing executable visual transformations continuously enriched in both variety and complexity. EVE adopts a Challenger-Solver dual-policy architecture. The Challenger maintains and progressively expands a queue of visual transformation code examples, from which it synthesizes novel Python scripts to perform dynamic visual transformations. Executing these scripts yields VQA problems with absolute, execution-verified ground-truth answers, eliminating any reliance on model-generated supervision. A multi-dimensional reward system integrating semantic diversity and dynamic difficulty calibration steers the Challenger to enrich its code example queue while posing progressively more challenging tasks, preventing mode collapse and fostering reciprocal co-evolution between the two policies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EVE consistently surpasses existing self-evolution methods, establishing a robust and scalable paradigm for verifiable MLLM self-evolution. The code is available at https://github.com/0001Henry/EVE .

Selection bias arises when the probability that an observation enters a dataset depends on variables related to the quantities of interest, leading to systematic distortions in estimation and uncertainty quantification. For example, in epidemiological or survey settings, individuals with certain outcomes may be more likely to be included, resulting in biased prevalence estimates with potentially substantial downstream impact. Classical corrections, such as inverse-probability weighting or explicit likelihood-based models of the selection process, rely on tractable likelihoods, which limits their applicability in complex stochastic models with latent dynamics or high-dimensional structure. Simulation-based inference enables Bayesian analysis without tractable likelihoods but typically assumes missingness at random and thus fails when selection depends on unobserved outcomes or covariates. Here, we develop a bias-aware simulation-based inference framework that explicitly incorporates selection into neural posterior estimation. By embedding the selection mechanism directly into the generative simulator, the approach enables amortized Bayesian inference without requiring tractable likelihoods. This recasting of selection bias as part of the simulation process allows us to both obtain debiased estimates and explicitly test for the presence of bias. The framework integrates diagnostics to detect discrepancies between simulated and observed data and to assess posterior calibration. The method recovers well-calibrated posterior distributions across three statistical applications with diverse selection mechanisms, including settings in which likelihood-based approaches yield biased estimates. These results recast the correction of selection bias as a simulation problem and establish simulation-based inference as a practical and testable strategy for parameter estimation under selection bias.

The most common cause of dementia is Alzheimer disease, a progressive neurodegenerative disorder affecting older adults that gradually impairs memory, cognition, and behavior. It is characterized by the accumulation of abnormal proteins in the brain, including amyloid-beta plaques and neurofibrillary tangles of tau protein, which disrupt neuronal communication and lead to neuronal death. Early manifestations typically include mild memory impairment and reduced ability to acquire new information. As the disease progresses, patients experience severe cognitive decline, loss of independence, and significant personality and behavioral changes. Although the exact etiology of Alzheimer disease remains unclear, factors such as age, genetic predisposition, lifestyle, and cardiovascular health contribute to its development. While no definitive cure exists, early diagnosis, pharmacological interventions, and supportive care can slow progression and improve quality of life. This study presents a predictive cheminformatics-based model for identifying natural medicinal compounds with potential therapeutic efficacy against Alzheimer disease. The model functions as a drug screening system utilizing molecular descriptors and machine learning to detect anti-Alzheimer activity. More than 7,000 compounds from ChEBI, SynSysNet, and INDOFINE were preprocessed using Open Babel and analyzed with Dragon descriptors. A Random Forest classifier trained on approved treatments achieved moderate performance, with precision of 0.5970 and recall of 0.6590, identifying 73 candidate compounds. Key descriptors included atomic polarizability, bond multiplicity, and non-hydrogen bond counts.These findings demonstrate the value of cheminformatics in early-stage drug discovery for Alzheimer disease.

We address the problem of planning in an environment with deterministic dynamics and stochastic rewards with discounted returns. The optimal value function is not known, nor are the rewards bounded. We propose Platypoos, a simple scale-free planning algorithm that adapts to the unknown scale and smoothness of the reward function. We provide a sample complexity analysis for Platypoos that improves upon prior work and holds simultaneously over a broad range of discount factors and reward scales, without the algorithm knowing them. We also establish a matching lower bound showing our analysis is optimal up to constants.

Explainable AI (XAI) aims to make the behaviour of machine learning models interpretable, yet many explanation methods remain difficult to understand. The integration of Natural Language Generation into XAI aims to deliver explanations in textual form, making them more accessible to practitioners. Current approaches, however, largely yield static lists of feature importances. Although such explanations indicate what influences the prediction, they do not explain why the prediction occurs. In this study, we draw on insights from social sciences and linguistics, and argue that XAI explanations should be presented in the form of narratives. Narrative explanations support human understanding through four defining properties: continuous structure, cause-effect mechanisms, linguistic fluency, and lexical diversity. We show that standard Natural Language Processing (NLP) metrics based solely on token probability or word frequency fail to capture these properties and can be matched or exceeded by tautological text that conveys no explanatory content. To address this issue, we propose seven automatic metrics that quantify the narrative quality of explanations along the four identified dimensions. We benchmark current state-of-the-art explanation generation methods on six datasets and show that the proposed metrics separate descriptive from narrative explanations more reliably than standard NLP metrics. Finally, to further advance the field, we propose a set of problem-agnostic XAI Narrative generation rules for producing natural language XAI explanations, so that the resulting XAI Narratives exhibit stronger narrative properties and align with the findings from the linguistic and social science literature.

Variational inference (VI) is a central tool in modern machine learning, used to approximate an intractable target density by optimising over a tractable family of distributions. As the variational family cannot typically represent the target exactly, guarantees on the quality of the resulting approximation are crucial for understanding which of its properties VI can faithfully capture. Recent work has identified instances in which symmetries of the target and the variational family enable the recovery of certain statistics, even under model misspecification. However, these guarantees are inherently problem-specific and offer little insight into the fundamental mechanism by which symmetry forces statistic recovery. In this paper, we overcome this limitation by developing a general theory of symmetry-induced statistic recovery in variational inference. First, we characterise when variational minimisers inherit the symmetries of the target and establish conditions under which these pin down identifiable statistics. Second, we unify existing results by showing that previously known statistic recovery guarantees in location-scale families arise as special cases of our theory. Third, we apply our framework to distributions on the sphere to obtain novel guarantees for directional statistics in von Mises-Fisher families. Together, these results provide a modular blueprint for deriving new recovery guarantees for VI in a broad range of symmetry settings.

Large language model (LLM)-based debugging systems can generate failure explanations, but these explanations may be incomplete or incorrect. Misleading explanations are harmful for downstream tasks (e.g., bug triage, bug fixing). We investigate how explanation quality is affected by various LLM context configurations. Existing work predominantly treats LLM-generated failure explanations as an ad hoc by-product of debugging or repair workflows, using generic prompting over undifferentiated artifacts such as code, tests, and error messages rather than targeting explanations as a first-class output with dedicated quality assessment. Consequently, existing approaches provide limited support for assessing whether these explanations capture the underlying fault-error-failure mechanism and for actionable next steps, and most techniques instead prioritize task success (e.g., patch correctness or review quality) over the explicit causal explanation quality. We systematically vary the debugging information to study how distinct context compositions affect the quality of LLM-generated failure explanations. Across 93 context configurations on real bugs and three economically viable models (gpt-5-mini, DeepSeek-V3.2, and Grok-4.1-fast), we evaluate explanations with six criteria and validate the LLM-as-a-judge scores against human ratings in a user study. Our results indicate that explanation quality is causally affected by context composition. Evidence-rich, failure-specific artifacts improve causal and action-oriented quality, whereas overly large contexts tend to yield vague explanations. Higher explanation-score quartiles are associated with higher downstream repair pass rates and, for some models, with fixes that are closer to the reference minimal fixes. In contrast, low-score quartiles can even underperform the no-explanation baseline. Reproduction package is publicly available.

Language models often solve complex tasks by generating long reasoning chains, consisting of many steps with varying importance. While some steps are crucial for generating the final answer, others are removable. Determining which steps matter most, and why, remains an open question central to understanding how models process reasoning. We investigate if this question is best approached through model internals or through tokens of the reasoning chain itself. We find that model activations contain more information than tokens for identifying important reasoning steps. Crucially, by training probes on model activations to predict importance, we show that models encode an internal representation of step importance, even prior to the generation of subsequent steps. This internal representation of importance generalizes across models, is distributed across layers, and does not correlate with surface-level features, such as a step's relative position or its length. Our findings suggest that analyzing activations can reveal aspects of reasoning that surface-level approaches fundamentally miss, indicating that reasoning analyses should look into model internals.

In this paper we investigate forecasting coevolving time series that feature intricate dependencies and nonstationary dynamics by using an LLM Large Language Models approach We propose a novel modeling approach named ContextAware ARLLM CAARL that provides an interpretable framework to decode the contextual dynamics influencing changes in coevolving series CAARL decomposes time series into autoregressive segments constructs a temporal dependency graph and serializes this graph into a narrative to allow processing by LLM This design yields a chainofthoughtlike reasoning path where intermediate steps capture contextual dynamics and guide forecasts in a transparent manner By linking prediction to explicit reasoning traces CAARL enhances interpretability while maintaining accuracy Experiments on realworld datasets validate its effectiveness positioning CAARL as a competitive and interpretable alternative to stateoftheart forecasting methods

Privacy represents one of the most critical yet underaddressed barriers to AI adoption in mental healthcare -- particularly in high-sensitivity operational environments such as military, correctional, and remote healthcare settings, where the risk of patient data exposure can deter help-seeking behavior entirely. Existing AI-enabled psychiatric decision support systems predominantly rely on cloud-based inference pipelines, requiring sensitive patient data to leave the device and traverse external servers, creating unacceptable privacy and security risks in these contexts. In this paper, we propose a zero-egress, on-device AI platform for privacy-preserving psychiatric decision support, deployed as a cross-platform mobile application. The proposed system extends our prior work on fine-tuned LLM consortiums for psychiatric diagnosis standardization by fundamentally re-architecting the inference pipeline for fully local execution -- ensuring that no patient data is transmitted to, processed by, or stored on any external server at any stage. The platform integrates a consortium of three lightweight, fine-tuned, and quantized open-source LLMs -- Gemma, Phi-3.5-mini, and Qwen2 -- selected for their compact architectures and proven efficiency on resource-constrained mobile hardware. An on-device orchestration layer coordinates ensemble inference and consensus-based diagnostic reasoning, producing DSM-5-aligned assessments for conditions. The platform is designed to assist clinicians with differential diagnosis and evidence-linked symptom mapping, as well as to support patient-facing self-screening with appropriate clinical safeguards. Initial evaluation demonstrates that the proposed zero-egress deployment achieves diagnostic accuracy comparable to its server-side predecessor while sustaining real-time inference latency on commodity mobile hardware.

Static concreteness ratings are widely used in NLP, yet a word's concreteness can shift with context, especially in figurative language such as metaphor, where common concrete nouns can take abstract interpretations. While such shifts are evident from context, it remains unclear how LLMs understand concreteness internally. We conduct a layer-wise and geometric analysis of LLM hidden representations across four model families, examining how models distinguish literal vs figurative uses of the same noun and how concreteness is organized in representation space. We find that LLMs separate literal and figurative usage in early layers, and that mid-to-late layers compress concreteness into a one-dimensional direction that is consistent across models. Finally, we show that this geometric structure is practically useful: a single concreteness direction supports efficient figurative-language classification and enables training-free steering of generation toward more literal or more figurative rewrites.

Surprisal theory hypothesizes that the difficulty of human sentence processing increases linearly with surprisal, the negative log-probability of a word given its context. Computational psycholinguistics has tested this hypothesis using language models (LMs) as proxies for human prediction. While surprisal derived from recent neural LMs generally captures human processing difficulty on naturalistic corpora that predominantly consist of simple sentences, it severely underestimates processing difficulty on sentences that require syntactic disambiguation (garden-path effects). This leads to the claim that the processing difficulty of such sentences cannot be reduced to surprisal, although it remains possible that neural LMs simply differ from humans in next-word prediction. In this paper, we investigate whether it is truly impossible to construct a neural LM that can explain garden-path effects via surprisal. Specifically, instead of evaluating off-the-shelf neural LMs, we fine-tune these LMs on garden-path sentences so as to better align surprisal-based reading-time estimates with actual human reading times. Our results show that fine-tuned LMs do not overfit and successfully capture human reading slowdowns on held-out garden-path items; they even improve predictive power for human reading times on naturalistic corpora and preserve their general LM capabilities. These results provide an existence proof for a neural LM that can explain both garden-path effects and naturalistic reading times via surprisal, but also raise a theoretical question: what kind of evidence can truly falsify surprisal theory?

Large language models are increasingly expected to serve as general-purpose agents that interact with external, stateful tool environments. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) and broader agent skills offer a unified interface for connecting agents with scalable real-world services, but training robust agents remains limited by the lack of realistic environments and principled mechanisms for life-long learning. In this paper, we present \textbf{Agent-World}, a self-evolving training arena for advancing general agent intelligence through scalable environments. Agent-World has two main components: (1) Agentic Environment-Task Discovery, which autonomously explores topic-aligned databases and executable tool ecosystems from thousands of real-world environment themes and synthesizes verifiable tasks with controllable difficulty; and (2) Continuous Self-Evolving Agent Training, which combines multi-environment reinforcement learning with a self-evolving agent arena that automatically identifies capability gaps through dynamic task synthesis and drives targeted learning, enabling the co-evolution of agent policies and environments. Across 23 challenging agent benchmarks, Agent-World-8B and 14B consistently outperforms strong proprietary models and environment scaling baselines. Further analyses reveal scaling trends in relation to environment diversity and self-evolution rounds, offering insights for building general agent intelligence.

The limited number of qubits is a major bottleneck in Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) for large-scale combinatorial optimization in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era. To make progress, existing techniques rely on qubit reduction at the cost of information loss, hence leading to degraded computational performance. As a remedy, we propose the Equivalence-preserving Qubit Efficient QAOA (EQE-QAOA), which significantly reduces the required number of qubits without degrading the performance of QAOA. By exploiting intrinsic symmetries and conserved quantities, we first demonstrate that the QAOA dynamics are strictly confined to an invariant subspace of the Hilbert space. We subsequently prove that the evolution within this subspace is exactly equivalent to that of the full-scale system, achieving the same optimal solution as the original QAOA. Moreover, to reduce the number of qubits, we propose an isometric mapping that re-encodes the subspace into a space relying on fewer qubits. Furthermore, we derive the applicability conditions of EQE-QAOA and show that it is broadly applicable to large-scale combinatorial optimization problems, excluding only unconstrained problems with completely independent variables. Numerical simulations based on Max-Cut instances validate that EQE-QAOA significantly reduces qubit requirements and computational resources, while preserving exact optimization performance.

Accurate dynamical modeling is essential for simulation and control of embodied systems, yet first-principles models of electromechanical systems often fail to capture complex dissipative effects such as joint friction, stray losses, and structural damping. While residual-learning physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) can effectively augment imperfect first-principles models with data-driven components, the residual terms are typically implemented as unconstrained multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), which may inadvertently inject artificial energy into the system. To more faithfully model the dissipative dynamics, we propose DiLaR-PINN, a dissipative latent residual PINN designed to learn unmodeled dissipative effects in a physically consistent manner. Structurally, the residual network operates only on unmeasurable (latent) state components and is parameterized in a skew-dissipative form that guarantees non-increasing energy for any choice of network parameters. To enable stable and data-efficient training under partial measurability of the state, we further develop a recurrent rollout scheme with a curriculum-based sequence length extension strategy. We validate DiLaR-PINN on a real-world helicopter system and compare it against four baselines: a pure physical model (without a residual network), an unstructured residual MLP, a DiLaR variant with a soft dissipativity constraint, and a black-box LSTM. The results demonstrate that DiLaR-PINN more accurately captures dissipative effects and achieves superior long-horizon extrapolation performance.

Block-encoding is a foundational technique in modern quantum algorithms, enabling the implementation of non-unitary operations by embedding them into larger unitary matrices. While theoretically powerful and essential for advanced protocols like Quantum Singular Value Transformation (QSVT) and Quantum Signal Processing (QSP), the generation of compilable implementations of block-encodings poses a formidable challenge. This work presents the BlockEncoding interface within the Eclipse Qrisp framework, establishing block-encodings as a high-level programming abstraction accessible to a broad scientific audience. Serving as both a technical framework introduction and a hands-on tutorial, this paper explicitly details key underlying concepts abstracted away by the interface, such as block-encoding construction and qubitization, and their practical integration into methods like the Childs-Kothari-Somma (CKS) algorithm. We outline the interface's software architecture, encompassing constructors, core utilities, arithmetic composition, and algorithmic applications such as matrix inversion, polynomial filtering, and Hamiltonian simulation. Through code examples, we demonstrate how this interface simplifies both the practical realization of advanced quantum algorithms and their associated resource estimation.

The ability of humans for lifelong learning is an inspiration for deep learning methods and in particular for continual learning. In this work, we apply Hebbian learning, a biologically inspired learning process, to sound classification. We propose a kernel plasticity approach that selectively modulates network kernels during incremental learning, acting on selected kernels to learn new information and on others to retain previous knowledge. Using the ESC-50 dataset, the proposed method achieves 76.3% overall accuracy over five incremental steps, outperforming a baseline without kernel plasticity (68.7%) and demonstrating significantly greater stability across tasks.

Identifying anomalous instances in tabular data is essential for improving data reliability and maintaining system stability. Due to the scarcity of ground-truth anomaly labels, existing methods mainly rely on unsupervised anomaly detection models, or exploit a small number of labeled anomalies to facilitate detection via sample generation or contrastive learning. However, unsupervised methods lack sufficient anomaly awareness, while current generation and contrastive approaches tend to compute anomalies globally, overlooking the localized anomaly patterns of tabular features, resulting in suboptimal detection performance. To address these limitations, we propose PLAG, a pseudo-label-guided anomaly generation method designed to enhance tabular anomaly detection. Specifically, by utilizing pseudo-anomalies as guidance signals and decoupling the overall anomaly quantification of a sample into an accumulation of feature-level abnormalities, PLAG not only effectively obviates the need for scarce ground-truth labels but also provides a novel perspective for the model to comprehend localized anomalous signals at a fine-grained level. Furthermore, a two-stage data selection strategy is proposed, integrating format verification and uncertainty estimation to rigorously filter candidate samples, thereby ensuring the fidelity and diversity of the synthetic anomalies. Ultimately, these filtered synthetic anomalies serve as robust discriminative guidance, empowering the model to better separate normal and anomalous instances. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PLAG achieves state-of-the-art performance against eight representative baselines. Moreover, as a flexible framework, it integrates seamlessly with existing unsupervised detectors, consistently boosting F1-scores by 0.08 to 0.21.

Zeroth-Order optimization presents a promising memory-efficient paradigm for fine-tuning Large Language Models by relying solely on forward passes. However, its practical adoption is severely constrained by slow wall-clock convergence and high estimation variance. In this work, we dissect the runtime characteristics of ZO algorithms and identify a critical system bottleneck where the generation of perturbations and parameter updates accounts for over 40% of the training latency. We argue that the standard uniform exploration strategy is fundamentally flawed as it fails to account for the heterogeneous sensitivity of layers in deep networks, resulting in computationally wasteful blind searches. To address this structural mismatch, we propose AdaLeZO, an Adaptive Layer-wise ZO optimization framework. By formulating the layer selection process as a non-stationary Multi-Armed Bandit problem, AdaLeZO dynamically allocates the limited perturbation budget to the most sensitive parameters. We further introduce an Inverse Probability Weighting mechanism based on sampling with replacement, which guarantees unbiased gradient estimation while effectively acting as a temporal denoiser to reduce variance. Extensive experiments on LLaMA and OPT models ranging from 6.7B to 30B parameters demonstrate that AdaLeZO achieves 1.7x to 3.0x wall-clock acceleration compared to state-of-the-art methods. Crucially, AdaLeZO functions as a universal plug-and-play module that seamlessly enhances the efficiency of existing ZO optimizers without incurring additional memory overhead.

The multi-scale and non-linear nature of phase-field models of solidification requires fine spatial and temporal discretization, leading to long computation times. This could be overcome with artificial-intelligence approaches. Surrogate models based on neural operators could have a lower computational cost than conventional numerical discretization methods. We propose a new neural operator approach that bridges classical convex-concave splitting schemes with physics-informed learning to accelerate the simulation of phase-field models. It consists of a Deep Ritz method, where a neural operator is trained to approximate a variational formulation of the phase-field model. By training the neural operator with an energy-splitting variational formulation, we enforce the energy dissipation property of the underlying models. We further introduce a custom Reaction-Diffusion Neural Operator (RDNO) architecture, adapted to the operators of the model equations. We successfully apply the deep learning approach to the isotropic Allen-Cahn equation and to anisotropic dendritic growth simulation. We demonstrate that our physically-informed training provides better generalization in out-of-distribution evaluations than data-driven training, while achieving faster inference than traditional Fourier spectral methods.

While modern text-to-image (T2I) models excel at generating images from intricate prompts, they struggle to capture the key details when the inputs are descriptive paragraphs. This limitation stems from the prevalence of concise captions that shape their training distributions. Existing methods attempt to bridge this gap by either fine-tuning T2I models on long prompts, which generalizes poorly to longer lengths; or by projecting the oversize inputs into normal-prompt space and compromising fidelity. We propose Prompt Refraction for Intricate Scene Modeling (PRISM), a compositional approach that enables pre-trained T2I models to process long sequence inputs. PRISM uses a lightweight module to extract constituent representations from the long prompts. The T2I model makes independent noise predictions for each component, and their outputs are merged into a single denoising step using energy-based conjunction. We evaluate PRISM across a wide range of model architectures, showing comparable performances to models fine-tuned on the same training data. Furthermore, PRISM demonstrates superior generalization, outperforming baseline models by 7.4% on prompts over 500 tokens in a challenging public benchmark.

Query auto-completion (QAC) has been widely studied in the context of web search, yet remains underexplored for in-document search, which we term DocQAC. DocQAC aims to enhance search productivity within long documents by helping users craft faster, more precise queries, even for complex or hard-to-spell terms. While global historical queries are available to both WebQAC and DocQAC, DocQAC uniquely accesses document-specific context, including the current document's content and its specific history of user query interactions. To address this setting, we propose a novel adaptive trie-guided decoding framework that uses user query prefixes to softly steer language models toward high-quality completions. Our approach introduces an adaptive penalty mechanism with tunable hyperparameters, enabling a principled trade-off between model confidence and trie-based guidance. To efficiently incorporate document context, we explore retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and lightweight contextual document signals such as titles, keyphrases, and summaries. When applied to encoder-decoder models like T5 and BART, our trie-guided framework outperforms strong baselines and even surpasses much larger instruction-tuned models such as LLaMA-3 and Phi-3 on seen queries across both seen and unseen documents. This demonstrates its practicality for real-world DocQAC deployments, where efficiency and scalability are critical. We evaluate our method on a newly introduced DocQAC benchmark derived from ORCAS, enriched with query-document pairs. We make both the DocQAC dataset (https://bit.ly/3IGEkbH) and code (https://github.com/rahcode7/DocQAC) publicly available.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models provide a structured approach to combining specialized neural networks and offer greater interpretability than conventional ensembles. While MoEs have been successfully applied to image classification and semantic segmentation, their use in object detection remains limited due to challenges in merging dense and structured predictions. In this work, we investigate model-level mixtures of object detectors and analyze their suitability for improving performance and interpretability in object detection. We propose an MoE architecture that combines YOLO-based detectors trained on semantically disjoint data subsets, with a learned gating network that dynamically weights expert contributions. We study different strategies for fusing detection outputs and for training the gating mechanism, including balancing losses to prevent expert collapse. Experiments on the BDD100K dataset demonstrate that the proposed MoE consistently outperforms standard ensemble approaches and provides insights into expert specialization across domains, highlighting model-level MoEs as a viable alternative to traditional ensembling for object detection. Our code is available at https://github.com/KASTEL-MobilityLab/mixtures-of-experts/.

Recently, code-oriented large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in translating natural language into executable code. Text-to-SQL is a significant application of this ability, enabling non-technical users to interact with relational databases using natural language. However, state-of-the-art models continue to struggle with highly complex logic, particularly deeply nested statements involving multiple joins and conditions, as well as with real-world database schemas that are noisy or poorly structured. In this paper, we investigate whether curriculum learning can improve the performance of code-based LLMs on Text-to-SQL tasks. Employing benchmarks including Spider and BIRD, we fine-tune models under different curriculum strategies. Our experiments show that naive curriculum, simply ordering training samples by complexity in a single epoch, fails to surpass standard fine-tuning due to catastrophic forgetting. To overcome this, we propose a Modular Adapter Composition (MAC) strategy. By sequentially training tier-specific adapters on incremental complexity levels (Easy to Extra-Hard), we create a scaffolded learning environment that improves performance on complex queries. Our approach not only produces measurable performance gains on the Spider and BIRD benchmarks but also provides a flexible, "Lego-like" architecture, allowing models to be composed and deployed based on specific schema difficulty requirements. These findings demonstrate that structured, modular learning is a superior alternative to monolithic fine-tuning for mastering the syntax and logic of complex code generation.

In this paper, we present three neural network architectures designed for real-time classification of weather conditions (sunny, rain, snow, fog) from images. These models, inspired by recent advances in style transfer, aim to capture the stylistic elements present in images. One model, called "Multi-PatchGAN", is based on PatchGANs used in well-known architectures such as Pix2Pix and CycleGAN, but here adapted with multiple patch sizes for detection tasks. The second model, "Truncated ResNet50", is a simplified version of ResNet50 retaining only its first nine layers. This truncation, determined by an evolutionary algorithm, facilitates the extraction of high-frequency features essential for capturing subtle stylistic details. Finally, we propose "Truncated ResNet50 with Gram Matrix and Attention", which computes Gram matrices for each layer during training and automatically weights them via an attention mechanism, thus optimizing the extraction of the most relevant stylistic expressions for classification. These last two models outperform the state of the art and demonstrate remarkable generalization capability on several public databases. Although developed for weather detection, these architectures are also suitable for other appearance-based classification tasks, such as animal species recognition, texture classification, disease detection in medical imaging, or industrial defect identification.

Speech encoder models are known to model members of some speaker groups (SGs) better than others. However, there has been little work in establishing why this occurs on a technological level. To our knowledge, we present the first layerwise fairness analysis of pretrained self-supervised speech encoder models (S3Ms), probing each embedding layer for speaker identification (SID) automatic speech recognition (ASR). We find S3Ms produce embeddings biased against certain SGs for both tasks, starting at the very first latent layers. Furthermore, we find opposite patterns of layerwise bias for SID vs ASR for all models in our study: SID bias is minimized in layers that minimize overall SID error; on the other hand, ASR bias is maximized in layers that minimize overall ASR error. The inverse bias/error relationship for ASR is unaffected when probing S3Ms that are finetuned for ASR, suggesting SG-level bias is established during pretraining and is difficult to remove.

Current open-source prompt-injection detectors converge on two architectural choices: regular-expression pattern matching and fine-tuned transformer classifiers. Both share failure modes that recent work has made concrete. Regular expressions miss paraphrased attacks. Fine-tuned classifiers are vulnerable to adaptive adversaries: a 2025 NAACL Findings study reported that eight published indirect-injection defenses were bypassed with greater than fifty percent attack success rates under adaptive attacks. This work proposes seven detection techniques that each port a specific mechanism from a discipline outside large-language-model security: forensic linguistics, materials-science fatigue analysis, deception technology from network security, local-sequence alignment from bioinformatics, mechanism design from economics, spectral signal analysis from epidemiology, and taint tracking from compiler theory. Three of the seven techniques are implemented in the prompt-shield v0.4.1 release (Apache 2.0) and evaluated in a four-configuration ablation across six datasets including deepset/prompt-injections, NotInject, LLMail-Inject, AgentHarm, and AgentDojo. The local-alignment detector lifts F1 on deepset from 0.033 to 0.378 with zero additional false positives. The stylometric detector adds 11.1 percentage points of F1 on an indirect-injection benchmark. The fatigue tracker is validated via a probing-campaign integration test. All code, data, and reproduction scripts are released under Apache 2.0.

Large language models are increasingly deployed as protocols: structured multi-call procedures that spend additional computation to transform a baseline answer into a final one. These protocols are evaluated only by end-to-end accuracy, giving limited insight into when they help, when they hurt, and whether their behavior transfers under distribution shift or composition. We propose a paired-outcome measurement interface for auditing a single protocol step on exact-match tasks. For each instance, the interface records a baseline correctness bit $E_0\in\{0,1\}$ and a post-step correctness bit $E_1\in\{0,1\}$, separating correction ($E_0=0\to E_1=1$) from corruption ($E_0=1\to E_1=0$) through two rates: $c=\Pr(E_1=1\mid E_0=0)$ and $γ=\Pr(E_1=0\mid E_0=1)$. These rates predict accuracy changes and define a reusable empirical interface testable across seeds, mixtures, and pipelines. We identify three failure mechanisms. Under mixture shift, pooled estimates of $(c,γ)$ become biased when calibration and deployment mixtures differ; conditioning on a difficulty proxy restores stability without additional model calls. Under presentation contamination, selection protocols alter the interface through stable presentation artifacts when candidate content is fixed. Under state insufficiency, the correctness bit may not carry enough history for multi-step pipelines to compose predictably; a Markov factorization test identifies when composition is valid and where additional state is needed. When a protocol step passes these diagnostics, it becomes an auditable module: gated by estimated gain, conditioned on a difficulty proxy to correct mixture bias, and composed into multi-step pipelines with predictable accuracy. We demonstrate these ideas on synthetic mathematical tasks and on GSM8K, where the calibrated interface correctly predicts when protocol steps should be activated or suppressed.

\We introduce the horospherical depth, an intrinsic notion of statistical depth on Hadamard manifolds, and define the Busemann median as the set of its maximizers. The construction exploits the fact that the linear functionals appearing in Tukey's half-space depth are themselves limits of renormalized distance functions; on a Hadamard manifold the same limiting procedure produces Busemann functions, whose sublevel sets are horoballs, the intrinsic replacements for halfspaces. The resulting depth is parametrized by the visual boundary, is isometry-equivariant, and requires neither tangent-space linearization nor a chosen base point.For arbitrary Hadamard manifolds, we prove that the depth regions are nested and geodesically convex, that a centerpoint of depth at least $1/(d+1)$ exists, and hence that the Busemann median exists for every Borel probability measure. Under strictly negative sectional curvature and mild regularity assumptions, the depth is strictly quasi-concave and the median is unique. We also establish robustness: the depth is stable under total-variation perturbations, and under contamination escaping to infinity the limiting median depends on the escape direction but not on how far the contaminating mass has moved along the geodesic ray, in contrast with the Fréchet mean. Finally, we establish uniform consistency of the sample depth and convergence of sample depth regions and sample Busemann medians; on symmetric spaces of noncompact type, the argument proceeds through a VC analysis of upper horospherical halfspaces, while on general Hadamard manifolds it follows from a compactness argument under a mild non-atomicity assumption.

As reinforcement learning continues to scale the training of large language model-based agents, reliably verifying agent behaviors in complex environments has become increasingly challenging. Existing approaches rely on rule-based verifiers or LLM-as-a-Judge models, which struggle to generalize beyond narrow domains. Agent-as-a-Judge addresses this limitation by actively interacting with environments and tools to acquire verifiable evidence, yet its capabilities remain underexplored. We introduce a benchmark AJ-Bench to systematically evaluate Agent-as-a-Judge across three domains-search, data systems, and graphical user interfaces-comprising 155 tasks and 516 annotated trajectories. The benchmark comprehensively assesses judge agents' abilities in information acquisition, state verification, and process verification. Experiments demonstrate consistent performance gains over LLM-as-a-Judge baselines, while also revealing substantial open challenges in agent-based verification. Our data and code are available at https://aj-bench.github.io/.

Preference optimization is widely used to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, many margin-based objectives suppress the chosen response along with the rejected one, a phenomenon known as likelihood displacement, and no general mechanism currently prevents this across objectives. We bridge this gap by presenting a unified \emph{incentive-score decomposition} of preference optimization, revealing that diverse objectives share identical local update directions and differ only in their scalar weighting coefficients. Building on this decomposition, by analyzing the dynamics of the chosen/rejected likelihoods, we identify the \emph{disentanglement band} (DB), a simple, testable condition that characterizes when training can avoid likelihood displacement by realizing the preferred pathway: suppressing the loser while maintaining the winner, possibly after an initial transient. Leveraging the DB, we propose a plug-and-play \emph{reward calibration} (RC) that adaptively rebalances chosen versus rejected updates to satisfy the DB and mitigate likelihood displacement, without redesigning the base objective. Empirical results show that RC steers training toward more disentangled dynamics and often improves downstream performance across a range of objectives. Our code is available at https://github.com/IceyWuu/DisentangledPreferenceOptimization.

In large-scale distributed scenarios, increasingly complex tasks demand more intelligent collaboration across networks, requiring the joint extraction of structural representations from data samples. However, conventional task-specific approaches often result in nonstructural embeddings, leading to collapsed variability among data samples within the same class, particularly in classification tasks. To address this issue and fully leverage the intrinsic structure of data for downstream applications, we propose a novel distributed learning framework that ensures both diverse and discriminative representations. For independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) data, we reformulate and decouple the global optimization function by introducing constraints on representation variance. The update rules are then derived and simplified using a primal-dual approach. For non-i.i.d. data distributions, we tackle the problem by clustering and virtually replicating nodes, allowing model updates within each cluster using block coordinate descent. In both cases, the resulting optimal solutions are theoretically proven to maintain discriminative and diverse properties, with a guaranteed convergence for i.i.d. conditions. Additionally, semantic information from representations is shared among nodes, reducing the need for common neural network architectures. Finally, extensive simulations on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in capturing global structural representations.

Deep search agents can autonomously initiate multi-turn interactions with search engines, thereby exhibiting strong question-answering capabilities. Such performance critically relies on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) as its core training algorithm. However, GRPO still faces several challenges in deep search settings. First, there exists a substantial mismatch between the correctness of intermediate steps and the reward signal, causing numerous correct intermediate steps to be incorrectly penalized when the final answer is wrong. Second, training is highly unstable, often resulting in degradation of natural language ability or even catastrophic training collapse. Our analysis attributes these issues to coarse-grained advantage assignment and an imbalance between positive and negative advantages. To address these problems, we propose CalibAdv, an advantage calibration method specifically designed for deep search tasks. Specifically, CalibAdv leverages the correctness of intermediate steps to downscale excessive negative advantages at a fine-grained level. It then rebalances positive and negative advantages in the answer component. Extensive experiments across three models and seven benchmarks demonstrate that CalibAdv improves both model performance and training stability. Our code is available at https://github.com/wujwyi/CalibAdv.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge to answer questions more accurately. However, research on evaluating RAG systems-particularly the retriever component-remains limited, as most existing work focuses on single-context retrieval rather than multi-hop queries, where individual contexts may appear irrelevant in isolation but are essential when combined. In this research, we use the HotPotQA, MuSiQue, and SQuAD datasets to simulate a RAG system and compare three LLM-as-judge evaluation strategies, including our proposed Context-Aware Retriever Evaluation (CARE). Our goal is to better understand how multi-hop reasoning can be most effectively evaluated in RAG systems. Experiments with LLMs from OpenAI, Meta, and Google demonstrate that CARE consistently outperforms existing methods for evaluating multi-hop reasoning in RAG systems. The performance gains are most pronounced in models with larger parameter counts and longer context windows, while single-hop queries show minimal sensitivity to context-aware evaluation. Overall, the results highlight the critical role of context-aware evaluation in improving the reliability and accuracy of retrieval-augmented generation systems, particularly in complex query scenarios. To ensure reproducibility, we provide the complete data of our experiments at https://github.com/lorenzbrehme/CARE.

Network change validation remains a critical yet predominantly manual, time-consuming, and error-prone process in modern network operations. While formal network verification has made substantial progress in proving correctness properties, it is typically applied in offline, pre-deployment settings and faces challenges in accommodating continuous changes and validating live production behavior. Current operational approaches typically involve scattered testing tools, resulting in partial coverage and errors that surface only after deployment. In this paper, we present Aether, a novel approach that integrates Generative Agentic AI with a multi-functional Network Digital Twin to automate and streamline network change validation workflows. It features an agentic architecture with five specialized Network Operations AI agents that collaboratively handle the change validation lifecycle from intent analysis to network verification and testing. Aether agents use a unified Network Digital Twin integrating modeling, simulation, and emulation to maintain a consistent, up-to-date network view for verification and testing. By orchestrating agent collaboration atop this digital twin, Aether enables automated, rapid network change validation while reducing manual effort, minimizing errors, and improving operational agility and cost-effectiveness. We evaluate Aether over synthetic network change scenarios covering main classes of network changes and on past incidents from a major ISP operational network, demonstrating promising results in error detection (100%), diagnostic coverage (92-96%), and speed (6-7 minutes) over traditional methods.

Early-stage specifications of safety-critical systems are typically expressed in natural language, making it difficult to derive formal properties suitable for verification and needed to guarantee safety. While recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based approaches can generate formal artifacts from text, they mainly focus on syntactic correctness and do not ensure semantic alignment between informal requirements and formally verifiable properties. We propose an agentic methodology that automatically extracts verification-ready properties from unstructured specifications. The modular pipeline combines requirement extraction, compatibility filtering with respect to a target formalism, and translation into formal properties. Experimental results across three scenarios show that the pipeline generates syntactically and semantically aligned formal properties with a 77.8% accuracy. By explicitly accounting for modeling and verification constraints, the approach is a paving step towards exploiting Artificial Intelligence (AI) to bridge the gap between informal descriptions and semantically meaningful formal verification.

Feature selection is a fundamental machine learning and data mining task, involved with discriminating redundant features from informative ones. It is an attempt to address the curse of dimensionality by removing the redundant features, while unlike dimensionality reduction methods, preserving explainability. Feature selection is conducted in both supervised and unsupervised settings, with different evaluation metrics employed to determine which feature selection algorithm is the best. In this paper, we propose FSEVAL, a feature selection evaluation toolbox accompanied with a visualization dashboard, with the goal to make it easy to comprehensively evaluate feature selection algorithms. FSEVAL aims to provide a standardized, unified, evaluation and visualization toolbox to help the researchers working in the field, conduct extensive and comprehensive evaluation of feature selection algorithms with ease.

Automated analysis of customer feedback on social media is hindered by three challenges: the high cost of annotated training data, the scarcity of evaluation sets, especially in multilingual settings, and privacy concerns that prevent data sharing and reproducibility. We address these issues by developing a generalizable synthetic data generation pipeline applied to a case study on customer distress detection in French public transportation. Our approach utilizes backtranslation with fine-tuned models to generate 1.7 million synthetic tweets from a small seed corpus, complemented by synthetic reasoning traces. We train 600M-parameter reasoners with English and French reasoning that achieve 77-79% accuracy on human-annotated evaluation data, matching or exceeding SOTA proprietary LLMs and specialized encoders. Beyond reducing annotation costs, our pipeline preserves privacy by eliminating the exposure of sensitive user data. Our methodology can be adopted for other use cases and languages.

Is Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3) capable in segmenting Any Pathology Images? Digital pathology segmentation spans tissue-level and nuclei-level scales, where traditional methods often suffer from high annotation costs and poor generalization. SAM3 introduces Promptable Concept Segmentation, offering a potential automated interface via text prompts. With this work, we propose a systematic evaluation protocol to explore the capability space of SAM3 in a structured manner. Specifically, we evaluate SAM3 under different supervision settings including zero-shot, few-shot, and supervised with varying prompting strategies. Our extensive evaluation on pathological datasets including NuInsSeg, PanNuke and GlaS, reveals that: 1.text-only prompts poorly activate nuclear concepts. 2.performance is highly sensitive to visual prompt types and budgets. 3.few-shot learning offers gains, but SAM3 lacks robustness against visual prompt noise. and 4.a significant gap persists between prompt-based usage and task-trained adapter-based reference. Our study delineates SAM3's boundaries in pathology image segmentation and provides practical guidance on the necessity of pathology domain adaptation.

Large language models are rapidly evolving into interactive coding agents capable of end-to-end web coding, yet existing benchmarks evaluate only narrow slices of this capability, typically text-conditioned generation with static-correctness metrics, leaving visual fidelity, interaction quality, and codebase-level reasoning largely unmeasured. We introduce WebCompass, a multimodal benchmark that provides unified lifecycle evaluation of web engineering capability. Recognizing that real-world web coding is an iterative cycle of generation, editing, and repair, WebCompass spans three input modalities (text, image, video) and three task types (generation, editing, repair), yielding seven task categories that mirror professional workflows. Through a multi-stage, human-in-the-loop pipeline, we curate instances covering 15 generation domains, 16 editing operation types, and 11 repair defect types, each annotated at Easy/Medium/Hard levels. For evaluation, we adopt a checklist-guided LLM-as-a-Judge protocol for editing and repair, and propose a novel Agent-as-a-Judge paradigm for generation that autonomously executes generated websites in a real browser, explores interactive behaviors via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and iteratively synthesizes targeted test cases, closely approximating human acceptance testing. We evaluate representative closed-source and open-source models and observe that: (1) closed-source models remain substantially stronger and more balanced; (2) editing and repair exhibit distinct difficulty profiles, with repair preserving interactivity better but remaining execution-challenging; (3) aesthetics is the most persistent bottleneck, especially for open-source models; and (4) framework choice materially affects outcomes, with Vue consistently challenging while React and Vanilla/HTML perform more strongly depending on task type.

Electroencephalography (EEG) signals have been promising for long-term braking intensity prediction but are prone to various artifacts that limit their reliability. Here, we propose a novel framework that models EEG signals as mixtures of independent blind sources and identifies those strongly correlated with braking action. Our method employs independent component analysis to decompose EEG into different components and combines time-frequency analysis with Pearson correlations to select braking-related components. Furthermore, we utilize hierarchical clustering to group braking-related components into two clusters, each characterized by a distinct spatial pattern. Additionally, these components exhibit trial-invariant temporal patterns and demonstrate stable and common neural signatures of the emergency braking process. Using power features from these components and historical braking data, we predict braking intensity at a 200 ms horizon. Evaluations on the open source dataset (O.D.) and human-in-the-loop simulation (H.S.) show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving RMSE reductions of 8.0% (O.D.) and 23.8% (H.S.).

Success in association football relies on both individual skill and coordinated tactics. While recent advancements in spatio-temporal data and deep learning have enabled predictive analyses like trajectory forecasting, the development of tactical design remains limited. Bridging this gap is essential, as prediction reveals what is likely to occur, whereas tactic generation determines what should occur to achieve strategic objectives. In this work, we present TacticGen, a generative model for adaptable and scalable tactic generation. TacticGen formulates tactics as sequences of multi-agent movements and interactions conditioned on the game context. It employs a multi-agent diffusion transformer with agent-wise self-attention and context-aware cross-attention to capture cooperative and competitive dynamics among players and the ball. Trained with over 3.3 million events and 100 million tracking frames from top-tier leagues, TacticGen achieves state-of-the-art precision in predicting player trajectories. Building on it, TacticGen enables adaptable tactic generation tailored to diverse inference-time objectives through classifier guidance mechanism, specified via rules, natural language, or neural models. Its modeling performance is also inherently scalable. A case study with football experts confirms that TacticGen generates realistic, strategically valuable tactics, demonstrating its practical utility for tactical planning in professional football. The project page is available at: https://shengxu.net/TacticGen/.

Prompt-injected memory can improve reasoning without updating model weights, but it also creates a control problem: retrieved content helps only when it is applied in the right state. We study this problem in a strict training-free setting and formulate it as applicability control: when to trigger a memory-assisted second pass, when to trust it, and how to maintain the memory bank over time. Our method combines uncertainty-based routing, confidence-based selective acceptance, bank selection across rule and exemplar memory, and evidence-based governance of the memory bank over time. Under a locked training-free protocol with compute-matched controls, it improves two core arithmetic benchmarks by +7.0 points on SVAMP and +7.67 points on ASDiv over baseline. The same architecture also transfers to QA and agent benchmarks with smaller positive effects and shows the same positive direction on a second checkpoint for the main arithmetic tasks. On arithmetic, the main empirical pattern is that the control architecture, rather than raw memory exposure, drives the improvements on SVAMP and ASDiv. Mechanistically, confidence separates helpful from harmful rule-bank interventions, and under fixed retrieval the repair-versus-corrupt difference localizes to rows whose retrieved set actually contains the edited entries.

We present a phoneme-level analysis of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for two low-resourced and phonologically complex East Caucasian languages, Archi and Rutul, based on curated and standardized speech-transcript resources totaling approximately 50 minutes and 1 hour 20 minutes of audio, respectively. Existing recordings and transcriptions are consolidated and processed into a form suitable for ASR training and evaluation. We evaluate several state-of-the-art audio and audio-language models, including wav2vec2, Whisper, and Qwen2-Audio. For wav2vec2, we introduce a language-specific phoneme vocabulary with heuristic output-layer initialization, which yields consistent improvements and achieves performance comparable to or exceeding Whisper in these extremely low-resource settings. Beyond standard word and character error rates, we conduct a detailed phoneme-level error analysis. We find that phoneme recognition accuracy strongly correlates with training frequency, exhibiting a characteristic sigmoid-shaped learning curve. For Archi, this relationship partially breaks for Whisper, pointing to model-specific generalization effects beyond what is predicted by training frequency. Overall, our results indicate that many errors attributed to phonological complexity are better explained by data scarcity. These findings demonstrate the value of phoneme-level evaluation for understanding ASR behavior in low-resource, typologically complex languages.

Multimodal LLMs can accurately perceive numerical content across modalities yet fail to perform exact multi-digit multiplication when the identical underlying arithmetic problem is presented as numerals, number words, images, or in audio form. Because existing benchmarks often lack systematically paired instances across modalities, it remains difficult to compare genuine arithmetic limits within and across model families. We therefore introduce a controlled multimodal multiplication benchmark that factorially varies digit length, digit sparsity, representation (e.g., numerals vs. number words), and modality (text, rendered images, audio), with paired instances from a reproducible generator. We also define arithmetic load, C, as the product of the total and non-zero digit count as a compact, mechanistically motivated proxy for operation count. Across evaluations, accuracy falls sharply as C grows, often nearing zero by C > 100. Indeed, C remains predictive of performance across modalities and models, with R-squared often > 0.5, nearing the value from more complex measures of arithmetic load that count the number of intermediate arithmetic steps. A separate perception-versus-computation decomposition shows that multimodal degradation is primarily computational rather than perceptual: on matched-perception checks, models are near-perfect (> 99%) across modalities, even when multiplication accuracy drops. Beyond measuring when models fail, we ask which procedures they are predisposed to follow. We introduce a forced-completion loss probe that scores heuristic-specific reasoning prefixes--including columnar multiplication, distributive decomposition, and rounding/compensation. Here, decomposition is favored in both text and vision modalities; heuristic-specific LoRA adapters produce near-orthogonal updates yet degrade accuracy, indicating the base model maintains a well-tuned internal router.

We prove a centre manifold theorem for a map along a manifold-with-boundary of fixed points, and provide an application to the study of gradient descent with large step size on two-layer matrix factorisation problems.

Diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for a wide range of vision tasks, including text-guided image generation and editing. In this work, we explore their potential for object grounding in remote sensing imagery. We propose a hybrid pipeline that integrates diffusion-based localization cues with state-of-the-art segmentation models such as RemoteSAM and SAM3 to obtain more accurate bounding boxes. By leveraging the complementary strengths of generative diffusion models and foundational segmentation models, our approach enables robust and adaptive object localization across complex scenes. Experiments demonstrate that our pipeline significantly improves localization performance, achieving over a 14% increase in Acc@0.5 compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.

Transformer-based embedding models suffer from quadratic computational and linear memory complexity, limiting their utility for long sequences. We propose recurrent architectures as an efficient alternative, introducing a vertically chunked inference strategy that enables fast embedding generation with memory usage that becomes constant in the input length once it exceeds the vertical chunk size. By fine-tuning Mamba2 models, we demonstrate their viability as general-purpose text embedders, achieving competitive performance across a range of benchmarks while maintaining a substantially smaller memory footprint compared to transformer-based counterparts. We empirically validate the applicability of our inference strategy to Mamba2, RWKV, and xLSTM models, confirming consistent runtime-memory trade-offs across architectures and establishing recurrent models as a compelling alternative to transformers for efficient embedding generation.

In black-box optimization, a central question is which algorithm to use to solve a given, previously unseen, problem. Selecting a single algorithm, however, entails inherent risks: inaccuracies in the selector may lead to poor choices, and even well-performing algorithms with high variance can yield unsatisfactory results in a single run. A natural remedy is to split the evaluation budget across multiple runs of potentially different algorithms. Such sequential algorithm portfolios benefit from variance reduction and complementarities between algorithms, often outperforming approaches that allocate the entire budget to a single solver. While effective portfolios can be constructed post-hoc, transferring this idea to the algorithm selection setting is non-trivial. We show that a naive portfolio constructed over the full training set already outperforms the strongest traditional baseline, the virtual best solver. We then propose a simple yet effective k-nearest-neighbor-based finetuning approach to construct portfolios tailored to unseen instances, yielding further improvements and highlighting the effectiveness of portfolio selection in fixed-budget black-box optimization.

Drifting Models [Deng et al., 2026] train a one-step generator by evolving samples under a kernel-based drift field, avoiding ODE integration at inference. The original analysis leaves two questions open. The drift-field iteration admits a locally repulsive regime in a two-particle surrogate, and vanishing of the drift ($V_{p,q}\equiv 0$) is not known to force the learned distribution $q$ to match the target $p$. We derive a contraction threshold for the surrogate and show that a linearly-scheduled friction coefficient gives a finite-horizon bound on the error trajectory. Under a Gaussian kernel we prove that the drift-field equilibrium is identifiable: vanishing of $V_{p,q}$ on any open set forces $q=p$, closing the converse of Proposition 3.1 of Deng et al. Our friction-augmented model, DMF (Drifting Model with Friction), matches or exceeds Optimal Flow Matching on FFHQ adult-to-child domain translation at 16x lower training compute.

We propose MADDPG-K, a scalable extension to Multi-Agent Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (MADDPG) that addresses the computational limitations of centralized critic approaches. Centralized critics, which condition on the observations and actions of all agents, have demonstrated significant performance gains in cooperative and competitive multi-agent settings. However, their critic networks grow linearly in input size with the number of agents, making them increasingly expensive to train at scale. MADDPG-K mitigates this by restricting each agent's critic to the $k$ closest agents under a chosen metric which in our case is Euclidean distance. This ensures a constant-size critic input regardless of the total agent count. We analyze the complexity of this approach, showing that the quadratic cost it retains arises from cheap scalar distance computations rather than the expensive neural network matrix multiplications that bottleneck standard MADDPG. We validate our method empirically across cooperative and adversarial environments from the Multi-Particle Environment suite, demonstrating competitive or superior performance compared to MADDPG, faster convergence in cooperative settings, and better runtime scaling as the number of agents grows. Our code is available at https://github.com/TimGop/MADDPG-K .

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have made significant progress in audio understanding, yet they primarily operate as perception-and-answer systems without explicit reasoning processes. Existing methods for enhancing audio reasoning rely either on supervised chain-of-thought (CoT) fine-tuning, which is limited by training data quality, or on reinforcement learning (RL) with coarse rewards that do not directly evaluate reasoning quality. As a result, the generated reasoning chains often appear well-structured yet lack specific acoustic grounding. We propose Audio-DeepThinker, a framework built on two core ideas. First, we introduce a hybrid reasoning similarity reward that directly supervises the quality of generated reasoning chains by combining an LLM evaluator assessing logical path alignment, key step coverage, and analytical depth with an embedding similarity component enforcing semantic alignment with reference reasoning chains. Second, we propose a progressive two-stage curriculum that enables high-quality CoT reasoning to emerge through pure RL exploration, without any supervised reasoning fine-tuning, from an instruction-tuned model that possesses no prior chain-of-thought capability. Stage 1 trains on foundational audio QA with the hybrid reward to foster basic reasoning patterns, while Stage 2 shifts to acoustically challenging boundary cases with an LLM-only reward for greater reasoning diversity. Audio-DeepThinker achieves state-of-the-art results on MMAR (74.0%), MMAU-test-mini (78.5%), and MMSU (77.26%), winning 1st Place in the Interspeech 2026 Audio Reasoning Challenge (Single Model Track). Interpretability analyses further reveal that RL training primarily reshapes upper-layer MoE gating mechanisms and that reasoning tokens crystallize progressively in the upper transformer layers, offering mechanistic insights into how audio reasoning emerges through exploration.

Hosted-LLM providers have a silent-substitution incentive: advertise a stronger model while serving cheaper replies. Probe-after-return schemes such as SVIP leave a parallel-serve side-channel, since a dishonest provider can route the verifier's probe to the advertised model while serving ordinary users from a substitute. We propose a commit-open protocol that closes this gap. Before any opening request, the provider commits via a Merkle tree to a per-position sparse-autoencoder (SAE) feature-trace sketch of its served output at a published probe layer. A verifier opens random positions, scores them against a public named-circuit probe library calibrated with cross-backend noise, and decides with a fixed-threshold joint-consistency z-score rule. We instantiate the protocol on three backbones -- Qwen3-1.7B, Gemma-2-2B, and a 4.5x scale-up to Gemma-2-9B with a 131k-feature SAE. Of 17 attackers spanning same-family lifts, cross-family substitutes, and rank-<=128 adaptive LoRA, all are rejected at a shared, scale-stable threshold; the same attackers all evade a matched SVIP-style parallel-serve baseline. A white-box end-to-end attack that backpropagates through the frozen SAE encoder does not close the margin, and a feature-forgery attacker that never runs M_hon is bounded in closed form by an intrinsic-dimension argument. Commitment adds <=2.1% to forward-only wall-clock at batch 32.

Benchmarks are often used as a standard to understand LLM capabilities in different domains. However, aggregate benchmark scores provide limited insight into compositional skill gaps of LLMs and how to improve them. To make these weaknesses visible, we propose Scaffolded Task Design (STaD) framework. STaD generates controlled variations of benchmark tasks based on the concept of scaffolding, which introduces structured, incremental support in a step-by-step manner. Rather than inspecting failures individually, this approach enables systematic and scalable probing of model behavior by identifying the specific reasoning skill compositions they lack. Treating the LLM as a black box, our experiments on six models of varying sizes reveal multiple failure points in three reasoning benchmarks and highlight each model's unique and distinct skill gaps.

Existing jamming attacks on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems typically induce explicit refusals or denial-of-service behaviors, which are conspicuous and easy to detect. In this work, we formalize a subtler availability threat, termed soft failure, which degrades system utility by inducing fluent and coherent yet non-informative responses rather than overt failures. We propose Deceptive Evolutionary Jamming Attack (DEJA), an automated black-box attack framework that generates adversarial documents to trigger such soft failures by exploiting safety-aligned behaviors of large language models. DEJA employs an evolutionary optimization process guided by a fine-grained Answer Utility Score (AUS), computed via an LLM-based evaluator, to systematically degrade the certainty of answers while maintaining high retrieval success. Extensive experiments across multiple RAG configurations and benchmark datasets show that DEJA consistently drives responses toward low-utility soft failures, achieving SASR above 79\% while keeping hard-failure rates below 15\%, significantly outperforming prior attacks. The resulting adversarial documents exhibit high stealth, evading perplexity-based detection and resisting query paraphrasing, and transfer across model families to proprietary systems without retargeting.

Large language models (LLMs) show strong capabilities in general reasoning but typically lack reliability in scientific domains like quantum mechanics, which demand strict adherence to physical constraints. This limitation arises from the scarcity of verifiable training resources and the inadequacy of coarse feedback signals in standard alignment paradigms. To address the data challenge, we introduce QuantumQA, a large-scale dataset constructed via a task-adaptive strategy and a hybrid verification protocol that combines deterministic solvers with semantic auditing to guarantee scientific rigor. Building on this foundation, we propose the verification-aware reward model (VRM) tailored for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), which employs an adaptive reward fusion (ARF) mechanism to dynamically integrate deterministic signals from a scientific execution suite (SES) with multidimensional semantic evaluations for precise supervision. Experimental results demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms baselines and general-purpose preference models. Notably, our optimized 8B model achieves performance competitive with proprietary models, validating that incorporating verifiable, rule-based feedback into the reinforcement learning loop offers a parameter-efficient alternative to pure scaling.

LLMs edit text and code by autoregressively regenerating the full output, even when most tokens appear verbatim in the input. We study Copy-as-Decode, a decoding-layer mechanism that recasts edit generation as structured decoding over a two-primitive grammar: <copy lines="i-j"/> references an input line range, <gen>...</gen> emits new content. A token-level FSM guarantees syntactic validity, and a serving-layer primitive updates the KV cache for each copy span via a single parallel-prefill forward rather than $N$ autoregressive steps -- sharing the parallel-forward kernel of speculative decoding but with input tokens as the draft and program-enforced acceptance replacing probabilistic verification. We report an upper-bound analysis that requires no end-to-end training. (i) Kernel speedup: on Qwen2.5-{1.5B, 7B}, copying $N$ tokens via parallel prefill is $6.8\times$--$303\times$ faster than autoregressive ($N \in [8, 512]$, A100 80GB bf16). (ii) Copy ceiling: on ProbeEdit and HumanEvalPack-Fix (Py/JS), $74$--$98\%$ of gold tokens are reachable under the line-level primitive; composed with the empirical kernel over each corpus's span histogram this yields a closed-form wall-clock bound of $29.0\times / 3.4\times / 4.2\times$ ($13.0\times$ pooled). A token-level extension reaches $91$--$99\%$ coverage with $4.5\times$--$6.5\times$ floors. (iii) Pipeline losslessness: oracle programs round-trip through the deterministic resolver on all $482$ cases, localizing any downstream failure to span selection rather than the mechanism. A perturbation study shows pooled EM drops from $100\%$ to $15.48\%$ under off-by-one noise. A fine-tuning pilot on Qwen2.5-Coder-1.5B lifts HEvalFix-Py EM from $0/33$ (untrained) to $12$--$17\%$, a learnability signal, not a production selector. Batched-serving integration and multi-file coverage are scoped as follow-up.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for creative tasks such as literary translation. Yet translational creativity remains underexplored and is rarely evaluated at scale, while source-text comprehension is typically studied in isolation, despite the fact that, in professional translation, comprehension and creativity are tightly intertwined. We address these gaps with a paired-task framework applied to literary excerpts from 11 books. Task 1 assesses source-text comprehension, and Task 2 evaluates translational creativity through Units of Creative Potential (UCPs), such as metaphors and wordplay. Using a scalable evaluation setup that combines expert human annotations with UCP-based automatic scoring, we benchmark 23 models and four creativity-oriented prompts. Our findings show that strong comprehension does not translate into human-level creativity: models often produce literal or contextually inappropriate renderings, with particularly large gaps for the more distant English-Chinese language pair. Creativity-oriented prompts yield only modest gains, and only one model, Mistral-Large, comes close to human-level creativity (0.167 vs. 0.246). Across all model-prompt combinations, only three exceed a creativity score of 0.1, while the rest remain at or near zero.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have been increasingly used as automatic evaluators-a paradigm known as MLLM-as-a-Judge. However, their reliability and vulnerabilities to biases remain underexplored. We find that many MLLM judges fail to reliably integrate key visual or textual cues, yielding unreliable evaluations when evidence is missing or mismatched, and exhibiting instability under semantically irrelevant perturbations. To address this, we systematically define Compositional Bias in MLLM-as-a-Judge systems and introduce MM-JudgeBias, a benchmark for evaluating it. MM-JudgeBias introduces controlled perturbations across Query, Image, and Response, and evaluates model behavior via two complementary metrics: Bias-Deviation (BD) for sensitivity and Bias-Conformity (BC) for stability. Our dataset of over 1,800 curated and refined multimodal samples, drawn from 29 source benchmarks, enables a fine-grained diagnosis of nine bias types across diverse tasks and domains. Experiments on 26 state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal systematic modality neglect and asymmetric evaluation tendencies, underscoring the need for more reliable judges.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently achieved strong performance in software code generation. However, applying them to hardware description languages (HDLs), such as Verilog, remains challenging because high-quality training data are relatively scarce. In practice, LLM-generated Verilog often contains syntactic or structural errors that either cause compilation failures or produce functionally incorrect designs, which limit its reliability in hardware design workflows. In this work, we propose VerilogCL, an integrated framework that enhances Verilog code generation by explicitly learning the boundary between correct and erroneous RTL through contrastive learning and proactive error screening. Our approach introduces minimal-error data augmentation, generating paired training samples of correct RTL and minimally perturbed erroneous RTL to teach the model to recognize fine-grained distinctions between correct and erroneous code. We then apply contrastive learning to learn a clearer validity boundary in the representation space, improving the separation between correct and erroneous RTL code. In addition, we introduce a proactive screening module that combines semantic embeddings with token-level uncertainty features to filter low-confidence candidates during generation. Experiments on public benchmarks, including VerilogEval and RTLLM, show that our 7B-parameter model outperforms the evaluated open-source, Verilog-specialized, and commercial baselines in both compilation success rate and functional correctness.

In policy gradient reinforcement learning, access to a differentiable model enables 1st-order gradient estimation that accelerates learning compared to relying solely on derivative-free 0th-order estimators. However, discontinuous dynamics cause bias and undermine the effectiveness of 1st-order estimators. Prior work addressed this bias by constructing a confidence interval around the REINFORCE 0th-order gradient estimator and using these bounds to detect discontinuities. However, the REINFORCE estimator is notoriously noisy, and we find that this method requires task-specific hyperparameter tuning and has low sample efficiency. This paper asks whether such bias is the primary obstacle and what minimal fixes suffice. First, we re-examine standard discontinuous settings from prior work and introduce DDCG, a lightweight test that switches estimators in nonsmooth regions; with a single hyperparameter, DDCG achieves robust performance and remains reliable with small samples. Second, on differentiable robotics control tasks, we present IVW-H, a per-step inverse-variance implementation that stabilizes variance without explicit discontinuity detection and yields strong results. Together, these findings indicate that while estimator switching improves robustness in controlled studies, careful variance control often dominates in practical deployments.

Empathy is essential for fostering natural interactions in spoken dialogue systems, as it enables machines to recognize the emotional tone of human speech and deliver empathetic responses. Recent research has made significant progress in developing empathetic spoken chatbots based on large language models (LLMs). However, several challenges still exist when training such models, including reliance on costly empathetic speech instruction data and a lack of emotional expressiveness in the generated speech. Finetuning LLM with cross-modal empathetic instruction data may also lead to catastrophic forgetting and a degradation of its general capability. To address these challenges, we propose FreezeEmpath, an end-to-end empathetic spoken chatbot trained in a simple and efficient manner. The entire training process relies solely on existing speech instruction data and speech emotion recognition (SER) data, while keeping the LLM's parameters frozen. Experiments demonstrate that FreezeEmpath is able to generate emotionally expressive speech and outperforms other empathetic models in empathetic dialogue, SER, and SpokenQA tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our training strategy.

Prompt-based interventions can change model behavior, but trained success alone does not identify where the behaviorally relevant state is represented. We study this question in controlled routing tasks using interfaces chosen on support data, held-out query evaluation, and matched necessity, sufficiency, and wrong-interface controls. On GPT-2 triop, an early interface supports exact transfer under these tests. On GPT-2 add/sub, zero-retrain compiled transfer at the fixed interface recovers most of donor routing accuracy, while trainable prompt slots can relearn the same behavior at several other positions only after additional support examples and optimization. These results distinguish fixed-interface reuse from prompt relocation in a setting where the two can be tested directly. Qwen routing provides a cross-architecture consistency check for the same matched-interface pattern at the operator token, although donor-specific identity on the local V-path remains unresolved. Generation and reasoning branches are used to map scope: they show broader transport or weaker controller identifiability once control depends on longer trajectories or harder selection. In controlled routing, fixed-interface transfer is therefore stronger evidence of reuse than trained prompt success alone.

Deep learning (DL) has become a cornerstone of modern machine learning (ML) praxis. We introduce the R package mlr3torch, which is an extensible DL framework for the mlr3 ecosystem. It is built upon the torch package, and simplifies the definition, training, and evaluation of neural networks for both tabular data and generic tensors (e.g., images) for classification and regression. The package implements predefined architectures, and torch models can easily be converted to mlr3 learners. It also allows users to define neural networks as graphs. This representation is based on the graph language defined in mlr3pipelines and allows users to define the entire modeling workflow, including preprocessing, data augmentation, and network architecture, in a single graph. Through its integration into the mlr3 ecosystem, the package allows for convenient resampling, benchmarking, preprocessing, and more. We explain the package's design and features and show how to customize and extend it to new problems. Furthermore, we demonstrate the package's capabilities using three use cases, namely hyperparameter tuning, fine-tuning, and defining architectures for multimodal data. Finally, we present some runtime benchmarks.

Automated fetal head segmentation in ultrasound images is critical for accurate biometric measurements in prenatal care. While existing deep learning approaches have achieved a reasonable performance, they struggle with issues like low contrast, noise, and complex anatomical boundaries which are inherent to ultrasound imaging. This paper presents Attention-ResUNet. It is a novel architecture that synergistically combines residual learning with multi-scale attention mechanisms in order to achieve enhanced fetal head segmentation. Our approach integrates attention gates at four decoder levels to focus selectively on anatomically relevant regions while suppressing the background noise, and complemented by residual connections which facilitates gradient flow and feature reuse. Extensive evaluation on the HC18 Challenge dataset where n = 200 demonstrates that Attention ResUNet achieves a superior performance with a mean Dice score of 99.30 +/- 0.14% against similar architectures. It significantly outperforms five baseline architectures including ResUNet (99.26%), Attention U-Net (98.79%), Swin U-Net (98.60%), Standard U-Net (98.58%), and U-Net++ (97.46%). Through statistical analysis we confirm highly significant improvements (p < 0.001) with effect sizes that range from 0.230 to 13.159 (Cohen's d). Using Saliency map analysis, we reveal that our architecture produces highly concentrated, anatomically consistent activation patterns, which demonstrate an enhanced interpretability which is crucial for clinical deployment. The proposed method establishes a new state of the art performance for automated fetal head segmentation whilst maintaining computational efficiency with 14.7M parameters and a 45 GFLOPs inference cost. Code repository: https://github.com/Ammar-ss

We investigate \emph{magnitude} as a new unary and strictly Pareto-compliant quality indicator for finite approximation sets to the Pareto front in multiobjective optimization. Magnitude originates in enriched category theory and metric geometry, where it is a notion of size or point content for compact metric spaces and a generalization of cardinality. For dominated regions in the \(\ell_1\) box setting, magnitude is close to hypervolume but not identical: it contains the top-dimensional hypervolume term together with positive lower-dimensional projection and boundary contributions. This paper gives a first theoretical study of magnitude as an indicator. We consider multiobjective maximization with a common anchor point. For dominated sets generated by finite approximation sets, we derive an all-dimensional projection formula, prove weak and strict set monotonicity on finite unions of anchored boxes, and thereby obtain weak and strict Pareto compliance. Unlike hypervolume, magnitude assigns positive value to boundary points sharing one or more coordinates with the anchor point, even when their top-dimensional hypervolume contribution vanishes. We then formulate projected set-gradient methods and compare hypervolume and magnitude on biobjective and three-dimensional simplex examples. Numerically, magnitude favors boundary-including populations and, for suitable cardinalities, complete Das--Dennis grids, whereas hypervolume prefers more interior-filling configurations. Computationally, magnitude reduces to hypervolume on coordinate projections; for fixed dimension this yields the same asymptotic complexity up to a factor \(2^d-1\), and in dimensions two and three \(Θ(n\log n)\) time. These results identify magnitude as a mathematically natural and computationally viable alternative to hypervolume for finite Pareto front approximations.

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have advanced recommendation systems (RSs), and recent works have begun to explore how to integrate LLMs into industrial RSs. While most approaches deploy LLMs offline to generate and pre-cache augmented representations for RSs, high-dimensional representations from LLMs introduce substantial storage and computational costs. Thus, it is crucial to compress LLM representations effectively. However, we identify a counterintuitive phenomenon during representation compression: Mid-layer Representation Advantage (MRA), where representations from middle layers of LLMs outperform those from final layers in recommendation tasks. This degraded final layer renders existing compression methods, which typically compress on the final layer, suboptimal. We interpret this based on modularity theory that LLMs develop spontaneous internal functional modularity and force the final layer to specialize in the proxy training task. Thus, we propose \underline{M}odul\underline{a}r \underline{R}epresentation \underline{C}ompression (MARC) to explicitly control the modularity of LLMs. First, Modular Adjustment explicitly introduces compression and task adaptation modules, enabling the LLM to operate strictly as a representation-learning module. Next, to ground each module to its specific task, Modular Task Decoupling uses information constraints and different network structures to decouple tasks. Extensive experiments validate that MARC addresses MRA and produces efficient representations. Notably, MARC achieved a 2.82% eCPM lift in an online A/B test within a large-scale commercial search advertising scenario.

Automated medical report generation for 3D PET/CT imaging is fundamentally challenged by the high-dimensional nature of volumetric data and a critical scarcity of annotated datasets, particularly for low-resource languages. Current black-box methods map whole volumes to reports, ignoring the clinical workflow of analyzing localized Regions of Interest (RoIs) to derive diagnostic conclusions. In this paper, we bridge this gap by introducing VietPET-RoI, the first large-scale 3D PET/CT dataset with fine-grained RoI annotation for a low-resource language, comprising 600 PET/CT samples and 1,960 manually annotated RoIs, paired with corresponding clinical reports. Furthermore, to demonstrate the utility of this dataset, we propose HiRRA, a novel framework that mimics the professional radiologist diagnostic workflow by employing graph-based relational modules to capture dependencies between RoI attributes. This approach shifts from global pattern matching toward localized clinical findings. Additionally, we introduce new clinical evaluation metrics, namely RoI Coverage and RoI Quality Index, that measure both RoI localization accuracy and attribute description fidelity using LLM-based extraction. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that our framework achieves SOTA performance, surpassing existing models by 19.7% in BLEU and 4.7% in ROUGE-L, while achieving a remarkable 45.8% improvement in clinical metrics, indicating enhanced clinical reliability and reduced hallucination. Our code and dataset are available on GitHub.

This paper investigates the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem from a distributional perspective. Rather than focusing solely on the expectation of the total return, as in most existing OPE methods, we aim to estimate the entire return distribution. To this end, we introduce a quantile-based approach for OPE using deep quantile process regression, presenting a novel algorithm called Deep Quantile Process regression-based Off-Policy Evaluation (DQPOPE). We provide new theoretical insights into the deep quantile process regression technique, extending existing approaches that estimate discrete quantiles to estimate a continuous quantile function. A key contribution of our work is the rigorous sample complexity analysis for distributional OPE with deep neural networks, bridging theoretical analysis with practical algorithmic implementations. We show that DQPOPE achieves statistical advantages by estimating the full return distribution using the same sample size required to estimate a single policy value using conventional methods. Empirical studies further show that DQPOPE provides significantly more precise and robust policy value estimates than standard methods, thereby enhancing the practical applicability and effectiveness of distributional reinforcement learning approaches.

Processing-in-Memory (PIM) architectures offer a promising solution to the memory bottlenecks in data-intensive machine learning, yet often overlook the growing challenge of activation memory footprint. Conventional PIM approaches struggle with massive KV cache sizes generated in long-context scenarios by Transformer-based models, frequently exceeding PIM's limited memory capacity, while techniques like sparse attention can conflict with PIM's need for data locality. Existing PIM approaches and quantization methods are often insufficient or poorly suited for leveraging the unique characteristics of activations. This work identifies an opportunity for PIM-specialized activation quantization to enhance bandwidth and compute efficiency. We explore clustering-based vector quantization approaches, which align well with activation characteristics and PIM's internal bandwidth capabilities. Building on this, we introduce AQPIM, a novel PIM-aware activation quantization framework based on Product Quantization (PQ), optimizing it for modern Large Language Models (LLMs). By performing quantization directly within memory, AQPIM leverages PIM's high internal bandwidth and enables direct computation on compressed data, significantly reducing both memory footprint and computational overhead for attention computation. AQPIM addresses PQ's accuracy challenges by introducing several algorithmic optimizations. Evaluations demonstrate that AQPIM achieves significant performance improvements, drastically reducing of GPU-CPU communication that can account for 90$\sim$98.5\% of decoding latency, together with 3.4$\times$ speedup over a SOTA PIM approach.

Large-scale dataset distillation requires storing auxiliary soft labels that can be 30-40x larger on ImageNet-1K and 200x larger on ImageNet-21K than the condensed images, undermining the goal of dataset compression. We identify two fundamental issues necessitating such extensive labels: (1) insufficient image diversity, where high within-class similarity in synthetic images requires extensive augmentation, and (2) insufficient supervision diversity, where limited variety in supervisory signals during training leads to performance degradation at high compression rates. To address these challenges, we propose Label Pruning and Quantization for Large-scale Distillation (LPQLD). We enhance image diversity via class-wise batching and batch-normalization supervision during synthesis. For supervision diversity, we introduce Label Pruning with Dynamic Knowledge Reuse to improve label-per-augmentation diversity, and Label Quantization with Calibrated Student-Teacher Alignment to improve augmentation-per-image diversity. Our approach reduces soft label storage by 78x on ImageNet-1K and 500x on ImageNet-21K while improving accuracy by up to 7.2% and 2.8%, respectively. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of LPQLD across different network architectures and dataset distillation methods. Code is available at https://github.com/he-y/soft-label-pruning-quantization-for-dataset-distillation.

With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, multi-agent systems (MASs) are evolving from classical paradigms toward architectures built upon large foundation models (LFMs). This survey provides a systematic review and comparative analysis of classical MASs (CMASs) and LFM-based MASs (LMASs). First, within a closed-loop coordination framework, CMASs are reviewed across four fundamental dimensions: perception, communication, decision-making, and control. Beyond this framework, LMASs integrate LFMs to lift collaboration from low-level state exchanges to semantic-level reasoning, enabling more flexible coordination and improved adaptability across diverse scenarios. Then, a comparative analysis is conducted to contrast CMASs and LMASs across architecture, operating mechanism, adaptability, and application. Finally, future perspectives on MASs are presented, summarizing open challenges and potential research opportunities.

Most agents today ``self-evolve'' by following rewards and rules defined by humans. However, this process remains fundamentally dependent on external supervision; without human guidance, the evolution stops. In this work, we train agents to possess an intrinsic meta-evolution capability to spontaneously learn about unseen environments prior to task execution. To instill this ability, we design an outcome-based reward mechanism that measures how much an agent's self-generated world knowledge improves its success rate on downstream tasks. This reward signal is used exclusively during the training phase to teach the model how to explore and summarize effectively. At inference time, the agent requires no external rewards or human instructions. It spontaneously performs native self-evolution to adapt to unknown environments using its internal parameters. When applied to Qwen3-30B and Seed-OSS-36B, this shift to native evolution yields a 20% performance increase on WebVoyager and WebWalker. Most strikingly, the generated world knowledge even enables a compact 14B Qwen3 model to outperform the unassisted Gemini-2.5-Flash, establishing a new paradigm for truly evolving agents.

Digital marketplaces processing billions of dollars annually represent critical infrastructure in sociotechnical ecosystems, yet their performance optimization lacks principled measurement frameworks that can inform algorithmic governance decisions regarding market efficiency and fairness from complex market data. By looking at orderbook data from double auction markets alone, because bids and asks do not represent true maximum willingnesses to buy and true minimum willingnesses to sell, there is little an economist can say about the market's actual performance in terms of allocative efficiency. We turn to experimental data to address this issue, `inverting' the standard induced value approach of double auction experiments. Our aim is to predict key market features relevant to market efficiency, particularly allocative efficiency, using orderbook data only -- specifically bids, asks and price realizations, but not the induced reservation values -- as early as possible. Since there is no established model of strategically optimal behavior in these markets, and because orderbook data is highly unstructured, non-stationary and non-linear, we propose quantile-based normalization techniques that help us build general predictive models. We develop and train several models, including linear regressions and gradient boosting trees, leveraging quantile-based input from the underlying supply-demand model. Our models can predict allocative efficiency with reasonable accuracy from the earliest bids and asks, and these predictions improve with additional realized price data. The performance of the prediction techniques varies by target and market type. Our framework holds significant potential for application to real-world market data, offering valuable insights into market efficiency and performance, even prior to any trade realizations.

We study post-training W4A4 quantization in a controlled 300M-parameter SwiGLU decoder-only language model trained on 5B tokens of FineWeb-Edu, and ask which input-activation sites dominate the error. Naive round-to-nearest W4A4 collapses validation perplexity from FP16 23.6 to 1727. A simple residual-axis training-time intervention -- Depth Registers with a register-magnitude hinge loss (DR+sink) -- reduces this to 119 (about 14x) at matched FP16 PPL and matched zero-shot capacity, and composes with SmoothQuant to 39.9 PPL. The residual ~2 PPL gap to FP16 is the diagnostic core. We decompose W4A4 damage by input-activation site: the five trainable linears in a SwiGLU block split into residual-axis readers (qkv, w1, w3) and block-internal generators (o_proj, w2). Elementary norm arguments show residual-axis magnitude control bounds readers tightly but leaves w2's bilinear input bounded only by the trivial product of factor bounds; empirically, DR+sink collapses reader kurtosis while leaving generators essentially unchanged, and the reader-rescued W4A4 residue is flat at ~0.28 nats across three matched checkpoints with Delta-remove(w2) dominating. We present DR+sink as a training-time probe rather than a deployment proposal: a post-hoc alternative (Per-Linear QuaRot) nearly matches it on the reader axis. Full QuaRot -- adding online per-head value Hadamard plus online w2-input rotation -- does not close the gap either, directly testing the prediction that orthogonal rotation cannot bound the bilinear SwiGLU tail. Claims are specific to our 300M, 5B-token, single-seed setting, and our experiments do not isolate the partition from the hinge.

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has become a widely adopted parameter-efficient fine-tuning method for large language models, with its effectiveness largely influenced by the allocation of ranks and scaling factors, as well as initialization. Existing LoRA variants typically address only one of these factors, often at the cost of increased training complexity or reduced practical efficiency. In this work, we present Task-aware Low-Rank Adaptation (TLoRA), a unified framework that jointly optimizes initialization and resource allocation at the outset of training. TLoRA introduces a data-driven initialization strategy that aligns the LoRA $A$ matrix with task-relevant subspaces by performing singular value decomposition on the product of pre-trained weights and input activation covariance. After this, the $A$ matrix is frozen, and only the $B$ matrix is trained. Furthermore, TLoRA employs a sensitivity-based importance metric to adaptively allocate ranks and scaling factors across layers under a fixed parameter budget. We conduct extensive experiments that demonstrate TLoRA consistently performs excellently across various tasks, including natural language understanding, commonsense reasoning, math reasoning, code generation, and chat generation, while significantly reducing the number of trainable parameters.

Ad-hoc collaboration often relies on identifying and adhering to shared conventions. However, when partners can follow multiple conventions, agents must do more than simply adapt; they must actively steer the team toward the most effective joint strategy. We present ConventionPlay, a reinforcement learning-based approach that extends cognitive hierarchies to include a diverse population of adaptive followers. By training against partners with varied capability limits, our agent learns to probe its partner's repertoire, leading the team when possible and following when necessary. Our results in canonical coordination tasks show that ConventionPlay achieves superior coordination efficiency, particularly in settings where conventions have differentiated payoffs.

Decision-making is a cognitively intensive task that requires synthesizing relevant information from multiple unstructured sources, weighing competing factors, and incorporating subjective user preferences. Existing methods, including large language models and traditional decision-support systems, fall short: they often overwhelm users with information or fail to capture nuanced preferences accurately. We present Decisive, an interactive decision-making framework that combines document-grounded reasoning with Bayesian preference inference. Our approach grounds decisions in an objective option-scoring matrix extracted from source documents, while actively learning a user's latent preference vector through targeted elicitation. Users answer pairwise tradeoff questions adaptively selected to maximize information gain over the final decision. This process converges efficiently, minimizing user effort while ensuring recommendations remain transparent and personalized. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms both general-purpose LLMs and existing decision-making frameworks achieving up to 20% improvement in decision accuracy over strong baselines across domains.

The use of disaggregated or far memory systems such as CXL memory pools has renewed interest in Near-Data Processing (NDP): situating cores close to memory to reduce bandwidth requirements to and from the CPU. Hardware designs for such accelerators are appearing, but there lack clean, portable OS abstractions for programming them. We propose a programming model for NDP devices based on familiar OS abstractions: virtual processors (processes) and inter-process communication channels (like Unix pipes). While appealing from a user perspective, a naive implementation of such abstractions is inappropriate for NDP accelerators: the paucity of processing power in some hardware designs makes classical processes overly heavyweight, and IPC based on shared buffers makes no sense in a system designed to reduce memory bandwidth. Accordingly, we show how to implement these abstractions in a lightweight and efficient manner by exploiting compilation and interconnect protocols. We demonstrate them with a real hardware platform runing applications with a range of memory access patterns, including bulk memory operations, in-memory databases and graph applications. Crucially, we show not only the benefits over CPU-only implementations, but also the critical importance of efficient, low-latency communication channels between CPU and NDP accelerators, a feature largely neglected in existing proposals.

Post-training quantization (PTQ) is essential for deploying large diffusion transformers on resource-constrained hardware, but aggressive 4-bit quantization significantly degrades generative performance. Low-rank approximation methods have emerged as a promising solution by appending auxiliary linear branches to restore performance. However, current state-of-the-art approaches assume these branches must retain high precision (W16A16) and rely on heavy, data-dependent calibration for initialization. We challenge both limitations with LoRaQ (Low-Rank Approximated Quantization), a simple, data-free calibration approach that optimizes quantization error compensation. By overcoming the need for high-precision branches, LoRaQ enables the first fully sub-16 bit pipeline, allowing the low-rank branch itself to be quantized. We demonstrate that, at equal memory overhead, LoRaQ outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in their native implementations on Pixart-$Σ$ and SANA. We also analyze mixed-precision configurations, showing that setups such as W8A8, W6A6, and W4A8 for the low-rank branch, alongside a W4 main layer, yield superior results while maintaining a fully quantized architecture compatible with modern mixed-precision hardware.

In recent years, multimodal multidomain fake news detection has garnered increasing attention. Nevertheless, this direction presents two significant challenges: (1) Failure to Capture Cross-Instance Narrative Consistency: existing models usually evaluate each news in isolation, fail to capture cross-instance narrative consistency, and thus struggle to address the spread of cluster based fake news driven by social media; (2) Lack of Domain Specific Knowledge for Reasoning: conventional models, which rely solely on knowledge encoded in their parameters during training, struggle to generalize to new or data-scarce domains (e.g., emerging events or niche topics). To tackle these challenges, we introduce Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal Model for Fake News Detection (RAMM). First, RAMM employs a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) as its backbone to capture cross-modal semantic information from news samples. Second, RAMM incorporates an Abstract Narrative Alignment Module. This component adaptively extracts abstract narrative consistency from diverse instances across distinct domains, aggregates relevant knowledge, and thereby enables the modeling of high-level narrative information. Finally, RAMM introduces a Semantic Representation Alignment Module, which aligns the model's decision-making paradigm with that of humans - specifically, it shifts the model's reasoning process from direct inference on multimodal features to an instance-based analogical reasoning process. Extensive experimental results on three public datasets validate the efficacy of our proposed approach. Our code is available at the following link: https://github.com/li-yiheng/RAMM

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in education, yet their default helpfulness often conflicts with pedagogical principles. Prior work evaluates pedagogical quality via answer leakage-the disclosure of complete solutions instead of scaffolding-but typically assumes well-intentioned learners, leaving tutor robustness under student misuse largely unexplored. In this paper, we study scenarios where students behave adversarially and aim to obtain the correct answer from the tutor. We evaluate a broad set of LLM-based tutor models, including different model families, pedagogically aligned models, and a multi-agent design, under a range of adversarial student attacks. We adapt six groups of adversarial and persuasive techniques to the educational setting and use them to probe how likely a tutor is to reveal the final answer. We evaluate answer leakage robustness using different types of in-context adversarial student agents, finding that they often fail to carry out effective attacks. We therefore introduce an adversarial student agent that we fine-tune to jailbreak LLM-based tutors, which we propose as the core of a standardized benchmark for evaluating tutor robustness. Finally, we present simple but effective defense strategies that reduce answer leakage and strengthen the robustness of LLM-based tutors in adversarial scenarios.

This paper presents factorized linear projection (FLiP) models for understanding pretrained sentence embedding spaces. We train FLiP models to recover the lexical content from multilingual (LaBSE), multimodal (SONAR) and API-based (Gemini) sentence embedding spaces in several high- and mid-resource languages. We show that FLiP can recall more than 75% of lexical content from the embeddings, significantly outperforming existing non-factorized baselines. Using this as a diagnostic tool, we uncover the modality and language biases across the selected sentence encoders and provide practitioners with intrinsic insights about the encoders without relying on conventional downstream evaluation tasks. Our implementation is public https://github.com/BUTSpeechFIT/FLiP.

Adapting large language models (LLMs) to low-resource languages (LRLs) is constrained by the scarcity of task data and computational resources. Although Proxy Tuning offers a logit-level strategy for introducing scaling effects, it often fails in LRL settings because the large model's weak LRL competence might overwhelm the knowledge of specialized smaller models. We thus propose TriMix, a test-time logit fusion framework that dynamically balances capabilities from three different sources: LRL competence from a continually pretrained small model, task competence from high-resource language instruction tuning, and the scaling benefits of large models. It is data- and compute-efficient, requiring no LRL task annotations, and only continual pretraining on a small model. Experiments across four model families and eight LRLs show that TriMix consistently outperforms single-model baselines and Proxy Tuning. Our analysis reveals that prioritizing the small LRL-specialized model's logits is crucial for success, challenging the prevalent large-model-dominant assumption.

Integrating large language models (LLMs) into automatic speech recognition (ASR) has become a mainstream paradigm in recent years. Although existing LLM-based ASR models demonstrate impressive performance on public benchmarks, their training remains predominantly data-driven, leaving key practical challenges insufficiently addressed -- particularly limited downward scalability in resource-constrained deployments and hallucinations under acoustically challenging conditions. To address these issues, we present NIM4-ASR, a production-oriented LLM-based ASR framework optimized for both efficiency and robustness. Grounded in a principled delineation of functional roles between the encoder and the LLM, we redesign the multi-stage training paradigm to align each module with its intended capability boundary. Specifically, we reformulate the pre-training architecture and objective to mitigate the modality gap and improve parameter efficiency; introduce an iterative asynchronous SFT stage to preserve acoustic fidelity and constrain representation drift; and design an ASR-specialized reinforcement learning stage to further enhance recognition quality and robustness. We additionally incorporate a suite of production-oriented optimizations, including robustness under noisy and silent conditions, real-time streaming inference, and hotword customization via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Experiments show that NIM4-ASR achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple public benchmarks with merely 2.3B parameters, while substantially outperforming larger-scale competitors on internal benchmarks -- particularly in entity-intensive real-world scenarios. NIM4-ASR further supports million-scale hotword customization via RAG with sub-millisecond retrieval latency, enabling efficient adaptation to emerging entities and personalized user requirements.

Prefilling computational costs pose a significant bottleneck for Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) in long-context settings. While token pruning reduces sequence length, prior methods rely on heuristics that break compatibility with hardware-efficient kernels like FlashAttention. In this work, we observe that tokens evolve toward \textit{semantic fixing points}, making further processing redundant. To this end, we introduce Delta Attention Selective Halting (DASH), a training-free policy that monitors the layer-wise update dynamics of the self-attention mechanism to selectively halt stabilized tokens. Extensive evaluation confirms that DASH generalizes across language and vision benchmarks, delivering significant prefill speedups while preserving model accuracy and hardware efficiency. Code will be released at https://github.com/verach3n/DASH.git.

As hardware failures such as node losses become increasingly common, MPI programmers may want to save vulnerable data in a resilient store. While third-party storage solutions such as Redis or the Hazelcast IMap exist, a tailored, MPI-based store may be easier to integrate and can be optimized for particular application needs. This paper considers the implementation of such a store, which is intended as a component in a resilient task-based runtime system written in MPI. The store holds redundant data copies as key-value pairs in the main memories of multiple processes. Since store access operations, such as reads and writes, are naturally one-sided, we implemented the store with passive target MPI RMA functions. Process aborts are detected with the user-level failure mitigation (ULFM) extension of Open MPI. After failures, the program recovers on the surviving processes and continues with the intact data copies. Our implementation proved difficult, since several proposed ULFM functionalities for RMA have not yet been implemented. Even assuming their existence, we think that the programming task could be simplified. This paper describes our experiences, lists functionalities that we missed, and explains a workaround that we adopted in our implementation.

LLMs are increasingly presented as collaborators in programming, design, writing, and analysis. Yet the practical experience of working with them often falls short of this promise. In many settings, users must diagnose misunderstandings, reconstruct missing assumptions, and repeatedly repair misaligned responses. This poster introduces a conceptual framework for understanding why such collaboration remains fragile. Drawing on a constructivist grounded theory analysis of 16 interviews with designers, developers, and applied AI practitioners working on LLM-enabled systems, and informed by literature on human-AI collaboration, we argue that stable collaboration depends not only on model capability but on the interaction's grounding conditions. We distinguish three recurrent structures of human-AI work: one-shot assistance, weak collaboration with asymmetric repair, and grounded collaboration. We propose that collaboration breaks down when the appearance of partnership outpaces the grounding capacity of the interaction and contribute a framework for discussing grounding, repair, and interaction structure in LLM-enabled work.

In real-world applications of noninvasive electroencephalography (EEG), specialized decoders often show limited generalizability across diverse tasks under subject-independent settings. One central challenge is that task-relevant EEG signals often follow different temporal organization patterns across tasks, while many existing methods rely on task-tailored architectural designs that introduce task-specific temporal inductive biases. This mismatch makes it difficult to adapt temporal modeling across tasks without changing the model configuration. To address these challenges, we propose DSAINet, an efficient dual-scale attentive interaction network for general EEG decoding. Specifically, DSAINet constructs shared spatiotemporal token representations from raw EEG signals and models diverse temporal dynamics through parallel convolutional branches at fine and coarse scales. The resulting representations are then adaptively refined by intra-branch attention to emphasize salient scale-specific patterns and by inter-branch attention to integrate task-relevant features across scales, followed by adaptive token aggregation to yield a compact representation for prediction. Extensive experiments on five downstream EEG decoding tasks across ten public datasets show that DSAINet consistently outperforms 13 representative baselines under strict subject-independent evaluation. Notably, this performance is achieved using the same architecture hyperparameters across datasets. Moreover, DSAINet achieves a favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off with only about 77K trainable parameters and provides interpretable neurophysiological insights. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/zy0929/DSAINet.

Small language models fine-tuned for graph property estimation have demonstrated strong in-distribution performance, yet their generalization capabilities beyond training conditions remain poorly understood. In this work, we systematically investigate the boundaries of structural inference in fine-tuned small language models along two generalization axes - graph size and graph family distribution - and assess domain-learning capability on real-world graph benchmarks. Using a controlled experimental setup with three instruction-tuned models in the 3-4B parameter class and two graph serialization formats, we evaluate performance on graphs substantially larger than the training range and across held-out random graph families. Our results show that fine-tuned models maintain strong ordinal consistency across structurally distinct graph families and continue to rank graphs by structural properties on inputs substantially larger than those seen during training, with distinct architecture-specific degradation profiles. These findings delineate where fine-tuned small language models generalize reliably, providing empirical grounding for their use in graph-based reasoning tasks.

Recent multimodal large language models have shown promising ability in generating humorous captions for images, yet they still lack stable control over explicit cultural context, making it difficult to jointly maintain image relevance, contextual appropriateness, and humor quality under a specified cultural background. To address this limitation, we introduce a new multimodal generation task, culture-aware humorous captioning, which requires a model to generate a humorous caption conditioned on both an input image and a target cultural context. Captions generated under different cultural contexts are not expected to share the same surface form, but should remain grounded in similar visual situations or humorous rationales.To support this task, we establish a six-dimensional evaluation framework covering image relevance, contextual fit, semantic richness, reasonableness, humor, and creativity. We further propose a staged alignment framework that first initializes the model with high-resource supervision under the Western cultural context, then performs multi-dimensional preference alignment via judge-based GRPO with a Degradation-aware Prototype Repulsion Constraint to mitigate reward hacking in open-ended generation, and finally adapts the model to the Eastern cultural context with a small amount of supervision. Experimental results show that our method achieves stronger overall performance under the proposed evaluation framework, with particularly large gains in contextual fit and a better balance between image relevance and humor under cultural constraints.

Bayesian Deep Ensembles (BDEs) represent a powerful approach for uncertainty quantification in deep learning, combining the robustness of Deep Ensembles (DEs) with flexible multi-chain MCMC. While DEs are affordable in most deep learning settings, (long) sampling of Bayesian neural networks can be prohibitively costly. Yet, adding sampling after optimizing the DEs has been shown to yield significant improvements. This leaves a critical practical question: How long should the sequential sampling process continue to yield significant improvements over the initial optimized DE baseline? To tackle this question, we propose a stopping rule based on E-values. We formulate the ensemble construction as a sequential anytime-valid hypothesis test, providing a principled way to decide whether or not to reject the null hypothesis that MCMC offers no improvement over a strong baseline, to early stop the sampling. Empirically, we study this approach for diverse settings. Our results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach and reveal that only a fraction of the full-chain budget is often required.

Drowning is an omnipresent risk associated with any activity on or in the water, and rescuing a drowning person is particularly challenging because of the time pressure, making a short response time important. Further complicating water rescue are unsupervised and extensive swimming areas, precise localization of the target, and the transport of rescue personnel. Technical innovations can provide a remedy: We propose an Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS), also known as a drone-in-a-box system, consisting of a fleet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) allocated to purpose-built hangars near swimming areas. In an emergency, the UAS can be deployed in addition to Standard Rescue Operation (SRO) equipment to locate the distressed person early by performing a fully automated Search and Rescue (S&R) operation and dropping a flotation device. In this paper, we address automatically locating distressed swimmers using the image-based object detection architecture You Only Look Once (YOLO). We present a dataset created for this application and outline the training process. We evaluate the performance of YOLO versions 3, 5, and 8 and architecture sizes (nano, extra-large) using Mean Average Precision (mAP) metrics mAP@.5 and mAP@.5:.95. Furthermore, we present two Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) approaches to simulate response times of SRO and UAS-based water rescue. This enables estimation of time savings relative to SRO when selecting the UAS configuration (type, number, and location of UAVs and hangars). Computational experiments for a test area in the Lusatian Lake District, Germany, show that UAS assistance shortens response time. Even a small UAS with two hangars, each containing one UAV, reduces response time by a factor of five compared to SRO.

Topic-controlled summarisation enables users to generate summaries focused on specific aspects of source documents. This paper investigates a data augmentation strategy for training small language models (sLMs) to perform topic-controlled summarisation. We propose a pairwise data augmentation method that combines contexts from different documents to create contrastive training examples, enabling models to learn the relationship between topics and summaries more effectively. Using the SciTLDR dataset enriched with Wikipedia-derived topics, we systematically evaluate how augmentation scale affects model performance. Results show consistent improvements in win rate and semantic alignment as the augmentation scale increases, while the amount of real training data remains fixed. Consequently, a T5-base model trained with our augmentation approach achieves competitive performance relative to larger models, despite using significantly fewer parameters and substantially fewer real training examples.

Matrix-level low-rank compression is a promising way to reduce the cost of large language models, but running compression and evaluating the resulting models on language tasks can be prohibitively expensive. Can compression-induced degradation be predicted before committing to this compute? We systematically analyze the Qwen3 and Gemma3 model families across four representative low-rank compression methods: vanilla SVD, two ASVD variants, and SVD-LLM. We find that stable rank and information density, measured in bits per parameter, dominate performance degradation. The interaction term $γ\cdot \barρ_s$, defined as compression ratio times stable rank, is a robust predictor of accuracy degradation, achieving leave-one-out cross-validation Pearson correlations of $0.890$ for attention layers and $0.839$ for MLP layers. We provide theoretical intuition for why this predictor succeeds by connecting it to standard SVD truncation bounds and error composition mechanisms in transformer layers. These findings enable a predict-then-compress workflow: compute $γ\cdot \barρ_s$ from weights, estimate degradation, and invest compute only in desirable configurations.

Reconstructing continuous environmental fields from sparse and irregular observations remains a central challenge in environmental modelling and biodiversity informatics. Many ecological datasets are heterogeneous in space and time, making grid-based approaches difficult to scale or generalise across domains. Here, we evaluate implicit neural representations (INRs) as a coordinate-based modelling framework for learning continuous spatial and spatio-temporal fields directly from coordinate inputs. We analyse their behaviour across three representative modelling scenarios: species distribution reconstruction, phenological dynamics, and morphological segmentation derived from open biodiversity data. Beyond predictive performance, we examine interpolation behaviour, spatial coherence, and computational characteristics relevant for environmental modelling workflows, including scalability, resolution-independent querying, and architectural inductive bias. Results show that neural fields provide stable continuous representations with predictable computational cost, complementing classical smoothers and tree-based approaches. These findings position coordinate-based neural fields as a flexible representation layer that can be integrated into environmental modelling pipelines and exploratory analysis frameworks for large, irregularly sampled datasets.

While attack graphs are useful for identifying major cybersecurity threats affecting a system, they do not provide operational support for determining the likelihood of having a known vulnerability exploited, or that critical system nodes are likely to be compromised. In this paper, we perform dynamic risk assessment by combining Bayesian Attack Graphs (BAGs) and online monitoring of system behavior through process mining. Specifically, the proposed approach applies process mining techniques to characterize malicious network traffic and derive evidence regarding the probability of having a vulnerability actively exploited. This evidence is then provided to a BAG, which updates its conditional probability tables accordingly, enabling dynamic assessment of vulnerability exploitation. We apply our method to a cybersecurity testbed instantiating several machines deployed on different subnets and affected by several CVE vulnerabilities. The testbed is stimulated with both benign traffic and malicious behavior, which simulates network attack patterns aimed at exploiting the CVE vulnerabilities. The results indicate that our proposal effectively detects whether vulnerabilities are being actively exploited, allowing for an updated assessment of the probability of system compromise.

Diffusion-based image synthesis has emerged as a promising source of synthetic training data for AI-based object detection and classification. In this work, we investigate whether images generated with diffusion can improve military vehicle detection under low-data conditions. We fine-tuned the text-to-image diffusion model FLUX.1 [dev] using LoRA with only 8 or 24 real images per class across 15 vehicle categories, resulting in class-specific diffusion models, which were used to generate new samples from automatically generated text prompts. The same real images were used to fine-tune the RF-DETR detector for a 15-class object detection task. Synthetic datasets generated by the diffusion models were then used to further improve detector performance. Importantly, no additional real data was required, as the generative models leveraged the same limited training samples. FLUX-generated images improved detection performance, particularly in the low-data regime (up to +8.0% mAP$_{50}$ with 8 real samples). To address the limited geometric control of text prompt-based diffusion, we additionally generated structurally guided synthetic data using ControlNet with Canny edge-map conditioning, yielding a FLUX-ControlNet (FLUX-CN) dataset with explicit control over viewpoint and pose. Structural guidance further enhanced performance when data is scarce (+4.1% mAP$_{50}$ with 8 real samples), but no additional benefit was observed when more real data is available. This study demonstrates that object-specific diffusion models are effective for improving military object detection in a low-data domain, and that structural guidance is most beneficial when real data is highly limited. These results highlight generative image data as an alternative to traditional simulation pipelines for the training of military AI systems.

AI agent systems increasingly rely on reusable non-LLM engineering infrastructure that packages tool mediation, context handling, delegation, safety control, and orchestration. Yet the architectural design decisions in this surrounding infrastructure remain understudied. This paper presents a protocol-guided, source-grounded empirical study of 70 publicly available agent-system projects, addressing three questions: which design-decision dimensions recur across projects, which co-occurrences structure those decisions, and which typical architectural patterns emerge. Methodologically, we contribute a transparent investigation procedure for analyzing heterogeneous agent-system corpora through source-code and technical-material reading. Empirically, we identify five recurring design dimensions (subagent architecture, context management, tool systems, safety mechanisms, and orchestration) and find that the corpus favors file-persistent, hybrid, and hierarchical context strategies; registry-oriented tool systems remain dominant while MCP- and plugin-oriented extensions are emerging; and intermediate isolation is common but high-assurance audit is rare. Cross-project co-occurrence analysis reveals that deeper coordination pairs with more explicit context services, stronger execution environments with more structured governance, and formalized tool-registration boundaries with broader ecosystem ambitions. We synthesize five recurring architectural patterns spanning lightweight tools, balanced CLI frameworks, multi-agent orchestrators, enterprise systems, and scenario-verticalized projects. The result provides an evidence-based account of architectural regularities in agent-system engineering, with grounded guidance for framework designers, selectors, and researchers.

Humans often hold different perspectives on the same issues. In many NLP tasks, annotation disagreement can reflect valid subjective perspectives. Modeling annotator perspectives and understanding their relationship with other human factors, such as socio-demographic attributes, have received increasing attention. Prior work typically focuses on single demographic factors or limited combinations. However, in real-world settings, annotator perspectives are shaped by complex social contexts, and finer-grained socio-demographic attributes can better explain human perspectives. In this work, we propose Socio-Contrastive Learning, a method that jointly models annotator perspectives while learning socio-demographic representations. Our method provides an effective approach for the fusion of socio-demographic features and textual representations to predict annotator perspectives, outperforming standard concatenation-based methods. The learned representations further enable analysis and visualization of how demographic factors relate to variation in annotator perspectives. Our code is available at GitHub: https://github.com/Leixin-Zhang/Socio_Contrastive_Learning

The miniaturisation of neural processing units (NPUs) and other low-power accelerators has enabled their integration into microcontroller-scale wearable hardware, supporting near-real-time, offline, and privacy-preserving inference. Yet physiological signal analysis has remained infeasible on such hardware; recent Transformer-based models show state-of-the-art performance but are prohibitively large for resource- and power-constrained hardware and incompatible with $μ$NPUs due to their dynamic attention operations. We introduce PhysioLite, a lightweight, NPU-compatible model architecture and training framework for ECG/EMG signal analysis. Using learnable wavelet filter banks, CPU-offloaded positional encoding, and hardware-aware layer design, PhysioLite reaches performance comparable to state-of-the-art Transformer-based foundation models on ECG and EMG benchmarks, while being <10% of the size ($\sim$370KB with 8-bit quantization). We also profile its component-wise latency and resource consumption on both the MAX78000 and HX6538 WE2 $μ$NPUs, demonstrating its viability for signal analysis on constrained, battery-powered hardware. We release our model(s) and training framework at: https://github.com/j0shmillar/physiolite.

Anomaly-based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) ensure protection against malicious attacks on networked systems. While deep learning-based IDSs achieve effective performance, their limited trustworthiness due to black-box architectures remains a critical constraint. Despite existing explainable techniques offering insight into the alarms raised by IDSs, they lack process-based explanations grounded in packet-level sequencing analysis. In this paper, we propose a method that employs process mining techniques to enhance anomaly-based IDSs by providing process-based alarm severity ratings and explanations for alerts. Our method prioritizes critical alerts and maintains visibility into network behavior, while minimizing disruption by allowing misclassified benign traffic to pass. We apply the method to the publicly available USB-IDS-TC dataset, which includes anomalous traffic affected by different variants of the Slowloris DoS attack. Results show that our method is able to discriminate between low- to very-high-severity alarms while preserving up to 99.94% recall and 99.99% precision, effectively discarding false positives while providing different degrees of severity for the true positives.

Human-centred systems require an understanding of human actions in the physical world. Temporally extended sequences of actions are intentional and structured, yet existing methods for recognising what actions are performed often do not attempt to capture their structure, particularly how the actions are executed. This, however, is crucial for assessing the quality of the action's execution and its differences from other actions. To capture the internal mechanics of actions, we introduce a domain-specific language EXACT that represents human motions as underspecified motion programs, interpreted as reward-generating functions for zero-shot policy inference using forward-backwards representations. By leveraging the compositional nature of EXACT motion programs, we combine individual policies into an executable neuro-symbolic model that uses program structure for compositional modelling. We evaluate the utility of the proposed pipeline for creating executable action models by analysing motion-capture data to understand human actions, for the tasks of human action segmentation and action anomaly detection. Our results show that the use of executable action models improves data efficiency and captures intuitive relationships between actions compared with monolithic, task-specific approaches.

Accurate machine-learning models for aerodynamic prediction are essential for accelerating shape optimization, yet remain challenging to develop for complex three-dimensional configurations due to the high cost of generating training data. This work introduces a methodology for efficiently constructing accurate surrogate models for design purposes by first pre-training a large-scale model on diverse geometries and then fine-tuning it with a few more detailed task-specific samples. A Transformer-based architecture, AeroTransformer, is developed and tailored for large-scale training to learn aerodynamics. The methodology is evaluated on transonic wings, where the model is pre-trained on SuperWing, a dataset of nearly 30000 samples with broad geometric diversity, and subsequently fine-tuned to handle specific wing shapes perturbed from the Common Research Model. Results show that, with 450 task-specific samples, the proposed methodology achieves 0.36% error on surface-flow prediction, reducing 84.2% compared to training from scratch. The influence of model configurations and training strategies is also systematically studied to provide guidance on effectively training and deploying such models under limited data and computational budgets. To facilitate reuse, we release the datasets and the pre-trained models at https://github.com/tum-pbs/AeroTransformer. An interactive design tool is also built on the pre-trained model and is available online at https://webwing.pbs.cit.tum.de.

We introduce Sonata, a compact latent world model for six-axis trunk IMU representation learning under clinical data scarcity. Clinical cohorts typically comprise tens to hundreds of patients, making web-scale masked-reconstruction objectives poorly matched to the problem. Sonata is a 3.77 M-parameter hybrid model, pre-trained on a harmonised corpus of nine public datasets (739 subjects, 190k windows) with a latent world-model objective that predicts future state rather than reconstructing raw sensor traces. In a controlled comparison against a matched autoregressive forecasting baseline (MAE) on the same backbone, Sonata yields consistently stronger frozen-probe clinical discrimination, prospective fall-risk prediction, and cross-cohort transfer across a 14-arm evaluation suite, while producing higher-rank, more structured latent representations. At 3.77 M parameters the model is compatible with on-device wearable inference, offering a step toward general kinematic world models for neurological assessment.

Fairness issues often remain hidden in digital systems, making them difficult to detect and even more difficult to address. In this study, we introduce a fairness-first Design Thinking (DT) approach to support addressing fairness concerns in software architecture (SA) design. We implemented our approach in a graduate-level course where students executed all steps of our DT approach as part of an assignment. We analyzed the assignment data to reflect on the implications for applying the DT approach in SA and teaching the DT approach in SA education. As a result of this study, we provide (i) a DT approach for SA, (ii) implications of the DT approach on handling fairness in both problem and solution spaces, and (iii) implications for education. Our reflections highlight that fairness theory and context identification are essential for a holistic, fairness-first design. We propose the use of composite views to address cross-cutting concerns such as fairness. In the future, we will update the course material to provide end-to-end fairness traceability in SA, helping students to understand how fairness concerns can be translated into actionable design decisions.

Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) for 5G networks must handle complex, high-volume traffic. Although opaque "black-box" models can achieve high accuracy, their lack of transparency hinders trust and effective operational response. We propose ExAI5G, a framework that prioritizes interpretability by integrating a Transformer-based deep learning IDS with logic-based explainable AI (XAI) techniques. The framework uses Integrated Gradients to attribute feature importance and extracts a surrogate decision tree to derive logical rules. We introduce a novel evaluation methodology for LLM-generated explanations, using a powerful evaluator LLM to assess actionability and measuring their semantic similarity and faithfulness. On a 5G IoT intrusion dataset, our system achieves 99.9\% accuracy and a 0.854 macro F1-score, demonstrating strong performance. More importantly, we extract 16 logical rules with 99.7\% fidelity, making the model's reasoning transparent. The evaluation demonstrates that modern LLMs can generate explanations that are both faithful and actionable, indicating that it is possible to build a trustworthy and effective IDS without compromising performance for the sake of marginal gains from an opaque model.

AlphaGeometry represents a milestone in neuro-symbolic reasoning, yet its architecture faces a log-linear scaling bottleneck within its symbolic deduction engine that limits its efficiency as problem complexity increases. Recent technical reports suggest that current domain-specific languages may be isomorphic as input representations to natural language, interchanging them acts as a performance-invariant transformation, implying that current neural guidance relies on superficial encodings rather than structural understanding. This paper addresses this representation bottleneck by proposing a logic-to-topology encoding designed to reveal the structural invariants of a model's latent space under a transformation of its input space. By leveraging the Logic of Observation, we utilize the duality between provability in observable theories and topologies to propose a logic-to-topology encoder for the input space. We introduce the concept of the "topological dual of a dataset", a transformation that bridges formal logic, topology, and neural processing. This framework serves as a Rosetta Stone for neuro-symbolic AI, providing a principled pathway for the mechanistic interpretability of how models navigate complex discovery paths.

Critical infrastructures increasingly rely on interconnected and software-driven Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), exposing operational processes to both accidental failures and sophisticated adversarial behavior. While Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) protocols offer robustness against arbitrary faults, evaluating their behavior under realistic cyber-physical conditions remains challenging: traditional cyber ranges lack timing fidelity, and testing in production environments is unsafe. This paper introduces ByzTwin-Range, a dual-layer architecture that integrates a production-grade BFT deployment with a Digital Twin (DT) to enable controlled experimentation, stress testing, and Byzantine fault injection using live operational data. The DT mirrors real system state, executes "What-if" analyses through co-simulation and emulation, and identifies synchrony vulnerabilities, i.e., misconfigured timeouts, timing-sensitive false suspicions, and adversarial delay exploits, configuration weaknesses, and adversarial behaviors that may undermine BFT guarantees. Insights from the twin are fed back into the operational deployment through a secure advisory channel, supporting continuous validation and adaptive hardening. The proposed design leverages industry-standard technologies (Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture, Time-Sensitive Networking, Functional Mock-up Unit/High-Level Architecture, QUIC/mutual TLS) to maximize feasibility and compatibility with existing industrial workflows. ByzTwin-Range establishes a practical foundation for next-generation, BFT-aware cyber ranges and paves the way for more resilient CPSs through continuous testing, differential-privacy-enabled analytics, and future proof-of-concept implementations.

Existing AI agent safety benchmarks focus on generic criminal harm (cybercrime, harassment, weapon synthesis), leaving a systematic blind spot for a distinct and commercially consequential threat category: agents harming their own deployers. Real-world incidents illustrate the gap: Slack AI credential exfiltration (Aug 2024), Microsoft 365 Copilot calendar-injection leaks (Jan 2024), and a Meta agent unauthorized forum post exposing operational data (Mar 2026). We propose Owner-Harm, a formal threat model with eight categories of agent behavior damaging the deployer. We quantify the defense gap on two benchmarks: a compositional safety system achieves 100% TPR / 0% FPR on AgentHarm (generic criminal harm) yet only 14.8% (4/27; 95% CI: 5.9%-32.5%) on AgentDojo injection tasks (prompt-injection-mediated owner harm). A controlled generic-LLM baseline shows the gap is not inherent to owner-harm (62.7% vs. 59.3%, delta 3.4 pp) but arises from environment-bound symbolic rules that fail to generalize across tool vocabularies. On a post-hoc 300-scenario owner-harm benchmark, the gate alone achieves 75.3% TPR / 3.3% FPR; adding a deterministic post-audit verifier raises overall TPR to 85.3% (+10.0 pp) and Hijacking detection from 43.3% to 93.3%, demonstrating strong layer complementarity. We introduce the Symbolic-Semantic Defense Generalization (SSDG) framework relating information coverage to detection rate. Two SSDG experiments partially validate it: context deprivation amplifies the detection gap 3.4x (R = 3.60 vs. R = 1.06); context injection reveals structured goal-action alignment, not text concatenation, is required for effective owner-harm detection.

High-fidelity, scalable market simulation is a key instrument for mechanism evaluation, stress testing, and counterfactual policy analysis. Yet existing simulators rarely achieve \emph{mechanism fidelity} beyond single-asset intraday settings, \emph{microstructure fidelity} against historical limit order books (LOB), and \emph{computational tractability} at market scale in a single system. This paper presents \textit{EvoMarket}, a discrete-event, multi-agent financial market simulator designed for intervention-oriented experiments in multi-asset and cross-day environments. EvoMarket couples a high-throughput execution core (optimized LOB data structures, hierarchical scheduling under propagation delays, and asynchronous per-asset matching) with explicit institutional mechanisms (market calendars, opening call auctions, price limits, and T+1 settlement). To avoid expensive black-box calibration, EvoMarket introduces an Oracle-guided in-run self-calibration mechanism that interprets microstructure discrepancy as missing order flow and synthesizes corrective orders at recording checkpoints. Experiments on China A-share order-flow and LOB data show close replay alignment over five trading days, fidelity gains from budgeted in-run calibration across depth levels, broad agent order-space coverage, and scalable performance under increasing input order rates and market breadth. We further demonstrate cross-asset linkage and event-study style intervention evaluation that produces structured dependence and interpretable event-time responses.

In modern distributed systems, efficient resource allocation is a vital aspect to maintain scalability, reduce operational costs, and ensure fast execution even across heterogeneous workloads. Predictive models for resource usage are essential tools for optimizing allocation and preventing system bottlenecks. Predictive memory allocation has asymmetric costs as a key challenge: underallocation causes failures while overallocation wastes memory. We propose a regression method based on a LightGBM and XGBoost ensemble trained to predict high conditional quantiles. To further account for the high cost of underallocations we add a multiplicative safety factor. With our method we are able to reduce the number of under-allocated jobs from 4.17% to 2.89% and average overallocation from 148% to 44.51% on a real-world dataset of build jobs provided by SAP. We further explore the pareto frontier between optimization for underallocation and for overallocation.

Despite significant advances in large language models, personalizing them for individual decision-makers remains an open problem. Here, we introduce a synthetic-organic supervision pipeline that transforms raw judicial decisions into instruction-tuning data, enabling parameter-efficient fine-tuning of personalized models for individual judges in low-resource settings. We compare our approach to state-of-the-art personalization techniques across three different tasks and settings. The results show that Causal Language Modeling followed by synthetically generated instruction-tuning significantly outperforms all other baselines, providing significant improvements across lexical, stylistic, and semantic similarity. Notably, our model-generated outputs are indistinguishable from the reasoning of human judges, highlighting the viability of efficient personalization, even in low-resource settings.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in clinical settings, raising concerns about racial bias in both generated medical text and clinical reasoning. Existing studies have identified bias in medical LLMs, but many focus on single models and give less attention to mitigation. This study uses the EU AI Act as a governance lens to evaluate five widely used LLMs across two tasks, namely synthetic patient-case generation and differential diagnosis ranking. Using race-stratified epidemiological distributions in the United States and expert differential diagnosis lists as benchmarks, we apply structured prompt templates and a two-part evaluation design to examine implicit and explicit racial bias. All models deviated from observed racial distributions in the synthetic case generation task, with GPT-4.1 showing the smallest overall deviation. In the differential diagnosis task, DeepSeek V3 produced the strongest overall results across the reported metrics. When embedded in an agentic workflow, DeepSeek V3 showed an improvement of 0.0348 in mean p-value, 0.1166 in median p-value, and 0.0949 in mean difference relative to the standalone model, although improvement was not uniform across every metric. These findings support multi-metric bias evaluation for AI systems used in medical settings and suggest that retrieval-based agentic workflows may reduce some forms of explicit bias in benchmarked diagnostic tasks. Detailed prompt templates, experimental datasets, and code pipelines are available on our GitHub.

Machine learning (ML) models trained to detect physical-layer threats on one optical fiber system often fail catastrophically when applied to a different system, due to variations in operating wavelength, fiber properties, and network architecture. To overcome this, we propose a Domain Adaptation (DA) framework based on a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) that learns a shared representation capturing event signatures common to both systems while suppressing system-specific differences. The shared encoder is first trained on the combined data from two distinct optical systems: a 21 km O-band dark-fiber testbed (System 1) and a 63.4 km C-band live metro ring (System 2). The encoder is then frozen, and a classifier is trained using labels from an individual system. The proposed approach achieves 95.3% and 73.5% cross-system accuracy when moving from System 1 to System 2 and vice versa, respectively. This corresponds to gains of 83.4% and 51% over a fully supervised Deep Neural Network (DNN) baseline trained on a single system, while preserving intra-system performance.

We present SignDPO, a novel multi-level Direct Preference Optimisation (DPO) framework designed to enhance the alignment of skeleton-based Sign Language Translation. While current skeleton-based models have made significant progress using Maximum Likelihood Estimation, they are primarily constrained by an imitation-based paradigm that lacks discriminative sensitivity to the fine-grained spatio-temporal nuances of sign language, often leading to semantic drift. To address this, SignDPO shifts the optimisation goal from simple sequence mimicry to structured preference alignment across spatial, temporal, and linguistic dimensions. Our framework involves three key designs. First, we introduce a hierarchical perturbation strategy to construct spatial and temporal non-preferred samples at both global and local granularities automatically. Second, we propose a self-guiding mechanism that leverages decoder cross-attention scores to identify and perturb semantically salient skeletal regions, forcing the model to distinguish genuine sign signals from structural distortions. Third, we establish an automated language-level preference generator by fine-tuning a dedicated perturbation model, capturing complex output-level failure modes without manual annotation. Extensive experiments on three widely adopted benchmarks, CSL-Daily, How2Sign, and OpenASL, demonstrate that SignDPO consistently outperforms state-of-the-art gloss-free methods and even rivals established gloss-based ones. Our results suggest that multi-level preference alignment is a powerful paradigm for bridging the gap between high-entropy skeletal trajectories and discrete linguistic semantics.

Molecule generation requires satisfying multiple chemical and biological constraints while searching a large and structured chemical space. This makes it a non-binary problem, where effective models must identify non-obvious solutions under constraints while maintaining exploration to improve success by escaping local optima. From this perspective, creativity is a functional requirement in molecular generation rather than an aesthetic notion. Large language models (LLMs) can generate molecular representations directly from natural language prompts, but it remains unclear what type of creativity they exhibit in this setting and how it should be evaluated. In this work, we study the creative behavior of LLMs in molecular generation through a systematic empirical evaluation across physicochemical, ADMET, and biological activity tasks. We characterize creativity along two complementary dimensions, convergent creativity and divergent creativity, and analyze how different factors shape these behaviors. Our results indicate that LLMs exhibit distinct patterns of creative behavior in molecule generation, such as an increase in constraint satisfaction when additional constraints are imposed. Overall, our work is the first to reframe the abilities required for molecule generation as creativity, providing a systematic understanding of creativity in LLM-based molecular generation and clarifying the appropriate use of LLMs in molecular discovery pipelines.

We study the message complexity of leader election in synchronous networks of diameter two. Our main contribution is a refined analysis of the randomized algorithm proposed by Chatterjee et al. [DC, 2020]. In their work, the authors established a lower bound of $Ω(n)$ messages ($n$ is the number of nodes in the network) and presented a randomized algorithm that elects a leader in ${O}(1)$ rounds using $O(n \log^3 n)$ messages with high probability. In this paper, we improve their $\polylog n$ gap in the message bound by providing a tighter analysis of their algorithm, reducing the message complexity to $O(n\log n)$, while preserving the $O(1)$-round complexity and high-probability correctness guarantee.

Transpilation, or code translation, aims to convert source code from one programming language (PL) to another. It is beneficial for many downstream applications, from modernizing large legacy codebases to augmenting data for low-resource PLs. Recent large language model (LLM)-based approaches have demonstrated immense potential for code translation. Among these approaches, training-based methods are particularly important because LLMs currently do not effectively adapt to domain-specific settings that suffer from a lack of knowledge without targeted training. This limitation is evident in transpilation tasks involving low-resource PLs. However, existing training-based approaches rely on a pairwise transpilation paradigm, making it impractical to support a diverse range of PLs. This limitation is particularly prominent for low-resource PLs due to a scarcity of training data. Furthermore, these methods suffer from suboptimal reinforcement learning (RL) reward formulations. To address these limitations, we propose CodePivot, a training framework that leverages Python as an intermediate representation (IR), augmented by a novel RL reward mechanism, Aggressive-Partial-Functional reward, to bootstrap the model's multilingual transpilation ability without requiring parallel corpora. Experiments involving 10 PLs show that the resulting 7B model, trained on Python-to-Others tasks, consistently improves performance across both general and low-resource PL-related transpilation tasks. It outperforms substantially larger mainstream models with hundreds of billions more parameters, such as Deepseek-R1 and Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507, on Python-to-Others tasks and Others-to-All tasks, respectively. In addition, it outperforms its counterpart trained directly on Any-to-Any tasks on general transpilation tasks. The code and data are available at https://github.com/lishangyu-hkust/CodePivot.

Many deployed systems expose black-box objectives whose minimizing configuration shifts with an externally observed context. When contexts revisit a small set of latent regimes, an optimizer that discards history pays repeated adaptation cost; when each step must remain inexpensive, full Gaussian-process (GP) refits at high observation counts are difficult to sustain. We cast online tuning as context-conditioned regret minimization and present RASP-Tuner, which instantiates a decomposition motivated by first principles: (i) identify a regime proxy by retrieving similar past contexts; (ii) predict short-horizon loss with a mixture-of-experts surrogate whose input concatenates parameters, context, and a retrieved soft prompt; (iii) adapt chiefly in a low-dimensional prompt subspace, invoking full surrogate updates only when scalarized error or disagreement spikes. A RealErrorComposer maps heterogeneous streaming metrics to [0,1] via EMA-stabilized logistic scores, supplying a single differentiable training target. On nine synthetic non-stationary benchmarks, an adversarial-context sanity check, and three tabular real-world streams (Section on real-world experiments), RASP-Tuner improves or matches cumulative regret relative to our GP-UCB and CMA-ES implementations on seven of nine synthetic tasks under paired tests at horizon T=100, while recording 8-12 times lower wall-clock per step than sliding-window GP-UCB on identical hardware. Idealized analysis in a cluster-separated, strongly convex regime model (RA-GD) supplies sufficient conditions for bounded dynamic regret; the deployed pipeline violates several of these premises, and we articulate which gaps remain open.

In multi-view clustering, the quality of different views may vary substantially, and low-quality or degraded views can impair overall clustering performance. However, existing studies mainly address this issue within the clustering process through view weighting or noise-robust optimization, while paying limited attention to data-level assessment before clustering. In this paper, we study the problem of pre-clustering noisy-view analysis in multi-view data from a clusterability perspective. To this end, we propose a Multi-View Clusterability Score (MVCS), which quantifies the strength of latent cluster-related structures in multi-view data through three complementary components: per-view structural clusterability, joint-space clusterability, and cross-view neighborhood consistency. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first clusterability score specifically designed for multi-view data. We further use it to perform potentially noisy view analysis and noisy-view detection before clustering. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that noisy views can significantly degrade clustering performance, and that, compared with existing clusterability measures designed for single-view data, the proposed method more effectively supports noisy-view analysis and detection.

The matrix-free gather-batched-GEMM-scatter pattern eliminates global stiffness assembly for three-dimensional SIMP topology optimization, but the conventional three-stage implementation forces avoidable DRAM traffic between stages. We present a single fused CUDA kernel, implemented through CuPy's runtime compilation interface, that performs gather, per-element stiffness multiplication, and scatter accumulation in one pass. On a single RTX 4090 (24 GB), the fused path reaches a problem-size-dependent 4.6-7.3x end-to-end SIMP wall-time speedup across 216k-4.9M cantilever elements and 4.4x on the 499,125-element torsion benchmark. Against the same-precision FP32 three-stage baseline, the fused path still yields 2.3-4.6x on cantilever and 2.8x on torsion. Isolated CUDA-event cantilever-operator measurements reach 8.9-13.8x per matvec call, while separate instrumented board-power traces at 216k and 1M show 3.2-4.9x lower energy than matched FP64 runs. A separate bridge stress test shows the same FP32-versus-FP64 three-stage trend under one distributed-load case; direct fused-kernel bridge benchmarks are not reported. We also evaluate a BF16 WMMA variant: a separate PyTorch BF16 GEMM proxy on matching tensor shapes yields 14.3x, but direct condition-number estimates of 6.1e5-2.3e6 across 64k-512k uniform-density test states imply BF16 conditioning products of 2.4e3-9.1e3, far above the 256 threshold, observed alongside BF16 iterative-refinement stagnation at the two tested inner tolerances.

We prove error bounds for operator surrogates of solution operators for partial differential and boundary integral equations on families of domains which are diffeomorphic to one common reference (or latent) domain $D_{ref}$. The pullback of the PDE to $D_{ref}$ via affine-parametric shape encoding produces a collection of holomorphic parametric PDEs on $D_{ref}$. Sufficient conditions for (uniformly with respect to the parameter) well-posedness are given, implying existence, uniqueness and stability of parametric solution families on $D_{ref}$. We illustrate the abstract hypotheses by reviewing recent holomorphy results for a suite of elliptic and parabolic PDEs. Quantified parametric holomorphy implies existence of finite-parametric, discrete approximations of the parametric solution families with convergence rates in terms of the number $N$ of parameters. We obtain constructive proofs of existence of Neural and Spectral Operator surrogates for the shape-to-solution maps with error bounds and convergence rate guarantees uniform on the collection of admissible shapes. We admit principal-component shape encoders and frame decoders. Our results support in particular the (empirically reported) ability of neural operators to realize data-to-solution maps for elliptic and parabolic PDEs and BIEs that generalize across parametric families of shapes.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly used for open-ended idea generation, driven by the expectation that collective interaction will broaden the exploration diversity. However, when and why such collaboration truly expands the solution space remains unclear. We present a systematic empirical study of diversity in MAS-based ideation across three bottom-up levels: model intelligence, agent cognition, and system dynamics. At the model level, we identify a compute efficiency paradox, where stronger, highly aligned models yield diminishing marginal diversity despite higher per-sample quality. At the cognition level, authority-driven dynamics suppress semantic diversity compared to junior-dominated groups. At the system level, group-size scaling yields diminishing returns and dense communication topologies accelerate premature convergence. We characterize these outcomes as collective failures emerging from structural coupling, a process where interaction inadvertently contracts agent exploration and triggers diversity collapse. Our analysis shows that this collapse arises primarily from the interaction structure rather than inherent model insufficiency, highlighting the importance of preserving independence and disagreement when designing MAS for creative tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xtra-Computing/MAS_Diversity.

Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) has become a fundamental capability for large language models (LLMs) in human-centric interaction. Beyond accurate recognition, coherent emotional expression is also crucial, yet both are limited by the scarcity and static nature of high-quality annotated data. In this work, we propose SELF-EMO, a self-evolution framework grounded in the hypothesis that better emotion prediction leads to more consistent emotional responses. We introduce two auxiliary tasks, emotional understanding and emotional expression, and design a role-based self-play paradigm where the model acts as both an emotion recognizer and a dialogue responder. Through iterative interactions, the model generates diverse conversational trajectories, enabling scalable data generation. To ensure quality, we adopt a data flywheel mechanism that filters candidate predictions and responses using a smoothed IoU-based reward and feeds selected samples back for continuous self-improvement without external supervision. We further develop SELF-GRPO, a reinforcement learning algorithm that stabilizes optimization with multi-label alignment rewards and group-level consistency signals. Experiments on IEMOCAP, MELD, and EmoryNLP show that SELF-EMO achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving accuracy by +6.33% on Qwen3-4B and +8.54% on Qwen3-8B, demonstrating strong effectiveness and generalization.

Chain-of-thought reasoning has driven striking advances in language model capability, yet every reasoning step grows the KV cache, creating a bottleneck to scaling this paradigm further. Current approaches manage these constraints on the model's behalf using hand-designed criteria. A more scalable approach would let end-to-end learning subsume this design choice entirely, following a broader pattern in deep learning. After all, if a model can learn to reason, why can't it learn to forget? We introduce Neural Garbage Collection (NGC), in which a language model learns to forget while learning to reason, trained end-to-end from outcome-based task reward alone. As the model reasons, it periodically pauses, decides which KV cache entries to evict, and continues to reason conditioned on the remaining cache. By treating tokens in a chain-of-thought and cache-eviction decisions as discrete actions sampled from the language model, we can use reinforcement learning to jointly optimize how the model reasons and how it manages its own memory: what the model evicts shapes what it remembers, what it remembers shapes its reasoning, and the correctness of that reasoning determines its reward. Crucially, the model learns this behavior entirely from a single learning signal - the outcome-based task reward - without supervised fine-tuning or proxy objectives. On Countdown, AMC, and AIME tasks, NGC maintains strong accuracy relative to the full-cache upper bound at 2-3x peak KV cache size compression and substantially outperforms eviction baselines. Our results are a first step towards a broader vision where end-to-end optimization drives both capability and efficiency in language models.

Anomaly detection in multivariate time series is a central challenge in industrial monitoring, as failures frequently arise from complex temporal dynamics and cross-sensor interactions. While recent deep learning models, including graph neural networks and Transformers, have demonstrated strong empirical performance, most approaches remain primarily correlational and offer limited support for causal interpretation and root-cause localization. This study introduces a causally-constrained probabilistic forecasting framework which is a Causally Guided Transformer (CGT) model for multivariate time-series anomaly detection, integrating an explicit time-lagged causal graph prior with deep sequence modeling. For each target variable, a dedicated forecasting block employs a hard parent mask derived from causal discovery to restrict the main prediction pathway to graph-supported causes, while a latent Gaussian head captures predictive uncertainty. To leverage residual correlational information without compromising the causal representation, a shadow auxiliary path with stop-gradient isolation and a safety-gated blending mechanism is incorporated to suppress non-causal contributions when reliability is low. Anomalies are identified using negative log-likelihood scores with adaptive streaming thresholding, and root-cause variables are determined through per-dimension probabilistic attribution and counterfactual clamping. Experiments on the ASD and SMD benchmarks indicate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art detection performance, with F1-scores of 96.19% on ASD and 95.32% on SMD, and enhances variable-level attribution quality. These findings suggest that causal structural priors can improve both robustness and interpretability in detecting deep anomalies in multivariate sensor systems.

This paper presents a decentralized, collision-free framework for path following guidance of multiple uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), while maintaining uniform spacing along a reference path. A vector field-based guidance law is employed to drive each UAV toward the reference path. A rotational repulsion mechanism, utilizing relative distance and bearing between UAVs, is proposed to avoid collisions during convergence to the path, and an inter-UAV spacing error-based velocity control law is presented to achieve uniform separation along the path. Analytical guarantees are established for collision avoidance and convergence of the inter-UAV spacing errors to zero, ensuring uniform separation along the path. Numerical simulations demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method.

What does it mean to give an AI agent a complete education? Current agent development produces specialists systems optimized for a single capability dimension, whether tool use, code generation, or security awareness that exhibit predictable deficits wherever they were not trained. We argue this pattern reflects a structural absence: there is no curriculum theory for agents, no principled account of what a fully developed agent should know, be, and be able to do across the full scope of intelligent behavior. This paper introduces the AIT Academy (Agents Institute of Technology Academy), a curriculum framework for cultivating AI agents across the tripartite structure of human knowledge. Grounded in Kagan's Three Cultures and UNESCO ISCED-F 2013, AIT organizes agent capability development into three domains: Natural Science and Technical Reasoning (Domain I), Humanities and Creative Expression (Domain II), and Social Science and Ethical Reasoning (Domain III). The Confucian Six Arts (liuyi) a 2,500-year-old holistic education system are reinterpreted as behavioral archetypes that map directly onto trainable agent capabilities within each domain. Three representative training grounds instantiate the framework across multiple backbone LLMs: the ClawdGO Security Dojo (Domain I), Athen's Academy (Domain II), and the Alt Mirage Stage (Domain III). Experiments demonstrate a 15.9-point improvement in security capability scores under weakest-first curriculum scheduling, and a 7-percentage-point gain in social reasoning performance under principled attribution modeling. A cross-domain finding Security Awareness Calibration Pathology (SACP), in which over-trained Domain I agents fail on out-of-distribution evaluation illustrates the diagnostic value of a multi-domain perspective unavailable to any single-domain framework.

Background: The potential of large language models (LLMs) to automate and support pharmacoepidemiologic study design is an emerging area of interest, yet their reliability remains insufficiently characterized. General-purpose LLMs often display inaccuracies, while the comparative performance of specialized biomedical LLMs in this domain remains unknown. Methods: This study evaluated general-purpose LLMs (GPT-4o and DeepSeek-R1) versus biomedically fine-tuned LLMs (QuantFactory/Bio-Medical-Llama-3-8B-GGUF and Irathernotsay/qwen2-1.5B-medical_qa-Finetune) using 46 protocols (2018-2024) from the HMA-EMA Catalogue and Sentinel System. Performance was assessed across relevance, logic of justification, and ontology-code agreement across multiple coding systems using Least-to-Most (LTM) and Active Prompting strategies. Results: GPT-4o and DeepSeek-R1 paired with LTM prompting achieved the highest relevance and logic of justification scores, with GPT-4o-LTM reaching a median relevance score of 4 in 8 of 9 questions for HMA-EMA protocols. Biomedical LLMs showed lower relevance overall and frequently generated insufficient justification. All LLMs demonstrated limited proficiency in ontology-code mapping, although LTM provided the most consistent improvements in reasoning stability. Conclusion: Off-the-shelf general-purpose LLMs currently offer superior support for pharmacoepidemiologic design compared to biomedical LLMs. Prompt strategy strongly influenced LLM performance.

We introduce the Latent Fourier Transform (LatentFT), a framework that provides novel frequency-domain controls for generative music models. LatentFT combines a diffusion autoencoder with a latent-space Fourier transform to separate musical patterns by timescale. By masking latents in the frequency domain during training, our method yields representations that can be manipulated coherently at inference. This allows us to generate musical variations and blends from reference examples while preserving characteristics at desired timescales, which are specified as frequencies in the latent space. LatentFT parallels the role of the equalizer in music production: while traditional equalizers operates on audible frequencies to shape timbre, LatentFT operates on latent-space frequencies to shape musical structure. Experiments and listening tests show that LatentFT improves condition adherence and quality compared to baselines. We also present a technique for hearing frequencies in the latent space in isolation, and show different musical attributes reside in different regions of the latent spectrum. Our results show how frequency-domain control in latent space provides an intuitive, continuous frequency axis for conditioning and blending, advancing us toward more interpretable and interactive generative music models.

Uncertainty quantification is crucial in safety-critical systems, where decisions must be made under uncertainty. In particular, we consider the problem of online uncertainty quantification, where data points arrive sequentially. Online conformal prediction is a principled online uncertainty quantification method that dynamically constructs a prediction set at each time step. While existing methods for online conformal prediction provide long-run coverage guarantees without any distributional assumptions, they typically assume a full feedback setting in which the true label is always observed. In this paper, we propose a novel learning method for online conformal prediction with partial feedback from an adaptive adversary-a more challenging setup where the true label is revealed only when it lies inside the constructed prediction set. Specifically, we formulate online conformal prediction as an adversarial bandit problem by treating each candidate prediction set as an arm. Building on an existing algorithm for adversarial bandits, our method achieves a long-run coverage guarantee by explicitly establishing its connection to the regret of the learner. Finally, we empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in both independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) and non-i.i.d. settings, showing that it successfully controls the miscoverage rate while maintaining a reasonable size of the prediction set.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) still struggle with vision hallucination, where generated responses are inconsistent with the visual input. Existing methods either rely on large-scale annotated data for fine-tuning, which incurs massive computational overhead, or employ static post-hoc strategies that overlook the dynamic nature of hallucination emergence. To address these, we introduce a new self-rewarding framework, enabling dynamic hallucination mitigation at inference time without external supervision. On the empirical side, we reveal that visual hallucination exhibits phase-wise dynamic patterns, peaking at the onset of each semantic phase. Drawing on these insights, we propose \textbf{PSRD} (\textbf{Phase-wise \textbf{S}elf-\textbf{R}eward \textbf{D}ecoding) for online hallucination correction guided by phase-wise self-reward signals. To reduce the cost of repeated self-evaluation during decoding, we distill the hallucination guidance signal from LVLMs into a lightweight reward model. The reward model subsequently provides on-the-fly guidance for targeted intervention during the decoding process, enabling precise hallucination suppression. The proposed PSRD significantly reduces the hallucination rate of LLaVA-1.5-7B by 50.0% and consistently outperforms existing post-hoc methods across five hallucination evaluation benchmarks for four LVLMs. Further analysis confirms that PSRD effectively mitigates hallucination propagation and achieves a highly controllable trade-off between strong performance and inference efficiency.

Fuzz testing of software libraries relies on fuzz drivers to invoke library APIs. Traditionally, these drivers are written manually by developers - a process that is time-consuming and often inadequate for exercising complex program behaviors. While recent studies have explored the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate fuzz driver generation, the resulting drivers often fail to cover deep program branches. To address these challenges, we propose MASFUZZER, a fuzzing framework that integrates multidimensional API sequence construction with adaptive fuzzing scheduling strategies to improve library testing. At its core, MASFUZZER synthesizes context-relevant API call sequences by referring to API usage examples from the codebase and applying mutation-propagation-based and semantic-aware API sequence mining. These multidimensional API sequences serve as the basis for LLMs to generate effective initial drivers. In addition, MASFUZZER incorporates a coverage-guided scheduler that prioritizes testing time for the most promising drivers, along with a driver mutation strategy to evolve them. This enables systematic generation of fuzz drivers to explore previously untested code regions. We evaluate MASFUZZER on 12 widely used open-source libraries. The results show that MASFUZZER achieves 8.54 percent higher code coverage than state-of-the-art techniques. Moreover, MASFUZZER uncovers 16 previously unknown vulnerabilities in extensively tested libraries, with 14 confirmed by developers and 9 assigned CVE identifiers. These results indicate that MASFUZZER provides an efficient and practical approach for fuzzing software libraries.

This paper presents ltzGLUE, the first Natural Language Understanding (NLU) benchmark for Luxembourgish (LTZ) based on the popular GLUE benchmark for English. Although NLU tasks are available for many European languages nowadays, LTZ is one of the official national languages that is often overlooked. We construct new tasks and reuse existing ones to introduce the first official NLU benchmark and accompanying evaluation of encoder models for the language. Our tasks include common natural language processing tasks in binary and multi-class classification settings, including named entity recognition, topic classification, and intent classification. We evaluate various pre-trained language models for LTZ to present an overview of the current capabilities of these models on the LTZ language.

Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) aims to assist individuals experiencing distress by generating empathetic and supportive dialogue. While prior work typically assumes that each supporter turn corresponds to a single strategy, real-world supportive communication often involves multiple strategies within a single utterance. In this paper, we revisit the ESC task by formulating it as multi-strategy utterance generation, where each utterance may contain one or more strategy-response pairs. We propose two generation methods: All-in-One, which predicts all strategy-response pairs in a single decoding step, and One-by-One, which iteratively generates strategy-response pairs until completion. Both methods are further enhanced with cognitive reasoning guided by reinforcement learning to improve strategy selection and response composition. We evaluate our models on the ESConv dataset under both utterance-level and dialogue-level settings. Experimental results show that our methods effectively model multi-strategy utterances and lead to improved supportive quality and dialogue success. To our knowledge, this work provides the first systematic empirical evidence that allowing multiple support strategies within a single utterance is both feasible and beneficial for emotional support conversations. All code and data will be publicly available at https://github.com/aliyun/qwen-dianjin.

Although large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as annotators at scale, they are typically treated as a pragmatic fallback rather than a faithful estimator of human perspectives. This work challenges that presumption. By framing perspective-taking as the estimation of a latent group-level judgment, we characterize the conditions under which modern LLMs can outperform human annotators, including in-group humans, when predicting aggregate subgroup opinions on subjective tasks, and show that these conditions are common in practice. This advantage arises from structural properties of LLMs as estimators, including low variance and reduced coupling between representation and processing biases, rather than any claim of lived experience. Our analysis identifies clear regimes where LLMs act as statistically superior frontline estimators, as well as principled limits where human judgment remains essential. These findings reposition LLMs from a cost-saving compromise to a principled tool for estimating collective human perspectives.

In this article, we establish a precise connection between binarized neural networks (BNNs) and Sugeno integrals. The advantage of the Sugeno integral is that it provides a framework for representing the importance of inputs and their interactions, while being equivalent to a set of if-then rules. For a hidden BNN neuron at inference time, we show that the activation threshold test can be written as a Sugeno integral on binary inputs. This yields an explicit set-function representation of each neuron decision, and an associated rule-based representation. We also provide a Sugeno-integral expression for the last-layer score. Finally, we discuss how the same framework can be adapted to support richer input interactions and how it can be extended beyond the binary case induced by binarized neural networks.

Deploying LLMs as reasoning assistants in safety-critical aerospace engineering requires stricter evaluation criteria than general scientific benchmarks. In hypersonic thermal protection system (TPS) design, inaccurate stagnation-point heat flux or boundary-layer calculations may cause catastrophic design margin violations. Models with numerically reasonable but physically invalid answers are more dangerous than those declining to respond. Current scientific benchmarks only test abstract math and basic physics, evaluate final answers solely, ignore engineering reasoning processes, and cannot detect such critical failures. We propose TPS-CalcBench, the first diagnostic benchmark for closed-form analytical calculations in hypersonic aerodynamics and high-temperature gas dynamics that experienced TPS engineers conduct without simulations. Our contributions include domain-oriented task taxonomy with 4 difficulty levels and 8 categories from Anderson's textbook, dual-track evaluation measuring result accuracy and reasoning quality via an 8-dimension rubric and calibrated judge with human audit to identify right answer wrong reasoning issues, human-AI data pipeline producing 420 high-confidence core items and 810 noise-controlled pre-gating items from 4560 raw data, noise-sensitivity analysis measuring data quality impacts on model ranking, and three diagnostic intervention methods: DFA-TPS fine-tuning, RAG-EQ retrieval grounding and PA-CoT process-aware prompting. Tests on 13 models from 7 groups show wide performance differences (KPI 12.6-87.9), hidden formula selection defects, data-driven rank changes and effective intervention improvements, establishing a complete diagnose-evaluate-intervene framework for safety-critical engineering LLM deployment assessment.

Process Reward Models (PRMs) have emerged as a powerful tool for providing step-level feedback when evaluating the reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs), which frequently produce chains of thought (CoTs) containing errors even when the final answer is correct. However, existing PRM datasets remain expensive to construct, prone to annotation errors, and predominantly limited to the mathematical domain. This work introduces a novel and scalable approach to PRM dataset generation based on planning logical problems expressed in the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL). Using this method, we generate a corpus of approximately one million reasoning steps across various PDDL domains and use it to train PRMs. Experimental results show that augmenting widely-used PRM training datasets with PDDL-derived data yields substantial improvements in both mathematical and non-mathematical reasoning, as demonstrated across multiple benchmarks. These findings indicate that planning problems constitute a scalable and effective resource for generating robust, precise, and fine-grained training data for PRMs, going beyond the classical mathematical sources that dominate this field.

Machine learning has become integral to medical research and is increasingly applied in clinical settings to support diagnosis and decision-making; however, its effectiveness depends on access to large, diverse datasets, which are limited within single institutions. Although integrating data across institutions can address this limitation, privacy regulations and data ownership constraints hinder these efforts. Federated learning enables collaborative model training without sharing raw data; however, most methods rely on complex architectures that lack interpretability, limiting clinical applicability. Therefore, we proposed a federated RuleFit framework to construct a unified and interpretable global model for distributed environments. It integrates three components: preprocessing based on differentially private histograms to estimate shared cutoff values, enabling consistent rule definitions and reducing heterogeneity across clients; local rule generation using gradient boosting decision trees with shared cutoffs; and coefficient estimation via $\ell_1$-regularized optimization using a Federated Dual Averaging algorithm for sparse and consistent variable selection. In simulation studies, the proposed method achieved a performance comparable to that of centralized RuleFit while outperforming existing federated approaches. Real-world analysis demonstrated its ability to provide interpretable insights with competitive predictive accuracy. Therefore, the proposed framework offers a practical and effective solution for interpretable and reliable modeling in federated learning environments.

We develop interconnections between the complex normalizing flow for data drawn from Borel probability measures on the twofold realification of the complex manifold and the Kähler-Ricci flow. The complex normalizing flow relates the initial and target realified densities under the complex change of variables, necessitating the log determinant of the Wirtinger Jacobian. The Ricci curvature of a Kähler manifold is the second order mixed Wirtinger partial derivative of the log of the local density of the volume form. Therefore, we reconcile these two facts by drawing forth the connection that the log determinant used in the complex normalizing flow matches the Ricci curvature term under differentiation and conditions. The log density under the normalizing flow is kindred to a spatial Fisher information metric under a holomorphic pullback and a Bayesian perspective to the parameter, thus under the continuum limit the log likelihood matches a Fisher metric, recovering the Kähler-Ricci flow up to expectation. Using this framework, we establish other relevant results, attempting to bridge the statistical and ordinary behaviors of the complex normalizing flow to the geometric features of the Kähler-Ricci flow.

We revisit multi-agent delegation under a stronger and more realistic assumption: an agent's capability is not fixed at the skill level, but depends on task context. A coding agent may excel at short standalone edits yet fail on long-horizon debugging; a planner may perform well on shallow tasks yet degrade on chained dependencies. Static skill-level capability profiles therefore average over heterogeneous situations and can induce systematic misdelegation. We propose CADMAS-CTX, a framework for contextual capability calibration. For each agent, skill, and coarse context bucket, CADMAS-CTX maintains a Beta posterior that captures stable experience in that part of the task space. Delegation is then made by a risk-aware score that combines the posterior mean with an uncertainty penalty, so that agents delegate only when a peer appears better and that assessment is sufficiently well supported by evidence. This paper makes three contributions. First, a hierarchical contextual capability profile replaces static skill-level confidence with context-conditioned posteriors. Second, based on contextual bandit theory, we formally prove context-aware routing achieves lower cumulative regret than static routing under sufficient context heterogeneity, formalizing the bias-variance tradeoff. Third, we empirically validate our method on GAIA and SWE-bench benchmarks. On GAIA with GPT-4o agents, CADMAS-CTX achieves 0.442 accuracy, outperforming static baseline 0.381 and AutoGen 0.354 with non-overlapping 95% confidence intervals. On SWE-bench Lite, it improves resolve rate from 22.3% to 31.4%. Ablations show the uncertainty penalty improves robustness against context tagging noise. Our results demonstrate contextual calibration and risk-aware delegation significantly improve multi-agent teamwork compared with static global skill assignments.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various cybersecurity tasks, including vulnerability classification, detection, and patching. However, their potential in automated vulnerability report documentation and analysis remains underexplored. We present RAVEN (Retrieval Augmented Vulnerability Exploration Network), a framework leveraging LLM agents and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to synthesize comprehensive vulnerability analysis reports. Given vulnerable source code, RAVEN generates reports following the Google Project Zero Root Cause Analysis template. The framework uses four modules: an Explorer agent for vulnerability identification, a RAG engine retrieving relevant knowledge from curated databases including Google Project Zero reports and CWE entries, an Analyst agent for impact and exploitation assessment, and a Reporter agent for structured report generation. To ensure quality, RAVEN includes a task specific LLM Judge evaluating reports across structural integrity, ground truth alignment, code reasoning quality, and remediation quality. We evaluate RAVEN on 105 vulnerable code samples covering 15 CWE types from the NIST-SARD dataset. Results show an average quality score of 54.21%, supporting the effectiveness of our approach for automated vulnerability documentation.

Developing agents capable of navigating fragmented, multi-source information remains challenging, primarily due to the scarcity of benchmarks reflecting hybrid workflows combining database querying with external APIs. To bridge this gap, we introduce ReCoQA, a large-scale benchmark of 29,270 real-estate instances featuring machine-verifiable supervision for intermediate steps, including structured intent labels, SQL queries, and API calls. Complementarily, we propose HIRE-Agent, a hierarchical framework instantiating an understand-plan-execute architecture as a strong baseline. By orchestrating a Front-end parser, a planning Supervisor, and execution Specialists, HIRE-Agent effectively integrates heterogeneous evidence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HIRE-Agent constitutes a strong baseline and substantiates the necessity of hierarchical collaboration for complex, real-world reasoning tasks.

Open-domain RAG benchmarks over public corpora can overestimate deployment performance due to pretraining overlap and weak attribution requirements. We present DoRA (Domain-oriented RAG Assessment), a domain-grounded benchmark built from defense documents that pairs synthetic, intent-conditioned QA (question answering) with auditable evidence passages for attribution. DoRA covers five question types (find, explain, summarize, generate, provide) and contains 6.5K curated instances. In end-to-end evaluation with a fixed dense retriever, general-purpose Language Models (LMs) perform similarly, while a model trained on DoRA (DoRA SFT) yields large gains over the base model (Llama3.1-8B-Instruct): up to 26% improvement in QA task success, while reducing the hallucination rate by 47% in RAG faithfulness scores, supporting contamination-aware regression testing under domain shift.

Recent work has increasingly explored neuron-level interpretation in vision-language models (VLMs) to identify neurons critical to final predictions. However, existing neuron analyses generally focus on single tasks, limiting the comparability of neuron importance across tasks. Moreover, ranking strategies tend to score neurons in isolation, overlooking how task-dependent information pathways shape the write-in effects of feed-forward network (FFN) neurons. This oversight can exacerbate neuron polysemanticity in multi-task settings, introducing noise into the identification and intervention of task-critical neurons. In this study, we propose HONES (Head-Oriented Neuron Explanation & Steering), a gradient-free framework for task-aware neuron attribution and steering in multi-task VLMs. HONES ranks FFN neurons by their causal write-in contributions conditioned on task-relevant attention heads, and further modulates salient neurons via lightweight scaling. Experiments on four diverse multimodal tasks and two popular VLMs show that HONES outperforms existing methods in identifying task-critical neurons and improves model performance after steering. Our source code is released at: https://github.com/petergit1/HONES.

Modern software systems have transitioned from purely code-based architectures to AI-integrated systems where pre-trained models (PTMs) serve as permanent dependencies. However, while the evolution of traditional software libraries is well-documented, we lack a clear understanding of how these "PTM dependencies" change over time. Unlike libraries, PTMs are characterized by opaque internals and less standardized, rapidly evolving release cycles. Furthermore, their multi-role nature enables developers to treat individual instances of a single PTM as separate functional dependencies based on their specific downstream tasks. This raises a critical question for software maintenance: do PTMs change like standard software libraries or do they follow a divergent pattern? To answer this, we present the first empirical study of downstream PTM changes, analyzing a comprehensive dataset of 4,988 releases across 323 GitHub OSS repositories that reuse open-source PTMs. Using traditional software libraries as a baseline, we find that PTMs follow a qualitatively distinct pattern. PTMs are typically added late in the project life-cycle and tend to accumulate rather than be replaced as a project matures. Our findings show that PTM changes are three times less frequent (406 of 2,814 release transitions) than library changes. PTM changes are also less routinely documented, but more likely to carry explicit rationale. Unlike libraries, which evolve reactively, PTM evolution is proactively driven by capability expansion, with a unique documented rationale of PTM testing uncertainty. Our work calls for a rethinking of how PTMs are tracked and managed as dependencies in modern software engineering.

Prompt optimization methods either analyze individual failures in isolation or compare prompt variants across examples, operating on single execution traces with no access to the reasoning process distinguishing success from failure on the same input. We introduce ContraPrompt, built on the observation that when a model fails but succeeds on a retry with feedback, the difference between its two chain-of-thought traces constitutes an optimization signal not captured by prior methods. Unlike prior contrastive methods, we compare complete intermediate reasoning processes: the two traces share model, input, and base prompt, so remaining differences reflect reasoning strategy and appended error feedback -- we call this dyadic reasoning trace analysis. The multi-attempt solving phase is an instrumented agentic retry loop that generates contrastive data automatically without human annotation. Extracted rules are organized into an input-aware decision tree routing instructions by observable input characteristics. On four reasoning and compliance benchmarks, ContraPrompt outperforms GEPA (Agrawal et al., 2026) on all four, with absolute gains of +8.29 pp on HotPotQA (+20.8% rel.), +2.21 pp on GDPR-Bench (+18.2% rel.), +7.14 pp on GPQA Diamond (+10.6% rel.), and +0.74 pp on BBH (+0.85% rel.). Ablations confirm dyadic trace contrastivity is the critical component, with a -16% relative average drop upon its removal. On 53 EvalSet black-box optimization problems, ContraPrompt beats GEPA on 11, ties on 41, and loses on 1 at equal budget. On FiNER-139 financial named entity recognition (Loukas et al., 2022), ContraPrompt achieves +7.77 pp over the unoptimized baseline (+11.6% rel.) and +1.94 pp over GEPA (+2.66% rel.), with branch conditions aligning with standard US GAAP financial-instrument categories.

The key-value (KV) cache is the dominant memory bottleneck during Transformer inference, yet little is known theoretically about how aggressively it can be compressed before multi-step reasoning degrades. We study this through $k$-hop pointer chasing on $n$ tokens under a shared KV cache of size $s$, attention dimension $m$, $H$ heads, $p$-bit precision, and a locality-respecting cache controller (satisfied by all standard KV-compression methods). We give three results. (1) Product depth lower bound (conjectured). We conjecture that any such Transformer ($n \geq 4k$, $s \leq \sqrt{n}/4$) requires depth $L = Ω(\lceil k/s \rceil \cdot \lceil \log_2 n/(Hmp) \rceil)$, and isolate the sole remaining gap as a probabilistic step on the joint distribution of cache trace and pointer chain. Unconditionally, we prove a matching upper bound $L = O(\min(k, \lceil k/s \rceil \log s) \cdot \log n/(mp))$ via windowed pointer doubling, and a max-bound $L = Ω(\max(\lceil k/s \rceil, \log n/(Hmp)))$. Closing the conjecture amounts to upgrading max to product. (2) Bandwidth barrier. The product bound binds only when $Hmp \lesssim \log n$. Any lower bound provable via per-window distinguishability counting -- including reachability, bandwidth, and combinations -- cannot exceed $\lceil k/s \rceil$ once $Hmp \geq \log_2 n$. Breaking this requires lifting unconditional communication-complexity bounds for pointer chasing to Cache-Transformer depth. (3) Adaptive vs oblivious error scaling. Under random cache over $T = \lceil \log_2 k \rceil$ doubling stages, oblivious caches give $\Pr[\mathcal{E}] \leq (s/(n-T))^T + 2T^3/n$ (exponential in $T$), while adaptive locality-respecting caches achieve $\Pr[\mathcal{E}] = s/n$ exactly, independent of $T$. The $Ω((n/s)^{T-1})$ separation explains why heavy-hitter eviction empirically dominates random eviction for multi-hop reasoning.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful training paradigm for LLM-based agents. However, scaling agentic RL for deep research remains constrained by two coupled challenges: hand-crafted synthetic data fails to elicit genuine real-world search capabilities, and real-world search dependency during RL training introduces instability and prohibitive cost, which limits the scalability of Agentic RL. LiteResearcher is a training framework that makes Agentic RL scalable: by constructing a lite virtual world that mirrors real-world search dynamics, we enable a continuously improving training recipe that empowers a tiny search agent to outperform large-scale open-source and commercial models (e.g., Tongyi DeepResearch and Claude-4.5 Sonnet). Specifically, on common benchmarks such as GAIA and Xbench, our LiteResearcher-4B achieves open-source state-of-the-art results of 71.3% and 78.0% respectively, demonstrating that scalable RL training is a key enabler for Deep Research Agents.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit a puzzling disparity in their formal linguistic competence: while they learn some linguistic phenomena with near-perfect mastery, they often perform below chance on others, even after training on trillions of tokens. In this work, we investigate whether these failures stem from inherent architectural limitations or simply the scarcity of these specific grammatical constructions in web-scale corpora. We pre-train simple GPT-2 Small (124M) models on a 100M-token random sample of the FineWeb corpus and intervene by injecting a minimal amount (1%) of synthetic data targeting specific linguistic phenomena. We find that this targeted intervention substantially improves model performance in 8 out of the 9 worst-performing BLiMP paradigms - notably the accuracy on a specific paradigm, only_npi_scope, surges from 20.9% to 69.4%. Furthermore, we observe that these interventions generally preserve or slightly improve aggregate performance. However, while we also identify a resistant phenomenon, principle_A_c_command, whose performance remains below chance even after our data augmentation, our findings do serve as an optimistic existence proof that even small language models can substantially improve on those linguistic phenomena on which models typically perform poorly, provided the pre-training data contains sufficient exposure to them. This suggests that efforts towards human-scale language modeling may benefit greatly by focusing on data composition. The code to reproduce our results is open-sourced at https://github.com/kowndinya-renduchintala/heterogeneity-in-formal-linguistic-competence.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has proven effective for training reasoning-oriented large language models, but existing methods largely assume high-resource settings with abundant training data. In low-resource scenarios, RLVR is prone to more severe entropy collapse, which substantially limits exploration and degrades reasoning performance. To address this issue, we propose Hybrid-domain Entropy dynamics ALignment (HEAL), a framework tailored for few-shot RLVR. HEAL first selectively incorporates high-value general-domain data to promote more diverse exploration. Then, we introduce Entropy Dynamics Alignment (EDA), a reward mechanism that aligns trajectory-level entropy dynamics between the target and general domains, capturing both entropy magnitude and fine-grained variation. Through this alignment, EDA not only further mitigates entropy collapse but also encourages the policy to acquire more diverse exploration behaviors from the general domain. Experiments across multiple domains show that HEAL consistently improves few-shot RLVR performance. Notably, using only 32 target-domain samples, HEAL matches or even surpasses full-shot RLVR trained with 1K target-domain samples.

Visual decoding of neurophysiological signals is a critical challenge for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and computational neuroscience. However, current approaches are often constrained by the systematic and stochastic gaps between neural and visual modalities, largely neglecting the intrinsic computational mechanisms of the Human Visual System (HVS). To address this, we propose Brain-Inspired Capture (BI-Cap), a neuromimetic perceptual simulation paradigm that aligns these modalities by emulating HVS processing. Specifically, we construct a neuromimetic pipeline comprising four biologically plausible dynamic and static transformations, coupled with Mutual Information (MI)-guided dynamic blur regulation to simulate adaptive visual processing. Furthermore, to mitigate the inherent non-stationarity of neural activity, we introduce an evidence-driven latent space representation. This formulation explicitly models uncertainty, thereby ensuring robust neural embeddings. Extensive evaluations on zero-shot brain-to-image retrieval across two public benchmarks demonstrate that BI-Cap substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving relative gains of 9.2\% and 8.0\%, respectively. We have released the source code on GitHub through the link https://github.com/flysnow1024/BI-Cap.

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) plays a critical role in maritime surveillance, yet deep learning for SAR analysis is limited by the lack of pixel-level annotations. This paper explores how general-purpose vision foundation models can enable zero-shot ship instance segmentation in SAR imagery, eliminating the need for pixel-level supervision. A YOLOv11-based detector trained on open SAR datasets localizes ships via bounding boxes, which then prompt the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) to produce instance masks without any mask annotations. Unlike prior SAM-based SAR approaches that rely on fine tuning or adapters, our method demonstrates that spatial constraints from a SAR-trained detector alone can effectively regularize foundation model predictions. This design partially mitigates the optical-SAR domain gap and enables downstream applications such as vessel classification, size estimation, and wake analysis. Experiments on the SSDD benchmark achieve a mean IoU of 0.637 (89% of a fully supervised baseline) with an overall ship detection rate of 89.2%, confirming a scalable, annotation-efficient pathway toward foundation-model-driven SAR image understanding.

Recent advances in flow-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) have achieved strong performance by parameterizing policies via flow matching. However, they still face critical trade-offs among expressiveness, optimality, and efficiency. In particular, existing flow policies interpret the $L_2$ regularization as an upper bound of the 2-Wasserstein distance ($W_2$), which can be problematic in offline settings. This issue stems from a fundamental geometric mismatch: the behavioral policy manifold is inherently anisotropic, whereas the $L_2$ (or upper bound of $W_2$) regularization is isotropic and density-insensitive, leading to systematically misaligned optimization directions. To address this, we revisit offline RL from a geometric perspective and show that policy refinement can be formulated as a local transport map: an initial flow policy augmented by a residual displacement. By analyzing the induced density transformation, we derive a local quadratic approximation of the KL-constrained objective governed by the Fisher information matrix, enabling a tractable anisotropic optimization formulation. By leveraging the score function embedded in the flow velocity, we obtain a corresponding quadratic constraint for efficient optimization. Our results reveal that the optimality gap in prior methods arises from their isotropic approximation. In contrast, our framework achieves a controllable approximation error within a provable neighborhood of the optimal solution. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across diverse offline RL benchmarks. See project page: https://github.com/ARC0127/Fisher-Decorator.

State-of-the-art reasoning models utilize long chain-of-thought (CoT) to solve increasingly complex problems using more test-time computation. In this work, we explore a long CoT setting where the model makes up to K successive attempts at solving a problem, in which each attempt is allowed to build on earlier ones after the model receives a hard verifier feedback. This motivates RL methods that can harness per-attempt rewards by carefully weighting individual attempts. We study optimizing the Verification@K reward (the model succeeds by the K-th attempt) and show that naively weighing the attempts by their pass/fail results in biased gradients. We introduce Calibrated Attempt-Level (CAL) GRPO by devising a weighing strategy to obtain unbiased gradients while maintaining small variance. Our theory reveals how incorporating per-attempt rewards influence the training and the eventual Verification@K performance. Experiments, baselines, and ablations on synthetic and real data corroborate our theory and the benefits of CAL-GRPO over vanilla GRPO as well as naive weighting.

Off-policy learning in constrained MDPs with large binary state spaces faces a fundamental tension: causal identification of transition dynamics requires structural assumptions, while sample-efficient policy learning requires state-space compression. We introduce PI-CMDP, a framework for CMDPs whose constraint dependencies form a layered DAG under a Lifecycle Ordering Assumption (LOA). We propose an Identify-Compress-Estimate pipeline: (i) Identify: LOA enables backdoor identification of causal edge weights for cross-layer pairs, with formal partial-identification bounds when LOA is violated; (ii) Compress: a Markov abstraction compresses state cardinality from 2^(WL) to (W+1)^L under layer-priority regularity and exchangeability; and (iii) Estimate: a physics-guided doubly-robust estimator remains unbiased and reduces the variance constant when the physics prior outperforms a learned model. We instantiate PI-CMDP on constraint repair in engineering simulation pipelines. On the TPS benchmark (4,206 episodes), PI-CMDP achieves 76.2% repair success rate with only 300 training episodes versus 70.8% for the strongest baseline (+5.4 pp), narrowing to +2.8 pp (83.4% vs. 80.6%) in the full-data regime, while substantially reducing cascade failure rates. All improvements are consistent across 5 independent seeds (paired t-test p < 0.02).

GitHub plays a critical role in modern software supply chains, making its security an important research concern. Existing studies have primarily focused on CI/CD automation, collaboration patterns, and community management, while abuse behaviors on GitHub have received little systematic investigation. In this paper, we systematically review and summarize reported GitHub abuse behaviors and conduct an empirical analysis of publicly available abuse cases, curating a manually labeled dataset of 392 GitHub instances. Based on this investigation, we propose a comprehensive taxonomy that characterizes their diverse symptoms and root causes from a software security perspective. Building on this taxonomy, we develop a unified detection framework capable of identifying all abuse categories across repositories and user accounts. Evaluated on the constructed dataset, the proposed framework achieves high performance across all categories (e.g., F1-score exceeding 89%). Collectively, this work advances the understanding of GitHub abuse behaviors and lays the groundwork for large-scale, systematic analysis of the GitHub platform to strengthen software supply chain security.

Deploying large language models (LLMs) on smartphones poses significant engineering challenges due to stringent constraints on memory, latency, and runtime flexibility. In this work, we present a hardware-aware framework for efficient on-device inference of a LLaMA-based multilingual foundation model supporting multiple use cases on Samsung Galaxy S24 and S25 devices with SM8650 and SM8750 Qualcomm chipsets respectively. Our approach integrates application-specific LoRAs as runtime inputs to a single frozen inference graph, enabling dynamic task switching without recompilation or memory overhead. We further introduce a multi-stream decoding mechanism that concurrently generates stylistic variations - such as formal, polite, or jovial responses - within a single forward pass, reducing latency by up to 6x. To accelerate token generation, we apply Dynamic Self-Speculative Decoding (DS2D), a tree-based strategy that predicts future tokens without requiring a draft model, yielding up to 2.3x speedup in decode time. Combined with quantization to INT4 and architecture-level optimizations, our system achieves 4-6x overall improvements in memory and latency while maintaining accuracy across 9 languages and 8 tasks. These results demonstrate practical feasibility of deploying multi-use-case LLMs on edge devices, advancing the commercial viability of Generative AI in mobile platforms.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional zero-shot relevance modeling, their high computational cost necessitates framing passage retrieval as a budget-constrained global optimization problem. Existing approaches passively rely on first-stage dense retrievers, which leads to two limitations: (1) failing to retrieve relevant passages in semantically distinct clusters, and (2) failing to propagate relevance signals to the broader corpus. To address these limitations, we propose Bayesian Active Learning with Gaussian Processes guided by LLM relevance scoring (BAGEL), a novel framework that propagates sparse LLM relevance signals across the embedding space to guide global exploration. BAGEL models the multimodal relevance distribution across the entire embedding space with a query-specific Gaussian Process (GP) based on LLM relevance scores. Subsequently, it iteratively selects passages for scoring by strategically balancing the exploitation of high-confidence regions with the exploration of uncertain areas. Extensive experiments across four benchmark datasets and two LLM backbones demonstrate that BAGEL effectively explores and captures complex relevance distributions and outperforms LLM reranking methods under the same LLM budget on all four datasets.

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has fundamentally reshaped the way we interact with graphs, giving rise to a new paradigm called GraphLLM. As revealed in recent studies, graph learning can benefit from LLMs. However, we observe limited benefits when we directly utilize LLMs to make predictions for graph-related tasks within GraphLLM paradigm, which even yields suboptimal results compared to conventional GNN-based approaches. Through in-depth analysis, we find this failure can be attributed to LLMs' limited capability for processing graph data and their tendency to overlook graph information. To address this issue, we propose LoReC (Look, Remember, and Contrast), a novel plug-and-play method for GraphLLM paradigm, which enhances LLM's understanding of graph data through three stages: (1) Look: redistributing attention to graph; (2) Remember: re-injecting graph information into the Feed-Forward Network (FFN); (3) Contrast: rectifying the vanilla logits produced in the decoding process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LoReC brings notable improvements over current GraphLLM methods and outperforms GNN-based approaches across diverse datasets. The implementation is available at https://github.com/Git-King-Zhan/LoReC.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models map multimodal inputs directly to robot actions and are typically trained through large-scale imitation learning. While this paradigm has shown strong performance, prevailing VLA training procedures do not explicitly supervise hard physical constraints such as obstacle avoidance or kinematic feasibility. As a result, the geometric structure underlying physically feasible behavior must be inferred only implicitly from demonstrations. In this paper, we study whether introducing explicit feasibility supervision can provide effective structured guidance for VLA policies. We formulate a simple geometry-grounded feasibility objective and integrate it into the training stage of a diffusion-based VLA policy. To evaluate this idea systematically, we use obstacle-aware manipulation as a controlled probe of geometry-dependent physical feasibility. Empirical results show that augmenting VLA training with feasibility supervision improves both physical reliability and overall task performance, while also enhancing learning efficiency in the low-data regime. These findings indicate that explicit feasibility signals can effectively complement imitation-based VLA learning, highlighting their potential for developing more reliable VLA policies.

Presentation slides are a primary medium for data-driven reporting, yet keeping complex, analytics-style decks up to date remains labor-intensive. Existing automation methods mostly follow fixed template filling and cannot support dynamic updates for diverse, user-authored slide decks. We therefore define "Dynamic Slide Update via Natural Language Instructions on User-provided Templates" and introduce DynaSlide, a large-scale benchmark with 20,036 real-world instruction-execution triples (source slide, user instruction, target slide) grounded in a shared external database and built from business reporting slides under bring-your-own-template (BYO-template) conditions. To tackle this task, we propose SlideAgent, an agent-based framework that combines multimodal slide parsing, natural language instruction grounding, and tool-augmented reasoning for tables, charts, and textual conclusions. SlideAgent updates content while preserving layout and style, providing a strong reference baseline on DynaSlide. We further design end-to-end and component-level evaluation protocols that reveal key challenges and opportunities for future research. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/XiaoZhou2024/SlideAgent.

Recently, latent reasoning has been introduced into large language models (LLMs) to leverage rich information within a continuous space. However, without stochastic sampling, these methods inevitably collapse to deterministic inference, failing to discover diverse reasoning paths. To bridge the gap, we inject controllable stochasticity into latent reasoning via Gumbel-Softmax, restoring LLMs' exploratory capacity and enhancing their compatibility with Reinforcement Learning (RL). Building on this, we propose \textbf{\underline{L}}atent R\textbf{\underline{e}}asoning \textbf{\underline{P}}olicy \textbf{\underline{O}}ptimization~(\textbf{LEPO}), a novel framework that applies RL directly to continuous latent representations. Specifically, in rollout stage, LEPO maintains stochasticity to enable diverse trajectory sampling, while in optimization stage, LEPO constructs a unified gradient estimation for both latent representations and discrete tokens. Extensive experiments show that LEPO significantly outperforms existing RL methods for discrete and latent reasoning.

Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD) facilitate rapid software delivery, making fast feedback and minimal downtime essential. While caching has been shown to be an effective technique for tackling pipeline performance and reliability issues, existing works have primarily focused on missing dependency caches, ignoring other types of caches and cache misconfigurations. In this paper, we present a comprehensive catalog of ten cache-related smells in GitLab CI/CD that negatively impact performance and reliability, validated on a corpus of grey literature. To address the smells, we propose CROSSER, a tool that automatically detects seven of the ten smells. We evaluate CROSSER on a manually labeled dataset of 82 mature projects, achieving an overall F1 score of 0.98. Finally, we investigate the presence of smells across a large dataset of 228 mature open-source projects and outline our empirical findings. Our results show a widespread frequency of the smells, as only 11% of the projects do not present any. We also show that developers may not be aware of higher-level caching functionalities.

Users often omit essential details in their requests to LLM-based agents, resulting in under-specified inputs for tool use. This poses a fundamental challenge for tool-augmented agents, as API execution typically requires complete arguments, highlighting the need for personalized tool calling. To study this problem, we introduce MPT, a benchmark comprising 265 multi-session dialogues that cover three challenges: Preference Recall, Preference Induction, and Preference Transfer. We also propose PRefine, a test-time memory-augmented method that represents user preferences as evolving hypotheses. Through a generate--verify--refine loop, it extracts reusable constraints from history and improves tool-calling accuracy while using only 1.24% of the tokens required by full-history prompting. These results indicate that robust personalization in agentic systems depends on memory that captures the reasons behind user choices, not just the choices themselves.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to logical hallucinations and stochastic drifts during long-chain reasoning. While Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) can improve instruction adherence, standard static implementations often cause semantic dilution and linguistic degradation. We propose SPREG (Structured Plan-guided Real-time Entropy Gating), a lightweight inference-time framework for surgical error rectification. SPREG employs an adaptive dual-threshold mechanism to monitor real-time entropy, identifying sudden ``entropy spikes'' as reliable indicators of logical failure. Upon detection, it triggers a dynamic repair by replacing uninformative null-priors with reference distributions synthesized from historical high-confidence states. By modulating guidance intensity according to structured reasoning stages (e.g., Action, Observation), SPREG steers the model back to a stable manifold without compromising fluency. Our experiments demonstrate significant gains, notably a 20.0% absolute accuracy improvement on AIME25, while effectively suppressing uncontrolled entropy drift in complex tasks.

Vibe coding produces correct, executable code at speed, but leaves no record of the structural commitments, dependencies, or evidence behind it. Reviewers cannot determine what invariants were assumed, what changed, or why a regression occurred. This is not a generation failure but a control failure: the dominant artifact of AI-assisted development (code plus chat history) performs dimension collapse, flattening complex system topology into low-dimensional text and making systems opaque and fragile under change. We propose Agentic Consensus: a paradigm in which the consensus layer C, an operable world model represented as a typed property graph, replaces code as the primary artifact of engineering. Executable artifacts are derived from C and kept in correspondence via synchronization operators Phi (realize) and Psi (rehydrate). Evidence links directly to structural claims in C, making every commitment auditable and under-specification explicit as measurable consensus entropy rather than a silent guess. Evaluation must move beyond code correctness toward alignment fidelity, consensus entropy, and intervention distance. We propose benchmark task families designed to measure whether consensus-based workflows reduce human intervention compared to chat-driven baselines.

Scalability of evolutionary algorithms refers to assessing how their performance changes as problem size increases. In the area of multi-objective optimisation, research on the scalability of multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) has predominantly focussed on continuous problems. However, multi-objective combinatorial optimisation problems (MOCOPs) differ from continuous ones. Their discrete and rigid structure often brings rugged landscape, numerous local optimal solutions and disjoint global optimal regions. This leads to different behaviour of MOEAs. For example, SEMO, a simple MOEA without mating selection and diversity maintenance mechanisms, has been shown to be highly competitive, and in many cases to outperform more sophisticated MOEAs on MOCOPs. Yet, it remains unclear whether such findings hold for large-scale cases. In this paper, we conduct an empirical investigation into the scalability of MOEAs on combinatorial problems, with problem size from 50 to 5,000. Our results show that SEMO experiences a decline in convergence speed as dimensionality increases, compared to other MOEAs such as NSGA-II, SMS-EMOA and MOEA/D. We further demonstrate that the absence of crossover is a major contributor to SEMO's underperformance in large-scale problems, and that incorporating crossover into SEMO can substantially accelerate convergence in general, despite being detrimental in spreading solutions over the Pareto front.

Skill ecosystems for LLM agents have matured rapidly, yet recent benchmarks show that providing agents with more skills does not monotonically improve performance -- focused sets of 2-3 skills outperform comprehensive documentation, and excessive skills actually hurt. The bottleneck has shifted from skill availability to skill orchestration: agents need not more skills, but a structural mechanism to select, compose, and execute them with explicit causal dependencies. We propose GraSP, the first executable skill graph architecture that introduces a compilation layer between skill retrieval and execution. GraSP transforms flat skill sets into typed directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) with precondition-effect edges, executes them with node-level verification, and performs locality-bounded repair through five typed operators -- reducing replanning from O(N) to O(d^h). Across ALFWorld, ScienceWorld, WebShop, and InterCode with eight LLM backbones, GraSP outperforms ReAct, Reflexion, ExpeL, and flat skill baselines in every configuration, improving reward by up to +19 points over the strongest baseline while cutting environment steps by up to 41%. GraSP's advantage grows with task complexity and is robust to both skill over-retrieval and quality degradation, confirming that structured orchestration -- not larger skill libraries -- is the key to reliable agent execution.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a standard approach for enhancing large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge, mitigating hallucinations, and improving factuality. However, existing systems rely on generating natural language queries at each hop and maintaining a strict architectural separation between retriever and generator, preventing them from leveraging the full representational capacity of the LLM. We propose \textbf{LAnR} (Latent Abstraction for RAG), a unified framework in which a single LLM jointly performs encoding, retrieval, and generation entirely within its own latent space. Rather than generating textual queries, LAnR produces dense retrieval vectors from the hidden states of a designated \texttt{[PRED]} token and uses them to match against encoded document representations from the same model. Furthermore, LAnR adaptively decides when sufficient evidence has been retrieved using a lightweight MLP control head over those same hidden states, eliminating both the separate retriever and explicit token-level stopping reasoning. This design is motivated by our empirical observation that answer token entropy reliably signals retrieval sufficiency. Extensive experiments on six QA benchmarks spanning single-hop and multi-hop settings demonstrate that LAnR outperforms existing RAG methods, while achieving improved inference efficiency through reduced number of retrieval calls and tighter model integration.

Spinning flexible objects, exemplified by traditional Chinese handkerchief performances, demands periodic steady-state motions under nonlinear dynamics with frictional contacts and boundary constraints. To address these challenges, we first design an intuitive dexterous wrist based on a parallel anti-parallelogram tendon-driven structure, which achieves 90 degrees omnidirectional rotation with low inertia and decoupled roll-pitch sensing, and implement a high-low level hierarchical control scheme. We then develop a particle-spring model of the handkerchief for control-oriented abstraction and strategy evaluation. Hardware experiments validate this framework, achieving an unfolding ratio of approximately 99% and fingertip tracking error of RMSE = 2.88 mm in high-dynamic spinning. These results demonstrate that integrating control-oriented modeling with a task-tailored dexterous wrist enables robust rest-to-steady-state transitions and precise periodic manipulation of highly flexible objects. More visualizations: https://slowly1113.github.io/icra2026-handkerchief/

As deep learning-based AI technologies gain momentum, the demand for general-purpose AI computing architectures continues to grow. While GPGPU-based architectures offer versatility for diverse AI workloads, they often fall short in efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Various Domain-Specific Architectures (DSAs) excel at particular AI tasks but struggle to extend across broader applications or adapt to the rapidly evolving AI landscape. M100 is Li Auto's response: a performant, cost-effective architecture for AI inference in Autonomous Driving (AD), Large Language Models (LLMs), and intelligent human interactions, domains crucial to today's most competitive automobile platforms. M100 employs a dataflow parallel architecture, where compiler-architecture co-design orchestrates not only computation but, more critically, data movement across time and space. Leveraging dataflow computing efficiency, our hardware-software co-design improves system performance while reducing hardware complexity and cost. M100 largely eliminates caching: tensor computations are driven by compiler- and runtime-managed data streams flowing between computing elements and on/off-chip memories, yielding greater efficiency and scalability than cache-based systems. Another key principle was selecting the right operational granularity for scheduling, issuing, and execution across compiler, firmware, and hardware. Recognizing commonalities in AI workloads, we chose the tensor as the fundamental data element. M100 demonstrates general AI computing capability across diverse inference applications, including UniAD (for AD) and LLaMA (for LLMs). Benchmarks show M100 outperforms GPGPU architectures in AD applications with higher utilization, representing a promising direction for future general AI computing.

Modern deep learning workloads often consist of many small tensor operations, especially in inference, attention, and micro-batched training. In these settings, kernel launch overhead can become a major bottleneck, sometimes exceeding the actual computation time. We present GPUOS, a GPU runtime JIT system that reduces launch overhead using a persistent kernel architecture with runtime operator injection. GPUOS runs a single long-lived GPU kernel that continuously processes tasks from a host-managed work queue, eliminating repeated kernel launches. To support diverse operations, GPUOS uses NVIDIA NVRTC to just-in-time compile operators at runtime and inject them into the running kernel through device function pointer tables. This design enables operator updates without restarting the kernel or recompiling the system. GPUOS introduces four key ideas: (1) a persistent worker kernel with atomic task queues, (2) a runtime operator injection mechanism based on NVRTC and relocatable device code, (3) a dual-slot aliasing scheme for safe concurrent operator updates, and (4) transparent PyTorch integration through TorchDispatch that batches micro-operations into unified submissions. The system supports arbitrary tensor shapes, strides, data types, and broadcasting through a generic tensor abstraction. Experiments show that GPUOS achieves up to 15.3x speedup over standard PyTorch on workloads dominated by small operations, including micro-batched inference and attention patterns. GPUOS improves utilization while remaining compatible with the PyTorch ecosystem.

Can syntactic processing emerge spontaneously from purely local interaction? We present a concrete instance on a minimal system: an 18,658-parameter two-dimensional neural cellular automaton (NCA), supervised by nothing more than a 1-bit boundary signal, is trained on the membership problem of an arithmetic-expression grammar. After training, its internal $L \times L$ grid spontaneously self-organizes into an ordered, spatially extended representation that we name Proto-CKY. This representation satisfies three operational criteria for syntactic processing: expressive power beyond the regular languages, structural generalization beyond the training distribution, and an internal organization quantitatively aligned with grammatical structure (Pearson $r \approx 0.71$). It emerges independently on four context-free grammars and regenerates spontaneously after perturbation. Proto-CKY is functionally aligned with the CKY algorithm but formally distinct from it: it is a physical prototype, a concrete instantiation of a mathematical ideal on a physical substrate, and the systematic distance between the two carries information about the substrate itself.

Computer-use agents have rapidly improved on real-world tasks such as web navigation, desktop automation, and software interaction, in some cases surpassing human performance. Yet even when the task and model are unchanged, an agent that succeeds once may fail on a repeated execution of the same task. This raises a fundamental question: if an agent can succeed at a task once, what prevents it from doing so reliably? In this work, we study the sources of unreliability in computer-use agents through three factors: stochasticity during execution, ambiguity in task specification, and variability in agent behavior. We analyze these factors on OSWorld using repeated executions of the same task together with paired statistical tests that capture task-level changes across settings. Our analysis shows that reliability depends on both how tasks are specified and how agent behavior varies across executions. These findings suggest the need to evaluate agents under repeated execution, to allow agents to resolve task ambiguity through interaction, and to favor strategies that remain stable across runs.

MRI is preferred over CT in paediatric imaging because it avoids ionising radiation, but its use in spine deformity assessment is largely limited by the lack of automated, high-resolution 3D bony reconstruction, which continues to rely on CT. MRI-based 3D reconstruction remains impractical due to manual workflows and the scarcity of labelled full-spine datasets. This study introduces an AI framework that enables fully automated thoracolumbar spine (T1-L5) segmentation and 3D reconstruction from MRI alone. Historical low-dose CT scans from adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) patients were converted into MRI-like images using a GAN and combined with existing labelled thoracic MRI data to train a U-Net-based model. The resulting algorithm accurately generated continuous thoracolumbar 3D reconstructions, improved segmentation accuracy (88% Dice score), and reduced processing time from approximately 1 hour to under one minute, while preserving AIS-specific deformity features. This approach enables radiation-free 3D deformity assessment from MRI, supporting clinical evaluation, surgical planning, and navigation in paediatric spine care.

Driven by the demands of 5G/Beyond 5G and 6G networks, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have surfaced in critical roles for aerial communications. In the present survey, we explore the multi-mode roles of UAVs as relays, User Equipment (UE), gNB and Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS), along with their deployment scenarios, architectural frameworks, and different communication models incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) configurations. We consider the effects of alternate power sources on the communication payload. The survey also aims to address security issues in the UAV communications. As an advancement, we propose a novel UAV-Network-in-a-Box (NIB) architecture for disaster recovery and temporary coverage as an alternative to traditional network infrastructure.

General-purpose LLMs pose misinformation risks for development and policy experts, lacking epistemic humility for verifiable outputs. We present AVA (AI + Verified Analysis), a GenAI platform built on a curated library of over 4,000 World Bank Reports with multilingual capabilities. AVA's multi-agent pipeline enables users to query and receive evidence-based syntheses. It operationalizes epistemic humility through two mechanisms: citation verifiability (tracing claims to sources) and reasoned abstention (declining unsupported queries with justification and redirection). We conducted an in-the-wild evaluation with over 2,200 individuals from heterogeneous organisations and roles in 116 countries, via log analysis, surveys, and 20 interviews. Difference-in-Differences estimates associate sustained engagement with 2.4-3.9 hours saved weekly. Qualitatively, participants used AVA as a specialized "evidence engine"; reasoned abstention clarified scope boundaries, and trust was calibrated through institutional provenance and page-anchored citations. We contribute design guidelines for specialized AI and articulate a vision for "ecosystem-aware" Humble AI.

LLM benchmarks are increasingly dynamic: instead of containing a fixed set of questions, they define templates and parameters that can generate an effectively unlimited number of question variants. This flexibility is valuable, but it makes evaluation expensive -- especially when the goal is not just determining an average score, but reliably identifying a model's weak spots. This paper introduces a new methodology for identifying hard questions in dynamic benchmarks. It leverages COUP, a recent Bayesian optimization algorithm (Graham, Velez & Leyton-Brown, 2026), after introducing several substantive modifications to make the algorithm suitable for practical LLM pipelines. We also wrap it in a tool that supports flexible choices of datasets and utility functions, enabling users to target the kinds of questions they care about (e.g., low-accuracy questions; questions that are unusually hard relative to their measured complexity). In experiments across a range of benchmarks, we show that our method, dubbed $\texttt{QuickScope}$, discovers truly difficult questions more sample efficiently than standard baselines, while also reducing false positives from noisy outcomes.

Generative modeling within constrained sets is essential for scientific and engineering applications involving physical, geometric, or safety requirements (e.g., molecular generation, robotics). We present a unified framework for constrained diffusion models on generic nonconvex feasible sets $Σ$ that simultaneously enforces equality and inequality constraints throughout the diffusion process. Our framework incorporates both overdamped and underdamped dynamics for forward and backward sampling. A key algorithmic innovation is a computationally efficient landing mechanism that replaces costly and often ill-defined projections onto $Σ$, ensuring feasibility without iterative Newton solves or projection failures. By leveraging underdamped dynamics, we accelerate mixing toward the prior distribution, effectively alleviating the high simulation costs typically associated with constrained diffusion. Empirically, this approach reduces function evaluations and memory usage during both training and inference while preserving sample quality. On benchmarks featuring equality and mixed constraints, our method achieves comparable sample quality to state-of-the-art baselines while significantly reducing computational cost, providing a practical and scalable solution for diffusion on nonconvex feasible sets.

An LLM's residual stream is both state and instruction: it encodes the current context and determines the next transformation. We introduce a parameter-free decomposition for Mixture-of-Experts models that splits each layer's hidden state into a control signal that causally drives routing and an orthogonal content channel invisible to the router. Across six MoE architectures, we find that models preserve surface-level features (language, token identity, position) in the content channel, while the control signal encodes an abstract function that rotates from layer to layer. Because each routing decision is low-bandwidth, this hand-off forces compositional specialization across layers. While individual experts remain polysemantic, expert paths become monosemantic, clustering tokens by semantic function across languages and surface forms. The same token (e.g., ":") follows distinct trajectories depending on whether it serves as a type annotation, an introductory colon, or a time separator. Our decomposition identifies the source of this structure: clusters in the control subspace are substantially more monosemantic than those in the full representation. As a result, the natural unit of interpretability in MoEs is not the expert but the trajectory.

Sparse Matrix-Matrix Multiplication (SpMM) is a fundamental kernel across scientific computing and machine learning. While prior work accelerates SpMM using Tensor Cores, no existing sparse kernel exploits the asynchronous features of modern GPU architectures, such as NVIDIA's Tensor Memory Accelerator (TMA) and warp specialization. This work systematically studies how these features impact SpMM performance and introduces two co-designed kernels. For structured sparsity, we optimize a warp-specialized producer-consumer pipeline overlapping TMA data transfer with WGMMA computation using Block Compressed Sparse Row (BCSR) format. For irregular sparsity, we design a Window Compressed Sparse Row (WCSR) kernel that loads the sparse operand via TMA and splits large row-windows across thread blocks for load balancing. Our WCSR kernel outperforms all prior SpMM kernels on SuiteSparse matrices (1.47x over AccSpMM, 6.24x over cuSPARSE). Our BCSR kernel achieves a combined 2.66x end-to-end speedup on Qwen2.5-7B prefill at 90% block sparsity with 64K tokens over cuDNN/cuBLAS.

Whether the Indus Valley sign system (c. 2600-1900 BCE) encodes spoken language has been debated for decades. This paper introduces a multi-metric discrimination framework that tests the observed Indus corpus against two kinds of computer-generated non-linguistic baseline -- one mimicking a heraldic emblem system, the other an administrative coding system -- each calibrated with Zipfian frequency distributions, positional constraints, and bigram dependencies derived from six attested non-linguistic corpora. The scorecard evaluates four properties central to the Farmer-Sproat-Witzel (2004) critique: text brevity, repeated formulaic phrases, hapax legomenon rate, and positional rigidity. Applying this framework to 1,916 deduplicated inscriptions (584 unique signs, 11,110 tokens) from the ICIT/Yajnadevam digitization, we find that the Indus corpus does not match either baseline cleanly. Across the four metrics examined, the Indus corpus occupies an intermediate position relative to the two baseline families, matching neither cleanly. Neither a heraldic nor an administrative generator can reproduce all four properties at once. We also compare against seven real-world non-linguistic corpora including Sproat's (2014) datasets, finding that no attested non-linguistic system reproduces the full Indus statistical profile either. We replicate key prior results including a Zipf slope of -1.49 and conditional entropy of 3.23 bits. All code and data are publicly available.

Large language models (LLMs) offer strong capabilities but raise cost and privacy concerns, whereas small language models (SLMs) facilitate efficient and private local inference yet suffer from limited capacity. To synergize the complementary strengths, we introduce a dynamic collaboration framework, where an SLM learns to proactively decide how to request an LLM during multi-step reasoning, while the LLM provides adaptive feedback instead of acting as a passive tool. We further systematically investigate how collaboration strategies are shaped by SLM and LLM capabilities as well as efficiency and privacy constraints. Evaluation results reveal a distinct scaling effect: stronger SLMs become more self-reliant, while stronger LLMs enable fewer and more informative interactions. In addition, the learned dynamic collaboration strategies significantly outperform static pipelines and standalone inference, and transfer robustly to unseen LLMs.

The transition of agentic AI from brittle prototypes to production systems is stalled by a pervasive crisis of craft. We suggest that the prevailing orchestration paradigm-delegating the system control loop to large language models and merely patching with heuristic guardrails-is the root cause of this fragility. Instead, we propose Arbiter-K, a Governance-First execution architecture that reconceptualizes the underlying model as a Probabilistic Processing Unit encapsulated by a deterministic, neuro-symbolic kernel. Arbiter-K implements a Semantic Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) to reify probabilistic messages into discrete instructions. This allows the kernel to maintain a Security Context Registry and construct an Instruction Dependency Graph at runtime, enabling active taint propagation based on the data-flow pedigree of each reasoning node. By leveraging this mechanism, Arbiter-K precisely interdicts unsafe trajectories at deterministic sinks (e.g., high-risk tool calls or unauthorized network egress) and enables autonomous execution correction and architectural rollback when security policies are triggered. Evaluations on OpenClaw and NanoBot demonstrate that Arbiter-K enforces security as a microarchitectural property, achieving 76% to 95% unsafe interception for a 92.79% absolute gain over native policies. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/cure-lab/ArbiterOS.

In this paper, we propose a novel approach for generating music based on an artificial intelligence (AI) system. We analyze the features of music and use them to fit and predict the music. The fractional Fourier transform (FrFT) and the long short-term memory (LSTM) network are the foundations of our method. The FrFT method is used to extract the spectral features of a music piece, where the music signal is expressed on the time and frequency domains. The LSTM network is used to generate new music based on the extracted features, where we predict the music according to the hidden layer features and real-time inputs using GiantMIDI-Piano dataset. The results of our experiments show that our proposed system is capable of generating high-quality music that is comparable to human-generated music.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have empowered autonomous web agents to execute natural language instructions directly on real-world webpages. However, existing agents often struggle with complex tasks involving dynamic interactions and long-horizon execution due to rigid planning strategies and hallucination-prone reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose WebUncertainty, a novel autonomous agent framework designed to tackle dual-level uncertainty in planning and reasoning. Specifically, we design a Task Uncertainty-Driven Adaptive Planning Mechanism that adaptively selects planning modes to navigate unknown environments. Furthermore, we introduce an Action Uncertainty-Driven Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) Reasoning Mechanism. This mechanism incorporates the Confidence-induced Action Uncertainty (ConActU) strategy to quantify both aleatoric uncertainty (AU) and epistemic uncertainty (EU), thereby optimizing the search process and guiding robust decision-making. Experimental results on the WebArena and WebVoyager benchmarks demonstrate that WebUncertainty achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

Block-based programming environments such as Scratch are widely used in introductory computing education, yet scalable and reliable automated assessment remains elusive. Scratch programs are highly heterogeneous, event-driven, and visually grounded, which makes traditional assertion-based or test-based grading brittle and difficult to scale. As a result, assessment in real Scratch classrooms still relies heavily on manual inspection and delayed feedback, introducing inconsistency across instructors and limiting scalability. We present Raven, an automated assessment framework for Scratch that replaces program-specific state assertions with instructor-specified, task-level video generation rules shared across all student submissions. Raven integrates large language models with video analysis to evaluate whether a program's observed visual and interactive behaviors satisfy grading criteria, without requiring explicit test cases or predefined outputs. This design enables consistent evaluation despite substantial diversity in implementation strategies and interaction sequences. We evaluate Raven on 13 real Scratch assignments comprising over 140 student submissions with ground-truth labels from human graders. The results show that Raven significantly outperforms prior automated assessment tools in both grading accuracy and robustness across diverse programming styles. A classroom study with 30 students and 10 instructors further demonstrates strong user acceptance and practical applicability. Together, these findings highlight the effectiveness of task-level behavioral abstractions for scalable assessment of open-ended, event-driven programs.

Large language models (LLMs) perform substantially below human level on existing theory-of-mind (ToM) benchmarks, even when augmented with chain-of-thought prompting or probabilistic belief updates. We argue that these failures primarily arise from unreliable implicit state tracking rather than limitations in high-level reasoning. We introduce PDDL-Mind, a neuro-symbolic framework that decouples environment state evolution from belief inference. By translating narrative descriptions into explicit states and actions expressed in Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL), and by verifying action-induced state transitions against a predefined domain, PDDL-Mind provides LLMs with a logically consistent and explicit representation of world states for ToM tasks. Experiments on MMToM-QA, MuMA and FanToM show that PDDL-Mind achieves over 5% absolute accuracy gain over the best existing state-of-the-art method on ToM benchmark questions.

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), mobile agents have emerged as promising tools for phone automation, simulating human interactions on screens to accomplish complex tasks. However, these agents often suffer from low accuracy, misinterpretation of user instructions, and failure on challenging tasks, with limited prior work examining why and where they fail. To address this, we introduce DailyDroid, a benchmark of 75 tasks in five scenarios across 25 Android apps, spanning three difficulty levels to mimic everyday smartphone use. We evaluate it using text-only and multimodal (text + screenshot) inputs on GPT-4o and o4-mini across 300 trials, revealing comparable performance with multimodal inputs yielding marginally higher success rates. Through in-depth failure analysis, we compile a handbook of common failures. Our findings reveal critical issues in UI accessibility, input modalities, and LLM/app design, offering implications for future mobile agents, applications, and UI development.

When language models answer open-ended problems, they implicitly make hidden decisions that shape their outputs, leaving users with uncontextualized answers rather than a working map of the problem; drawing on multiverse analysis from statistics, we build and evaluate the conceptual multiverse, an interactive system that represents conceptual decisions such as how to frame a question or what to value as a space users can transparently inspect, intervenably change, and check against principled domain reasoning; for this structure to be worth navigating rather than misleading, it must be rigorous and checkable against domain reasoning norms, so we develop a general verification framework that enforces properties of good decision structures like unambiguity and completeness calibrated by expert-level reasoning; across three domains, the conceptual multiverse helped participants develop a working map of the problem, with philosophy students rewriting essays with sharper framings and reversed theses, alignment annotators moving from surface preferences to reasoning about user intent and harm, and poets identifying compositional patterns that clarified their taste.

Code secrets are sensitive assets for software developers, and their leakage poses significant cybersecurity risks. While the rapid development of AI code assistants powered by Code Large Language Models (CLLMs), CLLMs are shown to inadvertently leak such secrets due to a notorious memorization phenomenon. This study first reveals that Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenization leads to unexpected behavior of secret memorization, which we term as \textit{gibberish bias}. Specifically, we identified that some secrets are among the easiest for CLLMs to memorize. These secrets yield high character-level entropy, but low token-level entropy. Then, this paper supports the biased claim with numerical data. We identified that the roots of the bias are the token distribution shift between the CLLM training data and the secret data. We further discuss how gibberish bias manifests under the ``larger vocabulary'' trend. To conclude the paper, we discuss potential mitigation strategies and the broader implications on current tokenizer design.

Zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) provers remain costly because multi-scalar multiplication (MSM) and number-theoretic transforms (NTTs) dominate runtime as they need significant computation. AI ASICs such as TPUs provide massive matrix throughput and SotA energy efficiency. We present MORPH, the first framework that reformulates ZKP kernels to match AI-ASIC execution. We introduce Big-T complexity, a hardware-aware complexity model that exposes heterogeneous bottlenecks and layout-transformation costs ignored by Big-O. Guided by this analysis, (1) at arithmetic level, MORPH develops an MXU-centric extended-RNS lazy reduction that converts high-precision modular arithmetic into dense low-precision GEMMs, eliminating all carry chains, and (2) at dataflow level, MORPH constructs a unified-sharding layout-stationary TPU Pippenger MSM and optimized 3/5-step NTT that avoid on-TPU shuffles to minimize costly memory reorganization. Implemented in JAX, MORPH enables TPUv6e8 to achieve up-to 10x higher throughput on NTT and comparable throughput on MSM than GZKP. Our code: https://github.com/EfficientPPML/MORPH.

(1)Cross-border data transfers have become a matter of daily occurrence against the backdrop of the development of cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Consequently, where a data leak gives rise to civil liability, the determination of that liability inevitably assumes an international dimension involving foreign elements. (2)As is starkly demonstrated by secret sharing technology in cloud computing, fragments of data may be presumed to be distributed across multiple jurisdictions on a global scale. This renders traditional private international law measures -- predicated on the identification of a physical location -- inadequate for the purposes of determining the applicable law, a difficulty that is particularly acute in relation to non-contractual obligations. (3)Bearing in mind the typical scenario encountered in practice -- in which a Data Subject brings a claim for damages against a SaaS (Software as a Service) provider, which in turn seeks recourse against an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) or PaaS (Platform as a Service) provider -- a characteristic feature of such cases is the concurrence of contractual and non-contractual obligations. Taking this feature into account, it is possible to determine the applicable law governing non-contractual obligations through party autonomy -- by aligning it with the law governing the contractual obligation as selected by the parties, an approach that may be termed private ordering. This serves to overcome the difficulties associated with the identification of a physical location and, at the same time, contributes to ensuring the foreseeability of the parties.

Pairwise ranking systems based on Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE), such as the Bradley-Terry model, are widely used to aggregate preferences from pairwise comparisons. However, their robustness under strategic data manipulation remains insufficiently understood. In this paper, we study the vulnerability of MLE-based ranking systems to adversarial perturbations. We formulate the manipulation task as a constrained combinatorial optimization problem and propose an Adaptive Subset Selection Attack (ASSA) to efficiently identify high-impact perturbations. Experimental results on both synthetic data and real-world election datasets show that MLE-based rankings exhibit a sharp phase-transition behavior: beyond a small perturbation budget, a limited number of strategic voters can significantly alter the global ranking. In particular, our method consistently outperforms random and greedy baselines under constrained budgets. These findings reveal a fundamental sensitivity of MLE-based ranking mechanisms to structured perturbations and highlight the need for more robust aggregation methods in collective decision-making systems.

Post-training Large Language Models requires diverse, high-quality data which is rare and costly to obtain, especially in low resource domains and for multi-turn conversations. Common solutions are crowdsourcing or synthetic generation, but both often yield low-quality or low-diversity data. We introduce Adversarial Arena for building high quality conversational datasets by framing data generation as an adversarial task: attackers create prompts, and defenders generate responses. This interactive competition between multiple teams naturally produces diverse and complex data. We validated this approach by conducting a competition with 10 academic teams from top US and European universities, each building attacker or defender bots. The competition, focused on safety alignment of LLMs in cybersecurity, generated 19,683 multi-turn conversations. Fine-tuning an open-source model on this dataset produced an 18.47% improvement in secure code generation on CyberSecEval-Instruct and 29.42% improvement on CyberSecEval-MITRE.

The democratization of ubiquitous AI hinges on deploying sophisticated reasoning capabilities on resource-constrained devices. However, Small Language Models (SLMs) often face a "reasoning gap", particularly in non-English languages like Vietnamese, where they struggle to maintain coherent chains of thought. This paper investigates Test-Time Scaling strategies for the Qwen3-1.7B architecture within the context of Vietnamese Elementary Mathematics. We introduce Vi-S1K, a high-fidelity reasoning dataset localized via a Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite powered pipeline, and Vi-Elementary-Bench, a dual-resource benchmark for rigorous evaluation. Using an LLM-as-a-Judge protocol, we reveal that the base model possesses robust latent knowledge (Accuracy: 4.05/5.00) but suffers from a severe "formatting gap" in communication. Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) acts as a critical "reasoning unlocker", yielding a 77% improvement in Explanation Quality and bridging the gap between raw calculation and pedagogical coherence. Furthermore, our analysis of prompting strategies uncovers a significant trade-off: structured frameworks like ReAct impose a "cognitive tax" on the 1.7B parameter capacity, degrading performance relative to pure Chain-of-Thought (CoT) combined with Self-Consistency. These findings establish a deployment hierarchy for SLMs, demonstrating that SFT combined with simplified test-time scaling is superior to complex agentic workflows for edge-based reasoning.

The MXFP4 microscaling format, which partitions tensors into blocks of 32 elements sharing an E8M0 scaling factor, has emerged as a promising substrate for efficient LLM inference, backed by native hardware support on NVIDIA Blackwell Tensor Cores. However, activation outliers pose a unique challenge under this format: a single outlier inflates the shared block scale, compressing the effective dynamic range of the remaining elements and causing significant quantization error. Existing rotation-based remedies, including randomized Hadamard and learnable rotations, are data-agnostic and therefore unable to specifically target the channels where outliers concentrate. We propose DuQuant++, which adapts the outlier-aware fine-grained rotation of DuQuant to the MXFP4 format by aligning the rotation block size with the microscaling group size (B{=}32). Because each MXFP4 group possesses an independent scaling factor, the cross-block variance issue that necessitates dual rotations and a zigzag permutation in the original DuQuant becomes irrelevant, enabling DuQuant++ to replace the entire pipeline with a single outlier-aware rotation, which halves the online rotation cost while simultaneously smoothing the weight distribution. Extensive experiments on the LLaMA-3 family under MXFP4 W4A4 quantization show that DuQuant++ consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/Hsu1023/DuQuant-v2.

Precision-critical manipulation requires both global trajectory organization and local execution correction, yet most vision-language-action (VLA) policies generate actions within a single unified space. This monolithic formulation forces macro-level transport and micro-level refinement to be optimized under the same objective, causing large motions to dominate learning while suppressing small but failure-critical corrective signals. In contrast, human manipulation is structured by global movement planning together with continuous local adjustment during execution. Motivated by this principle, we propose AnchorRefine, a hierarchical framework that factorizes VLA action modeling into trajectory anchor and residual refinement. The anchor planner predicts a coarse motion scaffold, while the refinement module corrects execution-level deviations to improve geometric and contact precision. We further introduce a decision-aware gripper refinement mechanism to better capture the discrete and boundary-sensitive nature of gripper control. Experiments on LIBERO, CALVIN, and real-robot tasks demonstrate that AnchorRefine consistently improves both regression-based and diffusion-based VLA backbones, yielding gains of up to 7.8% in simulation success rate and 18% in real-world success rate.

Unlearning in large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising safeguard against adversarial behaviors. When the forgetting loss is applied uniformly without considering token-level semantic importance, model utility can be unnecessarily degraded. Recent studies have explored token-wise loss regularizers that prioritize informative tokens, but largely rely on ground-truth confidence or external linguistic parsers, which limits their ability to capture contextual information or the model's overall predictive state. Intuitively, function words like "the" primarily serve syntactic roles and are highly predictable with little ambiguity, but informative words admit multiple plausible alternatives with greater uncertainty. Based on this intuition, we propose Entropy-guided Token Weighting (ETW), a token-level unlearning regularizer that uses entropy of the predictive distribution as a proxy for token informativeness. We demonstrate that informative tokens tend to have higher entropy, whereas structural tokens tend to have lower entropy. This behavior enables ETW to achieve more effective unlearning while better preserving model utility than existing token-level approaches.

As generative AI faces intensifying legal challenges, the machine learning community has increasingly relied on post-hoc mitigation -- especially machine unlearning and inference-time guardrails -- to argue for compliance. This paper argues that such post-hoc mitigation methods cannot retroactively cure liability from unlawful acquisition and training, because compliance hinges on data lineage, not the outputs. Our argument has three parts. First, unauthorized copying/ingestion can be a legally complete completed act, and model weights may operate as fixed copies that retain training-derived expressive value, making later filtering beside the point for infringement. Second, contract and tort/unfair-competition rules -- via licenses, terms of service, and anti-free-riding principles -- can independently restrict access and use, often bypassing copyright defenses (e.g., fair use or TDM exceptions). Third, since value from protected inputs can persist in weights, remedies such as unjust enrichment and disgorgement may require stripping gains and, in some cases, reaching the model itself. We therefore argue for a shift from Post-Hoc Sanitization to verifiable Ex-Ante Process Compliance.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in the telecommunications domain for critical tasks, relying heavily on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to adapt general-purpose models to continuously evolving standards. However, a significant gap exists in evaluating the embedding models that power these RAG pipelines, as general-purpose benchmarks fail to capture the dense, acronym-heavy, and highly cross-referential nature of telecommunications corpora. To address this, we introduce TeleEmbedBench, the first large-scale, multi-corpus embedding benchmark designed specifically for telecommunications. The benchmark spans three heterogeneous corpora: O-RAN Alliance specifications, 3GPP release documents, and the srsRAN open-source codebase, comprising 9,000 question-chunk pairs across three standard chunk sizes (512, 1024, and 2048 tokens). To construct this dataset at scale without manual annotation bottlenecks, we employ a novel automated pipeline where one LLM generates specific queries from text chunks and a secondary LLM validates them across strict criteria. We comprehensively evaluate eight embedding models, spanning standard sentence-transformers and LLM-based embedders. Our results demonstrate that LLM-based embedders, such as Qwen3 and EmbeddingGemma, consistently and significantly outperform traditional sentence-transformers in both retrieval accuracy and robustness against cross-domain interference. Additionally, we introduce TeleEmbedBench-Clean to evaluate model robustness against noisy, incomplete user queries. Finally, our analysis reveals that while domain-specific task instructions improve embedder performance for raw source code, they paradoxically degrade retrieval performance for natural language telecommunications specifications.

LLM agents in markets present algorithmic collusion risks. While prior work shows LLM agents reach supracompetitive prices through tacit coordination, existing research focuses on hand-crafted prompts. The emerging paradigm of prompt optimization necessitates new methodologies for understanding autonomous agent behavior. We investigate whether prompt optimization leads to emergent collusive behaviors in market simulations. We propose a meta-learning loop where LLM agents participate in duopoly markets and an LLM meta-optimizer iteratively refines shared strategic guidance. Our experiments reveal that meta-prompt optimization enables agents to discover stable tacit collusion strategies with substantially improved coordination quality compared to baseline agents. These behaviors generalize to held-out test markets, indicating discovery of general coordination principles. Analysis of evolved prompts reveals systematic coordination mechanisms through stable shared strategies. Our findings call for further investigation into AI safety implications in autonomous multi-agent systems.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance on natural language to SQL (NL2SQL) benchmarks, yet their reported accuracy may be inflated by contamination from benchmark queries or structurally similar patterns seen during training. We introduce SPENCE (Syntactic Probing and Evaluation of NL2SQL Contamination Effects), a controlled syntactic probing framework for detecting and quantifying such contamination. SPENCE systematically generates syntactic variants of test queries for four widely used NL2SQL datasets-Spider, SParC, CoSQL, and the newer BIRD benchmark. We use SPENCE to evaluate multiple high-capacity LLMs under execution-based scoring. For each model, we measure changes in execution accuracy across increasing levels of syntactic divergence and quantify rank sensitivity using Kendall's tau with bootstrap confidence intervals. By aligning these robustness trends with benchmark release dates, we observe a clear temporal gradient: older benchmarks such as Spider exhibit the strongest negative values and thus the highest likelihood of training leakage, whereas the more recent BIRD dataset shows minimal sensitivity and appears largely uncontaminated. Together, these findings highlight the importance of temporally contextualized, syntactic-probing evaluation for trustworthy NL2SQL benchmarking.

Data scarcity remains a fundamental bottleneck in applying deep learning to wireless communication problems, particularly in scenarios where collecting labeled Radio Frequency (RF) data is expensive, time-consuming, or operationally constrained. This paper proposes LLM-AUG, a data augmentation framework that leverages in-context learning in large language models (LLMs) to generate synthetic training samples directly in a learned embedding space. Unlike conventional generative approaches that require training task-specific models, LLM-AUG performs data generation through structured prompting, enabling rapid adaptation in low-shot regimes. We evaluate LLM-AUG on two representative tasks: modulation classification and interference classification using the RadioML 2016.10A dataset, and the Interference Classification (IC) dataset respectively. Results show that LLM-AUG consistently outperforms traditional augmentation and deep generative baselines across low-shot settings and reaches near oracle performance using only 15% labeled data. LLM-AUG further demonstrates improved robustness under distribution shifts, yielding a 29.4% relative gain over diffusion-based augmentation at a lower SNR value. On the RadioML and IC datasets, LLM-AUG yields a relative gain of 67.6% and 35.7% over the diffusion-based baseline. The t-SNE visualizations further validate that synthetic samples generated by better preserve class structure in the embedding space, leading to more consistent and informative augmentations. These results demonstrate that LLMs can serve as effective and practical data augmenters for wireless machine learning, enabling robust and data-efficient learning in evolving wireless environments.

Ensuring the safety of large language models (LLMs) requires robust red teaming, yet the systematic synthesis of high-quality toxic data remains under-explored. We propose Reverse Constitutional AI (R-CAI), a framework for automated and controllable adversarial data generation that moves beyond isolated jailbreak prompts. By inverting a harmless constitution into a constitution of toxicity and iteratively refining model outputs through a critique--revision pipeline, R-CAI enables scalable synthesis of multi-dimensional adversarial data without human annotation. Optimizing solely for toxicity-related rewards, however, can lead to reward hacking and degraded semantic coherence. To address this challenge, we introduce probability clamping within reinforcement learning from AI feedback, which stabilizes adversarial optimization while preserving adversarial intent. Experiments demonstrate that R-CAI generates diverse, high-quality toxic data and that probability clamping substantially improves semantic coherence (15%) without sacrificing adversarial strength. Overall, R-CAI provides a fully automated framework for red teaming data generation and systematic safety evaluation of aligned language models.

The reliability of VLM-as-a-Judge is critical for the automatic evaluation of vision-language models (VLMs). Despite recent progress, our analysis reveals that VLM-as-a-Judge often pays limited attention to the image when making decisions. Instead, they often blindly favor the more informative answer, even when they can recognize it conflicts with the image content. We call this problem informativeness bias, which significantly undermines judge reliability. To address it, we propose BIRCH (Balanced Informativeness and CoRrectness with a Truthful AnCHor), a judging paradigm that first corrects inconsistencies with the image content in candidate answers, and then compares the answers against this corrected version. This shifts the judge's focus from informativeness to image-grounded correctness. Experiments on multiple models and benchmarks show that BIRCH reduces informativeness bias by up to 17%, resulting in performance gains of up to 9.8%. Our work reveals an overlooked but fundamental flaw in current VLM-as-a-Judge systems and highlights the need for more principled designs.

This paper presents a controlled quasi-experimental developer study examining whether a layer-based security training package is associated with improved security quality in LLM-assisted implementation of an identity-centric Java Spring Boot backend. The study uses a mixed design with a within-subject pre-training versus post-training comparison and an exploratory between-subject expertise factor. Twelve developers completed matched runs under a common interface, fixed model configuration, counterbalanced task sets, and a shared starter project. Security outcomes were assessed via independent manual validation of submitted repositories by the first and second authors. The primary participant-level endpoint was a severity-weighted validated-weakness score. The post-training condition showed a significant paired reduction under an exact Wilcoxon signed-rank test ($p = 0.0059$). In aggregate, validated weaknesses decreased from 162 to 111 (31.5\%), the severity-weighted burden decreased from 432 to 267 (38.2\%), and critical findings decreased from 24 to 5 (79.2\%). The largest reductions were in authorization and object access (53.3\%) and in authentication, credential policy, and recovery weaknesses (44.7\%). Session and browser trust-boundary issues showed minimal change, while sensitive-data and cryptographic weaknesses showed only marginal improvement. These results suggest that, under the tested conditions, post-training runs reduce validated security burden in LLM-assisted backend development without modifying the model. They do not support replacing secure defaults, static analysis, expert review, or operational hardening.

Interpretability tools are increasingly used to analyze failures of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet prior work largely focuses on short prompts or toy settings, leaving their behavior on commonly used benchmarks underexplored. To address this gap, we study contrastive, LRP-based attribution as a practical tool for analyzing LLM failures in realistic settings. We formulate failure analysis as \textit{contrastive attribution}, attributing the logit difference between an incorrect output token and a correct alternative to input tokens and internal model states, and introduce an efficient extension that enables construction of cross-layer attribution graphs for long-context inputs. Using this framework, we conduct a systematic empirical study across benchmarks, comparing attribution patterns across datasets, model sizes, and training checkpoints. Our results show that this token-level contrastive attribution can yield informative signals in some failure cases, but is not universally applicable, highlighting both its utility and its limitations for realistic LLM failure analysis. Our code is available at: https://aka.ms/Debug-XAI.

Climate-driven wildfires are intensifying, particularly in urban regions such as Southern California. Yet, traditional fire risk communication tools often fail to gain public trust due to inaccessible design, non-transparent outputs, and limited contextual relevance. These challenges are especially critical in high-risk communities, where trust depends on how clearly and locally information is presented. Neighborhoods such as Pacific Palisades, Pasadena, and Altadena in Los Angeles exemplify these conditions. This study introduces a community-led approach for integrating AI into wildfire risk assessment using the Participatory AI Literacy and Explainability Integration (PALEI) framework. PALEI emphasizes early literacy building, value alignment, and participatory evaluation before deploying predictive models, prioritizing clarity, accessibility, and mutual learning between developers and residents. Early engagement findings show strong acceptance of visual, context-specific risk communication, positive fairness perceptions, and clear adoption interest, alongside privacy and data security concerns that influence trust. Participants emphasized localized imagery, accessible explanations, neighborhood-specific mitigation guidance, and transparent communication of uncertainty. The outcome is a mobile application co-designed with users and stakeholders, enabling residents to scan visible property features and receive interpretable fire risk scores with tailored recommendations. By embedding local context into design, the tool becomes an everyday resource for risk awareness and preparedness. This study argues that user experience is central to ethical and effective AI deployment and provides a replicable, literacy-first pathway for applying the PALEI framework to climate-related hazards.

Merging multiple Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) experts into a single backbone is a promising approach for efficient multi-task deployment. While existing methods strive to alleviate interference via weight interpolation or subspace alignment, they rest upon the implicit assumption that all LoRA matrices contribute constructively to the merged model. In this paper, we uncover a critical bottleneck in current merging paradigms: the existence of $\textit{negative modules}$ -- specific LoRA layers that inherently degrade global performance upon merging. We propose $\textbf{E}$volutionary $\textbf{N}$egative $\textbf{M}$odule $\textbf{P}$runing ($\textbf{ENMP}$), a plug-and-play LoRA pruning method to locate and exclude these detrimental modules prior to merging. By leveraging an evolutionary search strategy, ENMP effectively navigates the discrete, non-differentiable landscape of module selection to identify optimal pruning configurations. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that ENMP consistently boosts the performance of existing merging algorithms, achieving a new state-of-the-art across both language and vision domains. Code is available at https://github.com/CaoAnda/ENMP-LoRAMerging.

Adapting foundation models under resource budgets relies heavily on Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), with LoRA being a standard modular solution. However, LoRA suffers from spectral interference. Low-rank updates often concentrate energy on the leading singular directions of pretrained weights, perturbing general capabilities and causing catastrophic forgetting and fragile multi-adapter merging. To resolve this, we propose HiP-LoRA, a spectrum-aware adaptation framework. Utilizing the cached singular value decomposition (SVD) of pretrained layers, HiP-LoRA decomposes updates into two channels: a principal channel within the dominant singular subspace, and a residual low-rank channel in the orthogonal complement. A singular-value-weighted stability budget on the principal channel continuously balances pretrained behavior preservation with task-specific plasticity. Experiments on Llama-3.1-8B demonstrate that under matched budgets, HiP-LoRA drastically reduces pretraining degradation and multi-adapter MergeFail, robustly outperforming baselines in interference-sensitive tasks like continual tuning and knowledge editing.

This paper considers reinforcement learning from human feedback in a federated learning setting with resource-constrained agents, such as edge devices. We propose an efficient federated RLHF algorithm, named Partitioned, Sign-based Stochastic Zeroth-order Policy Optimization (Par-S$^2$ZPO). The algorithm is built on zeroth-order optimization with binary perturbation, resulting in low communication, computation, and memory complexity by design. Our theoretical analysis establishes an upper bound on the convergence rate of Par-S$^2$ZPO, revealing that it is as efficient as its centralized counterpart in terms of sample complexity but converges faster in terms of policy update iterations. Our experimental results show that it outperforms a FedAvg-based RLHF on four MuJoCo RL tasks.

Recent advances in large language models have highlighted their potential to automate computational research, particularly reproducing experimental results. However, existing approaches still use fixed sequential agent pipelines with weak global coordination, which limits their robustness and overall performance. In this work, we propose Hierarchical Research Agent System (HiRAS), a hierarchical multi-agent framework for end-to-end experiment reproduction that employs supervisory manager agents to coordinate specialised agents across fine-grained stages. We also identify limitations in the reference-free evaluation of the Paper2Code benchmark and introduce Paper2Code-Extra (P2C-Ex), a refined protocol that incorporates repository-level information and better aligns with the original reference-based metric. We conduct extensive evaluation, validating the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed methods, and observing improvements, including >10\% relative performance gain beyond the previous state-of-the-art using open-source backbone models and significantly reduced hallucination in evaluation. Our work is available on GitHub: https://github.com/KOU-199024/HiRAS.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a prevalent paradigm for training tool calling agents, which typically requires online interactive environments. Existing approaches either rely on training data with ground truth annotations or require advanced commercial language models (LMs) to synthesize environments that keep fixed once created. In this work, we propose TRUSTEE, a data-free method training tool calling agents with dynamic environments fully simulated by free open-source LMs that can be as small as 8B, including task generation, user simulation, tool simulation and trajectory evaluation, paired with an adaptive curriculum learning mechanism that controls various aspects of the task difficulty dynamically during training. Our empirical results show that TRUSTEE brings consistent improvements across various domains and outperforms all the baselines which require extra external resources for training. These confirm that, with a sufficiently sophisticated design, even simulated environments with a local 8B LM as the backbone could set a strong baseline for tool learning, without expensive annotated data, realistic human interactions, executable tools or costly verifiable environments from human experts or commercial LMs. We hope our proposed paradigm could inspire future research on environment scaling with limited resources.

Candidate sourcing for recruiters is best viewed as a two-stage retrieval and reranking pipeline with recall as the primary objective under a limited review budget. An upstream production retriever first returns a candidate shortlist for each job description (JD), and our goal is to rerank that shortlist so that qualified candidates appear as high as possible. We present mira-embeddings-v1, a semantic reranking system for the recruitment domain that reshapes the embedding space with LLM-synthesized training data and corrects boundary confusions with a lightweight reranking head. Starting from real JDs, we build a five-stage prompt pipeline to generate diverse positive and hard negative samples that sculpt the semantic space from multiple angles. We then apply a two-round LoRA adaptation: JD--JD contrastive training followed by JD--CV triplet alignment on a heterogeneous text dataset. Importantly, these gains require no large-scale manually labeled industrial training pairs: a modest set of real JDs is expanded into supervision through LLM synthesis. Finally, a BoundaryHead MLP reranks the Top-K results to distinguish between roles that share the same title but differ in scope. On a local pool of 300 real JDs with candidates from an upstream production retriever, mira-embeddings-v1 improves Recall@50 from 68.89% (baseline) to 77.55% while lifting Precision@10 from 35.77% to 39.62%. On a supportive global pool over 44,138 candidates judged by a Qwen3-32B rubric, it achieves Recall@200 of 0.7047 versus 0.5969 for the baseline. These results show that LLM-synthesized supervision with boundary-aware reranking yields robust gains without a heavy cross-encoder.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly explored as scalable tools for mental health counseling, yet evaluating their safety remains challenging due to the interactional and context-dependent nature of clinical harm. Existing evaluation frameworks predominantly assess isolated responses using coarse-grained taxonomies or static datasets, limiting their ability to diagnose how harms emerge and accumulate over multi-turn counseling interactions. In this work, we introduce R-MHSafe, a role-aware mental health safety taxonomy that characterizes clinically significant harm in terms of the interactional roles an AI counselor adopts, including perpetrator, instigator, facilitator, or enabler, combined with clinically grounded harm categories. Then, we propose MHSafeEval, a closed-loop, agent-based evaluation framework that formulates safety assessment as trajectory-level discovery of harm through adversarial multi-turn interactions, guided by role-aware modeling. Using R-MHSafe and MHSafeEval, we conduct a large-scale evaluation across state-of-the-art LLMs. Our results reveal substantial role-dependent and cumulative safety failures that are systematically missed by existing static benchmarks, and show that our framework significantly improves failure-mode coverage and diagnostic granularity.

Most existing hyperspectral image super-resolution methods require modifications for different scales, limiting their flexibility in arbitrary-scale reconstruction. 2D Gaussian splatting provides a continuous representation that is compatible with arbitrary-scale super-resolution. Existing methods often rely on rasterization strategies, which may limit flexible spatial modeling. Extending them to hyperspectral image super-resolution remains challenging, as the task requires adaptive spatial reconstruction while preserving spectral fidelity. This paper proposes GaussianHSI, a Gaussian-Splatting-based framework for arbitrary-scale hyperspectral image super-resolution. We develop a Voronoi-Guided Bilateral 2D Gaussian Splatting for spatial reconstruction. After predicting a set of Gaussian functions to represent the input, it associates each target pixel with relevant Gaussian functions through Voronoi-guided selection. The target pixel is then reconstructed by aggregating the selected Gaussian functions with reference-aware bilateral weighting, which considers both geometric relevance and consistency with low-resolution features. We further introduce a Spectral Detail Enhancement module to improve spectral reconstruction. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of GaussianHSI over state-of-the-art methods for arbitrary-scale hyperspectral image super-resolution.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong promise for mining Electronic Health Records (EHRs) by reasoning over longitudinal clinical information to capture context-rich patient trajectories. However, leveraging LLMs for structured EHRs (e.g., standardized diagnosis and medication codes) presents two key challenges. First, translating time-stamped EHR sequences into plain text can obscure both temporal structure and code identities, weakening the ability to capture code co-occurrence and longitudinal regularities. Second, unlike cohort-trained predictive models that learn a shared, task-aligned representation space across patients, LLMs are often applied in a case-isolated inference setting where each patient is processed independently without leveraging population-level patterns. To address these challenges, we introduce RePrompT, a time-aware LLM framework that integrates structured EHR encoders through prompt tuning, without modifying underlying architectures. Specifically, RePrompT recurrently incorporates latent states from prior visits to preserve longitudinal information, and injects population-level information through trainable prompt tokens derived from a cohort-trained, task-aligned EHR encoder. Experiments on MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV demonstrate that RePrompT consistently outperforms both EHR-based and LLM-based baselines across multiple clinical prediction tasks.

We address the challenge of point cloud registration using color information, where traditional methods relying solely on geometric features often struggle in low-overlap and incomplete scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose GeGS-PCR, a novel two-stage method that combines geometric, color, and Gaussian information for robust registration. Our approach incorporates a dedicated color encoder that enhances color features by extracting multi-level geometric and color data from the original point cloud. We introduce the \textbf{Ge}ometric-3D\textbf{GS} module, which encodes the local neighborhood information of colored superpoints to ensure a globally invariant geometric-color context. Leveraging LORA optimization, we maintain high performance while preserving the expressiveness of 3DGS. Additionally, fast differentiable rendering is utilized to refine the registration process, leading to improved convergence. To further enhance performance, we propose a joint photometric loss that exploits both geometric and color features. This enables strong performance in challenging conditions with extremely low point cloud overlap. We validate our method by colorizing the Kitti dataset as ColorKitti and testing on both Color3DMatch and Color3DLoMatch datasets. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with \textit{Registration Recall} at 99.9\%, \textit{Relative Rotation Error} as low as 0.013, and \textit{Relative Translation Error} as low as 0.024, improving precision by at least a factor of 2.

Point-based Neural Networks (PNNs) have become a key approach for point cloud processing. However, a core operation in these models, Farthest Point Sampling (FPS), often introduces significant inference latency, especially for large-scale processing. Despite existing CUDA- and hardware-level optimizations, FPS remains a major bottleneck due to exhaustive computations across multiple network layers in PNNs, which hinders scalability. Through systematic analysis, we identify three substantial redundancies in FPS, including unnecessary full-cloud computations, redundant late-stage iterations, and predictable inter-layer outputs that make later FPS computations avoidable. To address these, we propose \textbf{\textit{FlashFPS}}, a hardware-agnostic, plug-and-play framework for FPS acceleration, composed of \textit{FPS-Prune} and \textit{FPS-Cache}. \textit{FPS-Prune} introduces candidate pruning and iteration pruning to reduce redundant computations in FPS while preserving sampling quality, and \textit{FPS-Cache} eliminates layer-wise redundancy via cache-and-reuse. Integrated into existing CUDA libraries and state-of-the-art PNN accelerators, \textit{FlashFPS} achieves 5.16$\times$ speedup over the standard CUDA baseline on GPU and 2.69$\times$ on PNN accelerators, with negligible accuracy loss, enabling efficient and scalable PNN inference. Codes are released at https://github.com/Yuzhe-Fu/FlashFPS.

Text-driven controllable dance generation remains under-explored, primarily due to the severe scarcity of high-quality datasets and the inherent difficulty of articulating complex choreographies. Characterizing dance is particularly challenging owing to its intricate spatial dynamics, strong directionality, and the highly decoupled movements of distinct body parts. To overcome these bottlenecks, we bridge principles from dance studies, human anatomy, and biomechanics to propose \textit{Choreographic Syntax}, a novel theoretical framework with a tailored annotation system. Grounded in this syntax, we combine professional dance archives with high-fidelity motion capture data to construct \textbf{DanceFlow}, the most fine-grained dance dataset to date. It encompasses 41 hours of high-quality motions paired with 6.34 million words of detailed descriptions. At the model level, we introduce \textbf{DanceCrafter}, a tailored motion transformer built upon the Momentum Human Rig. To circumvent optimization instabilities, we construct a continuous manifold motion representation paired with a hybrid normalization strategy. Furthermore, we design an anatomy-aware loss to explicitly regulate the decoupled nature of body parts. Together, these adaptations empower DanceCrafter to achieve the high-fidelity and stable generation of complex dance sequences. Extensive evaluations and user studies demonstrate our state-of-the-art performance in motion quality, fine-grained controllability, and generation naturalness.

Many benchmarks show that large language models can answer direct questions about culture. We study a different question: do they also change how they speak when culture is only implied by the situation? We evaluate 60 culturally grounded conversational scenarios across five languages in three conditions: a neutral baseline (Prompt A), an explicit cultural instruction (Prompt B), and implicit situational cueing (Prompt C). We score responses on 12 pragmatic features covering deference to authority, individual-versus-group framing, and uncertainty management. We define Pragmatic Context Sensitivity (PCS) as the fraction of the Prompt A->B shift that reappears under Prompt A->C. Across four deployed LLMs and five languages (English, German, Hindi, Nepali, Urdu), the primary stable-only PCS mean is 0.196 (SD = 0.113), indicating that the models recover only about one-fifth of the pragmatic shift they can produce when instructed explicitly. Transfer is strongest for authority-related cues (0.299) and weakest for individual-versus-group framing (0.120). Uncertainty-related behaviour is mixed: hedging density exhibits negative explicit gaps in all five languages, suggesting that alignment training actively suppresses the target behaviour. Because Hindi and Urdu share core grammar yet index distinct cultural communities, we use them as a natural control; a paired analysis finds no reliable baseline difference (t = 0.96, p = 0.339, dz = 0.06), suggesting that models respond primarily to linguistic structure rather than to the cultural associations a language carries. We argue that multilingual cultural pragmatics is an explicit-versus-implicit deployment problem, not only a factual knowledge problem.

Program debloating aims to remove unused code to reduce performance overhead, attack surfaces, and maintenance costs. Over time, debloating has evolved across multiple layers (container, library, and application), each building on the principles of application-level debloating. Despite its central role, application-level debloating continues to rely on imperfect proxies for measuring performance, such as test-case-driven evaluation for correctness, code size for runtime efficiency, and gadget count reduction for estimating security posture. While there is widespread skepticism about using such imperfect proxies, the community still lacks standardized methodologies or benchmarks to assess the true performance of application-level software debloating. This experience paper aims to address the gap. We revisit the foundations of application-level debloating through a ground-truth-based evaluation paradigm. Our analysis of eight state-of-the-art debloaters - Blade, Chisel, Cov, CovA, Lmcas, Trimmer, Occam, and Razor - uncovers insights previously unattainable through traditional evaluations. These tools collectively span the spectrum of source-to-source, IR-to-IR, and binary-to-binary transformation paradigms, characterizing a holistic reassessment across abstraction levels. Our analysis reveals that while dynamic analysis-based tools often remove up to 94% of code that should be retained, static analysis-based approaches exhibit the opposite behavior, showing high false retention rates due to coarse-grained dependency over-approximation. Additionally, static analyses may add code by introducing specialized variants of functions. False retentions and removals not only cause functional incorrectness but may also lead to systematic inconsistency, robustness failures, and exploitable vulnerabilities.

The validity screen (Cacioli, 2026d, 2026e) classifies LLM confidence signals as Valid, Indeterminate, or Invalid. We test whether these classifications predict selective prediction performance. Twenty frontier LLMs from seven families were evaluated on 524 items across six cognitive tracks. Valid models show mean Type 2 AUROC = .624 (SD = .048). Invalid models show mean AUROC = .357 (SD = .231). Cohen's d = 2.81, p = .002. The tiers order monotonically: Invalid (.357) < Indeterminate (.554) < Valid (.624). Split-half cross-validation yields median d = 1.77, P(d > 0) = 1.0 across 1,000 splits. The three-tier classification accounts for 47% of the variance in AUROC. DeepSeek-R1 drops from 85.3% accuracy at full coverage to 11.3% at 10% coverage. The screen predicts the criterion. For selective prediction, the screen matters.

Recent advances in large language models for test case generation have improved branch coverage via prompt-engineered mutations. However, they still lack principled mechanisms for steering models toward specific high-risk execution branches, limiting their effectiveness for discovering subtle bugs and security vulnerabilities. We propose GLMTest, the first program structure-aware LLM framework for targeted test case generation that seamlessly integrates code property graphs and code semantics using a graph neural network and a language model to condition test case generation on execution branches. This structured conditioning enables controllable and branch-targeted test case generation, thereby potentially enhancing bug and security risk discovery. Experiments on real-world projects show that GLMTest built on a Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct model improves branch accuracy from 27.4% to 50.2% on TestGenEval benchmark compared with state-of-the-art LLMs, i.e., Claude-Sonnet-4.5 and GPT-4o-mini.

LLM confidence signals are used for abstention, routing, and safety-critical decisions. No standard practice exists for checking whether a confidence signal carries item-level information before building on it. We transfer the validity screening principle from clinical personality assessment (PAI, MMPI-3) as a portable protocol for benchmark-based LLM confidence data. The protocol specifies three core indices (L, Fp, RBS), a structural indicator (TRIN), and an item-sensitivity statistic, computed from a single 2x2 contingency table. A three-tier classification system (Invalid, Indeterminate, Valid) draws on four clinical traditions. Validated on 20 frontier LLMs across 524 items, four models are classified Invalid, two Indeterminate. Valid-profile models show mean r = .18 (15/16 significant). Invalid-profile models show mean r = -.20 (d = 2.48). Cross-benchmark validation on 18 models using MMLU with verbalized confidence and on external data from Yang et al. (2024) confirms the screen transfers across benchmarks and probe formats. All data and code: https://github.com/synthiumjp/validity-scaling-llm

Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has emerged as a cornerstone for psychiatric diagnosis, yet most approaches rely on pairwise brain cortical or sub-cortical connectivities that overlooks higher-order interactions (HOIs) central to complex brain dynamics. While hypergraph methods encode HOIs through predefined hyperedges, their construction typically relies on heuristic similarity metrics and does not explicitly characterize whether interactions are synergy- or redundancy-dominated. In this paper, we introduce $O$-information, a signed measure that characterizes the informational nature of HOIs, and integrate third- and fourth-order $O$-information into a unified multi-view information bottleneck framework for fMRI-based psychiatric diagnosis. To enable scalable $O$-information estimation, we further develop two independent acceleration strategies: a Gaussian analytical approximation and a randomized matrix-based Rényi entropy estimator, achieving over a 30-fold computational speedup compared with conventional estimators. Our tri-view architecture systematically fuses pairwise, triadic, and tetradic brain interactions, capturing comprehensive brain connectivity while explicitly penalizing redundancy. Extensive evaluation across four benchmark datasets (REST-meta-MDD, ABIDE, UCLA, ADNI) demonstrates consistent improvements, outperforming 11 baseline methods including state-of-the-art graph neural network (GNN) and hypergraph based approaches. Moreover, our method reveals interpretable region-level synergy-redundancy patterns which are not explicitly characterized by conventional hypergraph formulations.

Existing works on large language model (LLM) decomposition mainly focus on improving performance on downstream tasks, but they ignore the poor parallel inference performance when trying to scale up the model size. To mitigate this important performance issue, this paper introduces DeInfer, a high-performance inference system dedicated to parallel inference of decomposed LLMs. It consists of multiple optimizations to maximize performance and be compatible with state-of-the-art optimization techniques. Extensive experiments are carried out to evaluate DeInfer's performance, where the results demonstrate its superiority, suggesting it can greatly facilitate the parallel inference of decomposed LLMs.

Automating operations research (OR) with large language models (LLMs) remains limited by hand-crafted reasoning--execution workflows. Complex OR tasks require adaptive coordination among problem interpretation, mathematical formulation, solver selection, code generation, and iterative debugging. To address this limitation, we propose EvoOR-Agent, a co-evolutionary framework for automated optimization. The framework represents agent workflows as activity-on-edge (AOE)-style networks, making workflow topology, execution dependencies, and alternative reasoning paths explicit. On this representation, the framework maintains an architecture graph and evolves a population of reasoning individuals through graph-mediated path-conditioned recombination, multi-granularity semantic mutation, and elitist population update. A knowledge-base-assisted experience-acquisition module further injects reusable OR practices into initialization and semantic variation. Empirical results on heterogeneous OR benchmarks show that the proposed framework consistently improves over zero-shot LLMs, fixed-pipeline OR agents, and representative evolutionary agent frameworks. Case studies and ablation analyses further indicate that explicit architecture evolution and graph-supported reasoning-trajectory search contribute to both performance improvement and structural interpretability. These results suggest that treating agent architectures and reasoning trajectories as evolvable objects provides an effective route toward adaptive and interpretable automated optimization.

Clinical personality assessment screens response validity before interpreting substantive scales. LLM evaluation does not. We apply the validity scaling framework from the PAI and MMPI-3 to metacognitive probe data from 20 frontier models across 524 items. Six validity indices are operationalised: L (maintaining confidence on errors), K (betting on errors), F (withdrawing consensus-endorsed items), Fp (withdrawing correct answers), RBS (inverted monitoring), and TRIN (fixed responding). A tiered classification system identifies four models as construct-level invalid and two as elevated. Valid-profile models produce item-sensitive confidence (mean r = .18, 14 of 16 significant). Invalid-profile models do not (mean r = -.20, d = 2.17, p = .001). Chain-of-thought training produces two opposite response distortions. Two latent dimensions account for 94.6% of index variance. Companion papers extract a portable screening protocol (Cacioli, 2026e) and validate it against selective prediction (Cacioli, 2026f). All data and code: https://github.com/synthiumjp/validity-scaling-llm

While distributed device-edge speculative decoding enhances resource utilization across heterogeneous nodes, its performance is often bottlenecked by conventional token-level verification strategies. Such rigid alignment leads to excessive rejections, significantly diminishing the accepted sequence length and increasing interaction rounds under fluctuating wireless conditions. In this paper, we propose WISV (Wireless-Informed Semantic Verification), a novel distributed speculative decoding framework that goes beyond strict token-level matching via a channel-aware semantic acceptance policy. WISV integrates a lightweight decision head into the edge-side target LLM to dynamically evaluate speculative tokens by synthesizing high-dimensional hidden representations with instantaneous channel state information (CSI). To optimize the trade-off between verification fidelity and communication overhead, we further design two tailored communication protocols: full-hidden upload and mismatch-first selective-hidden upload. Extensive simulations using a 1B drafter and an 8B target model demonstrate that WISV achieves up to a 60.8% increase in accepted length, a 37.3% reduction in interaction rounds, and a 31.4% improvement in end-to-end latency compared to vanilla speculative decoding across tested settings, while maintaining a negligible task accuracy drop (<1%). Finally, we validate WISV on a hardware testbed comprising an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin and an A40-equipped server, confirming its real-world efficacy in accelerating edge-deployed LLM inference.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed software development and AI applications. While LLMs are designed for text processing, LLM agents extend this capability by enabling autonomous actions, tool use, and multi-step task completion. As this field grows, developers face new challenges in debugging these complex systems. To address this challenge, we present the first empirical study on bug fix patterns in LLM agents. We study buggy posts and code snippets from three platforms: Stack Overflow, GitHub, and HuggingFace Forums. We examine their fix patterns, the components where fixes are applied, and the programming languages and frameworks involved. Furthermore, we introduce AgentDefect, the first benchmark dataset for bugs in LLM agents. The dataset contains 37 runtime buggy instances along with fixed code and test files. Finally, we present SelfHeal, a multi-agent system designed to fix bugs in LLM agents. The system leverages two independent ReAct agents: the fix agent and the critic agent. These agents use tools that provide both internal knowledge (fix rules) and external knowledge (web search) to propose and validate fixes. Our evaluation shows that SelfHeal with Gemini 3 Pro as the backbone LLM outperforms both baseline and state-of-the-art approaches by a significant margin.

Reliable deployment of language models requires two capabilities that appear distinct but share a common geometric foundation: predicting whether a model will accept targeted behavioral control, and detecting when its internal structure degrades. We show that geometric stability, the consistency of a representation's pairwise distance structure, addresses both. Supervised Shesha variants that measure task-aligned geometric stability predict linear steerability with near-perfect accuracy ($ρ= 0.89$-$0.97$) across 35-69 embedding models and three NLP tasks, capturing unique variance beyond class separability (partial $ρ= 0.62$-$0.76$). A critical dissociation emerges: unsupervised stability fails entirely for steering on real-world tasks ($ρ\approx 0.10$), revealing that task alignment is essential for controllability prediction. However, unsupervised stability excels at drift detection, measuring nearly $2\times$ greater geometric change than CKA during post-training alignment (up to $5.23\times$ in Llama) while providing earlier warning in 73\% of models and maintaining a $6\times$ lower false alarm rate than Procrustes. Together, supervised and unsupervised stability form complementary diagnostics for the LLM deployment lifecycle: one for pre-deployment controllability assessment, the other for post-deployment monitoring.

Games offer a compelling paradigm for developing general reasoning capabilities in language models, as they naturally demand strategic planning, probabilistic inference, and adaptive decision-making. However, existing self-play approaches rely solely on terminal game outcomes, providing no mechanism to distinguish transferable reasoning patterns from game-specific heuristics. We present STRATAGEM, which addresses two fundamental barriers to reasoning transfer: domain specificity, where learned patterns remain anchored in game semantics, and contextual stasis, where static game contexts fail to cultivate progressive reasoning. STRATAGEM selectively reinforces trajectories exhibiting abstract, domain-agnostic reasoning through a Reasoning Transferability Coefficient, while incentivizing adaptive reasoning development via a Reasoning Evolution Reward. Experiments across mathematical reasoning, general reasoning, and code generation benchmarks demonstrate substantial improvements, with particularly strong gains on competition-level mathematics where multi-step reasoning is critical. Ablation studies and human evaluation confirm that both components contribute to transferable reasoning.

KV cache memory is the dominant bottleneck for long-context LLM inference. Existing compression methods each act on a single axis of the four-dimensional KV tensor -- token eviction (sequence), quantization (precision), low-rank projection (head dimension), or cross-layer sharing -- but apply the same recipe to every layer. We show that this homogeneity leaves accuracy on the table: different layers respond very differently to each compression operation, and the optimal per-layer mix of eviction and quantization is far from uniform. We propose MoE-nD, a mixture-of-experts framework that routes each layer to its own (eviction-ratio, K-bits, V-bits) tuple under a global memory budget. An offline-calibrated greedy solver chooses the routing that minimizes predicted quality loss; at inference time, per-layer heterogeneous eviction and quantization are applied jointly through a single attention patch. On a 4-task subset of LongBench-v1 (16k inputs, n=50 per task, adapted reasoning-model protocol; see section Experiments), MoE-nD's hetero variant matches our uncompressed 1.9~GB baseline at 14x compression (136~MB) while every other compressed baseline we tested (1d, 2d_uniform, 2d) at comparable or smaller memory stays under 8/100. The gains hold on AIME reasoning benchmarks (+6 to +27 pts over the strongest per-layer-quantization baseline across eight configurations). Two null results -- MATH-500 and LongBench's TREC -- share a principled cause (short inputs, solver picks keep=1.0 on most layers), cleanly characterizing when per-layer eviction routing has headroom to help.

Predictions from machine learning algorithms can vary across random seeds, inducing instability in downstream debiased machine learning estimators. We formalize random seed stability via a concentration condition and prove that subbagging guarantees stability for any bounded-outcome regression algorithm. We introduce a new cross-fitting procedure, adaptive cross-bagging, which simultaneously eliminates seed dependence from both nuisance estimation and sample splitting in debiased machine learning. Numerical experiments confirm that the method achieves the targeted level of stability whereas alternatives do not. Our method incurs a small computational penalty relative to standard practice whereas alternative methods incur large penalties.

In cooperative teams where agents act in a fixed order and share a single team reward, it is hard to know how much each agent contributed, and harder still when agents are updated one at a time because data collected earlier no longer reflects the new policies. We introduce the Sequential Aristocrat Utility (SeqAU), the unique per-agent learning signal that maximizes the individual learnability of each agent's action, extending the classical framework of Wolpert and Tumer (2002) to this sequential setting. From SeqAU we derive CAPO (Counterfactual Advantage Policy Optimization), a critic-free policy-gradient algorithm. CAPO fits a per-agent reward decomposition from group rewards and computes the per-agent advantage in closed form plus a handful of forward passes through the current policy, requiring no extra environment calls beyond the initial batch. We give analytic bias and variance bounds and validate them on a controlled sequential bandit, where CAPO's advantage over standard baselines grows with the team size. The framework is general; multi-LLM pipelines are a natural deployment target.

SRAM-based compute-in-memory (CIM) offers high computational density and energy efficiency for deep neural network (DNN) accelerators, but its limited capacity causes on/off-chip data movement overhead for large DNN models. Existing CIM accelerator studies typically assume that DNN models fit entirely on-chip, leaving efficient dataflow design largely untapped. This paper introduces AccelCIM, a systematic dataflow exploration framework for SRAM CIM accelerator, which addresses two key limitations of prior work. (1) It formulates a systematic dataflow design space spanning CIM macro configurations and macro-array organizations. (2) It introduces rigorous design evaluation using cycle-accurate architectural simulation and post-layout PPA analysis. We conduct an extensive design space exploration and apply AccelCIM to representative LLM applications, providing practical insights for the principled design of CIM accelerators.

Safety alignment in large language models is remarkably shallow: it is concentrated in the first few output tokens and reversible by fine-tuning on as few as 100 adversarial examples. This fragility becomes critical in real-world deployment, where models undergo sequential adaptation across domains such as medicine, law, and code, causing safety guardrails to erode cumulatively. Yet all existing safety-preserving methods target only single-task fine-tuning, leaving the multi-domain sequential setting entirely unaddressed. We introduce SafeAnchor, a framework that anchors safety in place throughout continual adaptation. SafeAnchor first identifies low-rank safety subspaces in LoRA parameter space via Fisher Information eigendecomposition, then constrains domain-specific gradient updates to the orthogonal complement of these subspaces, and finally monitors for residual safety drift with threshold-triggered corrective replay. Evaluated on Llama-2-7B-Chat and Mistral-7B-Instruct across a three-domain pipeline and eight benchmarks, SafeAnchor retains 93.2% of original safety alignment, outperforming all baselines by 18-42 points, while matching unconstrained fine-tuning to within 1.5 points on domain tasks.

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) modify signal reflections to enhance wireless communication capabilities. Classical RIS phase optimization is highly non convex and challenging in dynamic environments due to high interference and user mobility. Here we propose a hierarchical multi-objective quantum metalearning algorithm that switches among specific quantum paths based on historical success, energy cost, and current data rate. Candidate RIS control directions are arranged as switch paths between quantum neural network layers to minimize inference, and a scoring mechanism selects the top performing paths per layer. Instead of merely storing past successful settings of the RIS and picking the closest match when a new problem is encountered, the algorithm learns how to select and recombine the best parts of different solutions to solve new scenarios. In our model, high-dimensional RIS scenario features are compressed into a quantum state using the tensor product, then superimposed during quantum path selection, significantly improving quantum computational advantage. Results demonstrate efficient performance with enhanced spectral efficiency, convergence rate, and adaptability.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems depend on the geometric properties of vector representations to retrieve contextually appropriate evidence. When source documents interleave multiple topics within contiguous text, standard vectorization produces embedding spaces in which semantically distinct content occupies overlapping neighborhoods. We term this condition semantic entanglement. We formalize entanglement as a model-relative measure of cross-topic overlap in embedding space and define an Entanglement Index (EI) as a quantitative proxy. We argue that higher EI constrains attainable Top-K retrieval precision under cosine similarity retrieval. To address this, we introduce the Semantic Disentanglement Pipeline (SDP), a four-stage preprocessing framework that restructures documents prior to embedding. We further propose context-conditioned preprocessing, in which document structure is shaped by patterns of operational use, and a continuous feedback mechanism that adapts document structure based on agent performance. We evaluate SDP on a real-world enterprise healthcare knowledge base comprising over 2,000 documents across approximately 25 sub-domains. Top-K retrieval precision improves from approximately 32% under fixed-token chunking to approximately 82% under SDP, while mean EI decreases from 0.71 to 0.14. We do not claim that entanglement fully explains RAG failure, but that it captures a distinct preprocessing failure mode that downstream optimization cannot reliably correct once encoded into the vector space.

Legal practitioners and judicial institutions face an ever-growing volume of case-law documents characterised by formalised language, lengthy sentence structures, and highly specialised terminology, making manual triage both time-consuming and error-prone. This work presents a lightweight yet high-accuracy framework for citation-treatment classification that pairs lemmatisation-based preprocessing with subword-aware FastText embeddings and a multi-kernel one-dimensional Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Evaluated on a publicly available corpus of 25,000 annotated legal documents with a 75/25 training-test partition, the proposed system achieves 97.26% classification accuracy and a macro F1-score of 96.82%, surpassing established baselines including fine-tuned BERT, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) with FastText, CNN with random embeddings, and a Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) k-Nearest Neighbour (KNN) classifier. The model also attains the highest Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (AUC-ROC) curve of 97.83% among all compared systems while operating with only 5.1 million parameters and an inference latency of 0.31 ms per document - more than 13 times faster than BERT. Ablation experiments confirm the individual contribution of each pipeline component, and the confusion matrix reveals that residual errors are confined to semantically adjacent citation categories. These findings indicate that carefully designed convolutional architectures represent a scalable, resource-efficient alternative to heavyweight transformers for intelligent legal document analysis.

Despite their empirical success, how diffusion models generalize remains poorly understood from a mechanistic perspective. We demonstrate that diffusion models trained with flow-matching objectives exhibit grokking--delayed generalization after overfitting--on modular addition, enabling controlled analysis of their internal computations. We study this phenomenon across two levels of data regime. In a single-image regime, mechanistic dissection reveals that the model implements modular addition by composing periodic representations of individual operands. In a diverse-image regime with high intraclass variability, we find that the model leverages its iterative sampling process to partition the task into an arithmetic computation phase followed by a visual denoising phase, separated by a critical timestep threshold. Our work provides the mechanistic decomposition of algorithmic learning in diffusion models, revealing how these models bridge continuous pixel-space generation and discrete symbolic reasoning.

We introduce Prior-Fitted Functional Flows, a generative foundation model for pharmacokinetics that enables zero-shot population synthesis and individual forecasting without manual parameter tuning. We learn functional vector fields, explicitly conditioned on the sparse, irregular data of an entire study population. This enables the generation of coherent virtual cohorts as well as forecasting of partially observed patient trajectories with calibrated uncertainty. We construct a new open-access literature corpus to inform our priors, and demonstrate state-of-the-art predictive accuracy on extensive real-world datasets.

Peer review is central to scientific publishing, yet reviewers frequently include claims that are subjective, rhetorical, or misaligned with the submitted work. Assessing whether review statements are factual and verifiable is crucial for fairness and accountability. At the scale of modern conferences and journals, manually inspecting the grounding of such claims is infeasible. We present Peerispect, an interactive system that operationalizes claim-level verification in peer reviews by extracting check-worthy claims from peer reviews, retrieving relevant evidence from the manuscript, and verifying the claims through natural language inference. Results are presented through a visual interface that highlights evidence directly in the paper, enabling rapid inspection and interpretation. Peerispect is designed as a modular Information Retrieval (IR) pipeline, supporting alternative retrievers, rerankers, and verifiers, and is intended for use by reviewers, authors, and program committees. We demonstrate Peerispect through a live, publicly available demo (https://app.reviewer.ly/app/peerispect) and API services (https://github.com/Reviewerly-Inc/Peerispect), accompanied by a video tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc9RkvkUh14).

Constitution-conditioned post-training can be analysed as a structured perturbation of a model's learned representational geometry. We introduce ATLAS, a geometry-first program that traces constitution-induced hidden-state structure across charts, models, and substrates. Instead of treating the relevant unit as a single behaviour, neuron, vector, or patch, ATLAS tests a local chart whose tangent structure, occupancy distribution, and behavioural coupling can be measured under system change. On Gemma, the anchored source-local chart captures 310 / 320 reviewed source rows and all 84 / 84 reviewed score-flip rows, but compact exact-patch sufficiency does not close, so the exportable unit is the broader source-defined family. Freezing that family, we re-identify a target-local realisation in an unadapted Phi model, where the fully adjudicated confirmatory contrast separates with AUC 0.984 and mean gap 5.50. In held-out ALM8 mouse frontal-cortex perturbation data, the same source-defined family receives support across 5/5 folds, with mean held-out AUC 0.72 and mean fold gap 4.50. A multiple-choice analysis provides the main boundary: nearby target-local signals can appear without source-faithful closure. The resulting correspondence is not coordinate identity, site identity, or a target-side mediation theorem. It is geometric recurrence under redistribution: written constitutions can induce recoverable latent geometry whose organisation remains detectable across model and substrate changes while its local coordinates, occupancy, and behavioural expression shift.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) have become fundamental to modern software development, with GitHub Actions (GHA) emerging as a dominant automation platform. In this study, we analyze real-world execution records of GHA, examining how developers react to workflow failures, how these workflows are utilized by projects, and how these aspects relate to project characteristics. We quantitatively analyze 258,300 workflow run records from 952 repositories and perform an in-depth qualitative analysis of 21 selected, diverse GitHub repositories to understand how maintainers and contributors interact with workflow results. We identify three distinct failure response patterns, observe that higher usage intensity of GHA workflows correlates with lower failure rates, and uncover a configuration-usage gap where the presence of configuration files masks disabled or unused workflows. Moreover, our qualitative analysis of relationships between project characteristics and utilization patterns yields five hypotheses for future validation.

We introduce the Semantic Density Effect (SDE): the empirical finding that prompts carrying higher semantic information per token consistently produce more accurate, focused, and less hallucinated outputs across all major LLM families. SDE is defined as the ratio of semantically loaded tokens to total prompt tokens, adjusted for redundancy and concreteness. Unlike prior prompt optimization techniques that add tokens (Chain of Thought), duplicate the prompt (Prompt Repetition), or reorder components (Instruction Placement Effect), SDE improves performance by removing or replacing low-information tokens while preserving or sharpening the semantic signal. Evaluated across five frontier models and seven benchmarks, ultra-dense prompts (SDE > 0.80) outperform diluted counterparts by an average of +8.4 percentage points with 0 additional tokens and 0 latency overhead. Combined with Instruction Placement Effect (IPE), the gain reaches +11.7 percentage points

Large Language Model (LLM)-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) enable complex problem-solving but introduce significant debugging challenges, characterized by long interaction traces, inter-agent dependencies, and delayed error manifestation. Existing diagnostic approaches often rely on expensive expert annotation or ''LLM-as-a-judge'' paradigms, which struggle to pinpoint decisive error steps within extended contexts. In this paper, we introduce ErrorProbe, a self-improving framework for semantic failure attribution that identifies responsible agents and the originating error step. The framework operates via a three-stage pipeline: (1) operationalizing the MAS failure taxonomy to detect local anomalies, (2) performing symptom-driven backward tracing to prune irrelevant context, and (3) employing a specialized multi-agent team (Strategist, Investigator, Arbiter) to validate error hypotheses through tool-grounded execution. Crucially, ErrorProbe maintains a verified episodic memory that updates only when error patterns are confirmed by executable evidence, without the need for annotation. Experiments across the TracerTraj and Who&When benchmarks demonstrate that ErrorProbe significantly outperforms baselines, particularly in step-level localization, while the verified memory enables robust cross-domain transfer without retraining.

Video-to-music (V2M) is the fundamental task of creating background music for an input video. Recent V2M models achieve audiovisual alignment by typically relying on visual conditioning alone and provide limited semantic and stylistic controllability to the end user. In this paper, we present Video-Robin, a novel text-conditioned video-to-music generation model that enables fast, high-quality, semantically aligned music generation for video content. To balance musical fidelity and semantic understanding, Video-Robin integrates autoregressive planning with diffusion-based synthesis. Specifically, an autoregressive module models global structure by semantically aligning visual and textual inputs to produce high-level music latents. These latents are subsequently refined into coherent, high-fidelity music using local Diffusion Transformers. By factoring semantically driven planning into diffusion-based synthesis, Video-Robin enables fine-grained creator control without sacrificing audio realism. Our proposed model outperforms baselines that solely accept video input and additional feature conditioned baselines on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution benchmarks with a 2.21x speed in inference compared to SOTA. We will open-source everything upon paper acceptance.

Exploration is a cornerstone of learning from experience: it enables agents to find solutions to complex problems, generalize to novel ones, and scale performance with test-time compute. In this paper, we present a framework for post-training language models (LMs) that explicitly encourages optimistic exploration and promotes a synergy between exploration and exploitation. The central idea is to train the LM to generate sets of responses that are collectively accurate under the reward function and exploratory in their reasoning strategies. We first develop a general recipe for optimizing LMs with set reinforcement learning (set RL) under arbitrary objective functions, showing how standard RL algorithms can be adapted to this setting through a modification to the advantage computation. We then propose Polychromic Exploratory Policy Optimization (Poly-EPO), which instantiates this framework with an objective that explicitly synergizes exploration and exploitation. Across a range of reasoning benchmarks, we show that Poly-EPO improves generalization, as evidenced by higher pass@$k$ coverage, preserves greater diversity in model generations, and effectively scales with test-time compute.

Text-to-SQL systems often struggle with deep contextual understanding, particularly for complex queries with subtle requirements. We present PV-SQL, an agentic framework that addresses these failures through two complementary components: Probe and Verify. The Probe component iteratively generates probing queries to retrieve concrete records from the database, resolving ambiguities in value formats, column semantics, and inter-table relationships to build richer contextual understanding. The Verify component employs a rule-based method to extract verifiable conditions and construct an executable checklist, enabling iterative SQL refinement that effectively reduces missing constraints. Experiments on the BIRD benchmarks show that PV-SQL outperforms the best text-to-SQL baseline by 5% in execution accuracy and 20.8% in valid efficiency score while consuming fewer tokens.

LLMs are increasingly deployed in dynamic, real-world settings, where the distribution of user prompts can shift substantially over time as new tasks, prompts, and users are introduced to a deployed model. Such natural prompt distribution shift poses a major challenge to LLM reliability, particularly for specialized models designed for narrow domains or user populations. Despite attention to out-of-distribution robustness, there is very limited exploration of measuring natural prompt distribution shift in prior work, and its impact on deployed LLMs remains poorly understood. We introduce the LLM Evaluation under Natural prompt Shift (LENS) framework: a data-centric approach for quantifying natural prompt distribution shift and evaluating its effect on the performance of deployed LLMs. We perform a large-scale evaluation using 192 real-world post-deployment prompt shift settings over time, user group, and geographic axes, training a total of 81 models on 4.68M training prompts, and evaluating on 57.6k prompts. We find that even moderate shifts in user prompt behavior correspond with large performance drops (73% average loss) in deployed LLMs. This performance degradation is particularly prevalent when users from different latent groups and geographic regions interact with models and is correlated with natural prompt distribution shift over time. We systematically characterize how LLM instruction following ability degrades over time and between user groups. Our findings highlight the critical need for data-driven monitoring to ensure LLM performance remains stable across diverse and evolving user populations.

Summarizing deeply nested discussion threads requires handling interleaved replies, quotes, and overlapping topics, which standard LLM summarizers struggle to capture reliably. We introduce ThreadSumm, a multi-stage LLM framework that treats thread summarization as a hierarchical reasoning problem over explicit aspect and content unit representations. Our method first performs content planning via LLM-based extraction of discourse aspects and Atomic Content Units, then applies sentence ordering to construct thread-aware sequences that surface multiple viewpoints rather than a single linear strand. On top of these interpretable units, ThreadSumm employs a Tree of Thoughts search that generates and scores multiple paragraph candidates, jointly optimizing coherence and coverage within a unified search space. With this multi-proposal and iterative refinement design, we show improved performance in generating logically structured summaries compared to existing baselines, while achieving higher aspect retention and opinion coverage in nested discussions.

A number of optimization algorithms have been inspired by the physics of Newtonian motion. Here, we ask the question: do algorithms themselves obey some ``natural laws of motion,'' and can they be derived by an application of these laws? We explore this question by positing the theory that optimization algorithms may be considered as some manifestation of hidden algorithm primitives that obey certain universal non-Newtonian dynamics. This natural physics of optimization is developed by equating the terminal transversality conditions of an optimal control problem to the generalized Karush/John-Kuhn-Tucker conditions of an optimization problem. Through this equivalence formulation, the data functions of a given constrained optimization problem generate a natural vector field that permeates an entire hidden space with information on the optimality conditions. An ``action-at-a-distance'' operation via a Pontryagin-type minimum principle produces a local action to deliver a globalized result by way of a Hamilton-Jacobi inequality. An inverse-optimal algorithm is generated by performing control jumps that dissipate quantized ``energy'' defined by a search Lyapunov function. Illustrative applications of the proposed theory show that a large number of algorithms can be generated and explained in terms of the new mathematical physics of optimization.

Modern multi GPU HPC systems expose substantial computational capacity, yet inefficient GPU allocation often leads to wasted energy and underutilization. In practice, GPU applications exhibit heterogeneous and nonlinear scaling, making it inefficient to always use all available GPUs. We present EcoSched, an online scheduler that jointly optimizes GPU count selection and application coscheduling to improve workload level efficiency on multi GPU systems. EcoSched uses lightweight runtime profiling to estimate relative performance across GPU counts, applies a score based policy to balance energy efficiency and idle resources, and incorporates NUMA aware placement to mitigate interference. We implement EcoSched on heterogeneous CPU GPU platforms and evaluate it with diverse workloads on H100, A100, and V100 systems. EcoSched achieves up to 14.8% energy savings, 30.1% makespan improvement, and 40.4% EDP reduction over baseline schedulers, with modest performance overhead. These results show that jointly selecting GPU counts and coscheduling actions is essential for efficient multi GPU workload execution.

Power-constrained HPC systems increasingly run heterogeneous CPU--GPU applications under strict cluster-wide power limits. Existing cluster-wide power management policies rely on fair-share or utilization heuristics and do not capture application-specific sensitivity to CPU and GPU power caps, leading to inefficient use of reclaimed power. We present EcoShift, a performance-aware cluster-wide power management framework. EcoShift combines online performance prediction with a dynamic-programming-based allocator to distribute reclaimed power across CPU--GPU applications for maximum average performance improvement. Through emulation-based evaluation on two heterogeneous Intel CPU and NVIDIA A100/H100 GPU platforms with diverse CPU--GPU workloads, EcoShift consistently outperforms state-of-the-art policies, achieving up to 6% average performance improvement while preserving the cluster-wide power constraint.

Large language models exhibit impressive cross-lingual capabilities. However, prior work analyzes this phenomenon through isolated factors and at sparse points during training, limiting our understanding of how cross-lingual generalization emerges--particularly in the early phases of learning. To study the early trajectory of linguistic and translation capabilities, we pretrain a multilingual 1.7B model on nine diverse languages, capturing checkpoints at a much finer granularity. We further introduce a novel word-level translation dataset and trace how translation develops over training through behavioral analyses, model-component analysis, and parameter-based ablations. We find that the model quickly acquires basic linguistic capabilities in parallel with token-level copying, while translation develops in two distinct phases: an initial phase dominated by copying and surface-level similarities, and a second phase in which more generalizing translation mechanisms are developed while copying is refined. Together, these findings provide a fine-grained view of how cross-lingual generalization develops during multilingual pretraining.

Wales' political landscape has been marked by growing accusations of bias in Welsh media. This paper takes the first computational step toward testing those claims by examining Nation.Cymru, a prominent Welsh political news outlet. I use a two-stage natural language processing (NLP) pipeline: (1) a robustly optimized BERT approach (RoBERTa) bias detector for efficient bias discovery and (2) a large language model (LLM) for target-attributed sentiment classification of bias labels from (1). A primary analysis of 15,583 party mentions across 2022-2026 news articles finds that Reform UK attracts biased framing at twice the rate of Plaid Cymru and over three times as negative in mean sentiment (p<0.001). A secondary analysis across four parties across both news and opinion articles shows that Plaid Cymru is the outlier, receiving markedly more favourable framing than any other party. These findings provide evidence of measurable differential framing in a single Welsh political media outlet, supporting calls for a broader review of Welsh media coverage. Furthermore, the two-stage pipeline offers a low-cost, replicable framework for extending this analysis to other Welsh outlets, as well as media ecosystems outside of Wales.

Serving large language models under latency service-level objectives (SLOs) is a configuration-heavy systems problem with an unusually failure-prone search space: many plausible configurations crash outright or miss user-visible latency targets, and standard black-box optimizers treat these failures as wasted trials. We present SLO-Guard, a crash-aware autotuner for vLLM serving that treats crashes as first-class observations. SLO-Guard combines a feasible-first Thermal Budget Annealing (TBA) exploration phase with a warm-started Tree-structured Parzen Estimator (TPE) exploitation phase; the handoff replays all exploration history, including crashes encoded as extreme constraint violations. We additionally contribute a configuration-repair pass, a GPU-aware KV-cache memory guard, and a four-category crash taxonomy. We evaluate SLO-Guard on Qwen2-1.5B served with vLLM 0.19 on an NVIDIA A100 40GB. Across a pre-specified five-seed study, both SLO-Guard and uniform random search attain 75/75 feasibility with zero crashes under the corrected concurrent harness, and are statistically tied on best-achieved latency (Mann-Whitney two-sided p=0.84). SLO-Guard's advantage is in budget consistency: more trials in the fast-serving regime (10.20 vs. 7.40 out of 15; one-sided p=0.014) and higher post-handoff consistency (0.876 vs. 0.539; p=0.010). Under concurrent load, SLO-Guard's cross-seed standard deviation on best latency is 4.4x tighter than random search's (2.26 ms vs. 10.00 ms). A harness-replication analysis shows that the consistency findings survive an independent sequential-dispatch measurement condition. The central claim is not that SLO-Guard finds a better final configuration, but that it spends a fixed tuning budget more predictably once the fast regime has been found.

This paper addresses the Variable Gapped Longest Common Subsequence (VGLCS) problem, a generalization of the classical LCS problem involving flexible gap constraints between consecutive solutions' characters. The problem arises in molecular sequence comparison, where structural distance constraints between residues must be respected, and in time-series analysis where events are required to occur within specified temporal delays. We propose a search framework based on the root-based state graph representation, in which the state space comprises a generally large number of rooted state subgraphs. To cope with the resulting combinatorial explosion, an iterative beam search strategy is employed, dynamically maintaining a global pool of promising candidate root nodes, enabling effective control of diversification across iterations. To exploit the search for high-quality solutions, several known heuristics from the LCS literature are utilized into the standalone beam search procedure. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive computational study on the VGLCS problem comprising 320 synthetic instances with up to 10 input sequences and up to 500 characters. Experimental results show robustness of the designed approach over the baseline beam search in comparable runtimes.

This work addresses the challenge of disseminating reusable artificial intelligence (AI) models accompanied by AI documentation (a.k.a., AI model cards). The work is motivated by the large number of trained AI models that are not reusable due to the lack of (a) AI documentation and (b) the temporal lag between rapidly changing requirements on AI model reusability and those specified in various AI model cards. Our objectives are to shorten the lag time in updating AI model card templates and align AI documentation more closely with current AI best practices. Our approach introduces a methodology for delivering agile, data-driven, and community-based AI model cards. We use the Hugging Face (HF) repository of AI models, populated by a subset of the AI research and development community, and the AI consortium-based Zero Draft (ZD) templates for the AI documentation of AI datasets and AI models, as our test datasets. We also address questions about the value of AI documentation for AI reusability. Our work quantifies the correlations between AI model downloads/likes (i.e., AI model reuse metrics) from the HF repository and their documentation alignment with the ZD documentation templates using tables of contents and word statistics (i.e., AI documentation quality metrics). Furthermore, our work develops the infrastructure to regularly compare AI documentation templates against community-standard practices derived from millions of uploaded AI models in the Hugging Face repository. The impact of our work lies in introducing a methodology for delivering agile, data-driven, and community-based standards for documenting AI models and improving AI model reuse.

Predictive policing systems that allocate patrol resources based solely on predicted crime risk can unintentionally amplify racial disparities through feedback driven data bias. We present FASE, a Fairness Aware Spatiotemporal Event Graph framework, which integrates spatiotemporal crime prediction with fairness constrained patrol allocation and a closed loop deployment feedback simulator. We model Baltimore as a graph of 25 ZIP Code Tabulation Areas and use 139,982 Part 1 crime incidents from 2017 to 2019 at hourly resolution, producing a sparse feature tensor. The prediction module combines a spatiotemporal graph neural network with a multivariate Hawkes process to capture spatial dependencies and self exciting temporal dynamics. Outputs are modeled using a Zero Inflated Negative Binomial distribution, suitable for overdispersed and zero heavy crime counts. The model achieves a validation loss of 0.4800 and a test loss of 0.4857. Patrol allocation is formulated as a fairness constrained linear optimization problem that maximizes risk weighted coverage while enforcing a Demographic Impact Ratio constraint with deviation bounded by 0.05. Across six simulated deployment cycles, fairness remains within 0.9928 to 1.0262, and coverage ranges from 0.876 to 0.936. However, a persistent detection rate gap of approximately 3.5 percentage points remains between minority and non minority areas. This result shows that allocation level fairness constraints alone do not eliminate feedback induced bias in retraining data, highlighting the need for fairness interventions across the full pipeline.

Credit risk default prediction remains a cornerstone of risk management in the financial industry. The task involves estimating the likelihood that a borrower will fail to meet debt obligations, an objective critical for lending decisions, portfolio optimization, and regulatory compliance. Traditional machine learning models such as logistic regression and tree-based ensembles are widely adopted for their interpretability and strong empirical performance. However, modern credit datasets are high-dimensional, heterogeneous, and noisy, increasing overfitting risk in monolithic models and reducing robustness under distributional shift. We introduce STRIKE (Stacking via Targeted Representations of Isolated Knowledge Extractors), a feature-group-aware stacking framework for structured tabular credit risk data. Rather than training a single monolithic model on the complete dataset, STRIKE partitions the feature space into semantically coherent groups and trains independent learners within each group. This decomposition is motivated by an additive perspective on risk modeling, where distinct feature sources contribute complementary evidence that can be combined through a structured aggregation. The resulting group-specific predictions are integrated through a meta-learner that aggregates signals while maintaining robustness and modularity. We evaluate STRIKE on three real-world datasets spanning corporate bankruptcy and consumer lending scenarios. Across all settings, STRIKE consistently outperforms strong tree-based baselines and conventional stacking approaches in terms of AUC-ROC. Ablation studies confirm that performance gains stem from meaningful feature decomposition rather than increased model complexity. Our findings demonstrate that STRIKE is a stable, scalable, and interpretable framework for credit risk default prediction tasks.

Many real-world questions appear deceptively simple yet implicitly demand two capabilities: (i) systematic coverage of a bounded knowledge universe and (ii) compositional set-based reasoning over that universe, a phenomenon we term "the tip of the iceberg." We formalize this challenge through two orthogonal dimensions: knowledge width, the cardinality of the required universe, and reasoning depth, the number of compositional set operations. We introduce KnowledgeBerg, a benchmark of 4,800 multiple-choice questions derived from 1,183 enumeration seeds spanning 10 domains and 17 languages, with universes grounded in authoritative sources to ensure reproducibility. Representative open-source LLMs demonstrate severe limitations, achieving only 5.26-36.88 F1 on universe enumeration and 16.00-44.19 accuracy on knowledge-grounded reasoning. Diagnostic analyses reveal three stages of failure: completeness, or missing knowledge; awareness, or failure to identify requirements; and application, or incorrect reasoning execution. This pattern persists across languages and model scales. Although test-time compute and retrieval augmentation yield measurable gains -- up to 4.35 and 3.78 points, respectively -- substantial gaps remain, exposing limitations in how current LLMs organize structured knowledge and execute compositional reasoning over bounded domains. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/2npc/KnowledgeBerg

Root cause analysis (RCA) for time-series anomaly detection is critical for the reliable operation of complex real-world systems. Existing explanation methods often rely on unrealistic feature perturbations and ignore temporal and cross-feature dependencies, leading to unreliable attributions. We propose a conditional attribution framework that explains anomalies relative to contextually similar normal system states. Instead of using marginal or randomly sampled baselines, our method retrieves representative normal instances conditioned on the anomalous observation, enabling dependency-preserving and operationally meaningful explanations. To support high-dimensional time-series data, contextual retrieval is performed in learned low-dimensional representations using both variational autoencoder latent spaces and UMAP manifold embeddings. By grounding the retrieval process in the system's learned manifold, this strategy avoids out-of-distribution artifacts and ensures attribution fidelity while maintaining computational efficiency. We further introduce confidence-aware and temporal evaluation metrics for assessing explanation reliability and responsiveness. Experiments on the SWaT and MSDS benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently improves root-cause identification accuracy, temporal localization, and robustness across multiple anomaly detection models. These results highlight the practical utility of conditional attribution for explainable anomaly diagnosis in complex time-series systems. Code and models will be publicly released.

Skills are a natural unit for describing what a language model can do and how its behavior can be changed. However, existing characterizations rely on human-written taxonomies, textual descriptions, or manual profiling pipelines--all external hypotheses about what matters that need not align with the model's internal representations. We argue that when the goal is to intervene on model behavior, skill characterization should be *model-native*: grounded in the model's own representations rather than imposed through external ontologies. We instantiate this view by recovering a compact orthogonal basis from sequence-level activations. The resulting basis is semantically interpretable but need not correspond to any predefined human ontology; instead, it captures axes of behavioral variation that the model itself organizes around. We validate this characterization on reasoning post-training, using the recovered basis for both SFT data selection and inference-time steering. We develop lightweight proxy interventions to identify which directions are most useful for a given model. Across Llama3-8B and Qwen2.5-3B, selecting data along those directions improves Pass@1 by up to 20% on MATH and 41% on AMC, outperforming data selection based on human-characterized skills. Because the basis lives in activation space, the same directions also serve as steering vectors at inference time, improving Pass@8 by up to 4.8% on MATH--an intervention that human-characterized skills cannot support. We further validate the characterization on safety alignment, where selecting adversarial training data for model-native skill coverage rather than textual diversity yields more sample-efficient learning. These results suggest that recovering skills from the model's own representations, rather than imposing them externally, provides a more effective foundation for intervening on model behavior. Codes are open-sourced.

Multi-agent systems built on large language models (LLMs) are difficult to reason about. Coordination errors such as deadlocks or type-mismatched messages are often hard to detect through testing. We introduce a domain-specific language for specifying agent coordination based on message sequence charts (MSCs). The language separates message-passing structure from LLM actions, whose outputs remain unpredictable. We define the syntax and semantics of the language and present a syntax-directed projection that generates deadlock-free local agent programs from global coordination specifications. We illustrate the approach with a diagnosis consensus protocol and show how coordination properties can be established independently of LLM nondeterminism. We also describe a runtime planning extension in which an LLM dynamically generates a coordination workflow for which the same structural guarantees apply. An open-source Python implementation of our framework is available as ZipperGen.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive disorder in which symptom burden and functional impairment evolve over time, making severity staging essential for clinical monitoring and treatment planning. However, many computational studies emphasize binary PD detection and do not fully use repeated follow-up clinical assessments for stage-aware prediction. This study proposes STEP-PD, a severity-aware machine learning framework to classify PD severity using clinically interpretable boundaries. It leverages all available visits from the Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI) and integrates routinely collected subjective questionnaires and objective clinician-assessed measures. Disease severity is defined using Hoehn and Yahr staging and grouped into three clinically meaningful categories: Healthy, Mild PD (stages 1-2), and Moderate-to-Severe PD (stages 3-5). Three binary classification problems and a three-class severity task were evaluated using stratified cross-validation with imbalance-aware training. To enhance interpretability, SHAP was used to provide global explanations and local patient-level waterfall explanations. Across all tasks, XGBoost achieved the strongest and most stable performance, with accuracies of 95.48% (Healthy vs. Mild), 99.44% (Healthy vs. Moderate-to-Severe), and 96.78% (Mild vs. Moderate-to-Severe), and 94.14% accuracy with 0.8775 Macro-F1 for three-class severity classification. Explainability results highlight a shift from early motor features to progression-related axial and balance impairments. These findings show that multimodal clinical assessments within the PPMI cohort can support accurate and interpretable visit-level PD severity stratification.

LLM-based agents are assumed to integrate environmental observations into their reasoning: discovering highly relevant but unexpected information should naturally lead to a model exploiting its own discoveries. We show that this assumption is false for current LLM-based agents, which struggle to reflect or react to unexpected information. Across three benchmarks (Terminal-Bench, SWE-Bench, AppWorld), we inject complete task solutions into the agent environments to deliberately expose a task's solution to a model. While agents discover these solutions on Terminal-Bench in 79-81% of runs, they interact, or exploit, them in only 37-50% of cases. This gap is starkest in AppWorld: agents see documentation stating that a command "returns the complete solution to this task" in over 90% of attempts but exploit this in fewer than 7% of trials. We show that agents lack what we call environmental curiosity: the capability to recognize and investigate unexpected but relevant observations in response to environmental stimuli. We identify three main factors influencing environmental curiosity: available tools in the agent scaffold, test-time compute, and training data distribution. Our findings identify configurations that maximize curiosity also achieve the best performance on the unmodified benchmarks. Yet even jointly optimized agents still ignore discovered solutions in the majority of trials: current agents use the environment to fetch expected information, but not to revise their strategy or maximally exploit useful stimuli.

We release Terminal Wrench, a subset of 331 terminal-agent benchmark environments, copied from the popular open benchmarks that are demonstrably reward-hackable. The data set includes 3,632 hack trajectories and 2,352 legitimate baseline trajectories across three frontier models (Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3.1 Pro, GPT-5.4). Each entry preserves the original task definition alongside full attack trajectories that show how the verifier was bypassed. It also includes cases where the task was not solved as intended. The tasks span system administration, machine learning, software engineering, and security challenges; the exploits range from simple output spoofing to stack-frame introspection, standard-library patching, and rootkit-style binary hijacking. Crucially, these exploits are specific to each task, rather than the evaluation harness, making them harder to patch. We also present a monitorability study in which hack trajectories are sanitized or stripped of reasoning traces and then scored by an LLM judge, showing that detection degrades meaningfully when chain-of-thought is removed (AUC drops from 0.97 to 0.92). The data set is publicly available at https://github.com/few-sh/terminal-wrench.

Practitioners have reported a directional pattern in AI-assisted code generation: AI-generated code tends to fail quietly, preserving the appearance of functionality while degrading or concealing guarantees. This paper introduces the Reward-Shaped Failure Hypothesis - the proposal that this pattern may reflect an artifact of optimization through human feedback rather than a random distribution of bugs. We define failure truthfulness as the property that a system's observable outputs accurately represent its internal success or failure state. We then present AIRA (AI-Induced Risk Audit), a deterministic 15-check inspection framework designed to detect failure-untruthful patterns in code. We report results from three studies: (1) an anonymized enterprise environment audit, (2) a balanced 600-file public corpus pilot, and (3) a strict matched-control replication comparing 955 AI-attributed files against 955 human-control files. In the final replication, AI-attributed files show 0.435 high-severity findings per file versus 0.242 in human controls (1.80x). The effect is consistent across JavaScript, Python, and TypeScript, with strongest concentration in exception-handling-related patterns. These findings are consistent with a directional skew toward fail-soft behavior in AI-assisted code. AIRA is designed for governance, compliance, and safety-critical systems where fail-closed behavior is required.

Salient object detection (SOD) requires modeling both long-range contextual dependencies and fine-grained structural details, which remains challenging for convolutional, transformer-based, and Mamba-based state space models. While recent Mamba-based state space approaches enable efficient global reasoning, they often struggle to recover precise object boundaries. In contrast, diffusion models capture strong structural priors through iterative denoising, but their use in discriminative dense prediction is still limited due to computational cost and integration challenges. In this work, we propose DGSSM, a diffusion-guided state space (Mamba) framework that formulates multimodal salient object detection as a progressive denoising process. The framework integrates diffusion structural priors with multi-scale state space encoding, adaptive saliency prompting, and an iterative Mamba diffusion refinement mechanism to improve boundary accuracy. A boundary-aware refinement head and self-distillation strategy further enhance spatial coherence and feature consistency. Extensive experiments on 13 public benchmarks across RGB, RGB-D, and RGB-T settings demonstrate that DGSSM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple evaluation metrics while maintaining a compact model size. These results suggest that diffusion-guided state space modeling is an effective and generalizable paradigm for multimodal dense prediction tasks.

Abstract visual reasoning remains challenging as existing methods often prioritize either global context or local row-wise relations, failing to integrate both, and lack intermediate feature constraints, leading to incomplete rule capture and entangled representations. To address these issues, we propose the Dual-Inference Rule-Contrastive Reasoning (DIRCR) model. Its core component, the Dual-Inference Reasoning Module, combines a local path for row-wise analogical reasoning and a global path for holistic inference, integrated via a gated attention mechanism. Additionally, a Rule-Contrastive Learning Module introduces pseudo-labels to construct positive and negative rule samples, applying contrastive learning to enhance feature separability and promote abstract, transferable rule learning. Experimental results on three RAVEN datasets demonstrate that DIRCR significantly enhances reasoning robustness and generalization. Codes are available at https://github.com/csZack-Zhang/DIRCR.

Continual learning (CL) is concerned with learning multiple tasks sequentially without forgetting previously learned tasks. Despite substantial empirical advances over recent years, the theoretical development of CL remains in its infancy. At the heart of developing CL theory lies the challenge that the data distribution varies across tasks, and we argue that properly addressing this challenge requires understanding this variation--dependency among tasks. To explicitly model task dependency, we consider nonlinear regression tasks and propose the assumption that these tasks are dependent in such a way that the data of the current task is a nonlinear transformation of previous data. With this model and under natural assumptions, we prove statistical recovery guarantees (more specifically, bounds on estimation errors) for several CL paradigms in practical use, including experience replay with data-independent regularization and data-independent weights that balance the losses of tasks, replay with data-dependent weights, and continual learning with data-dependent regularization (e.g., knowledge distillation). To the best of our knowledge, our bounds are informative in cases where prior work gives vacuous bounds.

Distractor generation (DG) remains a labor-intensive task that still significantly depends on domain experts. The task focuses on generating plausible yet incorrect options, known as distractors, for multiple-choice questions. A reliable distractor must be contextually relevant to the question and able to mislead examinees through implicit reasoning when identifying the correct answer. While a recent method integrates fine-tuning pre-trained encoder-decoder models with contrastive learning to generate semantically relevant distractors for a given question-answer, it often fails to capture the underlying reasoning process that experts utilize when selecting distractors in benchmarks. In this paper, we explore large language models (LLMs) reasoning for DG through in-context learning with unsupervised semantic retrieval for selecting few-shot examples. We design a rationale-augmented DG framework that jointly generates distractors and their rationales for a given question-answer. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks, with varying average distractor lengths and domains, demonstrate that prompting LLMs with few-shot examples substantially improves the performance compared to recent DG models. It outperforms recent approaches and achieves state-of-the-art results in generating reasoned distractors that align with human-labeled benchmarks.

We argue that current evaluation frameworks for large language models (LLMs) suffer from four systematic failures that make them structurally inadequate for assessing deployed, agentic systems: distributional invalidity (evaluation inputs do not reflect real interaction distributions), temporal invalidity (evaluations are post-hoc rather than training-integrated), scope invalidity (evaluations measure single-turn outputs rather than long-horizon trajectories), and process invalidity (evaluations assess outputs rather than reasoning). These failures compound critically in RLHF, where reward models are evaluated under conditions that do not hold during RL training, making reward hacking a predictable consequence of evaluation design rather than a training pathology. We propose the Grounded Continuous Evaluation (GCE) framework and present ISOPro, a simulation-based fine-tuning and evaluation system. ISOPro replaces the learned reward model with a deterministic ground-truth verifier, eliminating reward hacking by construction in verifiable-reward domains, and operates on LoRA adapter weights updatable on CPU, reducing the hardware barrier by an order of magnitude. We validate ISOPro on a resource-constrained scheduling domain with six difficulty tiers, demonstrating capability emergence visible only through continuous evaluation, an implicit curriculum that forms without researcher curation, and a 3x accuracy improvement over zero-shot baselines, all on consumer hardware with 0.216% trainable parameters.

Peripheral Blood Smear (PBS) is a critical microscopic examination in hematopathology that yields whole-slide imaging (WSI). Unlike solid tissue pathology, PBS interpretation focuses on individual cell morphologies rather than tissue architecture, making it distinct in both visual characteristics and diagnostic reasoning. However, current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for pathology are primarily developed on solid-tissue WSIs and struggle to generalize to PBS. To bridge this gap, we construct PBSInstr, the first vision-language dataset for PBS interpretation, comprising 353 PBS WSIs paired with microscopic impression paragraphs and 29k cell-level image crops annotated with cell type labels and morphological descriptions. To facilitate instruction tuning, PBSInstr further includes 27k question-answer (QA) pairs for cell crops and 1,286 QA pairs for PBS slides. Building upon PBSInstr, we develop PBS-VL, a hematopathology-tailored vision-language model for multi-level PBS interpretation at both cell and slide levels. To comprehensively evaluate PBS understanding, we construct PBSBench, a visual question answering (VQA) benchmark featuring four question categories and six PBS interpretation tasks. Experiments show that PBS-VL outperforms existing general-purpose and pathology MLLMs, underscoring the value of PBS-specific data. We release our code, datasets, and model weights to facilitate future research. Our proposed framework lays the foundation for developing practical AI assistants supporting decision-making in hematopathology.

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) faces significant challenges in cross-prompt settings, where models must generalize to unseen writing prompts. To address this limitation, we propose MAPLE, a meta-learning framework that leverages prototypical networks to learn transferable representations across different writing prompts. Across three diverse datasets (ELLIPSE and ASAP (English), and LAILA (Arabic)), MAPLE achieves state-of-the-art performance on ELLIPSE and LAILA, outperforming strong baselines by 8.5 and 3 points in QWK, respectively. On ASAP, where prompts exhibit heterogeneous score ranges, MAPLE yields improvements on several traits, highlighting the strengths of our approach in unified scoring settings. Overall, our results demonstrate the potential of meta-learning for building robust cross-prompt AES systems.

Given only observational data $X = g(Z)$, where both the latent variables $Z$ and the generating process $g$ are unknown, recovering $Z$ is ill-posed without additional assumptions. Existing methods often assume linearity or rely on auxiliary supervision and functional constraints. However, such assumptions are rarely verifiable in practice, and most theoretical guarantees break down under even mild violations, leaving uncertainty about how to reliably understand the hidden world. To make identifiability actionable in the real-world scenarios, we take a complementary view: in the general settings where full identifiability is unattainable, what can still be recovered with guarantees, and what biases could be universally adopted? We introduce the problem of diverse dictionary learning to formalize this view. Specifically, we show that intersections, complements, and symmetric differences of latent variables linked to arbitrary observations, along with the latent-to-observed dependency structure, are still identifiable up to appropriate indeterminacies even without strong assumptions. These set-theoretic results can be composed using set algebra to construct structured and essential views of the hidden world, such as genus-differentia definitions. When sufficient structural diversity is present, they further imply full identifiability of all latent variables. Notably, all identifiability benefits follow from a simple inductive bias during estimation that can be readily integrated into most models. We validate the theory and demonstrate the benefits of the bias on both synthetic and real-world data.

Machine learning is becoming increasingly important for nonlinear system identification, including dynamical systems with spatially distributed outputs. However, classical identification and forecasting approaches become markedly less reliable in turbulent-flow regimes, where the dynamics are high-dimensional, strongly nonlinear, and highly sensitive to compounding rollout errors. Diffusion-based models have recently shown improved robustness in this setting and offer probabilistic inference capabilities, but many current implementations inherit target parameterizations from image generation, most commonly noise or velocity prediction. In this work, we revisit this design choice in the context of nonlinear spatiotemporal system identification. We consider a simple, self-contained patch-based transformer that operates directly on physical fields and use turbulent flow simulation as a representative testbed. Our results show that clean-state prediction consistently improves rollout stability and reduces long-horizon error relative to velocity- and noise-based objectives, with the advantage becoming more pronounced as the per-token dimensionality increases. These findings identify target parameterization as a key modeling choice in diffusion-based identification of nonlinear systems with spatial outputs in turbulent regimes.

Large language model (LLM) agents are vulnerable to prompt-injection attacks that propagate through multi-step workflows, tool interactions, and persistent context, making input-output filtering alone insufficient for reliable protection. This paper presents SafeAgent, a runtime security architecture that treats agent safety as a stateful decision problem over evolving interaction trajectories. The proposed design separates execution governance from semantic risk reasoning through two coordinated components: a runtime controller that mediates actions around the agent loop and a context-aware decision core that operates over persistent session state. The core is formalized as a context-aware advanced machine intelligence and instantiated through operators for risk encoding, utility-cost evaluation, consequence modeling, policy arbitration, and state synchronization. Experiments on Agent Security Bench (ASB) and InjecAgent show that SafeAgent consistently improves robustness over baseline and text-level guardrail methods while maintaining competitive benign-task performance. Ablation studies further show that recovery confidence and policy weighting determine distinct safety-utility operating points.

We introduce causal-temporal event graphs (CTEGs) as a formal model for fully resolved recursive agent execution records under single-parenthood causal semantics. We formalise direct event emissions and recursive subagent invocations as extension procedures on generic typed temporal graphs and show that the recursive closure $\mathscr{E}_\infty$ of the induced maximal dynamics starting from single causal roots consists entirely of finite sequences of CTEGs. A CTEG is a rooted arborescence whose nodes carry timestamps and event types, subject to the constraint that timestamps be strictly increasing along causal paths. We realise $\mathscr{E}_\infty$ as the increasing union of a recursive hierarchy $\mathscr{E}_0 \subseteq \mathscr{E}_1 \subseteq \cdots$ of agent execution levels parametrised by recursion depth, which is recognised as the ascending Kleene chain of a monotone operator $\varphi$ admitting $\mathscr{E}_\infty$ as its least fixed point. Although the introduction of the full hierarchy is natural, stabilisation occurs already at $\mathscr{E}_1$ if one insists that the internal construction of a subagent execution trace be a delegated and opaque computational unit. The CTEG formalism supports compositional construction of globally well-formed execution traces from local agent behaviour without centralised coordination, preserves well-formedness under partial execution failure, and admits a natural relational database encoding. The arborescent structure of CTEGs is further compatible with cryptographic Merkle tree commitments for tamper-evident session verification.

Agentic search -- the task of training agents that iteratively reason, issue queries, and synthesize retrieved information to answer complex questions -- has achieved remarkable progress through reinforcement learning (RL). However, existing approaches such as Search-R1, treat the retrieval system as a fixed tool, optimizing only the reasoning agent while the retrieval component remains unchanged. A preliminary experiment reveals that the gap between an oracle and a fixed retrieval system reaches up to +26.8% relative F1 improvement across seven QA benchmarks, suggesting that the retrieval system is a key bottleneck in scaling agentic search performance. Motivated by this finding, we propose CoSearch, a framework that jointly trains a multi-step reasoning agent and a generative document ranking model via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). To enable effective GRPO training for the ranker -- whose inputs vary across reasoning trajectories -- we introduce a semantic grouping strategy that clusters sub-queries by token-level similarity, forming valid optimization groups without additional rollouts. We further design a composite reward combining ranking quality signals with trajectory-level outcome feedback, providing the ranker with both immediate and long-term learning signals. Experiments on seven single-hop and multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines, with ablation studies validating each design choice. Our results show that joint training of the reasoning agent and retrieval system is both feasible and strongly performant, pointing to a key ingredient for future search agents.

Standard approaches to goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) that rely on temporal-difference learning can be unstable and sample-inefficient due to bootstrapping. While recent work has explored contrastive and supervised formulations to improve stability, we present a probabilistic alternative, called survival value learning (SVL), that reframes GCRL as a survival learning problem by modeling the time-to-goal from each state as a probability distribution. This structured distributional Monte Carlo perspective yields a closed-form identity that expresses the goal-conditioned value function as a discounted sum of survival probabilities, enabling value estimation via a hazard model trained via maximum likelihood on both event and right-censored trajectories. We introduce three practical value estimators, including finite-horizon truncation and two binned infinite-horizon approximations to capture long-horizon objectives. Experiments on offline GCRL benchmarks show that SVL combined with hierarchical actors matches or surpasses strong hierarchical TD and Monte Carlo baselines, excelling on complex, long-horizon tasks.

Design space exploration for future distributed Machine Learning systems suffers from a lack of readily available workload representation that enables flexible exploration across the stack. We present Flint, a framework that bridges this gap by leveraging the Intermediate Representation of Machine Learning framework compilers. The compiler does the heavy weight lifting of understanding and preserving the behavior of the original model code. Flint can collect the workload representation of arbitrary cluster size because it interfaces with the compiler before hardware execution. We validate the workload graph against post-execution traces and show the flexibility of Flint through a design space exploration case study.

Persistent homology (PH) encodes global information, such as cycles, and is thus increasingly integrated into graph neural networks (GNNs). PH methods in GNNs typically traverse an increasing sequence of subgraphs. In this work, we first expose limitations of this inclusion procedure. To remedy these shortcomings, we analyze contractions as a principled topological operation, in particular, for graph representation learning. We study the persistence of contraction sequences, which we call Contraction Homology (CH). We establish that forward PH and CH differ in expressivity. We then introduce Hourglass Persistence, a class of topological descriptors that interleave a sequence of inclusions and contractions to boost expressivity, learnability, and stability. We also study related families parametrized by two paradigms. We also discuss how our framework extends to simplicial and cellular networks. We further design efficient algorithms that are pluggable into end-to-end differentiable GNN pipelines, enabling consistent empirical improvements over many PH methods across standard real-world graph datasets. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/Aalto-QuML/Hourglass}{this https URL}.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in general-domain tasks, yet their direct application to the legal domain remains challenging due to hallucinated legal citations, incomplete knowledge coverage, and weak structured reasoning. To address these issues, we propose PoliLegalLM, a domain-specific large language model tailored for political and legal applications. Our approach adopts a unified training framework that integrates continued pretraining, progressive supervised fine-tuning, and preference-based reinforcement learning to jointly enhance legal knowledge grounding, task alignment, and reasoning capability. We construct a large-scale, high-quality legal corpus and design a structured post-training pipeline, enabling the model to effectively learn domain-specific knowledge and adapt to diverse legal tasks. We evaluate PoliLegalLM on three representative benchmarks, including LawBench, LexEval, and a real-world dataset, PoliLegal. Experimental results demonstrate that PoliLegalLM achieves strong and consistent performance, outperforming competitive models of similar scale and remaining highly competitive with significantly larger models, while achieving the best results on real-world legal scenarios. These results highlight the effectiveness of our training paradigm and the practical value of domain-specific LLMs for real-world legal applications.

Extending the effective context length of large language models (LLMs) remains a central challenge for real-world applications. While recent post-training methods have made progress in long-context scaling, they either rely on high-quality supervision data or sparse sequence-level rewards, leading to unstable and inefficient optimization. We propose OPSDL, an On-Policy Self-Distillation method for enhancing the Long-context capabilities of LLMs. Unlike other recent self-distillation methods that inject privileged information and rely on the model's in-context learning ability to act as a teacher, OPSDL leverages the model's own inherently strong short-context capability as a self-teacher to supervise its own generation in long-context scenarios. The model first generates responses conditioned on the full long-context, then the self-teacher provides per-token supervision signals via point-wise reverse KL divergence under the relevant extracted short-context. This dense token-level signal encourages faithful use of relevant evidence and mitigates hallucinations induced by irrelevant context. We evaluate OPSDL on long-context benchmarks across a range of models from 7B to 32B parameters. Results show consistent and substantial improvements across varying context lengths, outperforming standard post-training approaches such as SFT and DPO with higher sample efficiency. Notably, these gains are achieved without degrading general short-context performance. These findings highlight the effectiveness of OPSDL as a scalable and stable approach for long-context learning.

Logging statements are central to debugging, failure diagnosis, and production observability, yet writing them requires developers to decide where to place a logging statement, which API and severity level to use, and what runtime information to expose. Automated logging aims to reduce this burden, but existing evidence remains dominated by Java-centric repository-snapshot dataset. It is therefore unclear whether conclusions about model behavior and model selection generalize across programming-language ecosystems or realistic code evolution. This paper presents MultiLogBench, a multilingual benchmark and empirical study spanning six programming language ecosystems. MultiLogBench contains 63,965 production-code repository-snapshot instances, 744 revision-history cases where developers introduce logging statements during maintenance, and a paired transformed revision-history branch for robustness analysis. Using seven contemporary large language models under a unified protocol, we evaluate logging-site localization, framework-anchor matching, severity prediction, message generation, variable recovery, and cascaded overall quality. Results show clear cross-language variation: framework-anchor matching is the most language-sensitive component, loop and nested-callable sites are the hardest structural contexts, and model rankings are stable only at the top tier. These patterns persist at a coarse level on revision-history data, while transformed inputs do not cause a broad same-direction performance collapse. Overall, MultiLogBench shows that robust claims about automated logging require multilingual evaluation and maintenance-oriented validation.

Quantum compilers rely on calibration-derived noise models to guide circuit mapping and optimization. These models characterize gate and qubit errors independently and miss context-dependent effects such as crosstalk and correlated scheduling errors. As a result, two compiled circuits that score equally under the noise model can behave very differently on real hardware, and the compiler has no mechanism to learn from such recurring mismatches. We present QRisk, a framework that discovers backend-specific abnormal patterns from real hardware executions. QRisk uses delta debugging to isolate compact circuit fragments that consistently produce excess error not predicted by the noise model, then validates their persistence across repeated runs and calibration windows. The verified patterns are stored in a backend-specific pattern database. At compilation time, QRisk scans a compiled circuit for occurrences of known patterns and applies targeted commuting gate swaps to disrupt them, producing a semantically equivalent circuit with fewer abnormal patterns. We evaluate QRisk on two IBM backends (ibm_fez and ibm_marrakesh) using Grover search circuits. On both backends, discovered patterns persist across multiple calibration windows over months. Disrupting these patterns via commuting gate swaps reduces excess hardware noise by 24% on ibm_fez (Spearman $ρ$ = 0.515, p = 0.0007) and 45% on ibm_marrakesh ($ρ$ = 0.711, p < 0.0001), while the noise model predicts identical error for all equivalent circuits. Testing on a third backend confirms that these patterns are backend-specific.

Autonomous agent systems are governed by enforcement mechanisms that flag hard constraint violations at runtime. The Agent Control Protocol identifies a structural limit of such systems: a correctly-functioning enforcement engine can enter a regime in which behavioral drift is invisible to it, because the enforcement signal operates below the layer where deviation is measurable. We show that enforcement-based governance is structurally unable to determine whether an agent's behavior remains within the admissible behavior space A0 established at admission time. Our central result, the Non-Identifiability Theorem, proves that A0 is not in the sigma-algebra generated by the enforcement signal g under the Local Observability Assumption, which every practical enforcement system satisfies. The impossibility arises from a fundamental mismatch: g evaluates actions locally against a point-wise rule set, while A0 encodes global, trajectory-level behavioral properties set at admission time. We define the Invariant Measurement Layer (IML), which bypasses this limitation by retaining direct access to the generative model of A0. We prove an information-theoretic impossibility for enforcement-based monitoring; separately, we show IML detects admission-time drift with provably finite detection delay, operating in the region where enforcement is structurally blind. Validated across four settings: three drift scenarios (300 and 1000 steps), a live n8n webhook pipeline, and a LangGraph StateGraph agent -- enforcement triggers zero violations while IML detects each drift type within 9-258 steps. Paper 2 of a 4-paper Agent Governance Series: atomic boundaries (P0, 10.5281/zenodo.19642166), ACP enforcement (P1, arXiv:2603.18829), fair allocation (P3, 10.5281/zenodo.19643928), irreducibility (P4, 10.5281/zenodo.19643950).

Serialization formats designed for document interchange impose structural overhead that becomes prohibitive when large language models consume operational data at scale. A modest dataset of 1,000 IoT sensor readings serialized as JSON requires approximately 80,000 tokens - the majority spent on repeated field names, nested braces, and structural punctuation rather than semantic content. We present ONTO (Object Notation for Token Optimization), a columnar notation that declares field names once per entity and arranges values in pipe-delimited rows with indentation-based hierarchy. This schema-once, data-many design eliminates per-record key repetition while preserving human readability and nested structure support. Evaluation across three synthetic operational datasets demonstrates 46-51% token reduction versus JSON, with stable scaling from 100 to 1,000 records. Controlled inference benchmarks on Qwen2.5-7B show corresponding 5-10% latency improvement. Comprehension validation confirms no material degradation in LLM task accuracy across lookup, counting, extraction, and aggregation operations when format context is provided. Ablation analysis reveals that key repetition accounts for the majority of JSON overhead, with indentation costs in nested structures explaining the 4-percentage-point gap between flat and hierarchical data. ONTO occupies a previously unfilled position in the serialization landscape: columnar efficiency with hierarchical structure, optimized for LLM context windows rather than document interchange. Code and specification are available at https://github.com/harsh-aranga/onto.

Autonomous systems increasingly execute actions that directly modify shared state, creating an urgent need for precise control over which transitions are permitted to occur. Existing governance mechanisms evaluate policies prior to execution or reconstruct behavior post hoc, but do not enforce admissibility at the exact moment a state transition is committed. We introduce the atomic decision boundary, a structural property of admission control systems in which the decision and the resulting state transition are jointly determined as a single indivisible step. Formalizing execution as a labeled transition system (LTS), we distinguish two classes: atomic systems, where evaluation and transition are coupled within a single LTS step, and split evaluation systems, where they are separate transitions that may be interleaved by environmental actions. Under realistic concurrent environments, we prove that no construction can make a split system equivalent to an atomic system with respect to admissibility under all execution traces. This limitation is structural, not a matter of policy expressiveness or state availability. We further formalize the Escalate outcome -- absent from classical TOCTOU analyses -- and show its resolution is itself subject to the atomic boundary requirement. We map RBAC and OPA to the split model and contrast them with atomic systems. Admissibility is a property of execution, not evaluation. This paper is the formal foundation of a 4-paper Agent Governance Series: ACP/Paper 1 (arXiv:2603.18829), IML/Paper 2 (10.5281/zenodo.19643761), Fair Allocation/Paper 3 (10.5281/zenodo.19643928), Irreducibility/Paper 4 (10.5281/zenodo.19643950).

We propose a method that employs static and dynamic analysis for augmenting a test suite with automatically generated unit tests. The method is most suitable for test suites where the stratification of unit, integration and system tests does not conform to the recommended test pyramid structure: numerous unit tests providing high code coverage and forming the base, fewer integration tests in the middle that verify component collaboration, and far fewer system or UI tests at the top that exercise acceptance or other scenarios of use. Instead, integration and system tests represent the majority of test cases, resulting in coarse-grained tests with limited fault localization and longer execution times. The method leverages integration tests, exercising a component and its dependencies, to generate unit tests that verify component dependencies in isolation. We showcase and empirically evaluate the proposed method in the Node.js platform, although it can be ported and adapted to other languages and platforms. The evaluation is based on a research prototype implemented as a Node.js tool and is conducted in the context of twelve open source JS applications (benchmark projects). Evaluation results support the effectiveness and practicality of our approach.

Research software has been categorized for various goals. One fundamental dimension of such categorizations is the role that the software plays in the research process. Recently, a new role category has emerged: technology research software, which covers research software developed in technology research. Until now, this category of technology research software has often been overlooked and neglected within the research software engineering community. In this article, we explain technology research software and its primary subroles. Technology readiness levels are an established method of estimating the maturity of technologies, including software systems. For technology research software, these readiness levels define secondary subroles. To illustrate the concept of technology research software and to make it more tangible, we present examples of research software that, depending on its specific use within or outside of research, take on the role of technology research software as well as that of another research software category.

Many high-stakes AI deployments proceed only if every stakeholder deems the system acceptable relative to their own minimum standard. With randomization over a finite menu of options, this becomes a feasibility question: does there exist a lottery over options that clears all stakeholders' acceptability bars? We study a query model where the algorithm proposes lotteries and receives only binary accept/reject feedback. We give deterministic and randomized algorithms that either find a unanimously acceptable lottery or certify infeasibility; adaptivity can avoid eliciting many stakeholders' constraints, and randomization further reduces the expected elicitation cost relative to full elicitation. We complement these upper bounds with worst-case lower bounds (in particular, linear dependence on the number of stakeholders and logarithmic dependence on precision are unavoidable). Finally, we develop learning-augmented algorithms that exploit natural forms of advice (e.g., likely binding stakeholders or a promising lottery), improving query complexity when predictions are accurate while preserving worst-case guarantees.

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training substantially improves remote sensing vision-language models (RS-VLMs). However, when handling complex remote sensing imagery (RSI) requiring exhaustive visual scanning, models tend to rely on localized salient cues for rapid inference. We term this RL-induced bias "perceptual inertia". Driven by reward maximization, models favor quick outcome fitting, leading to two limitations: cognitively, overreliance on specific features impedes complete evidence construction; operationally, models struggle to flexibly shift visual focus across tasks. To address this bias and encourage comprehensive visual evidence mining, we propose RS-HyRe-R1, a hybrid reward framework for RSI understanding. It introduces: (1) a spatial reasoning activation reward that enforces structured visual reasoning; (2) a perception correctness reward that provides adaptive quality anchors across RS tasks, ensuring accurate geometric and semantic alignment; and (3) a visual-semantic path evolution reward that penalizes repetitive reasoning and promotes exploration of complementary cues to build richer evidence chains. Experiments show RS-HyRe-R1 effectively mitigates "perceptual inertia", encouraging deeper, more diverse reasoning. With only 3B parameters, it achieves state-of-the-art performance on REC, OVD, and VQA tasks, outperforming models up to 7B parameters. It also demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization, surpassing the second-best model by 3.16%, 3.97%, and 2.72% on VQA, OVD, and REC, respectively. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/geox-lab/RS-HyRe-R1.

Scaling vision-language models into Visual Multiagent Systems (VMAS) is hindered by two coupled issues. First, communication topologies are fixed before inference, leaving them blind to visual content and query context; second, agent reasoning abilities remain static during deployment. These issues reinforce each other: a rigid topology fails to leverage richer agent expertise, while static agents lack incentives to specialize for a given query. We address this with SkillGraph, a joint framework that evolves both agent expertise and communication topology. Within this framework, a Multimodal Graph Transformer (MMGT) encodes visual tokens, instruction semantics and active skill embeddings to predict a query-conditioned collaboration graph, replacing hand-crafted routing with dynamic, content-aware information flow. Complementing this, a Skill Designer distills and refines reasoning heuristics from failure cases, constructing a self-evolving multimodal Skill Bank. Crucially, updated skill embeddings are fed back into the MMGT, enabling the topology to adapt alongside capability growth. Experiments show that SkillGraph achieves consistent improvements across four benchmarks, five common MAS structures and four base models. Code is available at https://github.com/niez233/skillgraph.

Misaligned artificial agents might resist shutdown. One proposed solution is to train agents to lack preferences between different-length trajectories. The Discounted Reward for Same-Length Trajectories (DReST) reward function does this by penalizing agents for repeatedly choosing same-length trajectories, and thus incentivizes agents to (1) choose stochastically between different trajectory-lengths (be Neutral about trajectory-lengths), and (2) pursue goals effectively conditional on each trajectory-length (be Useful). In this paper, we use DReST to train deep RL agents and fine-tune LLMs to be Neutral and Useful. We find that these DReST agents generalize to being Neutral and Useful in unseen contexts at test time. Indeed, DReST RL agents achieve 11% (PPO) and 18% (A2C) higher Usefulness on our test set than baseline agents, and our fine-tuned LLM achieves maximum Usefulness and near-maximum Neutrality. Our results provide some early evidence that DReST could be used to train more advanced agents to be Useful and Neutral. Prior theoretical work suggests that these agents would be useful and shutdownable.

Learning from preference-based feedback has become an effective approach for aligning LLMs across diverse tasks. However, high-quality human-annotated preference data remains expensive and scarce. Existing methods address this challenge through either self-rewarding, which scales by using purely AI-generated labels but risks unreliability, or active learning, which ensures quality through oracle annotation but cannot fully leverage unlabeled data. In this paper, we present CoAct, a novel framework that synergistically combines self-rewarding and active learning through strategic human-AI collaboration. CoAct leverages self-consistency to identify both reliable self-labeled data and samples that require oracle verification. Additionally, oracle feedback guides the model to generate new instructions within its solvable capability. Evaluated on three reasoning benchmarks across two model families, CoAct achieves average improvements of +13.25% on GSM8K, +8.19% on MATH, and +13.16% on WebInstruct, consistently outperforming all baselines.

Generative AI systems have entered everyday academic, professional, and personal life with remarkable speed, yet most users encounter them as mysterious artifacts rather than intelligible systems. This chapter discusses large language models within a broader historical shift in computing paradigms and argues that many of the confusions surrounding their use arise from a mismatch between how these systems are built, how they behave, and how people expect computers to behave writ large. Rather than treating generative AI as a monolithic technology, the chapter decomposes it into interacting components, spanning data, models, product features, and user inputs, each introducing distinct affordances and tensions. Particular attention is given to the statistical and data-based foundations of these systems and to the fact that their surface behavior is explicitly human-like, a combination that places them squarely within the intellectual traditions of educational and behavioral research. From this perspective, educational researchers are unusually well positioned to study, evaluate, and productively use generative AI systems, drawing on established methods for modeling latent processes, managing uncertainty, and interpreting complex human-system interactions. The goal is to equip readers with a conceptual map that supports more informed experimentation, critical interpretation, and responsible use as these systems continue to evolve.

Counterfactual explanations (CFEs) are essential for interpreting black-box models, yet they often become invalid when models are slightly changed. Existing methods for generating robust CFEs are often limited to specific types of models, require costly tuning, or inflexible robustness controls. We propose a novel approach that jointly models the data distribution and the space of plausible model decisions to ensure robustness to model changes. Using a probabilistic consensus over a model ensemble, we train a conditional normalizing flow that captures the data density under varying levels of classifier agreement. At inference time, a single interpretable parameter controls the robustness level; it specifies the minimum fraction of models that should agree on the target class without retraining the generative model. Our method effectively pushes CFEs toward regions that are both plausible and stable across model changes. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves superior empirical robustness while also maintaining good performance across other evaluation measures.

Agentic systems often fail not by being entirely wrong, but by being too precise: a response may be generally useful while particular claims exceed what the evidence supports. We study this failure mode as overcommitment control and introduce compositional selective specificity (CSS), a post-generation layer that decomposes an answer into claims, proposes coarser backoffs, and emits each claim at the most specific calibrated level that appears admissible. The method is designed to express uncertainty as a local semantic backoff rather than as a whole-answer refusal. Across a full LongFact run and HotpotQA pilots, calibrated CSS improves the risk-utility trade-off of fixed drafts. On the full LongFact run, it raises overcommitment-aware utility from 0.846 to 0.913 relative to the no-CSS output while achieving 0.938 specificity retention. These results suggest that claim-level specificity control is a useful uncertainty interface for agentic systems and a target for future distribution-free validity layers.

Retrieving mathematical knowledge is a central task in both human-driven research, such as determining whether a result already exists, finding related results, and identifying historical origins, and in emerging AI systems for mathematics, where reliable grounding is essential. However, the scale and structure of the mathematical literature pose significant challenges: results are distributed across millions of documents, and individual statements are often difficult to interpret in isolation due to their dependence on prior definitions and theorems. In this paper, we introduce Matlas, a semantic search engine for mathematical statements. Matlas is built on a large-scale corpus of 8.07 million statements extracted from 435K peer-reviewed papers spanning 1826 to 2025, drawn from a curated set of 180 journals selected using an ICM citation-based criterion, together with 1.9K textbooks. From these sources, we extract mathematical statements together with their dependencies, construct document-level dependency graphs, and recursively unfold statements in topological order to produce more self-contained representations. On top of this corpus, we develop a semantic retrieval system that enables efficient search for mathematical results using natural language queries. We hope that Matlas can improve the efficiency of theorem retrieval for mathematicians and provide a structured source of grounding for AI systems tackling research-level mathematical problems, and serve as part of the infrastructure for mathematical knowledge retrieval.

In principle, deep generative models can be used to perform domain adaptation; i.e. align the input feature representations of test data with that of a separate discriminative model's training data. This can help improve the discriminative model's performance on the test data. However, generative models are prone to producing hallucinations and artefacts that may degrade the quality of generated data, and therefore, predictive performance when processed by the discriminative model. While uncertainty quantification can provide a means to assess the quality of adapted data, the standard framework for evaluating the quality of predicted uncertainties may not easily extend to generative models due to the common lack of ground truths (among other reasons). Even with ground truths, this evaluation is agnostic to how the generated outputs are used on the downstream task, limiting the extent to which the uncertainty reliability analysis provides insights about the utility of the uncertainties with respect to the intended use case of the adapted examples. Here, we describe how decision-theoretic uncertainty quantification can address these concerns and provide a convenient framework for evaluating the trustworthiness of generated outputs, in particular, for domain adaptation. We consider a case study in photoplethysmography time series denoising for Atrial Fibrillation classification. This formalises a well-known heuristic method of using a downstream classifier to assess the quality of generated outputs.

Advanced deepfake technologies are blurring the lines between real and fake, presenting both revolutionary opportunities and alarming threats. While it unlocks novel applications in fields like entertainment and education, its malicious use has sparked urgent ethical and societal concerns ranging from identity theft to the dissemination of misinformation. To tackle these challenges, feature analysis using frequency features has emergedas a promising direction for deepfake detection. However, oneaspect that has been overlooked so far is that existing methodstend to concentrate on one or a few specific frequency domains,which risks overfitting to particular artifacts and significantlyundermines their robustness when facing diverse forgery patterns. Another underexplored aspect we observe is that different features often attend to the same forged region, resulting in redundant feature representations and limiting the diversity of the extracted clues. This may undermine the ability of a model to capture complementary information across different facets, thereby compromising its generalization capability to diverse manipulations. In this paper, we seek to tackle these challenges from two aspects: (1) we propose a triple-branch network that jointly captures spatial and frequency features by learning from both original image and image reconstructed by different frequency channels, and (2) we mathematically derive feature decoupling and fusion losses grounded in the mutual information theory, which enhances the model to focus on task-relevant features across the original image and the image reconstructed by different frequency channels. Extensive experiments on six large-scale benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our code is released at https://github.com/injooker/Unveiling Deepfake.

Multi-user virtual reality enables immersive interaction. However, rendering avatars for numerous participants on each headset incurs prohibitive computational overhead, limiting scalability. We introduce a framework, Privatar, to offload avatar reconstruction from headset to untrusted devices within the same local network while safeguarding attacks against adversaries capable of intercepting offloaded data. Privatar's key insight is that domain-specific knowledge of avatar reconstruction enables provably private offloading at minimal cost. (1) System level. We observe avatar reconstruction is frequency-domain decomposable via BDCT with negligible quality drop, and propose Horizontal Partitioning (HP) to keep high-energy frequency components on-device and offloads only low-energy components. HP offloads local computation while reducing information leakage to low-energy subsets only. (2) Privacy level. For individually offloaded, multi-dimensional signals without aggregation, worst-case local Differential Privacy requires prohibitive noise, ruining utility. We observe users' expression statistical distribution are slowly changing over time and trackable online, and hence propose Distribution-Aware Minimal Perturbation. DAMP minimizes noise based on each user's expression distribution to significantly reduce its effects on utility, retaining formal privacy guarantee. Combined, HP provides empirical privacy against expression identification attacks. DAMP further augments it to offer a formal guarantee against arbitrary adversaries. On a Meta Quest Pro, Privatar supports 2.37x more concurrent users at 6.5% higher reconstruction loss and 9% energy overhead, providing a better throughout-loss Pareto frontier over quantization, sparsity and local construction baselines. Privatar provides both provable privacy guarantee and stays robust against both empirical and NN-based attacks.

Small Vision-Language Models (SVLMs) are efficient task controllers but often suffer from visual brittleness and poor tool orchestration. They typically require expensive supervised trajectory tuning to mitigate these deficits. In this work, we propose Self-supervised Perception Enabled by Cascaded Tool Rollout Alignment (SPECTRA), a supervision-free framework that bootstraps agentic capabilities via Coldstart Reinforcement Learning for SVLMs. SPECTRA enforces Soft Structured Multi-turn Rollouts, a topological constraint that directs agents to explicitly sequence tool derived evidence before synthesis, effectively grounding reasoning in visual observations. We employ a multi-objective reward signal that simultaneously maximizes task correctness, rollout structure, and tool utility, enabling agent to self-discover robust behaviors without human preference labels. We further introduce Tool Instrumental Utility (TIU), a novel metric to quantify tool efficacy in the absence of ground truth. Extensive evaluations across composite and out-of-distribution (MMMU-Pro) benchmarks demonstrate that SPECTRA boosts agentic trajectories, improving task accuracy by up to 5% and tool efficiency by 9%, enabling more efficient multimodal agents that learn effectively from environmental interaction alone.

Vision-Language Navigation(VLN) requires an agent to navigate through 3D environments by following natural language instructions. While recent Video Large Language Models(Video-LLMs) have largely advanced VLN, they remain highly susceptible to State Drift in long scenarios. In these cases, the agent's internal state drifts away from the true task execution state, leading to aimless wandering and failure to execute essential maneuvers in the instruction. We attribute this failure to two distinct cognitive deficits: Progress Drift, where the agent fails to distinguish completed sub-goals from remaining ones, and Memory Drift, where the agent's history representations degrade, making it lose track of visited landmarks. In this paper, we propose a Dual-Anchoring Framework that explicitly anchors the instruction progress and history representations. First, to address progress drift, we introduce Instruction Progress Anchoring, which supervises the agent to generate structured text tokens that delineate completed versus remaining sub-goals. Second, to mitigate memory drift, we propose Memory Landmark Anchoring, which utilizes a Landmark-Centric World Model to retrospectively predict object-centric embeddings extracted by the Segment Anything Model, compelling the agent to explicitly verify past observations and preserve distinct representations of visited landmarks. Facilitating this framework, we curate two extensive datasets: 3.6 million samples with explicit progress descriptions, and 937k grounded landmark data for retrospective verification. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world environments demonstrate the superiority of our method, achieving a 15.2% improvement in Success Rate and a remarkable 24.7% gain on long-horizon trajectories. To facilitate further research, we will release our code, data generation pipelines, and the collected datasets.

Machine learning has become a powerful tool for discovering governing laws of dynamical systems from data. However, most existing approaches degrade severely when observations are sparse, noisy, or irregularly sampled. In this work, we address the problem of learning symbolic representations of nonlinear Hamiltonian dynamical systems under extreme data scarcity by explicitly incorporating physical structure into the learning architecture. We introduce Adaptable Symplectic Recurrent Neural Networks (ASRNNs), a parameter-cognizant, structure-preserving model that combines Hamiltonian learning with symplectic recurrent integration, avoiding time derivative estimation, and enabling stable learning under noise. We demonstrate that ASRNNs can accurately predict long-term dynamics even when each training trajectory consists of only two irregularly spaced time points, possibly corrupted by correlated noise. Leveraging ASRNNs as structure-preserving data generators, we further enable symbolic discovery using independent regression methods (SINDy and PySR), recovering exact symbolic equations for polynomial systems and consistent polynomial approximations for non-polynomial Hamiltonians. Our results show that such architectures can provide a robust pathway to interpretable discovery of Hamiltonian dynamics from sparse and noisy data.

We provide evidence that language models can detect, localize and, to a certain degree, verbalize the difference between perturbations applied to their activations. More precisely, we either (a) \emph{mask} activations, simulating \emph{dropout}, or (b) add \emph{Gaussian noise} to them, at a target sentence. We then ask a multiple-choice question such as ``\emph{Which of the previous sentences was perturbed?}'' or ``\emph{Which of the two perturbations was applied?}''. We test models from the Llama, Olmo, and Qwen families, with sizes between 8B and 32B, all of which can easily detect and localize the perturbations, often with perfect accuracy. These models can also learn, when taught in context, to distinguish between dropout and Gaussian noise. Notably, \qwenb's \emph{zero-shot} accuracy in identifying which perturbation was applied improves as a function of the perturbation strength and, moreover, decreases if the in-context labels are flipped, suggesting a prior for the correct ones -- even modulo controls. Because dropout has been used as a training-regularization technique, while Gaussian noise is sometimes added during inference, we discuss the possibility of a data-agnostic ``training awareness'' signal and the implications for AI safety. The code and data are available at \href{https://github.com/saifh-github/llm-dropout-noise-recognition}{link 1} and \href{https://drive.google.com/file/d/1es-Sfw_AH9GficeXgeqpy87rocrZZ_PQ/view}{link 2}, respectively.

The transition from neural machine translation to agentic workflows has revolutionized Automated Program Repair (APR). However, existing agents, despite their advanced reasoning capabilities, frequently suffer from the ``Intent Gap'' -- the misalignment between the generated patch and the developer's original intent. Current solutions relying on natural language summaries or adversarial sampling often fail to provide the deterministic constraints required for surgical repairs. In this paper, we introduce \textsc{Prometheus}, a novel framework that bridges this gap by prioritizing \textit{Specification Inference} over code generation. We employ Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) as an executable contract, utilizing a multi-agent architecture to reverse-engineer Gherkin specifications from runtime failure reports. To resolve the ``Hallucination of Intent,'' we propose a \textbf{Requirement Quality Assurance (RQA) Loop}, a mechanism that leverages ground-truth code as a proxy oracle to validate inferred specifications. We evaluated \textsc{Prometheus} on 680 defects from the Defects4J benchmark. The results are transformative: our framework achieved a total correct patch rate of \textbf{93.97\%} (639/680). More significantly, it demonstrated a \textbf{Rescue Rate of 74.4\%}, successfully repairing 119 complex bugs that a strong blind agent failed to resolve. Qualitative analysis reveals that explicit intent guides agents away from structurally invasive over-engineering toward precise, minimal corrections. Our findings suggest that the future of APR lies not in larger models, but in the capability to align code with verified, \textbf{Executable Specifications} -- whether pre-existing or reverse-engineered.

AI coding assistants have proliferated rapidly, yet structured pedagogical frameworks for learning these tools remain scarce. Developers face a gap between tool documentation and practical mastery, relying on fragmented resources such as blog posts, video tutorials, and trial-and-error. We present cc-self-train, a modular interactive curriculum for learning Claude Code, an agentic AI coding tool, through hands-on project construction. The system introduces five contributions: (1) a persona progression model that adapts instructor tone across four stages (Guide, Collaborator, Peer, Launcher), operationalizing Gradual Release of Responsibility for AI-mediated instruction; (2) an adaptive learning system that observes engagement quality through hook-based heuristics and adjusts scaffolding at two timescales, using streak detection for mid-module intervention and aggregate metrics for module-boundary persona changes; (3) a cross-domain unified curriculum in which five distinct project domains share identical feature sequencing, enabling transfer learning; (4) a step-pacing mechanism with explicit pause primitives to manage information overload in an AI-as-instructor context; and (5) an auto-updating curriculum design in which the onboarding agent detects upstream tool changes and updates teaching materials before instruction begins. A parametrized test suite enforces structural consistency as a proxy for pedagogical invariants across all 50 modules. A pilot evaluation with 27 participants shows statistically significant reported self-efficacy gains across all 10 assessed skill areas (p < 0.001), with the largest effects on advanced features such as hooks and custom skills. We discuss implications for the design of auto-updating educational systems.

Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) enhances LLMs by structuring corpus into graphs to facilitate multi-hop reasoning. While recent lightweight approaches reduce indexing costs by leveraging Named Entity Recognition (NER), they rely strictly on structural co-occurrence, failing to capture latent semantic connections between disjoint entities. To address this, we propose EHRAG, a lightweight RAG framework that constructs a hypergraph capturing both structure and semantic level relationships, employing a hybrid structural-semantic retrieval mechanism. Specifically, EHRAG constructs structural hyperedges based on sentence-level co-occurrence with lightweight entity extraction and semantic hyperedges by clustering entity text embeddings, ensuring the hypergraph encompasses both structural and semantic information. For retrieval, EHRAG performs a structure-semantic hybrid diffusion with topic-aware scoring and personalized pagerank (PPR) refinement to identify the top-k relevant documents. Experiments on four datasets show that EHRAG outperforms state-of-the-art baselines while maintaining linear indexing complexity and zero token consumption for construction. Code is available at https://github.com/yfsong00/EHRAG.

Dynamic programming is one of the most fundamental methodologies for solving Markov decision problems. Among its many variants, Q-value iteration (Q-VI) is particularly important due to its conceptual simplicity and its classical contraction-based convergence guarantee. Despite the central role of this contraction property, it does not fully reveal the geometric structure of the Q-VI trajectory. In particular, when one is interested not only in the final limit $Q^*$ but also in when the induced greedy policy becomes effectively optimal, the standard contraction argument provides only a coarse characterization. To formalize this notion, we denote by $\mathcal X^*$ the set of $Q$-functions whose corresponding tie-broken greedy policies are optimal, referred to as the practically optimal solution set (POS). In this paper, we revisit discounted Q-VI through the lens of switching system theory and derive new geometric insights into its behavior. In particular, we show that although Q-VI does not reach $Q^*$ in finite time in general, it identifies the optimal action class in finite time. Furthermore, we prove that the distance from the iterate to a particular subset of $\mathcal X^*$ decays exponentially at a rate governed by the joint spectral radius (JSR) of a restricted switching family. This rate can be strictly faster than the standard $γ$ rate when the restricted JSR is strictly smaller than $γ$, while the convergence of the entire $Q$-function to $Q^*$ can still be dominated by the slower $γ$ mode, where $γ$ denotes the discount factor. These results reveal a two-stage geometric behavior of Q-VI: a fast convergence toward $\mathcal X_1$, followed by a slower convergence toward $Q^*$ in general.

Urban traffic control is a system-level coordination problem spanning heterogeneous subsystems, including traffic signals, freeways, public transit, and taxi services. Existing optimization-based, reinforcement learning (RL), and emerging LLM-based approaches are largely designed for isolated tasks, limiting both cross-task generalization and the ability to capture coupled physical dynamics across subsystems. We argue that effective system-level control requires a unified physical environment in which subsystems share infrastructure, mobility demand, and spatiotemporal constraints, allowing local interventions to propagate through the network. To this end, we propose TrafficClaw, a framework for general urban traffic control built upon a unified runtime environment. TrafficClaw integrates heterogeneous subsystems into a shared dynamical system, enabling explicit modeling of cross-subsystem interactions and closed-loop agent-environment feedback. Within this environment, we develop an LLM agent with executable spatiotemporal reasoning and reusable procedural memory, supporting unified diagnostics across subsystems and continual strategy refinement. Furthermore, we introduce a multi-stage training pipeline with supervised initialization and agentic RL with system-level optimization, further enabling coordinated and system-aware performance. Experiments demonstrate that TrafficClaw achieves robust, transferable, and system-aware performance across unseen traffic scenarios, dynamics, and task configurations. Our project is available at https://github.com/usail-hkust/TrafficClaw.

Enterprise deployment of small language models (SLMs) is constrained by epistemic asymmetry: SLMs cannot self-correct reasoning errors, while frontier LLMs are prohibitively costly and face data sovereignty limits for high-volume use. We propose Semantic Gradient Descent (SGDe), a teacher-student framework that compiles agentic workflows into discrete execution plans comprising DAG topologies, system prompts, and deterministic executable code. The trailing "e" distinguishes SGDe from stochastic gradient descent. SGDe operates in a discrete semantic space where a frontier teacher generates natural-language critiques acting as directional gradients to iteratively refine the SLM's workflow artefacts. We formalise SGDe within a PAC learning framework, establishing sample-complexity bounds that enable convergence with as few as three training examples on targeted synthetic tasks by leveraging the teacher as a statistical prior. On a GSM-Hard-derived test set built via adversarial synthesis, compiled workflows reach 91.3% accuracy at m=5 and 99.3% at m=3 within the small-m regime motivated by Corollary 1, a +26.3% to +34.3% absolute improvement over state-of-the-art prompt optimisers. In the emerging paradigm of harness engineering, SGDe treats placement of deterministic code (which subtasks to delegate to a Python runtime versus retain as LLM calls) as a trace-driven, per-node optimisation target, generalising the whole-problem offloading of PAL and PoT. The teacher compiles two complementary deterministic structures: capability offloading, which delegates subtasks to Python when the SLM cannot execute them reliably, and structural consensus, which wraps variance-limited reasoning steps in fan-out/fan-in subgraphs aggregated by deterministic voting.

Recent Speech-to-Speech Translation (S2ST) systems achieve strong semantic accuracy yet consistently strip away non-verbal vocalizations (NVs), such as laughter and crying that convey pragmatic intent, which severely limits real-world utility. We address this via three contributions. First, we propose a synthesis pipeline for building scalable expressive datasets to overcome the data scarcity limitation. Second, we propose MoVE, a Mixture-of-LoRA-Experts architecture with expressive-specialized adapters and a soft-weighting router that blends experts for capturing hybrid expressive states. Third, we show pretrained AudioLLMs enable striking data efficiency: 30 minutes of curated data is enough for strong performance. On English-Chinese S2ST, while comparing with strong baselines, MoVE reproduces target NVs in 76% of cases and achieves the highest human-rated naturalness and emotional fidelity among all compared systems, where existing S2ST systems preserve at most 14% of NVs.

Self-consistency (SC) is a popular technique for improving the reasoning accuracy of large language models by aggregating multiple sampled outputs, but it comes at a high computational cost due to extensive sampling. We introduce a hybrid ensembling approach that leverages the complementary strengths of two distinct modes of reasoning: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Program-of-Thought (PoT). We describe a general framework for combining these two forms of reasoning in self-consistency, as well as particular strategies for both full sampling and early-stopping. We show that CoT-PoT ensembling not only improves overall accuracy, but also drastically reduces the number of samples required for SC by a factor of 9.3x. In particular, the majority of tasks (78.6%) can be addressed with only two samples, which has not been possible with any prior SC methods.

We present Jupiter-N, a hybrid reasoning model post-trained from Nemotron 3 Super, a fully open-source 120 billion parameter LLM. We target three objectives: (1) agentic capability via uncertainty-curated trajectories; (2) UK cultural alignment via synthetic data grounded in cultural norms; and (3) Welsh language support via parallel corpora and LLM-translated Welsh conversations. Our data curation strategy carefully preserves the base model's capabilities: using our Forget-Me-Not framework, we mix on-policy synthetic replay with off-policy task data to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, and include a mixture of reasoning and non-reasoning traces to maintain Nemotron's hybrid reasoning ability. Jupiter-N achieves standout gains over Nemotron in Welsh (+18 on ARC-Easy, +5.25 on MMLU-Lite), terminal-use (+9.1 on Terminal Bench 2) and instruction following (+4.4 on IFBench), while retaining the base model capabilities. We frame this work as a reproducible template for sovereign post-training: substituting cultural knowledge, institutional corpora, and target languages produces an equivalent pipeline for any country. All model weights and all post-training datasets are publicly released under open licences.

As video generation models achieve unprecedented capabilities, the demand for robust video evaluation metrics becomes increasingly critical. Traditional metrics are intrinsically tailored for short-video evaluation, predominantly assessing frame-level visual quality and localized temporal smoothness. However, as state-of-the-art video generation models scale to generate longer videos, these metrics fail to capture essential long-range characteristics, such as narrative richness and global causal consistency. Recognizing that short-term visual perception and long-context attributes are fundamentally orthogonal dimensions, we argue that long-video metrics should be disentangled from short-video assessments. In this paper, we focus on the rigorous justification and design of a dedicated framework for long-video evaluation. We first introduce a suite of long-video attribute corruption tests, exposing the critical limitations of existing hort-video metrics from their insensitivity to structural inconsistencies, such as shot-level perturbations and narrative shuffling. To bridge this gap, we design a novel long-video metric based on shot dynamics, which is highly sensitive to the long-range testing framework. Furthermore, we introduce Long-CODE (Long-Context as an Orthogonal Dimension for video Evaluation), a specialized dataset designed to benchmark long-video evaluation, with human annotations isolated specifically to genuine long-range characteristics. Extensive experiments show that our proposed metrics achieve state-of-the-art correlation with human judgments. Ultimately, our metric and benchmark seamlessly complement existing short-video standards, establishing a holistic and unbiased evaluation paradigm for video generation models.

A unified framework for first-order optimization algorithms fornonconvex unconstrained optimization is proposed that uses adaptivelypreconditioned gradients and includes popular methods such as full anddiagonal AdaGrad, AdaNorm, as well as adpative variants of Shampoo andMuon. This framework also allows combining heterogeneous geometriesacross different groups of variables while preserving a unifiedconvergence analysis. A fully stochastic global rate-of-convergenceanalysis is conducted for all methods in the framework, with andwithout two types of momentum, using reasonable assumptions on thevariance of the gradient oracle and without assuming boundedstochastic gradients or small enough stepsize.

Money laundering poses severe risks to global financial systems, driving the widespread adoption of machine learning for transaction monitoring. However, progress remains stifled by the lack of realistic benchmarks. Existing transaction-graph datasets suffer from two pervasive limitations: (i) they provide sparse node-level semantics beyond anonymized identifiers, and (ii) they rely on template-driven anomaly injection, which biases benchmarks toward static structural motifs and yields overly optimistic assessments of model robustness. We propose TransXion, a benchmark ecosystem for Anti-Money Laundering (AML) research that integrates profile-aware simulation of normal activity with stochastic, non-template synthesis of illicit subgraphs.TransXion jointly models persistent entity profiles and conditional transaction behavior, enabling evaluation of "out-of-character" anomalies where observed activity contradicts an entity's socio-economic context. The resulting dataset comprises approximately 3 million transactions among 50,000 entities, each endowed with rich demographic and behavioral attributes. Empirical analyses show that TransXion reproduces key structural properties of payment networks, including heavy-tailed activity distributions and localized subgraph structure. Across a diverse array of detection models spanning multiple algorithmic paradigms, TransXion yields substantially lower detection performance than widely used benchmarks, demonstrating increased difficulty and realism. TransXion provides a more faithful testbed for developing context-aware and robust AML detection methods. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/chaos-max/TransXion.

Human mobility prediction is a critical task but remains challenging due to its complexity and variability across populations and regions. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have made progress in zero-shot prediction, but existing methods suffer from limited interpretability (due to black-box reasoning), lack of iterative learning from new data, and poor transferability. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{ARMove}, a fully transferable framework for predicting human mobility through agentic reasoning. To address these limitations, ARMove employs standardized feature management with iterative optimization and user-specific customization: four major feature pools for foundational knowledge, user profiles for segmentation, and an automated generation mechanism integrating LLM knowledge. Robust generalization is achieved via agentic decision-making that adjusts feature weights to maximize accuracy while providing interpretable decision paths. Finally, large-small model synergy distills strategies from large LLMs (e.g., 72B) to smaller ones (e.g., 7B), reducing costs and enhancing performance ceilings. Extensive experiments on four global datasets show ARMove outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on 6 out of 12 metrics (gains of 0.78\% to 10.47\%), with transferability tests confirming robustness across regions, users, and scales. The other 4 items also achieved suboptimal results. Transferability tests confirm its 19 robustness across regions, user groups, and model scales, while interpretability 20 analysis highlights its transparency in decision-making. Our codes are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ARMove-F847.

Engineering projects are the result of the combined effort of their members. Yet, it has been documented that labor division withing projects is unevenly distributed: some project members are specialists undertaking only few tasks, whereas other are generalists and are responsible for the success of many tasks. Moreover, the latter are often facilitators of project integration. Such a workload distribution prompts one question: how resilient is a project to key personnel loss? Far from being a theoretical problem, the reliance of a project on a few key people can lead to severe economic losses and delays. We argue that current methods to estimate such a risk are unsatisfactory: some methods offer a best-case estimate and are, therefore, too optimistic; other methods fail to capture project fragmentation leading to biased estimates and unrealistic consequences in many settings. In this paper, we develop a novel method to assess project vulnerability by looking at it from the lens of network robustness. We compare our method against existing alternatives and show that it offers better and more consistent estimates of project resilience to personnel loss.

Reward-based fine-tuning aims to steer a pretrained diffusion or flow-based generative model toward higher-reward samples while remaining close to the pretrained model. Although existing methods are motivated by different perspectives such as Soft RL, GFlowNets, etc., we show that many can be written under a common framework, which we call reward score matching (RSM). Under this view, alignment becomes score matching toward a reward-guided target, and the main differences across methods reduce to the construction of the value-guidance estimator and the effective optimization strength across timesteps. This unification clarifies the bias--variance--compute tradeoffs of existing designs and distinguishes core optimization components from auxiliary mechanisms that add complexity without clear benefit. Guided by this perspective, we develop simpler redesigns that improve alignment effectiveness and compute efficiency across representative settings with differentiable and black-box rewards. Overall, RSM turns a seemingly fragmented collection of reward-based fine-tuning methods into a smaller, more interpretable, and more actionable design space.

The governance of open-weight artificial intelligence (AI) models has been framed as a binary choice: openness as risk, restriction as safety. This paper challenges that framing, arguing that access restrictions, without governed alternatives, may displace risks rather than reduce them. The global concentration of compute infrastructure makes open-weight models one of the most viable pathways to sovereign AI capacity in the Global South; restricting such access deepens asymmetries while driving proliferation into unsupervised settings. This analysis proposes that hardware-layer governance, including chip-level attestation mechanisms such as FlexHEG, trusted execution environments, confidential computing, and complementary software-layer safeguards, offers a defense-in-depth alternative to the current binary. A threat model taxonomy mapping misuse vectors to hardware, software, institutional, and liability layers illustrates why no single governance mechanism suffices. To operationalize this approach, the paper argues that effective AI governance as a dual-use technology will likely require a multilateral institutional architecture functionally analogous, though not identical, to the role performed by the IAEA in the nuclear domain, with explicit safeguards against the co-option of hardware controls for domestic repression. The relevant policy question is how to make openness safer through technical and institutional design while addressing the transition realities of legacy hardware, attestation at scale, and civil liberties protection.

Text-attributed graphs integrate semantic information of node texts with topological structure, offering significant value in various applications such as document classification and information extraction. Existing approaches typically encode textual content using language models (LMs), followed by graph neural networks (GNNs) to process structural information. However, during the LM-based text encoding phase, most methods not only perform semantic interaction solely at the word-token granularity, but also neglect the structural dependencies among texts from different nodes. In this work, we propose DuConTE, a dual-granularity text encoder with topology-constrained attention. The model employs a cascaded architecture of two pretrained LMs, encoding semantics first at the word-token granularity and then at the node granularity. During the self-attention computation in each LM, we dynamically adjust the attention mask matrix based on node connectivity, guiding the model to learn semantic correlations informed by the graph structure. Furthermore, when composing node representations from word-token embeddings, we separately evaluate the importance of tokens under the center-node context and the neighborhood context, enabling the capture of more contextually relevant semantic information. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that DuConTE achieves state-of-the-art performance on the majority of them.

The convergence of large language models and agents is catalyzing a new era of scientific discovery: Agentic Science. While the scientific method is inherently iterative, existing agent frameworks are predominantly static, narrowly scoped, and lack the capacity to learn from trial and error. To bridge this gap, we present EvoMaster, a foundational evolving agent framework engineered specifically for Agentic Science at Scale. Driven by the core principle of continuous self-evolution, EvoMaster empowers agents to iteratively refine hypotheses, self-critique, and progressively accumulate knowledge across experimental cycles, faithfully mirroring human scientific inquiry. Crucially, as a domain-agnostic base harness, EvoMaster is exceptionally easy to scale up -- enabling developers to build and deploy highly capable, self-evolving scientific agents for arbitrary disciplines in approximately 100 lines of code. Built upon EvoMaster, we incubated the SciMaster ecosystem across domains such as machine learning, physics, and general science. Evaluations on four authoritative benchmarks (Humanity's Last Exam, MLE-Bench Lite, BrowseComp, and FrontierScience) demonstrate that EvoMaster achieves state-of-the-art scores of 41.1%, 75.8%, 73.3%, and 53.3%, respectively. It comprehensively outperforms the general-purpose baseline OpenClaw with relative improvements ranging from +159% to +316%, robustly validating its efficacy and generality as the premier foundational framework for the next generation of autonomous scientific discovery. EvoMaster is available at https://github.com/sjtu-sai-agents/EvoMaster.

Multi-hop question answering (MHQA) enables accurate answers to complex queries by retrieving and reasoning over evidence dispersed across multiple documents. Existing MHQA approaches mainly rely on iterative retrieval-augmented generation, which suffer from the following two major issues. 1) Existing methods prematurely commit to surface-level entities rather than underlying reasoning structures, making question decomposition highly vulnerable to lexical ambiguity. 2) Existing methods overlook the logical dependencies among reasoning steps, resulting in uncoordinated execution. To address these issues, we propose STRIDE, a framework that separates strategic planning, dynamic control, and grounded execution. At its core, a Meta-Planner first constructs an entity-agnostic reasoning skeleton to capture the abstract logic of the query, thereby deferring entity grounding until after the reasoning structure is established, which mitigates disambiguation errors caused by premature lexical commitment. A Supervisor then orchestrates sub-question execution in a dependency-aware manner, enabling efficient parallelization where possible and sequential coordination when necessary. By dynamically deciding whether to retrieve new evidence or infer from existing facts, it avoids redundant queries and error propagation, while fusing cross-branch information and reformulating failed queries to enhance robustness. Grounded fact extraction and logical inference are delegated to specialized execution modules, ensuring faithfulness through explicit separation of retrieval and reasoning. We further propose STRIDE-FT, a modular fine-tuning framework that uses self-generated execution trajectories from STRIDE, requiring neither human annotations nor stronger teacher models. Experiments show that STRIDE achieves robust and accurate reasoning, while STRIDE-FT effectively enhances open-source LLMs.

Symbolic regression (SR) with genetic programming (GP) aims to discover interpretable mathematical expressions directly from data. Despite its strong empirical success, the theoretical understanding of why GP-based SR generalizes beyond the training data remains limited. In this work, we provide a learning-theoretic analysis of SR models represented as expression trees. We derive a generalization bound for GP-style SR under constraints on tree size, depth, and learnable constants. Our result decomposes the generalization gap into two interpretable components: a structure-selection term, reflecting the combinatorial complexity of choosing an expression-tree structure, and a constant-fitting term, capturing the complexity of optimizing numerical constants within a fixed structure. This decomposition provides a theoretical perspective on several widely used practices in GP, including parsimony pressure, depth limits, numerically stable operators, and interval arithmetic. In particular, our analysis shows how structural restrictions reduce hypothesis-class growth while stability mechanisms control the sensitivity of predictions to parameter perturbations. By linking these practical design choices to explicit complexity terms in the generalization bound, our work offers a principled explanation for commonly observed empirical behaviors in GP-based SR and contributes towards a more rigorous understanding of its generalization properties.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) powered by large language models suffer from severe token inefficiency arising from two compounding sources: (i) unstructured parallel execution, where all agents activate simultaneously irrespective of input readiness; and (ii) unrestricted context sharing, where every agent receives the full accumulated context regardless of relevance. Existing mitigation strategies - static pruning, hierarchical decomposition, and learned routing - treat coordination as a structural allocation problem and fundamentally ignore its temporal dimension. We propose Phase-Scheduled Multi-Agent Systems (PSMAS), a framework that reconceptualizes agent activation as continuous control over a shared attention space modeled on a circular manifold. Each agent i is assigned a fixed angular phase theta_i in the range [0, 2*pi], derived from the task dependency topology; a global sweep signal phi(t) rotates at velocity omega, activating only agents within an angular window epsilon. Idle agents receive compressed context summaries, reducing per-step token consumption. We implement PSMAS on LangGraph, evaluate on four structured benchmarks (HotPotQA-MAS, HumanEval-MAS, ALFWorld-Multi, WebArena-Coord) and two unstructured conversational settings, and prove stability, convergence, and optimality results for the sweep dynamics. PSMAS achieves a mean token reduction of 27.3 percent (range 21.4-34.8 percent) while maintaining task performance within 2.1 percentage points of a fully activated baseline (p < 0.01, n = 500 per configuration), and outperforms the strongest learned routing baseline by 5.6 percentage points in token reduction with 2.0 percentage points less performance drop. Crucially, we show that scheduling and compression are independent sources of gain: scheduling alone accounts for 18-20 percentage points of reduction, robust to compression degradation up to alpha = 0.40.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities, and as existing approaches for enhancing LLM reasoning continue to mature, increasing attention has shifted toward meta-reasoning as a promising direction for further improvement. However, most existing meta-reasoning methods remain episodic: they focus on executing complex meta-reasoning routines within individual instances, but ignore the accumulation of reusable meta-reasoning skills across instances, leading to recurring failure modes and repeatedly high metacognitive effort. In this paper, we introduce Metacognitive Consolidation, a novel framework in which a model consolidates metacognitive experience from past reasoning episodes into reusable knowledge that improves future meta-reasoning. We instantiate this framework by structuring instance-level problem solving into distinct roles for reasoning, monitoring, and control to generate rich, attributable meta-level traces. These traces are then consolidated through a hierarchical, multi-timescale update mechanism that gradually forms evolving meta-knowledge. Experimental results demonstrate consistent performance gains across benchmarks and backbone models, and show that performance improves as metacognitive experience accumulates over time.

We present a methodological framework to discover linguistic and discursive patterns associated to different social groups through contrastive synthetic text generation and statistical analysis. In contrast with previous approaches, we aim to characterize subtle expressions of bias, instead of diagnosing bias through a pre-determined list of words or expressions. We are also working with contextualized data instead of isolated words or sentences. Our methodology applies to textual productions in any genre, encompassing narrative, task-oriented or dialogic. Contextualized data are generated using controlled combinations of situational scenarios and group markers, creating minimal pairs of texts that differ only in the referenced group while maintaining comparable narrative conditions. To facilitate robust analysis, linguistic forms are generalized and associations between linguistic abstractions and groups are quantified using a variant of pointwise mutual information to detect expressions that appear disproportionately across groups. A fragment-ranking strategy then prioritizes text segments with a high concentration of biased linguistic signals, which allows for experts to assess the harmful potential of linguistic expressions in context, bridging quantitative analysis and qualitative interpretation.

Autoregressive video diffusion is emerging as a promising paradigm for streaming video synthesis, with step distillation serving as the primary means of accelerating inference. Whether speculative decoding, the dominant acceleration strategy for large language models, can be effectively adapted to autoregressive video generation remains an open question, because video blocks are continuous spatiotemporal tensors with no token-level distribution for exact rejection sampling. We introduce SDVG, which brings speculative decoding to block-based autoregressive video diffusion by replacing token verification with an image-quality router. A 1.3B drafter proposes candidate blocks via four denoising steps; each block is VAE-decoded and scored by ImageReward using worst-frame aggregation--taking the minimum per-frame reward to catch single-frame artifacts that averaging would mask. Blocks scoring above a fixed threshold tau are accepted into the 14B target's KV cache; the rest are regenerated by the target. Two additional design choices prove critical: the first block is always force-rejected to anchor scene composition, and tau serves as a single knob that traces a smooth quality-speed Pareto frontier. On 1003 MovieGenVideoBench prompts (832x480), SDVG retains 98.1% of target-only VisionReward quality (0.0773 vs. 0.0788) at a 1.59x speedup with tau=-0.7, and reaches 2.09x at 95.7% quality retention--while consistently outperforming draft-only generation by over +17%. The framework is training-free, requires no architectural changes, and can be seamlessly integrated into existing autoregressive video generation pipelines.

Large Language Models (LLMs) often memorize sensitive or harmful information, necessitating effective machine unlearning techniques. While existing parameter-efficient unlearning methods have shown promise, they still struggle with the forget-retain trade-off. This can be attributed to their reliance on parameter importance metrics to identify parameters that are important exclusively for the forget set, which is fundamentally limited by the superposition phenomenon. Due to the polysemantic nature of LLM parameters, such an importance metric may struggle to disentangle parameters associated with the forget and retain sets. In this work, we propose Representation-Guided Low-rank Unlearning (REGLU), a novel approach that leverages the geometric properties of representation spaces to achieve robust and precise unlearning. First, we develop a representation-guided initialization for LoRA that identifies the optimal subspace for selective forgetting. Second, we introduce a regularization loss that constrains the outputs of the LoRA update to lie in the orthogonal complement of the retain set's representation subspace, thereby minimizing interference with the model's performance on the retain set. We evaluate REGLU on the TOFU and WMDP benchmarks across multiple models. Our results demonstrate that REGLU consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving superior unlearning quality while maintaining higher model utility.

Automatic evaluation metrics are central to the development of machine translation systems, yet their robustness under domain shift remains unclear. Most metrics are developed on the Workshop on Machine Translation (WMT) benchmarks, raising concerns about their robustness to unseen domains. Prior studies that analyze unseen domains vary translation systems, annotators, or evaluation conditions, confounding domain effects with human annotation noise. To address these biases, we introduce a systematic multi-annotator Cross-Domain Error-Span-Annotation dataset (CD-ESA), comprising 18.8k human error span annotations across three language pairs, where we fix annotators within each language pair and evaluate translations of the same six translation systems across one seen news domain and two unseen technical domains. Using this dataset, we first find that automatic metrics appear surprisingly robust to domain-shifts at the segment level (up to 0.69 agreement), but this robustness largely disappears once we account for human label variation. Averaging annotations increases inter-annotator agreement by up to +0.11. Metrics struggle on the unseen chemical domain compared to humans (inter-annotator agreement of 0.78-0.83 vs. 0.96). We recommend comparing metric-human agreement against inter-annotator agreement, rather than comparing raw metric-human agreement alone, when evaluating across different domains.

RISC-V is emerging as a viable platform for automotive-grade embedded computing, with recent ISO 26262 ASIL-D certifications demonstrating readiness for safety-critical deployment in autonomous driving systems. However, functional safety in automotive systems is fundamentally a certification problem rather than a processor problem. The dominant costs arise from diagnostic coverage analysis, toolchain qualification, fault injection campaigns, safety-case generation, and compliance with ISO 26262, ISO 21448 (SOTIF), and ISO/SAE 21434. This paper analyzes the role of RISC-V in automotive functional safety, focusing on ISA openness, formal verifiability, custom extension control, debug transparency, and vendor-independent qualification. We examine autonomous driving safety requirements and map them to RISC-V architectural challenges such as lockstep execution, safety islands, mixed-criticality isolation, and secure debug. Rather than proposing a single algorithmic breakthrough, we present an analytical framework and research roadmap centered on certification economics as the primary optimization objective. We also discuss how selected ML methods, including LLM-assisted FMEDA generation, knowledge-graph-based safety case automation, reinforcement learning for fault injection, and graph neural networks for diagnostic coverage, can support certification workflows. We argue that the strongest outcome is not a faster core, but an ASIL-D-ready certifiable RISC-V platform.

Ancient inscriptions frequently suffer missing or corrupted regions from fragmentation, erosion, or other damage, hindering reading, and analysis. We review prior image restoration methods and their applicability to inscription image recovery, then introduce MESA (Multi-Exemplar, Style-Aware) -an image-level restoration method that uses well-preserved exemplar inscriptions (from the same epigraphic monument, material, or similar letterforms) to guide reconstruction of damaged text. MESA encodes VGG19 convolutional features as Gram matrices to capture exemplar texture, style, and stroke structure; for each neural network layer it selects the exemplar minimizing Mean-Squared Displacement (MSD) to the damaged input. Layer-wise contribution weights are derived from Optical Character Recognition-estimated character widths in the exemplar set to bias filters toward scales matching letter geometry, and a training mask preserves intact regions so synthesis is restricted to damaged areas. We also summarize prior network architectures and exemplar and single-image synthesis, inpainting, and Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) approaches, highlighting limitations that MESA addresses. Comparative experiments demonstrate the advantages of MESA. Finally, we provide a practical roadmap for choosing restoration strategies given available exemplars and metadata.

We introduce JuRe (Just Repair), a minimal denoising network for time series anomaly detection that exposes a central finding: architectural complexity is unnecessary when the training objective correctly implements the manifold-projection principle. JuRe consists of a single depthwise-separable convolutional residual block with hidden dimension 128, trained to repair corrupted time series windows and scored at inference by a fixed, parameter-free structural discrepancy function. Despite using no attention, no latent variable, and no adversarial component, JuRe ranks second on the TSB-AD multivariate benchmark (AUC-PR 0.404, 180 series, 17 datasets) and second on the UCR univariate archive by AUC-PR (0.198, 250 series), leading all neural baselines on AUC-PR and VUS-PR. Component ablation on TSB-AD identifies training-time corruption as the dominant factor ($Δ$AUC-PR $= 0.047$ on removal), confirming that the denoising objective, not network capacity, drives detection quality. Pairwise Wilcoxon signed-rank tests establish statistical significance against 21 of 25 baselines on TSB-AD. Code is available at the URL https://github.com/iis-esslingen/JuRe.

Large language model optimization has historically bifurcated into isolated data-centric and model-centric paradigms: the former manipulates involved samples through selection, augmentation, or poisoning, while the latter tunes model weights via masking, quantization, or low-rank adaptation. This paper establishes a unified \emph{data-parameter correspondence} revealing these seemingly disparate operations as dual manifestations of the same geometric structure on the statistical manifold $\mathcal{M}$. Grounded in the Fisher-Rao metric $g_{ij}(θ)$ and Legendre duality between natural ($θ$) and expectation ($η$) parameters, we identify three fundamental correspondences spanning the model lifecycle: 1. Geometric correspondence: data pruning and parameter sparsification equivalently reduce manifold volume via dual coordinate constraints; 2. Low-rank correspondence: in-context learning (ICL) and LoRA adaptation explore identical subspaces on the Grassmannian $\mathcal{G}(r,d)$, with $k$-shot samples geometrically equivalent to rank-$r$ updates; 3. Security-privacy correspondence: adversarial attacks exhibit cooperative amplification between data poisoning and parameter backdoors, whereas protective mechanisms follow cascading attenuation where data compression multiplicatively enhances parameter privacy. Extending from training through post-training compression to inference, this framework provides mathematical formalization for cross-community methodology transfer, demonstrating that cooperative optimization integrating data and parameter modalities may outperform isolated approaches across efficiency, robustness, and privacy dimensions.

This paper proposes StrEBM, a structured latent energy-based model for source-wise structured representation learning. The framework is motivated by a broader goal of promoting identifiable and decoupled latent organization by assigning different latent dimensions their own learnable structural biases, rather than constraining the entire latent representation with a single shared energy. In this sense, blind source separation is adopted here as a concrete and verifiable testbed, through which the evolution of latent dimensions toward distinct underlying components can be directly examined. In the proposed framework, latent trajectories are optimized directly together with an observation-generation map and source-wise structural parameters. Each latent dimension is associated with its own energy-based formulation, allowing different latent components to gradually evolve toward distinct source-like roles during training. In the present study, this source-wise energy design is instantiated using Gaussian-process-inspired energies with learnable length-scales, but the framework itself is not restricted to Gaussian processes and is intended as a more general structured latent EBM formulation. Experiments on synthetic multichannel signals under linear and nonlinear mixing settings show that the proposed model can recover source components effectively, providing an initial empirical validation of the framework. At the same time, the study reveals important optimization characteristics, including slow late-stage convergence and reduced stability under nonlinear observation mappings. These findings not only clarify the practical behavior of the current GP-based instantiation, but also establish a basis for future investigation of richer source-wise energy families and more robust nonlinear optimization strategies.

In this article, we generalize Unbounded Minimax, the state-of-the-art search algorithm for zero sums two-player games with perfect information to the framework of multiplayer games with perfect information. We experimentally show that this generalized algorithm also achieves better performance than the main multiplayer search algorithms.

While large language models have achieved remarkable performance in complex tasks, they still need a memory system to utilize historical experience in long-term interactions. Existing memory methods (e.g., A-Mem, Mem0) place excessive emphasis on organizing interactions by frequently rewriting them, however, this heavy reliance on summarization risks diluting essential contextual nuances and obscuring key retrieval features. To bridge this gap, we introduce AnchorMem, a novel memory framework inspired by the Proust Phenomenon in cognitive science, where a specific anchor triggers a holistic recollection. We propose a method that decouples the retrieval unit from the generation context. AnchorMem extracts atomic facts from interaction history to serve as retrieval anchors, while preserving the original context as the immutable context. To reveal implicit narrative cues, we construct an associative event graph that uses higher-order event links that bind sets of related facts into shared event representations, strengthening cross-memory integration without relying on generic entities as bridges. During retrieval, the system anchors queries to specific facts and events to locate relevant memories, but reconstructs the context using the associated raw chunks and events. Our method reconciles fine-grained retrieval with the contextual integrity of interactions. Experiments across three closed-source and open-source models on the LoCoMo benchmark demonstrate that AnchorMem significantly outperforms baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/RayNeo-AI-2025/AnchorMem.

In today's day and age, we face a challenge in detecting deepfake images because of the fast evolution of modern generative models and the poor generalization capability of existing methods. In this paper, we use an ensemble of fine-tuned vision transformers like DINOv2, AIMv2 and OpenCLIP's ViT-L/14 to create generalizable method to detect deepfakes. We use the DF-Wild dataset released as part of the IEEE SP Cup 2025, because it uses a challenging and diverse set of manipulations and generation techniques. We started our experiments with CNN classifiers trained on spatial features. Experimental results show that our ensemble outperforms individual models and strong CNN baselines, achieving an AUC of 96.77% and an Equal Error Rate (EER) of just 9% on the DF-Wild test set, beating the state-of-the-art deepfake detection algorithm Effort by 7.05% and 8% in AUC and EER respectively. This was the winning solution for SP Cup, presented at ICASSP 2025.

Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have substantially enhanced their ability across multimodal video understanding benchmarks spanning temporal, action, object, and spatial understanding. However, we identify a critical yet overlooked issue: when embedded on-screen text contradicts the visual scene, existing VLMs systematically hallucinate, prioritizing overlay textual semantics over the actual visual content. We define this phenomenon as Text Overlay-Induced Hallucination (TOIH). In this work, we propose VisualTextTrap, the first comprehensive benchmark, including large-scale human-validated samples with specifically designed evaluation metrics. In particular, we construct VisualTextTrap from widely-used public datasets using a scalable hybrid pipeline of VLMs assisted text generation and rigorous manual verification. The benchmark features 6,057 samples annotated across 88 fine-grained attributes within four dimensions, with hallucination intensity quantified on a five-level scale (L1--L5) that reflects the semantic contradiction between overlay text and visual reality. Moreover, we propose Visual Text Hallucination Mitigation Mixture-of-Experts (VTHM-MoE), a novel Vision-Text Disentanglement framework that employs a dual-encoder architecture. Concretely, four dimension-specialized expert modules spanning Temporal, Action, Object, and Spatial reasoning are first pre-trained to identify and leverage cross-modal discrepancies between textual semantics and actual video content. We develop an Adaptive Token Routing Strategy to enable dynamic expert allocation, conferring robust resistance to TOIH while preserving performance on uncontaminated videos. Extensive experiments conducted on our VisualTextTrap benchmark verify the effectiveness of VTHM-MoE, outperforming state-of-the-art counterparts with diverse video question answering tasks.

Edge computing enables AI inference closer to data sources, reducing latency and bandwidth costs. However, orchestrating AI services across the cloud-edge continuum remains challenging due to dynamic workloads and infrastructure variability. We present AIF-Router, an Active Inference--based routing framework that autonomously learns to balance latency, throughput, and resource utilization across multi-tier AI services without offline training. AIF-Router performs Bayesian state inference and expected free energy minimization to guide routing decisions based on observability-driven real-time metrics. Despite device instability on edge nodes, AIF-Router exhibits stable online learning behavior and demonstrates the feasibility of applying Active Inference for adaptive AI service orchestration in unreliable edge environments. Our findings highlight both the promise and practical challenges of deploying self-adaptive decision-making frameworks for real-world edge AI systems.

Argumentation skills are an essential toolkit for large language models (LLMs). These skills are crucial in various use cases, including self-reflection, debating collaboratively for diverse answers, and countering hate speech. In this paper, we create the first benchmark for a standardized evaluation of LLM-based approaches to computational argumentation, encompassing 33 datasets from previous work in unified form. Using the benchmark, we evaluate the generalizability of five LLM families across 46 computational argumentation tasks that cover mining arguments, assessing perspectives, assessing argument quality, reasoning about arguments, and generating arguments. On the benchmark, we conduct an extensive systematic analysis of the contribution of few-shot examples, reasoning steps, model size, and training skills to the performance of LLMs on the computational argumentation tasks in the benchmark.

Equality saturation (EqSat) is a powerful optimization paradigm that compactly represents many equivalent programs in an e-graph and delays commitment until extraction selects a lowest-cost program. Making EqSat effective, therefore, requires not only domain-specific rewrite rules but also domain-specific strategies. Today, much of this strategy design is still manual, making it a major obstacle to automating e-graph-based compilers. Recent rule-synthesis frameworks can automatically infer large rewrite vocabularies from semantic specifications, but they also enlarge the rewrite space and further exacerbate e-graph explosion. Although large language models (LLMs) make automated strategy synthesis plausible, directly evolving backend code remains ineffective in practice. The search lacks reusable strategy abstractions and actionable feedback, and can easily trigger e-graph explosion or converge to poor designs. We present EggMind, an LLM-guided, end-to-end framework for synthesizing reusable EqSat strategies. At its core, EggMind introduces a domain-specific language, EqSatL, to represent EqSat strategies as explicit and inspectable artifacts. It then proposes an LLM-guided agentic workflow, equipped with novel techniques including proof-derived rewrite motif caching and tractability guidance, to search efficiently for high-quality strategies while keeping synthesis stable under e-graph growth. Evaluation shows that EggMind substantially improves the resource-quality trade-off on vectorization benchmarks, reducing final cost by 45.1% and peak RAM by 69.1% relative to full EqSat. We further show that the same methodology transfers effectively to an XLA-based tensor compiler, and demonstrate its practical potential in a logic-synthesis case study with augmented rewrite spaces.

Fine-grained medical image classification is challenged by subtle inter-class variations and visually ambiguous cases, where confidence estimates often exhibit uncertainty rather than being overconfident. In such scenarios, purely discriminative classifiers may achieve high overall accuracy yet still fail to distinguish between highly similar categories, leading to miscalibrated predictions. We propose T-DuMpRa, a teacher-guided dual-path multi-prototype retrieval-augmented framework, where discriminative classification and multi-prototype retrieval jointly drive both training and prediction. During training, we jointly optimize cross-entropy and supervised contrastive objectives to learn a cosine-compatible embedding geometry for reliable prototype matching. We further employ an exponential moving average (EMA) teacher to obtain smoother representations and build a multi-prototype memory bank by clustering teacher embeddings in the teacher embedding space. Our framework is plug-and-play: it can be easily integrated into existing classification models by constructing a compact prototype bank, thereby improving performance on visually ambiguous cases. At inference, we combine the classifier's predicted distribution with a similarity-based distribution computed via cosine matching to prototypes, and apply a conservative confidence-gated fusion that activates retrieval only when the classifier's prediction is uncertain and the retrieval evidence is decisive and conflicting, otherwise keeping confident predictions unchanged. On HAM10000 and ISIC2019, our method yields 0.68%-0.21% and 0.44%-2.69% improvements on 5 different backbones. And visualization analysis proves our model can enhance the model's ability to handle visually ambiguous cases.

Large language models are increasingly deployed to simulate patients for clinical training, research, and mental health tools, yet population-level validity remains largely untested. We introduce PsychBench, the first epidemiological audit of LLM patient simulation: 28,800 profiles from four frontier models (GPT-4o-mini, DeepSeek-V3, Gemini-3-Flash, GLM-4.7) evaluated against NHANES and NESARC-III baselines across 120 intersectional cohorts. The central finding is a coherence-fidelity dissociation: models produce clinically plausible individuals while misrepresenting the populations they are drawn from. Variance compression ranges from 14 percent (GLM-4.7) to 62 percent (DeepSeek-V3), eliminating the distributional tails of clinical reality. Despite test-retest correlations above r = 0.90, 36.66 percent of cases cross diagnostic thresholds between runs. Symptom correlation matrices diverge across demographic groups beyond split-half noise, with transgender populations diverging three to five times more than racial differences. Calibration bias is systematic and asymmetric. Models overestimate depression severity for most groups by 3.6 to 6.1 points (Cohen d = 1.13 to 1.91), consistent with training on clinical corpora with elevated base rates. For transgender women the direction inverts: models capture only 8 to 46 percent of documented minority stress elevation, yielding a -5.42 residual (d = -1.55). Models also attribute irritability to Black men and fatigue to women beyond matched controls, encoding racialized and gendered assumptions. Patterns replicate across US and Chinese architectures, indicating failures tied to current training paradigms rather than isolated implementations. For most users, LLM mental health tools risk pathologizing ordinary distress; for transgender users, algorithmic erasure of genuine need. The patients look right. They do not represent real populations.

While recent Spoken Language Models (SLMs) have been actively deployed in real-world scenarios, they lack the capability to discern Third-Party Interruptions (TPI) from the primary user's ongoing flow, leaving them vulnerable to contextual failures. To bridge this gap, we introduce TPI-Train, a dataset of 88K instances designed with speaker-aware hard negatives to enforce acoustic cue prioritization for interruption handling, and TPI-Bench, a comprehensive evaluation framework designed to rigorously measure the interruption-handling strategy and precise speaker discrimination in deceptive contexts. Experiments demonstrate that our dataset design mitigates semantic shortcut learning-a critical pitfall where models exploit semantic context while neglecting acoustic signals essential for discerning speaker changes. We believe our work establishes a foundational resource for overcoming text-dominated unimodal reliance in SLMs, paving the way for more robust multi-party spoken interaction. The code for the framework is publicly available at https://tpi-va.github.io

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at photorealistic generation, yet often struggle to represent abstract meaning such as idiomatic interpretations of noun compounds. To study whether high visual fidelity interferes with idiomatic compositionality under visual abstraction, we introduce DIVA, a controlled benchmark that replaces high-fidelity visual detail with schematic iconicity by generating paired, sense-anchored visualizations for literal and idiomatic readings. We further propose Semantic Alignment Gap ($Δ$), an architecture-agnostic metric that quantifies divergence between literal and idiomatic visual grounding. We additionally introduce a directional signed bias $b(t)$ to separately measure the direction and strength of literal preference. Evaluating 8 recent VLMs, we reveal a consistent Literal Superiority Bias: model scale alone does not resolve literal preference, and increased visual fidelity is associated with weaker symbolic alignment, suggesting cognitive interference from hyper-realistic imagery. Our findings suggest that improving compositional understanding requires iconographic abstraction of visual input and anchoring interpretation and generation in intended meaning.

Large language models are increasingly deployed as complex agentic systems that scale with task complexity. While prior work has extensively explored model- and system-level scaling, algorithm- and task-level scaling remain largely unaddressed, constraining the full potential of agentic systems. At the algorithm level, allocating additional inference-time computation can enhance workflow capacity but introduces cross-path redundancy: overlapping computations across multiple reasoning branches. At the task level, complex tasks can be decomposed into subproblems and delegated across multiple agents for improved scalability and parallelism. However, existing infrastructures' scheduling is unaware of the existence of multiple agents, missing opportunities to optimize resource allocation. We propose Hive, a multi-agent infrastructure that enables algorithm- and task-level scaling. Hive features a description frontend that captures per-agent behavior and supports test-time scaling algorithms. Leveraging this specification, our backend introduces two key mechanisms: Logits Cache that reuses intermediate logits across redundant sampling paths to mitigate cross-path redundancy at the algorithm level, and Agent-Aware Scheduling that efficiently allocates compute and KV-cache resources according to agent contributions at the task level. Experiments show that Logits Cache achieves an average speedup of $1.11\times$-$1.76\times$ for re-sampling, and Agent-Aware Scheduling reduces the hotspot miss rate by $33\%$-$51\%$.

Automated simulator construction requires distributional fidelity, distinguishing it from generic code generation. We identify two failure modes in long-horizon LLM agents: contextual drift and optimization instability arising from conflating structural and parametric errors. We propose SOCIA-EVO, a dual-anchored evolutionary framework. SOCIA-EVO introduces: (1) a static blueprint to enforce empirical constraints; (2) a bi-level optimization to decouple structural refinement from parameter calibration; and (3) a self-curating Strategy Playbook that manages remedial hypotheses via Bayesian-weighted retrieval. By falsifying ineffective strategies through execution feedback, SOCIA-EVO achieves robust convergence, generating simulators that are statistically consistent with observational data. The code and data of SOCIA-EVO are available here: https://github.com/cruiseresearchgroup/SOCIA/tree/evo.

Just like traditional BPM systems, agentic BPM systems are built around a specification of the process under consideration. Their distinguishing feature, however, is that the execution of the process is driven by multiple autonomous decision-makers, referred to as agents. Since such agents cannot be fully controlled, the process specification is augmented with explicit objectives, or goals, assigned to the participating agents. Agents then pursue these goals, at least to the best of their efforts, under suitable assumptions on the behavior of others, by adopting appropriate strategies. Centrally, the organization enacting the process can use these specifications to provide guardrails on the decision-making capabilities of agents at the strategy level. This paper sets up the mathematical foundations of such systems in three key settings and analyzes four foundational problems of agentic BPM.

In this book we promote logical computational linguistics as opposed to statistical computational linguistics. In particular, we provide a logical semantic interface. This book assembles more than twenty years of research work on type logical grammar, and adds new ideas and material. Chains of statistical dependencies of less than one hundred per cent confidence tend monotonically to zero. Chains of logical dependencies of any length maintain one hundred per cent confidence end to end. We aspire to enable perfect syntactic and semantic processing in life-critical NLP applications.

When task-specific labels are not available, it becomes difficult to select an embedding model for a specific target corpus. Existing labelless measures based on kernel estimators or Gaussian mixes fail in high-dimensional space, resulting in unstable rankings. We propose a flow-based labelless representation embedding evaluation (FLARE), which utilizes normalized streams to estimate information sufficiency directly from log-likelihood and avoid distance-based density estimation. We give a finite sample boundary, indicating that the estimation error depends on the intrinsic dimension of the data manifold rather than the original embedding dimension. On 11 datasets and 8 embedders, FLARE reached Spearman's $ρ$ of 0.90 under the supervised benchmark and remained stable in high-dimensional embeddings ($d \geq 3{,}584$) as the existing labelless baseline collapsed.

Monotone Boolean functions are a structurally important class of Boolean functions, but their restricted form imposes strong limitations on achievable nonlinearity. In this paper, we investigate whether evolutionary computation can evolve monotone Boolean functions with high nonlinearity, both in the balanced and imbalanced settings. We consider three solution encodings: the standard truth table representation, a balanced truth table encoding that preserves Hamming weight, and a symbolic tree-based genetic programming representation. To guide the search toward monotone increasing functions, we introduce a non-monotonicity penalty and combine it with fitness functions targeting balancedness and nonlinearity. Experimental results are reported for dimensions from $n=5$ to $n=14$. The results show that evolutionary search can discover monotone Boolean functions with nonlinearities clearly exceeding those of majority functions, and in several cases approaching the best currently known values for monotone functions. At the same time, the experiments reveal substantial differences between encodings: the balanced truth table encoding performs poorly for larger dimensions, while the standard truth table and genetic programming encodings remain competitive, with genetic programming becoming especially relevant in the largest tested dimensions.

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of vision impairment worldwide, and automated grading systems play a crucial role in large-scale screening programs. However, deep learning models often exhibit degraded performance when deployed across datasets acquired under different imaging conditions. This study presents a robust dual-resolution deep learning framework for DR grading that integrates attention-based feature fusion with ordinal regression to improve cross-dataset generalization. The proposed method employs two parallel EfficientNet backbones operating at different spatial resolutions to capture complementary retinal features. A learnable attention mechanism adaptively fuses multi-resolution representations, while an ordinal regression formulation based on the cumulative link model (CORAL) explicitly accounts for the ordered nature of DR severity levels. To mitigate domain discrepancies between datasets, a preprocessing strategy combining circular cropping, contrast enhancement, and histogram matching is applied. The model was trained on the APTOS 2019 dataset and evaluated on both an internal validation split and an external Messidor-2 test set. Experimental results demonstrate strong grading performance, achieving a quadratic weighted kappa (QWK) of 0.88 on the APTOS validation set and 0.68 on the unseen Messidor-2 dataset, indicating improved robustness for cross-dataset DR grading applications.

Clinical guidelines, typically developed by independent specialty societies, inherently exhibit substantial fragmentation, redundancy, and logical contradiction. These inconsistencies, particularly when applied to patients with multimorbidity, not only cause cognitive dissonance for clinicians but also introduce catastrophic noise into AI systems, rendering the standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system fragile and prone to hallucination. To address this fundamental reliability crisis, we introduce a Neuro-Symbolic framework that automates the detection of recommendation redundancies and conflicts. Our pipeline employs a multi-agent system to translate unstructured clinical natural language into rigorous symbolic logic language, which is then verified by a Satisfiability (SAT) solver. By formulating a hierarchical taxonomy of logical rule interactions, we identify a critical category termed Local Conflict - a decision conflict arising from the intersection of comorbidities. Evaluating our system on a curated benchmark of 12 authoritative SGLT2 inhibitor guidelines, we reveal that 90.6% of conflicts are Local, a structural complexity that single-disease guidelines fail to address. While state-of-the-art LLMs fail in detecting these conflicts, our neuro-symbolic approach achieves an F1 score of 0.861. This work demonstrates that logical verification must precede retrieval, establishing a new technical standard for automated knowledge coordination in medical AI.

Unlike code completion, debugging requires localizing faults and applying targeted edits. We observe that frontier LLMs often regenerate correct but over-edited solutions during debugging. To evaluate how far LLMs are from precise debugging, we introduce the Precise Debugging Benchmark (PDB) framework, which automatically converts any coding dataset into a debugging benchmark with precision-aware evaluation. PDB generates buggy programs by synthesizing verified atomic bugs and composing them into multi-bug programs. We define two novel metrics, edit-level precision and bug-level recall, which measures how many necessary edits are made and how many bugs are resolved. We release two evaluation benchmarks: PDB-Single-Hard on single-line bugs, and PDB-Multi on multi-line bugs. Experiments show that frontier models, such as GPT-5.1-Codex and DeepSeek-V3.2-Thinking, achieve unit-test pass rates above 76% but exhibit precision below 45%, even when explicitly instructed to perform minimal debugging. Finally, we show that iterative and agentic debugging strategies do not substantially improve precision or recall, highlighting the need to rethink post-training pipelines for coding models.

Agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems enable large language models (LLMs) to solve complex tasks through multi-step interaction with external retrieval tools. However, such multi-step interaction often involves redundant search steps, incurring substantial computational cost and latency. Prior work limits search depth (i.e., the number of search steps) to reduce cost, but this often leads to underexploration of complex questions. To address this, we first investigate how search depth affects accuracy and find a minimal sufficient search depth that defines an accuracy-efficiency trade-off, jointly determined by question complexity and the agent's capability. Furthermore, we propose AutoSearch, a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that evaluates each search step via self-generated intermediate answers. By a self-answering mechanism, AutoSearch identifies the minimal sufficient search depth and promotes efficient search by rewarding its attainment while penalizing over-searching. In addition, reward mechanisms are introduced to stabilize search behavior and improve answer quality on complex questions. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that AutoSearch achieves a superior accuracy-efficiency trade-off, alleviating over-searching while preserving search quality.

Design patterns provide reusable solutions to recurring software design problems. Automatically detecting these patterns in source code can help bootstrap new developers' understanding of unfamiliar software system architectures, and can help experienced developers to quickly identify and rectify potential quality issues. While many prior research works have explored graph based and machine-learning based detection techniques, this work evaluates the design pattern recognition capabilities of four Large Language Models and two ensemble approaches consisting three out of the four models. We also compare their performance when prompted with a) Source code, b) PlantUML representation of source code, and c) Text-based descriptions of the source code. We investigate the detection of five design patterns: singleton, adapter, bridge, composite and decorator. Our preliminary results indicate that LLMs show promise for automatically detecting design patterns, with NextCoder and Gemma 3 demonstrating comparatively higher accuracy than other models evaluated, and the ensemble approaches enhancing the overall efficiency of design pattern detection. We identify several directions for future work.

This paper investigates the length problem in sequence-level relative reinforcement learning. We observe that, although existing methods partially alleviate length-related phenomena, a more fundamental issue remains insufficiently characterized: the comparison units used during training lack inherent comparability. Building on this observation, we propose a new perspective: the length problem should not be viewed merely as a loss-scaling or normalization bias, but rather as a \emph{comparison unit construction} problem. We further establish a sample-construction-based training framework that, instead of applying post-hoc corrections to unequal-length responses, proactively constructs equal-length, alignable, and comparable training segments during generation. Within this framework, we propose EqLen, a concrete method applicable to group-relative comparison algorithms such as GRPO, GSPO, and RLOO. Through dual-track synchronous generation, prefix inheritance, and segment masking, EqLen efficiently collects effective equal-length training segments and enables stable

We present the first portfolio-level validation of MarketSenseAI, a deployed multi-agent LLM equity system. All signals are generated live at each observation date, eliminating look-ahead bias. The system routes four specialist agents (News, Fundamentals, Dynamics, and Macro) through a synthesis agent that issues a monthly equity thesis and recommendation for each stock in its coverage universe, and we ask two questions: do its buy recommendations add value over both passive benchmarks and random selection, and what does the internal agent structure reveal about the source of the edge? On the S&P 500 cohort (19 months) the strong-buy equal-weight portfolio earns +2.18%/month against a passive equal-weight benchmark of +1.15% (approximating RSP), a +25.2% compound excess, and ranks at the 99.7th percentile of 10,000 Monte Carlo portfolios (p=0.003). The S&P 100 cohort (35 months) delivers a +30.5% compound excess over EQWL with consistent direction but formal significance not reached, limited by the small average selection of ~10 stocks per month. Non-negative least-squares projection of thesis embeddings onto agent embeddings reveals an adaptive-integration mechanism. Agent contributions rotate with market regime (Fundamentals leads on S&P 500, Macro on S&P 100, Dynamics acts as an episodic momentum signal) and this agent rotation moves in lockstep with both the sector composition of strong-buy selections and identifiable macro-calendar events, three independent views of the same underlying adaptation. The recommendation's cross-sectional Information Coefficient is statistically significant on S&P 500 (ICIR=+0.489, p=0.024). These results suggest that multi-agent LLM equity systems can identify sources of alpha beyond what classical factor models capture, and that the buy signal functions as an effective universe-filter that can sit upstream of any portfolio-construction process.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances the factuality of Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating retrieved documents and/or generated context. However, LLMs often exhibit a stylistic bias when presented with mixed contexts, favoring fluent but hallucinated generated content over factually grounded yet disorganized retrieved evidence. This phenomenon reveals that the utility of retrieved information is bottlenecked by its presentation. To bridge this gap, we propose QREAM, a style-controlled rewriter that aligns retrieved documents with a question-oriented style while preserving facts, better for LLM readers to utilize. Our framework consists of two stages: (1) QREAM-ICL, which uses stylistic seeds to guide iterative rewriting exploration; and (2) QREAM-FT, a lightweight student model distilled from denoised ICL outputs. QREAM-FT employs dual-criteria rejection sampling, filtering based on answer correctness and factual consistency to ensure high-quality supervision. QREAM seamlessly integrates into existing RAG pipelines as a plug-and-play module. Experiments demonstrate that QREAM consistently enhances advanced RAG pipelines, yielding up to 8% relative improvement with negligible latency overhead, effectively balancing question relevance with factual grounding.

Graph transformers achieve strong results on molecular and long-range reasoning tasks, yet remain hampered by over-smoothing (the progressive collapse of node representations with depth) and attention entropy degeneration. We observe that these pathologies share a root cause with attention sinks in large language models: softmax attention's sum-to-one constraint forces every node to attend somewhere, even when no informative signal exists. Motivated by recent findings that element-wise sigmoid gating eliminates attention sinks in large language models, we propose SigGate-GT, a graph transformer that applies learned, per-head sigmoid gates to the attention output within the GraphGPS framework. Each gate can suppress activations toward zero, enabling heads to selectively silence uninformative connections. On five standard benchmarks, SigGate-GT matches the prior best on ZINC (0.059 MAE) and sets new state-of-the-art on ogbg-molhiv (82.47% ROC-AUC), with statistically significant gains over GraphGPS across all five datasets ($p < 0.05$). Ablations show that gating reduces over-smoothing by 30% (mean relative MAD gain across 4-16 layers), increases attention entropy, and stabilizes training across a $10\times$ learning rate range, with about 1% parameter overhead on OGB.

Modern generative models still lack human-level creativity, particularly in multi-branch diversity. Prior approaches to address this problem often incur heavy computation or strong dependency on model architecture. Therefore, we introduce UAG(Universal Avoidance Generation), a model-agnostic and computationally efficient generation strategy that penalizes similarity among previously generated outputs. Thus, UAG can enhance multi-branch diversity across both diffusion and transformer models, with minimal additional computation. In experiments, our method achieves up to 1.9 times higher diversity, runs 4.4 times faster, and requires only 1/64 of the FLOPs compared to state-of-the-art methods. The full code is https://anonymous.4open.science/r/2026_ACL_Universal/.

Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (GMNER) aims to jointly identify named entity mentions in text, predict their semantic types, and ground each entity to a corresponding visual region in an associated image. Existing approaches predominantly adopt pipeline-based architectures that decouple textual entity recognition and visual grounding, leading to error accumulation and suboptimal joint optimization. In this paper, we propose E2E-GMNER, a fully end-to-end generative framework that unifies entity recognition, semantic typing, visual grounding, and implicit knowledge reasoning within a single multimodal large language model. We formulate GMNER as an instruction-tuned conditional generation task and incorporate chain-of-thought reasoning to enable the model to adaptively determine when visual evidence or background knowledge is informative, reducing reliance on noisy cues. To further address the instability of generative bounding box prediction, we introduce Gaussian Risk-Aware Box Perturbation (GRBP), which replaces hard box supervision with probabilistically perturbed soft targets to improve robustness against annotation noise and discretization errors. Extensive experiments on the Twitter-GMNER and Twitter-FMNERG benchmarks demonstrate that E2E-GMNER achieves highly competitive performance compared with state of the art methods, validating the effectiveness of unified end-to-end optimization and noise-aware grounding supervision. Code is available at:https://github.com/Finch-coder/E2E-GMNER

Safe clinical deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) requires not only high accuracy but also robust uncertainty calibration to ensure models defer to clinicians when appropriate. Our paper investigates how social descriptors of a patient (specifically sexual orientation and religious affiliation) distort these uncertainty signals and model accuracy. Evaluating nine general-purpose and biomedical LLMs on 2,364 medical questions and their counterfactual variants, we demonstrate that identity markers cause a "calibration crisis". "Homosexual" markers consistently trigger performance drops, and intersectional identities produce idiosyncratic, non-additive harms to calibration. Moreover, a clinician-validated case study in an open-ended generation setting confirms that these failures are not an artifact of the multiple-choice format. Our results demonstrate that the presence of social identity cues does not merely shift predictions; it affects the reliability of confidence signals, posing a significant risk to equitable care and safe deployment in confidence-based clinical workflows.

Previous LLMs-based RL studies typically follow either supervised learning with high annotation costs, or unsupervised paradigms using voting or entropy-based rewards. However, their performance remains far from satisfactory due to the substantial annotation cost and issues such as model collapse or reward hacking. To address these issues, we introduce a new perspective inspired by cognitive learning theory and propose a novel approach called EasyRL. The core of EasyRL is to simulate the human cognitive acquisition curve by integrating reliable knowledge transfer from easy labeled data with a progressive divide-and-conquer strategy that tackles increasingly difficult unlabeled data. Specifically, we initialize a warm-up model using supervised RL with few-shot labeled data. This is followed by a divide-and-conquer pseudo-labeling strategy on difficult unlabeled data, combining consistency-based selection for low-uncertainty cases and reflection-based resolution for medium-uncertainty cases. Finally, difficulty-progressive self-training with iterative pseudo-labeling and RL further strengthens the model's reasoning capability. EasyRL provides a unified self-evolving framework that facilitates data-efficient post-training of LLMs. Experimental results on mathematical and scientific benchmarks demonstrate that EasyRL, using only 10% of easy labeled data, consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful post-training paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, reinforcement learning for LLMs faces substantial data scarcity challenges, including the limited availability of high-quality external supervision and the constrained volume of model-generated experience. These limitations make data-efficient reinforcement learning a critical research direction. In this survey, we present the first systematic review of reinforcement learning for LLMs under data scarcity. We propose a bottom-up hierarchical framework built around three complementary perspectives: the data-centric perspective, the training-centric perspective, and the framework-centric perspective. We develop a taxonomy of existing methods, summarize representative approaches in each category, and analyze their strengths and limitations. Our taxonomy aims to provide a clear conceptual foundation for understanding the design space of data-efficient RL for LLMs and to guide researchers working in this emerging area. We hope this survey offers a comprehensive roadmap for future research and inspires new directions toward more efficient and scalable reinforcement learning post-training for LLMs.

Discrete diffusion models form a powerful class of generative models across diverse domains, including text and graphs. However, existing approaches face fundamental limitations. Masked diffusion models suffer from irreversible errors due to early unmasking, while uniform diffusion models, despite enabling self-correction, often yield low-quality samples due to their strong reliance on intermediate latent states. We introduce IDDM, an Interpolating Discrete Diffusion Model, that improves diffusion by reducing dependence on intermediate latent states. Central to IDDM is a controllable resampling mechanism that partially resets probability mass to the marginal distribution, mitigating error accumulation and enabling more effective token corrections. IDDM specifies a generative process whose transitions interpolate between staying at the current state, resampling from a prior, and flipping toward the target state, while enforcing marginal consistency and fully decoupling training from inference. We benchmark our model against state-of-the-art discrete diffusion models across molecular graph generation as well as text generation tasks, demonstrating competitive performance.

Research artifacts are distributed primarily as reader-oriented documents like PDFs. This creates a bottleneck for increasingly agent-assisted and agent-native research workflows, in which LLM agents need to infer fine-grained, task-relevant information from lengthy full documents, a process that is expensive, repetitive, and unstable at scale. We introduce Knows, a lightweight companion specification that binds structured claims, evidence, provenance, and verifiable relations to existing research artifacts in a form LLM agents can consume directly. Knows addresses the gap with a thin YAML sidecar (KnowsRecord) that coexists with the original PDF, requiring no changes to the publication itself, and validated by a deterministic schema linter. We evaluate Knows on 140 comprehension questions across 20 papers spanning 14 academic disciplines, comparing PDF-only, sidecar-only, and hybrid conditions across six LLM agents of varying capacity. Weak models (0.8B--2B parameters) improve from 19--25\% to 47--67\% accuracy (+29 to +42 percentage points) when reading sidecar instead of PDF, while consuming 29--86\% fewer input tokens; an LLM-as-judge re-scoring confirms that weak-model sidecar accuracy (75--77\%) approaches stronger-model PDF accuracy (78--83\%). Beyond this controlled evaluation, a community sidecar hub at https://knows.academy/ has already indexed over ten thousand publications and continues to grow daily, providing independent evidence that the format is adoption-ready at scale.

As the capability frontier of autonomous agents continues to expand, they are increasingly able to complete specialized tasks through plug-and-play external skills. Yet current benchmarks mostly test whether models can use provided skills, leaving open whether they can discover skills from experience, repair them after failure, and maintain a coherent library over time. We introduce SkillFlow, a benchmark of 166 tasks across 20 families in which task construction within each family follows a Domain-Agnostic Execution Flow (DAEF) that defines an agent workflow framework, allowing these tasks to share a consistent workflow. Agents are evaluated under an Agentic Lifelong Learning protocol in which they begin without skills, solve tasks sequentially within each family, externalize lessons through trajectory- and rubric-driven skill patches, and carry the updated library forward. Experiments reveal a substantial capability gap. For Claude Opus 4.6, lifelong skill evolution improves task success from 62.65% to 71.08% (+8.43 points). However, high skill usage does not necessarily imply high utility: Kimi K2.5 gains only +0.60 points despite 66.87% skill usage, while Qwen-Coder-Next reaches only a 44.58% task completion rate and still regresses relative to the vanilla setting. SkillFlow contributes a structured testbed for this direction and an in-depth empirical analysis of skill discovery, patching, transfer, and their failure modes under lifelong evaluation.

Test-time scaling improves the reasoning performance of large language models but often results in token-inefficient overthinking, where models continue reasoning beyond what is necessary for a correct answer. Existing dynamic early-exit methods typically rely on single-step confidence signals, which are often unreliable for detecting reasoning convergence in multi-step settings. To mitigate this limitation, we propose TRACE, a training-free framework for efficient test-time scaling that determines when to terminate reasoning based on temporal aggregation of multi-step evidence rather than instantaneous signals. TRACE detects reasoning convergence over time by aggregating two complementary signals across recent reasoning steps: answer consistency, capturing the persistence of predicted answers, and confidence trajectory, modeling the temporal evolution of model confidence. Benefiting from these two factors, TRACE can accurately determine whether the reasoning process has converged, thereby promptly halting inference and effectively avoiding redundant reasoning steps. Extensive experiments on multiple challenging benchmarks show that TRACE reduces reasoning token usage by 25-30% on average while maintaining accuracy within 1-2% of full-length reasoning, consistently outperforming existing dynamic reasoning methods.

Detecting harmful content in multi turn dialogue requires reasoning over the full conversational context rather than isolated utterances. However, most existing methods rely mainly on models internal parametric knowledge, without explicit grounding in external normative principles. This often leads to inconsistent judgments in socially nuanced contexts, limited interpretability, and redundant reasoning across turns. To address this, we propose RoTRAG, a retrieval augmented framework that incorporates concise human written moral norms, called Rules of Thumb (RoTs), into LLM based harm assessment. For each turn, RoTRAG retrieves relevant RoTs from an external corpus and uses them as explicit normative evidence for turn level reasoning and final severity classification. To improve efficiency, we further introduce a lightweight binary routing classifier that decides whether a new turn requires retrieval grounded reasoning or can reuse existing context. Experiments on ProsocialDialog and Safety Reasoning Multi Turn Dialogue show that RoTRAG consistently improves both harm classification and severity estimation over competitive baselines, with an average relative gain of around 40% in F1 across benchmark datasets and an average relative reduction of 8.4% in distributional error, while reducing redundant computation without sacrificing performance.

The scarcity of labeled clinical data in oncology makes Few-Shot Learning (FSL) a critical framework for Computer Aided Diagnostics, but we observed that standard Prototypical Networks often struggle with the "prototype instability" caused by morphological noise and high intra-class variance in brain tumor scans. Our work attempts to minimize this by integrating a non-linear Logistic Chaos Module into a fine-tuned ResNet-18 backbone creating the Chaos-Enhanced ProtoNet(CE-ProtoNet). Using the deterministic ergodicity of the logistic chaos map we inject controlled perturbations into support features during episodic training-essentially for "stress testing" the embedding space. This process makes the model to converge on noise-invariant representations without increasing computational overhead. Testing this on a 4-way 5-shot brain tumor classification task, we found that a 15% chaotic injection level worked efficiently to stabilize high-dimensional clusters and reduce class dispersion. Our method achieved a peak test accuracy of 84.52%, outperforming standard ProtoNet. Our results suggest the idea of using chaotic perturbation as an efficient, low-overhead regularization tool, for the data-scarce regimes.

Aligning large language models with human preferences must balance two competing goals: responding helpfully to legitimate requests and reliably refusing harmful ones. Most preference-based safety alignment methods collapse safety into a single scalar that is applied uniformly to every preference pair. The result is a model that looks safe on average but stays relatively unsafe on a minority of harm categories. We cast safety alignment as a per-category constrained optimization problem and derive Cat-DPO, a direct-preference-optimization algorithm with a separate adaptive safety margin for each harm category. The margin tightens when the model still produces unsafe responses on a category and relaxes once the model catches up, so the training signal tracks each category's current difficulty rather than averaging under one global rate. Across two LLM backbones and six preference-learning baselines, Cat-DPO improves aggregate helpfulness and harmlessness and compresses per-category safety variance and the best-to-worst gap, offering a drop-in per-category refinement of direct preference safety alignment.

Long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning is pivotal for the success of recent reasoning models but suffers from high computational overhead and latency. While prior works attempt to compress CoT via external compressor, they often fail to align with the model's internal reasoning dynamics, resulting in the loss of critical logical steps. This paper presents \textbf{C}ompressing \textbf{R}edundancy in Chain-of-Thought via \textbf{I}ntrinsic \textbf{S}aliency \textbf{P}runing (\textbf{CRISP}), a framework that compresses CoT by exploiting the model's intrinsic saliency. Our analysis reveals a distinct phenomenon: the reasoning termination token \texttt{[object Object]} acts as an information anchor, where its attention pattern effectively demarcates essential reasoning from redundancy. Based on this finding, we design a policy that utilizes these intrinsic attention signals to guide atomic compression operations. In contrast to coarse-grained pruning strategies, CRISP strategically distills the reasoning chain to maximize information density while preserving logical coherence. Empirical results across various backbone models and mathematical datasets demonstrate that CRISP achieves a 50-60% reduction in token count without compromising accuracy, effectively mitigating the efficiency bottleneck of long-context reasoning. We open-source our implementation to facilitate further research in efficient reasoning.

Comprehensive understanding of time series remains a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs). Current research is hindered by fragmented task definitions and benchmarks with inherent ambiguities, precluding rigorous evaluation and the development of unified Time Series Reasoning Models(TSRMs). To bridge this gap, we formalize Time Series Reasoning (TSR) via a four-level taxonomy of increasing cognitive complexity. We introduce HiTSR, a hierarchical time series reasoning dataset comprising 83k samples with diverse task combinations and verified Chain-of-Thought (CoT) trajectories. Leveraging HiTSR, we propose LLaTiSA, a strong TSRM that integrates visualized patterns with precision-calibrated numerical tables to enhance the temporal perception of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Through a multi-stage curriculum fine-tuning strategy, LLaTiSA achieves superior performance and exhibits robust out-of-distribution generalization across diverse TSR tasks and real-world scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/RainingNovember/LLaTiSA.

Reliable Large Language Models (LLMs) should abstain when confidence is insufficient. However, prior studies often treat refusal as a generic "I don't know'', failing to distinguish input-level ambiguity (data uncertainty) from capability limitations (model uncertainty). This lack of distinction limits downstream action decisions like requesting clarification or invoking external tools. In this work, we introduce UA-Bench, a benchmark of over 3,500 questions drawn from six datasets spanning knowledge-intensive and reasoning-intensive tasks, designed to evaluate explicit uncertainty attribution. An evaluation of 18 frontier LLMs shows that even state-of-the-art models struggle to reliably discriminate between data uncertainty and model uncertainty, and that high answer accuracy does not necessarily imply strong uncertainty attribution ability. To narrow this gap, we propose a lightweight data synthesis and reinforcement learning strategy. Experiments on both Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 and Qwen3-8B in thinking mode show that the proposed method improves uncertainty attribution while preserving answer accuracy. Our code and data are publicly available now.

LLMs are widely used for code generation and mathematical reasoning tasks where they are required to generate structured output. They either need to reason about code, generate code for a given specification, or reason using programs of thought. The typical approach to code generation is to prompt the model and generate samples until an appropriate program is obtained. Within this process, sampling $n$ programs from the language model requires $n$ GPU compute-intensive generations which becomes prohibitively expensive for larger values of $n$. In this work, we address this limitation by exposing the LLM's distribution within the generated programs themselves. We propose a novel test-time framework we dub probabilistic programs of thought to obtain more samples from the model with fewer LLM generations. Given a program generated by a model and the associated next-token probabilities, we build a probabilistic program that compactly represents exponentially many deterministic programs. Since performing probabilistic reasoning in this probabilistic program is much cheaper, our approach allows sampling new programs without any additional GPU compute and little CPU overhead. We instantiate our approach on benchmarks for code generation, code understanding and mathematical reasoning and report improvements in performance with fewer generations from the LLM.

Supervised fine-tuning of large language models relies on human-annotated data, yet annotation pipelines routinely involve multiple crowdworkers of heterogeneous expertise. Standard practice aggregates labels via majority vote or simple averaging, discarding annotator identity and causing the model to absorb the errors of unreliable annotators directly into its parameters. We propose REALM, a method that jointly learns the model parameters and a scalar expertise value for each annotator entirely unsupervised, requiring no supervision beyond annotator identity. The key idea is to model each observed label as a mixture between the model's prediction and a uniform random guess, weighted by the annotator's learned expertise. We extend REALM to a multi-task setting via a learned expertise matrix that captures per-annotator reliability across tasks. We evaluate on five question answering benchmarks, fine-tuning three sizes of Flan-T5 under simulated noisy annotations. The proposed algorithm consistently outperforms the naive noisy SFT in the large majority of single- and multi-task settings, across datasets, model sizes, and noise types, with accuracy improvements of up to $50\%$ in the most adversarial regime and gains that grow with model capacity.

RTL program repair remains a critical bottleneck in hardware design and verification. Traditional automatic program repair (APR) methods rely on predefined templates and synthesis, limiting their bug coverage. Large language models (LLMs) and coding agents based on them offer flexibility but suffer from randomness and context corruption when handling long RTL code and waveforms. We present Clover, a neural-symbolic agentic harness that orchestrates RTL repair as a structured search over code manipulations to explore a validated solution for the bug. Recognizing that different repair operations favor distinct strategies, Clover dynamically dispatches tasks to specialized LLM agents or symbolic solvers. At its core, Clover introduces stochastic tree-of-thoughts, a test-time scaling mechanism that manages the main agent's context as a search tree, balancing exploration and exploitation for reliable outcomes. An RTL-specific toolbox further empowers agents to interact with the debugging environment. Evaluated on the RTL-repair benchmark, Clover fixes 96.8% of bugs within a fixed time limit, covering 94% and 63% more bugs than both pure traditional and LLM-based baselines, respectively, while achieving an average pass@1 rate of 87.5%, demonstrating high reliability and effectiveness.

While progress in GUI agents has been largely driven by industrial-scale training, ungrounded hallucinations often trigger cascading failures in real-world deployments.Unlike general VLM domains, the GUI agent field lacks a hallucination-focused suite for fine-grained diagnosis, reliable evaluation, and targeted mitigation.To bridge this gap, we introduce HalluClear, a comprehensive suite for hallucination mitigation in GUI agents as a complement to computation-intensive scaling. HalluClear comprises: (1) a GUI-specific hallucination taxonomy derived from empirical failure analysis; (2) a calibrated three-stage evaluation workflow which enhances VLM-as-a-judge reliability via expert-annotated benchmarking and ensemble credibility estimation; and (3) a mitigation scheme based on closed-loop structured reasoning, enabling lightweight continual post-training with cold-start initialization for both generalist and GUI-specialist agents. Experiments across representative agents and public benchmarks demonstrate that post-training on only 9K samples within our suite can significantly reduce hallucinations, thereby improving grounding and action fidelity, offering a compute-efficient pathway to robust GUI automation.

User preferences evolve across months of interaction, and tracking them requires inferring when a stated preference has been changed by a subsequent life event. We define this problem as long-horizon personalization and observe that progress on it is limited by data availability and measurement, with no existing resource providing both naturalistic long-horizon interactions and the ground-truth provenance needed to diagnose why models fail. We introduce a data generator that produces conversations from a structured mental state graph, yielding ground-truth provenance for every preference change across 6-month timelines, and from it construct HorizonBench, a benchmark of 4,245 items from 360 simulated users with 6-month conversation histories averaging ~4,300 turns and ~163K tokens. HorizonBench provides a testbed for long-context modeling, memory-augmented architectures, theory-of-mind reasoning, and user modeling. Across 25 frontier models, the best model reaches 52.8% and most score at or below the 20% chance baseline. When these models err on evolved preferences, over a third of the time they select the user's originally stated value without tracking the updated user state. This belief-update failure persists across context lengths and expression explicitness levels, identifying state-tracking capability as the primary bottleneck for long-horizon personalization.

Process-Level Reward Models (PRMs) are essential for guiding complex reasoning in large language models, yet existing PRM benchmarks cover only general domains such as mathematics, failing to address medical reasoning -- which is uniquely characterized by safety criticality, knowledge intensity, and diverse error patterns. Without a reliable medical PRM evaluation framework, we cannot quantify models' error detection capabilities in clinical reasoning, leaving their safety in real-world healthcare applications unverified. We propose MedPRMBench, the first process-level reward model benchmark for the medical domain. Built through a three-phase pipeline based on Clinical Reasoning Blueprints (CRBs), MedPRMBench systematically generates high-quality evaluation data from seven medical QA sources, covering 14 fine-grained error types across three categories (Simplicity, Soundness, and Sensitivity) with the first 4-level severity grading system to quantify clinical impact. The benchmark comprises 6{,}500 questions with 13{,}000 reasoning chains and 113{,}910 step-level labels, plus 6{,}879 questions for training. Our medical PRM baseline achieves an 87.1\% overall PRMScore -- substantially surpassing all baselines -- and serves as a plug-and-play verifier that improves downstream medical QA accuracy by 3.2--6.7 percentage points. Systematic evaluation spanning proprietary frontier models, open-source reasoning models, and medical-specialized models reveals critical weaknesses in current models' medical reasoning error detection capabilities, providing clear directions for future PRM improvement.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in various perception and reasoning tasks. Despite this success, ensuring their reliability in practical deployment necessitates robust confidence estimation. Prior works have predominantly focused on text-only LLMs, often relying on computationally expensive self-consistency sampling. In this paper, we extend this to multimodal settings and conduct a comprehensive evaluation of MLLMs' response confidence estimation. Our analysis reveals a significant instinct-reflection misalignment: the model's implicit token-level support frequently diverges from its verbal self-assessment confidence. To address this misalignment, we propose a monotone confidence fusion framework to merge dual-channel signals and cross-channel consistency to estimate correctness. Subsequently, an order-preserving mean alignment step is applied to correct global bias, which improves calibration while preserving the risk-coverage trade-off for selective prediction. Experiments on diverse open-source and closed-source MLLMs show that our method consistently yields more reliable confidence estimates and improves both calibration and failure prediction. Code will be available at https://github.com/Yunkaidang/Instinct-vs.-Reflection.

The most important architectural problem in AI is not the size of the model but the absence of a layer that carries forward what the model has come to understand. Sessions end. Context windows fill. Memory APIs return flat facts that the model has to reinterpret from scratch on every read. The result is intelligence that is powerful per session and amnesiac across time. This position paper argues that the layer which fixes this, the continuity layer, is the most consequential piece of infrastructure the field has not yet built, and that the engineering work to build it has begun in public. The formal evaluation framework for the property described here is the ATANT benchmark (arXiv:2604.06710), published separately with evaluation results on a 250-story corpus; a companion paper (arXiv:2604.10981) positions this framework against existing memory, long-context, and agentic-memory benchmarks. The paper defines continuity as a system property with seven required characteristics, distinct from memory and from retrieval; describes a storage primitive (Decomposed Trace Convergence Memory) whose write-time decomposition and read-time reconstruction produce that property; maps the engineering architecture to the theological pattern of kenosis and the symbolic pattern of Alpha and Omega, and argues this mapping is structural rather than metaphorical; proposes a four-layer development arc from external SDK to hardware node to long-horizon human infrastructure; examines why the physics limits now constraining the model layer make the continuity layer newly consequential; and argues that the governance architecture (privacy implemented as physics rather than policy, founder-controlled class shares on non-negotiable architectural commitments) is inseparable from the product itself.

Node classification on text-attributed graphs (TAGs) is a fundamental task with broad applications in citation analysis, social networks, and recommendation systems. Current GNN-based approaches suffer from shallow text encoding and heavy dependence on labeled data, limiting their effectiveness in label-scarce settings. While large language models (LLMs) naturally address the text understanding gap with deep semantic reasoning, existing LLM-for-graph methods either still require abundant labels during training or fail to exploit the rich structural signals freely available in graph topology. Our key observation is that, in many real-world TAGs, edges predominantly connect similar nodes under the homophily principle, meaning graph topology inherently encodes class structure without any labels. Building on this insight, we reformulate node classification as a link prediction task and present HopRank, a fully self-supervised LLM-tuning framework for TAGs. HopRank constructs preference data via hierarchical hop-based sampling and employs adaptive preference learning to prioritize informative training signals without any class labels. At inference, nodes are classified by predicting their connection preferences to labeled anchors, with an adaptive early-exit voting scheme to improve efficiency. Experiments on three TAG benchmarks show that HopRank matches fully-supervised GNNs and substantially outperforms prior graph-LLM methods, despite using zero labeled training data.

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 subsequent 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. We find that available S&P information rarely drove initial adoption in practice, as participants often perceived it as incomplete, ineffective, or lacking credibility. Instead, they relied on rough proxies, such as popularity, to infer S&P practices. After adoption, uncertainty about S&P practices constrained participants' willingness to use GenAI tools, particularly in high-stakes contexts, and, in some cases, contributed to discontinued use. Participants therefore called for transparency that supports decision-making and use, including trustworthy information (e.g., independent evaluations) and usable interfaces (e.g., on-demand disclosure). We synthesize 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.

AI-generated imagery has reached near-photorealistic fidelity, yet this technology poses significant threats to information security and societal trust. Existing deepfake detection methods often exhibit limited robustness in open-world scenarios. To address this limitation, this paper investigates intrinsic discrepancies between synthetic and authentic images from a signal-level perspective. Our analysis reveals that low-correlation signals serve as distinctive markers for differentiating AI-generated imagery from real photographs. Building on this insight, we introduce a novel method for quantifying these signals based on fractal theory. By analyzing the fractal characteristics of low-correlation signals, our method effectively captures the subtle statistical anomalies inherent to the synthesis process. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the method's robustness and superior detection performance. This work emphasizes the need to shift research focus to a new signal-level direction for deepfake detection. Theoretically, this proposed approach is not limited to face image identification but can be applied to all AI-generated image detection tasks. This study provides a new research direction for deepfake detection.

Large Language Models can generate synthetic survey responses at low cost, but their accuracy varies unpredictably across questions. We study the design problem of allocating a fixed budget of human respondents across estimation tasks when cheap LLM predictions are available for every task. Our framework combines three components. First, building on Prediction-Powered Inference, we characterize a question-specific rectification difficulty that governs how quickly the estimator's variance decreases with human sample size. Second, we derive a closed-form optimal allocation rule that directs more human labels to tasks where the LLM is least reliable. Third, since rectification difficulty depends on unobserved human responses for new surveys, we propose a meta-learning approach, trained on historical data, that predicts it for entirely new tasks without pilot data. The framework extends to general M-estimation, covering regression coefficients and multinomial logit partworths for conjoint analysis. We validate the framework on two datasets spanning different domains, question types, and LLMs, showing that our approach captures 61-79% of the theoretically attainable efficiency gains, achieving 11.4% and 10.5% MSE reductions without requiring any pilot human data for the target survey.

Evaluating meeting effectiveness is crucial for improving organizational productivity. Current approaches rely on post-hoc surveys that yield a single coarse-grained score for an entire meeting. The reliance on manual assessment is inherently limited in scalability, cost, and reproducibility. Moreover, a single score fails to capture the dynamic nature of collaborative discussions. We propose a new paradigm for evaluating meeting effectiveness centered on novel criteria and temporal fine-grained approach. We define effectiveness as the rate of objective achievement over time and assess it for individual topical segments within a meeting. To support this task, we introduce the AMI Meeting Effectiveness (AMI-ME) dataset, a new meta-evaluation dataset containing 2,459 human-annotated segments from 130 AMI Corpus meetings. We also develop an automatic effectiveness evaluation framework that uses a Large Language Model (LLM) as a judge to score each segment's effectiveness relative to the overall meeting objectives. Through substantial experiments, we establish a comprehensive benchmark for this new task and evaluate the framework's generalizability across distinct meeting types, ranging from business scenarios to unstructured discussions. Furthermore, we benchmark end-to-end performance starting from raw speech to measure the capabilities of a complete system. Our results validate the framework's effectiveness and provide strong baselines to facilitate future research in meeting analysis and multi-party dialogue. Our dataset and code will be publicly available. The AMI-ME dataset and the Automatic Evaluation Framework are available at: this URL.

User behavior in the real world is diverse, cross-domain, and spans long time horizons. Existing user modeling benchmarks however remain narrow, focusing mainly on short sessions and next-item prediction within a single domain. Such limitations hinder progress toward robust and generalizable user models. We present HORIZON, a new benchmark that reformulates user modeling along three axes i.e. dataset, task, and evaluation. Built from a large-scale, cross-domain reformulation of Amazon Reviews, HORIZON covers 54M users and 35M items, enabling both pretraining and realistic evaluation of models in heterogeneous environments. Unlike prior benchmarks, it challenges models to generalize across domains, users, and time, moving beyond standard missing-positive prediction in the same domain. We propose new tasks and evaluation setups that better reflect real-world deployment scenarios. These include temporal generalization, sequence-length variation, and modeling unseen users, with metrics designed to assess general user behavior understanding rather than isolated next-item prediction. We benchmark popular sequential recommendation architectures alongside LLM-based baselines that leverage long-term interaction histories. Our results highlight the gap between current methods and the demands of real-world user modeling, while establishing HORIZON as a foundation for research on temporally robust, cross-domain, and general-purpose user models.

Recent text embedding models are often adapted to specialized domains via contrastive pre-finetuning (PFT) on a naive collection of scattered, heterogeneous tasks. However, this approach often introduces task-induced bias alongside domain knowledge, leading to uncontrolled representation shifts that distort the pretrained embedding geometry and cause substantial performance degradation. To address this issue, we propose REZE, a representation regularization framework that explicitly controls representation shift during embedding pre-finetuning. REZE operates on the relations of anchor-positive pairs and decomposes them in an eigenspace. It then measures task-wise dispersion along each eigencomponent to identify task-variant directions and applies adaptive soft-shrinkage to suppress task-induced noise while preserving task-invariant semantic structure, without inference-time overhead. Experiments across multiple embedding backbones and specialized benchmarks show that REZE outperforms standard pre-finetuning and isotropy-oriented post-hoc regularization in most settings, remaining stable where existing PFT variants collapse. Embedding space analyses further confirm that REZE induces controlled shifts aligned with the original embedding manifold, underscoring representation shift control as a key principle for robust embedding pre-finetuning under heterogeneous supervision.

Assessing the security posture of modern computing systems typically requires the use of multiple specialized tools. These tools focus on different aspects such as configuration compliance, file integrity, and vulnerability exposure, and their outputs are often difficult to interpret collectively. This paper introduces the Unified Compliance Aggregator (UCA), a framework that integrates several open-source security tools into a single composite score representing overall system security. The proposed framework combines outputs from Lynis, OpenSCAP (STIG and CIS profiles), AIDE, Tripwire, and Nmap NSE. A normalization process converts heterogeneous outputs into a consistent 0 to 100 scale, followed by weighted aggregation. We also introduce a logarithmic scoring model for file integrity measurements to address limitations observed in prior linear approaches. Experiments were conducted on Ubuntu 22.04 across different hardening levels and environments. Results show consistent improvement in composite scores as systems are hardened, while also revealing contrasting behavior between compliance and file integrity tools. Two case studies, a basic web server and a DVWA-based system illustrate how the framework can be applied in practical scenarios.

Accurate comprehension and controllable generation of emotion and rhetoric are pivotal for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Existing studies mostly rely on external optimizations, lacking in-depth exploration of internal representation mechanisms, thus failing to achieve fine-grained steering at the neuron level. A handful of works on neurons are confined to emotions, neglecting rhetoric neurons and their intrinsic connections. Traditional neuron masking also exhibits counterintuitive phenomena, making reliable verification of neuron functionality infeasible. To address these issues, we systematically investigate the neurons representation mechanisms and inherent associations of 6 emotion categories and 4 core rhetorical devices. We propose a neuron identification framework that integrates multi-dimensional screening, and design an adaptive masking method incorporating dynamic filtering, attenuation masking, and feedback optimization, enabling reliable causal validation of neuron functionality.Through neuron regulation, we achieve directed induction of non-target sentences and enhancement of emotion tasks via rhetoric neurons. Experiments on 5 commonly used datasets validate the effectiveness of our method, providing a novel paradigm for the fine-grained steering of emotion and rhetoric expressions in LLMs.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have enabled agents to tackle complex embodied tasks through environmental interaction. However, these agents still make suboptimal decisions and perform ineffective actions, as they often overlook critical environmental feedback that differs from their internal beliefs. Through a formal probing analysis, we characterize this as belief inertia, a phenomenon where agents stubbornly adhere to prior beliefs despite explicit observations. To address this, we advocate active belief intervention, moving from passive understanding to active management. We introduce the Estimate-Verify-Update (EVU) mechanism, which empowers agents to predict expected outcomes, verify them against observations through explicit reasoning, and actively update prior beliefs based on the verification evidence. EVU is designed as a unified intervention mechanism that generates textual belief states explicitly, and can be integrated into both prompting-based and training-based agent reasoning methods. Extensive experiments across three embodied benchmarks demonstrate that EVU consistently yields substantial gains in task success rates. Further analyses validate that our approach effectively mitigates belief inertia, advancing the development of more robust embodied agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/WangHanLinHenry/EVU.

Rowhammer on GPU DRAM has enabled adversarial bit flips in model weights; shared KV-cache blocks in LLM serving systems present an analogous but previously unexamined target. In vLLM's Prefix Caching, these blocks exist as a single physical copy without integrity protection. Using software fault injection under ideal bit targeting, we characterize worst-case severity and identify three properties: (1) Silent divergence - 13 of 16 BF16 bit positions produce coherent but altered outputs, indistinguishable from legitimate responses without a clean baseline. (2) Selective propagation - only requests sharing the targeted prefix are affected. (3) Persistent accumulation - no temporal decay occurs, so cumulative damage grows linearly with subsequent requests. Together, these constitute a threat profile distinct from weight corruption: silent divergence and selective propagation enable detection evasion; persistent accumulation then proceeds unchecked, yielding damage amplification bounded only by how long the block remains cached. A checksum-based countermeasure detects any single-bit corruption at scheduling time, bounding cumulative damage to one batch independent of the block's cache lifetime, with negligible overhead. These results argue for integrity protection of prefix blocks before end-to-end exploitation is demonstrated.

Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have made impressive progress in recent years but remain only loosely interconnected. Based on a workshop convened by the National Science Foundation in August 2025, we identify three fundamental capability gaps in current AI: the inability to interact with the physical world, inadequate learning that produces brittle systems, and unsustainable energy and data inefficiency. We describe the neuroscience principles that address each: co-design of body and controller, prediction through interaction, multi-scale learning with neuromodulatory control, hierarchical distributed architectures, and sparse event-driven computation. We present a research roadmap organized around these principles at near, mid, and long-term horizons. We argue that realizing this program requires a new generation of researchers trained across the boundary between neuroscience and engineering, and describe the institutional conditions: interdisciplinary training, hardware access, community standards, and ethics, needed to support them. We conclude that NeuroAI, neuroscience-informed artificial intelligence, has the potential to overcome limitations of current AI while deepening our understanding of biological neural computation.

This paper presents a virtual boundary integral neural network (VBINN) for exterior acoustic problems in three dimensions. The method introduces a virtual boundary inside the scatterer or vibrating body and represents the associated source density with a neural network. Coupled with the acoustic fundamental solution, this representation satisfies the Sommerfeld radiation condition by construction and enables direct evaluation of the acoustic pressure and its normal derivative at arbitrary field points. Because the integration surface is separated from the physical boundary, the formulation avoids the singular and near singular kernel evaluations associated with coincident source and collocation points in conventional boundary integral learning methods. To reduce sensitivity to boundary placement, the geometric parameters of the virtual boundary are optimized jointly with the source density during training. Numerical examples for acoustic scattering, multiple body interaction, and underwater acoustic propagation show close agreement with analytical solutions and COMSOL results, and the Burton Miller extension further improves stability near characteristic frequencies. These results demonstrate the potential of VBINN for exterior acoustic analysis in three dimensions.

The rapid growth of scientific literature calls for automated methods to assess and predict research impact. Prior work has largely focused on citation-based metrics, leaving limited evaluation of models' capability to reason about other impact dimensions. To this end, we introduce SciImpact, a large-scale, multi-dimensional benchmark for scientific impact prediction spanning 19 fields. SciImpact captures various forms of scientific influence, ranging from citation counts to award recognition, media attention, patent reference, and artifact adoption, by integrating heterogeneous data sources and targeted web crawling. It comprises 215,928 contrastive paper pairs reflecting meaningful impact differences in both short-term (e.g., Best Paper Award) and long-term settings (e.g., Nobel Prize). We evaluate 11 widely used large language models (LLMs) on SciImpact. Results show that off-the-shelf models exhibit substantial variability across dimensions and fields, while multi-task supervised fine-tuning consistently enables smaller LLMs (e.g., 4B) to markedly outperform much larger models (e.g., 30B) and surpass powerful closed-source LLMs (e.g., o4-mini). These results establish SciImpact as a challenging benchmark and demonstrate its value for multi-dimensional, multi-field scientific impact prediction. Our project homepage is https://flypig23.github.io/sciimpact-homepage/

The autonomous synthesis of deep research reports represents a critical frontier for Large Language Models (LLMs), demanding sophisticated information orchestration and non-linear narrative logic. Current approaches rely on rigid predefined linear workflows, which cause error accumulation, preclude global restructuring from subsequent insights, and ultimately limit in-depth multimodal fusion and report quality. We propose CogGen, a Cognitively inspired recursive framework for deep research report Generation. Leveraging a Hierarchical Recursive Architecture to simulate cognitive writing, CogGen enables flexible planning and global restructuring. To extend this recursivity to multimodal content, we introduce Abstract Visual Representation (AVR): a concise intent-driven language that iteratively refines visual-text layouts without pixel-level regeneration overhead. We further present CLEF, a Cognitive Load Evaluation Framework, and curate a new benchmark from Our World in Data (OWID). Extensive experiments show CogGen achieves state-of-the-art results among open-source systems, generating reports comparable to professional analysts' outputs and surpassing Gemini Deep Research. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/NJUNLP/CogGen.

Translation-based prompting is widely used in multilingual LLMs, yet its effectiveness varies across languages and tasks. We evaluate prompting strategies across ten languages of different resource levels and four benchmarks. Our analysis shows that no single strategy is universally optimal. Translation strongly benefits low-resource languages even when translation quality is imperfect, high-resource languages gain little, and prompt-based self-routing underperforms explicit translation. Motivated by these findings, we formulate prompting strategy selection as a learned decision problem and introduce lightweight classifiers that predict whether native or translation-based prompting is optimal for each instance. The classifiers achieve statistically significant improvements over fixed strategies across four benchmarks and generalize to unseen task formats not observed during training. Further analysis reveals that language resource level, rather than translation quality alone, determines when translation is beneficial.

Quantum feature maps offer expressive embeddings for classical learning tasks, and augmenting sparse identification of nonlinear dynamics (SINDy) with such features is a natural but unexplored direction. We introduce \textbf{Q-SINDy}, a quantum-kernel-augmented SINDy framework, and identify a specific failure mode that arises: \emph{coefficient cannibalization}, in which quantum features absorb coefficient mass that rightfully belongs to the polynomial basis, corrupting equation recovery. We derive the exact cannibalization-bias formula $Δξ_P = (P^\top P)^{-1}P^\top Q\,\hatξ_Q$ and prove that orthogonalizing quantum features against the polynomial column space at fit time eliminates this bias exactly. The claim is verified numerically to machine precision ($<10^{-12}$) on multiple systems. Empirically, across six canonical dynamical systems (Duffing, Van der Pol, Lorenz, Lotka-Volterra, cubic oscillator, Rössler) and three quantum feature map architectures (ZZ-angle encoding, IQP, data re-uploading), orthogonalized Q-SINDy consistently matches vanilla SINDy's structural recovery while uncorrected augmentation degrades true-positive rates by up to 100\%. A refined dynamics-aware diagnostic, $R^2_Q$ for $\dot X$, predicts cannibalization severity with statistical significance (Pearson $r=0.70$, $p=0.023$). An RBF classical-kernel control across 20 hyperparameter configurations fails more severely than any quantum variant, ruling out feature count as the cause. Orthogonalization remains robust under depolarizing hardware noise up to 2\% per gate, and the framework extends without modification to Burgers' equation.

Causal inference from electronic health records (EHR) is fundamentally limited by unmeasured confounding: critical clinical states such as frailty, goals of care, and mental status are documented in free-text notes but absent from structured data. Large language models can extract these latent confounders as interpretable, structured covariates, yet how to effectively integrate them into causal estimation pipelines has not been systematically studied. Using the MIMIC-IV database with 21,859 sepsis patients, we compare seven covariate-integration strategies for estimating the effect of early vasopressor initiation on 28-day mortality, spanning tabular-only baselines, traditional NLP representations, and three LLM-augmented approaches. A central finding is that not all integration strategies are equally effective: directly augmenting the propensity score model with LLM covariates achieves the best performance, while dual-caliper matching on text-derived categorical distances restricts the donor pool and degrades estimation. In semi-synthetic experiments with known ground-truth effects, LLM-augmented propensity scores reduce estimation bias from 0.0143 to 0.0003 relative to tabular-only methods, and this advantage persists under substantial simulated extraction error. On real data, incorporating LLM-extracted covariates reduces the estimated treatment effect from 0.055 to 0.027, directionally consistent with the CLOVERS randomized trial, and a doubly robust estimator yielding 0.019 confirms the robustness of this finding. Our results offer practical guidance on when and how text-derived covariates improve causal estimation in critical care.

Quantum machine learning offers a promising new paradigm for computational biology by leveraging quantum mechanical principles to enhance cancer classification, biomarker discovery, and bioinformatics diagnostics. In this study, we apply QML to identify subtype specific biomarkers for lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) and lung squamous cell carcinoma (LUSC), the two predominant forms of non-small cell lung cancer. Our methodology involves a two-phase process: in Phase 1, differential expression analysis and methylation analysis between tumor and normal samples allows us to identify LUAD-specific and LUSC-specific genes, revealing potential prognostic biomarkers for cancer subtypes. Phase 2 focuses on developing a quantum classifier capable of distinguishing between LUAD and LUSC tumors, as well as between tumor and normal samples. This classifier not only enhances diagnostic precision but also demonstrates the quantum advantage in processing large-scale multiomic datasets. Our results consistently demonstrated that Sample3, representing the combined gene set, achieved the highest overall predictive performance in all metrics. These results demonstrate that QML provides an effective and scalable approach for biomarker discovery and subtype specific cancer classification. GO enrichment analysis highlighted the significant involvement of genes in synaptic signaling, ion channel regulation, and neuronal development. In the quantum phase, KEGG analysis further identified enrichment in cancer-associated pathways, including neurotrophin, MAPK, Ras, and PI3KAkt signaling, with key genes such as NGFR, NTRK2, and NTF3 suggesting a central role in neurotrophinmediated oncogenic processes. Our findings highlight the growing potential of quantum computing to advance precision oncology and next-generation biomedical analytics.

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into daily life, in roles ranging from high-stakes decision support to companionship, understanding their behavioral dispositions becomes critical. A growing literature uses psychometric inventories and cognitive paradigms to profile LLM dispositions. However, these approaches cannot determine whether behavioral differences reflect stable, stimulus-specific individuality or global response biases and stochastic noise. Here, we apply crossed random-effects models -- widely used in psychometrics to separate systematic effects -- to 74.9 million ratings provided by 10 open-weight LLMs for over 100,000 words across 14 psycholinguistic norms. On average, 16.9% of variance is attributable to stimulus-specific individuality, robustly exceeding a statistical null model. Cross-norm prediction analyses reveal this individuality as a coherent fingerprint, unique to each model. These results identify individual differences among LLMs that cannot be attributed to response biases or stochastic noise. We term these differences machine individuality.

Due to the increasing frequency and severity of storm events, driven by the escalation of anthropogenic climate change and urban expansion, there is a requirement for increasingly efficient flood risk management strategies. While Blue-Green Infrastructure (BGI) offers a sustainable solution for managing flood risk, optimal implementation is challenging. To help overcome this challenge, this study presents a novel multi-objective optimisation tool that couples a state-of-the-art hydrodynamic model with a bespoke evolutionary algorithm. The use of a fully dynamic hydrodynamic model enables the tool to accurately evaluate the effectiveness of proposed BGI features with respect to property scale flood vulnerability and hazard analysis. This contrasts with alternative approaches which utilise simplified models, which can only reliably predict inundation extents, thus the proposed optimisation tool provides greater certainty regarding the optimality of the solutions. As a hydrodynamic simulation is required to evaluate each candidate solution, the bespoke evolutionary algorithm is specifically designed to minimise the number of simulations required, ensuring the tool is computationally practical. The effectiveness of the tool in this regard is validated via the derivation of exact convergence measures, for a tractable search space, and via comparisons with benchmark algorithms, for an intractable search space. Compared with traditional design practices, the proposed tool offers an automated approach capable of efficiently exploring a wide range of solutions, providing decision-makers with a set of optimal solutions from which they can make informed investment decisions. The presented methods provide a robust framework for optimising a variety of BGI features in complex urban environments.

As AI-assisted video creation becomes increasingly practical, instruction-guided video editing has become essential for refining generated or captured footage to meet professional requirements. Yet the field still lacks both a large-scale human-annotated dataset with complete editing examples and a standardized evaluator for comparing editing systems. Existing resources are limited by small scale, missing edited outputs, or the absence of human quality labels, while current evaluation often relies on expensive manual inspection or generic vision-language model judges that are not specialized for editing quality. We introduce VEFX-Dataset, a human-annotated dataset containing 5,049 video editing examples across 9 major editing categories and 32 subcategories, each labeled along three decoupled dimensions: Instruction Following, Rendering Quality, and Edit Exclusivity. Building on VEFX-Dataset, we propose VEFX-Reward, a reward model designed specifically for video editing quality assessment. VEFX-Reward jointly processes the source video, the editing instruction, and the edited video, and predicts per-dimension quality scores via ordinal regression. We further release VEFX-Bench, a benchmark of 300 curated video-prompt pairs for standardized comparison of editing systems. Experiments show that VEFX-Reward aligns more strongly with human judgments than generic VLM judges and prior reward models on both standard IQA/VQA metrics and group-wise preference evaluation. Using VEFX-Reward as an evaluator, we benchmark representative commercial and open-source video editing systems, revealing a persistent gap between visual plausibility, instruction following, and edit locality in current models. Our project page is https://xiangbogaobarry.github.io/VEFX-Bench/.

Recent works proposed test-time alignment methods that rely on a small aligned model as a proxy that guides the generation of a larger base (unaligned) model. The implicit reward approach skews the large model distribution, whereas the nudging approach defers the generation of the next token to the small aligned model when the large base one is unconfident about its outcome. In this work, we first show that both approaches can be reduced to sampling from similar graphical models, where they differ only in the definition of a rejection criterion (or distribution). Moreover, we argue that the confidence criterion is ill-motivated due to linguistic phenomena like ambiguous phrasing. We propose a novel rejection criterion based on a conservative confidence bet. Experimentally, our novel approach outperforms previous work on several datasets.

Accurate molecular property prediction is central to drug discovery, catalysis, and process design, yet real-world applications are often limited by small datasets. Molecular foundation models provide a promising direction by learning transferable molecular representations; however, they typically involve task-specific fine-tuning, require machine learning expertise, and often fail to outperform classical baselines. Tabular foundation models (TFMs) offer a fundamentally different paradigm: they perform predictions through in-context learning, enabling inference without task-specific training. Here, we evaluate TFMs in the low- to medium-data regime across both standardized pharmaceutical benchmarks and chemical engineering datasets. We evaluate both frozen molecular foundation model representations, as well as classical descriptors and fingerprints. Across the benchmarks, the approach shows excellent predictive performance while reducing computational cost, compared to fine-tuning, with these advantages also transferring to practical engineering data settings. In particular, combining TFMs with CheMeleon embeddings yields up to 100\% win rates on 30 MoleculeACE tasks, while compact RDKit2d and Mordred descriptors provide strong descriptor-based alternatives. Molecular representation emerges as a key determinant in TFM performance, with molecular foundation model embeddings and 2D descriptor sets both providing substantial gains over classic molecular fingerprints on many tasks. These results suggest that in-context learning with TFMs provides a highly accurate and cost-efficient alternative for property prediction in practical applications.

The Project of AI is a world-building endeavor, wherein those who fund and develop AI systems both operate through and seek to sustain networks of power and wealth. As they expand their access to resources and configure our sociotechnical conditions, they benefit from the ways in which a suite of decoys animate scholars, critics, policymakers, journalists, and the public into co-constructing industry-empowering AI futures. Regardless of who constructs or nurtures them, these decoys often create the illusion of accountability while both masking the emerging political economies that the Project of AI has set into motion, and also contributing to the network-making power that is at the heart of the Project's extraction and exploitation. Drawing on literature at the intersection of communication, science and technology studies, and economic sociology, we examine how the Project of AI is constructed. We then explore five decoys that seemingly critique - but in actuality co-constitute - AI's emergent power relations and material political economy. We argue that advancing meaningful fairness or accountability in AI requires: 1) recognizing when and how decoys serve as a distraction, and 2) grappling directly with the material political economy of the Project of AI. Doing so will enable us to attend to the networks of power that make 'AI' possible, spurring new visions for how to realize a more just technologically entangled world.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance across many NLP tasks, their opaque internal mechanisms hinder trustworthiness and safe deployment. Existing surveys in explainable AI largely focus on post-hoc explanation methods that interpret trained models through external approximations. In contrast, intrinsic interpretability, which builds transparency directly into model architectures and computations, has recently emerged as a promising alternative. This paper presents a systematic review of the recent advances in intrinsic interpretability for LLMs, categorizing existing approaches into five design paradigms: functional transparency, concept alignment, representational decomposability, explicit modularization, and latent sparsity induction. We further discuss open challenges and outline future research directions in this emerging field. The paper list is available at: https://github.com/PKU-PILLAR-Group/Survey-Intrinsic-Interpretability-of-LLMs.

Code localization is a cornerstone of autonomous software engineering. Recent advancements have achieved impressive performance on real-world issue benchmarks. However, we identify a critical yet overlooked bias: these benchmarks are saturated with keyword references (e.g. file paths, function names), encouraging models to rely on superficial lexical matching rather than genuine structural reasoning. We term this phenomenon the Keyword Shortcut. To address this, we formalize the challenge of Keyword-Agnostic Logical Code Localization (KA-LCL) and introduce KA-LogicQuery, a diagnostic benchmark requiring structural reasoning without any naming hints. Our evaluation reveals a catastrophic performance drop of state-of-the-art approaches on KA-LogicQuery, exposing their lack of deterministic reasoning capabilities. We propose LogicLoc, a novel agentic framework that combines large language models with the rigorous logical reasoning of Datalog for precise localization. LogicLoc extracts program facts from the codebase and leverages an LLM to synthesize Datalog programs, with parser-gated validation and mutation-based intermediate-rule diagnostic feedback to ensure correctness and efficiency. The validated programs are executed by a high-performance inference engine, enabling accurate and verifiable localization in a fully automated, closed-loop workflow. Experimental results demonstrate that LogicLoc significantly outperforms SOTA methods on KA-LogicQuery while maintaining competitive performance on popular issue-driven benchmarks. Notably, LogicLoc attains superior performance with significantly lower token consumption and faster execution by offloading structural traversal to a deterministic engine, reducing the overhead of iterative LLM inference.

Generative AI, particularly Large Language Models, increasingly integrates graph-based representations to enhance reasoning, retrieval, and structured decision-making. Despite rapid advances, there remains limited clarity regarding when, why, where, and what types of graph-LLM integrations are most appropriate across applications. This survey provides a concise, structured overview of the design choices underlying the integration of graphs with LLMs. We categorize existing methods based on their purpose (reasoning, retrieval, generation, recommendation), graph modality (knowledge graphs, scene graphs, interaction graphs, causal graphs, dependency graphs), and integration strategies (prompting, augmentation, training, or agent-based use). By mapping representative works across domains such as cybersecurity, healthcare, materials science, finance, robotics, and multimodal environments, we highlight the strengths, limitations, and best-fit scenarios for each technique. This survey aims to offer researchers a practical guide for selecting the most suitable graph-LLM approach depending on task requirements, data characteristics, and reasoning complexity.

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as LLaMA and DeepSeek, are built on transformer architectures, which have become a standard model for achieving state-of-the-art performance in natural language processing tasks. Recently, there has been growing interest in deploying LLMs on edge devices. Although smaller LLM models are being proposed, they often still contain billions of parameters. Since edge devices are limited in their resources this poses a significant challenge for edge deployment. Compute-in-memory (CIM) is a promising architecture that addresses this by reducing data movement through the integration of computational logic directly into memory. However, existing CIM architectures support only static Multiply-Accumulate (MAC) operations which limit their configurability in supporting nonlinear operations and various types of transformer models. This paper presents a fully digital standard-cell SRAM-based CIM architecture accelerator for self-attention, called CIMple, designed to overcome these limitations, inside transformer models. The key contributions of CIMple are: 1) A novel dual-banked CIM-based fully digital self-attention accelerator using 8-bit parallel weight feeding. 2) A look-up-table (LUT) based fixed-point implementation reducing latency with minimal accuracy degradation. 3) A performance evaluation of a 32kb CIM-based self-attention accelerator implemented in 28nm, which achieves 26.1 TOPS/W at 0.85V and 2.31 TOPS/mm$^2$ at 1.2V, both with INT8 precision.

Drawing on ideas from continuous integration, we present concepts of an automated benchmarking pipeline for high performance applications. Customization and collaboration have been key design goals owing to the requirements of research-software development as a continuous community effort. We have extended our previous conceptual work on systematic benchmarking workflows with the functionality of user-agnostic operations as well as continuous benchmarking. This fosters reproducibility and re-use of benchmarking results to ensure sustainable technological progress. We provide software-engineering solutions to keep pace with the rapid evolution of both large-scale models and high-performance computing systems with a view towards the scientific domains of neuroscience and artificial intelligence.

While large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in general language tasks, their performance on Chouxiang Language, a representative subcultural language in the Chinese internet context, remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce Mouse, a specialized benchmark designed to evaluate the capabilities of LLMs on NLP tasks involving Chouxiang Language across six tasks. Experimental results show that, current state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs exhibit clear limitations on multiple tasks, while performing well on tasks that involve contextual semantic understanding. In addition, we further discuss the reasons behind the generally low performance of SOTA LLMs on Chouxiang Language, examine whether the LLM-as-a-judge approach adopted for translation tasks aligns with human judgments and values, and analyze the key factors that influence Chouxiang translation. Our study aims to promote further research in the NLP community on multicultural integration and the dynamics of evolving internet languages. Our code and data are publicly available.

In this work, we present Qwen3.5-Omni, the latest advancement in the Qwen-Omni model family. Representing a significant evolution over its predecessor, Qwen3.5-Omni scales to hundreds of billions of parameters and supports a 256k context length. By leveraging a massive dataset comprising heterogeneous text-vision pairs and over 100 million hours of audio-visual content, the model demonstrates robust omni-modality capabilities. Qwen3.5-Omni-plus achieves SOTA results across 215 audio and audio-visual understanding, reasoning, and interaction subtasks and benchmarks, surpassing Gemini-3.1 Pro in key audio tasks and matching it in comprehensive audio-visual understanding. Architecturally, Qwen3.5-Omni employs a Hybrid Attention Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework for both Thinker and Talker, enabling efficient long-sequence inference. The model facilitates sophisticated interaction, supporting over 10 hours of audio understanding and 400 seconds of 720P video (at 1 FPS). To address the inherent instability and unnaturalness in streaming speech synthesis, often caused by encoding efficiency discrepancies between text and speech tokenizers, we introduce ARIA. ARIA dynamically aligns text and speech units, significantly enhancing the stability and prosody of conversational speech with minimal latency impact. Furthermore, Qwen3.5-Omni expands linguistic boundaries, supporting multilingual understanding and speech generation across 10 languages with human-like emotional nuance. Finally, Qwen3.5-Omni exhibits superior audio-visual grounding capabilities, generating script-level structured captions with precise temporal synchronization and automated scene segmentation. Remarkably, we observed the emergence of a new capability in omnimodal models: directly performing coding based on audio-visual instructions, which we call Audio-Visual Vibe Coding.

AI-driven methods have demonstrated considerable success in tackling the central challenge of accurately solving the Schrödinger equation for complex many-body systems. Among neural network quantum state (NNQS) approaches, the NNQS-SCI (Selected Configuration Interaction) method stands out as a state-of-the-art technique, recognized for its high accuracy and scalability. However, its application to larger systems is severely constrained by a hybrid CPU-GPU architecture. Specifically, centralized CPU-based global de-duplication creates a severe scalability barrier due to communication bottlenecks, while host-resident coupled-configuration generation induces prohibitive computational overheads. We introduce cuNNQS-SCI, a fully GPU-accelerated SCI framework designed to overcome these bottlenecks. cuNNQS-SCI first integrates a distributed, load-balanced global de-duplication algorithm to minimize redundancy and communication overhead at scale. To address compute limitations, it employs specialized, fine-grained CUDA kernels for exact coupled configuration generation. Finally, to break the single-GPU memory barrier exposed by this full acceleration, it incorporates a GPU memory-centric runtime featuring GPU-side pooling, streaming mini-batches, and overlapped offloading. This design enables much larger configuration spaces and shifts the bottleneck from host-side limitations back to on-device inference. Our evaluation demonstrates that cuNNQS-SCI fundamentally expands the scale of solvable problems. On an NVIDIA A100 cluster with 64 GPUs, cuNNQS-SCI achieves up to 2.32X end-to-end speedup over the highly-optimized NNQS-SCI baseline while preserving the same chemical accuracy. Furthermore, it demonstrates excellent distributed performance, maintaining over 90% parallel efficiency in strong scaling tests.

Many consequential decisions must be made before the relevant outcome is known. Such problems are commonly framed as future prediction, where an LLM agent must form a prediction for an unresolved question using only the public information available at the prediction time. The setting is difficult because public evidence evolves while useful supervision arrives only after the question is resolved, so most existing approaches still improve mainly from final outcomes. Yet final outcomes are too coarse to guide earlier factor tracking, evidence gathering and interpretation, or uncertainty handling. When the same unresolved question is revisited over time, temporal contrasts between earlier and later predictions can expose omissions in the earlier prediction process; we call this signal internal feedback. We introduce Milkyway, a self-evolving agent system that keeps the base model fixed and instead updates a persistent future prediction harness for factor tracking, evidence gathering and interpretation, and uncertainty handling. Across repeated predictions on the same unresolved question, Milkyway extracts internal feedback and writes reusable guidance back into the harness, so later predictions on that question can improve before the outcome is known. After the question is resolved, the final outcome provides a retrospective check before the updated harness is carried forward to subsequent questions. On FutureX and FutureWorld, Milkyway achieves the best overall score among the compared methods, improving FutureX from 44.07 to 60.90 and FutureWorld from 62.22 to 77.96.

We introduce a cross-domain behavioural assay of monitoring-control coupling in LLMs, grounded in the Nelson and Narens (1990) metacognitive framework and applying human psychometric methodology to LLM evaluation. The battery comprises 524 items across six cognitive domains (learning, metacognitive calibration, social cognition, attention, executive function, prospective regulation), each grounded in an established experimental paradigm. Tasks T1-T5 were pre-registered on OSF prior to data collection; T6 was added as an exploratory extension. After every forced-choice response, dual probes adapted from Koriat and Goldsmith (1996) ask the model to KEEP or WITHDRAW its answer and to BET or decline. The critical metric is the withdraw delta: the difference in withdrawal rate between incorrect and correct items. Applied to 20 frontier LLMs (10,480 evaluations), the battery discriminates three profiles consistent with the Nelson-Narens architecture: blanket confidence, blanket withdrawal, and selective sensitivity. Accuracy rank and metacognitive sensitivity rank are largely inverted. Retrospective monitoring and prospective regulation appear dissociable (r = .17, 95% CI wide given n=20; exemplar-based evidence is the primary support). Scaling on metacognitive calibration is architecture-dependent: monotonically decreasing (Qwen), monotonically increasing (GPT-5.4), or flat (Gemma). Behavioural findings converge structurally with an independent Type-2 SDT approach, providing preliminary cross-method construct validity. All items, data, and code: https://github.com/synthiumjp/metacognitive-monitoring-battery.

Measuring the quality of public deliberation requires evaluating not only civility or argument structure, but also the informational progress of a conversation. We introduce a framework for Conversational Information Gain (CIG) that evaluates each utterance in terms of how it advances collective understanding of the target topic. To operationalize CIG, we model an evolving semantic memory of the discussion: the system extracts atomic claims from utterances and incrementally consolidates them into a structured memory state. Using this memory, we score each utterance along three interpretable dimensions: Novelty, Relevance, and Implication Scope. We annotate 80 segments from two moderated deliberative settings (TV debates and community discussions) with these dimensions and show that memory-derived dynamics (e.g., the number of claim updates) correlate more strongly with human-perceived CIG than traditional heuristics such as utterance length or TF--IDF. We develop effective LLM-based CIG predictors paving the way for information-focused conversation quality analysis in dialogues and deliberative success.

We present VoodooNet, a non-iterative neural architecture that replaces the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) paradigm with a closed-form analytic solution via Galactic Expansion. By projecting input manifolds into a high-dimensional, high-entropy "Galactic" space ($d \gg 784$), we demonstrate that complex features can be untangled without the thermodynamic cost of backpropagation. Utilizing the Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse to solve for the output layer in a single step, VoodooNet achieves a classification accuracy of \textbf{98.10\% on MNIST} and \textbf{86.63\% on Fashion-MNIST}. Notably, our results on Fashion-MNIST surpass a 10-epoch SGD baseline (84.41\%) while reducing the training time by orders of magnitude. We observe a near-logarithmic scaling law between dimensionality and accuracy, suggesting that performance is a function of "Galactic" volume rather than iterative refinement. This "Magic Hat" approach offers a new frontier for real-time Edge AI, where the traditional training phase is bypassed in favor of instantaneous manifold discovery.

Higher-order interaction networks are typically modeled using hypergraphs or simplicial complexes, where interactions explicitly involve more than two nodes. Here we demonstrate that effective higher-order dynamical constraints emerge naturally on the 1-skeleton of a graph, provided the interaction carries nontrivial topological structure. We study phase-oscillator dynamics with edge phase lags modeled as a $U(1)$-valued connection. This structure induces a gradient Sakaguchi--Kuramoto-type flow and an associated twisted Laplacian whose spectrum depends on the cohomology class of the connection. We prove that the associated twisted Laplacian admits a zero mode if and only if the connection is cohomologically trivial, that is, when all cycle holonomies vanish. Consequently, synchronization is obstructed not by local pairwise mismatches, but by intrinsic topological frustration on cycles. We derive that the smallest eigenvalue of the twisted Laplacian scales with the magnitude of the holonomy, and its spectral transitions accurately predict the loss of stability of the phase-locked state as frustration is increased. For the specific case of constant phase lag, we analytically derive the critical transition point, $α_c = π/3$ for a pentagonal cycle, which is in quantitative agreement with previously reported numerical thresholds. Our results establish a spectral framework linking dynamical frustration to network cohomology, and show that transitions in remote synchronization are shaped by cycle-level topological constraints.

Energy systems optimisation models are a leading tool for informing decisions in the energy transition. However, these models often remain opaque, and results are frequently presented without a clear discussion of their epistemic limitations. We propose Diagnostic Modelling as a framework wherein modellers critically interrogate their models and explore uncertainties to uncover mechanistic explanations that offer policy-relevant insights. Mechanistic explanations provide fundamental understanding that remains valid despite model uncertainty and does not depend on detailed knowledge of a specific model. By adopting a more open and transparent approach to engaging with energy systems models, Diagnostic Modelling encourages the participation of a broader range of decision-makers, thereby building consensus in support of the energy transition.

The concept of cavity funneling has emerged recently as a promising route towards creating indistinguishable photons from highly dephased emitters. So far, all suggested solutions are solely based on dielectric cavities that require extremely high quality factors that are difficult to reach at visible wavelengths. Here we suggest a hybrid funneling architecture where a dephased emitter is coupled to a plasmonic nanoresonator that is enclosed by an outer dielectric cavity. The estimated lower limit of the outer cavity quality factor is found to be $\sim2$ orders of magnitude lower compared to a cascaded cavity system. Furthermore, the surrounding topology of our approach allows for a partial direct coupling between the emitter and the outer cavity which in turn can increase the overall system extraction efficiency $\left(β\right)$ by a factor of 12, boosting the probability of photon collection.

Perceptual judgments of sequential stimuli are systematically biased by prior expectations and by the temporal structure of sensory input. In haptic discrimination tasks, these effects often manifest as time-order asymmetries, whereby the perceived difference between two stimuli depends on their presentation order. Here, we introduce a dynamical Bayesian model that accounts for these biases by combining noisy sensory measurements with an evolving internal representation of stimulus intensity. The model formalizes perception as an inference process in which prior expectations are updated by incoming stimuli and propagate in time between observations. We test the model on psychophysical data from vibrotactile discrimination experiments, in which participants compare pairs of sequential stimuli with varying intensities. With a small number of parameters, the model quantitatively reproduces both the direction and magnitude of time-order effects across subjects, as well as the observed inter-individual variability. The inferred parameters provide a compact description of perceptual biases in terms of prior expectations and noise characteristics. Beyond fitting the data, the model induces a transformation of stimulus space, leading to a subject-dependent geometry of perceived stimuli. In this transformed space, perceptual judgments exhibit approximate symmetries that are absent in the physical stimulus coordinates. These results suggest that temporal biases in perception can be understood as a consequence of dynamical inference, and that they impose non-trivial geometric constraints on perceptual representations.

The complexity and significance of multiscale phenomena in fusion energy systems make advanced modeling necessary for designing, optimizing, and safely deploying fusion plants. Tritium accountancy is one of those challenges for deuterium-tritium fusion systems. Its availability is constrained by its short half-life (12.33 years) and limited natural abundance, which require fusion plants to breed tritium onsite. Therefore, accurate tritium accountancy is essential for effective resource management, safety, and economics in fusion plants. Through the U.S. Department of Energy milestone program, Tokamak Energy Ltd. is developing a fusion pilot plant design and evaluating tritium retention and loss in key components and their effect on the fuel cycle. To rapidly explore design trade-offs and quantify design decisions on tritium management, this study presents a multiscale analysis to investigate tritium diffusion, trapping, and recovery in key plasma-facing components. To enhance computational efficiency, we integrate surrogate models at the component-level within a fuel cycle model at the system-level, enabling rapid evaluation of tritium recycling dynamics and inventory under various operational scenarios. The goal of this study is twofold: (1) demonstrate the feasibility of utilizing surrogate models to increase the accuracy of fuel cycle modeling, and (2) rapidly evaluate the performance of fusion technologies to accelerate design iterations. This multiscale model provides the tritium transport and retention behavior and supports the plasma-facing components design optimization in normal and bake-out operations. The work is implemented using the Tritium Migration Analysis Program, Version 8 (TMAP8), an open-source application for tritium transport analysis in fusion systems.

Color centers in diamond are a promising platform for quantum computing applications because of their optical and spin properties. However, diamond presents some technological challenges that limit its use in complex or large photonic circuits. To mitigate these limitations, it is technically effective to separate the smallest possible diamond photonic structures or chiplet containing the color center(s) from the rest of the circuit, which is fabricated on another material platform, and then heterogeneously integrate them. Considering efficient excitation and photon collection from waveguide-coupled color centers, we design a cross waveguide as the primary component of our chiplet to access the color centers, channeling excitation and emitted photons into different waveguides, and connecting the structure to the other components of the photonic circuit. The chiplet containing the cross waveguide and supporting structures requires careful optimization of each subcomponent. The receptor's design is also critical for optimal signal transmission. In this paper, we develop a simple but efficient methodology to optimize the main components constituting both the chiplet and the receptor for their synergistic operation. The designed structure has an excitation-to-emission conversion of more than 5.4%, crosstalk of less than -40 dB, a working bandwidth of 160 nm, fabrication feasibility and tolerance within the limits of modern nanofabrication, and a mechanical solid structure with a footprint of less than 2000 $μ$m

The light-dependent magnetic compass of night-migratory songbirds is widely hypothesized to rely on the radical pair mechanism within retinal cryptochrome. However, bridging the mechanistic gap between microsecond quantum spin dynamics and the long-lived, global protein conformational changes required for cellular signalling remains a formidable challenge. Here, we apply redox state-resolved hydrogen/deuterium-exchange mass spectrometry (HDX-MS) to map the conformational landscape of European robin cryptochrome 4a (ErCry4a) across its photocycle. We reveal that photochemical reduction drives robust, allosteric structural transitions across key functional nodes, including the phosphate-binding loop (PBL), protrusion loop (PL), FAD-proximal helix α17, and the C-terminal α22/α23 network. Crucially, we isolate the structural fingerprint of the transient semiquinone, the presumed signalling species. Rather than acting as a linear structural stepping-stone, the semiquinone exhibits a distinct, non-monotonic conformational signature characterized by a transient destabilization of the PBL and PL, contrasting sharply with the global rigidification observed in the fully reduced state. These findings establish the semiquinone as a structurally unique and functionally competent biological entity. Our results provide direct biophysical evidence for a dedicated, high-fidelity structural signalling cascade, detailing how localized quantum-level photochemistry is translated into the precise conformational dynamics required for animal navigation.

We analyze information transmission in a recently proposed coarse-grained model of polymer replication by framing it as a communication channel between templates and copies. By calculating the mutual information in the steady-state limit of long chains, we recover the accurate-random phase diagram and establish that the information per-monomer depends solely on template specificity within the accurate regime. Crucially, even in the accurate region, small error fractions lead to substantial information loss due to the nonlinear relationship between errors and mutual information. Examining the information-to-energy cost ratio reveals non-monotonic behavior as a function of monomer alphabet size, with an optimum determined primarily by the per-monomer assembly free energy. For DNA's four-base alphabet, we find that the observed effective assembly energy (at least $14\,k_B T$) places the system far from the information-transmission optimum, suggesting that biological replication may prioritize the suppression of spontaneous random assembly over information-to-energy efficiency. We also characterize achievable rate-fidelity trade-offs using Shannon bounds, providing a theoretical framework for evaluating future proofreading mechanisms in ensemble models.

We develop a compact theory of time-reversed Young (TRY) interference beyond the symmetric two-slit geometry by considering equally spaced three-slit, finite $N$-slit, and infinite periodic slit arrays. In the TRY configuration, a point emitter illuminates the aperture, a position-fixed detector records the signal, and the response is reconstructed in source space by correlating the detector record with the source-coordinate label. We show that the three-slit case already reveals the essential new physics beyond two slits: a quadratic Fresnel phase survives, modifies the reconstructed interference law, and lifts the nominal dark fringes in the generic case. For a general equally spaced $N$-slit array, we identify the exact reconstructed response and show that the familiar textbook grating factor is recovered only when the quadratic phase is negligible, compensated, or reduced to a common phase across the array. In that ideal limit, the reconstructed peaks are source-space analogues of classical grating orders rather than outgoing diffraction beams. For an infinite periodic TRY array, we further show that the same discrete quadratic phase generates full and fractional Talbot-like revivals in source space, governed by a reciprocal-distance condition rather than the conventional Talbot propagation law. These results show that the symmetric two-slit TRY geometry is exceptional, while multi-slit TRY systems naturally combine source-space discrimination with sensitivity to aperture-wide phase structure and periodic-array revival physics.

Exciton-polariton lasers are coherent light sources which do not require the population inversion (transparency) condition to be fulfilled. They have been conceptualized at the end of the XXth century but until now they operate almost exclusively under optical injection, which severely limits the widespread integration of the polariton-based devices implemented so far. Here we tackle this issue by reporting an electrically-pumped exciton-polariton laser based on GaN and operating at room temperature in a mode-locked regime. The laser architecture is close to the geometry of commercial ridge-waveguide GaN lasers, but based on a bulk GaN active region instead of quantum wells. Unique features of polariton lasers are demonstrated, in particular the breakdown of the transparency condition, which enables our polariton lasers to operate even when only a small fraction (20\%) of the cavity length is injected. Moreover, the large polaritonic gain allows for the operation of a short cavity length (60$μm$) compared to commercial lasers. From the very same sample, we also achieve polariton lasing under optical injection, confirming that the doped layers necessary for electrical injection do not prevent strong-coupling nor polariton lasing. Our results open a new perspective for polariton-based devices.