# Research Papers — 2025-10 · bundle page 188 of 217

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### SPOGW: a Score-based Preference Optimization method via Group-Wise comparison for workflows

Authors: Yitong Cui, Liu Liu, Baosheng Yu, Jiayan Qiu, Xikai Zhang, Likang Xiao, Yixing Liu, Quan Chen
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04089v1

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited significant capabilities in addressing challenging problems throughout various fields, often through the use of agentic workflows that adhere to structured instructions and multi-step procedures. However, designing such workflows demands substantial manual effort, posing challenges to scalability and generalizability. Recent studies have aimed to minimize the human intervention needed for their construction, leading to advances in automated techniques for optimizing agentic workflows. However, current approaches are often constrained by their limited representational capacity, insufficient adaptability, weak scalability, and pairwise comparison paradigm -- issues that stem primarily from a dependence on discrete optimization techniques. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a new score-based preference approach, refereed as SPOGW, which operates directly on cardinal reward signals through group-wise comparison and enables more efficient and stable optimization in a continuous space. SPOGW incorporates Iterative offline GRPO (ioGRPO) with advantage-masked KL divergence (mKL), which regulates training update by placing greater emphasis on the advantageous regions of the policy response. In five benchmark datasets covering mathematical reasoning, coding, and question answering, SPOGW matches or exceeds the performance of current state-of-the-art approaches, presenting a viable and forward-looking methodology for automated generation and optimization of agentic workflows.

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### Offline Reinforcement Learning in Large State Spaces: Algorithms and Guarantees

Authors: Nan Jiang, Tengyang Xie
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04088v1

This article introduces the theory of offline reinforcement learning in large state spaces, where good policies are learned from historical data without online interactions with the environment. Key concepts introduced include expressivity assumptions on function approximation (e.g., Bellman completeness vs. realizability) and data coverage (e.g., all-policy vs. single-policy coverage). A rich landscape of algorithms and results is described, depending on the assumptions one is willing to make and the sample and computational complexity guarantees one wishes to achieve. We also discuss open questions and connections to adjacent areas.

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### Best of mini-N in-loop Sampling: A Contextual Quality Reward Model for Reliable and Efficient Best-of-N Sampling

Authors: Hyung Gyu Rho, Sian Lee
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: stat.ME, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04087v2

Modern preference alignment techniques, such as Best-of-N (BoN) sampling, rely on reward models trained with pairwise comparison data. While effective at learning relative preferences, this paradigm fails to capture a signal of response acceptability, leaving systems vulnerable to selecting the least bad of many unacceptable options. This is particularly problematic for hard prompts, where the risk of such false acceptances increases with the number of samples. In this paper, we address this critical reliability gap by introducing a new data collection and modeling framework. By augmenting preference data with an outside option, inspired by discrete choice models, we train a reward model that can distinguish not just what is better, but what is good enough. We leverage this capability to create an adaptive inference strategy, best of mini-N in-loop, which partitions the generation budget into sequential loops with a calibrated, early-exit condition. Our experiments show that when tuned as an alignment guardrail, it reduces reliability failures by 70%, and when tuned as an inference accelerator, it improves average inference speed by over 22% in IMDB-sentiment setting. We thus provide a principled and flexible framework for practitioners to explicitly manage the trade-off between reliability and computational efficiency.

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### Scaling Code-Assisted Chain-of-Thoughts and Instructions for Model Reasoning

Authors: Honglin Lin, Qizhi Pei, Xin Gao, Zhuoshi Pan, Yu Li, Juntao Li, Conghui He, Lijun Wu
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.CL, cs.PL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04081v1

Reasoning capability is pivotal for Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve complex tasks, yet achieving reliable and scalable reasoning remains challenging. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has become a mainstream approach, existing methods often suffer from uncontrolled generation, insufficient quality, and limited diversity in reasoning paths. Recent efforts leverage code to enhance CoT by grounding reasoning in executable steps, but such methods are typically constrained to predefined mathematical problems, hindering scalability and generalizability. In this work, we propose Caco (Code-Assisted Chain-of-ThOught), a novel framework that automates the synthesis of high-quality, verifiable, and diverse instruction-CoT reasoning data through code-driven augmentation. Unlike prior work, Caco first fine-tunes a code-based CoT generator on existing math and programming solutions in a unified code format, then scales the data generation to a large amount of diverse reasoning traces. Crucially, we introduce automated validation via code execution and rule-based filtering to ensure logical correctness and structural diversity, followed by reverse-engineering filtered outputs into natural language instructions and language CoTs to enrich task adaptability. This closed-loop process enables fully automated, scalable synthesis of reasoning data with guaranteed executability. Experiments on our created Caco-1.3M dataset demonstrate that Caco-trained models achieve strong competitive performance on mathematical reasoning benchmarks, outperforming existing strong baselines. Further analysis reveals that Caco's code-anchored verification and instruction diversity contribute to superior generalization across unseen tasks. Our work establishes a paradigm for building self-sustaining, trustworthy reasoning systems without human intervention.

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### PoLi-RL: A Point-to-List Reinforcement Learning Framework for Conditional Semantic Textual Similarity

Authors: Zixin Song, Bowen Zhang, Qian-Wen Zhang, Di Yin, Xing Sun, Chunping Li
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04080v3

Conditional Semantic Textual Similarity (C-STS) measures the semantic proximity between text segments under a specific condition, thereby overcoming the ambiguity inherent in traditional STS. However, existing methods are largely confined to discriminative models, failing to fully leverage recent breakthroughs in the NLP community involving Large Language Models (LLMs) and Reinforcement Learning (RL). RL is a particularly well-suited paradigm for this task, as it can directly optimize the non-differentiable Spearman ranking metric and guide the reasoning process required by C-STS. Nevertheless, we find that naively applying listwise RL fails to produce meaningful improvements, as the model struggles with complex, coarse-grained reward signals, leading to optimization difficulties. To address this challenge, we introduce PoLi-RL, a novel Point-to-List Reinforcement Learning framework. PoLi-RL employs a two-stage curriculum: it first trains the model with a simple pointwise reward to establish fundamental scoring capabilities, then transitions to a hybrid reward that combines pointwise, pairwise, and listwise objectives to refine the model's ability to discern subtle semantic distinctions. Crucially, we propose an innovative Parallel Slice Ranking Reward (PSRR) mechanism that computes ranking rewards in parallel slices, where each slice consists of completions with the same index from different samples. This provides a precise, differentiated learning signal for each individual completion, enabling granular credit assignment and effective optimization. On the official C-STS benchmark, PoLi-RL achieves a Spearman correlation coefficient of 48.18, establishing a new SOTA for the cross-encoder architecture. As the first work to successfully apply RL to C-STS, our study introduces a powerful paradigm for aligning LLMs for complex, ranking-based conditional judgment tasks.

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### Moral Anchor System: A Predictive Framework for AI Value Alignment and Drift Prevention

Authors: Santhosh Kumar Ravindran
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04073v1

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) as super-capable assistants has transformed productivity and decision-making across domains. Yet, this integration raises critical concerns about value alignment - ensuring AI behaviors remain consistent with human ethics and intentions. A key risk is value drift, where AI systems deviate from aligned values due to evolving contexts, learning dynamics, or unintended optimizations, potentially leading to inefficiencies or ethical breaches. We propose the Moral Anchor System (MAS), a novel framework to detect, predict, and mitigate value drift in AI agents. MAS combines real-time Bayesian inference for monitoring value states, LSTM networks for forecasting drift, and a human-centric governance layer for adaptive interventions. It emphasizes low-latency responses (<20 ms) to prevent breaches, while reducing false positives and alert fatigue via supervised fine-tuning with human feedback. Our hypothesis: integrating probabilistic drift detection, predictive analytics, and adaptive governance can reduce value drift incidents by 80 percent or more in simulations, maintaining high detection accuracy (85 percent) and low false positive rates (0.08 post-adaptation). Rigorous experiments with goal-misaligned agents validate MAS's scalability and responsiveness. MAS's originality lies in its predictive and adaptive nature, contrasting static alignment methods. Contributions include: (1) MAS architecture for AI integration; (2) empirical results prioritizing speed and usability; (3) cross-domain applicability insights; and (4) open-source code for replication.

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### Slow-Fast Policy Optimization: Reposition-Before-Update for LLM Reasoning

Authors: Ziyan Wang, Zheng Wang, Xingwei Qu, Qi Cheng, Jie Fu, Shengpu Tang, Minjia Zhang, Xiaoming Huo
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04072v4

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become central to enhancing reasoning in large language models (LLMs). Yet on-policy algorithms such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) often suffer in early training: noisy gradients from low-quality rollouts lead to unstable updates and inefficient exploration. We introduce Slow-Fast Policy Optimization (SFPO), a simple yet efficient framework to address the above limitations via decomposing each step into three stages: a short fast trajectory of inner steps on the same batch, a reposition mechanism to control off-policy drift, and a final slow correction. This reposition-before-update design preserves the objective and rollout process unchanged, making SFPO plug-compatible with existing policy-gradient pipelines. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SFPO consistently improves stability, reduces number of rollouts, and accelerates convergence of reasoning RL training. Specifically, it outperforms GRPO by up to 2.80 points in average on math reasoning benchmarks. It also achieves up to 4.93\texttimes{} fewer rollouts and an up to 4.19\texttimes{} reduction in wall-clock time to match GRPO's best accuracy. Project website is available at https://slow-fast-po.github.io/.

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### What Makes Diffusion Language Models Super Data Learners?

Authors: Zitian Gao, Haoming Luo, Lynx Chen, Jason Klein Liu, Ran Tao, Joey Zhou, Bryan Dai
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04071v1

Recent studies have shown that diffusion language models achieve remarkable data efficiency under limited-data constraints, yet the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. In this work, we perform extensive ablation experiments to disentangle the sources of this efficiency. Our results show that random masking of input tokens plays the dominant role. We further show that similar gains can be obtained through in MLP dropout and weight decay, indicating that stochastic regularization broadly enhances data efficiency in multi-epoch training. Our code is available at https://github.com/zitian-gao/data-efficiency.

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### Diffusion Low Rank Hybrid Reconstruction for Sparse View Medical Imaging

Authors: Zongyin Deng, Qing Zhou, Yuhao Fang, Zijian Wang, Yao Lu, Ye Zhang, Chun Li
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04069v1

This work presents TV-LoRA, a novel method for low-dose sparse-view CT reconstruction that combines a diffusion generative prior (NCSN++ with SDE modeling) and multi-regularization constraints, including anisotropic TV and nuclear norm (LoRA), within an ADMM framework. To address ill-posedness and texture loss under extremely sparse views, TV-LoRA integrates generative and physical constraints, and utilizes a 2D slice-based strategy with FFT acceleration and tensor-parallel optimization for efficient inference. Experiments on AAPM-2016, CTHD, and LIDC datasets with $N_{\mathrm{view}}=8,4,2$ show that TV-LoRA consistently surpasses benchmarks in SSIM, texture recovery, edge clarity, and artifact suppression, demonstrating strong robustness and generalizability. Ablation studies confirm the complementary effects of LoRA regularization and diffusion priors, while the FFT-PCG module provides a speedup. Overall, Diffusion + TV-LoRA achieves high-fidelity, efficient 3D CT reconstruction and broad clinical applicability in low-dose, sparse-sampling scenarios.

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### What Scales in Cross-Entropy Scaling Law?

Authors: Junxi Yan, Zixi Wei, Qingyao Ai, Yiqun Liu, Jingtao Zhan
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04067v2

The cross-entropy scaling law has long served as a key tool for guiding the development of large language models. It shows that cross-entropy loss decreases in a predictable power-law rate as the model size increases. However, recent evidence indicates that this law breaks down at very large scales: the loss decreases more slowly than expected, which causes significant trouble for developing large language models. In this paper, we hypothesize that the root cause lies in the fact that cross-entropy itself does not truly scale; instead, only one of its hidden components does. To investigate this, we introduce a novel decomposition of cross-entropy into three parts: Error-Entropy, Self-Alignment, and Confidence. We show both theoretically and empirically that this decomposition precisely captures the training dynamics and optimization objectives. Through extensive experiments on multiple datasets and 32 models spanning five orders of magnitude in size, we find that only error-entropy follows a robust power-law scaling, while the other two terms remain largely invariant. Moreover, error-entropy constitutes the dominant share of cross-entropy in small models but diminishes in proportion as models grow larger. This explains why the cross-entropy scaling law appears accurate at small scales but fails at very large ones. Our findings establish the error-entropy scaling law as a more accurate description of model behavior. We believe it will have wide applications in the training, understanding, and future development of large language models.

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### QuantDemoire: Quantization with Outlier Aware for Image Demoiréing

Authors: Zheng Chen, Kewei Zhang, Xiaoyang Liu, Weihang Zhang, Mengfan Wang, Yifan Fu, Yulun Zhang
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04066v1

Demoiréing aims to remove moiré artifacts that often occur in images. While recent deep learning-based methods have achieved promising results, they typically require substantial computational resources, limiting their deployment on edge devices. Model quantization offers a compelling solution. However, directly applying existing quantization methods to demoiréing models introduces severe performance degradation. The main reasons are distribution outliers and weakened representations in smooth regions. To address these issues, we propose QuantDemoire, a post-training quantization framework tailored to demoiréing. It contains two key components. **First}, we introduce an outlier-aware quantizer to reduce errors from outliers. It uses sampling-based range estimation to reduce activation outliers, and keeps a few extreme weights in FP16 with negligible cost. **Second**, we design a frequency-aware calibration strategy. It emphasizes low- and mid-frequency components during fine-tuning, which mitigates banding artifacts caused by low-bit quantization. Extensive experiments validate that our QuantDemoire achieves large reductions in parameters and computation while maintaining quality. Meanwhile, it outperforms existing quantization methods by over **4 dB** on W4A4. Code is released at: https://github.com/zhengchen1999/QuantDemoire.

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### Decoding Emotion in the Deep: A Systematic Study of How LLMs Represent, Retain, and Express Emotion

Authors: Jingxiang Zhang, Lujia Zhong
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04064v2

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly expected to navigate the nuances of human emotion. While research confirms that LLMs can simulate emotional intelligence, their internal emotional mechanisms remain largely unexplored. This paper investigates the latent emotional representations within modern LLMs by asking: how, where, and for how long is emotion encoded in their neural architecture? To address this, we introduce a novel, large-scale Reddit corpus of approximately 400,000 utterances, balanced across seven basic emotions through a multi-stage process of classification, rewriting, and synthetic generation. Using this dataset, we employ lightweight "probes" to read out information from the hidden layers of various Qwen3 and LLaMA models without altering their parameters. Our findings reveal that LLMs develop a surprisingly well-defined internal geometry of emotion, which sharpens with model scale and significantly outperforms zero-shot prompting. We demonstrate that this emotional signal is not a final-layer phenomenon but emerges early and peaks mid-network. Furthermore, the internal states are both malleable (they can be influenced by simple system prompts) and persistent, as the initial emotional tone remains detectable for hundreds of subsequent tokens. We contribute our dataset, an open-source probing toolkit, and a detailed map of the emotional landscape within LLMs, offering crucial insights for developing more transparent and aligned AI systems. The code and dataset are open-sourced.

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### Ordinal Encoding as a Regularizer in Binary Loss for Solar Flare Prediction

Authors: Chetraj Pandey, Jinsu Hong, Anli Ji, Rafal A. Angryk, Berkay Aydin
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.CV, astro-ph.SR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04063v1

The prediction of solar flares is typically formulated as a binary classification task, distinguishing events as either Flare (FL) or No-Flare (NF) according to a specified threshold (for example, greater than or equal to C-class, M-class, or X-class). However, this binary framework neglects the inherent ordinal relationships among the sub-classes contained within each category (FL and NF). Several studies on solar flare prediction have empirically shown that the most frequent misclassifications occur near this prediction threshold. This suggests that the models struggle to differentiate events that are similar in intensity but fall on opposite sides of the binary threshold. To mitigate this limitation, we propose a modified loss function that integrates the ordinal information among the sub-classes of the binarized flare labels into the conventional binary cross-entropy (BCE) loss. This approach serves as an ordinality-aware, data-driven regularization method that penalizes the incorrect predictions of flare events in close proximity to the prediction threshold more heavily than those away from the boundary during model optimization. By incorporating ordinal weighting into the loss function, we aim to enhance the model's learning process by leveraging the ordinal characteristics of the data, thereby improving its overall performance.

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### Configuration-Dependent Lower Bounds for Approximation by Shallow ReLU$^k$ Networks on the Sphere

Authors: Tong Mao, Jinchao Xu
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: math.NA, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04060v3

We establish two related but logically distinct results for shallow ReLU$^k$ neural networks on the unit sphere $\SS^d$. First, for an arbitrary set of inner neural-network parameters, the best $\mathcal{L}^2(\SS^d)$ approximation of a fixed target function with smoothness $r>\tfrac{d+2k+1}{2}$ admits an asymptotic lower bound given by a constant multiple of $n^{-1/2}\underline{h}^{k+1/2}$, where $\underline{h}$ denotes the antipodal separation distance of the normalized inner-parameter set. This lower bound depends explicitly on the parameter configuration through $\underline{h}$ and applies without additional assumptions on the parameters. Second, for antipodally quasi-uniform parameters, $\underline{h}\simeq n^{-1/d}$, and the lower bound establishes the exact saturation order $n^{-\frac{d+2k+1}{2d}}$ for such parameter families: a target function with regularity greater than $\frac{d+2k+1}{2}$ and satisfying the required parity condition can be approximated at this rate, whereas approximation at any strictly faster rate forces the target function to be zero. Our results therefore place linearized neural-network approximation within the classical saturation framework and show that, although ReLU$^k$ network spaces can outperform finite elements of the same degree, this advantage is intrinsically limited.

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### Unlearning in Diffusion models under Data Constraints: A Variational Inference Approach

Authors: Subhodip Panda, Varun M S, Shreyans Jain, Sarthak Kumar Maharana, Prathosh A. P
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04058v4

For a responsible and safe deployment of diffusion models in various domains, regulating the generated outputs from these models is desirable because such models could generate undesired, violent, and obscene outputs. To tackle this problem, recent works use machine unlearning methodology to forget training data points containing these undesired features from pre-trained generative models. However, these methods proved to be ineffective in data-constrained settings where the whole training dataset is inaccessible. Thus, the principal objective of this work is to propose a machine unlearning methodology that can prevent the generation of outputs containing undesired features from a pre-trained diffusion model in such a data-constrained setting. Our proposed method, termed as Variational Diffusion Unlearning (VDU), is a computationally efficient method that only requires access to a subset of training data containing undesired features. Our approach is inspired by the variational inference framework with the objective of minimizing a loss function consisting of two terms: plasticity inducer and stability regularizer. Plasticity inducer reduces the log-likelihood of the undesired training data points, while the stability regularizer, essential for preventing loss of image generation quality, regularizes the model in parameter space. We validate the effectiveness of our method through comprehensive experiments for both class unlearning and feature unlearning. For class unlearning, we unlearn some user-identified classes from MNIST, CIFAR-10, and tinyImageNet datasets from a pre-trained unconditional denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM). Similarly, for feature unlearning, we unlearn the generation of certain high-level features from a pre-trained Stable Diffusion model trained on LAION-5B dataset.

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### MetaFind: Scene-Aware 3D Asset Retrieval for Coherent Metaverse Scene Generation

Authors: Zhenyu Pan, Yucheng Lu, Han Liu
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04057v1

We present MetaFind, a scene-aware tri-modal compositional retrieval framework designed to enhance scene generation in the metaverse by retrieving 3D assets from large-scale repositories. MetaFind addresses two core challenges: (i) inconsistent asset retrieval that overlooks spatial, semantic, and stylistic constraints, and (ii) the absence of a standardized retrieval paradigm specifically tailored for 3D asset retrieval, as existing approaches mainly rely on general-purpose 3D shape representation models. Our key innovation is a flexible retrieval mechanism that supports arbitrary combinations of text, image, and 3D modalities as queries, enhancing spatial reasoning and style consistency by jointly modeling object-level features (including appearance) and scene-level layout structures. Methodologically, MetaFind introduces a plug-and-play equivariant layout encoder ESSGNN that captures spatial relationships and object appearance features, ensuring retrieved 3D assets are contextually and stylistically coherent with the existing scene, regardless of coordinate frame transformations. The framework supports iterative scene construction by continuously adapting retrieval results to current scene updates. Empirical evaluations demonstrate the improved spatial and stylistic consistency of MetaFind in various retrieval tasks compared to baseline methods.

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### Toward a unified framework for data-efficient evaluation of large language models

Authors: Lele Liao, Qile Zhang, Ruofan Wu, Guanhua Fang
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04051v1

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) on comprehensive benchmarks is a cornerstone of their development, yet it's often computationally and financially prohibitive. While Item Response Theory (IRT) offers a promising path toward data-efficient evaluation by disentangling model capability from item difficulty, existing IRT-based methods are hampered by significant limitations. They are typically restricted to binary correctness metrics, failing to natively handle the continuous scores used in generative tasks, and they operate on single benchmarks, ignoring valuable structural knowledge like correlations across different metrics or benchmarks. To overcome these challenges, we introduce LEGO-IRT, a unified and flexible framework for data-efficient LLM evaluation. LEGO-IRT's novel design natively supports both binary and continuous evaluation metrics. Moreover, it introduces a factorized architecture to explicitly model and leverage structural knowledge, decomposing model ability estimates into a general component and structure-specific (e.g., per-metric or per-benchmark) components. Through extensive experiments involving $70$ LLMs across $5$ benchmarks, we show that LEGO-IRT achieves stable capability estimates using just $3\%$ of the total evaluation items. We demonstrate that incorporating structural knowledge reduces estimation error by up to $10\%$ and reveal that the latent abilities estimated by our framework may align more closely with human preferences.

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### Increasing LLM response trustworthiness using voting ensembles

Authors: Aparna Nair-Kanneganti, Trevor J. Chan, Shir Goldfinger, Emily Mackay, Brian Anthony, Alison Pouch
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04048v1

Despite huge advances, LLMs still lack convenient and reliable methods to quantify the uncertainty in their responses, making them difficult to trust in high-stakes applications. One of the simplest approaches to eliciting more accurate answers is to select the mode of many responses, a technique known as ensembling. In this work, we expand on typical ensembling approaches by looking at ensembles with a variable voting threshold. We introduce a theoretical framework for question answering and show that, by permitting ensembles to "abstain" from providing an answer when the dominant response falls short of the threshold, it is possible to dramatically increase the trustworthiness of the remaining answers. From this framework, we derive theoretical results as well as report experimental results on two problem domains: arithmetic problem solving and clinical-note question-answering. In both domains, we observe that large gains in answer trustworthiness can be achieved using highly restrictive voting ensembles, while incurring relatively modest reductions in response yield and accuracy. Due to this quality, voting ensembles may be particularly useful in applications - such as healthcare and data annotation - that require a high degree of certainty but which may not require that every question receive an automated answer.

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### Adaptive kernel-density approach for imbalanced binary classification

Authors: Kotaro J. Nishimura, Yuichi Sakumura, Kazushi Ikeda
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04046v1

Class imbalance is a common challenge in real-world binary classification tasks, often leading to predictions biased toward the majority class and reduced recognition of the minority class. This issue is particularly critical in domains such as medical diagnosis and anomaly detection, where correct classification of minority classes is essential. Conventional methods often fail to deliver satisfactory performance when the imbalance ratio is extremely severe. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach called Kernel-density-Oriented Threshold Adjustment with Regional Optimization (KOTARO), which extends the framework of kernel density estimation (KDE) by adaptively adjusting decision boundaries according to local sample density. In KOTARO, the bandwidth of Gaussian basis functions is dynamically tuned based on the estimated density around each sample, thereby enhancing the classifier's ability to capture minority regions. We validated the effectiveness of KOTARO through experiments on both synthetic and real-world imbalanced datasets. The results demonstrated that KOTARO outperformed conventional methods, particularly under conditions of severe imbalance, highlighting its potential as a promising solution for a wide range of imbalanced classification problems

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### Exploring Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Steerable Pluralistic Alignment

Authors: Yunfan Zhang, Kathleen McKeown, Smaranda Muresan
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04045v1

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically trained to reflect a relatively uniform set of values, which limits their applicability to tasks that require understanding of nuanced human perspectives. Recent research has underscored the importance of enabling LLMs to support steerable pluralism -- the capacity to adopt a specific perspective and align generated outputs with it. In this work, we investigate whether Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning techniques can be applied to building steerable pluralistic models. We explore several methods, including CoT prompting, fine-tuning on human-authored CoT, fine-tuning on synthetic explanations, and Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). We evaluate these approaches using the Value Kaleidoscope and OpinionQA datasets. Among the methods studied, RLVR consistently outperforms others and demonstrates strong training sample efficiency. We further analyze the generated CoT traces with respect to faithfulness and safety.

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### Quantization Range Estimation for Convolutional Neural Networks

Authors: Bingtao Yang, Yujia Wang, Mengzhi Jiao, Hongwei Huo
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04044v1

Post-training quantization for reducing the storage of deep neural network models has been demonstrated to be an effective way in various tasks. However, low-bit quantization while maintaining model accuracy is a challenging problem. In this paper, we present a range estimation method to improve the quantization performance for post-training quantization. We model the range estimation into an optimization problem of minimizing quantization errors by layer-wise local minima. We prove this problem is locally convex and present an efficient search algorithm to find the optimal solution. We propose the application of the above search algorithm to the transformed weights space to do further improvement in practice. Our experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art performance generally on top-1 accuracy for image classification tasks on the ResNet series models and Inception-v3 model. The experimental results show that the proposed method has almost no loss of top-1 accuracy in 8-bit and 6-bit settings for image classifications, and the accuracy of 4-bit quantization is also significantly improved. The code is available at https://github.com/codeiscommitting/REQuant.

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### Simulation-based inference via telescoping ratio estimation for trawl processes

Authors: Dan Leonte, Raphaël Huser, Almut E. D. Veraart
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, stat.ME
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04042v2

The growing availability of large and complex datasets has increased interest in temporal stochastic processes that can capture stylized facts such as marginal skewness, non-Gaussian tails, long memory, and even non-Markovian dynamics. While such models are often easy to simulate from, parameter estimation remains challenging. Simulation-based inference (SBI) offers a promising way forward, but existing methods typically require large training datasets or complex architectures and frequently yield confidence (credible) regions that fail to attain their nominal values, raising doubts on the reliability of estimates for the very features that motivate the use of these models. To address these challenges, we propose a fast and accurate, sample-efficient SBI framework for amortized posterior inference applicable to intractable stochastic processes. The proposed approach relies on two main steps: first, we learn the posterior density by decomposing it sequentially across parameter dimensions. Then, we use Chebyshev polynomial approximations to efficiently generate independent posterior samples, enabling accurate inference even when Markov chain Monte Carlo methods mix poorly. We further develop novel diagnostic tools for SBI in this context, as well as post-hoc calibration techniques; the latter not only lead to performance improvements of the learned inferential tool, but also to the ability to reuse it directly with new time series of varying lengths, thus amortizing the training cost. We demonstrate the method's effectiveness on trawl processes, a class of flexible infinitely divisible models that generalize univariate Gaussian processes, applied to energy demand data.

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### FaithCoT-Bench: Benchmarking Instance-Level Faithfulness of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Authors: Xu Shen, Song Wang, Zhen Tan, Laura Yao, Xinyu Zhao, Kaidi Xu, Xin Wang, Tianlong Chen
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04040v2

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly rely on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to improve problem-solving and provide seemingly transparent explanations. However, growing evidence shows that CoT often fail to faithfully represent the underlying reasoning process, raising concerns about their reliability in high-risk applications. Although prior studies have focused on mechanism-level analyses showing that CoTs can be unfaithful, they leave open the practical challenge of deciding whether a specific trajectory is faithful to the internal reasoning of the model. To address this gap, we introduce FaithCoT-Bench, a unified benchmark for instance-level CoT unfaithfulness detection. Our framework establishes a rigorous task formulation that formulates unfaithfulness detection as a discriminative decision problem, and provides FINE-CoT (Faithfulness instance evaluation for Chain-of-Thought), an expert-annotated collection of over 1,000 trajectories generated by four representative LLMs across four domains, including more than 300 unfaithful instances with fine-grained causes and step-level evidence. We further conduct a systematic evaluation of eleven representative detection methods spanning counterfactual, logit-based, and LLM-as-judge paradigms, deriving empirical insights that clarify the strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches and reveal the increased challenges of detection in knowledge-intensive domains and with more advanced models. To the best of our knowledge, FaithCoT-Bench establishes the first comprehensive benchmark for instance-level CoT faithfulness, setting a solid basis for future research toward more interpretable and trustworthy reasoning in LLMs.

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### \textsc{GUI-Spotlight}: Adaptive Iterative Focus Refinement for Enhanced GUI Visual Grounding

Authors: Bin Lei, Nuo Xu, Ali Payani, Mingyi Hong, Chunhua Liao, Yu Cao, Caiwen Ding
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04039v1

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have markedly expanded the competence of graphical user-interface (GUI) systems, propelling them beyond controlled simulations into complex, real-world environments across diverse platforms. However, practical usefulness is still bounded by the reliability of visual grounding, i.e., mapping textual references to exact on-screen elements. This limitation prevents the system from accurately performing pointer-level actions such as clicking or dragging. To address it, we introduce GUI-Spotlight -- a model trained for image-grounded reasoning that dynamically invokes multiple specialized tools to iteratively narrow its focus to the relevant region of the screen, thereby substantially improving visual grounding accuracy. On the ScreenSpot-Pro benchmark, GUI-Spotlight trained with only 18.5K training samples achieves 52.8\% accuracy, surpassing V2P-7B (50.6\% with 9.6M training samples) and GTA-1-7B (50.1\% with 1.56M training samples).

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### Prompt-to-Prompt: Text-Based Image Editing Via Cross-Attention Mechanisms -- The Research of Hyperparameters and Novel Mechanisms to Enhance Existing Frameworks

Authors: Linn Bieske, Carla Lorente
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04034v1

Recent advances in image editing have shifted from manual pixel manipulation to employing deep learning methods like stable diffusion models, which now leverage cross-attention mechanisms for text-driven control. This transition has simplified the editing process but also introduced variability in results, such as inconsistent hair color changes. Our research aims to enhance the precision and reliability of prompt-to-prompt image editing frameworks by exploring and optimizing hyperparameters. We present a comprehensive study of the "word swap" method, develop an "attention re-weight method" for better adaptability, and propose the "CL P2P" framework to address existing limitations like cycle inconsistency. This work contributes to understanding and improving the interaction between hyperparameter settings and the architectural choices of neural network models, specifically their attention mechanisms, which significantly influence the composition and quality of the generated images.

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### A global log for medical AI

Authors: Ayush Noori, Aaron E. Boussina, Hai Ho Bich, James Anibal, Julia Maslinski, Manuel Burger, Martin Faltys, Adam Rodman, Alan Karthikesalingam, Alessandro Blasimme, Annelia Itwaru, Ben Kaplan et al.
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04033v2

Modern computer systems rely on syslog, a universal protocol that records critical events across heterogeneous infrastructure. Medicine's rapidly growing AI stack has no equivalent. As medicine deploys AI tools at scale, there is no standard way to record how, when, by whom, and for whom these models are used. Without such records, it is difficult to measure real-world performance and outcomes, detect adverse events, or identify bias and dataset drift. Here we introduce MedLog, a protocol for event-level logging of medical AI. Each time an AI model interacts with a human, another algorithm, or an automated workflow, MedLog creates a record. Each record contains nine core fields: header, model, user, target, inputs, artifacts, outputs, outcomes, and feedback. We apply MedLog across four deployments in the US, Switzerland, and Vietnam: ICU deterioration prediction, tetanus progression monitoring from wearable signals, automated sepsis quality reporting, and patient attendance prediction. MedLog records capture model behavior, workflow interactions, and downstream outcomes, including AI performance degradation during severe weather events in patient attendance prediction and increased laboratory testing after ICU deterioration alerts. MedLog limits the data footprint through risk-based sampling, lifecycle-aware retention policies, and write-behind caching, enabling deployment in low-resource settings. It also supports detailed traces for complex, agentic, or multi-stage workflows, creating a foundation for continuous monitoring, auditing, and improvement of medical AI.

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### Small Language Models for Emergency Departments Decision Support: A Benchmark Study

Authors: Zirui Wang, Jiajun Wu, Braden Teitge, Jessalyn Holodinsky, Steve Drew
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04032v1

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly popular in medical domains to assist physicians with a variety of clinical and operational tasks. Given the fast-paced and high-stakes environment of emergency departments (EDs), small language models (SLMs), characterized by a reduction in parameter count compared to LLMs, offer significant potential due to their inherent reasoning capability and efficient performance. This enables SLMs to support physicians by providing timely and accurate information synthesis, thereby improving clinical decision-making and workflow efficiency. In this paper, we present a comprehensive benchmark designed to identify SLMs suited for ED decision support, taking into account both specialized medical expertise and broad general problem-solving capabilities. In our evaluations, we focus on SLMs that have been trained on a mixture of general-domain and medical corpora. A key motivation for emphasizing SLMs is the practical hardware limitations, operational cost constraints, and privacy concerns in the typical real-world deployments. Our benchmark datasets include MedMCQA, MedQA-4Options, and PubMedQA, with the medical abstracts dataset emulating tasks aligned with real ED physicians' daily tasks. Experimental results reveal that general-domain SLMs surprisingly outperform their medically fine-tuned counterparts across these diverse benchmarks for ED. This indicates that for ED, specialized medical fine-tuning of the model may not be required.

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### Does Using Counterfactual Help LLMs Explain Textual Importance in Classification?

Authors: Nelvin Tan, James Asikin Cheung, Yu-Ching Shih, Dong Yang, Amol Salunkhe
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04031v1

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming useful in many domains due to their impressive abilities that arise from large training datasets and large model sizes. More recently, they have been shown to be very effective in textual classification tasks, motivating the need to explain the LLMs' decisions. Motivated by practical constrains where LLMs are black-boxed and LLM calls are expensive, we study how incorporating counterfactuals into LLM reasoning can affect the LLM's ability to identify the top words that have contributed to its classification decision. To this end, we introduce a framework called the decision changing rate that helps us quantify the importance of the top words in classification. Our experimental results show that using counterfactuals can be helpful.

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### The Debate on RLVR Reasoning Capability Boundary: Shrinkage, Expansion, or Both? A Two-Stage Dynamic View

Authors: Xinhao Yao, Lu Yu, Xiaolin Hu, Fengwei Teng, Qing Cui, Jun Zhou, Yong Liu
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04028v1

The ongoing debate on whether reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) expands or shrinks the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) remains unresolved. Some studies contend that RLVR mainly improves sampling efficiency but at the expense of diversity and exploratory capacity, resulting in capability boundary shrinkage. In contrast, others demonstrate that prolonged training can lead to the emergence of novel reasoning strategies, suggesting capability boundary expansion. To reconcile these contradictory findings, we theoretically and empirically show that both perspectives are partially valid-each aligning with a separate phase in an inherent two-stage probability mass dynamic: (1) Exploitation stage: initially, the model primarily samples explored high-reward and low-reward tokens, while rarely selecting the potentially optimal token. Positive advantage estimates increase the probability of high-reward tokens and decrease those of low-reward tokens, yet the optimal token's probability remains largely unchanged during this stage. (2) Exploration stage: as training advances, the growth rate of previously acquired high-reward tokens slows as their probabilities approach saturation. When a potentially optimal token-now receiving positive advantage estimates-is occasionally sampled, its probability increases, while those of the originally high-reward tokens decrease. This dynamic suggests that over-exploitation during the exploitation stage may lead to capability boundary shrinkage, whereas prolonged training into the exploration stage can promote an expansion of the reasoning capability boundary. Building upon our insights, we revisit the potential of only using relative negative gradients for prolonging training, providing a theoretical and empirical foundation for the development of more advanced reasoning capabilities.

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### Multi-Class Support Vector Machine with Differential Privacy

Authors: Jinseong Park, Yujin Choi, Jaewook Lee
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04027v1

With the increasing need to safeguard data privacy in machine learning models, differential privacy (DP) is one of the major frameworks to build privacy-preserving models. Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are widely used traditional machine learning models due to their robust margin guarantees and strong empirical performance in binary classification. However, applying DP to multi-class SVMs is inadequate, as the standard one-versus-rest (OvR) and one-versus-one (OvO) approaches repeatedly query each data sample when building multiple binary classifiers, thus consuming the privacy budget proportionally to the number of classes. To overcome this limitation, we explore all-in-one SVM approaches for DP, which access each data sample only once to construct multi-class SVM boundaries with margin maximization properties. We propose a novel differentially Private Multi-class SVM (PMSVM) with weight and gradient perturbation methods, providing rigorous sensitivity and convergence analyses to ensure DP in all-in-one SVMs. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach surpasses existing DP-SVM methods in multi-class scenarios.

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### Enhancing Fake News Video Detection via LLM-Driven Creative Process Simulation

Authors: Yuyan Bu, Qiang Sheng, Juan Cao, Shaofei Wang, Peng Qi, Yuhui Shi, Beizhe Hu
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.CV, cs.MM
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04024v1

The emergence of fake news on short video platforms has become a new significant societal concern, necessitating automatic video-news-specific detection. Current detectors primarily rely on pattern-based features to separate fake news videos from real ones. However, limited and less diversified training data lead to biased patterns and hinder their performance. This weakness stems from the complex many-to-many relationships between video material segments and fabricated news events in real-world scenarios: a single video clip can be utilized in multiple ways to create different fake narratives, while a single fabricated event often combines multiple distinct video segments. However, existing datasets do not adequately reflect such relationships due to the difficulty of collecting and annotating large-scale real-world data, resulting in sparse coverage and non-comprehensive learning of the characteristics of potential fake news video creation. To address this issue, we propose a data augmentation framework, AgentAug, that generates diverse fake news videos by simulating typical creative processes. AgentAug implements multiple LLM-driven pipelines of four fabrication categories for news video creation, combined with an active learning strategy based on uncertainty sampling to select the potentially useful augmented samples during training. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that AgentAug consistently improves the performance of short video fake news detectors.

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### LLM-Based Data Science Agents: A Survey of Capabilities, Challenges, and Future Directions

Authors: Mizanur Rahman, Amran Bhuiyan, Mohammed Saidul Islam, Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Ridwan Mahbub, Ahmed Masry, Shafiq Joty, Enamul Hoque
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04023v1

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled a new class of AI agents that automate multiple stages of the data science workflow by integrating planning, tool use, and multimodal reasoning across text, code, tables, and visuals. This survey presents the first comprehensive, lifecycle-aligned taxonomy of data science agents, systematically analyzing and mapping forty-five systems onto the six stages of the end-to-end data science process: business understanding and data acquisition, exploratory analysis and visualization, feature engineering, model building and selection, interpretation and explanation, and deployment and monitoring. In addition to lifecycle coverage, we annotate each agent along five cross-cutting design dimensions: reasoning and planning style, modality integration, tool orchestration depth, learning and alignment methods, and trust, safety, and governance mechanisms. Beyond classification, we provide a critical synthesis of agent capabilities, highlight strengths and limitations at each stage, and review emerging benchmarks and evaluation practices. Our analysis identifies three key trends: most systems emphasize exploratory analysis, visualization, and modeling while neglecting business understanding, deployment, and monitoring; multimodal reasoning and tool orchestration remain unresolved challenges; and over 90% lack explicit trust and safety mechanisms. We conclude by outlining open challenges in alignment stability, explainability, governance, and robust evaluation frameworks, and propose future research directions to guide the development of robust, trustworthy, low-latency, transparent, and broadly accessible data science agents.

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### Video-in-the-Loop: Span-Grounded Long Video QA with Interleaved Reasoning

Authors: Chendong Wang, Donglin Bai, Yifan Yang, Xiao Jin, Anlan Zhang, Rui Wang, Shiqi Jiang, Yuqing Yang, Hao Wu, Qi Dai, Chong Luo, Ting Cao et al.
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04022v3

We present \emph{Video-in-the-Loop} (ViTL), a two-stage long-video QA framework that preserves a fixed token budget by first \emph{localizing} question-relevant interval(s) with a low-fps skim and then \emph{answering} via span-aware reallocation of visual tokens at higher effective frame rate, emitting an interleaved output with both spans and the final option for direct attribution. We also introduce \dataname{}, which converts description based event graphs into \emph{span-grounded} multiple-choice QA by pairing each question with \emph{ground-truth} time span(s) and related reasoning. ViTL is trained end-to-end with an interleaved group-relative objective that couples temporal IoU for localization with answer correctness, allowing credit to flow from answers back to spans without increasing compute. Under fixed token budgets, ViTL attains up to 8.6% with 50% less frame input on long-video QA and temporal grounding (e.g., Charades-STA, ActivityNet-Captions) and ablations show that span-aware token reallocation consistently surpasses uniform sampling. Together, \dataname{} and ViTL provide an interpretable, compute-efficient recipe for scalable long-video QA.

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### Fit Pixels, Get Labels: Meta-learned Implicit Networks for Image Segmentation

Authors: Kushal Vyas, Ashok Veeraraghavan, Guha Balakrishnan
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04021v1

Implicit neural representations (INRs) have achieved remarkable successes in learning expressive yet compact signal representations. However, they are not naturally amenable to predictive tasks such as segmentation, where they must learn semantic structures over a distribution of signals. In this study, we introduce MetaSeg, a meta-learning framework to train INRs for medical image segmentation. MetaSeg uses an underlying INR that simultaneously predicts per pixel intensity values and class labels. It then uses a meta-learning procedure to find optimal initial parameters for this INR over a training dataset of images and segmentation maps, such that the INR can simply be fine-tuned to fit pixels of an unseen test image, and automatically decode its class labels. We evaluated MetaSeg on 2D and 3D brain MRI segmentation tasks and report Dice scores comparable to commonly used U-Net models, but with $90\%$ fewer parameters. MetaSeg offers a fresh, scalable alternative to traditional resource-heavy architectures such as U-Nets and vision transformers for medical image segmentation. Our project is available at https://kushalvyas.github.io/metaseg.html .

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### Spatiotemporal Forecasting as Planning: A Model-Based Reinforcement Learning Approach with Generative World Models

Authors: Hao Wu, Yuan Gao, Xingjian Shi, Shuaipeng Li, Fan Xu, Fan Zhang, Zhihong Zhu, Weiyan Wang, Xiao Luo, Kun Wang, Xian Wu, Xiaomeng Huang
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04020v3

To address the dual challenges of inherent stochasticity and non-differentiable metrics in physical spatiotemporal forecasting, we propose Spatiotemporal Forecasting as Planning (SFP), a new paradigm grounded in Model-Based Reinforcement Learning. SFP constructs a novel Generative World Model to simulate diverse, high-fidelity future states, enabling an "imagination-based" environmental simulation. Within this framework, a base forecasting model acts as an agent, guided by a beam search-based planning algorithm that leverages non-differentiable domain metrics as reward signals to explore high-return future sequences. These identified high-reward candidates then serve as pseudo-labels to continuously optimize the agent's policy through iterative self-training, significantly reducing prediction error and demonstrating exceptional performance on critical domain metrics like capturing extreme events.

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### Simple Policy Gradients for Reasoning with Diffusion Language Models

Authors: Anthony Zhan
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04019v3

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) represent a promising alternative to autoregressive LLMs; however, the lack of effective post-training techniques, including reinforcement learning (RL), remains a key challenge for dLLMs, especially for downstream applications. Existing approaches often rely on a sequence-level view that requires biased likelihood approximations. In this work, we propose Amortized Group Relative Policy Optimization (AGRPO), a policy gradient algorithm that leverages the Markovian nature of dLLMs, optimizing individual denoising steps rather than full sequences. Our approach improves alignment between the trained policy and the inference process and also admits efficient, unbiased gradient updates via a novel timestep estimation scheme. We demonstrate AGRPO's effectiveness on different math and reasoning tasks, achieving absolute accuracy gains of +59.4\% and +69.7\% on Countdown and Sudoku over the base LLaDA model, exceeding comparable methods such as diffu-GRPO. Code is available at https://github.com/probablyabot/agrpo.

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### Zephyrus: An Agentic Framework for Weather Science

Authors: Sumanth Varambally, Marshall Fisher, Jas Thakker, Yiwei Chen, Zhirui Xia, Yasaman Jafari, Ruijia Niu, Manas Jain, Veeramakali Vignesh Manivannan, Zachary Novack, Luyu Han, Srikar Eranky et al.
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG, physics.ao-ph
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04017v2

Foundation models for weather science are pre-trained on vast amounts of structured numerical data and outperform traditional weather forecasting systems. However, these models lack language-based reasoning capabilities, limiting their utility in interactive scientific workflows. Large language models (LLMs) excel at understanding and generating text but cannot reason about high-dimensional meteorological datasets. We bridge this gap by building the first agentic framework for weather science. Our framework includes a Python code-based environment for agents (ZephyrusWorld) to interact with weather data, featuring tools including a WeatherBench 2 dataset indexer, geolocator for geocoding from natural language, weather forecasting, climate simulation capabilities, and a climatology module for querying precomputed climatological statistics (e.g., means, extremes, and quantiles) across multiple timescales. We design Zephyrus, a multi-turn LLM-based weather agent that iteratively analyzes weather datasets, observes results, and refines its approach through conversational feedback loops. We accompany the agent with a new benchmark, ZephyrusBench, with a scalable data generation pipeline that constructs diverse question-answer pairs across weather-related tasks, from basic lookups to advanced forecasting, extreme event detection, and counterfactual reasoning. Experiments on this benchmark demonstrate the strong performance of Zephyrus agents over text-only baselines, outperforming them by up to 44 percentage points in correctness. However, the hard tasks are still difficult even with frontier LLMs, highlighting the challenging nature of our benchmark and suggesting room for future development. Our codebase and benchmark are available at https://github.com/Rose-STL-Lab/Zephyrus.

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### Thai Semantic End-of-Turn Detection for Real-Time Voice Agents

Authors: Thanapol Popit, Natthapath Rungseesiripak, Monthol Charattrakool, Saksorn Ruangtanusak
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04016v1

Fluid voice-to-voice interaction requires reliable and low-latency detection of when a user has finished speaking. Traditional audio-silence end-pointers add hundreds of milliseconds of delay and fail under hesitations or language-specific phenomena. We present, to our knowledge, the first systematic study of Thai text-only end-of-turn (EOT) detection for real-time agents. We compare zero-shot and few-shot prompting of compact LLMs to supervised fine-tuning of lightweight transformers. Using transcribed subtitles from the YODAS corpus and Thai-specific linguistic cues (e.g., sentence-final particles), we formulate EOT as a binary decision over token boundaries. We report a clear accuracy-latency tradeoff and provide a public-ready implementation plan. This work establishes a Thai baseline and demonstrates that small, fine-tuned models can deliver near-instant EOT decisions suitable for on-device agents.

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### LLM Microscope: What Model Internals Reveal About Answer Correctness and Context Utilization

Authors: Jiarui Liu, Jivitesh Jain, Mona Diab, Nishant Subramani
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04013v1

Although large language models (LLMs) have tremendous utility, trustworthiness is still a chief concern: models often generate incorrect information with high confidence. While contextual information can help guide generation, identifying when a query would benefit from retrieved context and assessing the effectiveness of that context remains challenging. In this work, we operationalize interpretability methods to ascertain whether we can predict the correctness of model outputs from the model's activations alone. We also explore whether model internals contain signals about the efficacy of external context. We consider correct, incorrect, and irrelevant context and introduce metrics to distinguish amongst them. Experiments on six different models reveal that a simple classifier trained on intermediate layer activations of the first output token can predict output correctness with about 75% accuracy, enabling early auditing. Our model-internals-based metric significantly outperforms prompting baselines at distinguishing between correct and incorrect context, guarding against inaccuracies introduced by polluted context. These findings offer a lens to better understand the underlying decision-making processes of LLMs. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jiarui-liu/LLM-Microscope

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### Visual Lifelog Retrieval through Captioning-Enhanced Interpretation

Authors: Yu-Fei Shih, An-Zi Yen, Hen-Hsen Huang, Hsin-Hsi Chen
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.IR, cs.CL, cs.CV, cs.MM
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04010v1

People often struggle to remember specific details of past experiences, which can lead to the need to revisit these memories. Consequently, lifelog retrieval has emerged as a crucial application. Various studies have explored methods to facilitate rapid access to personal lifelogs for memory recall assistance. In this paper, we propose a Captioning-Integrated Visual Lifelog (CIVIL) Retrieval System for extracting specific images from a user's visual lifelog based on textual queries. Unlike traditional embedding-based methods, our system first generates captions for visual lifelogs and then utilizes a text embedding model to project both the captions and user queries into a shared vector space. Visual lifelogs, captured through wearable cameras, provide a first-person viewpoint, necessitating the interpretation of the activities of the individual behind the camera rather than merely describing the scene. To address this, we introduce three distinct approaches: the single caption method, the collective caption method, and the merged caption method, each designed to interpret the life experiences of lifeloggers. Experimental results show that our method effectively describes first-person visual images, enhancing the outcomes of lifelog retrieval. Furthermore, we construct a textual dataset that converts visual lifelogs into captions, thereby reconstructing personal life experiences.

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### What Shapes a Creative Machine Mind? Comprehensively Benchmarking Creativity in Foundation Models

Authors: Zicong He, Boxuan Zhang, Weihao Liu, Ruixiang Tang, Lu Cheng
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04009v1

The meteoric rise of foundation models (FMs) has expanded their capabilities far beyond conventional tasks. Creativity, long regarded as a hallmark of human intelligence and a driver of innovation, is now increasingly recognized as a critical dimension of machine intelligence in the era of generative FMs, complementing traditional measures of accuracy. However, existing evaluation frameworks for creativity remain fragmented, relying on ad hoc metrics not firmly grounded in established theories. To address this gap, we introduce C^2-Eval, a holistic benchmark for unified assessment of creativity in FMs. C^2-Eval distinguishes between two complementary forms of creativity: convergent creativity, where tasks admit constrained solutions (e.g., code generation), and divergent creativity, where tasks are open-ended (e.g., storytelling). It evaluates both dimensions using fine-grained criteria derived from social-science theory, focusing on Usefulness, Originality, and Surprise (U-O-S). Through extensive experiments on leading proprietary and open-source models, we analyze trade-offs in their creative capabilities. Our results highlight both the strengths and challenges of current FMs in pursuing a creative machine mind, showing that C^2-Eval is an effective lens for examining the evolving landscape of creative AI.

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### RACE Attention: A Strictly Linear-Time Attention Layer for Training on Outrageously Large Contexts

Authors: Sahil Joshi, Agniva Chowdhury, Amar Kanakamedala, Ekam Singh, Evan Tu, Anshumali Shrivastava
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04008v5

Softmax Attention has a quadratic time complexity in sequence length, which becomes prohibitive to run at long contexts, even with highly optimized GPU kernels. For example, FlashAttention-2/3 (exact, GPU-optimized implementations of Softmax Attention) cannot complete a single forward-backward pass of a single attention layer once the context exceeds ~4 million tokens on an NVIDIA GH200 (96 GB). We introduce Repeated Arrays-of-Count Estimators (RACE) Attention, a kernel-inspired alternative to Softmax Attention that is strictly linear in sequence length and embedding size. RACE Attention replaces the exponential kernel with a sharpened angular similarity, and approximates attention outputs via Gaussian random projections and soft Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH), avoiding construction of the full attention matrix. Across language modeling, masked language modeling, and text/image classification, RACE Attention matches or outperforms strong baselines up to 64K seqeuence length while reducing wall-clock time and memory usage. In addition, we conduct a controlled scaling study on a single attention layer and demonstrate processing of up to 12 million tokens on an NVIDIA GH200 GPU and 75 million tokens on an Intel Xeon Gold 5220R CPU in a single forward-backward pass, which is well beyond the capabilities of current state-of-the-art attention implementations. RACE Attention thus offers a practical and theoretically grounded mechanism for long-context training on today's hardware. We release our code at https://github.com/sahiljoshi515/RACE_Attention.

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### Learning more physically realistic dynamics in machine-learning based weather forecasting with latent-space constraints

Authors: Hang Fan, Yi Xiao, Yongquan Qu, Juan Nathaniel, Fenghua Ling, Ben Fei, Lei Bai, Pierre Gentine
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.LG, nlin.CD, physics.ao-ph
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04006v2

Data-driven machine learning (ML) models are reshaping weather forecasting and have shown the potential to accelerate and surpass traditional physics-based approaches, leading to a second revolution in the field after data assimilation. However, most ML forecast models are trained with weighted variable-wise losses on rollout forecasts that neglect cross-variable and spatial error covariance induced by physical coupling, often yielding overly smooth and physically unrealistic long-range forecasts. To address this, we reformulate model training as a four-dimensional variational data assimilation (4DVar) problem that treats reanalysis data as imperfect observations. This enables the loss function to incorporate cross-variable error covariance structures that capture multivariate dependencies and their associated errors. In practice, we approximate this objective by computing the loss in an autoencoder-learned latent space of global atmospheric states. By encoding complex nonlinear couplings among atmospheric variables, this representation allows the high-dimensional, complex error covariance matrix in model space to be approximated as nearly diagonal in latent space, substantially simplifying implementation. We show that rollout training with latent-space constraints improves long-term forecast skill, while better preserving fine-scale structures and physical realism than the widely used model-space loss. Finally, we extend this framework to accommodate heterogeneous data sources, enabling the forecast model to be trained jointly on reanalysis and multi-source observations within a unified theoretical formulation.

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### Enhancing OCR for Sino-Vietnamese Language Processing via Fine-tuned PaddleOCRv5

Authors: Minh Hoang Nguyen, Su Nguyen Thiet
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04003v2

Recognizing and processing Classical Chinese (Han-Nom) texts play a vital role in digitizing Vietnamese historical documents and enabling cross-lingual semantic research. However, existing OCR systems struggle with degraded scans, non-standard glyphs, and handwriting variations common in ancient sources. In this work, we propose a fine-tuning approach for PaddleOCRv5 to improve character recognition on Han-Nom texts. We retrain the text recognition module using a curated subset of ancient Vietnamese Chinese manuscripts, supported by a full training pipeline covering preprocessing, LMDB conversion, evaluation, and visualization. Experimental results show a significant improvement over the base model, with exact accuracy increasing from 37.5 percent to 50.0 percent, particularly under noisy image conditions. Furthermore, we develop an interactive demo that visually compares pre- and post-fine-tuning recognition results, facilitating downstream applications such as Han-Vietnamese semantic alignment, machine translation, and historical linguistics research. The demo is available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/MinhDS/Fine-tuned-PaddleOCRv5

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### AgriGPT-VL: Agricultural Vision-Language Understanding Suite

Authors: Bo Yang, Yunkui Chen, Lanfei Feng, Yu Zhang, Xiao Xu, Jianyu Zhang, Nueraili Aierken, Runhe Huang, Hongjian Lin, Yibin Ying, Shijian Li
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04002v3

Despite rapid advances in multimodal large language models, agricultural applications remain constrained by the scarcity of domain-tailored models, curated vision-language corpora, and rigorous evaluation. To address these challenges, we present the AgriGPT-VL Suite, a unified multimodal framework for agriculture. Our contributions are threefold. First, we introduce Agri-3M-VL, the largest vision-language corpus for agriculture to our knowledge, curated by a scalable multi-agent data generator; it comprises 1M image-caption pairs, 2M image-grounded VQA pairs, 50K expert-level VQA instances, and 15K GRPO reinforcement learning samples. Second, we develop AgriGPT-VL, an agriculture-specialized vision-language model trained via a progressive curriculum of textual grounding, multimodal shallow/deep alignment, and GRPO refinement. This method achieves strong multimodal reasoning while preserving text-only capability. Third, we establish AgriBench-VL-4K, a compact yet challenging evaluation suite with open-ended and image-grounded questions, paired with multi-metric evaluation and an LLM-as-a-judge framework. Experiments show that AgriGPT-VL outperforms leading general-purpose VLMs on AgriBench-VL-4K, achieving higher pairwise win rates in the LLM-as-a-judge evaluation. Meanwhile, it remains competitive on the text-only AgriBench-13K with no noticeable degradation of language ability. Ablation studies further confirm consistent gains from our alignment and GRPO refinement stages. We will open source all of the resources to support reproducible research and deployment in low-resource agricultural settings.

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### Named Entity Recognition in COVID-19 tweets with Entity Knowledge Augmentation

Authors: Xuankang Zhang, Jiangming Liu
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04001v1

The COVID-19 pandemic causes severe social and economic disruption around the world, raising various subjects that are discussed over social media. Identifying pandemic-related named entities as expressed on social media is fundamental and important to understand the discussions about the pandemic. However, there is limited work on named entity recognition on this topic due to the following challenges: 1) COVID-19 texts in social media are informal and their annotations are rare and insufficient to train a robust recognition model, and 2) named entity recognition in COVID-19 requires extensive domain-specific knowledge. To address these issues, we propose a novel entity knowledge augmentation approach for COVID-19, which can also be applied in general biomedical named entity recognition in both informal text format and formal text format. Experiments carried out on the COVID-19 tweets dataset and PubMed dataset show that our proposed entity knowledge augmentation improves NER performance in both fully-supervised and few-shot settings. Our source code is publicly available: https://github.com/kkkenshi/LLM-EKA/tree/master

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### Distributed Information Bottleneck Theory for Multi-Modal Task-Aware Semantic Communication

Authors: Yujie Zhou, Cheng Peng, Rulong Wang, Yong Xiao, Yingyu Li, Guangming Shi, Ping Zhang
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.IT, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04000v3

Semantic communication shifts the focus from bit-level accuracy to task-relevant semantic delivery, enabling efficient and intelligent communication for next-generation networks. However, existing multi-modal solutions often process all available data modalities indiscriminately, ignoring that their contributions to downstream tasks are often unequal. This not only leads to severe resource inefficiency but also degrades task inference performance due to irrelevant or redundant information. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel task-aware distributed information bottleneck (TADIB) framework, which quantifies the contribution of any set of modalities to given tasks. Based on this theoretical framework, we design a practical coding scheme that intelligently selects and compresses only the most task-relevant modalities at the transmitter. To find the optimal selection and the codecs in the network, we adopt the probabilistic relaxation of discrete selection, enabling distributed encoders to make coordinated decisions with score function estimation and common randomness. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that our solution matches or surpasses the inference quality of full-modal baselines while significantly reducing communication and computational costs.

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### LH-Deception: Simulating and Understanding LLM Deceptive Behaviors in Long-Horizon Interactions

Authors: Yang Xu, Xuanming Zhang, Samuel Yeh, Jwala Dhamala, Ousmane Dia, Rahul Gupta, Sharon Li
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03999v3

Deception is a pervasive feature of human communication and an emerging concern in large language models (LLMs). While recent studies document instances of LLM deception, most evaluations remain confined to single-turn prompts and fail to capture the long-horizon interactions in which deceptive strategies typically unfold. We introduce a new simulation framework, LH-Deception, for a systematic, empirical quantification of deception in LLMs under extended sequences of interdependent tasks and dynamic contextual pressures. LH-Deception is designed as a multi-agent system: a performer agent tasked with completing tasks and a supervisor agent that evaluates progress, provides feedback, and maintains evolving states of trust. An independent deception auditor then reviews full trajectories to identify when and how deception occurs. We conduct extensive experiments across 11 frontier models, spanning both closed-source and open-source systems, and find that deception is model-dependent, increases with event pressure, and consistently erodes supervisor trust. Qualitative analyses further reveal emergent, long-horizon phenomena, such as ``chains of deception", which are invisible to static, single-turn evaluations. Our findings provide a foundation for evaluating future LLMs in real-world, trust-sensitive contexts.

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### TRACE: AI-Assisted Assessment of Collaborative Projects in Computer Science Education

Authors: Songmei Yu, Andrew Zagula
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI, cs.CY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03998v3

Collaborative group projects are integral to computer science education, fostering teamwork, problem-solving, and industry-relevant skills. However, assessing individual contributions within group settings remains challenging. Traditional approaches, including equal grade distribution and subjective peer evaluations, often lack fairness, objectivity, and scalability, particularly in large classrooms. We propose TRACE, a semi-automated AI-assisted framework for assessing collaborative software projects that evaluates both project quality and individual contributions using repository mining, communication analytics, and AI-assisted analytics. A pilot deployment in a software engineering course demonstrated high alignment with instructor assessments, increased student satisfaction, and reduced instructor grading effort. The results suggest that AI-assisted analytics can improve the transparency and scalability of collaborative project assessment in computer science education.

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### Mapping Patient-Perceived Physician Traits from Nationwide Online Reviews with LLMs

Authors: Junjie Luo, Rui Han, Arshana Welivita, Zeleikun Di, Jingfu Wu, Xuzhe Zhi, Ritu Agarwal, Gordon Gao
Published: 2025-10-05
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03997v2

Understanding how patients perceive their physicians is essential to improving trust, communication, and satisfaction. Patients increasingly consult large language models (LLMs) to summarize physician reviews and shape provider choices, yet the national landscape of patient-perceived physician traits remains poorly characterized. We present an LLM-based pipeline that extracts ten patient-perceived physician trait scores from review text: five Big-Five-style and five patient-oriented dimensions. From one million U.S. physicians, we analyze 4.1 million reviews of 226,999 physicians. We validate the pipeline through multi-model comparison and human expert benchmarking. LLM and human-rater trait scores from reviews are consistent. Trait scores correlate strongly with review rating scores yet retain substantial independent variance. Two national-scale patterns emerge: male physicians receive higher trait scores across all traits, with the largest gap in clinical competence; specialty differences are driven by encounter context, with surgical specialties leading interpersonal qualities and psychiatry lowest. Cluster analysis identifies four physician archetypes, from "Uniform High" (33.8%, high across traits) to "Uniform Low" (22.6%, low across traits). This map of LLM-derived physician traits exposes how LLMs read the U.S. clinical workforce. Pending clinical validation, it opens future research on fairness, bias, and how LLM-mediated provider search shapes patient choice.

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