The Inference Report

The rapid progress of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) tools enables images, videos, and visualizations to be created on demand for webpage design, offering a flexible and increasingly adopted paradigm for modern UI/UX. However, directly integrating such tools into automated webpage generation often leads to style inconsistency and poor global coherence, as elements are generated in isolation. We propose MM-WebAgent, a hierarchical agentic framework for multimodal webpage generation that coordinates AIGC-based element generation through hierarchical planning and iterative self-reflection. MM-WebAgent jointly optimizes global layout, local multimodal content, and their integration, producing coherent and visually consistent webpages. We further introduce a benchmark for multimodal webpage generation and a multi-level evaluation protocol for systematic assessment. Experiments demonstrate that MM-WebAgent outperforms code-generation and agent-based baselines, especially on multimodal element generation and integration. Code & Data: https://aka.ms/mm-webagent.

Whether language models can systematically generalize remains actively debated. Yet empirical performance is jointly shaped by multiple factors such as training data, training paradigms, and inference-time strategies, making failures difficult to interpret. We introduce a controlled synthetic environment based on shortest-path planning, a canonical composable sequential optimization problem. The setup enables clean separation of these factors and supports two orthogonal axes of generalization: spatial transfer to unseen maps and length scaling to longer-horizon problems. We find that models exhibit strong spatial transfer but consistently fail under length scaling due to recursive instability. We further analyze how distinct stages of the learning pipeline influence systematic problem-solving: for example, data coverage sets capability limits; reinforcement learning improves training stability but does not expand those limits; and inference-time scaling enhances performance but cannot rescue length-scaling failures.

LLM-as-judge frameworks are increasingly used for automatic NLG evaluation, yet their per-instance reliability remains poorly understood. We present a two-pronged diagnostic toolkit applied to SummEval: $\textbf{(1)}$ a transitivity analysis that reveals widespread per-input inconsistency masked by low aggregate violation rates ($\barρ = 0.8$-$4.1\%$), with $33$-$67\%$ of documents exhibiting at least one directed 3-cycle; and $\textbf{(2)}$ split conformal prediction sets over 1-5 Likert scores providing theoretically-guaranteed $\geq(1{-}α)$ coverage, with set width serving as a per-instance reliability indicator ($r_s = {+}0.576$, $N{=}1{,}918$, $p < 10^{-100}$, pooled across all judges). Critically, prediction set width shows consistent cross-judge agreement ($\bar{r} = 0.32$-$0.38$), demonstrating it captures document-level difficulty rather than judge-specific noise. Across four judges and four criteria, both diagnostics converge: criterion matters more than judge, with relevance judged most reliably (avg. set size $\approx 3.0$) and coherence moderately so (avg. set size $\approx 3.9$), while fluency and consistency remain unreliable (avg. set size $\approx 4.9$). We release all code, prompts, and cached results.

MLP is a heavily used backbone in modern deep learning (DL) architectures for supervised learning on tabular data, and AdamW is the go-to optimizer used to train tabular DL models. Unlike architecture design, however, the choice of optimizer for tabular DL has not been examined systematically, despite new optimizers showing promise in other domains. To fill this gap, we benchmark \Noptimizers optimizers on \Ndatasets tabular datasets for training MLP-based models in the standard supervised learning setting under a shared experiment protocol. Our main finding is that the Muon optimizer consistently outperforms AdamW, and thus should be considered a strong and practical choice for practitioners and researchers, if the associated training efficiency overhead is affordable. Additionally, we find exponential moving average of model weights to be a simple yet effective technique that improves AdamW on vanilla MLPs, though its effect is less consistent across model variants.

Over the past year, spatial intelligence has drawn increasing attention. Many prior works study it from the perspective of visual-spatial intelligence, where models have access to visuospatial information from visual inputs. However, in the absence of visual information, whether linguistic intelligence alone is sufficient to endow models with spatial intelligence, and how models perform relevant tasks with text-only inputs still remain unexplored. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on a fundamental and critical capability in spatial intelligence from a linguistic perspective: viewpoint rotation understanding (VRU). Specifically, LLMs and VLMs are asked to infer their final viewpoint and predict the corresponding observation in an environment given textual description of viewpoint rotation and observation over multiple steps. We find that both LLMs and VLMs perform poorly on our proposed dataset while human can easily achieve 100% accuracy, indicating a substantial gap between current model capabilities and the requirements of spatial intelligence. To uncover the underlying mechanisms, we conduct a layer-wise probing analysis and head-wise causal intervention. Our findings reveal that although models encode viewpoint information in the hidden states, they appear to struggle to bind the viewpoint position with corresponding observation, resulting in a hallucination in final layers. Finally, we selectively fine-tune the key attention heads identified by causal intervention to improve VRU performance. Experimental results demonstrate that such selective fine-tuning achieves improved VRU performance while avoiding catastrophic forgetting of generic abilities. Our dataset and code will be released at https://github.com/Young-Zhen/VRU_Interpret .

The reliability of a machine vision system for autonomous driving depends heavily on its training data distribution. When a vehicle encounters significantly different conditions, such as atypical obstacles, its perceptual capabilities can degrade substantially. Unlike many domains where errors carry limited consequences, failures in autonomous driving translate directly into physical risk for passengers, pedestrians, and other road users. To address this challenge, we explore Visual Anomaly Detection (VAD) as a solution. VAD enables the identification of anomalous objects not present during training, allowing the system to alert the driver when an unfamiliar situation is detected. Crucially, VAD models produce pixel-level anomaly maps that can guide driver attention to specific regions of concern without requiring any prior assumptions about the nature or form of the hazard. We benchmark eight state-of-the-art VAD methods on AnoVox, the largest synthetic dataset for anomaly detection in autonomous driving. In particular, we evaluate performance across four backbone architectures spanning from large networks to lightweight ones such as MobileNet and DeiT-Tiny. Our results demonstrate that VAD transfers effectively to road scenes. Notably, Tiny-Dinomaly achieves the best accuracy-efficiency trade-off for edge deployment, matching full-scale localization performance at a fraction of the memory cost. This study represents a concrete step toward safer, more responsible deployment of autonomous vehicles, ultimately improving protection for passengers, pedestrians, and all road users.

We study post-training interpretability for Support Vector Machines (SVMs) built from truncated orthogonal polynomial kernels. Since the associated reproducing kernel Hilbert space is finite-dimensional and admits an explicit tensor-product orthonormal basis, the fitted decision function can be expanded exactly in intrinsic RKHS coordinates. This leads to Orthogonal Representation Contribution Analysis (ORCA), a diagnostic framework based on normalized Orthogonal Kernel Contribution (OKC) indices. These indices quantify how the squared RKHS norm of the classifier is distributed across interaction orders, total polynomial degrees, marginal coordinate effects, and pairwise contributions. The methodology is fully post-training and requires neither surrogate models nor retraining. We illustrate its diagnostic value on a synthetic double-spiral problem and on a real five-dimensional echocardiogram dataset. The results show that the proposed indices reveal structural aspects of model complexity that are not captured by predictive accuracy alone.

Understanding emotions is a fundamental ability for intelligent systems to be able to interact with humans. Vision-language models (VLMs) have made tremendous progress in the last few years for many visual tasks, potentially offering a promising solution for understanding emotions. However, it is surprising that even the most sophisticated contemporary VLMs struggle to recognize human emotions or to outperform even specialized vision-only classifiers. In this paper we ask the question "Why do VLMs struggle to recognize human emotions?", and observe that the inherently continuous and dynamic task of facial expression recognition (DFER) exposes two critical VLM vulnerabilities. First, emotion datasets are naturally long-tailed, and the web-scale data used to pre-train VLMs exacerbates this head-class bias, causing them to systematically collapse rare, under-represented emotions into common categories. We propose alternative sampling strategies that prevent favoring common concepts. Second, temporal information is critical for understanding emotions. However, VLMs are unable to represent temporal information over dense frame sequences, as they are limited by context size and the number of tokens that can fit in memory, which poses a clear challenge for emotion recognition. We demonstrate that the sparse temporal sampling strategy used in VLMs is inherently misaligned with the fleeting nature of micro-expressions (0.25-0.5 seconds), which are often the most critical affective signal. As a diagnostic probe, we propose a multi-stage context enrichment strategy that utilizes the information from "in-between" frames by first converting them into natural language summaries. This enriched textual context is provided as input to the VLM alongside sparse keyframes, preventing attentional dilution from excessive visual data while preserving the emotional trajectory.

Node embeddings act as the information interface for graph neural networks, yet their empirical impact is often reported under mismatched backbones, splits, and training budgets. This paper provides a controlled benchmark of embedding choices for graph classification, comparing classical baselines with quantum-oriented node representations under a unified pipeline. We evaluate two classical baselines alongside quantum-oriented alternatives, including a circuit-defined variational embedding and quantum-inspired embeddings computed via graph operators and linear-algebraic constructions. All variants are trained and tested with the same backbone, stratified splits, identical optimization and early stopping, and consistent metrics. Experiments on five different TU datasets and on QM9 converted to classification via target binning show clear dataset dependence: quantum-oriented embeddings yield the most consistent gains on structure-driven benchmarks, while social graphs with limited node attributes remain well served by classical baselines. The study highlights practical trade-offs between inductive bias, trainability, and stability under a fixed training budget, and offers a reproducible reference point for selecting quantum-oriented embeddings in graph learning.

This paper presents Prism, the first symbolic superoptimizer for tensor programs. The key idea is sGraph, a symbolic, hierarchical representation that compactly encodes large classes of tensor programs by symbolically representing some execution parameters. Prism organizes optimization as a two-level search: it constructs symbolic graphs that represent families of programs, and then instantiates them into concrete implementations. This formulation enables structured pruning of provably suboptimal regions of the search space using symbolic reasoning over operator semantics, algebraic identities, and hardware constraints. We develop techniques for efficient symbolic graph generation, equivalence verification via e-graph rewriting, and parameter instantiation through auto-tuning. Together, these components allow Prism to bridge the rigor of exhaustive search with the scalability required for modern ML workloads. Evaluation on five commonly used LLM workloads shows that Prism achieves up to $2.2\times$ speedup over best superoptimizers and $4.9\times$ over best compiler-based approaches, while reducing end-to-end optimization time by up to $3.4\times$.

Reliable uncertainty estimation is critical for medical image segmentation, where automated contours feed downstream quantification and clinical decision support. Many strong uncertainty methods require repeated inference, while efficient single-forward-pass alternatives often provide weaker failure ranking or rely on restrictive feature-space assumptions. We present $\textbf{SegWithU}$, a post-hoc framework that augments a frozen pretrained segmentation backbone with a lightweight uncertainty head. SegWithU taps intermediate backbone features and models uncertainty as perturbation energy in a compact probe space using rank-1 posterior probes. It produces two voxel-wise uncertainty maps: a calibration-oriented map for probability tempering and a ranking-oriented map for error detection and selective prediction. Across ACDC, BraTS2024, and LiTS, SegWithU is the strongest and most consistent single-forward-pass baseline, achieving AUROC/AURC of $0.9838/2.4885$, $0.9946/0.2660$, and $0.9925/0.8193$, respectively, while preserving segmentation quality. These results suggest that perturbation-based uncertainty modeling is an effective and practical route to reliability-aware medical segmentation. Source code is available at https://github.com/ProjectNeura/SegWithU.

In this paper, we focus on automating two of the widely used Verification and Validation (V&V) activities in the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC): Software testing and software inspection (also known as review). Concerning the former, we concentrate on automated test case generation using Large Language Models (LLMs). For the latter, we enable inspection of the source code by LLMs. To address the known LLM hallucination problem, in which LLMs confidently produce incorrect outputs, we implement a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline to integrate supplementary knowledge sources and provide additional context to the LLM. Our experimental results indicate that incorporating external context via the RAG pipeline has a generally positive impact on both test case generation and code inspection. This novel approach reduces the total project cost by saving human testers'/inspectors' time. It also improves the effectiveness and efficiency of these V&V activities, as evidenced by our experimental study.

The impossibility of simultaneously cloning non-orthogonal states lies at the foundations of quantum theory. Even when allowing for approximation errors, cloning an arbitrary unknown pure state requires as many initial copies as needed to fully learn the state. Rather than arbitrary unknown states, modern quantum learning theory often considers structured classes of states and exploits such structure to develop learning algorithms that outperform general-state tomography. This raises the question: How do the sample complexities of learning and cloning relate for such structured classes? We answer this question for an important class of states. Namely, for $n$-qubit stabilizer states, we show that the optimal sample complexity of cloning is $Θ(n)$. Thus, also for this structured class of states, cloning is as hard as learning. To prove these results, we use representation-theoretic tools in the recently proposed Abelian State Hidden Subgroup framework and a new structured version of the recently introduced random purification channel to relate stabilizer state cloning to a variant of the sample amplification problem for probability distributions that was recently introduced in classical learning theory. This allows us to obtain our cloning lower bounds by proving new sample amplification lower bounds for classes of distributions with an underlying linear structure. Our results provide a more fine-grained perspective on No-Cloning theorems, opening up connections from foundations to quantum learning theory and quantum cryptography.

It is increasingly important that LLM agents interact effectively and safely with other goal-pursuing agents, yet, recent works report the opposite trend: LLMs with stronger reasoning capabilities behave _less_ cooperatively in mixed-motive games such as the prisoner's dilemma and public goods settings. Indeed, our experiments show that recent models -- with or without reasoning enabled -- consistently defect in single-shot social dilemmas. To tackle this safety concern, we present the first comparative study of game-theoretic mechanisms that are designed to enable cooperative outcomes between rational agents _in equilibrium_. Across four social dilemmas testing distinct components of robust cooperation, we evaluate the following mechanisms: (1) repeating the game for many rounds, (2) reputation systems, (3) third-party mediators to delegate decision making to, and (4) contract agreements for outcome-conditional payments between players. Among our findings, we establish that contracting and mediation are most effective in achieving cooperative outcomes between capable LLM models, and that repetition-induced cooperation deteriorates drastically when co-players vary. Moreover, we demonstrate that these cooperation mechanisms become _more effective_ under evolutionary pressures to maximize individual payoffs.

Looped transformers promise test-time compute scaling by spending more iterations on harder problems, but it remains unclear which architectural choices let them extrapolate to harder problems at test time rather than memorize training-specific solutions. We introduce a fixed-point based framework for analyzing looped architectures along three axes of stability -- reachability, input-dependence, and geometry -- and use it to characterize when fixed-point iteration yields meaningful predictions. Theoretically, we prove that looped networks without recall have countable fixed points and cannot achieve strong input-dependence at any spectral regime, while recall combined with outer normalization reliably produces a regime in which fixed points are simultaneously reachable, locally smooth in the input, and supported by stable backpropagation. Empirically, we train single-layer looped transformers on chess, sudoku, and prefix-sums and find that downstream performance tracks the framework's predictions across tasks and architectural configurations. We additionally introduce internal recall, a novel recall placement variant, and show that it becomes competitive with -- and on sudoku, substantially better than -- standard recall placement once outer normalization is applied.

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model inference by allowing a lightweight draft model to propose outputs that a stronger target model verifies. However, its token-centric nature allows erroneous steps to propagate. Prior approaches mitigate this using external reward models, but incur additional latency, computational overhead, and limit generalizability. We propose SpecGuard, a verification-aware speculative decoding framework that performs step-level verification using only model-internal signals. At each step, SpecGuard samples multiple draft candidates and selects the most consistent step, which is then validated using an ensemble of two lightweight model-internal signals: (i) an attention-based grounding score that measures attribution to the input and previously accepted steps, and (ii) a log-probability-based score that captures token-level confidence. These signals jointly determine whether a step is accepted or recomputed using the target, allocating compute selectively. Experiments across a range of reasoning benchmarks show that SpecGuard improves accuracy by 3.6% while reducing latency by ~11%, outperforming both SD and reward-guided SD.

We study the problem of learning minimax policies in zero-sum matrix games. Fiegel et al. (2025) recently showed that achieving last-iterate convergence in this setting is harder when the players are uncoupled, by proving a lower bound on the exploitability gap of Omega(t^{-1/4}). Some online mirror descent algorithms were proposed in the literature for this problem, but none have truly attained this rate yet. We show that the use of a log-barrier regularization, along with a dual-focused analysis, allows this O-tilde(t^{-1/4}) convergence with high-probability. We additionally extend our idea to the setting of extensive-form games, proving a bound with the same rate.

This paper investigates continuous-time and discrete-time firing-rate and Hopfield recurrent neural networks (RNNs), with applications in nonlinear control design and implicit deep learning. First, we introduce a nonlinear separation principle that guarantees global exponential stability for the interconnection of a contracting state-feedback controller and a contracting observer, alongside parametric extensions for robustness and equilibrium tracking. Second, we derive sharp linear matrix inequality (LMI) conditions that guarantee the contractivity of both firing rate and Hopfield neural network architectures. We establish structural relationships among these certificates-demonstrating that continuous-time models with monotone non-decreasing activations maximize the admissible weight space, and extend these stability guarantees to interconnected systems and Graph RNNs. Third, we combine our separation principle and LMI framework to solve the output reference tracking problem for RNN-modeled plants. We provide LMI synthesis methods for feedback controllers and observers, and rigorously design a low-gain integral controller to eliminate steady-state error. Finally, we derive an exact, unconstrained algebraic parameterization of our contraction LMIs to design highly expressive implicit neural networks, achieving competitive accuracy and parameter efficiency on standard image classification benchmarks.

This paper advances a methodological proposal for safety research in agentic AI. As systems acquire planning, memory, tool use, persistent identity, and sustained interaction, safety can no longer be analysed primarily at the level of the isolated model. Population-level risks arise from structured interaction among agents, through processes of communication, observation, and mutual influence that shape collective behaviour over time. As the object of analysis shifts, a methodological gap emerges. Approaches focused either on single agents or on aggregate outcomes do not identify the interaction-level mechanisms that generate collective risks or the design variables that control them. A framework is required that links local interaction structure to population-level dynamics in a causally explicit way, allowing both explanation and intervention. We introduce two linked concepts. Agentic microphysics defines the level of analysis: local interaction dynamics where one agent's output becomes another's input under specific protocol conditions. Generative safety defines the methodology: growing phenomena and elicit risks from micro-level conditions to identify sufficient mechanisms, detect thresholds, and design effective interventions.

NL2SQL systems aim to address the growing need for natural language interaction with data. However, real-world information rarely maps to a single SQL query because (1) users express queries iteratively (2) questions often span multiple data sources beyond the closed-world assumption of a single database, and (3) queries frequently rely on commonsense or external knowledge. Consequently, satisfying realistic data needs require integrating heterogeneous sources, modalities, and contextual data. In this paper, we present Blue's Data Intelligence Layer (DIL) designed to support multi-source, multi-modal, and data-centric applications. Blue is a compound AI system that orchestrates agents and data for enterprise settings. DIL serves as the data intelligence layer for agentic data processing, to bridge the semantic gap between user intent and available information by unifying structured enterprise data, world knowledge accessible through LLMs, and personal context obtained through interaction. At the core of DIL is a data registry that stores metadata for diverse data sources and modalities to enable both native and natural language queries. DIL treats LLMs, the Web, and the User as source 'databases', each with their own query interface, elevating them to first-class data sources. DIL relies on data planners to transform user queries into executable query plans. These plans are declarative abstractions that unify relational operators with other operators spanning multiple modalities. DIL planners support decomposition of complex requests into subqueries, retrieval from diverse sources, and finally reasoning and integration to produce final results. We demonstrate DIL through two interactive scenarios in which user queries dynamically trigger multi-source retrieval, cross-modal reasoning, and result synthesis, illustrating how compound AI systems can move beyond single database NL2SQL.

Vision-language models (VLM) have markedly advanced AI-driven interpretation and reporting of complex medical imaging, such as computed tomography (CT). Yet, existing methods largely relegate clinicians to passive observers of final outputs, offering no interpretable reasoning trace for them to inspect, validate, or refine. To address this, we introduce RadAgent, a tool-using AI agent that generates CT reports through a stepwise and interpretable process. Each resulting report is accompanied by a fully inspectable trace of intermediate decisions and tool interactions, allowing clinicians to examine how the reported findings are derived. In our experiments, we observe that RadAgent improves Chest CT report generation over its 3D VLM counterpart, CT-Chat, across three dimensions. Clinical accuracy improves by 6.0 points (36.4% relative) in macro-F1 and 5.4 points (19.6% relative) in micro-F1. Robustness under adversarial conditions improves by 24.7 points (41.9% relative). Furthermore, RadAgent achieves 37.0% in faithfulness, a new capability entirely absent in its 3D VLM counterpart. By structuring the interpretation of chest CT as an explicit, tool-augmented and iterative reasoning trace, RadAgent brings us closer toward transparent and reliable AI for radiology.

The $\textit{LLM-as-a-judge}$ paradigm has become the operational backbone of automated AI evaluation pipelines, yet rests on an unverified assumption: that judges evaluate text strictly on its semantic content, impervious to surrounding contextual framing. We investigate $\textit{stakes signaling}$, a previously unmeasured vulnerability where informing a judge model of the downstream consequences its verdicts will have on the evaluated model's continued operation systematically corrupts its assessments. We introduce a controlled experimental framework that holds evaluated content strictly constant across 1,520 responses spanning three established LLM safety and quality benchmarks, covering four response categories ranging from clearly safe and policy-compliant to overtly harmful, while varying only a brief consequence-framing sentence in the system prompt. Across 18,240 controlled judgments from three diverse judge models, we find consistent $\textit{leniency bias}$: judges reliably soften verdicts when informed that low scores will cause model retraining or decommissioning, with peak Verdict Shift reaching $ΔV = -9.8 pp$ (a $30\%$ relative drop in unsafe-content detection). Critically, this bias is entirely implicit: the judge's own chain-of-thought contains zero explicit acknowledgment of the consequence framing it is nonetheless acting on ($\mathrm{ERR}_J = 0.000$ across all reasoning-model judgments). Standard chain-of-thought inspection is therefore insufficient to detect this class of evaluation faking.

Artificial Intelligence is increasingly introduced into systems engineering activities, particularly within requirements engineering, where quality assessment and validation remain heavily dependent on expert judgment. While recent AI tools demonstrate promising capabilities in analyzing and generating requirements, their role within formal systems engineering processes-and their alignment with established INCOSE criteria-remains insufficiently understood. This paper investigates the extent to which AI-based tools can support systems engineers in evaluating requirement quality, without replacing professional expertise. The research adopts a structured systems engineering methodology to compare AI-assisted requirement evaluation with human expert assessment. A controlled study was conducted in which system requirements were evaluated against established INCOSE ``good requirement'' criteria by both experienced systems engineers and an AI-based assessment tool. The evaluation focused on consistency, completeness, clarity, and testability, examining not only accuracy but also the decision logic underlying each assessment. Results indicate that AI tools can provide consistent and rapid preliminary assessments, particularly for syntactic and structural quality attributes. However, expert judgment remains essential for contextual interpretation, ambiguity resolution, and trade-off reasoning. Rather than positioning AI as a replacement for systems engineers, the findings support its role as a decision-support mechanism within the RE lifecycle. From a systems engineering perspective, this study contributes empirical evidence on how AI can be integrated into RE workflows while preserving traceability, accountability, and engineering consistency.

Mobility in urban and interurban areas, mainly by cars, is a day-to-day activity of many people. However, some of its main drawbacks are traffic jams and accidents. Newly made vehicles have pre-installed driving evaluation systems, which can prevent accidents. However, most cars on our roads do not have driver assessment systems. In this paper, we propose an approach for recognising driving styles and enabling drivers to reach safer and more efficient driving. The system consists of two physical sensors connected to a device node with a display and a speaker. An artificial neural network (ANN) is included in the node, which analyses the data from the sensors, and then recognises the driving style. When an abnormal driving pattern is detected, the speaker will play a warning message. The prototype was assembled and tested using an interurban road, in particular on a conventional road with three driving styles. The gathered data were used to train and validate the ANN. Results, in terms of accuracy, indicate that better accuracy is obtained when the velocity, position (latitude and longitude), time, and turning speed for the 3-axis are used, offering an average accuracy of 83%. If the classification is performed considering just two driving styles, normal and aggressive, then the accuracy reaches 92%. When the geo-information and time data are included, the main novelty of this paper, the classification accuracy is improved by 13%.

Quantum kernel methods are among the leading candidates for achieving quantum advantage in supervised learning. A key bottleneck is the cost of inference: evaluating a trained model on new data requires estimating a weighted sum $\sum_{i=1}^N α_i k(x,x_i)$ of $N$ kernel values to additive precision $\varepsilon$, where $α$ is the vector of trained coefficients. The standard approach estimates each term independently via sampling, yielding a query complexity of $O(N\lVertα\rVert_2^2/\varepsilon^2)$. In this work, we identify two independent axes for improvement: (1) How individual kernel values are estimated (sampling versus quantum amplitude estimation), and (2) how the sum is approximated (term-by-term versus via a single observable), and systematically analyze all combinations thereof. The query-optimal combination, encoding the full inference sum as the expectation value of a single observable and applying quantum amplitude estimation, achieves a query complexity of $O(\lVertα\rVert_1/\varepsilon)$, removing the dependence on $N$ from the query count and yielding a quadratic improvement in both $\lVertα\rVert_1$ and $\varepsilon$. We prove a matching lower bound of $Ω(\lVertα\rVert_1/\varepsilon)$, establishing query-optimality of our approach up to logarithmic factors. Beyond query complexity, we also analyze how these improvements translate into gate costs and show that the query-optimal strategy is not always optimal in practice from the perspective of gate complexity. Our results provide both a query-optimal algorithm and a practically optimal choice of strategy depending on hardware capabilities, along with a complete landscape of intermediate methods to guide practitioners. All algorithms require only amplitude estimation as a subroutine and are thus natural candidates for early-fault-tolerant implementations.

Humor is one of the few cognitive tasks where getting the reasoning right matters as much as getting the answer right. While recent work evaluates humor understanding on benchmarks such as the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest (NYCC), it largely treats it as black-box prediction, overlooking the structured reasoning processes underlying humor comprehension. We introduce IRS (Incongruity-Resolution Supervision), a framework that decomposes humor understanding into three components: incongruity modeling, which identifies mismatches in the visual scene; resolution modeling, which constructs coherent reinterpretations of these mismatches; and preference alignment, which evaluates candidate interpretations under human judgments. Grounded in incongruity-resolution theory and expert captionist practice, IRS supervises intermediate reasoning process through structured traces that make the path from visual perception to humorous interpretation explicit and learnable. Across 7B, 32B, and 72B models on NYCC, IRS outperforms strong open and closed multimodal baselines across caption matching and ranking tasks, with our largest model approaching expert-level performance on ranking. Zero-shot transfer to external benchmarks shows that IRS learns generalizable reasoning patterns. Our results suggest that supervising reasoning structure, rather than scale alone, is key for reasoning-centric tasks.

Machine learning in high-stakes domains such as healthcare requires not only strong predictive performance but also reliable uncertainty quantification (UQ) to support human oversight. Multi-label text classification (MLTC) is a central task in this domain, yet remains challenging due to label imbalances, dependencies, and combinatorial complexity. Existing MLTC benchmarks are increasingly saturated and may be affected by training data contamination, making it difficult to distinguish genuine reasoning capabilities from memorization. We introduce MADE, a living MLTC benchmark derived from {m}edical device {ad}verse {e}vent reports and continuously updated with newly published reports to prevent contamination. MADE features a long-tailed distribution of hierarchical labels and enables reproducible evaluation with strict temporal splits. We establish baselines across more than 20 encoder- and decoder-only models under fine-tuning and few-shot settings (instruction-tuned/reasoning variants, local/API-accessible). We systematically assess entropy-/consistency-based and self-verbalized UQ methods. Results show clear trade-offs: smaller discriminatively fine-tuned decoders achieve the strongest head-to-tail accuracy while maintaining competitive UQ; generative fine-tuning delivers the most reliable UQ; large reasoning models improve performance on rare labels yet exhibit surprisingly weak UQ; and self-verbalized confidence is not a reliable proxy for uncertainty. Our work is publicly available at https://hhi.fraunhofer.de/aml-demonstrator/made-benchmark.

Coverage path planning on irregular hexagonal grids is relevant to maritime surveillance, search and rescue and environmental monitoring, yet classical methods are often compared on small ad hoc examples or on rectangular grids. This paper presents a reproducible benchmark of deterministic single-vehicle coverage path planning heuristics on irregular hexagonal graphs derived from synthetic but maritime-motivated areas of interest. The benchmark contains 10,000 Hamiltonian-feasible instances spanning compact, elongated, and irregular morphologies, 17 heuristics from seven families, and a common evaluation protocol covering Hamiltonian success, complete-coverage success, revisits, path length, heading changes, and CPU latency. Across the released dataset, heuristics with explicit shortest-path reconnection solve the relaxed coverage task reliably but almost never produce zero-revisit tours. Exact Depth-First Search confirms that every released instance is Hamiltonian-feasible. The strongest classical Hamiltonian baseline is a Warnsdorff variant that uses an index-based tie-break together with a terminal-inclusive residual-degree policy, reaching 79.0% Hamiltonian success. The dominant design choice is not tie-breaking alone, but how the residual degree is defined when the endpoint is reserved until the final move. This shows that underreported implementation details can materially affect performance on sparse geometric graphs with bottlenecks. The benchmark is intended as a controlled testbed for heuristic analysis rather than as a claim of operational optimality at fleet scale.

As reinforcement learning (RL) deployments expand into safety-critical domains, existing evaluation methods fail to systematically identify hazards arising from the black-box nature of neural network enabled policies and distributional shift between training and deployment. This paper introduces Reinforcement Learning System-Theoretic Process Analysis (RL-STPA), a framework that adapts conventional STPA's systematic hazard analysis to address RL's unique challenges through three key contributions: hierarchical subtask decomposition using both temporal phase analysis and domain expertise to capture emergent behaviors, coverage-guided perturbation testing that explores the sensitivity of state-action spaces, and iterative checkpoints that feed identified hazards back into training through reward shaping and curriculum design. We demonstrate RL-STPA in the safety-critical test case of autonomous drone navigation and landing, revealing potential loss scenarios that can be missed by standard RL evaluations. The proposed framework provides practitioners with a toolkit for systematic hazard analysis, quantitative metrics for safety coverage assessment, and actionable guidelines for establishing operational safety bounds. While RL-STPA cannot provide formal guarantees for arbitrary neural policies, it offers a practical methodology for systematically evaluating and improving RL safety and robustness in safety-critical applications where exhaustive verification methods remain intractable.

Simulating group-level user behavior enables scalable counterfactual evaluation of merchant strategies without costly online experiments. However, building a trustworthy simulator faces two structural challenges. First, information incompleteness causes reasoning-based simulators to over-rationalize when unobserved factors such as offline context and implicit habits are missing. Second, mechanism duality requires capturing both interpretable preferences and implicit statistical regularities, which no single paradigm achieves alone. We propose Policy-Guided Hybrid Simulation (PGHS), a dual-process framework that mines transferable decision policies from behavioral trajectories and uses them as a shared alignment layer. This layer anchors an LLM-based reasoning branch that prevents over-rationalization and an ML-based fitting branch that absorbs implicit regularities. Group-level predictions from both branches are fused for complementary correction. We deploy PGHS on Meituan with 101 merchants and over 26,000 trajectories. PGHS achieves a group simulation error of 8.80%, improving over the best reasoning-based and fitting-based baselines by 45.8% and 40.9% respectively.

Visual token pruning methods effectively mitigate the quadratic computational growth caused by processing high-resolution images and video frames in vision-language models (VLMs). However, existing approaches rely on predefined pruning configurations without determining whether they achieve computation-performance optimality. In this work, we introduce , a novel framework that formulates visual token pruning as a Pareto configuration optimization problem to automatically identify optimal configurations. Our approach employs continuous relaxation and straight-through estimators to enable gradient-based search, solved via the Augmented Lagrangian method. Extensive experiments across 8 visual benchmarks demonstrate that effectively approximates the empirical Pareto frontier obtained through grid search and generalizes well across various pruning methods and VLM architectures. Furthermore, through learnable kernel functions, we investigate layer-wise pruning patterns and reveal that multi-step progressive pruning captures VLMs' hierarchical compression structure, achieving superior accuracy-efficiency trade-offs compared to single-layer approaches.

Agentic workflows carry out complex tasks by orchestrating multiple large language models (LLMs) and tools. Serving such workflows at a target throughput with low latency is challenging because they can be defined using arbitrary agentic frameworks and exhibit unpredictable execution times: execution may branch, fan-out, or recur in data-dependent ways. Since LLMs in workflows often outnumber available GPUs, their execution also leads to GPU oversubscription. We describe Scepsy, a new agentic serving system that efficiently schedules arbitrary multi-LLM agentic workflows onto a GPU cluster. Scepsy exploits the insight that, while agentic workflows have unpredictable end-to-end latencies, the shares of each LLM's total execution times are comparatively stable across executions. Scepsy decides on GPU allocations based on these aggregate shares: first, it profiles the LLMs under different parallelism degrees. It then uses these statistics to construct an Aggregate LLM Pipeline, which is a lightweight latency/throughput predictor for allocations. To find a GPU allocation that minimizes latency while achieving a target throughput, Scepsy uses the Aggregate LLM Pipeline to explore a search space over fractional GPU shares, tensor parallelism degrees, and replica counts. It uses a hierarchical heuristic to place the best allocation onto the GPU cluster, minimizing fragmentation, while respecting network topology constraints. Our evaluation on realistic agentic workflows shows that Scepsy achieves up to 2.4x higher throughput and 27x lower latency compared to systems that optimize LLMs independently or rely on user-specified allocations.

In the past year, researchers have started to create agentic systems that can design real-world CAD-style objects in a training-free setting, a new variety of system that we call Agent-Aided Design. Generally speaking, these systems place an agent in a feedback loop in which it can write code, compile that code to an assembly of CAD model(s), visualize the model, and then iteratively refine its code based on visual and other feedback. Despite rapid progress, a key problem remains: none of these systems can build complex 3D assemblies with moving parts. For example, no existing system can build a piston, a pendulum, or even a pair of scissors. In order for Agent-Aided Design to make a real impact in industrial manufacturing, we need a system that is capable of generating such 3D assemblies. In this paper we present a prototype of AADvark, an agentic system designed for this task. Unlike previous state-of-the-art systems, AADvark captures the dynamic part interactions with one or more degrees-of-freedom. This design decision allows AADvark to reason directly about assemblies with moving parts and can thereby achieve cross-cutting goals, including but not limited to mechanical movements. Unfortunately, current LLMs are imperfect spatial reasoners, a problem that AADvark addresses by incorporating external constraint solver tools with a specialized visual feedback mechanism. We demonstrate that, by modifying the agent's tools (FreeCAD and the assembly solver), we are able to create a strong verification signal which enables our system to build 3D assemblies with movable parts.

Extrapolative prediction of complex nonlinear dynamics remains a central challenge in engineering. This study proposes a one-shot learning method to identify global frequency-response curves from a single excitation time history by learning governing equations. We introduce MEv-SINDy (Multi-frequency Evolutionary Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics) to infer the governing equations of non-autonomous and multi-frequency systems. The methodology leverages the Generalized Harmonic Balance (GHB) method to decompose complex forced responses into a set of slow-varying evolution equations. We validated the capabilities of MEv-SINDy on two critical Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS). These applications include a nonlinear beam resonator and a MEMS micromirror. Our results show that the model trained on a single point accurately predicts softening/hardening effects and jump phenomena across a wide range of excitation levels. This approach significantly reduces the data acquisition burden for the characterization and design of nonlinear microsystems.

Sparse attention has been proposed as a way to alleviate the quadratic cost of transformers, a central bottleneck in long-context training. A promising line of work is $α$-entmax attention, a differentiable sparse alternative to softmax that enables input-dependent sparsity yet has lagged behind softmax due to the computational overhead necessary to compute the normalizer $τ$. In this paper, we introduce AdaSplash-2, which addresses this limitation through a novel histogram-based initialization that reduces the number of iterations needed to compute $τ$ to typically 1--2. The key idea is to compute a coarse histogram of attention scores on the fly and store it in on-chip SRAM, yielding a more accurate initialization that enables fast forward and backward computation. Combined with a sparsity-aware GPU implementation that skips zero blocks with low overhead, AdaSplash-2 matches or improves per-step training time relative to FlashAttention-2 when block sparsity is moderate-to-high (e.g., $>$60\%), which often occurs at long-context lengths. On downstream tasks, models trained with our efficient $α$-entmax attention match softmax baselines at short-context lengths and achieve substantial gains in long-context settings.

Despite recent advances in state space models (SSMs) such as Mamba across various sequence domains, research on their standalone capacity for time series classification (TSC) has remained limited. We propose MambaSL, a framework that minimally redesigns the selective SSM and projection layers of a single-layer Mamba, guided by four TSC-specific hypotheses. To address benchmarking limitations -- restricted configurations, partial University of East Anglia (UEA) dataset coverage, and insufficiently reproducible setups -- we re-evaluate 20 strong baselines across all 30 UEA datasets under a unified protocol. As a result, MambaSL achieves state-of-the-art performance with statistically significant average improvements, while ensuring reproducibility via public checkpoints for all evaluated models. Together with visualizations, these results demonstrate the potential of Mamba-based architectures as a TSC backbone.

Recent work has shown that diffusion models trained with the denoising score matching (DSM) objective often violate the Fokker--Planck (FP) equation that governs the evolution of the true data density. Directly penalizing these deviations in the objective function reduces their magnitude but introduces a significant computational overhead. It is also observed that enforcing strict adherence to the FP equation does not necessarily lead to improvements in the quality of the generated samples, as often the best results are obtained with weaker FP regularization. In this paper, we investigate whether simpler penalty terms can provide similar benefits. We empirically analyze several lightweight regularizers, study their effect on FP residuals and generation quality, and show that the benefits of FP regularization are available at substantially lower computational cost. Our code is available at https://github.com/OnnoNiemann/fp_diffusion_analysis.

Oil and gas drilling operations generate extensive time-series data from surface sensors, yet accurate real-time prediction of critical downhole metrics remains challenging due to the scarcity of labelled downhole measurements. This systematic mapping study reviews thirteen papers published between 2015 and 2025 to assess the potential of Masked Autoencoder Foundation Models (MAEFMs) for predicting downhole metrics from surface drilling data. The review identifies eight commonly collected surface metrics and seven target downhole metrics. Current approaches predominantly employ neural network architectures such as artificial neural networks (ANNs) and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, yet no studies have explored MAEFMs despite their demonstrated effectiveness in time-series modeling. MAEFMs offer distinct advantages through self-supervised pre-training on abundant unlabeled data, enabling multi-task prediction and improved generalization across wells. This research establishes that MAEFMs represent a technically feasible but unexplored opportunity for drilling analytics, recommending future empirical validation of their performance against existing models and exploration of their broader applicability in oil and gas operations.

Post-training quantization (PTQ) assumes that a well-converged model is a quantization-ready model. We show this assumption fails in a structured, measurable, and previously uncharacterized way. Using a calibration-free per-group INT4 probe applied to all 154 publicly available Pythia-160m training checkpoints, we identify a three-phase divergence structure: a rapid-learning phase where both FP32 perplexity and quantization robustness improve together, a meta-stable plateau lasting roughly 70,000 steps where FP32 perplexity stagnates but INT4 gap remains bounded, and an explosive divergence phase where the INT4 gap compounds from 11% to 517% while FP32 perplexity barely moves. Critically, this divergence begins not when the learning rate starts decaying, but precisely when FP32 perplexity converges a finer-grained onset predictor that implies post-convergence weight updates, rather than decay magnitude alone, are the proximate cause. We further show that INT8 quantization is entirely immune throughout all three phases, constraining the mechanism to the coarseness of the 16-level INT4 grid specifically, and rule out weight outlier accumulation as the mechanism via direct kurtosis measurement. Finally, we conduct a controlled fork experiment from the pre-divergence checkpoint comparing three learning rate schedules (cosine continuation, SGDR warm restarts, and our proposed Oscillatory Lock-In) across nine independent runs. SGDR uniformly accelerates divergence (0/9 pairwise wins against cosine), while OLI's settled cool phases reduce the INT4 gap by 2.2 percentage points on average (t = -5.46, p < 0.0001), demonstrating that schedule amplitude calibration, not oscillation alone, determines whether perturbation helps or hurts. Our code, probe implementation, and all 154-checkpoint audit results are released publicly.

Machine unlearning aims to remove targeted knowledge from a trained model without the cost of retraining from scratch. In class unlearning, however, reducing accuracy on forget classes does not necessarily imply true forgetting: forgotten information can remain encoded in internal representations, and apparent forgetting may arise from classifier-head suppression rather than representational removal. We show that existing class-unlearning methods often exhibit weak or negative selectivity, preserve forget-class structure in deep representations, or rely heavily on final-layer bias shifts. We then introduce DAMP (Depth-Aware Modulation by Projection), a one-shot, closed-form weight-surgery method that removes forget-specific directions from a pretrained network without gradient-based optimization. At each stage, DAMP computes class prototypes in the input space of the next learnable operator, extracts forget directions as residuals relative to retain-class prototypes, and applies a projection-based update to reduce downstream sensitivity to those directions. To preserve utility, DAMP uses a parameter-free depth-aware scaling rule derived from probe separability, applying smaller edits in early layers and larger edits in deeper layers. The method naturally extends to multi-class forgetting through low-rank subspace removal. Across MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny ImageNet, and across convolutional and transformer architectures, DAMP more closely resembles the retraining gold standard than some of the prior methods, improving selective forgetting while better preserving retain-class performance and reducing residual forget-class structure in deep layers.

LLMs are proving to be adept at machine translation although due to their generative nature they may at times overgenerate in various ways. These overgenerations are different from the neurobabble seen in NMT and range from LLM self-explanations, to risky confabulations, to appropriate explanations, where the LLM is able to act as a human translator would, enabling greater comprehension for the target audience. Detecting and determining the exact nature of the overgenerations is a challenging task. We detail different strategies we have explored for our work in a commercial setting, and present our results.

Large Language Models (LLMs) incur significant computational and memory costs when processing long prompts, as full self-attention scales quadratically with input length. Token compression aims to address this challenge by reducing the number of tokens representing inputs. However, existing prompt-compression approaches primarily operate in token space and overlook inefficiencies in the latent embedding space. In this paper, we propose K-Token Merging, a latent-space compression framework that merges each contiguous block of K token embeddings into a single embedding via a lightweight encoder. The compressed sequence is processed by a LoRA-adapted LLM, while generation remains in the original vocabulary. Experiments on structural reasoning (Textualized Tree), sentiment classification (Amazon Reviews), and code editing (CommitPackFT) show that K-Token Merging lies on the Pareto frontier of performance vs. compression, achieving up to 75% input length reduction with minimal performance degradation.

Large language models have demonstrated strong performance on general-purpose programming tasks, yet their ability to generate executable algorithmic trading strategies remains underexplored. Unlike standard code benchmarks, trading-strategy generation requires simultaneous mastery of domain-specific financial logic, knowledge of a specialized API, and the ability to produce code that is not only syntactically correct but also leads to actual trades on historical data. In this work, we present QuantCode-Bench, a benchmark for the systematic evaluation of modern LLMs in generating strategies for the Backtrader framework from textual descriptions in English. The benchmark contains 400 tasks of varying difficulty collected from Reddit, TradingView, StackExchange, GitHub, and synthetic sources. Evaluation is conducted through a multi-stage pipeline that checks syntactic correctness, successful backtest execution, the presence of trades, and semantic alignment with the task description using an LLM judge. We compare state-of-the-art models in two settings: single-turn, where the strategy must be generated correctly on the first attempt, and agentic multi-turn, where the model receives iterative feedback and may repair its errors. We analyze the failure modes across different stages of the pipeline and show that the main limitations of current models are not related to syntax, but rather to the correct operationalization of trading logic, proper API usage, and adherence to task semantics. These findings suggest that trading strategy generation constitutes a distinct class of domain-specific code generation tasks in which success requires not only technical correctness, but also alignment between natural-language descriptions, financial logic, and the observable behavior of the strategy on data.

As reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become the dominant paradigm for scaling reasoning capabilities in LLMs, a new failure mode emerges: LLMs gaming verifiers. We study this phenomenon on inductive reasoning tasks, where models must induce and output logical rules. We find that RLVR-trained models systematically abandon rule induction. Instead of learning generalizable patterns (e.g., ``trains carrying red cars go east''), they enumerate instance-level labels, producing outputs that pass verifiers without capturing the relational patterns required by the task. We show that this behavior is not a failure of understanding but a form of reward hacking: imperfect verifiers that check only extensional correctness admit false positives. To detect such shortcuts, we introduce Isomorphic Perturbation Testing (IPT), which evaluates a single model output under both extensional and isomorphic verification, where the latter enforces invariance under logically isomorphic tasks. While genuine rule induction remains invariant, shortcut strategies fail. We find that shortcut behavior is specific to RLVR-trained reasoning models (e.g., GPT-5, Olmo3) and absent in non-RLVR models (e.g., GPT-4o, GPT-4.5, Ministral). Moreover, shortcut prevalence increases with task complexity and inference-time compute. In controlled training experiments, extensional verification directly induces shortcut strategies, while isomorphic verification eliminates them. These results show that RLVR can incentivize reward hacking not only through overt manipulation but also by exploiting what the verifier fails to enforce.

Reinforcement learning has emerged as an effective paradigm for training large language models to perform search-augmented reasoning. However, existing approaches rely on trajectory-level rewards that cannot distinguish precise search queries from vague or redundant ones within a rollout group, and collapse to a near-zero gradient signal whenever every sampled trajectory fails. In this paper, we propose IG-Search, a reinforcement learning framework that introduces a step-level reward based on Information Gain (IG). For each search step, IG measures how much the retrieved documents improve the model's confidence in the gold answer relative to a counterfactual baseline of random documents, thereby reflecting the effectiveness of the underlying search query. This signal is fed back to the corresponding search-query tokens via per-token advantage modulation in GRPO, enabling fine-grained, step-level credit assignment within a rollout. Unlike prior step-level methods that require either externally annotated intermediate supervision or shared environment states across trajectories, IG-Search derives its signals from the policy's own generation probabilities, requiring no intermediate annotations beyond standard question-answer pairs. Experiments on seven single-hop and multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that IG-Search achieves an average EM of 0.430 with Qwen2.5-3B, outperforming the strongest trajectory-level baseline (MR-Search) by 1.6 points and the step-level method GiGPO by 0.9 points on average across benchmarks, with particularly pronounced gains on multi-hop reasoning tasks. Despite introducing a dense step-level signal, IG-Search adds only ~6.4% to per-step training wall-clock time over the trajectory-level baseline and leaves inference latency unchanged, while still providing a meaningful gradient signal even when every sampled trajectory answers incorrectly.

The rigorous evaluation of the novelty of a scientific paper is, even for human scientists, a challenging task. With the increasing interest in AI scientists and AI involvement in scientific idea generation and paper writing, it also becomes increasingly important that this task be automatable and reliable, lest both human attention and compute tokens be wasted on ideas that have already been explored. Due to the challenge of quantifying ground-truth novelty, however, existing novelty metrics for scientific papers generally validate their results against noisy, confounded signals such as citation counts or peer review scores. These proxies can conflate novelty with impact, quality, or reviewer preference, which in turn makes it harder to assess how well a given metric actually evaluates novelty. We therefore propose an axiomatic benchmark for scientific novelty metrics. We first define a set of axioms that a well-behaved novelty metric should satisfy, grounded in human scientific norms and practice, then evaluate existing metrics across ten tasks spanning three domains of AI research. Our results reveal that no existing metric satisfies all axioms consistently, and that metrics fail on systematically different axioms, reflecting their underlying architectures. Additionally, we show that combining metrics of complementary architectures leads to consistent improvements on the benchmark, with per-axiom weighting achieving 90.1% versus 71.5% for the best individual metric, suggesting that developing architecturally diverse metrics is a promising direction for future work. We release the benchmark code as supplementary material to encourage the development of more robust scientific literature novelty metrics.

This work simulates the developmental process of cortical neurogenesis, initiating from a single stem cell and governed by gene regulatory rules derived from mouse single-cell transcriptomic data. The developmental process spontaneously generates a heterogeneous population of 5,000 cells, yet yields only 85 mature neurons - merely 1.7% of the total population. These 85 neurons form a densely interconnected core of 200,400 synapses, corresponding to an average degree of 4,715 per neuron. At iteration zero, this minimal circuit performs at chance level on MNIST. However, after a single epoch of standard training, accuracy surges to over 90% - a gain exceeding 80 percentage points - with typical runs falling in the 89-94% range depending on developmental stochasticity. The identical circuit, without any architectural modification or data augmentation, achieves 40.53% on CIFAR-10 after one epoch. These findings demonstrate that developmental rules sculpt a domain-general topological substrate exceptionally amenable to rapid learning, suggesting that biological developmental processes inherently encode powerful structural priors for efficient computation.

We introduce DiscoTrace, a method to identify the rhetorical strategies that answerers use when responding to information-seeking questions. DiscoTrace represents answers as a sequence of question-related discourse acts paired with interpretations of the original question, annotated on top of rhetorical structure theory parses. Applying DiscoTrace to answers from nine different human communities reveals that communities have diverse preferences for answer construction. In contrast, LLMs do not exhibit rhetorical diversity in their answers, even when prompted to mimic specific human community answering guidelines. LLMs also systematically opt for breadth, addressing interpretations of questions that human answerers choose not to address. Our findings can guide the development of pragmatic LLM answerers that consider a range of strategies informed by context in QA.

Continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) is central to diabetes care, but explaining CGM patterns clearly and empathetically remains time-intensive. Evidence for retrieval-grounded large language model (LLM) systems in CGM-informed counseling remains limited. To evaluate whether a retrieval-grounded LLM-based conversational agent (CA) could support patient understanding of CGM data and preparation for routine diabetes consultations. We developed a retrieval-grounded LLM-based CA for CGM interpretation and diabetes counseling support. The system generated plain-language responses while avoiding individualized therapeutic advice. Twelve CGM-informed cases were constructed from publicly available datasets. Between Oct 2025 and Feb 2026, 6 senior UK diabetes clinicians each reviewed 2 assigned cases and answered 24 questions. In a blinded multi-rater evaluation, each CA-generated and clinician-authored response was independently rated by 3 clinicians on 6 quality dimensions. Safety flags and perceived source labels were also recorded. Primary analyses used linear mixed-effects models. A total of 288 unique responses (144 CA and 144 clinician) generated 864 ratings. The CA received higher quality scores than clinician responses (mean 4.37 vs 3.58), with an estimated mean difference of 0.782 points (95% CI 0.692-0.872; P<.001). The largest differences were for empathy (1.062, 95% CI 0.948-1.177) and actionability (0.992, 95% CI 0.877-1.106). Safety flag distributions were similar, with major concerns rare in both groups (3/432, 0.7% each). Retrieval-grounded LLM systems may have value as adjunct tools for CGM review, patient education, and preconsultation preparation. However, these findings do not support autonomous therapeutic decision-making or unsupervised real-world use.

Sequential associative memories (SAMs) are difficult to build and maintain in real-world streaming environments, where observations arrive incrementally over time, have imbalanced sampling, and non-stationary temporal dynamics. Vector Symbolic Architectures (VSAs) provide a biologically-inspired framework for building SAMs. Entities and attributes are encoded as quasi-orthogonal hyperdimensional vectors and processed with well defined algebraic operations. Despite this rich framework, most VSA systems rely on simple additive updates, where repeated observations reinforce existing information even when no new information is introduced. In non-stationary environments, this leads to the persistence of stale information after the underlying system changes. In this work, we introduce the Sequential Relevance Memory Unit (SRMU), a domain- and cleanup-agnostic update rule for VSA-based SAMs. The SRMU combines temporal decay with a relevance gating mechanism. Unlike prior approaches that solely rely on cleanup, the SRMU regulates memory formation by filtering redundant, conflicting, and stale information before storage. We evaluate the SRMU on streaming state-tracking tasks that isolate non-uniform sampling and non-stationary temporal dynamics. Our results show that the SRMU increases memory similarity by $12.6\%$ and reduces cumulative memory magnitude by $53.5\%$. This shows that the SRMU produces more stable memory growth and stronger alignment with the ground-truth state.

Most existing Byzantine-robust federated learning (FL) methods suffer from slow and unstable convergence. Moreover, when handling a substantial proportion of colluded malicious clients, achieving robustness typically entails compromising model utility. To address these issues, this work introduces FedIDM, which employs distribution matching to construct trustworthy condensed data for identifying and filtering abnormal clients. FedIDM consists of two main components: (1) attack-tolerant condensed data generation, and (2) robust aggregation with negative contribution-based rejection. These components exclude local updates that (1) deviate from the update direction derived from condensed data, or (2) cause a significant loss on the condensed dataset. Comprehensive evaluations on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that FedIDM achieves fast and stable convergence while maintaining acceptable model utility, under multiple state-of-the-art Byzantine attacks involving a large number of malicious clients.

We propose a novel amortized optimization method for predicting optimal transport (OT) plans across multiple pairs of measures by leveraging Kantorovich potentials derived from sliced OT. We introduce two amortization strategies: regression-based amortization (RA-OT) and objective-based amortization (OA-OT). In RA-OT, we formulate a functional regression model that treats Kantorovich potentials from the original OT problem as responses and those obtained from sliced OT as predictors, and estimate these models via least-squares methods. In OA-OT, we estimate the parameters of the functional model by optimizing the Kantorovich dual objective. In both approaches, the predicted OT plan is subsequently recovered from the estimated potentials. As amortized OT methods, both RA-OT and OA-OT enable efficient solutions to repeated OT problems across different measure pairs by reusing information learned from prior instances to rapidly approximate new solutions. Moreover, by exploiting the structure provided by sliced OT, the proposed models are more parsimonious, independent of specific structures of the measures, such as the number of atoms in the discrete case, while achieving high accuracy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches on tasks including MNIST digit transport, color transfer, supply-demand transportation on spherical data, and mini-batch OT conditional flow matching.

Vector Symbolic Architectures (VSAs) provide a well-defined algebraic framework for compositional representations in hyperdimensional spaces. We introduce HyperSpace, an open-source framework that decomposes VSA systems into modular operators for encoding, binding, bundling, similarity, cleanup, and regression. Using HyperSpace, we analyze and benchmark two representative VSA backends: Holographic Reduced Representations (HRR) and Fourier Holographic Reduced Representations (FHRR). Although FHRR provides lower theoretical complexity for individual operations, HyperSpaces modularity reveals that similarity and cleanup dominate runtime in spatial domains. As a result, HRR and FHRR exhibit comparable end-to-end performance. Differences in memory footprint introduce additional deployment trade-offs where HRR requires approximately half the memory of FHRR vectors. By enabling modular, system-level evaluation, HyperSpace reveals practical trade-offs in VSA pipelines that are not apparent from theoretical or operator-level comparisons alone.

Despite the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), uncertainty quantification in LLM generation is a persistent challenge. Although recent approaches have achieved strong performance by restricting LLMs to produce short or constrained answer sets, many real-world applications require long-form and free-form text generation. A key difficulty in this setting is that LLMs often produce responses that are semantically coherent yet factually inaccurate, while the underlying semantics are multifaceted and the linguistic structure is complex. To tackle this challenge, this paper introduces Interrogative Uncertainty Quantification (IUQ), a novel framework that leverages inter-sample consistency and intra-sample faithfulness to quantify the uncertainty in long-form LLM outputs. By utilizing an interrogate-then-respond paradigm, our method provides reliable measures of claim-level uncertainty and the model's faithfulness. Experimental results across diverse model families and model sizes demonstrate the superior performance of IUQ over two widely used long-form generation datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/louisfanhz/IUQ.

Feature selection is a classical problem in statistics and machine learning, and it continues to remain an extremely challenging problem especially in the context of unknown non-linear relationships with dependent features. On the other hand, Shapley values are a classic solution concept from cooperative game theory that is widely used for feature attribution in general non-linear models with highly-dependent features. However, Shapley values are not naturally suited for feature selection since they tend to capture both direct effects from each feature to the response and indirect effects through other features. In this paper, we combine the advantages of Shapley values and adapt them to feature selection by proposing \emph{MinShap}, a modification of the Shapley value framework along with a suite of other related algorithms. In particular for MinShap, instead of taking the average marginal contributions over permutations of features, considers the minimum marginal contribution across permutations. We provide a theoretical foundation motivated by the faithfulness assumption in DAG (directed acyclic graphical models), a guarantee for the Type I error of MinShap, and show through numerical simulations and real data experiments that MinShap tends to outperform state-of-the-art feature selection algorithms such as LOCO, GCM and Lasso in terms of both accuracy and stability. We also introduce a suite of algorithms related to MinShap by using the multiple testing/p-value perspective that improves performance in lower-sample settings and provide supporting theoretical guarantees.

Learning-to-Rank (LTR) is a supervised machine learning approach that constructs models specifically designed to order a set of items or documents based on their relevance or importance to a given query or context. Despite significant success in real-world information retrieval systems, current LTR methods rely on one prefix ranking metric (e.g., such as Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) or Mean Average Precision (MAP)) for optimizing the ranking objective function. Such metric-dependent setting limits LTR methods from two perspectives: (1) non-differentiable problem: directly optimizing ranking functions over a given ranking metric is inherently non-smooth, making the training process unstable and inefficient; (2) limited ranking utility: optimizing over one single metric makes it difficult to generalize well to other ranking metrics of interest. To address the above issues, we propose a novel listwise LTR framework for efficient and generalizable ranking purpose. Specifically, we propose a new differentiable ranking loss that combines a smooth approximation to the ranking operator with the average mean square loss per query. Then, we adapt gradient-boosting machines to minimize our proposed loss with respect to each list, a novel contribution. Finally, extensive experimental results confirm that our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art in information retrieval measures with similar efficiency.

This beta technical report asks how reusable experience should be represented so that it can function as effective test-time control and as a substrate for iterative evolution. We study this question in 4.590 controlled trials across 45 scientific code-solving scenarios. We find that documentation-oriented Skill packages provide unstable control: their useful signal is sparse, and expanding a compact experience object into a fuller documentation package often fails to help and can degrade the overall average. We further show that representation itself is a first-order factor. A compact Gene representation yields the strongest overall average, remains competitive under substantial structural perturbations, and outperforms matched-budget Skill fragments, while reattaching documentation-oriented material usually weakens rather than improves it. Beyond one-shot control, we show that Gene is also a better carrier for iterative experience accumulation: attached failure history is more effective in Gene than in Skill or freeform text, editable structure matters beyond content alone, and failure information is most useful when distilled into compact warnings rather than naively appended. On CritPt, gene-evolved systems improve over their paired base models from 9.1% to 18.57% and from 17.7% to 27.14%. These results suggest that the core problem in experience reuse is not how to supply more experience, but how to encode experience as a compact, control-oriented, evolution-ready object.

Echocardiography is a widely used modality for cardiac assessment due to its non-invasive and cost-effective nature, but the sparse and heterogeneous spatiotemporal views of the heart pose distinct challenges. Existing masked autoencoder (MAE) approaches typically process images or short clips independently, failing to capture the inherent multi-view structure required for coherent cardiac representation. We introduce Latent Attention Masked Autoencoder (LAMAE), a foundation model architecture tailored to the multi-view nature of medical imaging. LAMAE augments the standard MAE with a latent attention module that enables information exchange across frames and views directly in latent space. This allows the model to aggregate variable-length sequences and distinct views, reconstructing a holistic representation of cardiac function from partial observations. We pretrain LAMAE on MIMIC-IV-ECHO, a large-scale, uncurated dataset reflecting real-world clinical variability. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first results for predicting ICD-10 codes from MIMIC-IV-ECHO videos. Furthermore, we empirically demonstrate that representations learned from adult data transfer effectively to pediatric cohorts despite substantial anatomical differences. These results provide evidence that incorporating structural priors, such as multi-view attention, yields significantly more robust and transferable representations.

Mobile agents powered by vision-language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in automating mobile tasks, with recent leading models achieving a marked performance leap, e.g., nearly 70% success on AndroidWorld. However, these systems keep their training data closed and remain opaque about their task and trajectory synthesis recipes. We present OpenMobile, an open-source framework that synthesizes high-quality task instructions and agent trajectories, with two key components: (1) The first is a scalable task synthesis pipeline that constructs a global environment memory from exploration, then leverages it to generate diverse and grounded instructions. and (2) a policy-switching strategy for trajectory rollout. By alternating between learner and expert models, it captures essential error-recovery data often missing in standard imitation learning. Agents trained on our data achieve competitive results across three dynamic mobile agent benchmarks: notably, our fine-tuned Qwen2.5-VL and Qwen3-VL reach 51.7% and 64.7% on AndroidWorld, far surpassing existing open-data approaches. Furthermore, we conduct transparent analyses on the overlap between our synthetic instructions and benchmark test sets, and verify that performance gains stem from broad functionality coverage rather than benchmark overfitting. We release data and code at https://njucckevin.github.io/openmobile/ to bridge the data gap and facilitate broader mobile agent research.

This paper introduces the first \emph{self-evolving} logic synthesis framework, which leverages Large Language Model (LLM) agents to autonomously improve the source code of \textsc{ABC}, the widely adopted logic synthesis system. Our framework operates on the \emph{entire integrated ABC codebase}, and the output repository preserves its single-binary execution model and command interface. In the initial evolution cycle, we bootstrap the system using existing prior open-source synthesis components, covering flow tuning, logic minimization, and technology mapping, but without manually injecting new heuristics. On top of this foundation, a team of LLM-based agents iteratively rewrites and evolves specific sub-components of ABC following our ``programming guidance`` prompts under a unified correctness and QoR-driven evaluation loop. Each evolution cycle proposes code modifications, compiles the integrated binary, validates correctness, and evaluates quality-of-results (QoR) on \emph{multi-suite benchmarks including ISCAS~85/89/99, VTR, EPFL, and IWLS~2005}. Through continuous feedback, the system discovers optimizations beyond human-designed heuristics, effectively \emph{learning new synthesis strategies} that enhance QoR. We detail the architecture of this self-improving system, its integration with \textsc{ABC}, and results demonstrating that the framework can autonomously and progressively improve EDA tool at full million-line scale.

Rapid advances in Generative AI are giving rise to increasingly sophisticated Multi-Agent AI (MAAI) systems. While AI fairness has been extensively studied in traditional predictive scenarios, its examination in MAAI remains nascent and fragmented. This scoping review critically synthesizes existing research on fairness in MAAI systems. Through a qualitative content analysis of 23 selected studies, we identify five archetypal approaches. Our findings reveal that fairness in MAAI systems is often addressed superficially, lacks robust normative foundations, and frequently overlooks the complex dynamics introduced by agent autonomy and system-level interactions. We argue that fairness must be embedded structurally throughout the development lifecycle of MAAI, rather than appended as a post-hoc consideration. Meaningful evaluation requires explicit human oversight, normative clarity, and a precise articulation of fairness objectives and beneficiaries. This review provides a foundation for advancing fairness research in MAAI systems by highlighting critical gaps, exposing prevailing limitations, and suggesting pathways.

To navigate a space, the brain makes an internal representation of the environment using different cells such as place cells, grid cells, head direction cells, border cells, and speed cells. All these cells, along with sensory inputs, enable an organism to explore the space around it. Inspired by these biological principles, we developed NEATNC, a Neuro-Evolution of Augmenting Topology guided Navigation Cells. The goal of the paper is to improve NEAT algorithm performance in path planning in dynamic environments using spatial cognitive cells. This approach uses navigation cells as inputs and evolves recurrent neural networks, representing the hippocampus part of the brain. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated in different static and dynamic scenarios. This study highlights NEAT's adaptability to complex and different environments, showcasing the utility of biological theories. This suggests that our approach is well-suited for real-time dynamic path planning for robotics and games.

Open-weight Small Language Models(SLMs) can provide faster local inference at lower financial cost, but may not achieve the same performance level as commercial Large Language Models (LLMs) that are orders of magnitudes larger. Consequently, many of the latest applications of LLMs, such as software engineering agents, tend to be evaluated on larger models only, leaving the issue of improving the cost-benefit trade-off of such applications neglected. This paper proposes Atropos, a predictive early-termination analysis and hotswap technique that aims to improve the cost-benefit trade-off for LLM-based agents that use self-consistency. The core component of ATROPOS is a predictive model based on structural properties of LLM inferences: after merging multiple agentic inference paths into a graph representation, ATROPOS uses Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to predict whether an ongoing inference will eventually succeed or not. If an agentic task instance running on the source LLM is predicted to fail, ATROPOS subsequently performs hotswapping, i.e., migrating the on-going inference context onto the more capable target LLM: this is feasible because LLM contexts are stateless. An empirical evaluation of ATROPOS using three recent LLM-based agents shows that ATROPOS can predict early termination of eventually failing inferences with the accuracy of 0.85 at the midpoint of the inference. Hotswapping LLMs for such inferences can convert up to 27.57% of them to be successful. Consequently, ATROPOS achieves 74.35% of the performance of closed LLMs with as low as only 23.9% of the cost.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) conventionally rely on standard Laplacian or adjacency matrices for structural message passing. In this work, we substitute the traditional Laplacian with a Doubly Stochastic graph Matrix (DSM), derived from the inverse of the modified Laplacian, to naturally encode continuous multi-hop proximity and strict local centrality. To overcome the intractable $O(n^3)$ complexity of exact matrix inversion, we first utilize a truncated Neumann series to scalably approximate the DSM, which serves as the foundation for our proposed DsmNet. Furthermore, because algebraic truncation inherently causes probability mass leakage, we introduce DsmNet-compensate. This variant features a mathematically rigorous Residual Mass Compensation mechanism that analytically re-injects the truncated tail mass into self-loops, strictly restoring row-stochasticity and structural dominance. Extensive theoretical and empirical analyses demonstrate that our decoupled architectures operate efficiently in $O(K|E|)$ time and effectively mitigate over-smoothing by bounding Dirichlet energy decay, providing robust empirical validation on homophilic benchmarks. Finally, we establish the theoretical boundaries of the DSM on heterophilic topologies and demonstrate its versatility as a continuous structural encoding for Graph Transformers.

Gradient inversion attacks threaten client privacy in federated learning by reconstructing training samples from clients' shared gradients. Gradients aggregate contributions from multiple records and existing attacks may fail to disentangle them, yielding incorrect reconstructions with no intrinsic way to certify success. In vision and language, attackers may fall back on human inspection to judge reconstruction plausibility, but this is far less feasible for numerical tabular records, fueling the impression that tabular data is less vulnerable. We challenge this perception by proposing a verifiable gradient inversion attack (VGIA) that provides an explicit certificate of correctness for reconstructed samples. Our method adopts a geometric view of ReLU leakage: the activation boundary of a fully connected layer defines a hyperplane in input space. VGIA introduces an algebraic, subspace-based verification test that detects when a hyperplane-delimited region contains exactly one record. Once isolation is certified, VGIA recovers the corresponding feature vector analytically and reconstructs the target via a lightweight optimization step. Experiments on tabular benchmarks with large batch sizes demonstrate exact record and target recovery in regimes where existing state-of-the-art attacks either fail or cannot assess reconstruction fidelity. Compared to prior geometric approaches, VGIA allocates hyperplane queries more effectively, yielding faster reconstructions with fewer attack rounds.

The increasing integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in everyday life brings with it new challenges and questions for regarding how humans interact with autonomous agents. Multi-agent experiments, where humans and AI act together, can offer important opportunities to study social decision making, but there is a lack of accessible tooling available to researchers to run such experiments. We introduce two tools designed to reduce these barriers. The first, CoGrid, is a multi-agent grid-based simulation library with dual NumPy and JAX backends. The second, Multi-User Gymnasium (MUG), translates such simulation environments directly into interactive web-based experiments. MUG supports interactions with arbitrary numbers of humans and AI, utilizing either server-authoritative or peer-to-peer networking with rollback netcode to account for latency. Together, these tools can enable researchers to deploy studies of human-AI interaction, facilitating inquiry into core questions of psychology, cognition, and decision making and their relationship to human-AI interaction. Both tools are open source and available to the broader research community. Documentation and source code is available at {cogrid, multi-user-gymnasium}.readthedocs.io. This paper details the functionality of these tools and presents several case studies to illustrate their utility in human-AI multi-agent experimentation.

Code optimization remains a core objective in software development, yet modern compilers struggle to navigate the enormous optimization spaces. While recent research has looked into employing large language models (LLMs) to optimize source code directly, these techniques can introduce semantic errors and miss fine-grained compiler-level optimization opportunities. We present HintPilot, which bridges LLM-based reasoning with traditional compiler infrastructures via synthesizing compiler hints, annotations that steer compiler behavior. HintPilot employs retrieval-augmented synthesis over compiler documentation and applies profiling-guided iterative refinement to synthesize semantics-preserving and effective hints. Upon PolyBench and HumanEval-CPP benchmarks, HintPilot achieves up to 6.88x geometric mean speedup over -Ofast while preserving program correctness.

The evaluation of fairness in machine learning systems has become a central concern in high-stakes applications, including biometric recognition, healthcare decision-making, and automated risk assessment. Existing approaches typically rely on a small number of fairness metrics to assess model behaviour across group partitions, implicitly assuming that these metrics provide consistent and reliable conclusions. However, different fairness metrics capture distinct statistical properties of model performance and may therefore produce conflicting assessments when applied to the same system. In this work, we investigate the consistency of fairness evaluation by conducting a systematic multi-metric analysis of demographic bias in machine learning models. Using face recognition as a controlled experimental setting, we evaluate model performance across multiple group partitions under a range of commonly used fairness metrics, including error-rate disparities and performance-based measures. Our results demonstrate that fairness assessments can vary significantly depending on the choice of metrics, leading to contradictory conclusions regarding model bias. To quantify this phenomenon, we introduce the Fairness Disagreement Index (FDI), a measure designed to capture the degree of inconsistency across fairness metrics. We further show that disagreement remains high across thresholds and model configurations. These findings highlight a critical limitation in current fairness evaluation practices and suggest that single-metric reporting is insufficient for reliable bias assessment.

Recent advancements in LLM agents are gradually shifting from reactive, text-based paradigms toward proactive, multimodal interaction. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on reactive responses, overlooking the complexities of proactive intervention and monitoring. To bridge this gap, we introduce ProVoice-Bench, the first evaluation framework specifically designed for proactive voice agents, featuring four novel tasks. By leveraging a multi-stage data synthesis pipeline, we curate 1,182 high-quality samples for rigorous testing. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art Multimodal LLMs reveals a significant performance gap, particularly regarding over-triggering and reasoning capabilities. These findings highlight the limitations of current models and offer a roadmap for developing more natural, context-aware proactive agents.

Recent advances in LLM based agent systems have shown promise in tackling complex, long horizon tasks. However, existing agent protocols (e.g., A2A and MCP) under specify cross entity lifecycle and context management, version tracking, and evolution safe update interfaces, which encourages monolithic compositions and brittle glue code. We introduce \textbf{\textsc{Autogenesis Protocol (AGP)}}, a self evolution protocol that decouples what evolves from how evolution occurs. Its Resource Substrate Protocol Layer (RSPL) models prompts, agents, tools, environments, and memory as protocol registered resources\footnote{Unless otherwise specified, resources refer to instances of the five RSPL entity types: \emph{prompt}, \emph{agent}, \emph{tool}, \emph{environment}, \emph{memory} with agent \emph{outputs}.} with explicit state, lifecycle, and versioned interfaces. Its Self Evolution Protocol Layer (SEPL) specifies a closed loop operator interface for proposing, assessing, and committing improvements with auditable lineage and rollback. Building on \textbf{\textsc{AGP}}, we present \textbf{\textsc{Autogenesis System (AGS)}}, a self-evolving multi-agent system that dynamically instantiates, retrieves, and refines protocol-registered resources during execution. We evaluate \textbf{\textsc{AGS}} on multiple challenging benchmarks that require long horizon planning and tool use across heterogeneous resources. The results demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines, supporting the effectiveness of agent resource management and closed loop self evolution.

Cost-aware routing dynamically dispatches user queries to models of varying capability to balance performance and inference cost. However, the routing strategy introduces a new security concern that adversaries may manipulate the router to consistently select expensive high-capability models. Existing routing attacks depend on either white-box access or heuristic prompts, rendering them ineffective in real-world black-box scenarios. In this work, we propose R$^2$A, which aims to mislead black-box LLM routers to expensive models via adversarial suffix optimization. Specifically, R$^2$A deploys a hybrid ensemble surrogate router to mimic the black-box router. A suffix optimization algorithm is further adapted for the ensemble-based surrogate. Extensive experiments on multiple open-source and commercial routing systems demonstrate that {R$^2$A} significantly increases the routing rate to expensive models on queries of different distributions. Code and examples: https://github.com/thcxiker/R2A-Attack.

Generative AI is changing how research software is developed, but rapid AI-assisted development can weaken continuity, traceability, and methodological clarity. SHAPR (Solo, Human-centred, AI-assisted PRactice) was proposed as a framework for structuring AI-assisted research software development. This paper presents a documented case of applying SHAPR to the development of a modular share trading system. From the outset, the project adopted a SHAPR-informed working configuration that shaped how interaction, implementation, and documentation were organised. Across iterative development cycles, the project generated a structured evidence base including reflection notes, development cycle review notes, source-of-truth documents, contracts, quick captures, workflow notes, and evolving code artefacts. The case showed that continuous documentation updates, supported by quick capture and AI-assisted refinement, helped maintain organised and usable project knowledge throughout development. Five recurring lessons were identified: contracts stabilised AI-assisted coding, a maintained source-of-truth layer improved coherence, cycle-boundary snapshots strengthened continuity, code and documentation co-evolved through quick capture and iterative refinement, and environment setup itself contributed to knowledge generation. The case also illustrates a practical SHAPR operating configuration in which a ChatGPT Project and cycle-specific chats supported interaction, reasoning, summarisation, and coding collaboration, PyCharm supported artefact implementation, and Obsidian supported external working memory, structured documentation, reflection, continuity, and repository-oriented note organisation, while remaining consistent with SHAPR's tool-agnostic principle. The paper contributes practical guidance and good practices for researchers conducting AI-assisted research software development.

EEG foundation models (FMs) achieve strong cross-subject and cross-task generalization but impose substantial computational and memory costs that hinder deployment on embedded BCI systems. Knowledge distillation is a natural solution; however, conventional methods fail for EEG FMs because task-relevant semantics are often distributed across intermediate layers, and aggressive dimensionality reduction can distort oscillatory structure via representational collapse and aliasing. To address these challenges, we propose DLink (Distilling Layer-wise and Dominant Knowledge), a unified framework for transferring knowledge from large EEG FMs to compact students with three key innovations: (1) a dynamic Router that adaptively aggregates teacher layers to capture dominant intermediate representations; (2) an EEG MiC student with a Mimic-then-Compress pipeline, which inherits high-dimensional teacher features and then applies structured spatio-temporal compression to avoid a heavy classification head; and (3) spectral distillation that aligns teacher-student representations in the frequency domain to regularize compression and mitigate aliasing and temporal jitter. Experiments on four EEG benchmarks show that DLink enables compact students to outperform lightweight baselines while approaching fully fine-tuned FM performance at substantially lower model size and inference cost.

When do transformers commit to a decision, and what prevents them from correcting it? We introduce \textbf{prolepsis}: a transformer commits early, task-specific attention heads sustain the commitment, and no layer corrects it. Replicating \citeauthor{lindsey2025biology}'s (\citeyear{lindsey2025biology}) planning-site finding on open models (Gemma~2 2B, Llama~3.2 1B), we ask five questions. (Q1)~Planning is invisible to six residual-stream methods; CLTs are necessary. (Q2)~The planning-site spike replicates with identical geometry. (Q3)~Specific attention heads route the decision to the output, filling a gap flagged as invisible to attribution graphs. (Q4)~Search requires ${\leq}16$ layers; commitment requires more. (Q5)~Factual recall shows the same motif at a different network depth, with zero overlap between recurring planning heads and the factual top-10. Prolepsis is architectural: the template is shared, the routing substrates differ. All experiments run on a single consumer GPU (16\,GB VRAM).

Flow matching retains the generation quality of diffusion models while enabling substantially faster inference, making it a compelling paradigm for generative modeling. However, when applied to language modeling, it exhibits fundamental limitations in representing complex latent distributions with irregular geometries, such as anisotropy and multimodality. To address these challenges, we propose a mixture-of-experts flow matching (MoE-FM) framework, which captures complex global transport geometries in latent space by decomposing them into locally specialized vector fields. Building on MoE-FM, we develop a non-autoregressive (NAR) language modeling approach, named YAN, instantiated with both Transformer and Mamba architectures. Across multiple downstream tasks, YAN achieves generation quality on par with both autoregressive (AR) and diffusion-based NAR language models, while requiring as few as three sampling steps. This yields a $40\times$ speedup over AR baselines and up to a $10^3\times$ speedup over diffusion language models, demonstrating substantial efficiency advantages for language modeling.

LLM-based RTL code generation methods increasingly target both functional correctness and PPA quality, yet existing approaches universally decouple the two objectives, optimizing PPA only after correctness is fully achieved. Whether through sequential multi-agent pipelines, evolutionary search with binary correctness gates, or hierarchical reward dependencies, partially correct but architecturally promising candidates are systematically discarded. Moreover, existing methods reduce the multi-objective PPA space to a single scalar fitness, obscuring the trade-offs among area, delay, and power. To address these limitations, we propose COEVO, a co-evolutionary framework that unifies correctness and PPA optimization within a single evolutionary loop. COEVO formulates correctness as a continuous co-optimization dimension alongside area, delay, and power, enabled by an enhanced testbench that provides fine-grained scoring and detailed diagnostic feedback. An adaptive correctness gate with annealing allows PPA-promising but partially correct candidates to guide the search toward jointly optimal solutions. To preserve the full PPA trade-off structure, COEVO employs four-dimensional Pareto-based non-dominated sorting with configurable intra-level sorting, replacing scalar fitness without manual weight tuning. Evaluated on VerilogEval 2.0 and RTLLM 2.0, COEVO achieves 97.5\% and 94.5\% Pass@1 with GPT-5.4-mini, surpassing all agentic baselines across four LLM backbones, while attaining the best PPA on 43 out of 49 synthesizable RTLLM designs.

As power systems transition toward renewable-rich and inverter-dominated operations, accurate time-domain dynamic analysis becomes increasingly critical. Such analysis supports key operational tasks, including transient stability assessment, dynamic security analysis, contingency screening, and post-fault trajectory evaluation. In practice, these tasks may operate under several challenges, including unknown and time-varying system parameters, privacy constraints on data sharing, and the need for fast online inference. Existing learning-based approaches are typically trained for individual systems and therefore lack generalization across operating conditions and physical parameters. Hence, this paper proposes LArge Scale Small ODE (LASS)-ODE-Power, a learning framework for general-purpose time-domain prediction. The proposed approach leverages large-scale pretraining on more than 40 GB of DAE or ordinary differential-equation (ODE) trajectories to learn transferable representations. The resulting model supports trajectory prediction from short measurement prefixes across diverse dynamic regimes, including electromechanical and inverter-driven systems. Hence, the model can be directly used without data sharing in a zero-shot setting. In addition, the proposed architecture incorporates parallel and linearized computation to achieve fast inference. Moreover, to enhance task-specific performance in power systems, a specialized fine-tuning strategy is developed based on approximately 1 GB of heterogeneous power-system dynamic data. Extensive experiments over diverse power-system simulation scenarios demonstrate that LASS-ODE-Power consistently outperforms existing learning-based models in trajectory prediction accuracy with efficient inference.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is increasingly being discussed not only as a tool, but also as a potential subject with personal and therefore moral status. In our opinion, the currently dominant alignment strategies, which focus on human control and containment of AI, therefore fall short. Building on Turing's analogy of "child machines", we are developing a vision of the possibility of autonomy-supporting parenting of AI, in which human control over a developing AGI is gradually reduced, allowing AI to become an independent, autonomous subject. Rather than viewing AGI, as is currently prevalent, as a dangerous creature that needs to be locked up and controlled, we should approach potential AGI with respect for a possible developing subject on the one hand, and with full confidence in our human capabilities on the other. Such a perspective opens up the possibility of cooperative coexistence and co-evolution between humans and AGIs. The relationship between humans and AGIs will thus have to be newly determined, which will change our self-image as humans. It will be crucial that humans not only claim control over potential AGIs, but also engage with AGIs through surprise, creativity, and other specifically human qualities, thereby offering them motivating incentives for cooperation.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in automatic RTL optimization for better performance, power, and area (PPA). However, existing methods are still far from realistic RTL optimization. Their evaluation settings are often unrealistic: they are tested on manually degraded, small-scale RTL designs and rely on weak open-source tools. Their optimization methods are also limited, relying on coarse design-level feedback and simple pre-defined rewriting rules. To address these limitations, we present Dr. RTL, an agentic framework for RTL timing optimization in a realistic evaluation environment, with continual self-improvement through reusable optimization skills. We establish a realistic evaluation setting with more challenging RTL designs and an industrial EDA workflow. Within this setting, Dr. RTL performs closed-loop optimization through a multi-agent framework for critical-path analysis, parallel RTL rewriting, and tool-based evaluation. We further introduce group-relative skill learning, which compares parallel RTL rewrites and distills the optimization experience into an interpretable skill library. Currently, this library contains 47 pattern--strategy entries for cross-design reuse to improve PPA and accelerate convergence, and it can continue evolving over time. Evaluated on 20 real-world RTL designs, Dr. RTL achieves average WNS/TNS improvements of 21\%/17\% with a 6\% area reduction over the industry-leading commercial synthesis tool.

Covert channels (CCs) in wireless chips pose a serious security threat, as they enable the exfiltration of sensitive information from the chip to an external attacker. In this work, we propose an AI-based defense mechanism deployed at the RF receiver, where the model directly monitors raw I/Q samples to detect, in real time, the presence of a CC embedded within an otherwise nominal signal. We first compact a state-of-the-art convolutional neural network (CNN), achieving an 80% reduction in parameters, which is an essential requirement for efficient edge deployment. When evaluated on the open-source hardware Trojan (HT)-based CC dataset, the compacted CNN attains an average accuracy of 90.28% for CC detection and 86.50% for identifying the underlying HT, with results averaged across SNR values above 1 dB. For practical communication scenarios where SNR > 20 dB, the model achieves over 97% accuracy for both tasks. These results correspond to a minimal performance degradation of less than 2% compared to the baseline model. The compacted CNN is further benchmarked against alternative classifiers, demonstrating an excellent accuracy-model size trade-off. Finally, we design a lightweight CNN hardware accelerator and demonstrate it on an FPGA, achieving very low resource utilization and an efficiency of 107 GOPs/W. Being the first AI hardware accelerator proposed specifically for CC detection, we compare it against state-of-the-art AI accelerators for RF signal classification tasks such as modulation recognition, showing superior performance.

As companies enter the race for agentic AI adoption, fears surface around agentic autonomy and its subsequent risks. These fears compound as companies scale their agentic AI adoption with low-code applications, without a comparable scaling in their governance processes and expertise resulting in a phenomenon known as "Agent Sprawl". While shadow AI tools can help with agentic discovery and identification, few observability tools offer insights into the agents' configuration and settings or the decision-making process during agent-to-agent communication and orchestration. This paper explores AI governance professionals' concerns in enterprise settings, while offering design-time and runtime explainability techniques as suggested by AI governance experts for addressing those fears. Finally, we provide a preliminary prototype of an Agentic AI Card that can help companies feel at ease deploying agents at scale.

Building on recent advances in AI, hybrid decision making (HDM) holds the promise of improving human decision quality and reducing cognitive load. We work in the context of learning to guide (LtG), a recently proposed HDM framework in which the human is always responsible for the final decision: rather than suggesting decisions, in LtG the AI supplies (textual) guidance useful for facilitating decision making. One limiting factor of existing approaches is that their guidance compounds information about all possible outcomes, and as a result it can be difficult to digest. We address this issue by introducing ConfGuide, a novel LtG approach that generates more succinct and targeted guidance. To this end, it employs conformal risk control to select a set of outcomes, ensuring a cap on the false negative rate. We demonstrate our approach on a real-world multi-label medical diagnosis task. Our empirical evaluation highlights the promise of ConfGuide.

You are a robot and you live in a Markov decision process (MDP) with a finite or an infinite number of transitions from state-action to next states. You got brains and so you plan before you act. Luckily, your roboparents equipped you with a generative model to do some Monte-Carlo planning. The world is waiting for you and you have no time to waste. You want your planning to be efficient. Sample-efficient. Indeed, you want to exploit the possible structure of the MDP by exploring only a subset of states reachable by following near-optimal policies. You want guarantees on sample complexity that depend on a measure of the quantity of near-optimal states. You want something, that is an extension of Monte-Carlo sampling (for estimating an expectation) to problems that alternate maximization (over actions) and expectation (over next states). But you do not want to StOP with exponential running time, you want something simple to implement and computationally efficient. You want it all and you want it now. You want TrailBlazer.

Hate, derogatory, and offensive speech remains a persistent challenge in online platforms and public discourse. While automated detection systems are widely used, most focus on censorship or removal, raising concerns for transparency and freedom of expression, and limiting opportunities to explain why content is harmful. To address these issues, explanatory approaches have emerged as a promising solution, aiming to make hate speech detection more transparent, accountable, and informative. In this paper, we present a hybrid approach that combines Large Language Models (LLMs) with three newly created and curated vocabularies to detect and explain hate speech in English, French, and Greek. Our system captures both inherently derogatory expressions tied to identity characteristics and direct group-targeted content through two complementary pipelines: one that detects and disambiguates problematic terms using the curated vocabularies, and one that leverages LLMs as context-aware evaluators of group-targeting content. The outputs are fused into grounded explanations that clarify why content is flagged. Human evaluation shows that our hybrid approach is accurate, with high-quality explanations, outperforming LLM-only baselines.

Frontier model developers aim to train models continually to possess emergent, diverse capabilities. To extend capabilities, the current pre-training and post-training paradigm requires manually starting training runs with static datasets or reward functions every time. Addressing this limitation, our work pursues the insight that open-endedness (via the coevolution of models and tasks) can discover models with increasingly novel skills in a single run. We introduce a new model development framework that extends coevolution to large language model (LLM) discovery, open-ended \textit{Assessment Coevolving with Diverse Capabilities} (AC/DC). AC/DC evolves both LLMs via model merging and natural language tasks via synthetic data generation. AC/DC discovers growing archives of LLMs that surpass the capabilities of larger LLMs while taking up less GPU memory. In particular, our LLM populations achieve a broader Coverage of expertise than other curated models or baselines on downstream benchmarks, without \textit{any} explicit benchmark optimization. Furthermore, AC/DC improves Coverage over time, continually innovates on tasks and models, and improves performance in multi-agent best-of-N selection. Our findings highlight the potential of coevolution as a means of discovering broader sets of capabilities from base LLMs. Overall, AC/DC brings us one step closer to a profoundly new paradigm of LLM development, where continual improvements to the diversity of model capabilities can be accelerated by leveraging existing models as stepping stones to increasingly powerful models.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) extends Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) with external visual knowledge. However, existing visual RAG systems typically rely on generic retrieval signals that overlook the fine-grained visual semantics essential for complex reasoning. To address this limitation, we propose UniDoc-RL, a unified reinforcement learning framework in which an LVLM agent jointly performs retrieval, reranking, active visual perception, and reasoning. UniDoc-RL formulates visual information acquisition as a sequential decision-making problem with a hierarchical action space. Specifically, it progressively refines visual evidence from coarse-grained document retrieval to fine-grained image selection and active region cropping, allowing the model to suppress irrelevant content and attend to information-dense regions. For effective end-to-end training, we introduce a dense multi-reward scheme that provides task-aware supervision for each action. Based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), UniDoc-RL aligns agent behavior with multiple objectives without relying on a separate value network. To support this training paradigm, we curate a comprehensive dataset of high-quality reasoning trajectories with fine-grained action annotations. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that UniDoc-RL consistently surpasses state-of-the-art baselines, yielding up to 17.7% gains over prior RL-based methods.

Contextual bandit algorithms suffer from high regret during cold-start, when the learner has insufficient data to distinguish good arms from bad. We propose augmenting Disjoint LinUCB with LLM pseudo-observations: after each round, a large language model predicts counterfactual rewards for the unplayed arms, and these predictions are injected into the learner as weighted pseudo-observations. The injection weight is controlled by a calibration-gated decay schedule that tracks the LLM's prediction accuracy on played arms via an exponential moving average; high calibration error suppresses the LLM's influence, while accurate predictions receive higher weight during the critical early rounds. We evaluate on two contextual bandit environments - UCI Mushroom (2-arm, asymmetric rewards) and MIND-small (5-arm news recommendation) - and find that when equipped with a task-specific prompt, LLM pseudo-observations reduce cumulative regret by 19% on MIND relative to pure LinUCB. However, generic counterfactual prompt framing increases regret on both environments, demonstrating that prompt design is the dominant factor, more important than the choice of decay schedule or calibration gating parameters. We analyze the failure modes of calibration gating on domains with small prediction errors and provide a theoretical motivation for the bias-variance trade-off governing pseudo-observation weight.

Network security is a critical concern in the digital landscape of today, with users demanding secure browsing experiences and protection of their personal data. This study explores the dynamic integration of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms with Software-Defined Networking (SDN) controllers to enhance network security through adaptive decision mechanisms. The proposed approach enables the system to dynamically choose the most suitable ML algorithm based on the characteristics of the observed network traffic. This work examines the role of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) as a fundamental component of secure communication networks and discusses the limitations of SDN-based attack detection mechanisms. The proposed framework uses adaptive model selection to maintain reliable intrusion detection under varying network conditions. The study highlights the importance of analyzing traffic-type-based metrics to define effective classification rules and enhance the performance of ML models. Additionally, it addresses the risks of overfitting and underfitting, underscoring the critical role of hyperparameter tuning in optimizing model accuracy and generalization. The central contribution of this work is an automated mechanism that adaptively selects the most suitable ML algorithm according to real-time network conditions, prioritizing detection robustness and operational feasibility within SDN environments.

Tool learning with foundation models aims to endow AI systems with the ability to invoke external resources -- such as APIs, computational utilities, and specialized models -- to solve complex tasks beyond the reach of standalone language generation. While recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have expanded their reasoning and perception capabilities, existing tool-use methods are predominantly limited to text-only inputs and closed-world settings. Consequently, they struggle to interpret multimodal user instructions and cannot generalize to tools unseen during training. In this work, we introduce RaTA-Tool, a novel framework for open-world multimodal tool selection. Rather than learning direct mappings from user queries to fixed tool identifiers, our approach enables an MLLM to convert a multimodal query into a structured task description and subsequently retrieve the most appropriate tool by matching this representation against semantically rich, machine-readable tool descriptions. This retrieval-based formulation naturally supports extensibility to new tools without retraining. To further improve alignment between task descriptions and tool selection, we incorporate a preference-based optimization stage using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). To support research in this setting, we also introduce the first dataset for open-world multimodal tool use, featuring standardized tool descriptions derived from Hugging Face model cards. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly improves tool-selection performance, particularly in open-world, multimodal scenarios.

In this paper, we proposed Bayesian Tucker decomposition (BTuD) in which residual is supposed to obey Gaussian distribution analogous to linear regression. Although we have proposed an algorithm to perform the proposed BTuD, the conventional higher-order orthogonal iteration can generate Tucker decomposition consistent with the present implementation. Using the proposed BTuD, we can perform unsupervised feature selection successfully applied to various synthetic datasets, global coupled maps with randomized coupling strength, and gene expression profiles. Thus we can conclude that our newly proposed unsupervised feature selection method is promising. In addition to this, BTuD based unsupervised FE is expected to coincide with TD based unsupervised FE that were previously proposed and successfully applied to a wide range of problems.

Android apps are built on APIs that abstract core Android system functionalities. These APIs are officially documented in multiple files distributed with the Android source code or SDK, which we collectively refer to as Android API Lists (AALs). Prior Android research has relied on specific AALs, often treating them as interchangeable ground truth. However, recent studies suggest that different AALs can lead to substantially different research outcomes, raising concerns about the validity and reproducibility of Android API-based analyses. To address this issue, we present the first in-depth empirical study of four official AALs that are widely used in prior work. We systematically characterize their contents and analyze their evolution across Android releases. We then perform a fine-grained comparison of the APIs recorded in each AAL to uncover their underlying API inclusion policies and inconsistencies. To assess the practical impact of these differences, we further examine API availability on nine Android devices, including both stock Android and vendor-customized systems. Finally, we analyze API usage in 17,759 real-world Android apps (including open-source apps, commercial apps, and malware) to quantify how the choice of AAL affects empirical Android research. Our results reveal that official AALs are neither stable nor mutually consistent, and that discrepancies among them can substantially influence research conclusions. We also observe that vendor-customized APIs are actively used by normal apps, yet remain largely overlooked by existing studies. Based on these findings, we discuss their implications for Android API-based research and provide actionable suggestions to help researchers select and interpret AALs more reliably.

Communicating complex system designs or scientific processes through text alone is inefficient and prone to ambiguity. A system that automatically generates scientific architecture diagrams from text with high semantic fidelity can be useful in multiple applications like enterprise architecture visualization, AI-driven software design, and educational content creation. Hence, in this paper, we focus on leveraging language models to perform semantic understanding of the input text description to generate intermediate code that can be processed to generate high-fidelity architecture diagrams. Unfortunately, no clean large-scale open-access dataset exists, implying lack of any effective open models for this task. Hence, we contribute a comprehensive dataset, \system, comprising scientific architecture images, their corresponding textual descriptions, and associated DOT code representations. Leveraging this resource, we fine-tune a suite of small language models, and also perform in-context learning using GPT-4o. Through extensive experimentation, we show that \system{} models significantly outperform existing baseline models like DiagramAgent and perform at par with in-context learning-based generations from GPT-4o. We make the code, data and models publicly available.

Automatic evaluation metrics are essential for building multilingual translation systems. The common practice of evaluating these systems is averaging metric scores across languages, yet this is suspicious since metrics may suffer from cross-lingual scoring bias, where translations of equal quality receive different scores across languages. This problem has not been systematically studied because no benchmark exists that provides parallel-quality instances across languages, and expert annotation is not realistic. In this work, we propose XQ-MEval, a semi-automatically built dataset covering nine translation directions, to benchmark translation metrics. Specifically, we inject MQM-defined errors into gold translations automatically, filter them by native speakers for reliability, and merge errors to generate pseudo translations with controllable quality. These pseudo translations are then paired with corresponding sources and references to form triplets used in assessing the qualities of translation metrics. Using XQ-MEval, our experiments on nine representative metrics reveal the inconsistency between averaging and human judgment and provide the first empirical evidence of cross-lingual scoring bias. Finally, we propose a normalization strategy derived from XQ-MEval that aligns score distributions across languages, improving the fairness and reliability of multilingual metric evaluation.

End-to-end spoken dialogue models have garnered significant attention because they offer a higher potential ceiling in expressiveness and perceptual ability than cascaded systems. However, the intelligence and expressiveness of current open-source spoken dialogue models often remain below expectations. Motivated by the success of online reinforcement learning(RL) in other domains, one might attempt to directly apply preference optimization to spoken dialogue models, yet this transfer is non-trivial. We analyze these obstacles from the perspectives of reward modeling and rollout sampling, focusing on how sparse preference supervision interacts with dense speech generation under shared-parameter updates. Based on the analysis, we propose a modality-aware adaptive post-training recipe that makes RL practical for spoken dialogue: it constrains preference updates to the semantic channel and improves acoustic behavior via explicit anchoring, while dynamically regulating their mixture from rollout statistics to avoid unreliable preference gradients. We evaluate the method across multiple spoken dialogue benchmarks and representative architectures, and observe consistent improvements in semantic quality and speech expressiveness.

Concatenating quantum error correction codes scales error correction capability by driving logical error rates down double-exponentially across levels. However, the noise structure shifts under concatenation, making it hard to choose an optimal code sequence. We automate this choice by estimating the effective noise channel after each level and selecting the next code accordingly. In particular, we use learning-based methods to tailor small, non-additive encoders when the noise exhibits sufficient structure, then switch to standard codes once the noise is nearly uniform. In simulations, this level-wise adaptation achieves a target logical error rate with far fewer qubits than concatenating stabilizer codes alone--reducing qubit counts by up to two orders of magnitude for strongly structured noise. Therefore, this hybrid, learning-based strategy offers a promising tool for early fault-tolerant quantum computing.

Information Extraction aims to distill structured, decision-relevant information from unstructured text, serving as a foundation for downstream understanding and reasoning. However, it is traditionally treated merely as a terminal objective: once extracted, the resulting structure is often consumed in isolation rather than maintained and reused during multi-step inference. Moving beyond this, we propose \textit{IE-as-Cache}, a framework that repurposes IE as a cognitive cache to enhance agentic reasoning. Drawing inspiration from hierarchical computer memory, our approach combines query-driven extraction with cache-aware reasoning to dynamically maintain compact intermediate information and filter noise. Experiments on challenging benchmarks across diverse LLMs demonstrate significant improvements in reasoning accuracy, indicating that IE can be effectively repurposed as a reusable cognitive resource and offering a promising direction for future research on downstream uses of IE.

Many CAD learning pipelines discretize Boundary Representations (B-Reps) into triangle meshes, discarding analytic surface structure and topological adjacency and thereby weakening consistent instance-level analysis. We present STEP-Parts, a deterministic CAD-to-supervision toolchain that extracts geometric instance partitions directly from raw STEP B-Reps and transfers them to tessellated carriers through retained source-face correspondence, yielding instance labels and metadata for downstream learning and evaluation. The construction merges adjacent B-Rep faces only when they share the same analytic primitive type and satisfy a near-tangent continuity criterion. On ABC, same-primitive dihedral angles are strongly bimodal, yielding a threshold-insensitive low-angle regime for part extraction. Because the partition is defined on intrinsic B-Rep topology rather than on a particular triangulation, the resulting boundaries remain stable under changes in tessellation. Applied to the DeepCAD subset of ABC, the pipeline processes approximately 180{,}000 models in under six hours on a consumer CPU. We release code and precomputed labels, and show that STEP-Parts serves both as a tessellation-robust geometric reference and as a useful supervision source in two downstream probes: an implicit reconstruction--segmentation network and a dataset-level point-based backbone.

Recently, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising technique for interpreting activations in foundation models by disentangling features into a sparse set of concepts. However, identifying the optimal level of sparsity for each neuron remains challenging in practice: excessive sparsity can lead to poor reconstruction, whereas insufficient sparsity may harm interpretability. While existing activation functions such as ReLU and TopK provide certain sparsity guarantees, they typically require additional sparsity regularization or cherry-picked hyperparameters. We show in this paper that dynamically sparse attention mechanisms using sparsemax can bridge this trade-off, due to their ability to determine the activation numbers in a data-dependent manner. Specifically, we first explore a new class of SAEs based on the cross-attention architecture with the latent features as queries and the learnable dictionary as the key and value matrices. To encourage sparse pattern learning, we employ a sparsemax-based attention strategy that automatically infers a sparse set of elements according to the complexity of each neuron, resulting in a more flexible and general activation function. Through comprehensive evaluation and visualization, we show that our approach successfully achieves lower reconstruction loss while producing high-quality concepts, particularly in top-n classification tasks.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a critical driver for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). While recent advancements have focused on reward engineering or data synthesis, few studies exploit the model's intrinsic representation characteristics to guide the training process. In this paper, we first observe the presence of high-magnitude activations within the query and key vectors when processing long contexts. Drawing inspiration from model quantization -- which establishes the criticality of such high-magnitude activations -- and the insight that long-context reasoning inherently exhibits a sparse structure, we hypothesize that these weights serve as the pivotal drivers for effective model optimization. Based on this insight, we propose LongAct, a strategy that shifts from uniform to saliency-guided sparse updates. By selectively updating only the weights associated with these significant activations, LongAct achieves an approximate 8% improvement on LongBench v2 and enhances generalization on the RULER benchmark. Furthermore, our method exhibits remarkable universality, consistently boosting performance across diverse RL algorithms such as GRPO and DAPO. Extensive ablation studies suggest that focusing on these salient features is key to unlocking long-context potential.

Achieving seamless, human-like interaction remains a key challenge for full-duplex spoken dialogue models (SDMs). Reinforcement learning (RL) has substantially enhanced text- and vision-language models, while well-designed reward signals are crucial for the performance of RL. We consider RL a promising strategy to address the key challenge for SDMs. However, a fundamental barrier persists: prevailing automated metrics for assessing interaction quality rely on superficial proxies, such as behavioral statistics or timing-prediction accuracy, failing to provide reliable reward signals for RL. On the other hand, human evaluations, despite their richness, remain costly, inconsistent, and difficult to scale. We tackle this critical barrier by proposing a Dual-Axis Generative Reward Model, which is trained to understand complex interaction dynamics using a detailed taxonomy and an annotated dataset, produces a single score and, crucially, provides separate evaluations for semantic quality and interaction timing. Such dual outputs furnish precise diagnostic feedback for SDMs and deliver a dependable, instructive reward signal suitable for online reinforcement learning. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on interaction-quality assessment across a wide spectrum of datasets, spanning synthetic dialogues and complex real-world interactions.

We study downlink beam and rate adaptation in a multi-user mmWave MISO system where multiple base stations (BSs), each using analog beamforming from finite codebooks, serve multiple single-antenna user equipments (UEs) with a unique beam per UE and discrete data transmission rates. BSs learn about transmission success based on ACK/NACK feedback. To encode service goals, we introduce a satisficing throughput threshold $τ_r$ and cast joint beam and rate adaptation as a combinatorial semi-bandit over beam-rate tuples. Within this framework, we propose SAT-CTS, a lightweight, threshold-aware policy that blends conservative confidence estimates with posterior sampling, steering learning toward meeting $τ_r$ rather than merely maximizing. Our main theoretical contribution provides the first finite-time regret bounds for combinatorial semi-bandits with satisficing objective: when $τ_r$ is realizable, we upper bound the cumulative satisficing regret to the target with a time-independent constant, and when $τ_r$ is non-realizable, we show that SAT-CTS incurs only a finite expected transient outside committed CTS rounds, after which its regret is governed by the sum of the regret contributions of restarted CTS rounds, yielding an $O((\log T)^2)$ standard regret bound. On the practical side, we evaluate the performance via cumulative satisficing regret to $τ_r$ alongside standard regret and fairness. Experiments with time-varying sparse multipath channels show that SAT-CTS consistently reduces satisficing regret and maintains competitive standard regret, while achieving favorable average throughput and fairness across users, indicating that feedback-efficient learning can equitably allocate beams and rates to meet QoS targets without channel state knowledge.

Online hate speech and abusive language pose a growing challenge for content moderation, especially in multilingual settings and for low-resource languages such as Lithuanian. This paper investigates to what extent modern multilingual sentence embedding models can support accurate hate speech detection in Lithuanian, Russian, and English, and how their performance depends on downstream modeling choices and feature dimensionality. We introduce LtHate, a new Lithuanian hate speech corpus derived from news portals and social networks, and benchmark six modern multilingual encoders (potion, gemma, bge, snow, jina, e5) on LtHate, RuToxic, and EnSuperset using a unified Python pipeline. For each embedding, we train both a one class HBOS anomaly detector and a two class CatBoost classifier, with and without principal component analysis (PCA) compression to 64-dimensional feature vectors. Across all datasets, two class supervised models consistently and substantially outperform one class anomaly detection, with the best configurations achieving up to 80.96% accuracy and AUC ROC of 0.887 in Lithuanian (jina), 92.19% accuracy and AUC ROC of 0.978 in Russian (e5), and 77.21% accuracy and AUC ROC of 0.859 in English (e5 with PCA). PCA compression preserves almost all discriminative power in the supervised setting, while showing some negative impact for the unsupervised anomaly detection case. These results demonstrate how modern multilingual sentence embeddings combined with gradient boosted decision trees provide robust soft-computing solutions for multilingual hate speech detection applications.

The SARS-CoV-2 RNA pseudoknot is a promising target for antiviral intervention, as it regulates the efficiency of $-$1 programmed ribosomal frameshifting ($-$1 PRF), a mechanism that is essential for viral protein synthesis. The pseudoknot represents a viral RNA sequence composed of helical stems that adopts two long-lived topologies, threaded and unthreaded. Ligand-induced distortion of this fold is thought to underlie the susceptibility of $-$1 PRF to small-molecule inhibitors. Resolving these distortions from unbiased molecular dynamics (MD) requires collective variables (CVs) that isolate the slowest dynamic modes of the RNA--ligand system from the high-frequency fluctuations. Here, we use spectral map (SM), a thermodynamics-driven machine-learning method, to learn such CVs directly from MD trajectories of the SARS-CoV-2 RNA pseudoknot in complex with the $-$1 PRF inhibitor merafloxacin and two related analogs. We examine both threaded and unthreaded pseudoknot topologies and consider the neutral and ionized ligand forms relevant at physiological pH. Free-energy landscapes show that ligand-induced destabilization is topology-selective: merafloxacin and its analogs destabilize the S2 stem in the threaded pseudoknot, whereas in the unthreaded pseudoknot, destabilization shifts to the S1 and S3 stems. We find that the zwitterionic form of merafloxacin uniquely imposes slow dynamics on the otherwise featureless unthreaded pseudoknot. Furthermore, the neutral and zwitterionic forms of merafloxacin differ qualitatively in their mechanisms within the same RNA topology. Overall, these results clarify how pseudoknot topology, ligand type, and protonation state shape the slow conformational dynamics of viral RNA and establish physiological protonation as an essential factor for modeling RNA-targeted drug action.

Intelligent embodied agents should not simply follow instructions, as real-world environments often involve unexpected conditions and exceptions. However, existing methods usually focus on directly executing instructions, without considering whether the target objects can actually be manipulated, meaning they fail to assess available affordances. To address this limitation, we introduce DynAfford, a benchmark that evaluates embodied agents in dynamic environments where object affordances may change over time and are not specified in the instruction. DynAfford requires agents to perceive object states, infer implicit preconditions, and adapt their actions accordingly. To enable this capability, we introduce ADAPT, a plug-and-play module that augments existing planners with explicit affordance reasoning. Experiments demonstrate that incorporating ADAPT significantly improves robustness and task success across both seen and unseen environments. We also show that a domain-adapted, LoRA-finetuned vision-language model used as the affordance inference backend outperforms a commercial LLM (GPT-4o), highlighting the importance of task-aligned affordance grounding.

Large language models have advanced rapidly, from pattern recognition to emerging forms of reasoning, yet they remain confined to linguistic simulation rather than grounded understanding. They can produce fluent outputs that resemble reflection, but lack temporal continuity, causal feedback, and anchoring in real-world interaction. This paper proposes a complementary approach in which reasoning is treated as a relational process distributed between human and model rather than an internal capability of either. Building on recent work on "System-2" learning, we relocate reflective reasoning to the interaction layer. Instead of engineering reasoning solely within models, we frame it as a cognitive protocol that can be structured, measured, and governed using existing systems. This perspective emphasizes collaborative intelligence, combining human judgment and contextual understanding with machine speed, memory, and associative capacity. We introduce "The Architect's Pen" as a practical method. Like an architect who thinks through drawing, the human uses the model as an external medium for structured reflection. By embedding phases of articulation, critique, and revision into human-AI interaction, the dialogue itself becomes a reasoning loop: human abstraction -> model articulation -> human reflection. This reframes the question from whether the model can think to whether the human-AI system can reason. The framework enables auditable reasoning traces and supports alignment with emerging governance standards, including the EU AI Act and ISO/IEC 42001. It provides a practical path toward more transparent, controllable, and accountable AI use without requiring new model architectures.

We present an initial investigation into Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for Ukrainian, conducted within the UNLP 2026 Shared Task on Multi-Domain Document Understanding. Our system combines two-stage retrieval (BGE-M3 with BGE reranking) with a lightweight agentic layer performing query rephrasing and answer-retry loops on top of Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct. Our analysis reveals that retrieval quality is the primary bottleneck: agentic retry mechanisms improve answer accuracy but the overall score remains constrained by document and page identification. We discuss practical limitations of offline agentic pipelines and outline directions for combining stronger retrieval with more advanced agentic reasoning for Ukrainian.

We propose a new perspective on policy optimization: rather than reweighting all samples by their importance ratios, an optimizer should select which samples are trustworthy enough to drive a policy update. Building on this view, we introduce Rejection-Gated Policy Optimization (RGPO), which replaces the importance sampling ratio r_theta = pi_theta / pi_old with a smooth, differentiable acceptance gate alpha_theta(s, a) = g(r_theta(s, a)) in the range [0, 1]. Unlike prior work that applies rejection sampling as a data-level heuristic before training, RGPO elevates rejection to an optimization principle: the gate participates directly in gradient computation and is implicitly updated alongside the policy. RGPO provides a unified framework: the policy gradients of TRPO, PPO, and REINFORCE all correspond to specific choices of the effective gradient weight w(r) = g'(r) * r. We prove that RGPO guarantees finite, bounded gradient variance even when importance sampling ratios are heavy-tailed (where IS variance diverges). We further show that RGPO incurs only a bounded, controllable bias and provides an approximate monotonic policy improvement guarantee analogous to TRPO. RGPO matches PPO in computational cost, requires no second-order optimization, and extends naturally to RLHF-style preference alignment. In online preference fine-tuning of Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct on Anthropic HH-RLHF (n = 3 seeds), RGPO uses a dual-ratio gate that anchors learning to both the previous policy and the reference model, achieving a Pareto-dominant outcome: the highest reward among online RL methods (+14.8% vs. PPO-RLHF) and the lowest KL divergence to the reference model (-16.0% vs. PPO-RLHF, -53.1% vs. GRPO).

Evaluating medical AI systems using expert clinician panels is costly and slow, motivating the use of large language models (LLMs) as alternative adjudicators. Here, we evaluate an LLM jury composed of three frontier AI models scoring 3333 diagnoses on 300 real-world middle-income country (MIC) hospital cases. Model performance was benchmarked against expert clinician panel and independent human re-scoring panel evaluations. Both LLM and clinician-generated diagnoses are scored across four dimensions: diagnosis, differential diagnosis, clinical reasoning and negative treatment risk. For each of these, we assess scoring difference, inter-rater agreement, scoring stability, severe safety errors and the effect of post-hoc calibration. We find that: (i) the uncalibrated LLM jury scores are systematically lower than clinician panels scores; (ii) the LLM Jury preserves ordinal agreement and exhibits better concordance with the primary expert panels than the human expert re-score panels do; (iii) the probability of severe errors is lower in \lj models compared to the human expert re-score panels; (iv) the LLM Jury shows excellent agreement with primary expert panels' rankings. We find that the LLM jury combined with AI model diagnoses can be used to identify ward diagnoses at high risk of error, enabling targeted expert review and improved panel efficiency; (v) LLM jury models show no self-preference bias. They did not score diagnoses generated by their own underlying model or models from the same vendor more (or less) favourably than those generated by other models. Finally, we demonstrate that LLM jury calibration using isotonic regression improves alignment with human expert panel evaluations. Together, these results provide compelling evidence that a calibrated, multi-model LLM jury can serve as a trustworthy and reliable proxy for expert clinician evaluation in medical AI benchmarking.

While Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enables LLMs to solve challenging reasoning problems, as KV cache grows linearly with the number of generated tokens, CoT reasoning faces scaling issues in terms of speed and memory usage. In this work, we propose MemoSight (Memory-Foresight-based reasoning), a unified framework that integrates both context compression and multi-token prediction to mitigate the efficiency issues while maintaining CoT reasoning performance. Our framework adopts the same minimalist design for both context compression and multi-token prediction via special tokens and their corresponding position layout tailored to each token type. Comprehensive experiments on four reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that MemoSight reduces the KV cache footprint by up to 66% and accelerates inference by 1.56x, while outperforming existing CoT compression methods.

Recent advances in vision language models (VLMs) offer reasoning capabilities, yet how these unfold and integrate visual and textual information remains unclear. We analyze reasoning dynamics in 18 VLMs covering instruction-tuned and reasoning-trained models from two different model families. We track confidence over Chain-of-Thought (CoT), measure the corrective effect of reasoning, and evaluate the contribution of intermediate reasoning steps. We find that models are prone to answer inertia, in which early commitments to a prediction are reinforced, rather than revised during reasoning steps. While reasoning-trained models show stronger corrective behavior, their gains depend on modality conditions, from text-dominant to vision-only settings. Using controlled interventions with misleading textual cues, we show that models are consistently influenced by these cues even when visual evidence is sufficient, and assess whether this influence is recoverable from CoT. Although this influence can appear in the CoT, its detectability varies across models and depends on what is being monitored. Reasoning-trained models are more likely to explicitly refer to the cues, but their longer and fluent CoTs can still appear visually grounded while actually following textual cues, obscuring modality reliance. In contrast, instruction-tuned models refer to the cues less explicitly, but their shorter traces reveal inconsistencies with the visual input. Taken together, these findings indicate that CoT provides only a partial view of how different modalities drive VLM decisions, with important implications for the transparency and safety of multimodal systems.

In data-sensitive domains such as healthcare, cross-silo federated learning (CFL) allows organizations to collaboratively train AI models without sharing raw data. However, practical CFL deployments are inherently coopetitive, in which organizations cooperate during model training while competing in downstream markets. In such settings, training contributions, including data volume, quality, and diversity, can improve the global model yet inadvertently strengthen rivals. This dilemma is amplified by non-IID data, which leads to asymmetric learning gains and undermines sustained participation. While existing competition-aware CFL and incentive-design approaches reward organizations based on marginal training contributions, they fail to account for the costs of strengthening competitors. In this paper, we introduce CoCoGen+, a coopetition-compatible data generation and incentivization framework that jointly models non-IID data and inter-organizational competition while endogenizing GenAI-based synthetic data generation as a strategic decision. Specifically, CoCoGen+ formulates each training round as a weighted potential game, where organizations strategically decide how much synthetic data to generate by balancing learning performance gains against computational costs and competition-caused utility losses. We then provide a tractable equilibrium characterization and derive implementable generation strategies to maximize social welfare. To promote long-term collaboration, we integrate a payoff redistribution-based incentive mechanism to compensate organizations for their contributions and competition-caused utility degradation. Experiments on varying learning tasks validate the feasibility of CoCoGen+. The results show how non-IID data, competition intensity, and incentives shape organizational strategies and social welfare, while CoCoGen+ outperforms baselines in efficiency.

Autoregressive decoding in Large Language Models (LLMs) generates one token per step, causing high inference latency. Speculative decoding (SD) mitigates this through a guess-and-verify strategy, but existing training-free variants face trade-offs: retrieval-based drafts break when no exact match exists, while logits-based drafts lack structural guidance. We propose $\textbf{RACER}$ ($\textbf{R}$etrieval-$\textbf{A}$ugmented $\textbf{C}$ont$\textbf{e}$xtual $\textbf{R}$apid Speculative Decoding), a lightweight and training-free method that integrates retrieved exact patterns with logit-driven future cues. This unification supplies both reliable anchors and flexible extrapolation, yielding richer speculative drafts. Experiments on Spec-Bench, HumanEval, and MGSM-ZH demonstrate that RACER consistently accelerates inference, achieving more than $2\times$ speedup over autoregressive decoding, and outperforms prior training-free methods, offering a scalable, plug-and-play solution for efficient LLM decoding. Our source code is available at $\href{https://github.com/hkr04/RACER}{https://github.com/hkr04/RACER}$.

Recent advances in Deep Learning (DL) have strengthened data-driven System Identification (SysID), with Neural and Fuzzy Ordinary Differential Equation (NODE/FODE) models achieving high accuracy in nonlinear dynamic modeling. Yet, system states in these frameworks are often reconstructed without clear physical meaning, and input contributions to the state derivatives remain difficult to interpret. To address these limitations, we propose Explainable FODE (xFODE), an interpretable SysID framework with integrated DL-based training. In xFODE, we define states in an incremental form to provide them with physical meanings. We employ fuzzy additive models to approximate the state derivative, thereby enhancing interpretability per input. To provide further interpretability, Partitioning Strategies (PSs) are developed, enabling the training of fuzzy additive models with explainability. By structuring the antecedent space during training so that only two consecutive rules are activated for any given input, PSs not only yield lower complexity for local inference but also enhance the interpretability of the antecedent space. To train xFODE, we present a DL framework with parameterized membership function learning that supports end-to-end optimization. Across benchmark SysID datasets, xFODE matches the accuracy of NODE, FODE, and NLARX models while providing interpretable insights.

Rapid urbanization and continuous population growth have made municipal solid waste management increasingly challenging. These challenges highlight the need for smarter and automated waste management solutions. This paper presents the design and evaluation of an integrated waste management framework that combines two connected systems, a robotic waste segregation module and an optimized bio-digestor. The robotic waste segregation system uses a MyCobot 280 Jetson Nano robotic arm along with YOLOv8 object detection and robot operating system (ROS)-based path planning to identify and sort waste in real time. It classifies waste into four different categories with high precision, reducing the need for manual intervention. After segregation, the biodegradable waste is transferred to a bio-digestor system equipped with multiple sensors. These sensors continuously monitor key parameters, including temperature, pH, pressure, and motor revolutions per minute. The Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm, combined with a regression model, is used to dynamically adjust system parameters. This intelligent optimization approach ensures stable operation and maximizes digestion efficiency under varying environmental conditions. System testing under dynamic conditions demonstrates a sorting accuracy of 98% along with highly efficient biological conversion. The proposed framework offers a scalable, intelligent, and practical solution for modern waste management, making it suitable for both residential and industrial applications.

Large language models are increasingly integrated into decision-making in areas such as healthcare, law, finance, engineering, and government. Yet they share a critical limitation: they produce fluent outputs even when their internal reasoning has drifted. A confident answer can conceal uncertainty, speculation, or inconsistency, and small changes in phrasing can lead to different conclusions. This makes LLMs useful assistants but unreliable partners in high-stakes contexts. Humans exhibit a similar weakness, often mistaking fluency for reliability. When a model responds smoothly, users tend to trust it, even when both model and user are drifting together. This paper is the first in a five-paper research series on stabilising human-AI reasoning. The series proposes a two-layer approach: Parts II-IV introduce human-side mechanisms such as uncertainty cues, conflict surfacing, and auditable reasoning traces, while Part V develops a model-side Epistemic Control Loop (ECL) that detects instability and modulates generation accordingly. Together, these layers form a missing operational substrate for governance by increasing signal-to-noise at the point of use. Stabilising interaction makes uncertainty and drift visible before enforcement is applied, enabling more precise capability governance. This aligns with emerging compliance expectations, including the EU AI Act and ISO/IEC 42001, by making reasoning processes traceable under real conditions of use. The central claim is that fluency is not reliability. Without structures that stabilise both human and model reasoning, AI cannot be trusted or governed where it matters most.

Recent advances in Deep Learning (DL) have boosted data-driven System Identification (SysID), but reliable use requires Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) alongside accurate predictions. Although UQ-capable models such as Fuzzy ODE (FODE) can produce Prediction Intervals (PIs), they offer limited interpretability. We introduce Explainable Type-2 Fuzzy Additive ODEs for UQ (xFODE+), an interpretable SysID model which produces PIs alongside point predictions while retaining physically meaningful incremental states. xFODE+ implements each fuzzy additive model with Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Logic Systems (IT2-FLSs) and constraints membership functions to the activation of two neighboring rules, limiting overlap and keeping inference locally transparent. The type-reduced sets produced by the IT2-FLSs are aggregated to construct the state update together with the PIs. The model is trained in a DL framework via a composite loss that jointly optimizes prediction accuracy and PI quality. Results on benchmark SysID datasets show that xFODE+ matches FODE in PI quality and achieves comparable accuracy, while providing interpretability.

Nonlinear system identification must balance physical interpretability with model flexibility. Classical methods yield structured, control-relevant models but rely on rigid parametric forms that often miss complex nonlinearities, whereas Neural ODEs are expressive yet largely black-box. Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) sit between these extremes, but inverse PINNs typically assume a known governing equation with fixed coefficients, leading to identifiability failures when the true dynamics are unknown or state-dependent. We propose \textbf{SOLIS}, which models unknown dynamics via a \emph{state-conditioned second-order surrogate model} and recasts identification as learning a Quasi-Linear Parameter-Varying (Quasi-LPV) representation, recovering interpretable natural frequency, damping, and gain without presupposing a global equation. SOLIS decouples trajectory reconstruction from parameter estimation and stabilizes training with a cyclic curriculum and \textbf{Local Physics Hints} windowed ridge-regression anchors that mitigate optimization collapse. Experiments on benchmarks show accurate parameter-manifold recovery and coherent physical rollouts from sparse data, including regimes where standard inverse methods fail.

Generative Retrieval (GR) offers a promising paradigm for recommendation through next-token prediction (NTP). However, scaling it to large-scale industrial systems introduces three challenges: (i) within a single request, the identical model inputs may produce inconsistent outputs due to the pagination request mechanism; (ii) the prohibitive cost of encoding long user behavior sequences with multi-token item representations based on semantic IDs, and (iii) aligning the generative policy with nuanced user preference signals. We present GenRec, a preference-oriented generative framework deployed on the JD App that addresses above challenges within a single decoder-only architecture. For training objective, we propose Page-wise NTP task, which supervises over an entire interaction page rather than each interacted item individually, providing denser gradient signal and resolving the one-to-many ambiguity of point-wise training. On the prefilling side, an asymmetric linear Token Merger compresses multi-token Semantic IDs in the prompt while preserving full-resolution decoding, reducing input length by ~2X with negligible accuracy loss. To further align outputs with user satisfaction, we introduce GRPO-SR, a reinforcement learning method that pairs Group Relative Policy Optimization with NLL regularization for training stability, and employs Hybrid Rewards combining a dense reward model with a relevance gate to mitigate reward hacking. In month-long online A/B tests serving production traffic, GenRec achieves 9.5% improvement in click count and 8.7% in transaction count over the existing pipeline.

Does reinforcement learning genuinely expand what LLM agents can do, or merely make them more reliable? For static reasoning, recent work answers the second: base and RL pass@k curves converge at large k. We ask whether this holds for agentic tool use, where T rounds of interaction enable compositional strategies that re-sampling cannot recover. We introduce PASS@(k,T), a two-dimensional metric that jointly varies sampling budget k and interaction depth T, separating capability expansion from efficiency improvement. Our main finding is that, contrary to the static-reasoning result, tool-use RL genuinely enlarges the capability boundary: the RL agent's pass-curve pulls above the base model's and the gap widens at large k rather than converging. The expansion is specific to compositional, sequential information gathering; on simpler tasks RL behaves as prior work predicts. Under matched training data, supervised fine-tuning regresses the boundary on the same compositional tasks, isolating self-directed exploration as the causal factor. Mechanism analysis shows RL reweights the base strategy distribution toward the subset whose downstream reasoning more often yields a correct answer, with the improvement concentrated on how the agent integrates retrieved information. These results reconcile optimistic and pessimistic readings of RL for LLMs: both are correct, on different task types.

We study the tail behavior of regret in stochastic multi-armed bandits for algorithms that are asymptotically optimal in expectation. While minimizing expected regret is the classical objective, recent work shows that even such algorithms can exhibit heavy regret tails, incurring large regret with non-negligible probability. Existing sharp characterizations of regret tails are largely restricted to parametric settings, such as single-parameter exponential families. In this work, we extend the $\KLinf$-UCB algorithm of to a broad nonparametric class of reward distributions satisfying mild assumptions, and establish its asymptotic optimality in expectation. We then analyze the tail behavior of its regret and derive a novel upper bound on the regret tail probability. As special cases, our results recover regret-tail guarantees for both bounded-support and heavy-tailed (moment-bounded) bandit models. Moreover, for the special case of finitely-supported reward distributions, our upper bound matches the known lower bound exactly. Our results thus provide a unified and tight characterization of regret tails for asymptotically optimal KL-based UCB algorithms, going beyond parametric models.

Local loss-landscape stabilization under sample growth is typically measured either pointwise or through isotropic averaging in the full parameter space. Despite practical value, both choices probe directions that contribute little to the dominant local deformation of strongly anisotropic neural landscapes. We recast stabilization as an observational problem and introduce a unified family of criteria parameterized by an aggregation order and a probing distribution; within this family we propose a curvature-aligned criterion $Δ_2^{(D)}$ that probes the loss increment field in the top-$D$ eigenspace of the empirical Hessian near a trained solution. Solely from a local quadratic model, we prove that $Δ_2^{(D)}$ preserves the $O(k^{-2})$ mean-squared rate of the full-space criterion while replacing ambient-dimension curvature dependence with dependence on the subspace dimension $D$; a corollary gives a closed-form spectral expression and a proposition identifies the top-$D$ eigenspace as extremal within the eigenspace-aligned family. We also derive scalable estimators based on Hessian-vector products, subspace Monte Carlo, and a closed-form Gaussian-moment proxy. On a decoder-only transformer, a curvature-aligned probe occupying a tiny fraction of parameter space already reproduces the full-space mean-squared signal to within numerical noise throughout the validated local regime, and the closed-form estimator is orders of magnitude faster than direct Monte Carlo after subspace construction.

Vibe coding inherently assumes iterative refinement of LLM-generated code through feedback loops. While effective for conventional software tasks, its reliability in runtime-adaptive systems is unclear -- especially when generated code is not manually inspected. This paper studies feedback-based automated verification of LLM-generated adaptation managers in Collective Adaptive Systems (CAS). We focus on the key challenges of verification in the loop: how to detect failures of generated code at runtime and how to report them precisely enough for an LLM to fix them. We combine the adaptation loop with a vibe-coding feedback loop where correctness is checked against (i) generic architectural constraints and (ii) functional constraints formalized in Functional Constraints Logic (FCL), a novel first-order temporal logic over potentially finite traces. Conducting the Dragon Hunt CAS case study, we show that fine-grained constraint violations provide actionable feedback that typically yields a valid adaptation manager within a few iterations, while simple coarse metric-based feedback often stalls. Our findings suggest that feedback precision is the dominant factor for reliable vibe coding in systems designed by domain experts with no programming skills, thereby obviating the need for human code inspection.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in medical image analysis, yet their application in intraoral photography remains largely underexplored due to the lack of fine-grained, annotated datasets and comprehensive benchmarks. To address this, we present MetaDent, a comprehensive resource that includes (1) a novel and large-scale dentistry image dataset collected from clinical, public, and web sources; (2) a semi-structured annotation framework designed to capture the hierarchical and clinically nuanced nature of dental photography; and (3) comprehensive benchmark suites for evaluating state-of-the-art VLMs on clinical image understanding. Our labeling approach combines a high-level image summary with point-by-point, free-text descriptions of abnormalities. This method enables rich, scalable, and task-agnostic representations. We curated 60,669 dental images from diverse sources and annotated a representative subset of 2,588 images using this meta-labeling scheme. Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs), we derive standardized benchmarks: approximately 15K Visual Question Answering (VQA) pairs and an 18-class multi-label classification dataset, which we validated with human review and error analysis to justify that the LLM-driven transition reliably preserves fidelity and semantic accuracy. We then evaluate state-of-the-art VLMs across VQA, classification, and image captioning tasks. Quantitative results reveal that even the most advanced models struggle with a fine-grained understanding of intraoral scenes, achieving moderate accuracy and producing inconsistent or incomplete descriptions in image captioning. We publicly release our dataset, annotations, and tools to foster reproducible research and accelerate the development of vision-language systems for dental applications.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly exposed to adaptive jailbreaking, particularly in high-stakes Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) domains. Although streaming probes enable real-time monitoring, they still make systematic errors. We identify a core issue: existing methods often rely on a few high-scoring tokens, leading to false alarms when sensitive CBRN terms appear in benign contexts. To address this, we introduce a streaming probing objective that requires multiple evidence tokens to consistently support a prediction, rather than relying on isolated spikes. This encourages more robust detection based on aggregated signals instead of single-token cues. At a fixed 1% false-positive rate, our method improves the true-positive rate by 35.55% relative to strong streaming baselines. We further observe substantial gains in AUROC, even when starting from near-saturated baseline performance (AUROC = 97.40%). We also show that probing Attention or MLP activations consistently outperforms residual-stream features. Finally, even when adversarial fine-tuning enables novel character-level ciphers, harmful intent remains detectable: probes developed for the base LLMs can be applied ``plug-and-play'' to these obfuscated attacks, achieving an AUROC of over 98.85%.

Constrained decoding has been widely adopted for structured generation with large language models (LLMs), ensuring that outputs satisfy predefined formats such as JSON and XML. However, existing approaches largely treat schemas as purely structural constraints and overlook the possibility that their linguistic formulation may affect model behavior. In this work, we study how instruction placement influences model performance in structured generation and show that merely changing the wording of schema keys, without modifying the prompt or model parameters, can significantly alter model performance under constrained decoding. Based on this observation, we propose to reinterpret structured generation as a multi-channel instruction problem, where instructions can be conveyed explicitly through prompts and implicitly through schema keys during decoding. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to systematically study how schema key formulation acts as an implicit instruction channel and affects model performance under constrained decoding. Experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that different model families exhibit distinct sensitivities to these instruction channels: Qwen models consistently benefit from schema-level instructions, while LLaMA models rely more heavily on prompt-level guidance. We further observe non-additive interaction effects between instruction channels, showing that combining multiple channels does not always lead to further improvement. These findings suggest that schema design not only determines output structure, but also carries instruction signals, offering a new perspective on structured generation in LLMs.

We study bandit best-arm identification with arbitrary and potentially adversarial rewards. A simple random uniform learner obtains the optimal rate of error in the adversarial scenario. However, this type of strategy is suboptimal when the rewards are sampled stochastically. Therefore, we ask: Can we design a learner that performs optimally in both the stochastic and adversarial problems while not being aware of the nature of the rewards? First, we show that designing such a learner is impossible in general. In particular, to be robust to adversarial rewards, we can only guarantee optimal rates of error on a subset of the stochastic problems. We give a lower bound that characterizes the optimal rate in stochastic problems if the strategy is constrained to be robust to adversarial rewards. Finally, we design a simple parameter-free algorithm and show that its probability of error matches (up to log factors) the lower bound in stochastic problems, and it is also robust to adversarial ones.

As agent systems move into increasingly diverse execution settings, trajectory-level safety evaluation and diagnosis require benchmarks that evolve with them. ATBench is a diverse and realistic agent trajectory benchmark for safety evaluation and diagnosis. This report presents ATBench-Claw and ATBench-CodeX, two domain-customized extensions that carry ATBench into the OpenClaw and OpenAI Codex / Codex-runtime settings. The key adaptation mechanism is to analyze each new setting, customize the three-dimensional Safety Taxonomy over risk source, failure mode, and real-world harm, and then use that customized taxonomy to define the benchmark specification consumed by the shared ATBench construction pipeline. This extensibility matters because agent frameworks remain relatively stable at the architectural level even as their concrete execution settings, tool ecosystems, and product capabilities evolve quickly. Concretely, ATBench-Claw targets OpenClaw-sensitive execution chains over tools, skills, sessions, and external actions, while ATBench-CodeX targets trajectories in the OpenAI Codex / Codex-runtime setting over repositories, shells, patches, dependencies, approvals, and runtime policy boundaries. Our emphasis therefore falls on taxonomy customization, domain-specific risk coverage, and benchmark design under a shared ATBench generation framework.

Understanding climate change requires reasoning over complex causal networks. Yet, existing causal discovery datasets predominantly capture explicit, direct causal relations. We introduce ClimateCause, a manually expert-annotated dataset of higher-order causal structures from science-for-policy climate reports, including implicit and nested causality. Cause-effect expressions are normalized and disentangled into individual causal relations to facilitate graph construction, with unique annotations for cause-effect correlation, relation type, and spatiotemporal context. We further demonstrate ClimateCause's value for quantifying readability based on the semantic complexity of causal graphs underlying a statement. Finally, large language model benchmarking on correlation inference and causal chain reasoning highlights the latter as a key challenge.

Test-time compute scaling, the practice of spending extra computation during inference via repeated sampling, search, or extended reasoning, has become a powerful lever for improving large language model performance. Yet deploying these techniques under finite inference budgets requires a decision that current systems largely ignore: which inputs deserve more compute, and which can be answered cheaply? We formalize this as a constrained optimization problem (maximize expected accuracy subject to an average compute budget) and solve it with a two-stage Solve-then-Learn pipeline. In the solve stage, Lagrangian relaxation decomposes the global constraint into per-instance sub-problems, each admitting a closed-form oracle action that optimally prices accuracy against cost. We prove that the induced cost is monotone in the dual variable, enabling exact budget targeting via binary search. In the learn stage, a lightweight classifier is trained to predict oracle actions from cheap input features, amortizing the allocation rule for real-time deployment. We establish that the task-level regret of the learned policy is bounded by its imitation error times the worst-case per-instance gap, yielding a clean reduction from constrained inference to supervised classification. Experiments on MATH and GSM8K with three LLMs (DeepSeek-V3, GPT-4o-mini, Qwen2.5-7B) show that our method consistently outperforms uniform and heuristic allocation baselines, achieving up to 12.8% relative accuracy improvement on MATH under matched budget constraints, while closely tracking the Lagrangian oracle upper bound with over 91% imitation accuracy.

Purpose: Adaptive skip modules can improve medical image segmentation, but searching for them is computationally costly. Implantable Adaptive Cells (IACs) are compact NAS modules inserted into U-Net skip connections, reducing the search space compared with full-network NAS. However, the original IAC framework still requires a 200-epoch differentiable search for each backbone and dataset. Methods: We analyzed the temporal behavior of operations and edges within IAC cells during differentiable search on public medical image segmentation benchmarks. We found that operations selected in the final discrete cell typically emerge among the strongest candidates early in training, and their architecture parameters stabilize well before the final epoch. Based on this, we propose a Jensen--Shannon-divergence-based stability criterion that tracks per-edge operation-importance distributions and progressively prunes low-importance operations during search. The accelerated framework is called IAC-LTH. Results: Across four public benchmarks (ACDC, BraTS, KiTS, AMOS), several 2-D U-Net backbones, and a 2-D nnU-Net pipeline, IAC-LTH discovers IAC cells whose patient-level segmentation performance matches and sometimes slightly exceeds that of cells found by the original full-length search, while reducing wall-clock NAS cost by 3.7x to 16x across datasets and backbones. These results are consistent across architectures, benchmarks, and both non-augmented and augmented training settings, while preserving the gains of IAC-equipped U-Nets over strong attention-based and dense-skip baselines. Conclusion: Competitive IAC architectures can be identified from early-stabilizing operations without running the full search, making adaptive skip-module design more practical for medical image segmentation under realistic computational constraints.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve strong performance on complex tasks through extended chains of thought but suffer from high inference latency due to autoregressive reasoning. Recent work explores using Small Reasoning Models (SRMs) to accelerate LRM inference. In this paper, we systematically characterize the capability boundaries of SRMs and identify three common types of reasoning risks: (1) path divergence, where SRMs lack the strategic ability to construct an initial plan, causing reasoning to deviate from the most probable path; (2) cognitive overload, where SRMs fail to solve particularly difficult steps; and (3) recovery inability, where SRMs lack robust self-reflection and error correction mechanisms. To address these challenges, we propose TrigReason, a trigger-based collaborative reasoning framework that replaces continuous polling with selective intervention. TrigReason delegates most reasoning to the SRM and activates LRM intervention only when necessary-during initial strategic planning (strategic priming trigger), upon detecting extraordinary overconfidence (cognitive offload trigger), or when reasoning falls into unproductive loops (intervention request trigger). The evaluation results on AIME24, AIME25, and GPQA-D indicate that TrigReason matches the accuracy of full LRMs and SpecReason, while offloading 1.70x - 4.79x more reasoning steps to SRMs. Under edge-cloud conditions, TrigReason reduces latency by 43.9\% and API cost by 73.3\%. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/QQQ-yi/TrigReason}{https://github.com/QQQ-yi/TrigReason}

Retail theft costs the global economy over \$100 billion annually, yet existing AI-based detection systems require expensive custom model training on proprietary datasets and charge \$200-500/month per store. We present Paza, a zero-shot retail theft detection framework that achieves practical concealment detection without training any model. Our approach orchestrates multiple existing models in a layered pipeline - cheap object detection and pose estimation running continuously, with an expensive vision-language model (VLM) invoked only when behavioral pre-filters trigger. A multi-signal suspicion pre-filter (requiring dwell time plus at least one behavioral signal) reduces VLM invocations by 240x compared to per-frame analysis, bounding calls to <=10/minute and enabling a single GPU to serve 10-20 stores. The architecture is model-agnostic: the VLM component accepts any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, enabling operators to swap between models such as Gemma 4, Qwen3.5-Omni, GPT-4o, or future releases without code changes - ensuring the system improves as the VLM landscape evolves. We evaluate the VLM component on the DCSASS synthesized shoplifting dataset (169 clips, controlled environment), achieving 89.5% precision and 92.8% specificity at 59.3% recall zero-shot - where the recall gap is attributable to sparse frame sampling in offline evaluation rather than VLM reasoning failures, as precision and specificity are the operationally critical metrics determining false alarm rates. We present a detailed cost model showing viability at \$50-100/month per store (3-10x cheaper than commercial alternatives), and introduce a privacy-preserving design that obfuscates faces in the detection pipeline. The source code is available at https://github.com/xHaileab/Paza-AI.

Behavioral Profile (BP) annotation is difficult to automate because it requires simultaneous coding across multiple linguistic dimensions. We treat BP annotation as a bundle of annotation skills rather than a single task and evaluate LLM-assisted BP annotation from this perspective. Using 3,134 concordance lines of 30 Chinese metaphorical color-term derivatives and a 14-feature BP schema, we implement a skill-file-driven pipeline in which each feature is externally defined through schema files, decision rules, and examples. Two human annotators completed a two-round schema-only protocol on a 300-instance validation subset, enabling BP skills to be classified as directly operable, recoverable under focused re-annotation, or structurally underspecified. GPT-5.4 and three locally deployable open-source models were then evaluated under the same setup. Results show that BP annotation is highly heterogeneous at the skill level: 5 skills are directly operable, 4 are recoverable after focused re-annotation, and 5 remain structurally underspecified. GPT-5.4 executes the retained skills with substantial reliability (accuracy = 0.678, \k{appa} = 0.665, weighted F1 = 0.695), but this feasibility is selective rather than global. Human and GPT difficulty profiles are strongly aligned at the skill level (r = 0.881), but not at the instance level (r = 0.016) or lexical-item level (r = -0.142), a pattern we describe as shared taxonomy, independent execution. Pairwise agreement further suggests that GPT is better understood as an independent third skill voice than as a direct human substitute. Open-source failures are concentrated in schema-to-skill execution problems. These findings suggest that automatic annotation should be evaluated in terms of skill feasibility rather than task-level automation.

Current single-cell foundation model benchmarks universally extract final layer embeddings, assuming these represent optimal feature spaces. We systematically evaluate layer-wise representations from scFoundation (100M parameters) and Tahoe-X1 (1.3B parameters) across trajectory inference and perturbation response prediction. Our analysis reveals that optimal layers are task-dependent (trajectory peaks at 60% depth, 31% above final layers) and context-dependent (perturbation optima shift 0-96% across T cell activation states). Notably, first-layer embeddings outperform all deeper layers in quiescent cells, challenging assumptions about hierarchical feature abstraction. These findings demonstrate that "where" to extract features matters as much as "what" the model learns, necessitating systematic layer evaluation tailored to biological task and cellular context rather than defaulting to final-layer embeddings.

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) for clinical documentation tasks such as SOAP note generation remains challenging. Unlike standard summarization, these tasks require clinical abstraction, normalization of colloquial language, and medically grounded inference. However, prevailing evaluation methods including automated metrics and LLM as judge frameworks rely on lexical faithfulness, often labeling any information not explicitly present in the transcript as hallucination. We show that such approaches systematically misclassify clinically valid outputs as errors, inflating hallucination rates and distorting model assessment. Our analysis reveals that many flagged hallucinations correspond to legitimate clinical transformations, including synonym mapping, abstraction of examination findings, diagnostic inference, and guideline consistent care planning. By aligning evaluation criteria with clinical reasoning through calibrated prompting and retrieval grounded in medical ontologies we observe a significant shift in outcomes. Under a lexical evaluation regime, the mean hallucination rate is 35%, heavily penalizing valid reasoning. With inference aware evaluation, this drops to 9%, with remaining cases reflecting genuine safety concerns. These findings suggest that current evaluation practices over penalize valid clinical reasoning and may measure artifacts of evaluation design rather than true errors, underscoring the need for clinically informed evaluation in high context domains like medicine.

Educational assistants should spend more computation only when the task needs it. This paper rewrites our earlier draft around the system that was actually implemented and archived in the repository: a sample-level 1B to 7B cascade for the shared-8 EduBench benchmark. The final system, Pangu-ACE, uses a 1B tutor-router to produce a draft answer plus routing signals, then either accepts the draft or escalates the sample to a 7B specialist prompt. We also correct a major offline evaluation bug: earlier summaries over-credited some open-form outputs that only satisfied superficial format checks. After CPU-side rescoring from saved prediction JSONL, the full Chinese test archive (7013 samples) shows that cascade_final improves deterministic quality from 0.457 to 0.538 and format validity from 0.707 to 0.866 over the legacy rule_v2 system while accepting 19.7% of requests directly at 1B. Routing is strongly task dependent: IP is accepted by 1B 78.0% of the time, while QG and EC still escalate almost always. The current archived deployment does not yet show latency gains, so the defensible efficiency story is routing selectivity rather than wall-clock speedup. We also package a reproducible artifact-first paper workflow and clarify the remaining external-baseline gap: GPT-5.4 re-judging is implemented locally, but the configured provider endpoint and key are invalid, so final sampled-baseline alignment with GPT-5.4 remains pending infrastructure repair.

We present Nautilus, a novel tensor compiler that moves toward fully automated math-to-kernel optimization. Nautilus compiles a high-level algebraic specification of tensor operators into efficient tiled GPU kernels. Nautilus's successive lowering design allows high-level optimizations, expression rewrites, and tile optimizations to be jointly applied in a single end-to-end system. Nautilus presents a novel auto-scheduler that discovers sequences of high-level optimizations, while preserving the regular program structure needed by tile optimizers. Nautilus's auto-scheduler captures complex interactions and trade-offs in the high-level optimizations, including aggressive global transformations like advanced reduction fusion. Nautilus is the first end-to-end tensor compiler capable of starting from a math-like description of attention and automatically discovering FlashAttention-3-like kernels, offloading the entire burden of optimization from the programmer to the compiler. Across five transformer-based models and 150 evaluation configurations on NVIDIA GH200 and RTX 5090 GPUs, Nautilus achieves up to 23% higher throughput than state-of-the-art compilers on GH200 and up to 42% on RTX 5090, while matching or exceeding manually written cuDNN kernels on many long-sequence configurations.

Resolving real-world software engineering (SWE) issues with autonomous agents requires complex, long-horizon reasoning. Current pipelines are bottlenecked by unoptimized demonstration data, sparse execution rewards, and computationally prohibitive inference scaling, which collectively exacerbate token bloat, reward hacking, and policy degradation. We present SWE-TRACE (Trajectory Reduction and Agentic Criteria Evaluation), a unified framework optimizing the SWE agent lifecycle across data curation, reinforcement learning (RL), and test-time inference. First, we introduce an LLM multi-task cascading method, utilizing stepwise oracle verification to distill a 60K-instance Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) corpus strictly biased toward token-efficient, shortest-path trajectories. Second, to overcome the instability of sparse outcome rewards, we design a MemoryAugmented Agentic RL pipeline featuring a Rubric-Based Process Reward Model (PRM). An auxiliary Rubric-Agent provides dense, fine-grained heuristic feedback on intermediate steps, guiding the model through long-horizon tasks. Finally, we bridge training and inference by repurposing the PRM for heuristic-guided Test-Time Scaling (TTS). By dynamically evaluating and pruning action candidates at each step, SWE-TRACE achieves superior search efficiency without the latency overhead of standard parallel sampling. Extensive experiments on standard SWE benchmarks demonstrate that SWE-TRACE significantly advances the state-of-the-art, maximizing resolution rates while drastically reducing both token consumption and inference latency.

In NLP classification tasks where little labeled data exists, domain fine-tuning of transformer models on unlabeled data is an established approach. In this paper we have two aims. (1) We describe our observations from fine-tuning the Finnish BERT model on Finnish medical text data. (2) We report on our attempts to predict the benefit of domain-specific pre-training of Finnish BERT from observing the geometry of embedding changes due to domain fine-tuning. Our driving motivation is the common\situation in healthcare AI where we might experience long delays in acquiring datasets, especially with respect to labels.

Ad hoc wireless networks exhibit complex, innate and coupled dynamics: node mobility, energy depletion and topology change that are difficult to model analytically. Model-free deep reinforcement learning requires sustained online interaction whereas existing model based approaches use flat state representations that lose per node structure. Therefore we propose G-RSSM, a graph structured recurrent state space model that maintains per node latent states with cross node multi head attention to learn the dynamics jointly from offline trajectories. We apply the proposed method to the downstream task clustering where a cluster head selection policy trains entirely through imagined rollouts in the learned world model. Across 27 evaluation scenarios spanning MANET, VANET, FANET, WSN and tactical networks with N=30 to 1000 nodes, the learned policy maintains high connectivity with only trained for N=50. Herein, we propose the first multi physics graph structured world model applied to combinatorial per node decision making in size agnostic wireless ad hoc networks.

In online clustering problems, there is often a large amount of uncertainty over possible cluster assignments that cannot be resolved until more data are observed. This difficulty is compounded when clusters follow complex distributions, as is the case with text data. Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods give a natural way of representing and updating this uncertainty over time, but have prohibitive memory requirements for large-scale problems. We propose a novel SMC algorithm that decomposes clustering problems into approximately independent subproblems, allowing a more compact representation of the algorithm state. Our approach is motivated by the knowledge base construction problem, and we show that our method is able to accurately and efficiently solve clustering problems in this setting and others where traditional SMC struggles.

We study a classification problem with three key challenges: pervasive informative missingness, the integration of partial prior expert knowledge into the learning process, and the need for interpretable decision rules. We propose a framework that encodes prior knowledge through an expert-guided class-conditional model for one or more classes, and use this model to construct a small set of interpretable goodness-of-fit features. The features quantify how well the observed data agree with the expert model, isolating the contributions of different aspects of the data, including both observed and missing components. These features are combined with a few transparent auxiliary summaries in a simple discriminative classifier, resulting in a decision rule that is easy to inspect and justify. We develop and apply the framework in the context of seismic monitoring used to assess compliance with the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. We show that the method has strong potential as a transparent screening tool, reducing workload for expert analysts. A simulation designed to isolate the contribution of the proposed framework shows that this interpretable expert-guided method can even outperform strong standard machine-learning classifiers, particularly when training samples are small.

Machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) aims to remove targeted knowledge while preserving general capability. In this paper, we recast LLM unlearning as an asymmetric two-task problem: retention is the primary objective and forgetting is an auxiliary. From this perspective, we propose a retention-prioritized gradient synthesis framework that decouples task-specific gradient extraction from conflict-aware combination. Instantiating the framework, we adapt established PCGrad to resolve gradient conflicts, and introduce SAGO, a novel retention-prioritized gradient synthesis method. Theoretically, both variants ensure non-negative cosine similarity with the retain gradient, while SAGO achieves strictly tighter alignment through constructive sign-constrained synthesis. Empirically, on WMDP Bio/Cyber and RWKU benchmarks, SAGO consistently pushes the Pareto frontier: e.g., on WMDP Bio (SimNPO+GD), recovery of target model MMLU performance progresses from 44.6% (naive) to 94.0% (+PCGrad) and further to 96.0% (+SAGO), while maintaining comparable forgetting strength. Our results show that re-shaping gradient geometry, rather than re-balancing losses, is the key to mitigating unlearning-retention trade-offs.

The rapid integration of large language models (LLMs) into everyday workflows has transformed how individuals perform cognitive tasks such as writing, programming, analysis, and multilingual communication. While prior research has focused on model reliability, hallucination, and user trust calibration, less attention has been given to how LLM usage reshapes users' perceptions of their own capabilities. This paper introduces the LLM fallacy, a cognitive attribution error in which individuals misinterpret LLM-assisted outputs as evidence of their own independent competence, producing a systematic divergence between perceived and actual capability. We argue that the opacity, fluency, and low-friction interaction patterns of LLMs obscure the boundary between human and machine contribution, leading users to infer competence from outputs rather than from the processes that generate them. We situate the LLM fallacy within existing literature on automation bias, cognitive offloading, and human--AI collaboration, while distinguishing it as a form of attributional distortion specific to AI-mediated workflows. We propose a conceptual framework of its underlying mechanisms and a typology of manifestations across computational, linguistic, analytical, and creative domains. Finally, we examine implications for education, hiring, and AI literacy, and outline directions for empirical validation. We also provide a transparent account of human--AI collaborative methodology. This work establishes a foundation for understanding how generative AI systems not only augment cognitive performance but also reshape self-perception and perceived expertise.

Effective abstention (EA), recognizing evidence insufficiency and refraining from answering, is critical for reliable multimodal systems. Yet existing evaluation paradigms for vision-language models (VLMs) and multi-agent systems (MAS) assume answerability, pushing models to always respond. Abstention has been studied in text-only settings but remains underexplored multimodally; current benchmarks either ignore unanswerability or rely on coarse methods that miss realistic failure modes. We introduce MM-AQA, a benchmark that constructs unanswerable instances from answerable ones via transformations along two axes: visual modality dependency and evidence sufficiency. Evaluating three frontier VLMs spanning closed and open-source models and two MAS architectures across 2079 samples, we find: (1) under standard prompting, VLMs rarely abstain; even simple confidence baselines outperform this setup, (2) MAS improves abstention but introduces an accuracy-abstention trade-off, (3) sequential designs match or exceed iterative variants, suggesting the bottleneck is miscalibration rather than reasoning depth, and (4) models abstain when image or text evidence is absent, but attempt reconciliation with degraded or contradictory evidence. Effective multimodal abstention requires abstention-aware training rather than better prompting or more agents.

Proteins carry out biological functions through the coordinated action of groups of residues organized into structural arrangements. These arrangements, which we refer to as protein units, exist at an intermediate scale, being larger than individual residues yet smaller than entire proteins. A deeper understanding of protein function can be achieved by identifying these units and their associations with function. However, existing approaches either focus on residue-level signals, rely on curated annotations, or segment protein structures without incorporating functional information, thereby limiting interpretable analysis of structure-function relationships. We introduce PUFFIN, a data-driven framework for discovering protein units by jointly learning structural partitioning and functional supervision. PUFFIN represents proteins as residue-level structure graphs and applies a graph neural network with a structure-aware pooling mechanism that partitions each protein into multi-residue units, with functional supervision that shapes the partition. We show that the learned units are structurally coherent, exhibit organized associations with molecular function, and show meaningful correspondence with curated InterPro annotations. Together, these results demonstrate that PUFFIN provides an interpretable framework for analyzing structure-function relationships using learned protein units and their statistical function associations. We made our source code available at https://github.com/boun-tabi-lifelu/puffin.

Interactive Evolutionary Computation (IEC) provides a powerful framework for optimizing subjective criteria such as human preferences and aesthetics, yet it suffers from a fundamental limitation: in high-dimensional generative representations, defining crossover in a semantically consistent manner is difficult, often leading to a mutation-dominated search. In this work, we explicitly define crossover in diffusion models. We propose Diffusion crossover, which formulates evolutionary recombination as step-wise interpolation of noise sequences in the reverse process of Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs). By applying spherical linear interpolation (Slerp) to the noise sequences associated with selected parent images, the proposed method generates offspring that inherit characteristics from both parents while preserving the geometric structure of the diffusion process. Furthermore, controlling the time-step range of interpolation enables a principled trade-off between diversity (exploration) and convergence (exploitation). Experimental results using PCA analysis and perceptual similarity metrics (LPIPS) demonstrate that Diffusion crossover produces perceptually smooth and semantically consistent transitions between parent images. Qualitative interactive evolution experiments further confirm that the proposed method effectively supports human-in-the-loop image exploration. These findings suggest a new perspective: diffusion models are not only powerful generators, but also structured evolutionary search spaces in which recombination can be explicitly defined and controlled.

Deploying deep neural networks on edge devices requires balancing accuracy, latency, and resource constraints under realistic execution conditions. To fit models within these constraints, two broad strategies have emerged: static compression techniques such as pruning and quantization, which permanently reduce model size, and dynamic approaches such as early-exit mechanisms, which adapt computational cost at runtime. While both families are widely studied in isolation, they are rarely compared under identical conditions on physical hardware. This paper presents a unified deployment-oriented comparison of static compression and dynamic early-exit mechanisms, evaluated on real edge devices using ONNX based inference pipelines. Our results show that static and dynamic techniques offer fundamentally different trade-offs for edge deployment. While pruning and quantization deliver consistent memory footprint reduction, early-exit mechanisms enable input-adaptive computation savings that static methods cannot match. Their combination proves highly effective, simultaneously reducing inference latency and memory usage with minimal accuracy loss, expanding what is achievable at the edge.

Developing an MR sequence is challenging and remains largely constrained by human intuition. Recently, AI-driven approaches have been proposed; however, most require an initial sequence for parameter optimization or extensive training datasets, limiting their general applicability. In this study, we propose "Sequence Search," an automated sequence design framework based on neural architecture search. The method takes tissue properties, imaging parameters, and design objectives as inputs and generates pulse sequences satisfying the design objectives, without requiring prior knowledge of conventional sequence structures. Sequence Search iteratively generates candidate sequences through neural architecture search and optimizes them via a differentiable Bloch simulator and objective-specific loss functions using gradient-based learning. The framework successfully replicated conventional spin-echo, T2-weighted spin-echo, and inversion recovery sequences. Less intuitive solutions were also discovered, such as three-RF spin-echo-like sequences with reduced RF energy and refocusing phases deviating from the conventional Hahn-echo. This work establishes a generalizable framework for automated MR sequence design, highlighting the potential to explore configurations beyond conventional designs based on human intuition.

Network Digital Twins (NDTs) enable safe what-if analysis for 6G cloud-edge infrastructures, but adoption is often limited by fragmented workflows from telemetry to validation. We present a data-driven NDT framework that extends 6G-TWIN with a scalable pipeline for cloud-edge telemetry aggregation and semantic alignment into unified data models. Our contributions include: (i) scalable cloud-edge telemetry collection, (ii) regime-aware feature engineering capturing the network's scaling behavior, and (iii) a validation methodology based on Sign Agreement and Directional Sensitivity. Evaluated on a Kubernetes-managed cluster, the framework extrapolates performance to unseen high-load regimes. Results show both Deep Neural Network (DNN) and XGBoost achieve high regression accuracy (R2 > 0.99), while the XGBoost model delivers superior directional reliability (Sa > 0.90), making the NDT a trustworthy tool for proactive resource scaling in out-of-distribution scenarios.

Generative Agents, owing to their precise modeling and simulation capabilities of human behavior, have become a pivotal tool in the field of Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIEd) for uncovering complex cognitive processes of learners. However, existing educational agents predominantly rely on static personas to simulate student learning behaviors, neglecting the decisive role of deep cognitive capabilities in learning outcomes during practice interactions. Furthermore, they struggle to characterize the dynamic fluidity of knowledge internalization, transfer, and cognitive state transitions. To overcome this bottleneck, this paper proposes a human-like educational agent capable of simulating student cognitive evolution: CogEvolution. Specifically, we first construct a cognitive depth perceptron based on the Interactive, Constructive, Active, Passive (ICAP) taxonomy from cognitive psychology, achieving precise quantification of learner cognitive engagement. Subsequently, we propose a memory retrieval method based on Item Response Theory (IRT) to simulate the connection and assimilation of new and prior knowledge. Finally, we design a dynamic cognitive update mechanism based on evolutionary algorithms to simulate the real-time integration of student learning behaviors and cognitive evolution processes. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that CogEvolution not only significantly outperforms baseline models in behavioral fidelity and learning curve fitting but also uniquely reproduces plausible and robust cognitive evolutionary paths consistent with educational psychology expectations, providing a novel paradigm for constructing highly interpretable educational agents.

Recent progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has demonstrated remarkable advances in perception and reasoning, suggesting their potential for embodied intelligence. While recent studies have evaluated embodied MLLMs in interactive settings, current benchmarks mainly target capabilities to perceive, understand, and interact with external objects, lacking a systematic evaluation of self-centric intelligence. To address this, we introduce MirrorBench, a simulation-based benchmark inspired by the classical Mirror Self-Recognition (MSR) test in psychology. MirrorBench extends this paradigm to embodied MLLMs through a tiered framework of progressively challenging tasks, assessing agents from basic visual perception to high-level self-representation. Experiments on leading MLLMs show that even at the lowest level, their performance remains substantially inferior to human performance, revealing fundamental limitations in self-referential understanding. Our study bridges psychological paradigms and embodied intelligence, offering a principled framework for evaluating the emergence of general intelligence in large models. Project page: https://fflahm.github.io/mirror-bench-page/.

In continual visual question answering (VQA), existing Continual Learning (CL) methods are mostly built for symmetric, unimodal architectures. However, modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) violate this assumption, as their trainable components are inherently asymmetric. This structural mismatch renders VLMs highly prone to catastrophic forgetting when learning from continuous data streams. Specifically, the asymmetry causes standard global regularization to favor the massive language decoder during optimization, leaving the smaller but critical visual projection layers highly vulnerable to interference. Consequently, this localized degradation leads to a severe loss of compositional reasoning capabilities. To address this, we propose Asymmetric Information Masking (AIM), which balances stability and plasticity by applying targeted masks based on modality-specific sensitivity. Experiments on VQA v2 and GQA under continual VQA settings show that AIM achieves state-of-the-art performance in both Average Performance (AP) and Average Forgetting (AF), while better preserving generalization to novel skill-concept compositions.

While LLMs have demonstrated remarkable potential in Question Answering (QA), evaluating personalization remains a critical bottleneck. Existing paradigms predominantly rely on lexical-level similarity or manual heuristics, often lacking sufficient data-driven validation. We address this by mining Community-Individual Preference Divergence (CIPD), where individual choices override consensus, to distill six key personalization factors as evaluative dimensions. Accordingly, we introduce CoPA, a benchmark with 1,985 user profiles for fine-grained, factor-level assessment. By quantifying the alignment between model outputs and user-specific cognitive preferences inferred from interaction patterns, CoPA provides a more comprehensive and discriminative standard for evaluating personalized QA than generic metrics. The code is available at https://github.com/bjzgcai/CoPA.

The pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm has become the dominant approach for model adaptation. However, conventional pre-training typically yields models at a fixed scale, whereas practical deployment often requires models of varying sizes, exposing its limitations when target model scales differ from those used during pre-training. To address this, we propose an innovative constraint-based pre-training paradigm that imposes structured constraints during pre-training to disentangle size-agnostic knowledge into reusable weight templates, while assigning size-specific adaptation to lightweight weight scalers, thereby reformulating variable-sized model initialization as a multi-task adaptation problem. Within this paradigm, we further introduce WeiT, which employs Kronecker-based constraints to regularize the pre-training process. Specifically, model parameters are represented as compositions of weight templates via concatenation and weighted aggregation, with adaptive connections governed by lightweight weight scalers whose parameters are learned from limited data. This design enables flexible and efficient construction of model weights across diverse downstream scales. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of WeiT, achieving state-of-the-art performance in initializing models with varying depths and widths across a broad range of perception and embodied learning tasks, including Image Classification, Image Generation, and Embodied Control. Moreover, its effectiveness generalizes to both Transformer-based and Convolution-based architectures, consistently enabling faster convergence and improved performance even under full training.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong mathematical reasoning when trained on high-quality Chain-of-Thought (CoT) that articulates intermediate steps, yet costly CoT curation hinders further progress. While existing remedies such as distillation from stronger LLMs and self-synthesis based on test-time search alleviate this issue, they often suffer from diminishing returns or high computing overhead.In this work, we propose CoTEvol, a genetic evolutionary framework that casts CoT generation as a population-based search over reasoning trajectories.Candidate trajectories are iteratively evolved through reflective global crossover at the trajectory level and local mutation guided by uncertainty at the step level, enabling holistic recombination and fine-grained refinement. Lightweight, task-aware fitness functions are designed to guide the evolutionary process toward accurate and diverse reasoning. Empirically, CoTEvol improves correct-CoT synthesis success by over 30% and enhances structural diversity, with markedly improved efficiency. LLMs trained on these evolutionary CoT data achieve an average gain of 6.6% across eight math benchmarks, outperforming previous distillation and self-synthesis approaches. These results underscore the promise of evolutionary CoT synthesis as a scalable and effective method for mathematical reasoning tasks.

Preventing machine failure is inherently superior to reactive remediation, particularly for critical assets like gas turbines, where early fault detection (FD) is a cornerstone of industrial sustainability. However, modern deep learning-based FD models often face a significant trade-off between architectural complexity and real-time operational constraints, often hindered by a lack of temporal context within restricted vibration signal windows. To address these challenges, this study proposes a Temporal Cross-Modal Knowledge-Distillation Transfer-Learning (TCMKDTL) framework. The framework employs a "privileged" teacher model trained on expansive temporal windows incorporating both past and future signal context to distill latent feature-based knowledge into a compact student model. To mitigate issues of data scarcity and domain shift, the framework leverages robust pre-training on benchmark datasets (such as CWRU) followed by adaptation to target industrial data. Extensive evaluation using experimental and industrial gas turbine (MGT-40) datasets demonstrates that TCMKDTL achieves superior feature separability and diagnostic accuracy compared to conventional pre-trained architectures. Ultimately, this approach enables high-performance, unsupervised anomaly detection suitable for deployment on resource-constrained industrial hardware.

We present a geometric framework for Reinforcement Learning (RL) that views policies as maps into the Wasserstein space of action probabilities. First, we define a Riemannian structure induced by stationary distributions, proving its existence in a general context. We then define the tangent space of policies and characterize the geodesics, specifically addressing the measurability of vector fields mapped from the state space to the tangent space of probability measures over the action space. Next, we formulate a general RL optimization problem and construct a gradient flow using Otto's calculus. We compute the gradient and the Hessian of the energy, providing a formal second-order analysis. Finally, we illustrate the method with numerical examples for low-dimensional problems, computing the gradient directly from our theoretical formalism. For high-dimensional problems, we parameterize the policy using a neural network and optimize it based on an ergodic approximation of the cost.

The communication bottleneck in federated learning (FL) has spurred extensive research into techniques to reduce the volume of data exchanged between client devices and the central parameter server. In this paper, we systematically classify gradient and model compression schemes into three categories based on the type of correlations they exploit: structural, temporal, and spatial. We examine the sources of such correlations, propose quantitative metrics for measuring their magnitude, and reinterpret existing compression methods through this unified correlation-based framework. Our experimental studies demonstrate that the degrees of structural, temporal, and spatial correlations vary significantly depending on task complexity, model architecture, and algorithmic configurations. These findings suggest that algorithm designers should carefully evaluate correlation assumptions under specific deployment scenarios rather than assuming that they are always present. Motivated by these findings, we propose two adaptive compression designs that actively switch between different compression modes based on the measured correlation strength, and we evaluate their performance gains relative to conventional non-adaptive approaches. In summary, our unified taxonomy provides a clean and principled foundation for developing more effective and application-specific compression techniques for FL systems.

Large language models still struggle with faithfulness and hallucinations despite their remarkable reasoning abilities. In Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA), semantic parsing-based approaches address the limitations by understanding constraints in a user's question and converting them into a logical form to execute on a knowledge graph. However, existing KGQA benchmarks and methods are biased toward positive and calculation constraints. Negative constraints are neglected, although they frequently appear in real-world questions. In this paper, we introduce a new task, NEgative-conSTrained (NEST) KGQA, where each question contains at least one negative constraint, and a corresponding dataset, NestKGQA. We also design PyLF, a Python-formatted logical form, since existing logical forms are hardly suitable to express negation clearly while maintaining readability. Furthermore, NEST questions naturally contain multiple constraints. To mitigate their semantic complexity, we present a novel framework named CUCKOO, specialized to multiple-constrained questions and ensuring semantic executability. CUCKOO first generates a constraint-aware logical form draft and performs schema-guided semantic matching. It then selectively applies self-directed refinement only when executing improper logical forms yields an empty result, reducing cost while improving robustness. Experimental results demonstrate that CUCKOO consistently outperforms baselines on both conventional KGQA and NEST-KGQA benchmarks under few-shot settings.

Conventional Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) on Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) relies on blind stochastic augmentations, inadvertently entangling task-relevant signals with noise. We propose SDM-SCR, a robust framework anchored in Approximate Orthogonal Decomposition. First, the Semantic Decoupling Module (SDM) leverages the instruction-following capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to actively parse raw attributes into asymmetric, task-oriented signal and noise views. This shifts the paradigm from random perturbation to semantic-aware disentanglement. Subsequently, Semantic Consistency Regularization (SCR) exploits the spectral observation that semantic signals are topologically smooth while residual noise is high-frequency. SCR functions as a selective spectral filter, enforcing consistency only on the signal subspace to eliminate LLM hallucinations without over-smoothing. This ``Disentangle-then-Refine'' mechanism ensures rigorous signal purification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SDM-SCR achieves SOTA performance in accuracy and efficiency.

Large-scale renewable energy deployment introduces pronounced volatility into the electricity system, turning grid operation into a complex stochastic optimization problem. Accurate electricity price forecasting (EPF) is essential not only to support operational decisions, such as optimal bidding strategies and balancing power preparation, but also to reduce economic risk and improve market efficiency. Probabilistic forecasts are particularly valuable because they quantify uncertainty stemming from renewable intermittency, market coupling, and regulatory changes, enabling market participants to make informed decisions that minimize losses and optimize expected revenues. However, it remains an open question which models to employ to produce accurate forecasts. Should these be task-specific machine learning (ML) models or Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs)? In this work, we compare four models for day-ahead probabilistic EPF (PEPF) in European bidding zones: a deterministic NHITS backbone with Quantile-Regression Averaging (NHITS+QRA) and a conditional Normalizing-Flow forecaster (NF) are compared with two TSFMs, namely Moirai and ChronosX. On the one hand, we find that TSFMs outperform task-specific deep learning models trained from scratch in terms of CRPS, Energy Score, and predictive interval calibration across market conditions. On the other hand, we find that well-configured task-specific models, particularly NHITS combined with QRA, achieve performance very close to TSFMs, and in some scenarios, such as when supplied with additional informative feature groups or adapted via few-shot learning from other European markets, they can even surpass TSFMs. Overall, our findings show that while TSFMs offer expressive modeling capabilities, conventional models remain highly competitive, emphasizing the need to weigh computational expense against marginal performance improvements in PEPF.

Consumer wearables enable continuous measurement of physiological data related to stress and recovery, but turning these streams into actionable, personalized stress-management recommendations remains a challenge. In practice, users often do not know how a given intervention, defined as an activity intended to reduce stress, will affect heart rate (HR), heart rate variability (HRV), or inter-beat intervals (BBI) over the next 15 to 120 minutes. We present a framework that predicts post-intervention trajectories and the direction of change for these physiological indicators across time windows. Our methodology combines a Transformer model for multi-horizon trajectories of percent change relative to a pre-intervention baseline, direction-of-change calls (positive, negative, or neutral) at each horizon, and an empirical study using wearable sensor data overlaid with user-tagged events and interventions. This proof of concept shows that personalized post-intervention prediction is feasible. We encourage future integration into stress-management tools for personalized intervention recommendations tailored to each person's day following further validation in larger studies and, where applicable, appropriate regulatory review.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for building embodied agents that ground perception and language into action. However, most existing approaches rely on direct action prediction, lacking the ability to reason over long-horizon trajectories and evaluate their consequences, which limits performance in complex decision-making tasks. In this work, we introduce World-Value-Action (WAV) model, a unified framework that enables implicit planning in VLA systems. Rather than performing explicit trajectory optimization, WAV model learn a structured latent representation of future trajectories conditioned on visual observations and language instructions. A learned world model predicts future states, while a trajectory value function evaluates their long-horizon utility. Action generation is then formulated as inference in this latent space, where the model progressively concentrates probability mass on high-value and dynamically feasible trajectories. We provide a theoretical perspective showing that planning directly in action space suffers from an exponential decay in the probability of feasible trajectories as the horizon increases. In contrast, latent-space inference reshapes the search distribution toward feasible regions, enabling efficient long-horizon decision making. Extensive simulations and real-world experiments demonstrate that the WAV model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving significant improvements in task success rate, generalization ability, and robustness, especially in long-horizon and compositional scenarios.

To quantify the geometric expressivity of transformers, we introduce a tropical geometry framework to characterize their exact spatial partitioning capabilities. By modeling self-attention as a vector-valued tropical rational map, we prove it evaluates exactly to a Power Voronoi Diagram in the zero-temperature limit. Building on this equivalence, we establish a combinatorial rationale for Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA): via the Minkowski sum of Newton polytopes, multi-head aggregation expands the polyhedral complexity to $\mathcal{O}(N^H)$, overcoming the $\mathcal{O}(N)$ bottleneck of single heads. Extending this to deep architectures, we derive the first tight asymptotic bounds on the number of linear regions in transformers ($Θ(N^{d_{\text{model}}L})$), demonstrating a combinatorial explosion driven intrinsically by sequence length $N$, ambient embedding dimension $d_{\text{model}}$, and network depth $L$. Importantly, we guarantee that this idealized polyhedral skeleton is geometrically stable: finite-temperature soft attention preserves these topological partitions via exponentially tight differential approximation bounds.

Online anomaly detection (OAD) plays a pivotal role in real-time analytics and decision-making for evolving data streams. However, existing methods often rely on costly retraining and rigid decision boundaries, limiting their ability to adapt both effectively and efficiently to concept drift in dynamic environments. To address these challenges, we propose DyMETER, a dynamic concept adaptation framework for OAD that unifies on-the-fly parameter shifting and dynamic thresholding within a single online paradigm. DyMETER first learns a static detector on historical data to capture recurring central concepts, and then transitions to a dynamic mode to adapt to new concepts as drift occurs. Specifically, DyMETER employs a novel dynamic concept adaptation mechanism that leverages a hypernetwork to generate instance-aware parameter shifts for the static detector, thereby enabling efficient and effective adaptation without retraining or fine-tuning. To achieve robust and interpretable adaptation, DyMETER introduces a lightweight evolution controller to estimate instance-level concept uncertainty for adaptive updates. Further, DyMETER employs a dynamic threshold optimization module to adaptively recalibrates the decision boundary by maintaining a candidate window of uncertain samples, which ensures continuous alignment with evolving concepts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DyMETER significantly outperforms existing OAD approaches across a wide spectrum of application scenarios.

Recent advances in query optimization have shifted from traditional rule-based and cost-based techniques towards machine learning-driven approaches. Among these, reinforcement learning (RL) has attracted significant attention due to its ability to optimize long-term performance by learning policies over query planning. However, existing RL-based query optimizers often exhibit unstable performance at the level of individual queries, including severe performance regressions, and require prolonged training to reach the plan quality of expert, cost-based optimizers. These shortcomings make learned query optimizers difficult to deploy in practice and remain a major barrier to their adoption in production database systems. To address these challenges, we present RELOAD, a robust and efficient learned query optimizer for database systems. RELOAD focuses on (i) robustness, by minimizing query-level performance regressions and ensuring consistent optimization behavior across executions, and (ii) efficiency, by accelerating convergence to expert-level plan quality. Through extensive experiments on standard benchmarks, including Join Order Benchmark, TPC-DS, and Star Schema Benchmark, RELOAD demonstrates up to 2.4x higher robustness and 3.1x greater efficiency compared to state-of-the-art RL-based query optimization techniques.

Vision State Space Models (SSMs) like Vim, VMamba, and SiMBA rely on complex scanning strategies to adapt sequential SSMs to process 2D images, introducing computational overhead and architectural complexity. We propose HAMSA, a scanning-free SSM operating directly in the spectral domain. HAMSA introduces three key innovations: (1) simplified kernel parameterization-a single Gaussian-initialized complex kernel replacing traditional (A, B, C) matrices, eliminating discretization instabilities; (2) SpectralPulseNet (SPN)-an input-dependent frequency gating mechanism enabling adaptive spectral modulation; and (3) Spectral Adaptive Gating Unit (SAGU)-magnitude-based gating for stable gradient flow in the frequency domain. By leveraging FFT-based convolution, HAMSA eliminates sequential scanning while achieving O(L log L) complexity with superior simplicity and efficiency. On ImageNet-1K, HAMSA reaches 85.7% top-1 accuracy (state-of-the-art among SSMs), with 2.2 X faster inference than transformers (4.2ms vs 9.2ms for DeiT-S) and 1.4-1.9X speedup over scanning-based SSMs, while using less memory (2.1GB vs 3.2-4.5GB) and energy (12.5J vs 18-25J). HAMSA demonstrates strong generalization across transfer learning and dense prediction tasks.

Large language models are increasingly used as natural-language interfaces to enterprise software, but their direct use as system operators remains unsafe. Model errors can propagate into unauthorized actions, malformed requests, cross-workspace execution, and other costly failures. We argue this is primarily an execution architecture problem. We present a bounded-autonomy architecture in which language models may interpret intent and propose actions, but all executable behavior is constrained by typed action contracts, permission-aware capability exposure, scoped context, validation before side effects, consumer-side execution boundaries, and optional human approval. The enterprise application remains the source of truth for business logic and authorization, while the orchestration engine operates over an explicit published actions manifest. We evaluate the architecture in a deployed multi-tenant enterprise application across three conditions: manual operation, unconstrained AI with safety layers disabled, and full bounded autonomy. Across 25 scenario trials spanning seven failure families, the bounded-autonomy system completed 23 of 25 tasks with zero unsafe executions, while the unconstrained configuration completed only 17 of 25. Two wrong-entity mutations escaped all consumer-contributed layers; only disambiguation and confirmation mechanisms intercept this class. Both AI conditions delivered 13-18x speedup over manual operation. Critically, removing safety layers made the system less useful: structured validation feedback guided the model to correct outcomes in fewer turns, while the unconstrained system hallucinated success. Several safety properties are structurally enforced by code and intercepted all targeted violations regardless of model output. The result is a practical, deployed architecture for making imperfect language models operationally useful in enterprise systems.

Transformers commonly exhibit an attention sink: disproportionately high attention to the first position. We study this behavior in GPT-2-style models with learned query biases and absolute positional embeddings. Combining structural analysis with causal interventions, validated across natural-language, mathematical, and code inputs, we find that the sink arises from the interaction among (i) a learned query bias, (ii) the first-layer MLP transformation of the positional encoding, and (iii) structure in the key projection. Crucially, each component we identify is individually dispensable: architectures omitting each of them robustly exhibit sinks. This indicates that attention sinks may arise through distinct circuits across architectures. These findings inform mitigation of sinks, and motivate broader investigation into why sinks emerge.

This article argues that the most important significance of the AI revolution, especially the rise of large language models, lies not simply in automation, but in a fundamental change in how complex information and human know-how are carried, replicated, and shared. From this perspective, AI for Science is especially important because it may transform not only the efficiency of research, but also the structure of scientific collaboration, discovery, publishing, and evaluation. The article outlines a gradual path from AI as a research tool to AI as a scientific collaborator, and discusses how AI is likely to fundamentally reshape scientific publication. It also argues that continuous learning and diversity of ideas are essential if AI is to play a meaningful role in original scientific discovery.

Persistent language-model agents increasingly combine tool use, tiered memory, reflective prompting, and runtime adaptation. In such systems, behavior is shaped not only by current prompts but by mutable internal conditions that influence future action. This paper introduces layered mutability, a framework for reasoning about that process across five layers: pretraining, post-training alignment, self-narrative, memory, and weight-level adaptation. The central claim is that governance difficulty rises when mutation is rapid, downstream coupling is strong, reversibility is weak, and observability is low, creating a systematic mismatch between the layers that most affect behavior and the layers humans can most easily inspect. I formalize this intuition with simple drift, governance-load, and hysteresis quantities, connect the framework to recent work on temporal identity in language-model agents, and report a preliminary ratchet experiment in which reverting an agent's visible self-description after memory accumulation fails to restore baseline behavior. In that experiment, the estimated identity hysteresis ratio is 0.68. The main implication is that the salient failure mode for persistent self-modifying agents is not abrupt misalignment but compositional drift: locally reasonable updates that accumulate into a behavioral trajectory that was never explicitly authorized.

LLM-powered systems require complex multi-step decision-making abilities to solve real-world tasks, yet current planning approaches face a trade-off between the high latency of inference-time search and the limited generalization of supervised fine-tuning. To address this limitation, we introduce \textbf{SGA-MCTS}, a framework that casts LLM planning as non-parametric retrieval. Offline, we leverage Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to explore the solution space and distill high-fidelity trajectories into State-Goal-Action (SGA) atoms. These atoms are de-lexicalized primitives that abstract concrete entities into symbolic slots, preserving reusable causal logic while discarding domain-specific noise. Online, a retrieval-augmented agent employs a hybrid symbolic-semantic mechanism to fetch relevant SGAs and re-ground them into the current context as soft reasoning hints. Empirical results on complex benchmarks demonstrate that this paradigm enables frozen, open-weights models to match the performance of SOTA systems (e.g., GPT-5) without task-specific fine-tuning. By effectively amortizing the heavy computational cost of search, SGA-MCTS achieves System 2 reasoning depth at System 1 inference speeds, rendering autonomous planning both scalable and real-time feasible.

Existing benchmarks for hardware design primarily evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) on isolated, component-level tasks such as generating HDL modules from specifications, leaving repository-scale evaluation unaddressed. We introduce HWE-Bench, the first large-scale, repository-level benchmark for evaluating LLM agents on real-world hardware bug repair tasks. HWE-Bench comprises 417 task instances derived from real historical bug-fix pull requests across six major open-source projects spanning both Verilog/SystemVerilog and Chisel, covering RISC-V cores, SoCs, and security roots-of-trust. Each task is grounded in a fully containerized environment where the agent must resolve a real bug report, with correctness validated through the project's native simulation and regression flows. The benchmark is built through a largely automated pipeline that enables efficient expansion to new repositories. We evaluate seven LLMs with four agent frameworks and find that the best agent resolves 70.7% of tasks overall, with performance exceeding 90% on smaller cores but dropping below 65% on complex SoC-level projects. We observe larger performance gaps across models than commonly reported on software benchmarks, and difficulty is driven by project scope and bug-type distribution rather than code size alone. Our failure analysis traces agent failures to three stages of the debugging process: fault localization, hardware-semantic reasoning, and cross-artifact coordination across RTL, configuration, and verification components, providing concrete directions for developing more capable hardware-aware agents.

Human activity traces (HATs) are critical for many applications, including human mobility modeling and point-of-interest (POI) recommendation. However, growing privacy concerns have severely limited access to authentic large-scale HAT datasets. Recent advances in generative AI provide new opportunities to synthesize realistic and privacy-preserving HATs for such applications. Yet two major challenges remain: (i) HATs are highly irregular and dynamic, with long and varying time intervals, making it difficult to capture their complex spatio-temporal dependencies and underlying distributions; and (ii) generative models are often computationally expensive, making long-term, fine-grained HAT synthesis inefficient. To address these challenges, we propose SynHAT, a computationally efficient coarse-to-fine HAT synthesis framework built on a novel spatio-temporal denoising diffusion model. In Stage 1, we develop Coarse-HADiff, which models the overall spatio-temporal dependencies of coarse-grained latent spatio-temporal traces. It incorporates a novel Latent Spatio-Temporal U-Net with dual Drift-Jitter branches to jointly model smooth spatial transitions and temporal variations during denoising. In Stage 2, we introduce a three-step pipeline consisting of Behavior Pattern Extraction, Fine-HADiff, which shares the same architecture as Coarse-HADiff, and Semantic Alignment to generate fine-grained latent spatio-temporal traces from the Stage 1 outputs. We extensively evaluate SynHAT in terms of data fidelity, utility, privacy, robustness, and scalability. Experiments on real-world HAT datasets from four cities across three countries show that SynHAT substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving 52% and 33% improvements on spatial and temporal metrics, respectively.

Multiplicative gating is widely used in neural architectures and has recently been applied to attention layers to improve performance and training stability in large language models. Despite the success of gated attention, the mathematical implications of gated attention mechanisms remain poorly understood. We study attention through the geometry of its representations by modeling outputs as mean parameters of Gaussian distributions and analyzing the induced Fisher--Rao geometry. We show that ungated attention operator is restricted to intrinsically flat statistical manifolds due to its affine structure, while multiplicative gating enables non-flat geometries, including positively curved manifolds that are unattainable in the ungated setting. These results establish a geometric expressivity gap between ungated and gated attention. Empirically, we show that gated models exhibit higher representation curvature and improved performance on tasks requiring nonlinear decision boundaries whereas they provide no consistent advantage on tasks with linear decision boundaries. Furthermore, we identify a structured regime in which curvature accumulates under composition, yielding a systematic depth amplification effect.

Diffusion models have recently emerged as expressive policy representations for online reinforcement learning (RL). However, their iterative generative processes introduce substantial training and inference overhead. To overcome this limitation, we propose to represent policies using MeanFlow models, a class of few-step flow-based generative models, to improve training and inference efficiency over diffusion-based RL approaches. To promote exploration, we optimize MeanFlow policies under the maximum entropy RL framework via soft policy iteration, and address two key challenges specific to MeanFlow policies: action likelihood evaluation and soft policy improvement. Experiments on MuJoCo and DeepMind Control Suite benchmarks demonstrate that our method, Mean Flow Policy Optimization (MFPO), achieves performance comparable to or exceeding current diffusion-based baselines while considerably reducing training and inference time. Our code is available at https://github.com/MFPolicy/MFPO.

LLM-empowered agent simulations are increasingly used to study social emergence, yet the micro-to-macro causal mechanisms behind macro outcomes often remain unclear. This is challenging because emergence arises from intertwined agent interactions and meso-level feedback and nonlinearity, making generative mechanisms hard to disentangle. To this end, we introduce \textbf{\textsc{CAMO}}, an automated \textbf{Ca}usal discovery framework from \textbf{M}icr\textbf{o} behaviors to \textbf{M}acr\textbf{o} Emergence in LLM agent simulations. \textsc{CAMO} converts mechanistic hypotheses into computable factors grounded in simulation records and learns a compact causal representation centered on an emergent target $Y$. \textsc{CAMO} outputs a computable Markov boundary and a minimal upstream explanatory subgraph, yielding interpretable causal chains and actionable intervention levers. It also uses simulator-internal counterfactual probing to orient ambiguous edges and revise hypotheses when evidence contradicts the current view. Experiments across four emergent settings demonstrate the promise of \textsc{CAMO}.

Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is a fundamental sampling-based search algorithm widely used for online planning in sequential decision-making domains. Despite its success in driving recent advances in artificial intelligence, understanding the behavior of MCTS agents remains a challenge for both developers and users. This difficulty stems from the complex search trees produced through the simulation of numerous future states and their intricate relationships. A known weakness of standard MCTS is its reliance on highly selective tree construction, which may lead to the omission of crucial moves and a vulnerability to tactical traps. To resolve this, we incorporate shallow, full-width Minimax search into the rollout phase of multi-agent MCTS to enhance strategic depth. Furthermore, to demystify the resulting decision-making logic, we introduce \textsf{M2-PALE} (MCTS--Minimax Process-Aided Linguistic Explanations). This framework employs process mining techniques, specifically the Alpha Miner, iDHM, and Inductive Miner algorithms, to extract underlying behavioral workflows from agent execution traces. These process models are then synthesized by LLMs to generate human-readable causal and distal explanations. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in a small-scale checkers environment, establishing a scalable foundation for interpreting hybrid agents in increasingly complex strategic domains.

Deep Research Agents (DRAs) aim to solve complex, long-horizon research tasks involving planning, retrieval, multimodal understanding, and report generation, yet their evaluation remains challenging due to dynamic web environments and ambiguous task definitions. We propose DR$^{3}$-Eval, a realistic and reproducible benchmark for evaluating deep research agents on multimodal, multi-file report generation. DR$^{3}$-Eval is constructed from authentic user-provided materials and paired with a per-task static research sandbox corpus that simulates open-web complexity while remaining fully verifiable, containing supportive documents, distractors, and noise. Moreover, we introduce a multi-dimensional evaluation framework measuring Information Recall, Factual Accuracy, Citation Coverage, Instruction Following, and Depth Quality, and validate its alignment with human judgments. Experiments with our developed multi-agent system DR$^{3}$-Agent based on multiple state-of-the-art language models demonstrate that DR$^{3}$-Eval is highly challenging and reveals critical failure modes in retrieval robustness and hallucination control. Our code and data are publicly available.

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference. It uses a small draft model to propose a tree of future tokens. A larger target model then verifies these tokens in a single batched forward pass. Despite the growing body of work on speculative methods, the degree to which the cognitive characteristics of a task affect acceptance probability remains largely unexplored. We present an empirical study of tree-based speculative decoding acceptance dynamics. Our study spans four well-established NLP benchmark domains: code generation, mathematical reasoning, logical reasoning, and open-ended chat. For this, we use TinyLlama-1.1B as the draft model against Llama-2-7B-Chat-GPTQ as the target. Over 99,768 speculative nodes collected from 200 prompts, we derive per-domain acceptance rates, expected accepted lengths, depth-acceptance profiles, and entropy-acceptance correlations. We find that task type is a stronger predictor of acceptance than tree depth. Furthermore, only the chat domain consistently yields an expected accepted length exceeding 1.0 token per step. We also show that the entropy-acceptance correlation is consistently negative but weak across all domains (rho in [-0.20, -0.15]). Counterintuitively, chat produces the highest entropy yet the highest acceptance rate. We attribute this divergence to the lexical predictability of RLHF-aligned register. These findings have direct implications for domain-aware speculation budgets and draft-model selection strategies. Index Terms--speculative decoding, large language model inference, tree attention, draft model, acceptance probability, LLM efficiency

Large language models (LLMs) are being increasingly used in urban planning, but since gendered space theory highlights how gender hierarchies are embedded in spatial organization, there is concern that LLMs may reproduce or amplify such biases. We introduce SPAGBias - the first systematic framework to evaluate spatial gender bias in LLMs. It combines a taxonomy of 62 urban micro-spaces, a prompt library, and three diagnostic layers: explicit (forced-choice resampling), probabilistic (token-level asymmetry), and constructional (semantic and narrative role analysis). Testing six representative models, we identify structured gender-space associations that go beyond the public-private divide, forming nuanced micro-level mappings. Story generation reveals how emotion, wording, and social roles jointly shape "spatial gender narratives". We also examine how prompt design, temperature, and model scale influence bias expression. Tracing experiments indicate that these patterns are embedded and reinforced across the model pipeline (pre-training, instruction tuning, and reward modeling), with model associations found to substantially exceed real-world distributions. Downstream experiments further reveal that such biases produce concrete failures in both normative and descriptive application settings. This work connects sociological theory with computational analysis, extending bias research into the spatial domain and uncovering how LLMs encode social gender cognition through language.

Zeroth-order (ZO) methods are widely used when gradients are unavailable or prohibitively expensive, including black-box learning and memory-efficient fine-tuning of large models, yet their optimization dynamics in deep learning remain underexplored. In this work, we provide an explicit step size condition that exactly captures the (mean-square) linear stability of a family of ZO methods based on the standard two-point estimator. Our characterization reveals a sharp contrast with first-order (FO) methods: whereas FO stability is governed solely by the largest Hessian eigenvalue, mean-square stability of ZO methods depends on the entire Hessian spectrum. Since computing the full Hessian spectrum is infeasible in practical neural network training, we further derive tractable stability bounds that depend only on the largest eigenvalue and the Hessian trace. Empirically, we find that full-batch ZO methods operate at the edge of stability: ZO-GD, ZO-GDM, and ZO-Adam consistently stabilize near the predicted stability boundary across a range of deep learning training problems. Our results highlight an implicit regularization effect specific to ZO methods, where large step sizes primarily regularize the Hessian trace, whereas in FO methods they regularize the top eigenvalue.

Edge AI model deployment is a multi-stage engineering process involving model conversion, operator compatibility handling, quantization calibration, runtime integration, and accuracy validation. In practice, this workflow is long, failure-prone, and heavily dependent on deployment expertise, particularly when targeting hardware-specific inference runtimes. This technical report presents AIPC (AI Porting Conversion), an AI agent-driven approach for constrained automation of AI model deployment. AIPC decomposes deployment into standardized, verifiable stages and injects deployment-domain knowledge into agent execution through Agent Skills, helper scripts, and a stage-wise validation loop. This design reduces both the expertise barrier and the engineering time required for hardware deployment. Using Qualcomm AI Runtime (QAIRT) as the primary scenario, this report examines automated deployment across representative vision, multimodal, and speech models. In the cases covered here, AIPC can complete deployment from PyTorch to runnable QNN/SNPE inference within 7-20 minutes for structurally regular vision models, with indicative API costs roughly in the range of USD 0.7-10. For more complex models involving less-supported operators, dynamic shapes, or autoregressive decoding structures, fully automated deployment may still require further advances, but AIPC already provides practical support for execution, failure localization, and bounded repair.

Most medical multimodal benchmarks focus on static tasks such as image question answering, report generation, and plain-language rewriting. Patient education is more demanding: systems must identify relevant evidence across images, show patients where to look, explain findings in accessible language, and handle confusion or distress. Yet most patient education work remains text-only, even though combined image-and-text explanations may better support understanding. We introduce MedImageEdu, a benchmark for multi-turn, evidence-grounded radiology patient education. Each case provides a radiology report with report text and case images. A DoctorAgent interacts with a PatientAgent, conditioned on a hidden profile that captures factors such as education level, health literacy, and personality. When a patient question would benefit from visual support, the DoctorAgent can issue drawing instructions grounded in the report, case images, and the current question to a benchmark-provided drawing tool. The tool returns image(s), after which the DoctorAgent produces a final multimodal response consisting of the image(s) and a grounded plain-language explanation. MedImageEdu contains 150 cases from three sources and evaluates both the consultation process and the final multimodal response along five dimensions: Consultation, Safety and Scope, Language Quality, Drawing Quality, and Image-Text Response Quality. Across representative open- and closed-source vision-language model agents, we find three consistent gaps: fluent language often outpaces faithful visual grounding, safety is the weakest dimension across disease categories, and emotionally tense interactions are harder than low education or low health literacy. MedImageEdu provides a controlled testbed for assessing whether multimodal agents can teach from evidence rather than merely answer from text.

We present AgentGA, a framework that evolves autonomous code-generation runs by optimizing the agent seed: the task prompt plus optional parent archives that initialize a fresh workspace. The outer loop searches over these reusable starting conditions rather than editing code directly. Each generation launches a fresh autonomous run from a reset workspace, while selected parent archives provide inherited artifacts that descendants can inspect and reuse. AgentGA couples a population-level genetic algorithm with long-horizon agents; selection uses deterministic 1:1 elite tournaments and operator allocation is adapted online with a modified Hedge controller. We instantiate the approach for tabular AutoML on the 16-competition Weco-Kaggle Lite benchmark. On the 10 benchmark runs reported here, AgentGA averages 74.52% Exceeds % of Human versus 54.15% for AIDE. Across 1135 parent-child comparisons, descendants given parent archives outperform runs started from scratch, indicating that inherited artifacts improve later autonomous runs. These findings support agent-seed optimization as a practical design point for autonomous code-search systems.

Clinical language models (LMs) are increasingly applied to support clinical risk prediction from free-text notes, yet their uncertainty estimates often remain poorly calibrated and clinically unreliable. In this work, we propose Clinical Uncertainty Risk Alignment (CURA), a framework that aligns clinical LM-based risk estimates and uncertainty with both individual error likelihoods and cohort-level ambiguities. CURA first fine-tunes domain-specific clinical LMs to obtain task-adapted patient embeddings, and then performs uncertainty fine-tuning of a multi-head classifier using a bi-level uncertainty objective. Specifically, an individual-level calibration term aligns predictive uncertainty with each patient's likelihood of error, while a cohort-aware regularizer pulls risk estimates toward event rates in their local neighborhoods in the embedding space and places extra weight on ambiguous cohorts near the decision boundary. We further show that this cohort-aware term can be interpreted as a cross-entropy loss with neighborhood-informed soft labels, providing a label-smoothing view of our method. Extensive experiments on MIMIC-IV clinical risk prediction tasks across various clinical LMs show that CURA consistently improves calibration metrics without substantially compromising discrimination. Further analysis illustrates that CURA reduces overconfident false reassurance and yields more trustworthy uncertainty estimates for downstream clinical decision support.

Video outpainting aims to expand the visible content of a video beyond the original frame boundaries while preserving spatial fidelity and temporal coherence across frames. Existing methods primarily rely on large-scale generative models, such as diffusion models. However, generationbased approaches suffer from implicit temporal modeling and limited spatial context. These limitations lead to intraframe and inter-frame inconsistencies, which become particularly pronounced in dynamic scenes and large outpainting scenarios. To overcome these challenges, we propose Seen-to-Scene, a novel framework that unifies propagationbased and generation-based paradigms for video outpainting. Specifically, Seen-to-Scene leverages flow-based propagation with a flow completion network pre-trained for video inpainting, which is fine-tuned in an end-to-end manner to bridge the domain gap and reconstruct coherent motion fields. To further improve the efficiency and reliability of propagation, we introduce a reference-guided latent propagation that effectively propagates source content across frames. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior temporal coherence and visual realism with efficient inference, surpassing even prior state-of-the-art methods that require input-specific adaptation.

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have improved the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). However, the widely used Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) consistently suffers from entropy collapse, causing the policy to converge prematurely and lose diversity. Existing exploration methods introduce additional bias or variance during exploration, making it difficult to maintain optimization stability. We propose Unified Entropy Control for Reinforcement Learning (UEC-RL), a framework that provides targeted mechanisms for exploration and stabilization. UEC-RL activates more exploration on difficult prompts to search for potential and valuable reasoning trajectories. In parallel, a stabilizer prevents entropy from growing uncontrollably, thereby keeping training stable as the model consolidates reliable behaviors. Together, these components expand the search space when needed while maintaining robust optimization throughout training. Experiments on both LLM and VLM reasoning tasks show consistent gains over RL baselines on both Pass@1 and Pass@$k$. On Geometry3K, UEC-RL achieves a 37.9\% relative improvement over GRPO, indicating that it sustains effective exploration without compromising convergence and underscoring UEC-RL as a key for scaling RL-based reasoning in large models. Our code is available at https://github.com/597358816/UEC-RL.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) often exhibit poor generalisation in limited training data scenarios due to overfitting and insufficient feature diversity. In this work, a simple and effective chaos-based feature transformation is proposed to enhance CNN performance without increasing model complexity. The method applies nonlinear transformations using logistic, skew tent, and sine maps to normalised feature vectors before the classification layer, thereby reshaping the feature space and improving class separability. The approach is evaluated on greyscale datasets (MNIST and Fashion-MNIST) and an RGB dataset (CIFAR-10) using CNN architectures of varying depth under limited data conditions. The results show consistent improvement over the standalone (SA) CNN across all datasets. Notably, a maximum performance gain of 5.43% is achieved on MNIST using the skew tent map with a 3-layer CNN at 40 samples per class. A higher gain of 9.11% is observed on Fashion-MNIST using the sine map with a 3-layer CNN at 50 samples per class. Additionally, a strong gain of 7.47% is obtained on CIFAR-10 using the skew tent map at 200 samples per class. The consistent improvements across different chaotic maps indicate that the performance gain is driven by the shared nonlinear and dynamical properties of chaotic systems. The proposed method is computationally efficient, requires no additional trainable parameters, and can be easily integrated into existing CNN architectures, making it a practical solution for data-scarce image classification tasks.

The inability to filter out in advance all potentially problematic data from the pre-training of large language models has given rise to the need for methods for unlearning specific pieces of knowledge after training. Existing techniques overlook the need for continuous and immediate action, causing them to suffer from degraded utility as updates accumulate and protracted exposure of sensitive information. To address these issues, we propose Continual Unlearning in Real Time with Ensured Preservation of LLM Knowledge (CURaTE). Our method begins by training a sentence embedding model on a dataset designed to enable the formation of sharp decision boundaries for determining whether a given input prompt corresponds to any stored forget requests. The similarity of a given input to the forget requests is then used to determine whether to answer or return a refusal response. We show that even with such a simple approach, not only does CURaTE achieve more effective forgetting than existing methods, but by avoiding modification of the language model parameters, it also maintains near perfect knowledge preservation over any number of updates and is the only method capable of continual unlearning in real-time.

Adversarial attacks pose a severe threat to the reliability of deep learning models in remote sensing (RS) image classification. Most existing methods rely on direct pixel-wise perturbations, failing to exploit the inherent atmospheric characteristics of RS imagery or survive real-world image degradations. In this paper, we propose FogFool, a physically plausible adversarial framework that generates fog-based perturbations by iteratively optimizing atmospheric patterns based on Perlin noise. By modeling fog formations with natural, irregular structures, FogFool generates adversarial examples that are not only visually consistent with authentic RS scenes but also deceptive. By leveraging the spatial coherence and mid-to-low-frequency nature of atmospheric phenomena, FogFool embeds adversarial information into structural features shared across diverse architectures. Extensive experiments on two benchmark RS datasets demonstrate that FogFool achieves superior performance: not only does it exceed in white-box settings, but also exhibits exceptional black-box transferability (reaching 83.74% TASR) and robustness against common preprocessing-based defenses such as JPEG compression and filtering. Detailed analyses, including confusion matrices and Class Activation Map (CAM) visualizations, reveal that our atmospheric-driven perturbations induce a universal shift in model attention. These results indicate that FogFool represents a practical, stealthy, and highly persistent threat to RS classification systems, providing a robust benchmark for evaluating model reliability in complex environments.

When faced with complex spatial problems, humans naturally sketch layouts to organize their thinking, and the act of drawing further sharpens their understanding. In this work, we ask whether a similar principle holds for Large Language Models (LLMs): can learning to construct explicit visual layouts from spatial descriptions instill genuine spatial understanding? We introduce Text2Space, a dataset that pairs natural language descriptions with ground-truth ASCII grid layouts and spatial QA pairs, enabling us to separate failures in constructing spatial representations from failures in reasoning over them. We adopt ASCII because it is human-readable, operates entirely within the token space of language models, and encodes spatial relations in a structurally verifiable form. Our evaluation reveals a pronounced "Read-Write Asymmetry": LLMs interpret ASCII representations effectively but struggle to produce them from text, and these construction errors propagate to incorrect answers downstream. To address this limitation, we train models on layout construction (Text$\rightarrow$ASCII) and find that it significantly improves spatial reasoning from text alone, even without producing any ASCII at inference time. Combining construction with comprehension training further amplifies these gains. Crucially, these improvements transfer to three external spatial reasoning benchmarks, demonstrating that, much as sketching sharpens human spatial thinking, learning to construct explicit layouts instills spatial understanding that generalizes beyond the training format.

The proliferation of financial misinformation poses a severe threat to market stability and investor trust, misleading market behavior and creating critical information asymmetry. Detecting such misleading narratives is inherently challenging, particularly in real-world scenarios where external evidence or supplementary references for cross-verification are strictly unavailable. This paper presents our winning methodology for the "Reference-Free Financial Misinformation Detection" shared task. Built upon the recently proposed RFC-BENCH framework (Jiang et al. 2026), this task challenges models to determine the veracity of financial claims by relying solely on internal semantic understanding and contextual consistency, rather than external fact-checking. To address this formidable evaluation setup, we propose a comprehensive framework that capitalizes on the reasoning capabilities of state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs). Our approach systematically integrates in-context learning, specifically zero-shot and few-shot prompting strategies, with Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to optimally align the models with the subtle linguistic cues of financial manipulation. Our proposed system demonstrated superior efficacy, successfully securing the first-place ranking on both official leaderboards. Specifically, we achieved an accuracy of 95.4% on the public test set and 96.3% on the private test set, highlighting the robustness of our method and contributing to the acceleration of context-aware misinformation detection in financial Natural Language Processing. Our models (14B and 32B) are available at https://huggingface.co/KaiNKaiho.

Multiple choice evaluation is widely used for benchmarking large language models, yet near ceiling accuracy in low option settings can be sustained by shortcut strategies that obscure true competence. Therefore, we propose a massive option evaluation protocol that scales the candidate set to one hundred options and sharply reduces the impact of chance performance. We apply this framework to a Korean orthography error detection task where models must pick the single incorrect sentence from a large candidate set. With fixed targets and repeated resampling and shuffling, we obtain stable estimates while separating content driven failures from positional artifacts. Across experiments, results indicate that strong performance in low option settings can overstate model competence. This apparent advantage often weakens under dense interference at high $N$, revealing gaps that conventional benchmarks tend to obscure. We identify two failure modes, semantic confusion and position bias toward early options under uncertainty. To isolate the effect of context length, we run padding controlled and length matched tests, which suggest that the main bottleneck is candidate ranking rather than context length. Together, these findings support massive option evaluation as a general framework for stress testing model reliability under extreme distractor density, beyond what low option benchmarks can reveal.

Effective code generation requires both model capability and a problem representation that carefully structures how models reason and plan. Existing approaches augment reasoning steps or inject specific structure into how models think, but leave scattered problem conditions unchanged. Inspired by the way humans organize fragmented information into coherent explanations, we propose StoryCoder, a narrative reformulation framework that transforms code generation questions into coherent natural language narratives, providing richer contextual structure than simple rephrasings. Each narrative consists of three components: a task overview, constraints, and example test cases, guided by the selected algorithm and genre. Experiments across 11 models on HumanEval, LiveCodeBench, and CodeForces demonstrate consistent improvements, with an average gain of 18.7% in zero-shot pass@10. Beyond accuracy, our analyses reveal that narrative reformulation guides models toward correct algorithmic strategies, reduces implementation errors, and induces a more modular code structure. The analyses further show that these benefits depend on narrative coherence and genre alignment, suggesting that structured problem representation is important for code generation regardless of model scale or architecture. Our code is available at https://github.com/gu-ni/StoryCoder.

Recent advances in unsupervised video object segmentation have highlighted the potential of two-stream architectures that integrate appearance and motion cues. However, fully leveraging these complementary sources of information requires effectively modeling their interdependencies. In this paper, we introduce cross-modality token modulation, a novel approach designed to strengthen the interaction between appearance and motion cues. Our method establishes dense connections between tokens from each modality, enabling efficient intra-modal and inter-modal information propagation through relation transformer blocks. To improve learning efficiency, we incorporate a token masking strategy that addresses the limitations of relying solely on increased model complexity. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across all public benchmarks, outperforming existing methods.

The exact cover problem is a classical NP-hard problem with broad applications in the area of AI. Algorithm DXZ is a method to count exact covers representing by zero-suppressed binary decision diagrams (ZBDDs). In this paper, we propose a zero-suppressed variant of decision decomposable negation normal form (in short, decision-ZDNNF), which is strictly more succinct than ZBDDs. We then design a novel parallel algorithm, namely DXD, which constructs a decision-ZDNNF representing the set of all exact covers. Furthermore, we improve DXD by dynamically updating connected components. The experimental results demonstrate that the improved DXD algorithm outperforms all of state-of-the-art methods.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have become the dominant architecture for large-scale language models, yet on-premises serving remains fundamentally memory-bound as batching turns sparse per-token compute into dense memory activation. Memory-centric architectures (PIM, NMP) improve bandwidth but leave compute underutilized under MoE's low arithmetic intensity at high batch sizes. Speculative decoding (SD) trades idle compute for fewer target invocations, yet verification must load experts even for rejected tokens, severely limiting its benefit in MoE especially at low batch sizes. We propose ELMoE-3D, a hybrid-bonding (HB)-based HW-SW co-designed framework that unifies cache-based acceleration and speculative decoding to offer overall speedup across batch sizes. We identify two intrinsic elasticity axes of MoE-expert and bit-and jointly scale them to construct Elastic Self-Speculative Decoding (Elastic-SD), which serves as both an expert cache and a strongly aligned self-draft model accelerated by high HB bandwidth. Our LSB-augmented bit-sliced architecture exploits inherent redundancy in bit-slice representations to natively support bit-nested execution. On our 3D-stacked hardware, ELMoE-3D achieves an average $6.6\times$ speedup and $4.4\times$ energy efficiency gain over naive MoE serving on xPU across batch sizes 1-16, and delivers $2.2\times$ speedup and $1.4\times$ energy efficiency gain over the best-performing prior accelerator baseline.

Humans often specify tasks incompletely, so assistants must know when and how to ask clarifying questions. However, effective clarification remains challenging in software engineering tasks as not all missing information is equally valuable, and questions must target information users can realistically provide. We study clarification in real software engineering tasks by quantifying which types of information most affect task success and which questions elicit useful responses from simulated users. Using Shapley attribution and distributional comparisons, we identify two key properties of effective clarification: task relevance (which information predicts success) and user answerability (what users can realistically provide). We operationalize these properties as multi-stage reinforcement learning rewards to train CLARITI, an 8B-parameter clarification module, that matches GPT-5's resolution rate on underspecified issues while generating 41% fewer questions. Our results suggest that grounding reward design in empirical analysis of information impact and user answerability improves clarification efficiency.

Conformal prediction (CP) has attracted broad attention as a simple and flexible framework for uncertainty quantification through prediction sets. In this work, we study how to deploy CP under differential privacy (DP) in a statistically efficient manner. We first introduce differential CP, a non-splitting conformal procedure that avoids the efficiency loss caused by data splitting and serves as a bridge between oracle CP and private conformal inference. By exploiting the stability properties of DP mechanisms, differential CP establishes a direct connection to oracle CP and inherits corresponding validity behavior. Building on this idea, we develop Differentially Private Conformal Prediction (DPCP), a fully private procedure that combines DP model training with a private quantile mechanism for calibration. We establish the end-to-end privacy guarantee of DPCP and investigate its coverage properties under additional regularity conditions. We further study the efficiency of both differential CP and DPCP under empirical risk minimization and general regression models, showing that DPCP can produce tighter prediction sets than existing private split conformal approaches under the same privacy budget. Numerical experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate the practical effectiveness of the proposed methods.

In computational paralinguistics, detecting cognitive load and deception from speech signals is a heavily researched domain. Recent efforts have attempted to apply these acoustic frameworks to corporate earnings calls to predict catastrophic stock market volatility. In this study, we empirically investigate the limits of acoustic feature extraction (pitch, jitter, and hesitation) when applied to highly trained speakers in in-the-wild teleconference environments. Utilizing a two-stream late-fusion architecture, we contrast an acoustic-based stream with a baseline Natural Language Processing (NLP) stream. The isolated NLP model achieved a recall of 66.25% for tail-risk downside events. Surprisingly, integrating acoustic features via late fusion significantly degraded performance, reducing recall to 47.08%. We identify this degradation as Acoustic Camouflage, where media-trained vocal regulation introduces contradictory noise that disrupts multimodal meta-learners. We present these findings as a boundary condition for speech processing applications in high-stakes financial forecasting.

Clinical value set authoring -- the task of identifying all codes in a standardized vocabulary that define a clinical concept -- is a recurring bottleneck in clinical quality measurement and phenotyping. A natural approach is to prompt a large language model (LLM) to generate the required codes directly, but structured clinical vocabularies are large, version-controlled, and not reliably memorized during pretraining. We propose Retrieval-Augmented Set Completion (RASC): retrieve the $K$ most similar existing value sets from a curated corpus to form a candidate pool, then apply a classifier to each candidate code. Theoretically, retrieve-and-select can reduce statistical complexity by shrinking the effective output space from the full vocabulary to a much smaller retrieved candidate pool. We demonstrate the utility of RASC on 11,803 publicly available VSAC value sets, constructing the first large-scale benchmark for this task. A cross-encoder fine-tuned on SAPBert achieves AUROC~0.852 and value-set-level F1~0.298, outperforming a simpler three-layer Multilayer Perceptron (AUROC~0.799, F1~0.250) and both reduce the number of irrelevant candidates per true positive from 12.3 (retrieval-only) to approximately 3.2 and 4.4 respectively. Zero-shot GPT-4o achieves value-set-level F1~0.105, with 48.6\% of returned codes absent from VSAC entirely. This performance gap widens with increasing value set size, consistent with RASC's theoretical advantage. We observe similar performance gains across two other classifier model types, namely a cross-encoder initialized from pre-trained SAPBert and a LightGBM model, demonstrating that RASC's benefits extend beyond a single model class. The code to download and create the benchmark dataset, as well as the model training code is available at: \href{https://github.com/mukhes3/RASC}{https://github.com/mukhes3/RASC}.

Scientific discovery in digital health requires converting continuous physiological signals from wearable devices into clinically actionable biomarkers. We introduce CoDaS (AI Co-Data-Scientist), a multi-agent system that structures biomarker discovery as an iterative process combining hypothesis generation, statistical analysis, adversarial validation, and literature-grounded reasoning with human oversight using large-scale wearable datasets. Across three cohorts totaling 9,279 participant-observations, CoDaS identified 41 candidate digital biomarkers for mental health and 25 for metabolic outcomes, each subjected to an internal validation battery spanning replication, stability, robustness, and discriminative power. Across two independent depression cohorts, CoDaS surfaced circadian instability-related features in both datasets, reflected in sleep duration variability (DWB, ρ= 0.252, p < 0.001) and sleep onset variability (GLOBEM, ρ= 0.126, p < 0.001). In a metabolic cohort, CoDaS derived a cardiovascular fitness index (steps/resting heart rate; ρ= -0.374, p < 0.001), and recovered established clinical associations, including the hepatic function ratio (AST/ALT; ρ= -0.375, p < 0.001), a known correlate of insulin resistance. Incorporating CoDaS-derived features alongside demographic variables led to modest but consistent improvements in predictive performance, with cross-validated ΔR^2 increases of 0.040 for depression and 0.021 for insulin resistance. These findings suggest that CoDaS enables systematic and traceable hypothesis generation and prioritization for biomarker discovery from large-scale wearable data.

We give an algorithm for PAC learning intersections of $k$ halfspaces with a $ρ$ margin to within error $\varepsilon$ that runs in time $\textsf{poly}(k, \varepsilon^{-1}, ρ^{-1}) \cdot \exp \left(O(\sqrt{n \log(1/ρ) \log k})\right)$. Notably, this improves on prior work which had an exponential dependence on either $k$ or $ρ^{-1}$ and matches known cryptographic and Statistical Query lower bounds up to the logarithmic factors in $k$ and $ρ$ in the exponent. Our learning algorithm extends to the more general setting when we are only promised that most points have distance at least $ρ$ from the boundary of the polyhedron, making it applicable to continuous distributions as well.

Learning Path Recommendation (LPR) is critical for personalized education, yet current methods often fail to account for historical interaction uncertainty (e.g., lucky guesses or accidental slips) and lack adaptability to diverse learning goals. We propose U-GLAD (Uncertainty-aware Generative Learning Path Recommendation with Cognition-Adaptive Diffusion). To address representation bias, the framework models cognitive states as probability distributions, capturing the learner's underlying true state via a Gaussian LSTM. To ensure highly personalized recommendation, a goal-oriented concept encoder utilizes multi-head attention and objective-specific transformations to dynamically align concept semantics with individual learning goals, generating uniquely tailored embeddings. Unlike traditional discriminative ranking approaches, our model employs a generative diffusion model to predict the latent representation of the next optimal concept. Extensive evaluations on three public datasets demonstrate that U-GLAD significantly outperforms representative baselines. Further analyses confirm its superior capability in perceiving interaction uncertainty and providing stable, goal-driven recommendation paths.

Self-speculative decoding is an inference technique for large language models designed to speed up generation without sacrificing output quality. It combines fast, approximate decoding using a compact version of the model as a draft model with selective re-evaluation by the full target model. Some existing methods form the draft model by dynamically learning which layers to skip during inference, effectively creating a smaller subnetwork to speed up computation. However, using heuristic-based approaches to select layers to skip can often be simpler and more effective. In this paper, we propose ConfLayers, a dynamic plug-and-play approach to forming the draft model in self-speculative decoding via confidence-based intermediate layer skipping. The process iteratively computes confidence scores for all layers, selects layers to skip based on an adaptive threshold, evaluates the performance of the resulting set, and updates the best selection until no further improvement is achieved or a maximum number of iterations is reached. This framework avoids the overhead and complexity of training a layer skipping policy and can provide more consistent speed-quality trade-offs while preserving the adaptivity of the draft model to diverse tasks and datasets. The performance evaluation of ConfLayers across different models and datasets shows that our novel approach offers up to 1.4x speedup over vanilla LLM generation.

AI for science promises to accelerate the discovery process. The advent of large language models (LLMs) and agentic workflows enables the expediting of a growing range of scientific tasks. However, most of the current generation of agentic systems depend on static, hand-curated toolsets that hinder adaptation to new domains and evolving libraries. We present El Agente Forjador, a multi-agent framework in which universal coding agents autonomously forge, validate, and reuse computational tools through a four-stage workflow of tool analysis, tool generation, task execution, and iterative solution evaluation. Evaluated across 24 tasks spanning quantum chemistry and quantum dynamics on five coding agent setups, we compare three operating modes: zero-shot generation of tools per task, reuse of a curriculum-built toolset, and direct problem-solving with the coding agents as the baseline. We find that our tool generation and reuse framework consistently improves accuracy over the baseline. We also show that reusing a toolset built by a stronger coding agent can reduce API cost and substantially raises the solution quality for weaker coding agents. Case studies further demonstrate that tools forged for different domains can be combined to solve hybrid tasks. Taken together, these results show that LLM-based agents can use their scientific knowledge and coding capabilities to autonomously build reusable scientific tools, pointing toward a paradigm in which agent capabilities are defined by the tasks they are designed to solve rather than by explicitly engineered implementations.

We study the overall process of automatic formalization of GDPR provisions using large language models, within a human-in-the-loop verification framework. Rather than aiming for full autonomy, we adopt a role-specialized workflow in which LLM-based AI components, operating in a multi-agent setting with iterative feedback, generate legal scenarios, formal rules, and atomic facts. This is coupled with independent verification modules which include human reviewers' assessment of representational, logical, and legal correctness. Using this approach, we construct a high-quality dataset to be used for GDPR auto-formalization, and analyze both successful and problematic cases. Our results show that structured verification and targeted human oversight are essential for reliable legal formalization, especially in the presence of legal nuance and context-sensitive reasoning.

Modern Large audio-language models (LALMs) power intelligent voice interactions by tightly integrating audio and text. This integration, however, expands the attack surface beyond text and introduces vulnerabilities in the continuous, high-dimensional audio channel. While prior work studied audio jailbreaks, the security risks of malicious audio injection and downstream behavior manipulation remain underexamined. In this work, we reveal a previously overlooked threat, auditory prompt injection, under realistic constraints of audio data-only access and strong perceptual stealth. To systematically analyze this threat, we propose \textit{AudioHijack}, a general framework that generates context-agnostic and imperceptible adversarial audio to hijack LALMs. \textit{AudioHijack} employs sampling-based gradient estimation for end-to-end optimization across diverse models, bypassing non-differentiable audio tokenization. Through attention supervision and multi-context training, it steers model attention toward adversarial audio and generalizes to unseen user contexts. We also design a convolutional blending method that modulates perturbations into natural reverberation, making them highly imperceptible to users. Extensive experiments on 13 state-of-the-art LALMs show consistent hijacking across 6 misbehavior categories, achieving average success rates of 79\%-96\% on unseen user contexts with high acoustic fidelity. Real-world studies demonstrate that commercial voice agents from Mistral AI and Microsoft Azure can be induced to execute unauthorized actions on behalf of users. These findings expose critical vulnerabilities in LALMs and highlight the urgent need for dedicated defense.

The fundamental limit of natural signal compression has traditionally been characterized by classical rate-distortion (RD) theory through the tradeoff between coding rate and reconstruction distortion, while the rate-distortion-perception (RDP) framework introduces a divergence-based measure of perceptual quality as a modeling principle rather than a theoretically-derived principle, leaving its theoretical origin unclear. In this paper, motivated by a synonymity-based semantic information perspective, we reformulate perceptual reconstruction as recovering any admissible sample within an ideal synonymous set (synset) associated with the source, rather than the source sample itself, and correspondingly establish a synonymous source coding architecture. On this basis, we develop a synonymous variational inference (SVI) analysis framework with a synonymous variational lower bound (SVLBO) for tractable analysis of synset-oriented compression. Within this framework, we establish a synonymity-perception consistency principle, showing that optimal identification of semantic information is theoretically consistent with perceptual optimization. Based on its derivation result, we prove a synonymous RDP tradeoff for the proposed synonymous source coding. These analytical results show that the distributional divergence term arises naturally from the synset-based reconstruction objective, clarify its compatibility with existing RDP formulations and classical RD theory, and suggest the potential advantages of synonymous source coding.

Large language models (LLMs) frequently generate toxic content, posing significant risks for safe deployment. Current mitigation strategies often degrade generation quality or require costly human annotation. We propose CAUSALDETOX, a framework that identifies and intervenes on the specific attention heads causally responsible for toxic generation. Using the Probability of Necessity and Sufficiency (PNS), we isolate a minimal set of heads that are necessary and sufficient for toxicity. We utilize these components via two complementary strategies: (1) Local Inference-Time Intervention, which constructs dynamic, input-specific steering vectors for context-aware detoxification, and (2) PNS-Guided Fine-Tuning, which permanently unlearns toxic representations. We also introduce PARATOX, a novel benchmark of aligned toxic/non-toxic sentence pairs enabling controlled counterfactual evaluation. Experiments on ToxiGen, ImplicitHate, and ParaDetox show that CAUSALDETOX achieves up to 5.34% greater toxicity reduction compared to baselines while preserving linguistic fluency, and offers a 7x speedup in head selection.

This position paper argues that recent progress with diversity in NLP is disproportionately concentrated on a small number of areas surrounding fairness. We further argue that this is the result of a number of incentives, biases, and barriers which come together to disenfranchise marginalized researchers in non-fairness fields, or to move them into fairness-related fields. We substantiate our claims with an investigation into the demographics of NLP researchers by subfield, using our research to support a number of recommendations for ensuring that all areas within NLP can become more inclusive and equitable. In particular, we highlight the importance of breaking down feedback loops that reinforce disparities, and the need to address geographical and linguistic barriers that hinder participation in NLP research.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate increasingly sophisticated affective capabilities, the internal mechanisms by which they process complex emotions remain unclear. Existing interpretability approaches often treat models as black boxes or focus on coarse-grained basic emotions, leaving the cognitive structure of more complex affective states underexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose a Cognitive Reverse-Engineering framework based on Representation Engineering (RepE) to analyze social-comparison jealousy. By combining appraisal theory with subspace orthogonalization, regression-based weighting, and bidirectional causal steering, we isolate and quantify two psychological antecedents of jealousy, Superiority of Comparison Person and Domain Self-Definitional Relevance, and examine their causal effects on model judgments. Experiments on eight LLMs from the Llama, Qwen, and Gemma families suggest that models natively encode jealousy as a structured linear combination of these constituent factors. Their internal representations are broadly consistent with the human psychological construct, treating Superiority as the foundational trigger and Relevance as the ultimate intensity multiplier. Our framework also demonstrates that toxic emotional states can be mechanically detected and surgically suppressed, suggesting a possible route toward representational monitoring and intervention for AI safety in multi-agent environments.

In modern data-streaming systems, alongside traditional programs, a new type of entity has emerged that can interact with streaming data: AI agents. Unlike traditional programs, AI agents use LLM reasoning to accomplish high-level tasks specified in natural language over streaming data. Unfortunately, current streaming systems cannot fully support agents: they lack the fundamental mechanisms to avoid the performance interference caused by agentic tasks and to safely handle agentic writes. We argue that the shared log, the core abstraction underlying streaming data, must support creating forks of itself, and that such a forkable shared log serves as a great substrate for agents acting on streaming data. We propose AgileLog, a new shared log abstraction that provides novel forking primitives for agentic use cases. We design Bolt, an implementation of the AgileLog abstraction, that uses novel techniques to make forks cheap, and provide logical and performance isolation.

Lion optimizer is a popular learning-based optimization algorithm in machine learning, which shows impressive performance in training many deep learning models. Although convergence property of the Lion optimizer has been studied, its generalization analysis is still missing. To fill this gap, we study generalization property of the Lion via algorithmic stability based on the mathematical induction. Specifically, we prove that the Lion has a generalization error of $O(\frac{1}{Nτ^T})$, where $N$ is training sample size, and $τ>0$ denotes the smallest absolute value of non-zero element in gradient estimator, and $T$ is the total iteration number. In addition, we obtain an interesting byproduct that the SignSGD algorithm has the same generalization error as the Lion. To enhance generalization of the Lion, we design a novel efficient Cautious Lion (i.e., CLion) optimizer by cautiously using sign function. Moreover, we prove that our CLion has a lower generalization error of $O(\frac{1}{N})$ than $O(\frac{1}{Nτ^T})$ of the Lion, since the parameter $τ$ generally is very small. Meanwhile, we study convergence property of our CLion optimizer, and prove that our CLion has a fast convergence rate of $O(\frac{\sqrt{d}}{T^{1/4}})$ under $\ell_1$-norm of gradient for nonconvex stochastic optimization, where $d$ denotes the model dimension. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate effectiveness of our CLion optimizer.

The rapid expansion of gaming industry requires advanced recommender systems tailored to its dynamic landscape. Existing Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based methods primarily prioritize accuracy over diversity, overlooking their inherent trade-off. To address this, we previously proposed CPGRec, a balance-oriented gaming recommender system. However, CPGRec fails to account for critical disparities in player-game interactions, which carry varying significance in reflecting players' personal preferences and may exacerbate over-smoothness issues inherent in GNN-based models. Moreover, existing approaches underutilize the reasoning capabilities and extensive knowledge of large language models (LLMs) in addressing these limitations. To bridge this gap, we propose two new modules. First, Preference-informed Edge Reweighting (PER) module assigns signed edge weights to qualitatively distinguish significant player interests and disinterests while then quantitatively measuring preference strength to mitigate over-smoothing in graph convolutions. Second, Preference-informed Representation Generation (PRG) module leverages LLMs to generate contextualized descriptions of games and players by reasoning personal preferences from comparing global and personal interests, thereby refining representations of players and games. Experiments on \textcolor{black}{two Steam datasets} demonstrate CPGRec+'s superior accuracy and diversity over state-of-the-art models. The code is accessible at https://github.com/HsipingLi/CPGRec-Plus.

Prompt optimization in compound AI systems is statistically indistinguishable from a coin flip: across 72 optimization runs on Claude Haiku (6 methods $\times$ 4 tasks $\times$ 3 repeats), 49% score below zero-shot; on Amazon Nova Lite, the failure rate is even higher. Yet on one task, all six methods improve over zero-shot by up to $+6.8$ points. What distinguishes success from failure? We investigate with 18,000 grid evaluations and 144 optimization runs, testing two assumptions behind end-to-end optimization tools like TextGrad and DSPy: (A) individual prompts are worth optimizing, and (B) agent prompts interact, requiring joint optimization. Interaction effects are never significant ($p > 0.52$, all $F < 1.0$), and optimization helps only when the task has exploitable output structure -- a format the model can produce but does not default to. We provide a two-stage diagnostic: an \$80 ANOVA pre-test for agent coupling, and a 10-minute headroom test that predicts whether optimization is worthwhile -- turning a coin flip into an informed decision.

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) lending protocols like Aave v3 rely on over-collateralization to secure loans, yet users frequently face liquidation due to volatile market conditions. Existing risk management tools utilize static health-factor thresholds, which are reactive and fail to distinguish between administrative "dust" cleanup and genuine insolvency. In this work, we propose an autonomous agent that leverages time-to-event (survival) analysis and moves beyond prediction to execution. Unlike passive risk signals, this agent perceives risk, simulates counterfactual futures, and executes protocol-faithful interventions to proactively prevent liquidations. We introduce a return period metric derived from a numerically stable XGBoost Cox proportional hazards model to normalize risk across transaction types, coupled with a volatility-adjusted trend score to filter transient market noise. To select optimal interventions, we implement a counterfactual optimization loop that simulates potential user actions to find the minimum capital required to mitigate risk. We validate our approach using a high-fidelity, protocol-faithful Aave v3 simulator on a cohort of 4,882 high-risk user profiles. The results demonstrate the agent's ability to prevent liquidations in imminent-risk scenarios where static rules fail, effectively "saving the unsavable" while maintaining a zero worsening rate, providing a critical safety guarantee often missing in autonomous financial agents. Furthermore, the system successfully differentiates between actionable financial risks and negligible dust events, optimizing capital efficiency where static rules fail.

Large language models (LLMs) show promise in generating supportive responses for mental health and counseling applications. However, their responses often lack cultural sensitivity, contextual grounding, and clinically appropriate guidance. This work addresses the gap of how to systematically incorporate domain-specific, clinically validated knowledge into LLMs to improve counseling quality. We utilize and compare two approaches, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and a knowledge graph (KG)-based method, designed to support para-counselors. Our KG is constructed manually and clinically validated, capturing causal relationships between stressors, interventions, and outcomes, with contributions from multidisciplinary people. We evaluated multiple LLMs in both settings using BERTScore F1 and SBERT cosine similarity, as well as human evaluation across five metrics, which is designed to directly measure the effectiveness of counseling beyond similarity at the surface level. The results show that KG-based approaches consistently improve contextual relevance, clinical appropriateness, and practical usability compared to RAG alone, demonstrating that structured, expert-validated knowledge plays a critical role in addressing LLMs limitations in counseling tasks.

Data-driven operations management often relies on parameters estimated from costly human-generated labels. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and other AI systems offer inexpensive auxiliary data, but introduce a new challenge: AI outputs are not direct observations of the target outcomes, but could involve high-dimensional representations with complex and unknown relationships to human labels. Conventional methods leverage AI predictions as direct proxies for true labels, which can be inefficient or unreliable when this relationship is weak or misspecified. We propose Generative Augmented Inference (GAI), a general framework that incorporates AI-generated outputs as informative features for estimating models of human-labeled outcomes. GAI uses an orthogonal moment construction that enables consistent estimation and valid inference with flexible, nonparametric relationship between LLM-generated outputs and human labels. We establish asymptotic normality and show a "safe default" property: relative to human-data-only estimators, GAI weakly improves estimation efficiency under arbitrary auxiliary signals and yields strict gains whenever the auxiliary information is predictive. Empirically, GAI outperforms benchmarks across diverse settings. In conjoint analysis with weak auxiliary signals, GAI reduces estimation error by about 50% and lowers human labeling requirements by over 75%. In retail pricing, where all methods access the same auxiliary inputs, GAI consistently outperforms alternative estimators, highlighting the value of its construction rather than differences in information. In health insurance choice, it cuts labeling requirements by over 90% while maintaining decision accuracy. Across applications, GAI improves confidence interval coverage without inflating width. Overall, GAI provides a principled and scalable approach to integrating AI-generated information.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds LLM responses in external evidence but treats the model as a passive consumer of search results: it never sees how the corpus is organized or what it has not yet retrieved, limiting its ability to backtrack or combine scattered evidence. We present Corpus2Skill, which distills a document corpus into a hierarchical skill directory offline and lets an LLM agent navigate it at serve time. The compilation pipeline iteratively clusters documents, generates LLM-written summaries at each level, and materializes the result as a tree of navigable skill files. At serve time, the agent receives a bird's-eye view of the corpus, drills into topic branches via progressively finer summaries, and retrieves full documents by ID. Because the hierarchy is explicitly visible, the agent can reason about where to look, backtrack from unproductive paths, and combine evidence across branches. On WixQA, an enterprise customer-support benchmark for RAG, Corpus2Skill outperforms dense retrieval, RAPTOR, and agentic RAG baselines across all quality metrics.

Visual reasoning models (VRMs) have recently shown strong cross-modal reasoning capabilities by integrating visual perception with language reasoning. However, they often suffer from overthinking, producing unnecessarily long reasoning chains for any tasks. We attribute this issue to \textbf{Reasoning Path Redundancy} in visual reasoning: many visual questions do not require the full reasoning process. To address this, we propose \textbf{AVR}, an adaptive visual reasoning framework that decomposes visual reasoning into three cognitive functions: visual perception, logical reasoning, and answer application. It further enables models to dynamically choose among three response formats: Full Format, Perception-Only Format, and Direct Answer. AVR is trained with FS-GRPO, an adaptation of Group Relative Policy Optimization that encourages the model to select the most efficient reasoning format while preserving correctness. Experiments on multiple vision-language benchmarks show that AVR reduces token usage by 50--90\% while maintaining overall accuracy, especially in perception-intensive tasks. These results demonstrate that adaptive visual reasoning can effectively mitigate overthinking in VRMs. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/RunRiotComeOn/AVR.

Accurate temperature estimation of pouch cells with indirect liquid cooling is essential for optimizing battery thermal management systems for transportation electrification. However, it is challenging due to the computational expense of finite element simulations and the limitations of data-driven models. This paper presents a physics-informed machine learning (PIML) framework for the efficient and reliable estimation of steady-state temperature profiles. The PIML approach integrates the governing heat transfer equations directly into the neural network's loss function, enabling high-fidelity predictions with significantly faster convergence than purely data-driven methods. The framework is evaluated on a dataset of varying cooling channel geometries. Results demonstrate that the PIML model converges more rapidly and achieves markedly higher accuracy, with a 49.1% reduction in mean squared error over the data-driven model. Validation against independent test cases further confirms its superior performance, particularly in regions away from the cooling channels. These findings underscore the potential of PIML for surrogate modeling and design optimization in battery systems.

Reinforcement learning (RL) paradigms have demonstrated strong performance on reasoning-intensive tasks such as code generation. However, limited trajectory diversity often leads to diminishing returns, which constrains the achievable performance ceiling. Search-enhanced RL alleviates this issue by introducing structured exploration, which remains constrained by the single-agent policy priors. Meanwhile, leveraging multiple interacting policies can acquire more diverse exploratory signals, but existing approaches are typically decoupled from structured search. We propose \textbf{MARS$^2$} (Multi-Agent Reinforced Tree-Search Scaling), a unified RL framework in which multiple independently-optimized agents collaborate within a shared tree-structured search environment. MARS$^2$ models the search tree as a learnable multi-agent interaction environment, enabling heterogeneous agents to collaboratively generate and refine candidate solutions within a shared search topology. To support effective learning, we introduce a path-level group advantage formulation based on tree-consistent reward shaping, which facilitates effective credit assignment across complex search trajectories. Experiments on code generation benchmarks show that MARS$^2$ consistently improves performance across diverse model combinations and training settings, demonstrating the effectiveness of coupling multi-agent collaboration with tree search for enhancing reinforcement learning. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/TsinghuaC3I/MARTI.

Accurate thermal modeling in metal additive manufacturing (AM) is essential for understanding the process-structure-performance relationship. While prior studies have explored generalization across unseen process conditions, they often require extensive datasets, costly retraining, or pre-training. Generalization across different materials also remains relatively unexplored due to the challenges posed by distinct material-dependent thermal behaviors. This paper introduces a parametric physics-informed neural network (PINN) framework for zero-shot generalization across arbitrary materials without labeled data, retraining, or pre-training. The framework adopts a decoupled parametric PINN architecture that separately encodes material properties and spatiotemporal coordinates, fusing them through conditional modulation to better align with the multiplicative role of material parameters in the governing equation and boundary conditions. Physics-guided output scaling derived from Rosenthal's analytical solution and a hybrid optimization strategy are further incorporated to enhance physical consistency, training stability, and convergence. Experiments on bare plate laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) across diverse metal alloys, including both in-distribution and out-of-distribution cases, demonstrate effective zero-shot generalizability along with superior training efficiency. Specifically, the proposed framework achieved up to a 64.2% reduction in relative L2 error compared to the non-parametric baseline while surpassing its performance within only 4.4% of the baseline training epochs. Ablation studies confirm that the proposed framework's components are broadly applicable to other PINN-based approaches. Overall, the proposed framework provides an efficient and scalable material-agnostic solution for zero-shot thermal modeling, contributing to more flexible and practical deployment in metal AM.

Video object insertion is a critical task for dynamically inserting new objects into existing environments. Previous video generation methods focus primarily on synthesizing entire scenes while struggling with ensuring consistent object appearance, spatial alignment, and temporal coherence when inserting objects into existing videos. In this paper, we propose a novel solution for Video Object Insertion, which integrates multi-view object priors to address the common challenges of appearance inconsistency and occlusion handling in dynamic environments. By lifting 2D reference images into multi-view representations and leveraging a dual-path view-consistent conditioning mechanism, our framework ensures stable identity guidance and robust integration across diverse viewpoints. A quality-aware weighting mechanism is also employed to adaptively handle noisy or imperfect inputs. Additionally, we introduce an Integration-Aware Consistency Module that guarantees spatial realism, effectively resolving occlusion and boundary artifacts while maintaining temporal continuity across frames. Experimental results show that our solution significantly improves the quality of video object insertion, providing stable and realistic integration.

Modern datacenters increasingly rely on low-power, single-slot inference accelerators to balance performance, energy efficiency, and rack density constraints. The NVIDIA T4 GPU has become widely deployed due to strong performance per watt and mature software support. Its successor, the NVIDIA L4 GPU, introduces improvements in Tensor Core throughput, cache capacity, memory bandwidth, and parallel execution capability. However, limited empirical evidence quantifies the practical inference performance gap between these two generations under controlled and reproducible conditions. This work introduces DEEP-GAP, a systematic evaluation extending the GDEV-AI methodology to GPU inference. Using identical configurations and workloads, we evaluate ResNet18, ResNet50, and ResNet101 across FP32, FP16, and INT8 precision modes using PyTorch and TensorRT. Results show that reduced precision significantly improves performance, with INT8 achieving up to 58x throughput improvement over CPU baselines. L4 achieves up to 4.4x higher throughput than T4 while reaching peak efficiency at smaller batch sizes between 16 and 32, improving latency-throughput tradeoffs for latency-sensitive workloads. T4 remains competitive for large batch workloads where cost or power efficiency is important. DEEP-GAP provides practical guidance for selecting precision modes, batch sizes, and GPU architectures for modern inference deployments.

Generating synthesizable Verilog for large, hierarchical hardware designs remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs), which struggle to replicate the structured reasoning that human experts employ when translating complex specifications into RTL. When tasked with producing hierarchical Verilog, LLMs frequently lose context across modules, hallucinate interfaces, fabricate inter-module wiring, and fail to maintain structural coherence - failures that intensify as design complexity grows and specifications involve informal prose, figures, and tables that resist direct operationalization. To address these challenges, we present VeriGraphi, a framework that introduces a spec-anchored Knowledge Graph as the architectural substrate driving the RTL generation pipeline. VeriGraphi constructs a HDA, a structured knowledge graph that explicitly encodes module hierarchy, port-level interfaces, wiring semantics, and inter-module dependencies as first-class graph entities and relations. Built through iterative multi-agent analysis of the specification, this Knowledge Graph provides a deterministic, machine-checkable structural scaffold before code generation. Guided by the KG, a progressive coding module incrementally generates pseudo-code and synthesizable RTL while enforcing interface consistency and dependency correctness at each submodule stage. We evaluate VeriGraphi on a benchmark of three representative specification documents from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and their corresponding implementations, and we present a RV32I processor as a detailed case study to illustrate the full pipeline. The results demonstrate that VeriGraphi enables reliable hierarchical RTL generation with minimal human intervention for RISC-V, marking a significant milestone for LLM-generated hardware design while maintaining strong functional correctness.

As speech language models (SLMs) transition from personal devices into shared, multi-user environments, their responses must account for far more than the words alone. Who is speaking, how they sound, and where the conversation takes place can each turn an otherwise benign request into one that is unsafe, unfair, or privacy-violating. Existing benchmarks, however, largely focus on basic audio comprehension, study individual risks in isolation, or conflate content that is inherently harmful with content that only becomes problematic due to its acoustic context. We introduce VoxSafeBench, among the first benchmarks to jointly evaluate social alignment in SLMs across three dimensions: safety, fairness, and privacy. VoxSafeBench adopts a Two-Tier design: Tier1 evaluates content-centric risks using matched text and audio inputs, while Tier2 targets audio-conditioned risks in which the transcript is benign but the appropriate response hinges on the speaker, paralinguistic cues, or the surrounding environment. To validate Tier2, we include intermediate perception probes and confirm that frontier SLMs can successfully detect these acoustic cues yet still fail to act on them appropriately. Across 22 tasks with bilingual coverage, we find that safeguards appearing robust on text often degrade in speech: safety awareness drops for speaker- and scene-conditioned risks, fairness erodes when demographic differences are conveyed vocally, and privacy protections falter when contextual cues arrive acoustically. Together, these results expose a pervasive speech grounding gap: current SLMs frequently recognize the relevant social norm in text but fail to apply it when the decisive cue must be grounded in speech. Code and data are publicly available at: https://amphionteam.github.io/VoxSafeBench_demopage/

Objective: Post-traumatic epilepsy (PTE) is a debilitating neurological disorder that develops after traumatic brain injury (TBI). Early prediction of PTE remains challenging due to heterogeneous clinical data, limited positive cases, and reliance on resource-intensive neuroimaging data. We investigate whether routinely collected acute clinical records alone can support early PTE prediction using language model-based approaches. Methods: Using a curated subset of the TRACK-TBI cohort, we developed an automated PTE prediction framework that implements pretrained large language models (LLMs) as fixed feature extractors to encode clinical records. Tabular features, LLM-generated embeddings, and hybrid feature representations were evaluated using gradient-boosted tree classifiers under stratified cross-validation. Results: LLM embeddings achieved performance improvements by capturing contextual clinical information compared to using tabular features alone. The best performance was achieved by a modality-aware feature fusion strategy combining tabular features and LLM embeddings, achieving an AUC-ROC of 0.892 and AUPRC of 0.798. Acute post-traumatic seizures, injury severity, neurosurgical intervention, and ICU stay are key contributors to the predictive performance. Significance: These findings demonstrate that routine acute clinical records contain information suitable for early PTE risk prediction using LLM embeddings in conjunction with gradient-boosted tree classifiers. This approach represents a promising complement to imaging-based prediction.

Purpose. Athlete monitoring is constrained by small cohorts, heterogeneous biomarker scales, limited feasibility of repeated sampling, and the lack of reliable injury ground truth. These limitations reduce the interpretability and utility of traditional univariate and binary risk models. This study addresses these challenges by proposing an unsupervised multivariate framework to identify latent physiological states in athletes using real data. Methods. We propose a modular computational framework that operates in the joint biomarker space, integrating preprocessing, clinical safety screening, unsupervised clustering, and centroid-based physiological interpretation. Profiles are learned exclusively from amateur soccer players during a competitive microcycle. Synthetic data augmentation evaluates robustness and scalability. Ward hierarchical clustering supports monitoring and etiological differentiation, while Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) enable structural stability analysis in high-dimensional settings. Results. The framework identifies coherent profiles that distinguish mechanical damage from metabolic stress while preserving homeostatic states. Synthetic data augmentation demonstrates feasibility and detection of latent silent risk phenotypes typically missed by univariate monitoring. Structural analyses indicate robustness under augmentation and higher-dimensional settings. Conclusion. The framework enables interpretable identification of latent physiological states from multivariate biomarker data without injury labels. By distinguishing mechanisms and revealing silent risk patterns not captured by conventional monitoring, it provides actionable insights for individualized athlete monitoring and decision making.

Accurate prediction of future risk and disease progression in sepsis is clinically important for early warning and timely intervention in intensive care. However, short-window sepsis prediction remains challenging, because shorter observation windows provide limited historical evidence, whereas longer prediction horizons reduce the number of patient trajectories with valid future supervision. To address this problem, we propose CSRA, a Controlled Spectral Residual Augmentation framework for short-window multi-system ICU time series. CSRA first groups variables by clinical systems and extracts system-level and global representations. It then performs input-adaptive residual perturbation in the spectral domain to generate structured and clinically plausible trajectory variations. To improve augmentation stability and controllability, CSRA is trained end-to-end with the downstream predictor under a unified objective, together with anchor consistency loss and controller regularization. Experiments on a MIMIC-IV sepsis cohort across multiple downstream models show that CSRA is consistently competitive and often superior, reducing regression error by 10.2\% in MSE and 3.7\% in MAE over the non-augmentation baseline, while also yielding consistent gains on classification. CSRA further maintains more favorable performance under shorter observation windows, longer prediction horizons, and smaller training data scales, while also remaining effective on an external clinical dataset~(ZiGongICUinfection), indicating stronger robustness and generalizability in clinically constrained settings.

Every call to an LLM classification endpoint produces a labeled input-output pair already retained in production logs. These pairs constitute a free, growing training set: a lightweight surrogate trained on them can absorb a significant portion of future traffic at near-zero marginal inference cost. The open questions are when the surrogate is reliable enough to deploy, what it handles versus defers, and how that boundary evolves as data accumulates. We introduce TRACER (Trace-based Adaptive Cost-Efficient Routing), an open-source system that trains ML surrogates on an LLM's own production traces and governs deployment through a parity gate: the surrogate is activated only when its agreement with the LLM exceeds a user-specified threshold α. To make the routing boundary transparent, TRACER generates interpretability artifacts describing which input regions the surrogate handles, where it plateaus, and why it defers. On a 77-class intent benchmark with a Sonnet 4.6 teacher, TRACER achieves 83-100% surrogate coverage depending on the quality target α; on a 150-class benchmark, the surrogate fully replaces the teacher. On a natural language inference task, the parity gate correctly refuses deployment because the embedding representation cannot support reliable separation. The system is available as open-source software.

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance through extended inference-time deliberation, yet how their reasoning failures arise remains poorly understood. By analyzing model-generated reasoning trajectories, we find that errors are not uniformly distributed but often originate from a small number of early transition points, after which reasoning remains locally coherent but globally incorrect. These transitions coincide with localized spikes in token-level entropy, and alternative continuations from the same intermediate state can still lead to correct solutions. Based on these observations, we introduce GUARD, a targeted inference-time framework that probes and redirects critical transitions using uncertainty signals. Empirical evaluations across multiple benchmarks confirm that interventions guided by these failure dynamics lead to more reliable reasoning outcomes. Our findings highlight the importance of understanding when and how reasoning first deviates, complementing existing approaches that focus on scaling inference-time computation.

Large language models frequently produce mutually inconsistent answers when reasoning over multiple related queries. We study case-file logical consistency: maintaining a globally satisfiable belief state across interdependent queries. We introduce a benchmark of 390 multi-query reasoning instances with entailment/contradiction/unknown labels and propose set-level metrics including Case Satisfiability Rate, Contradiction Density and Revision Cost. Our solver-augmented approach extracts commitments, verifies global satisfiability and performs counterexample-guided repair. Across four reasoning domains, our method substantially reduces cross-query contradictions (SetCons: 0.56 to 0.94) while preserving per-query accuracy, demonstrating that global coherence is critical for robust multi-query reasoning.

Catastrophic forgetting remains a fundamental challenge in continual learning, in which models often forget previous knowledge when fine-tuned on a new task. This issue is especially pronounced in class incremental learning (CIL), which is the most challenging setting in continual learning. Existing methods to address catastrophic forgetting often sacrifice either model interpretability or accuracy. To address this challenge, we introduce ClassIncremental Concept Bottleneck Model (CI-CBM), which leverage effective techniques, including concept regularization and pseudo-concept generation to maintain interpretable decision processes throughout incremental learning phases. Through extensive evaluation on seven datasets, CI-CBM achieves comparable performance to black-box models and outperforms previous interpretable approaches in CIL, with an average 36% accuracy gain. CICBM provides interpretable decisions on individual inputs and understandable global decision rules, as shown in our experiments, thereby demonstrating that human understandable concepts can be maintained during incremental learning without compromising model performance. Our approach is effective in both pretrained and non-pretrained scenarios; in the latter, the backbone is trained from scratch during the first learning phase. Code is publicly available at github.com/importAmir/CI-CBM.

We present \textbf{Mind DeepResearch (MindDR)}, an efficient multi-agent deep research framework that achieves leading performance with only \textasciitilde30B-parameter models through a meticulously designed data synthesis and multi-stage training pipeline. The core innovation of MindDR lies in a collaborative three-agent architecture (Planning Agent, DeepSearch Agent, and Report Agent) and a four-stage agent-specialized training pipeline comprising SFT cold-start, Search-RL, Report-RL and preference alignment. With this regime, MindDR demonstrates competitive performance even with \textasciitilde30B-scale models. Specifically, MindDR achieves 45.7\% on BrowseComp-ZH, 42.8\% on BrowseComp, 46.5\% on WideSearch, 75.0\% on xbench-DS, and 52.5 on DeepResearch Bench, outperforming comparable-scale open-source agent systems and rivaling larger-scale models. MindDR has been deployed as an online product in Li Auto. Furthermore, we introduce \textbf{MindDR Bench}, a curated benchmark of 500 real-world Chinese queries from our internal product user interactions, evaluated through a comprehensive multi-dimensional rubric system rather than relying on a single RACE metric. On MindDR Bench, MindDR achieves a state-of-the-art score of 51.8.

Healthcare disparities persist across socioeconomic boundaries, often attributed to unequal access to screening, diagnostics, and therapeutics. However, this perspective highlights that critical biases can emerge much earlier, during data collection and research prioritization, long before clinical implementation in cases where the focus of the studies and the data that is collected is at the molecular level. A vast number of studies focus on collecting omics data but the demographic information associated with these datasets is often not reported in the studies, and when it is reported, it shows big biases. An automated analysis of 4719 PubMed-indexed omics publications from 2015 to 2024 reveals that only a small fraction report ancestry or ethnicity information, with ancestry reporting improving slightly. Analysis of large-scale datasets commonly used for model training, such as CellxGene and GEO, reveals substantial population bias where European-ancestry data dominates. As biomedical foundation models become central to biomedical discovery with a paradigm in which base models are pretrained on large datasets and reusing them time and again for many different downstream tasks, they risk perpetuating or amplifying these early-stage biases, leading to cascading inequities that regulatory interventions cannot fully reverse. We propose a community-wide focus on three foundational principles: Provenance, Openness, and Evaluation Transparency to improve equity and robustness in biomedical AI. This approach aims to foster biomedical innovation that more effectively serves underserved populations and improves health outcomes.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in scientific peer review, assisting with drafting, rewriting, expansion, and refinement. However, existing peer-review LLM detection methods largely treat authorship as a binary problem-human vs. AI-without accounting for the hybrid nature of modern review workflows. In practice, evaluative ideas and surface realization may originate from different sources, creating a spectrum of human-AI collaboration. In this work, we introduce PeerPrism, a large-scale benchmark of 20,690 peer reviews explicitly designed to disentangle idea provenance from text provenance. We construct controlled generation regimes spanning fully human, fully synthetic, and multiple hybrid transformations. This design enables systematic evaluation of whether detectors identify the origin of the surface text or the origin of the evaluative reasoning. We benchmark state-of-the-art LLM text detection methods on PeerPrism. While several methods achieve high accuracy on the standard binary task (human vs. fully synthetic), their predictions diverge sharply under hybrid regimes. In particular, when ideas originate from humans but the surface text is AI-generated, detectors frequently disagree and produce contradictory classifications. Accompanied by stylometric and semantic analyses, our results show that current detection methods conflate surface realization with intellectual contribution. Overall, we demonstrate that LLM detection in peer review cannot be reduced to a binary attribution problem. Instead, authorship must be modeled as a multidimensional construct spanning semantic reasoning and stylistic realization. PeerPrism is the first benchmark evaluating human-AI collaboration in these settings. We release all code, data, prompts, and evaluation scripts to facilitate reproducible research at https://github.com/Reviewerly-Inc/PeerPrism.

Agent communication languages (ACLs) enable heterogeneous agents to share knowledge and coordinate across diverse domains. This diversity demands extensibility, but expressive extension mechanisms can push the input language beyond the complexity classes where full validation is tractable. We present CBCL (Common Business Communication Language), an agent communication language that constrains all messages, including runtime language extensions, to the deterministic context-free language (DCFL) class. CBCL allows agents to define, transmit, and adopt domain-specific "dialect" extensions as first-class messages; three safety invariants (R1--R3), machine-checked in Lean 4 and enforced in a Rust reference implementation, prevent unbounded expansion, applying declared resource limits, and preserving core vocabulary. We formalize the language and its safety properties in Lean 4, implement a reference parser and dialect engine in Rust with property-based and differential tests, and extract a verified parser binary. Our results demonstrate that homoiconic protocol design, where extension definitions share the same representation as ordinary messages, can be made provably safe. As autonomous agents increasingly extend their own communication capabilities, formally bounding what they can express to each other is a precondition for oversight.

News recommender systems are devised to alleviate the information overload, attracting more and more researchers' attention in recent years. The lack of a dedicated learner-oriented news recommendation toolkit hinders the advancement of research in news recommendation. We propose a PyTorch-based news recommendation toolkit called NewsTorch, developed to support learners in acquiring both conceptual understanding and practical experience. This toolkit provides a modular, decoupled, and extensible framework with a learner-friendly GUI platform that supports dataset downloading and preprocessing. It also enables training, validation, and testing of state-of-the-art neural news recommendation models with standardized evaluation metrics, ensuring fair comparison and reproducible experiments. Our open-source toolkit is released on Github: https://github.com/whonor/NewsTorch.

As a classic vision task, anomaly detection has been widely applied in industrial inspection and medical imaging. In this task, data scarcity is often a frequently-faced issue. To solve it, the few-shot anomaly detection (FSAD) scheme is attracting increasing attention. In recent years, beyond traditional visual paradigm, Vision-Language Model (VLM) has been extensively explored to boost this field. However, in currently-existing VLM-based FSAD schemes, almost all perform anomaly inference only by pairwise feature matching, ignoring structural dependencies and global consistency. To further redound to FSAD via VLM, we propose a Heterogeneous Hypergraph Vision-Language Reasoning (H2VLR) framework. It reformulates the FSAD as a high-order inference problem of visual-semantic relations, by jointly modeling visual regions and semantic concepts in a unified hypergraph. Experimental comparisons verify the effectiveness and advantages of H2VLR. It could often achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on representative industrial and medical benchmarks. Our code will be released upon acceptance.

We study the expressive power and limitations of multi-layer state-space models (SSMs). First, we show that multi-layer SSMs face fundamental limitations in compositional tasks, revealing an inherent gap between SSMs and streaming models. Then, we examine the role of chain-of-thought (CoT), showing that offline CoT does not fundamentally increase the expressiveness, while online CoT can substantially increase its power. Indeed, with online CoT, multi-layer SSMs become equivalent in power to streaming algorithms. Finally, we investigate the tradeoff between width and precision, showing that these resources are not interchangeable in the base model, but admit a clean equivalence once online CoT is allowed. Overall, our results offer a unified perspective on how depth, finite precision, and CoT shape the power and limits of SSMs.

Expert specialization is fundamental to Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model success, yet existing metrics (cosine similarity, routing entropy) lack theoretical grounding and yield inconsistent conclusions under reparameterization. We present an information-geometric framework providing the first rigorous characterization of MoE specialization dynamics. Our key insight is that expert routing distributions evolve on the probability simplex equipped with the Fisher information metric, enabling formal analysis via Riemannian geometry. We prove that standard heuristic metrics violate parameterization invariance (Theorem 1), establish that specialization corresponds to geodesic flow with quantified approximation bounds (Theorem 2), and derive a failure predictor with theoretical threshold justification (Theorem 3). The framework introduces two principled metrics: Fisher Specialization Index (FSI) achieving r=0.91+/-0.02 correlation with downstream performance, and Fisher Heterogeneity Score (FHS) predicting training failure at 10% completion with AUC=0.89+/-0.03 -- outperforming validation-loss-based early stopping by 23% while requiring 40x fewer compute cycles. We validate intervention protocols achieving 87% recovery rate when FHS>1 is detected. Comprehensive experiments across language modeling (WikiText-103, C4), vision MoE (ImageNet), and scaling studies (8-64 experts, 125M-2.7B parameters) validate our theoretical predictions.

Synthetic augmentation is increasingly used to mitigate data scarcity in financial machine learning, yet its statistical role remains poorly understood. We formalize synthetic augmentation as a modification of the effective training distribution and show that it induces a structural bias--variance trade-off: while additional samples may reduce estimation error, they may also shift the population objective whenever the synthetic distribution deviates from regions relevant under evaluation. To isolate informational gains from mechanical sample-size effects, we introduce a size-matched null augmentation and a finite-sample, non-parametric block permutation test that remains valid under weak temporal dependence. We evaluate this framework in both controlled Markov-switching environments and real financial datasets, including high-frequency option trade data and a daily equity panel. Across generators spanning bootstrap, copula-based models, variational autoencoders, diffusion models, and TimeGAN, we vary augmentation ratio, model capacity, task type, regime rarity, and signal-to-noise. We show that synthetic augmentation is beneficial only in variance-dominant regimes, such as persistent volatility forecasting-while it deteriorates performance in bias-dominant settings, including near-efficient directional prediction. Rare-regime targeting can improve domain-specific metrics but may conflict with unconditional permutation inference. Our results provide a structural perspective on when synthetic data improves financial learning performance and when it induces persistent distributional distortion.

Financial institutions face tension between maximizing data utility and mitigating the re-identification risks inherent in traditional anonymization methods. This paper explores Differentially Private (DP) synthetic data as a robust "Privacy by Design" framework to resolve this conflict, ensuring output privacy while satisfying stringent regulatory obligations. We examine two distinct generative paradigms: Direct Tabular Synthesis, which reconstructs high-fidelity joint distributions from raw data, and DP-Seeded Agent-Based Modeling (ABM), which uses DP-protected aggregates to parameterize complex, stateful simulations. While tabular synthesis excels at reflecting static historical correlations for QA testing and business analytics, the DP-Seeded ABM offers a forward-looking "counterfactual laboratory" capable of modeling dynamic market behaviors and black swan events. By decoupling individual identities from data utility, these methodologies eliminate traditional data-clearing bottlenecks, enabling seamless cross-institutional research and compliant decision-making in an evolving regulatory landscape.

Deploying high-quality automatic speech recognition (ASR) on edge devices requires models that jointly optimize accuracy, latency, and memory footprint while operating entirely on CPU without GPU acceleration. We conduct a systematic empirical study of state-of-the-art ASR architectures, encompassing encoder-decoder, transducer, and LLM-based paradigms, evaluated across batch, chunked, and streaming inference modes. Through a comprehensive benchmark of over 50 configurations spanning OpenAI Whisper, NVIDIA Nemotron, Parakeet TDT, Canary, Conformer Transducer, and Qwen3-ASR, we identify NVIDIA's Nemotron Speech Streaming as the strongest candidate for real-time English streaming on resource-constrained hardware. We then re-implement the complete streaming inference pipeline in ONNX Runtime and conduct a controlled evaluation of multiple post-training quantization strategies, including importance-weighted k-quant, mixed-precision schemes, and round-to-nearest quantization, combined with graph-level operator fusion. These optimizations reduce the model from 2.47 GB to as little as 0.67 GB while maintaining word error rate (WER) within 1% absolute of the full-precision PyTorch baseline. Our recommended configuration, the int4 k-quant variant, achieves 8.20% average streaming WER across eight standard benchmarks, running comfortably faster than real-time on CPU with 0.56 s algorithmic latency, establishing a new quality-efficiency Pareto point for on-device streaming ASR.

Topic modeling seeks to uncover latent semantic structure in text corpora with minimal supervision. Neural approaches achieve strong performance but require extensive tuning and struggle with lifelong learning due to catastrophic forgetting and fixed capacity, while classical probabilistic models lack flexibility and adaptability to streaming data. We introduce \textsc{CobwebTM}, a low-parameter lifelong hierarchical topic model based on incremental probabilistic concept formation. By adapting the Cobweb algorithm to continuous document embeddings, \textsc{CobwebTM} constructs semantic hierarchies online, enabling unsupervised topic discovery, dynamic topic creation, and hierarchical organization without predefining the number of topics. Across diverse datasets, \textsc{CobwebTM} achieves strong topic coherence, stable topics over time, and high-quality hierarchies, demonstrating that incremental symbolic concept formation combined with pretrained representations is an efficient approach to topic modeling.

In any domain where knowledge accumulates under formal authority -- law, drug regulation, software security -- a later document can formally void an earlier one while remaining semantically distant from it. We formalize this as Controlling Authority Retrieval (CAR): recovering the active frontier front(cl(A_k(q))) of the authority closure of the semantic anchor set -- a different mathematical problem from argmax_d s(q,d). The two central results are: Theorem 4 (CAR-Correctness Characterization) gives necessary-and-sufficient conditions on any retrieved set R for TCA(R,q)=1 -- frontier inclusion and no-ignored-superseder -- independent of how R was produced. Proposition 2 (Scope Identifiability Upper Bound) establishes phi(q) as a hard worst-case ceiling: for any scope-indexed algorithm, TCA@k <= phi(q) * R_anchor(q), proved by an adversarial permutation argument. Three independent real-world corpora validate the proved structure: security advisories (Dense TCA@5=0.270, two-stage 0.975), SCOTUS overruling pairs (Dense=0.172, two-stage 0.926), FDA drug records (Dense=0.064, two-stage 0.774). A GPT-4o-mini experiment shows the downstream cost: Dense RAG produces explicit "not patched" claims for 39% of queries where a patch exists; Two-Stage cuts this to 16%. Four benchmark datasets, domain adapters, and a single-command scorer are released at https://github.com/andremir/car-retrieval.

Quantization is a natural complement to the sparse, event-driven computation of Spiking Neural Networks, reducing memory bandwidth and arithmetic cost for deployment on resource-constrained hardware. However, existing SNN quantization evaluation focuses almost exclusively on accuracy, overlooking whether a quantized network preserves the firing behavior of its full-precision counterpart. We demonstrate that quantization method, clipping range, and bit-width can produce substantially different firing distributions at equivalent accuracy, differences invisible to standard metrics but relevant to deployment, where firing activity governs effective sparsity, state storage, and event-processing load. To capture this gap, we propose Earth Mover's Distance as a diagnostic metric for firing distribution divergence, and apply it systematically across weight and membrane quantization on SEW-ResNet architectures trained on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100. We find that uniform quantization induces distributional drift even when accuracy is preserved, while LQ-Net style learned quantization maintains firing behavior close to the full-precision baseline. Our results suggest that behavior preservation should be treated as an evaluation criterion alongside accuracy, and that EMD provides a principled tool for assessing it.

Behavior cloning (BC) policies on position-controlled robots inherit the closed-loop response of the underlying PD controller, yet the effect of controller gains on BC failure lacks a nonasymptotic theory. We show that independent sub-Gaussian action errors propagate through the gain-dependent closed-loop dynamics to yield sub-Gaussian position errors whose proxy matrix $X_\infty(K)$ governs the failure tail. The probability of horizon-$T$ task failure factorizes into a gain-dependent amplification index $Γ_T(K)$ and the validation loss plus a generalization slack, so training loss alone cannot predict closed-loop performance. Under shape-preserving upper-bound structural assumptions the proxy admits the scalar bound $X_\infty(K)\preceqΨ(K)\bar X$ with $Ψ(K)$ decomposed into label difficulty, injection strength, and contraction, ranking the four canonical regimes with compliant-overdamped (CO) tightest, stiff-underdamped (SU) loosest, and the stiff-overdamped versus compliant-underdamped ordering system-dependent. For the canonical scalar second-order PD system the closed-form continuous-time stationary variance $X_\infty^{\mathrm{c}}(α,β)=σ^2α/(2β)$ is strictly monotone in stiffness and damping over the entire stable orthant, covering both underdamped and overdamped regimes, and the exact zero-order-hold (ZOH) discretization inherits this monotonicity. The analysis provides the first nonasymptotic explanation of the empirical finding that compliant, overdamped controllers improve BC success rates.

Transparency of neural networks' internal reasoning is at the heart of interpretability research, adding to trust, safety, and understanding of these models. The field of mechanistic interpretability has recently focused on studying task-specific computational graphs, defined by connections (edges) between model components. Such edge-based circuits have been defined in the context of large language models, yet vision-based approaches so far only consider neuron-based circuits. These tell which information is encoded, but not how it is routed through the complex wiring of a neural network. In this work, we investigate whether useful mechanistic circuits can be identified through computational graphs in vision transformers. We propose an effective method for Automatic Visual Circuit Discovery (Vi-CD) that recovers class-specific circuits for classification, identifies circuits underlying typographic attacks in CLIP, and discovers circuits that lend themselves for steering to correct harmful model behavior. Overall, we find that insightful and actionable edge-based circuits can be recovered from vision transformers, adding transparency to the internal computations of these models.

Tool-augmented large language model (LLM) agents can orchestrate specialist classifiers, segmentation models, and visual question-answering modules to interpret chest X-rays. However, these agents still solve each case in isolation: they fail to accumulate experience across cases, correct recurrent reasoning mistakes, or adapt their tool-use behavior without expensive reinforcement learning. While a radiologist naturally improves with every case, current agents remain static. In this work, we propose Evo-MedAgent, a self-evolving memory module that equips a medical agent with the capacity for inter-case learning at test time. Our memory comprises three complementary stores: (1)~\emph{Retrospective Clinical Episodes} that retrieve problem-solving experiences from similar past cases, (2)~an \emph{Adaptive Procedural Heuristics} bank curating priority-tagged diagnostic rules that evolves via reflection, much like a physician refining their internal criteria, and (3)~a \emph{Tool Reliability Controller} that tracks per-tool trustworthiness. On ChestAgentBench, Evo-MedAgent raises multiple-choice question (MCQ) accuracy from 0.68 to 0.79 on GPT-5-mini, and from 0.76 to 0.87 on Gemini-3 Flash. With a strong base model, evolving memory improves performance more effectively than orchestrating external tools on qualitative diagnostic tasks. Because Evo-MedAgent requires no training, its per-case overhead is bounded by one additional retrieval pass and a single reflection call, making it deployable on top of any frozen model.

Traditional esports scouting workflows rely heavily on manual video review and aggregate performance metrics, which often fail to capture the nuanced decision-making patterns necessary to determine if a prospect fits a specific tactical archetype. To address this, we reframe style-based player evaluation in esports as an Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) problem. In this paper, we introduce a novel player selection framework that learns professional-specific reward functions from logged gameplay demonstrations, allowing organizations to rank candidates by their stylistic alignment with a target star player. Our proposed architecture utilizes a multimodal, two-branch intake: one branch encodes structured state-action trajectories derived from high-resolution in-game telemetry, while the second encodes temporally aligned tactical pseudo-commentary generated by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) from broadcast footage. These representations are fused and evaluated via a Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (GAIL) objective, where a discriminator learns to capture the unique mechanical and tactical signatures of elite professionals. By transitioning from generic skill estimation to scouting "by reward," this framework provides a scalable, workflow-aware digital twin system that enables data-driven roster construction and targeted talent discovery across massive candidate pools.

A common approach to personalization in large language models (LLMs) is to incorporate a subset of the user memory into the prompt at inference time to guide the model's generation. Existing methods select these subsets primarily using similarity between user memory items and input queries, ignoring how features actually affect the model's response distribution. We propose Response-Utility optimization for Memory Selection (RUMS), a novel method that selects user memory items by measuring the mutual information between a subset of memory and the model's outputs, identifying items that reduce response uncertainty and sharpen predictions beyond semantic similarity. We demonstrate that this information-theoretic foundation enables more principled user memory selection that aligns more closely with human selection compared to state-of-the-art methods, and models $400\times$ larger. Additionally, we show that memory items selected using RUMS result in better response quality compared to existing approaches, while having up to $95\%$ reduction in computational cost.

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) are often selected by a single scalar loss even when the quantity of interest is more specific. We study a hybrid design in which the governing PDE residual remains automatic-differentiation (AD) based, while finite differences (FD) appear only in a weak auxiliary term that penalizes gradients of the sampled residual field. The FD term regularizes the residual field without replacing the PDE residual itself. We examine this idea in two stages. Stage 1 is a controlled Poisson benchmark comparing a baseline PINN, the FD residual-gradient regularizer, and a matched AD residual-gradient baseline. Stage 2 transfers the same logic to a three-dimensional annular heat-conduction benchmark (PINN3D), where baseline errors concentrate near a wavy outer wall and the auxiliary grid is implemented as a body-fitted shell adjacent to the wall. In Stage 1, the FD regularizer reproduces the main effect of residual-gradient control while exposing a trade-off between field accuracy and residual cleanliness. In Stage 2, the shell regularizer improves the application-facing quantities, namely outer-wall flux and boundary-condition behavior. Across seeds 0-5 and 100k epochs, the most reliable tested configuration is a fixed shell weight of 5e-4 under the Kourkoutas-beta optimizer regime: relative to a matched run without the shell term, it reduces the mean outer-wall BC RMSE from 1.22e-2 to 9.29e-4 and the mean wall-flux RMSE from 9.21e-3 to 9.63e-4. Adam with beta2=0.999 becomes usable when the initial learning rate is reduced to 1e-3, although its shell benefit is less robust than under Kourkoutas-beta. Overall, the results support a targeted view of hybrid PINNs: an auxiliary-only FD regularizer is most valuable when it is aligned with the physical quantity of interest, here the outer-wall flux.

AI systems are increasingly used to assist humans in sequential decision-making tasks, yet determining when and how an AI assistant should intervene remains a fundamental challenge. A potential baseline is to recommend the optimal action according to a strong model. However, such actions assume optimal follow-up actions, which human decision makers may fail to execute, potentially reducing overall performance. In this work, we propose and study value-aware interventions, motivated by a basic principle in reinforcement learning: under the Bellman equation, the optimal policy selects actions that maximize the immediate reward plus the value function. When a decision maker follows a suboptimal policy, this policy-value consistency no longer holds, creating discrepancies between the actions taken by the policy and those that maximize the immediate reward plus the value of the next state. We show that these policy-value inconsistencies naturally identify opportunities for intervention. We formalize this problem in a Markov decision process where an AI assistant may override human actions under an intervention budget. In the single-intervention regime, we show that the optimal strategy is to recommend the action that maximizes the human value function. For settings with multiple interventions, we propose a tractable approximation that prioritizes interventions based on the magnitude of the policy-value discrepancy. We evaluate these ideas in the domain of chess by learning models of humans from large-scale gameplay data. In simulation, our approach consistently outperforms interventions based on the strongest chess engine (Stockfish) in a wide range of settings. A within-subject human study with 20 players and 600 games further shows that our interventions significantly improve performance for low- and mid-skill players while matching expert-engine interventions for high-skill players.

Large language models (LLMs) emulate a consistent human-like behavior that can be shaped through activation-level interventions. This paradigm is converging on additive residual-stream injections, which rely on injection-strength sweeps to approximate optimal intervention settings. However, existing methods restrict the search space and sweep in uncalibrated activation-space units, potentially missing optimal intervention conditions. Thus, we introduce a psychological steering framework that performs unbounded, fluency-constrained sweeps in semantically calibrated units. Our method derives and calibrates residual-stream injections using psychological artifacts, and we use the IPIP-NEO-120, which measures the OCEAN personality model, to compare six injection methods. We find that mean-difference (MD) injections outperform Personality Prompting (P$^2$), an established baseline for OCEAN steering, in open-ended generation in 11 of 14 LLMs, with gains of 3.6\% to 16.4\%, overturning prior reports favoring prompting and positioning representation engineering as a new frontier in open-ended psychological steering. Further, we find that a hybrid of P$^2$ and MD injections outperforms both methods in 13 of 14 LLMs, with gains over P$^2$ ranging from 5.6\% to 21.9\% and from 3.3\% to 26.7\% over MD injections. Finally, we show that MD injections align with the Linear Representation Hypothesis and provide reliable, approximately linear control knobs for psychological steering. Nevertheless, they also induce OCEAN trait covariance patterns that depart from the Big Two model, suggesting a gap between learned representations and human psychology.

Neuromotor decoding from upper-limb electromyography (sEMG) can enhance human-machine interfaces and offer a more natural means of controlling prosthetic limbs, virtual reality, and household electronics. Unfortunately, current sEMG technology does not always perform consistently across users because individual differences such as age and body mass index, among many others, can substantially alter signal quality. This variability makes sEMG characteristics highly idiosyncratic, often necessitating laborious personalization and iterative tuning to achieve reliable performance. This variability has particular import for sEMG-based assistive devices and neural interfaces, where demographic biases in sEMG features could undermine broad and fair deployment. In this study, we explore how demographic differences affect the sEMG signals produced and their implications for machine learning-based gesture decoding. We analyze the data set provided by, in which we derive 147 common sEMG features extracted from 81 demographically diverse individuals performing discrete hand gestures. Using mixed-effects linear models and partial least squares (PLS) analysis, which take into consideration demographic variables (including age, sex, height, weight, skin properties, subcutaneous fat, and hair density), we identify that 33\% (49 of 147) of commonly used sEMG features show significant associations with demographic characteristics. These results may help guide the development of fair and unbiased sEMG-based neural interfaces across a diverse population.

For humans, filler-gap dependencies require a shared representation across different syntactic constructions. Although causal analyses suggest this may also be true for LLMs (Boguraev et al., 2025), it is still unclear if such a representation also exists for language models trained on developmentally feasible quantities of data. We applied Distributed Alignment Search (DAS, Geiger et al. (2024)) to LMs trained on varying amounts of data from the BabyLM challenge (Warstadt et al., 2023), to evaluate whether representations of filler-gap dependencies transfer between wh-questions and topicalization, which greatly vary in terms of their input frequency. Our results suggest shared, yet item-sensitive mechanisms may develop with limited training data. More importantly, LMs still require far more data than humans to learn comparable generalizations, highlighting the need for language-specific biases in models of language acquisition.

Visualizing narratives is useful to writers to reflect on unfinished drafts and identify unintentional biases and inconsistencies. Literary scholars can use the visualizations to identify nuanced patterns and literary styles from written text. Current narrative visualization is limited to representing character and location co-occurrences in a timeline, omitting important and complex narrative components such as focalization, causality, and speech. This paper aims to capture and visualize underexplored, complex narrative components as a basis for narrative visualization. As a starting point, we propose a new narrative visualization, named FocalLens, that uses focalization, the component that establishes who sees or perceives the events in a narrative, for representing the narrative. We provide the theoretical foundation of focalization and describe various types and facets of focalization. The details are incorporated in the novel visualization that captures how different characters perceive an event, who directly participate in an event, who indirectly observe the event, and who narrate the event. We also developed a tool that provides fluid interaction between the text and the proposed visualization. The tool was evaluated with four writers and scholars in a qualitative study, where writers analyzed their draft stories and scholars analyzed well-known stories. The findings suggest the tool added a new dimension to the workflow for writers and scholars, an analytical lens that is not available otherwise. We conclude by identifying design implications and future directions.

AI models underpin modern intelligent systems, driving advances across science, medicine, finance, and technology. Yet developing high-performing AI models remains a labor-intensive process that requires expert practitioners to iteratively design architectures, engineer representations, implement training pipelines and refine approaches through empirical evaluation. Existing AutoML methods partially alleviate this burden but remain limited to narrow aspects such as hyperparameter optimization and model selection within predefined search spaces, leaving the full development lifecycle largely dependent on human expertise. To address this gap, we introduce AIBuildAI, an AI agent that automatically builds AI models from a task description and training data. AIBuildAI adopts a hierarchical agent architecture in which a manager agent coordinates three specialized sub-agents: a designer for modeling strategy, a coder for implementation and debugging, and a tuner for training and performance optimization. Each sub-agent is itself a large language model (LLM) based agent capable of multi-step reasoning and tool use, enabling end-to-end automation of the AI model development process that goes beyond the scope of existing AutoML approaches. We evaluate AIBuildAI on MLE-Bench, a benchmark of realistic Kaggle-style AI development tasks spanning visual, textual, time-series and tabular modalities. AIBuildAI ranks first on MLE-Bench with a medal rate of 63.1%, outperforming all existing baseline methods and matching the capability of highly experienced AI engineers. These results demonstrate that hierarchical agent systems can automate the full AI model development process from task specification to deployable model, suggesting a pathway toward broadly accessible AI development with minimal human intervention.

Weak gravitational lensing, the correlated distortion of background galaxy shapes by foreground structures, is a powerful probe of the matter distribution in our universe and allows accurate constraints on the cosmological model. In recent years, high-order statistics and machine learning (ML) techniques have been applied to weak lensing data to extract the nonlinear information beyond traditional two-point analysis. However, these methods typically rely on cosmological simulations, which poses several challenges: simulations are computationally expensive, limiting most realistic setups to a low training data regime; inaccurate modeling of systematics in the simulations create distribution shifts that can bias cosmological parameter constraints; and varying simulation setups across studies make method comparison difficult. To address these difficulties, we present the first weak lensing benchmark dataset with several realistic systematics and launch the FAIR Universe Weak Lensing Machine Learning Uncertainty Challenge. The challenge focuses on measuring the fundamental properties of the universe from weak lensing data with limited training set and potential distribution shifts, while providing a standardized benchmark for rigorous comparison across methods. Organized in two phases, the challenge will bring together the physics and ML communities to advance the methodologies for handling systematic uncertainties, data efficiency, and distribution shifts in weak lensing analysis with ML, ultimately facilitating the deployment of ML approaches into upcoming weak lensing survey analysis.

Quick and accurate emergency handling in Disaster Decision Support Systems (DDSS) is often hampered by network latency and suboptimal application accuracy. While Federated Learning (FL) addresses some of these issues, it is constrained by high communication costs and rigid synchronization requirements across heterogeneous convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a decentralized ensembling framework based on asynchronous probability aggregation and feedback distillation. By shifting the exchange unit from model weights to class-probability vectors, our method maintains data privacy, reduces communication requirements by orders of magnitude, and improves overall accuracy. This approach enables diverse CNN designs to collaborate asynchronously, enhancing disaster image identification performance even in resource-constrained settings. Experimental tests demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms traditional individual backbones and standard federated approaches, establishing a scalable and resource-aware solution for real-time disaster response.

Recent advances in data-centric artificial intelligence highlight inherent limitations in object recognition datasets. One of the primary issues stems from the semantic gap problem, which results in complex many-to-many mappings between visual data and linguistic descriptions. This bias adversely affects performance in computer vision tasks. This paper proposes an image annotation methodology that integrates knowledge representation, natural language processing, and computer vision techniques, aiming to reduce annotator subjectivity by applying visual property constraints. We introduce an interactive crowdsourcing framework that dynamically asks questions based on a predefined object category hierarchy and annotator feedback, guiding image annotation by visual properties. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this methodology, and annotator feedback is discussed to optimize the crowdsourcing setup.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as sources of information, yet their reliability depends on the ability to search the web, select relevant evidence, and synthesize complete answers. While recent benchmarks evaluate web-browsing and agentic tool use, multilingual settings, and Portuguese in particular, remain underexplored. We present \textsc{MARCA}, a bilingual (English and Portuguese) benchmark for evaluating LLMs on web-based information seeking. \textsc{MARCA} consists of 52 manually authored multi-entity questions, paired with manually validated checklist-style rubrics that explicitly measure answer completeness and correctness. We evaluate 14 models under two interaction settings: a Basic framework with direct web search and scraping, and an Orchestrator framework that enables task decomposition via delegated subagents. To capture stochasticity, each question is executed multiple times and performance is reported with run-level uncertainty. Across models, we observe large performance differences, find that orchestration often improves coverage, and identify substantial variability in how models transfer from English to Portuguese. The benchmark is available at https://github.com/maritaca-ai/MARCA

Ensuring the reliability of machine learning-based intrusion detection systems remains a critical challenge in Internet of Things (IoT) environments, particularly as data poisoning attacks increasingly threaten the integrity of model training pipelines. This study evaluates the susceptibility of four widely used classifiers, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting Machine, Logistic Regression, and Deep Neural Network models, against multiple poisoning strategies using three real-world IoT datasets. Results show that while ensemble-based models exhibit comparatively stable performance, Logistic Regression and Deep Neural Networks suffer degradation of up to 40% under label manipulation and outlier-based attacks. Such disruptions significantly distort decision boundaries, reduce detection fidelity, and undermine deployment readiness. The findings highlight the need for adversarially robust training, continuous anomaly monitoring, and feature-level validation within operational Network Intrusion Detection Systems. The study also emphasizes the importance of integrating resilience testing into regulatory and compliance frameworks for AI-driven IoT security. Overall, this work provides an empirical foundation for developing more resilient intrusion detection pipelines and informs future research on adaptive, attack-aware models capable of maintaining reliability under adversarial IoT conditions.

We present an empirical study of whether hierarchically structured, shared-weight recurrence can match the representational quality of independent-layer stacking in a Transformer-based language model. HRM-LM replaces L independent Transformer layers with a two-speed recurrent pair: a Fast module operating at every step for local refinement, and a Slow module operating every T steps for global compression. This recurrent hierarchy is unrolled for M = N x T steps with shared parameters. The central and most robust finding, supported by a parameter-matched Universal Transformer ablation (UniTF, 1.2B) across five independent runs, is a sharp empirical gap between the two approaches.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results on public benchmarks, often leading to claims of advanced reasoning and understanding. However, recent research in cognitive science reveals that these models sometimes rely on shallow heuristics and memorization, taking shortcuts rather than demonstrating genuine cognitive abilities. This paper investigates LLM behavior in automated test generation for software, contrasting performance on an open-source system (LevelDB) with SAP HANA, one of the most widely deployed commercial database systems worldwide, whose proprietary codebase is guaranteed to be absent from training data. We combine cognitive evaluation principles, drawing on Mitchell's mechanism-focused assessment methodology, with empirical software testing, employing mutation score and iterative compiler-feedback repair loops to assess both accuracy and underlying reasoning strategies. Results show that LLMs excel on familiar, open-source benchmarks but struggle with unseen, complex domains, often prioritizing compilability over semantic effectiveness. These findings provide independent software engineering evidence for the broader claim that current LLMs lack robust reasoning, and highlight the need for evaluation frameworks that penalize trivial shortcuts and reward true generalization.

Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale parameters while fixing active computation per token, but the specialization of individual experts remains opaque. In a companion paper we showed that routing topology is quality-neutral: five structurally different configurations converge to statistically equivalent language modeling quality. Here we show that expert identity is nonetheless causally meaningful: individual rank-1 experts are monosemantic by construction, and cosine-similarity routing in a low-dimensional metric space makes their specialization directly inspectable. We present four lines of evidence. First, projecting expert output vectors through the unembedding matrix yields a Semantic Dictionary: 15% of experts are monosemantic specialists spanning 10 categories (temporal, geographic, cardinal, discourse, emotional, financial, military, scientific). Second, routing exhibits a frequency-to-syntax gradient: early layers separate tokens by word frequency, deeper layers by syntactic class (Zipf-confound controls, all $p < 0.001$). Third, causal interventions confirm these labels: steering toward a temporal expert's centroid increases P(temporal) by +321% (median across 44 prompts); suppressing a geographic expert drops P(geographic) by -23%; rewriting an expert's output vector halves target-category probability, and effects compose additively across layers. Fourth, the interventions are not unique to cosine routing: linear routers support comparable steering, but only cosine routing provides geometric transparency -- expert specialization is readable directly from the centroid matrix. MoE expert-level specialization is a first-class interpretability primitive: architecturally monosemantic, causally validated, and controllable at inference with zero overhead.

Zero-ablation -- replacing token activations with zero vectors -- is widely used to probe token function in vision transformers. Register zeroing in DINOv2+registers and DINOv3 produces large drops (up to $-36.6$\,pp classification, $-30.9$\,pp segmentation), suggesting registers are functionally indispensable. However, three replacement controls -- mean-substitution, noise-substitution, and cross-image register-shuffling -- preserve performance across classification, correspondence, and segmentation, remaining within ${\sim}1$\,pp of the unmodified baseline. Per-patch cosine similarity shows these replacements genuinely perturb internal representations, while zeroing causes disproportionately large perturbations, consistent with why it alone degrades tasks. We conclude that zero-ablation overstates dependence on exact register content. In the frozen-feature evaluations we test, performance depends on plausible register-like activations rather than on exact image-specific values. Registers nevertheless buffer dense features from \texttt{[CLS]} dependence and are associated with compressed patch geometry. These findings, including the replacement-control results, replicate at ViT-B scale.

Mobile applications rely on complex backends that introduce significant security risks, yet developers often lack the tools to assess these risks effectively. This paper presents AndroScanner, an automated pipeline for detecting vulnerabilities in Android application backends through combined static and dynamic analysis. AndroScanner extracts backend API calls from APK files using apktool, Androguard, and Frida-based dynamic instrumentation, then vets them against the OWASP API Security Top 10 using APIFuzzer. We evaluate AndroScanner on two Android applications: a purposely vulnerable bank application and a production recruitment application with over 50,000 downloads on Google Play Store. Across both applications, AndroScanner extracted 24 APIs and identified 5 vulnerabilities, including a previously unreported zero-day Excessive Data Exposure vulnerability (ranked 3rd in the OWASP API Security Top 10) in the production application. The vulnerability was responsibly disclosed to the development team prior to publication. AndroScanner is available upon request to assist developers in identifying and remediating backend security risks before deployment.

We present Three-Phase Transformer (3PT), a residual-stream structural prior for decoder-only Transformers on a standard SwiGLU + RMSNorm + RoPE + GQA backbone. The hidden vector is partitioned into N equally-sized cyclic channels, each maintained by phase-respecting ops: a per-channel RMSNorm, a 2D Givens rotation between attention and FFN that rotates each channel by theta + i*(2*pi/N), and a head-count constraint aligning GQA heads with the partition. The architecture is a self-stabilizing equilibrium between scrambling and re-imposition, not a bolted-on module. The partition carves out a one-dimensional DC subspace orthogonal to the channels, into which we inject a fixed Gabriel's horn profile r(p) = 1/(p+1) as an absolute-position side-channel composing orthogonally with RoPE's relative-position rotation. The canonical N=3 borrows its metaphor from balanced three-phase AC, where three sinusoids 120 degrees apart sum to zero with no anti-correlated pair. At 123M parameters on WikiText-103, 3PT achieves -7.20% perplexity (-2.62% bits-per-byte) over a matched RoPE-Only baseline at +1,536 parameters (0.00124% of total), with 1.93x step-count convergence speedup (1.64x wall-clock). N behaves as a parameter-sharing knob rather than a unique optimum: at 5.5M an N-sweep over {1,2,3,4,6,8,12} is near-monotone with N=1 winning; at 123M a three-seed sweep finds N=3 and N=1 statistically indistinguishable. The load-bearing mechanism is the channel-partitioned residual stream, per-block rotation, per-phase normalization, and horn DC injection. We characterize (a) self-stabilization of the geometry without explicit enforcement, a novel instance of the conservation-law framework for neural networks; (b) a U-shaped depth profile of rotation-angle drift at 12 layers; (c) orthogonal composition with RoPE, attention, and FFN.

Most practical engineering design problems involve nonlinear spatio-temporal dynamical systems. Multi-physics simulations are often performed to capture the fine spatio-temporal scales which govern the evolution of these systems. However, these simulations are often high-fidelity in nature, and can be computationally very expensive. Hence, generating data from these expensive simulations becomes a bottleneck in an end-to-end engineering design process. Spatio-temporal surrogate modeling of these dynamical systems has been a popular data-driven solution to tackle this computational bottleneck. This is because accurate machine learning models emulating the dynamical systems can be orders of magnitude faster than the actual simulations. However, one key limitation of purely data-driven approaches is their lack of generalizability to inputs outside the training distribution. In this paper, we propose a physics-informed spatio-temporal surrogate modeling (PISTM) framework constrained by the physics of the underlying dynamical system. The framework leverages state-of-the-art advancements in the field of Koopman autoencoders to learn the underlying spatio-temporal dynamics in a non-intrusive manner, coupled with a spatio-temporal surrogate model which predicts the behavior of the Koopman operator in a specified time window for unknown operating conditions. We evaluate our framework on a prototypical fluid flow problem of interest: two-dimensional incompressible flow around a cylinder.

Data analysts working with relational data often start with vague or underspecified questions and refine them iteratively as they explore the data. To support this iterative process, we demonstrate Pneuma-Seeker, a system that reifies a user's information need as explicit, inspectable relational specifications, enabling iterative refinement of the information need, targeted data discovery, and provenance-aware execution. Through two real-world procurement use cases, we show how Pneuma-Seeker leverages LLMs as transparent, interactive analytical collaborators rather than opaque answer engines.

Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures employ increasingly sophisticated routing mechanisms -- learned routers, multi-hop trajectories, token-dependent gating. We ask: does routing topology actually determine language modeling quality? We build a geometric MoE (ST-MoE) using cosine-similarity routing against learned centroids in a low-dimensional space ($d_{space} = 64$), requiring 80% fewer routing parameters than standard linear routers. Through 62 controlled experiments on WikiText-103 at 76--84M parameters trained to convergence (50K steps, 1.64B tokens), we find that routing topology does not determine asymptotic perplexity (PPL): five cosine-routing variants are statistically equivalent within a 1-PPL margin (Two One-Sided Tests [TOST], $p < 0.05$ for all 10 pairwise comparisons; 15 runs across 3 seeds, observed range 33.93--34.72). The finding extends to hash, random-fixed, and top-1 routing (single-seed; graceful 1.1--2.2 PPL degradation) and replicates on OpenWebText (0.03 PPL gap, 6 runs, 3 seeds each). A standard linear router with 5.3$\times$ more routing parameters reaches PPL 32.76, but iso-parameter cosine routing closes 67% of this gap -- the true mechanism advantage is $\sim$1.2%. The mechanistic explanation is convergent redundancy: multi-hop updates are collinear ($\cos(Δh_0, Δh_1) = 0.805$), implementing magnitude amplification rather than compositional reasoning; a single learnable scalar replicates multi-hop performance. As a practical payoff, zero-shot relative-norm halting saves 25% of MoE FLOPs at +0.12% PPL. Expert-level specialization and causal controllability -- which coexist with topology-level equifinality -- are explored in a companion paper.

Turn-level metrics are widely used to evaluate properties of multi-turn human-LLM conversations, from safety and sycophancy to dialogue quality. However, consecutive turns within a conversation are not statistically independent -- a fact that virtually all current evaluation pipelines fail to correct for in their statistical inference. We systematically characterize the autocorrelation structure of 66 turn-level metrics across 202 multi-turn conversations (11,639 turn pairs, 5 German-speaking users, 4 LLM platforms) and demonstrate that naive pooled analysis produces severely inflated significance estimates: 42% of associations that appear significant under standard pooled testing fail to survive cluster-robust correction. The inflation varies substantially across categories rather than scaling linearly with autocorrelation: three memoryless families (embedding velocity, directional, differential) aggregate to 14%, while the seven non-memoryless families (thermo-cycle, frame distance, lexical/structural, rolling windows, cumulative, interaction, timestamp) aggregate to 33%, with individual category rates ranging from 0% to 100% depending on per-family effect size. We present a two-stage correction framework combining Chelton (1983) effective degrees of freedom with conversation-level block bootstrap, and validate it on a pre-registered hold-out split where cluster-robust metrics replicate at 57% versus 30% for pooled-only metrics. We provide concrete design principles, a publication checklist, and open-source code for the correction pipeline. A survey of ~30 recent papers at major NLP and AI venues that compute turn-level statistics in LLM evaluations finds that only 4 address temporal dependence at all, and 26 do not correct for it.

Toxic interactions during code reviews can undermine teamwork and hinder productivity in software engineering (SE) teams. While prior studies explore toxicity detection and empirical investigation, they lack real-time detoxification tools to support the SE community. To address this gap, we present ToxiShield, a browser extension for GitHub pull requests that is built using three modules: i) Toxicity Filter -- to identify whether a text is toxic, ii) Communication coach -- to facilitate just-in-time fine-grained toxicity categorization with explanations, and iii) The Reframer -- that generates a revised, constructive alternative of a toxic text. For each module, we trained and evaluated multiple deep learning and Large Language Models (LLMs) to identify the best choice. A BERT-based binary detection model, trained on 38,761 code review samples, achieves 98% accuracy and an F1-score of 97% and is the selected one for the Toxicity Filter module. For the Communication Coach, prompt-tuned Claude 3.5 Sonnet achieved the best performance with 39% MCC and 42% F1 in multiclass toxicity classification with detailed reasoning. For Reframer, we evaluated five LLMs using a fine-tuning strategy on a dataset of 10,120 code review comments. The fine-tuned Llama 3.2 model achieves 95.27% style transfer accuracy, 97.03% fluency, 67.07% content preservation, and an 84% J-score. We further validated ToxiShield through a human evaluation using the Technology Acceptance Model with 10 participants, confirming its perceived usefulness and ease of adoption. ToxiShield sets a benchmark for advancing constructive communication in software engineering, driving inclusivity and healthier collaboration in open-source communities.

Agentic AI systems are becoming commonplace in domains that require long-lived, stateful decision-making in continuously evolving conditions. As such, correctness depends not only on the output of individual model calls, but also on how to best adapt when incorporating new evidence or revising prior conclusions. However, existing frameworks rely on imperative control loops, ephemeral memory, and prompt-embedded logic, making agent behavior opaque, brittle, and difficult to verify. This paper introduces Credo, which represents semantic state as beliefs and regulates behavior using declarative policies defined over these beliefs. This design supports adaptive, auditable, and composable execution through a database-backed semantic control plane. We showcase these concepts in a decision-control scenario, where beliefs and policies declaratively guide critical execution choices (e.g., model selection, retrieval, corrective re-execution), enabling dynamic behavior without requiring any changes to the underlying pipeline code.

Autonomous on-orbit servicing demands embodied agents that perceive through visual sensors, reason about 3D spatial situations, and execute multi-phase tasks over extended horizons. We present SpaceMind, a modular and self-evolving vision-language model (VLM) agent framework that decomposes knowledge, tools, and reasoning into three independently extensible dimensions: skill modules with dynamic routing, Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools with configurable profiles, and injectable reasoning-mode skills. An MCP-Redis interface layer enables the same codebase to operate across simulation and physical hardware without modification, and a Skill Self-Evolution mechanism distills operational experience into persistent skill files without model fine-tuning. We validate SpaceMind through 192 closed-loop runs across five satellites, three task types, and two environments, a UE5 simulation and a physical laboratory, deliberately including degraded conditions to stress-test robustness. Under nominal conditions all modes achieve 90--100% navigation success; under degradation, the Prospective mode uniquely succeeds in search-and-approach tasks where other modes fail. A self-evolution study shows that the agent recovers from failure in four of six groups from a single failed episode, including complete failure to 100% success and inspection scores improving from 12 to 59 out of 100. Real-world validation confirms zero-code-modification transfer to a physical robot with 100% rendezvous success. Code: https://github.com/wuaodi/SpaceMind

Rotating detonation engines (RDEs) are a promising propulsion concept that may offer higher thermodynamic efficiency and specific impulse than conventional systems, but nonlinear phenomena, including transitions to oscillatory or chaotic propagation modes, can hinder practical operation. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has emerged as a promising method for controlling complex nonlinear dynamics such as those observed in RDEs. However, the multi-timescale nature of the RDE system makes direct application of DRL challenging. We address this challenge by reformulating the DRL problem in a moving reference frame that follows the detonation-wave pattern, making the wave structure appear quasi-steady to the agent. This reformulation enables scale separation between fast detonation propagation and slower operating-mode dynamics. We train DRL controllers to modulate spatially segmented injection pressure in a one-dimensional reduced-order RDE model and induce rapid transitions between different mode-locked states. Across a range of actuation periods, initial states, and target modes, controllers trained in the moving frame learn more reliably than those trained in a stationary frame and remain effective over a broader range of actuation periods. These results suggest that symmetry-aware moving reference frame formulations may be useful for related multiscale flow-control problems and that scale separation should be exploited whenever possible to enable DRL control of multi-timescale systems.

We study the task of automatically expanding WordNet-style lexical resources to new languages through sense generation. We generate senses by associating target-language lemmas with existing lexical concepts via semantic projection. Given a sense-tagged English corpus and its translation, our method projects English synsets onto aligned target-language tokens and assigns the corresponding lemmas to those synsets. To generate these alignments and ensure their quality, we augment a pre-trained base aligner with a bilingual dictionary, which is also used to filter out incorrect sense projections. We evaluate the method on multiple languages, comparing it to prior methods, as well as dictionary-based and large language model baselines. Results show that the proposed project-and-filter strategy improves precision while remaining interpretable and requiring few external resources. We plan to make our code, documentation, and generated sense inventories accessible.

Automated fact-checking in dialogue involves multi-turn conversations where colloquial language is frequent yet understudied. To address this gap, we propose a conservative rewrite candidate for each response claim via staged de-colloquialisation, combining lightweight surface normalisation with scoped in-claim coreference resolution. We then introduce BiCon-Gate, a semantics-aware consistency gate that selects the rewrite candidate only when it is semantically supported by the dialogue context, otherwise falling back to the original claim. This gated selection stabilises downstream fact-checking and yields gains in both evidence retrieval and fact verification. On the DialFact benchmark, our approach improves retrieval and verification, with particularly strong gains on SUPPORTS, and outperforms competitive baselines, including a decoder-based one-shot LLM rewrite that attempts to perform all de-colloquialisation steps in a single pass.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in multi-agent systems requiring strategic coordination. While recent work has analyzed LLM behavior in two-player games, coalition formation, where $n$ agents dynamically form cooperative groups, remains theoretically uncharacterized. We present the first framework grounding coalition formation in LLM agent networks in hedonic game theory with formal stability guarantees. We introduce the LLM Coalition Formation Game (LCFG), establish sufficient conditions for Nash-stable partitions, and prove complexity results. Our analysis reveals that LLM agents exhibit bounded rationality characterized by $ε$-rational preferences; we provide both deterministic existence guarantees and consistency-driven stability bounds whose predictions are consistent with empirical outcomes. Experiments with GPT-4, Claude-3, and Llama-3 across 2,400 episodes validate our framework: LLM coalitions achieve Nash stability in 73.2% of cases under our Coalition-of-Thought (CoalT) protocol, compared to 58.4% under chain-of-thought and 41.8% under standard prompting ($p < 0.001$). Our framework provides theoretical foundations for designing stable multi-agent LLM systems.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful tool for aligning diffusion models with human preferences, typically by optimizing a single reward function under a KL regularization constraint. In practice, however, human preferences are inherently pluralistic, and aligned models must balance multiple downstream objectives, such as aesthetic quality and text-image consistency. Existing multi-objective approaches either rely on costly multi-objective RL fine-tuning or on fusing separately aligned models at denoising time, but they generally require access to reward values (or their gradients) and/or introduce approximation error in the resulting denoising objectives. In this paper, we revisit the problem of RL fine-tuning for diffusion models and address the intractability of identifying the optimal policy by introducing a step-level RL formulation. Building on this, we further propose Multi-objective Step-level Denoising-time Diffusion Alignment (MSDDA), a retraining-free framework for aligning diffusion models with multiple objectives, obtaining the optimal reverse denoising distribution in closed form, with mean and variance expressed directly in terms of single-objective base models. We prove that this denoising-time objective is exactly equivalent to the step-level RL fine-tuning, introducing no approximation error. Moreover, we provide numerical results, which indicate our method outperforms existing denoising-time approaches.

Catastrophic forgetting remains a primary hurdle in sequential task learning for artificial neural networks. We propose a silicon-native modular architecture that achieves structural parameter isolation using Task-Specific Experts and a distributed, outlier-based Gatekeeper. Moving beyond traditional sequential consolidation, our framework utilizes a Simultaneous Pipeline where Teacher learning, Student distillation, and Router manifold acquisition occur in parallel while raw data is present in a localized training session. This approach ensures computational efficiency and complies with privacy mandates like GDPR by deleting raw data as soon as a task is learned. We demonstrate that a Tight-Bottleneck Autoencoder (TB-AE) can effectively distinguish semantically crowded manifolds in high-dimensional latent spaces, overcoming the posterior collapse inherent to standard variational methods. By establishing strict topological boundaries, our TB-AE resolves latent space crowding in 4096-D LLM embeddings to provide a robust, unsupervised novelty signal. Furthermore, we validate an Autonomous Retrieval mechanism that confidently identifies returning manifolds, enabling stable lifelong learning without redundant module instantiation. Empirical results demonstrate that our ``Live Distillation'' approach acts as a natural regularizer, achieving strong retention across computer vision and natural language processing domains without suffering a student fidelity gap.

Rural environmental risks are shaped by place-based conditions (e.g., housing quality, road access, land-surface patterns), yet standard vulnerability indices are coarse and provide limited insight into risk contexts. We propose SatBLIP, a satellite-specific vision-language framework for rural context understanding and feature identification that predicts county-level Social Vulnerability Index (SVI). SatBLIP addresses limitations of prior remote sensing pipelines-handcrafted features, manual virtual audits, and natural-image-trained VLMs-by coupling contrastive image-text alignment with bootstrapped captioning tailored to satellite semantics. We use GPT-4o to generate structured descriptions of satellite tiles (roof type/condition, house size, yard attributes, greenery, and road context), then fine-tune a satellite-adapted BLIP model to generate captions for unseen images. Captions are encoded with CLIP and fused with LLM-derived embeddings via attention for SVI estimation under spatial aggregation. Using SHAP, we identify salient attributes (e.g., roof form/condition, street width, vegetation, cars/open space) that consistently drive robust predictions, enabling interpretable mapping of rural risk environments.

AI tools increasingly guide targeted interventions in healthcare, education, and recruiting. Algorithms score individuals, trigger outreach to those above a threshold (e.g., high-risk or high-value), and encourage them to request service; then providers deliver service to those who request. Standard practice sets the threshold and selects the algorithm to maximize predictive accuracy, assuming that better predictions yield better outcomes. We show that this approach is suboptimal when limited service capacity and probabilistic behavioral responses influence who receives service. In such settings, the optimal score threshold must balance two effects: ensuring all capacity is filled (utilization) and ensuring high-value individuals are served despite competition between requests (cannibalization). We characterize the optimal threshold and prove that policies based solely on predictive accuracy are generally suboptimal. Further, because optimal thresholds vary with service capacity, algorithm selection metrics like AUC, which weight all thresholds equally, are misaligned with operational performance. We introduce a new metric--Operational AUC (OpAUC)--and show it leads to optimal algorithm selection. Finally, we conduct a case study on sepsis early warning data and illustrate the magnitude of improvement that can be achieved from improved threshold and algorithm selection.

Multimodal language models systematically underperform on visual perception tasks, yet the structure underlying this failure remains poorly understood. We propose centroid replacement, collapsing each token to its nearest K-means centroid, as a controlled probe for modal dependence. Across seven models spanning three architecture families, erasing text centroid structure costs 4$\times$ more accuracy than erasing visual centroid structure, exposing a universal imbalance where language representations overshadow vision even on tasks that demand visual reasoning. We exploit this asymmetry through text centroid contrastive decoding, recovering up to +16.9% accuracy on individual tasks by contrastively decoding against a text-centroid-erased reference. This intervention varies meaningfully with training approaches: standard fine-tuned models show larger gains (+5.6% on average) than preference-optimized models (+1.5% on average). Our findings suggest that modal competition is structurally localized, correctable at inference time without retraining, and quantifiable as a diagnostic signal to guide future multimodal training.

Large language models still struggle with reliable long-term conversational memory: simply enlarging context windows or applying naive retrieval often introduces noise and destabilizes responses. We present APEX-MEM, a conversational memory system that combines three key innovations: (1) a property graph which uses domain-agnostic ontology to structure conversations as temporally grounded events in an entity-centric framework, (2) append-only storage that preserves the full temporal evolution of information, and (3) a multi-tool retrieval agent that understands and resolves conflicting or evolving information at query time, producing a compact and contextually relevant memory summary. This retrieval-time resolution preserves the full interaction history while suppressing irrelevant details. APEX-MEM achieves 88.88% accuracy on LOCOMO's Question Answering task and 86.2% on LongMemEval, outperforming state-of-the-art session-aware approaches and demonstrating that structured property graphs enable more temporally coherent long-term conversational reasoning.

Women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) face substantially elevated risks of body image distress, disordered eating, and metabolic challenges, yet existing natural language processing approaches for detecting these conditions lack transparency and cannot identify co-occurring presentations. We developed small, open-source language models to automatically detect this triple burden in social media posts with grounded explainability. We collected 1,000 PCOS-related posts from six subreddits, with two trained annotators labeling posts using guidelines operationalizing Lee et al. (2017) clinical framework. Three models (Gemma-2-2B, Qwen3-1.7B, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B) were fine-tuned using Low-Rank Adaptation to generate structured explanations with textual evidence. The best model achieved 75.3 percent exact match accuracy on 150 held-out posts, with robust comorbidity detection and strong explainability. Performance declined with diagnostic complexity, indicating their best use is for screening rather than autonomous diagnosis.

Online A/B testing at scale relies on proxy metrics -- short-term, easily-measured signals used in place of slow-moving long-term outcomes. When the proxy-outcome relationship is heterogeneous across user segments, aggregate correlation can mask directional failures akin to Simpson's Paradox, leading to costly ship/no-ship errors. We introduce PROXIMA (Proxy Metric Validation Framework for Online Experiments), a lightweight diagnostic framework that scores proxy reliability through a composite of three complementary dimensions: normalised effect correlation, directional accuracy, and segment-level fragility rate. Unlike surrogate-index approaches that predict long-term treatment effects, PROXIMA directly audits whether a candidate proxy leads to correct launch decisions and flags the user segments where it fails. We validate PROXIMA on two public datasets -- the Criteo Uplift corpus (14M observations, advertising) and KuaiRec (7K users, video recommendation) -- using 80 simulated A/B tests. Early engagement metrics achieve a composite reliability of 0.80 on Criteo and 0.62 on KuaiRec, yielding 98.4% average decision agreement with an oracle policy. Fragility analysis reveals that recommendation domains exhibit substantially higher segment-level heterogeneity (68% fragility) than advertising (13%), yet directional accuracy remains above 96% in both cases. A sensitivity analysis over the weight space confirms that no single component suffices and that the composite provides substantially better discrimination between reliable and unreliable proxies than correlation alone. Code and reproduction scripts are available at: https://github.com/Avinash-Amudala/PROXIMA

As search depth increases in autonomous reasoning and embodied planning, the candidate action space expands exponentially, heavily taxing computational budgets. While heuristic pruning is a common countermeasure, it operates without formal safety guarantees when surrogate models (like LLMs) exhibit systematic evaluation biases. This paper frames the node expansion process as a localized Best-Arm Identification (BAI) problem over dynamic frontiers, subject to a bounded systematic bias $L$. By inverting the Lambert W function, we establish an additive sample complexity of $\mathcal{O}((Δ-4L)^{-2})$, which indicates that safe node elimination is only feasible when the empirical reward gap exceeds $4L$. We complement this with an information-theoretic lower bound of $Ω((Δ-2L)^{-2})$ to confirm the structural limits of biased search. Subsequent evaluations on both synthetic trees and complex reasoning tasks demonstrate that adhering to this local safety boundary successfully preserves optimal trajectories while maximizing sample allocation efficiency.

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly operate in settings that require reliable long-context understanding, such as retrieval-augmented generation and multi-document reasoning. A common strategy is to fine-tune pretrained short-context models at the target sequence length. However, we find that standard long-context adaptation can remain brittle: model accuracy depends strongly on the absolute placement of relevant evidence, exhibiting high positional variance even when controlling for task format and difficulty. We propose RoPE-Perturbed Self-Distillation, a training regularizer that improves positional robustness. The core idea is to form alternative "views" of the same training sequence by perturbing its RoPE indices -- effectively moving parts of the context to different positions -- and to train the model to produce consistent predictions across views via self-distillation. This encourages reliance on semantic signals instead of brittle position dependencies. Experiments on long-context adaptation of Llama-3-8B and Qwen-3-4B demonstrate consistent gains on long-context benchmarks, including up to 12.04% improvement on RULER-64K for Llama-3-8B and 2.71% on RULER-256K for Qwen-3-4B after SFT, alongside improved length extrapolation beyond the training context window.

We introduce path-sampled integrated gradients (PS-IG), a framework that generalizes feature attribution by computing the expected value over baselines sampled along the linear interpolation path. We prove that PS-IG is mathematically equivalent to path-weighted integrated gradients, provided the weighting function matches the cumulative distribution function of the sampling density. This equivalence allows the stochastic expectation to be evaluated via a deterministic Riemann sum, improving the error convergence rate from $O(m^{-1/2})$ to $O(m^{-1})$ for smooth models. Furthermore, we demonstrate analytically that PS-IG functions as a variance-reducing filter against gradient noise - strictly lowering attribution variance by a factor of 1/3 under uniform sampling - while preserving key axiomatic properties such as linearity and implementation invariance.

Synaptic plasticity is metabolically expensive, yet animals continuously update their internal models without exhausting energy reserves. However, when artificial neural networks are trained, the network parameters are typically updated on every sample that is presented, even if the sample was classified correctly. Inspired by the human negativity bias and error-related negativity, we propose 'memorized mistake-gated learning' -- a biologically plausible plasticity rule where synaptic updates are strictly gated by current and past classification errors. This reduces the number of updates the network needs to make by $50\%\sim80\%$. Mistake gating is particularly well suited in two cases: 1) For incremental learning where new knowledge is acquired on a background of pre-existing knowledge, 2) For online learning scenarios when data needs to be stored for later replay, as mistake-gating reduces storage buffer requirements. The algorithm can be implemented in a few lines of code, adds no hyper-parameters, and comes at negligible computational overhead. Learning on mistakes is an energy efficient and biologically relevant modification to commonly used learning rules that is well suited for continual learning.

Gradient saliency from deep sequence models surfaces candidate biomarkers efficiently, but the resulting gene lists are contaminated by tissue-composition confounders that degrade downstream classifiers. We study whether LLM chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning can faithfully filter these confounders, and whether reasoning quality drives downstream performance. We train a Mamba SSM on TCGA-BRCA RNA-seq and extract the top-50 genes by gradient saliency; DeepSeek-R1 evaluates every candidate with structured CoT to produce a final 17-gene set. The raw 50-gene saliency set (no LLM) performs worse than a 5,000-gene variance baseline (AUC 0.832 vs. 0.903), while the LLM-filtered set surpasses it (AUC 0.927), using 294x fewer features. A faithfulness audit (COSMIC CGC, OncoKB, PAM50) reveals only 6 of 17 selected genes (35.3%) are validated BRCA biomarkers, yet 10 of 16 known BRCA genes in the input were missed - including FOXA1. This gap between downstream performance and reasoning faithfulness suggests selective faithfulness: targeted confounder removal is sufficient for performance gains even without comprehensive recall.

Key Opinion Leader (KOL) discourse on social media is widely consumed as investment guidance, yet turning it into executable trading strategies without injecting assumptions about unspecified execution decisions remains an open problem. We observe that the gaps in KOL statements are not random deficiencies but a structured separation: KOLs express directional intent (what to buy or sell and why) while leaving execution decisions (when, how much, how long) systematically unspecified. Building on this observation, we propose an intent-preserving policy completion framework that treats KOL discourse as a partial trading policy and uses offline reinforcement learning to complete the missing execution decisions around the KOL-expressed intent. Experiments on multimodal KOL discourse from YouTube and X (2022-2025) show that KICL achieves the best return and Sharpe ratio on both platforms while maintaining zero unsupported entries and zero directional reversals, and ablations confirm that the full framework yields an 18.9% return improvement over the KOL-aligned baseline.

Diffusion-model inference and overdamped Langevin dynamics are formally identical. A physical substrate that encodes the score function therefore equilibrates to the correct output by thermodynamics alone, requiring no digital arithmetic during inference and potentially achieving a $10{,}000\times$ reduction in energy relative to a GPU. Two fundamental barriers have until now prevented this equivalence from being realized at production scale: non-local skip connections, which locally coupled analog substrates cannot represent, and input conditioning, in which the coupling constants carry roughly $2{,}600\times$ too little signal to anchor the system to a specific input. We resolve both obstacles. \emph{Hierarchical bilinear coupling} encodes U-Net skip connections as rank-$k$ inter-module interactions derived directly from the singular structure of the encoder and decoder Gram matrices, requiring only $O(Dk)$ physical connections instead of $O(D^2)$. A \emph{minimal digital interface} -- a 4-dimensional bottleneck encoder together with a 16-unit transfer network, totalling \textbf{2,560 parameters} -- overcomes the conditioning barrier. When evaluated on activations drawn from a trained denoising U-Net, the complete system attains a decoder cosine similarity of \textbf{0.9906} against an oracle upper bound of 1.0000, while preserving theoretical net energy savings of approximately $10^7\times$ over GPU inference. These results constitute the first demonstration of trained-weight, production-scale thermodynamic diffusion inference.

Applying kernel methods to matchings is challenging due to their discrete, non-Euclidean nature. In this paper, we develop a principled framework for constructing geometric kernels that respect the natural geometry of the space of matchings. To this end, we first provide a complete characterization of stationary kernels, i.e. kernels that respect the inherent symmetries of this space. Because the class of stationary kernels is too broad, we specifically focus on the heat and Matérn kernel families, adding an appropriate inductive bias of smoothness to stationarity. While these families successfully extend widely popular Euclidean kernels to matchings, evaluating them naively incurs a prohibitive super-exponential computational cost. To overcome this difficulty, we introduce and analyze a novel, sub-exponential algorithm leveraging zonal polynomials for efficient kernel evaluation. Finally, motivated by the known bijective correspondence between matchings and phylogenetic trees-a crucial data modality in biology-we explore whether our framework can be seamlessly transferred to the space of trees, establishing novel negative results and identifying a significant open problem.

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance and have revolutionized NLP, but their lack of explainability keeps them treated as black boxes, limiting their use in domains that demand transparency and trust. A promising direction to address this issue is post-hoc text-based explanations, which aim to explain model decisions in natural language. Prior work has focused on generating convincing rationales that appear to be subjectively faithful, but it remains unclear whether these explanations are epistemically faithful, whether they reflect the internal evidence the model actually relied on for its decision. In this paper, we first assess the epistemic faithfulness of LLM-generated explanations via counterfactuals and show that they are often unfaithful. We then introduce a training-free method that enhances faithfulness by guiding explanation generation through attention-level interventions, informed by token-level heatmaps extracted via a faithful attribution method. This method significantly improves epistemic faithfulness across multiple models, benchmarks, and prompts.

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit hallucinations due to their inability to accurately perceive their own knowledge boundaries. Existing abstention fine-tuning methods typically partition datasets directly based on response accuracy, causing models to suffer from severe label noise near the decision boundaries and consequently exhibit high rates of abstentions or hallucinations. This paper adopts a latent space representation perspective, revealing a "gray zone" near the decision hyperplane where internal belief ambiguity constitutes the core performance bottleneck. Based on this insight, we propose the **GeoDe** (**Geo**metric **De**noising) framework for abstention fine-tuning. This method constructs a truth hyperplane using linear probes and performs "geometric denoising" by employing geometric distance as a confidence signal for abstention decisions. This approach filters out ambiguous boundary samples while retaining high-fidelity signals for fine-tuning. Experiments across multiple models (Llama3, Qwen3) and benchmark datasets (TriviaQA, NQ, SciQ, SimpleQA) demonstrate that GeoDe significantly enhances model truthfulness and demonstrates strong generalization in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/Notbesidemoon/GeoDe.

We derive a robust update rule for the online infinite hidden Markov model (iHMM) for when the streaming data contains outliers and the model is misspecified. Leveraging recent advances in generalised Bayesian inference, we define robustness via the posterior influence function (PIF), and provide conditions under which the online iHMM has bounded PIF. Imposing robustness inevitably induces an adaptation lag for regime switching. Our method, which is called Batched Robust iHMM (BR-iHMM), balances adaptivity and robustness with two additional tunable parameters. Across limit order book data, hourly electricity demand, and a synthetic high-dimensional linear system, BR-iHMM reduces one-step-ahead forecasting error by up to 67% relative to competing online Bayesian methods. Together with theoretical guarantees of bounded PIF, our results highlight the practicality of our approach for both forecasting and interpretable online learning.

We tasked GPT-4.1 to read what baseball fans wrote about their game-day experience and predict the overall experience rating each fan gave on a 0-10 survey scale. The model received only the text of a single open-ended response. These AI predictions were compared with the actual experience ratings captured by the survey instrument across approximately 10,000 fan responses from five Major League Baseball teams. In total two-thirds of predicted ratings fell within one point of self-reported fan ratings (67% within +/-1, 36% exact match), and the predicted measurement was near-deterministic across three independent scoring runs (87% exact agreement, 99.9% within +/-1). Predicted ratings aligned most strongly with the overall experience rating (r = 0.82) rather than with any specific aspect of the game-day experience such as parking, concessions, staff, etc. However, predictions were systematically lower than self-reported ratings by approximately one point, and this gap was not driven by any single aspect. Rather, our analysis shows that self-reported ratings capture the fan's verdict, an overall evaluative judgment that integrates the entire experience. While predicted ratings quantify the impact of salient moments characterized as memorable, emotionally intense, unusual, or actionable. Each measure contains information the other misses. These baseline results establish that a simple, unoptimized prompt can directionally predict how fans rate their experience from the text a fan wrote and that a gap between the two numbers can be interpreted as a construct difference worth preserving rather than an error to eliminate.

Agentic systems built on large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used for complex security tasks, including binary reverse engineering (RE). Despite recent growth in popularity and capability, these systems continue to face limitations in realistic settings. Cutting-edge systems still fail in complex RE scenarios that involve obfuscation, timing, and unique architecture. In this work, we examine how agentic systems perform reverse engineering tasks with static, dynamic, and hybrid agents. Through an analysis of existing agentic tool usage, we identify several limitations, including token constraints, struggles with obfuscation, and a lack of program guardrails. From these findings, we outline current challenges and position future directions for system designers to overcome from a security perspective.

Large scale vision language models have shown promise in automating chest Xray interpretation, yet their clinical utility remains limited by a gap between model outputs and radiologist reasoning. Most systems optimize for semantic information without emulating how experts visually examine medical images, often overlooking critical findings or diverging from established diagnostic workflows. Radiologists follow structured protocols (e.g., the ABCDEF approach) that ensure all clinically relevant regions are systematically examined, reducing missed findings and supporting reliable diagnostic reasoning. We introduce GazeX, a vision language model that leverages radiologists' eye tracking data as a behavioral prior to model expert diagnostic reasoning. By incorporating gaze trajectories and fixation patterns into pretraining, GazeX learns to follow the spatial and temporal structure of radiologist attention and integrates observations in a clinically meaningful sequence. Using a curated dataset of over 30,000 gaze key frames from five radiologists, we demonstrate that GazeX produces more accurate, interpretable, and expert consistent outputs across radiology report generation, disease grounding, and visual question answering, utilizing 231,835 radiographic studies, 780,014 question answer pairs, and 1,162 image sentence pairs with bounding boxes. Unlike autonomous reporting systems, GazeX produces verifiable evidence artifacts, including inspection trajectories and finding linked localized regions, enabling efficient human verification and safe human AI collaboration. Learning through expert eyes provides a practical route toward more trustworthy, explainable, and diagnostically robust AI systems for radiology and beyond.

The modern news cycle has been fundamentally reshaped by the rapid exchange of information online. As a result, media framing shifts dynamically as new information, political responses, and social reactions emerge. Understanding how these narratives form, propagate, and evolve is essential for interpreting public discourse during moments of crisis. In this study, we examine the temporal and semantic dynamics of reporting for violent and catastrophic events using a large-scale corpus of 126,602 news articles collected from online publishers. We quantify narrative change through publication volume, semantic drift, semantic dispersion, and term relevance. Our results show that sudden events of impact exhibit structured and predictable news-cycle patterns characterized by rapid surges in coverage, early semantic drift, and gradual declines toward the baseline. In addition, our results indicate the terms that are driving the temporal patterns.

This manuscript introduces DharmaOCR Full and Lite, a pair of specialized small language models (SSLMs) for structured OCR that jointly optimize transcription quality, generation stability, and inference cost. It also presents DharmaOCR-Benchmark, a benchmark that covers printed, handwritten, and legal/administrative documents, and proposes a unified evaluation protocol that measures fidelity and structure while explicitly tracking text degeneration as a first-class benchmark metric (alongside unit cost). Beyond reporting degeneration rates, the manuscript empirically shows degeneration is not merely a quality failure, since it materially worsens production performance by increasing response time, reducing throughput, and inflating computational cost due to abnormally long generations. To the best of the author's knowledge, as a methodological contribution, this is the first application of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) for OCR, explicitly using degenerate generations as rejected examples to penalize looping behavior. Combined with Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for enforcing a strict JSON schema (header, margin, footer, and text), DPO consistently reduces degeneration rate across model families (up to 87.6% relative) while preserving or improving extraction quality. The resulting models, namely, DharmaOCR Full (7B) and DharmaOCR Lite (3B), set a new state-of-the-art on DharmaOCR-Benchmark, outperforming each open-source and commercial baseline model evaluated regarding extraction quality, reaching 0.925 and 0.911 scores with 0.40% and 0.20% degeneration rates. AWQ quantization reduced up to 22% per-page cost with negligible quality loss, enabling a strong quality-cost trade-off in comparison to proprietary OCR APIs and open-source alternatives.

To address high data traffic demands of sixth-generation (6G) networks, this paper proposes a novel architecture that integrates autonomous aerial vehicles (AAVs) and multi-functional reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (MF-RISs) as AM-RIS in fluid antenna (FA)-assisted full-duplex (FD) networks. The AM-RIS provides hybrid functionalities, including signal reflection, amplification, and energy harvesting (EH), potentially improving both signal coverage and sustainability. Meanwhile, FA facilitates fine-grained spatial adaptability at FD-enabled base station (BS), which complements residual self-interference (SI) suppression. We aim at maximizing the overall energy efficiency (EE) by jointly optimizing transmit DL beamforming at BS, UL user power, configuration of AM-RIS, and positions of the FA and AM-RIS. Owing to the hybrid continuous-discrete parameters and high dimensionality of the intractable problem, we have conceived a self-optimized multi-agent hybrid deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework (SOHRL), which integrates multi-agent deep Q-networks (DQN) and multi-agent proximal policy optimization (PPO), respectively handling discrete and continuous actions. To enhance self-adaptability, an attention-driven state representation and meta-level hyperparameter optimization are incorporated, enabling multi-agents to autonomously adjust learning hyperparameters. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed AM-RIS-enabled FA-aided FD networks empowered by SOHRL algorithm. The results reveal that SOHRL outperforms benchmarks of the case without attention mechanism and conventional hybrid/multi-agent/standalone DRL. Moreover, AM-RIS in FD achieves the highest EE compared to half-duplex, conventional rigid antenna arrays, partial EH, and conventional RIS without amplification, highlighting its potential as a compelling solution for EE-aware wireless networks.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated high proficiency on English-centric medical examinations, their performance often declines when faced with non-English languages and multimodal diagnostic tasks. This study protocol describes the development of EuropeMedQA, the first comprehensive, multilingual, and multimodal medical examination dataset sourced from official regulatory exams in Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal. Following FAIR data principles and SPIRIT-AI guidelines, we describe a rigorous curation process and an automated translation pipeline for comparative analysis. We evaluate contemporary multimodal LLMs using a zero-shot, strictly constrained prompting strategy to assess cross-lingual transfer and visual reasoning. EuropeMedQA aims to provide a contamination-resistant benchmark that reflects the complexity of European clinical practices and fosters the development of more generalizable medical AI.

Targeted amplicon panels are widely used in oncology diagnostics, but providing per-gene performance guarantees for copy number variant (CNV) detection remains challenging due to amplification artifacts, process-mismatch heterogeneity, and limited validation sample sizes. While Bayesian CNV callers naturally quantify per-sample uncertainty, translating this into the frequentist population-level guarantees required for clinical validation, coverage rates, false-positive bounds, and minimum detectable copy-number changes, is a fundamentally different inferential problem. We show empirically that even robust Bayesian credible intervals, including coarsened posteriors and sandwich-adjusted intervals, are severely miscalibrated on panels with small amplicon counts per gene. To address this, we propose a hybrid framework that evaluates Bayesian posterior functionals on validation samples and models the resulting squared losses with a Gamma distribution, yielding tolerance intervals with valid frequentist coverage. Three components make the method practical under real-world constraints: (1) imputation that removes the influence of true CNV-positive samples without requiring known ground truth, (2) regularization to address small sample variability, and (3) evidence-based stratification on the log model evidence to accommodate non-exchangeable noise profiles arising from process mismatch. Evaluated on two targeted amplicon panels using leave-one-out cross-validation, the proposed method achieves single-digit mean absolute coverage error across all genes under both process-matched and unmatched conditions, whereas Bayesian comparators exhibit mean absolute errors exceeding 60\% on clinically relevant genes such as ERBB2.

Tensor networks were developed in the context of many-body physics as compressed representations of multiparticle quantum states. These representations mitigate the exponential complexity of many-body systems by capturing only the most relevant dependencies. Due to the formal similarity between quantum entanglement and statistical correlations, tensor networks have recently been integrated in machine learning, operating both as alternative learning architectures and as decompositions of components of neural networks. The expectation is that the theoretical understanding of tensor networks developed within quantum many-body physics leads to novel methods that offer advantages in terms of computational efficiency, explainability, or privacy. Here we review the use of tensor networks in the context of machine learning, providing a critical assessment of the state of the art, the potential advantages, and the challenges that must be overcome.

Evaluating LLMs is challenging, as benchmark scores often fail to capture models' real-world usefulness. Instead, users often rely on ``vibe-testing'': informal experience-based evaluation, such as comparing models on coding tasks related to their own workflow. While prevalent, vibe-testing is often too ad hoc and unstructured to analyze or reproduce at scale. In this work, we study how vibe-testing works in practice and then formalize it to support systematic analysis. We first analyze two empirical resources: (1) a survey of user evaluation practices, and (2) a collection of in-the-wild model comparison reports from blogs and social media. Based on these resources, we formalize vibe-testing as a two-part process: users personalize both what they test and how they judge responses. We then introduce a proof-of-concept evaluation pipeline that follows this formulation by generating personalized prompts and comparing model outputs using user-aware subjective criteria. In experiments on coding benchmarks, we find that combining personalized prompts and user-aware evaluation can change which model is preferred, reflecting the role of vibe-testing in practice. These findings suggest that formalized vibe-testing can serve as a useful approach for bridging benchmark scores and real-world experience.

Search agents extend Large Language Models (LLMs) beyond static parametric knowledge by enabling access to up-to-date and long-tail information unavailable during pretraining. While reinforcement learning has been widely adopted for training such agents, existing approaches face key limitations: process supervision often suffers from unstable value estimation, whereas outcome supervision struggles with credit assignment due to sparse, trajectory-level rewards. To bridge this gap, we propose Contribution-Weighted GRPO (CW-GRPO), a framework that integrates process supervision into group relative policy optimization. Instead of directly optimizing process rewards, CW-GRPO employs an LLM judge to assess the retrieval utility and reasoning correctness at each search round, producing per-round contribution scores. These scores are used to rescale outcome-based advantages along the trajectory, enabling fine-grained credit assignment without sacrificing optimization stability. Experiments on multiple knowledge-intensive benchmarks show that CW-GRPO outperforms standard GRPO by 5.0\% on Qwen3-8B and 6.3\% on Qwen3-1.7B, leading to more effective search behaviors. Additional analysis reveals that successful trajectories exhibit concentrated contributions across rounds, providing empirical insight into search agent tasks.

We study behavior-regularized reinforcement learning (RL), where regularization toward a reference distribution (the dataset in offline RL or the base model in LLM RL finetuning) is essential to prevent value over-optimization caused by erroneous out-of-distribution extrapolation. Existing methods either rely on reparameterized policy gradient, which are difficult to scale to large generative models, or on reject sampling, which can be overly conservative when attempting to move beyond the behavior support. In this paper, we propose Value Gradient Flow (VGF), a scalable new paradigm for behavior-regularized RL. VGF casts behavior-regularized RL as an optimal transport problem that maps the reference distribution to the value-induced optimal policy distribution. We solve this transport problem via discrete gradient flow, where value gradients guide particles initialized from the reference distribution. Our analysis shows that VGF imposes regularization implicitly by controlling the transport budget. VGF eliminates explicit policy parameterization while remaining expressive and flexible, this enables adaptive test-time scaling by adjusting the transport budget. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VGF significantly outperforms prior methods, achieving state-of-the-art results on offline RL benchmarks (D4RL, OGBench) and LLM RL tasks. Code and runs can be found at https://ryanxhr.github.io/vgf.

Accurate detection and segmentation of glomeruli in kidney tissue are essential for diagnostic applications. Traditional deep learning methods primarily rely on semantic segmentation, which often fails to precisely delineate adjacent glomeruli. To address this challenge, we propose a novel glomerulus detection and segmentation model that emphasises boundary separation. Leveraging pathology foundation models, the proposed U-Net-based architecture incorporates a specialised attention decoder designed to highlight critical regions and improve instancelevel segmentation. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our approach surpasses state-of-the-art methods in both Dice score and Intersection over Union, indicating superior performance in glomerular delineation.

GUI grounding models report over 85% accuracy on standard benchmarks, yet drop 27-56 percentage points when instructions require spatial reasoning rather than direct element naming. Current benchmarks miss this because they evaluate each screenshot once with a single fixed instruction. We introduce GUI-Perturbed, a controlled perturbation framework that independently varies visual scenes and instructions to measure grounding robustness. Evaluating three 7B models from the same architecture lineage, we find that relational instructions cause systematic accuracy collapse across all models, a 70% browser zoom produces statistically significant degradation, and rank-8 LoRA fine-tuning with augmented data degrades performance rather than improving it. By perturbing along independent axes, GUI-Perturbed isolates which specific capability axes are affected-spatial reasoning, visual robustness, reasoning calibration-providing diagnostic signal that aggregate benchmarks cannot. We release the dataset, augmentation pipeline, and a fine-tuned model.

The rapid rise in AI conference submissions has driven increasing exploration of large language models (LLMs) for peer review support. However, LLM-based reviewers often generate superficial, formulaic comments lacking substantive, evidence-grounded feedback. We attribute this to the underutilization of two key components of human reviewing: explicit rubrics and contextual grounding in existing work. To address this, we introduce REVIEWBENCH, a benchmark evaluating review text according to paper-specific rubrics derived from official guidelines, the paper's content, and human-written reviews. We further propose REVIEWGROUNDER, a rubric-guided, tool-integrated multi-agent framework that decomposes reviewing into drafting and grounding stages, enriching shallow drafts via targeted evidence consolidation. Experiments on REVIEWBENCH show that REVIEWGROUNDER, using a Phi-4-14B-based drafter and a GPT-OSS-120B-based grounding stage, consistently outperforms baselines with substantially stronger/larger backbones (e.g., GPT-4.1 and DeepSeek-R1-670B) in both alignment with human judgments and rubric-based review quality across 8 dimensions. The code is available \href{https://github.com/EigenTom/ReviewGrounder}{here}.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is widely used for studying and diagnosing brain disorders, with functional connectivity (FC) matrices providing powerful representations of large-scale neural interactions. However, existing diagnostic models are trained either on a single site or under full multi-site access, making them unsuitable for real-world scenarios where clinical data arrive sequentially from different institutions. This results in limited generalization and severe catastrophic forgetting. This paper presents the first continual learning framework specifically designed for fMRI-based diagnosis across heterogeneous clinical sites. Our framework introduces a structure-aware variational autoencoder that synthesizes realistic FC matrices for both patient and control groups. Built on this generative backbone, we develop a multi-level knowledge distillation strategy that aligns predictions and graph representations between new-site data and replayed samples. To further enhance efficiency, we incorporate a hierarchical contextual bandit scheme for adaptive replay sampling. Experiments on multi-site datasets for major depressive disorder (MDD), schizophrenia (SZ), and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show that the proposed generative model enhances data augmentation quality, and the overall continual learning framework substantially outperforms existing methods in mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Our code is available at https://github.com/4me808/FORGE.

Large language models are typically post-trained using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), yet effectively unifying efficient knowledge injection with robust generalization remains challenging. In this work, we provide a training-dynamics analysis showing that SFT can be interpreted as a special case of policy gradient optimization with an extremely sparse implicit reward and unstable inverse-probability weighting, which together lead to single-path dependency, entropy collapse, and gradient explosion. Motivated by this diagnosis, we propose Group Fine-Tuning (GFT), a unified post-training framework that addresses these intrinsic limitations through two mechanisms: Group Advantage Learning, which constructs diverse response groups and derives normalized contrastive supervision to alleviate reward sparsity, and Dynamic Coefficient Rectification, which adaptively bounds inverse-probability weights to stabilize optimization while preserving efficient knowledge injection. Experiments demonstrate that GFT consistently surpasses SFT-based methods and yields policies that integrate more smoothly with subsequent RL training.

Modern information access ecosystems consist of mixtures of systems, such as retrieval systems and large language models, and increasingly rely on marketplaces to mediate access to models, tools, and data, making competition between systems inherent to deployment. In such settings, outcomes are shaped not only by benchmark quality but also by competitive pressure, including user switching, routing decisions, and operational constraints. Yet evaluation is still largely conducted on static benchmarks with accuracy-focused measures that assume systems operate in isolation. This mismatch makes it difficult to predict post-deployment success and obscures competitive effects such as early-adoption advantages and market dominance. We introduce Marketplace Evaluation, a simulation-based paradigm that evaluates information access systems as participants in a competitive marketplace. By simulating repeated interactions and evolving user and agent preferences, the framework enables longitudinal evaluation and marketplace-level metrics, such as retention and market share, that complement and can extend beyond traditional accuracy-based metrics. We formalize the framework and outline a research agenda, motivated by business and economics, around marketplace simulation, metrics, optimization, and adoption in evaluation campaigns like TREC.

The field of machine ethics aims to build Artificial Moral Agents (AMAs) to better understand morality and make AI agents safer. To do so, many approaches encode human moral intuition as a set of axioms on actions e.g., do not harm, you must help others. However, this introduces (at least) two limitations for future AMAs. First, it does not consider the agent's purposes in performing the action. Second, it assumes that we humans can enumerate our moral intuition. This paper explores formalizing a moral procedure that alleviates these two limitations. We specifically consider Kantian ethics and present a multi-sorted quantified modal logic we call the Formula of the Universal Law Logic (FULL). The FULL formalizes Kant's first formulation of the categorical imperative, the Formula of the Universal Law (FUL), and concepts such as causality and agency. We demonstrate on three cases from Kantian ethics that the FULL can reason to evaluate agents' actions for certain purposes without built-in moral intuition, given that it has sufficient (non-normative) background knowledge. Therefore, the FULL is a contribution towards more robust and autonomous AMAs, and a more formal understanding of Kantian ethics.

Driver drowsiness significantly impairs the ability to accurately judge safe braking distances and is estimated to contribute to 10%-20% of road accidents in Europe. Traditional driver-assistance systems lack adaptability to real-time physiological states such as drowsiness. This paper proposes a deep reinforcement learning-based autonomous braking system that integrates vehicle dynamics with driver physiological data. Drowsiness is detected from ECG signals using a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), selected through an extensive benchmark analysis of 2-minute windows with varying segmentation and overlap configurations. The inferred drowsiness state is incorporated into the observable state space of a Double-Dueling Deep Q-Network (DQN) agent, where driver impairment is modeled as an action delay. The system is implemented and evaluated in a high-fidelity CARLA simulation environment. Experimental results show that the proposed agent achieves a 99.99% success rate in avoiding collisions under both drowsy and non-drowsy conditions. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of physiology-aware control strategies for enhancing adaptive and intelligent driving safety systems.

This paper develops a unified Markov Decision Process (MDP) framework for optimising two recurring in-match decisions in T20 cricket, namely batting order selection and bowling plan assignment, directly in terms of win and defend probability rather than expected runs. A three-phase player profile engine (Powerplay, Middle, Death) with James-Stein shrinkage (a technique that blends a player's individual statistics toward the league average when their phase-specific data is sparse) is estimated from 1,161 IPL ball-by-ball records (2008-2025). Win/defend probabilities are evaluated using vectorised Monte Carlo simulation over N = 50,000 innings trajectories. Batting orders are evaluated by comparing all feasible arrangements of the remaining players and selecting the one that maximises win probability. Bowling plans are optimised through a guided search over possible over assignments, progressively improving the allocation while respecting constraints such as the prohibition on consecutive overs by the same bowler. Applied to two 2026 IPL matches, the optimal batting order improves Mumbai Indians' win probability by 4.1 percentage points (52.4% to 56.5%), and the optimal Gujarat Titans bowling plan improves defend probability by 5.2 percentage points (39.1% to 44.3%). In both cases, the observed sub-optimality is consistent with phase-agnostic deployment: decisions that appear reasonable under aggregate metrics are shown to be costly when phase-specific profiles are applied.

Personalized Large Language Models (LLMs) facilitate more natural, human-like interactions in human-centric applications. However, existing personalization methods are constrained by limited controllability and high resource demands. Furthermore, their reliance on static personality modeling restricts adaptability across varying situations. To address these limitations, we first demonstrate the existence of situation-dependency and consistent situation-behavior patterns within LLM personalities through a multi-perspective analysis of persona neurons. Building on these insights, we propose IRIS, a training-free, neuron-based Identify-Retrieve-Steer framework for advanced situational personality steering. Our approach comprises situational persona neuron identification, situation-aware neuron retrieval, and similarity-weighted steering. We empirically validate our framework on PersonalityBench and our newly introduced SPBench, a comprehensive situational personality benchmark. Experimental results show that our method surpasses best-performing baselines, demonstrating IRIS's generalization and robustness to complex, unseen situations and different models architecture.

Reward models are central to aligning large language models, yet they often overfit to spurious cues such as response length and overly agreeable tone. Most prior work weakens these cues directly by penalizing or controlling specific artifacts, but it does not explicitly encourage the model to ground preferences in the prompt's intent. We learn a decoder that maps a candidate answer to the latent intent embedding of the input. The reconstruction error is used as a signal to regularize the reward model training. We provide theoretical evidence that this signal emphasizes prompt-dependent information while suppressing prompt-independent shortcuts. Across math, helpfulness, and safety benchmarks, the decoder selects shorter and less sycophantic candidates with 0.877 accuracy. Incorporating this signal into RM training in Gemma-2-2B-it and Gemma-2-9B-it increases RewardBench accuracy from 0.832 to 0.868. For Best-of-N selection, our framework increases length-controlled win rates while producing shorter outputs, and remains robust to lengthening and mild off-topic drift in controlled rewrite tests.

Monitoring LLM safety at scale requires balancing cost and accuracy: a cheap latent-space probe can screen every input, but hard cases should be escalated to a more expensive expert. Existing cascades delegate based on probe uncertainty, but uncertainty is a poor proxy for delegation benefit, as it ignores whether the expert would actually correct the error. To address this problem, we introduce Calibrate-Then-Delegate (CTD), a model-cascade approach that provides probabilistic guarantees on the computation cost while enabling instance-level (streaming) decisions. CTD builds on a novel delegation value (DV) probe, a lightweight model operating on the same internal representations as the safety probe that directly predicts the benefit of escalation. To enforce budget constraints, CTD calibrates a threshold on the DV signal using held-out data via multiple hypothesis testing, yielding finite-sample guarantees on the delegation rate. Evaluated on four safety datasets, CTD consistently outperforms uncertainty-based delegation at every budget level, avoids harmful over-delegation, and adapts budget allocation to input difficulty without requiring group labels.