理解基因组深度学习模型学到了哪些调控序列基序，并带有统计误差保证，对于信任其在下游任务（如变异效应预测）中的使用至关重要。现有识别训练网络中哪些单元编码了人类可理解概念的方法分为两类。探索性方法对单元进行排序和可视化，但不提供统计保证，无法确保所选单元在整个输入群体中与预测目标相关。基于检验的方法仅检验单个单元或一个预定义单元集合，且不控制众多单元集合上的误差。我们引入 CUTTIE（Cluster-tree Unit Top-down Testing of Independence with Error control），它将每一层的单元聚类成一棵树，并通过条件独立性检验自顶向下检验这些簇，在控制族系误差率的同时定位关于目标的信息。由此，我们识别出携带关于目标信息且超出该层其余部分的簇。对于所识别簇中的单元，条件归因图随后揭示它们编码了哪些基序。在受控模拟中，该流程识别出其概念影响目标的簇。我们将该流程应用于一个从 DNA 序列预测细胞类型特异性染色质可及性的卷积模型，其中所识别簇中编码的概念映射到已知的调控基序。
Deploying small language models on resource-constrained hardware requires compression, yet practitioners lack systematic guidance on how quantization, pruning, and post-compression recovery interact when combined. We present a factorial ablation study evaluating 72 compression configurations across four SLM architectures (2.7B-7B parameters), extended with a 48-configuration ordering analysis, benchmark accuracy validation on 30 compressed models, and robustness checks including multi-seed validation and full-corpus perplexity evaluation. INT8 quantization is effectively lossless (<0.5% accuracy degradation), while NF4 quantization combined with L1 magnitude pruning causes model collapse in all 16 tested combinations. LoRA-based fine-tuning reduces degraded perplexity by up to 97% after aggressive pruning; an ablation against standard fine-tuning without a teacher model shows the recovery is driven by LoRA adaptation itself rather than the distillation signal. Compression ordering shows no significant effect among viable configurations (ANOVA p = 0.96) but determines viability for NF4+pruning combinations. INT8 quantization alone provides 40-45% memory reduction with no quality loss. On-device CPU deployment via llama.cpp confirms these findings transfer off the GPU: 4-bit quantization runs 46-54% faster than 8-bit for a perplexity difference under 0.5 points, while un-structured pruning yields no CPU latency or memory benefit, consistent with its dense storage format.
Tell an LLM negotiator to be "headstrong" and it should hold firm on price, but does that instruction retain the same behavior in every language? To test this, we use identical buyer and seller instances of Gemini 3.6 Flash to negotiate the same 12 CraigslistBargain scenarios in English and Korean. The pilot-scale 2 x 2 x 3 design crosses interaction language, seller urgency (none or strong), and buyer persona (cooperative, neutral, or headstrong), yielding 432 attempted negotiations. We call this property cross-lingual social-policy fidelity: whether a prompt-defined social policy produces the same behavioral effect regardless of interaction language. It often does not. Korean negotiations reached agreement far more often than English (77.3% vs. 52.5%, a 24.8-point gap, Holm-adjusted p = .0039), but only for neutral and headstrong buyers; cooperative buyers were already near-ceiling in both languages. Buyers' opening offers barely differed by language; the gap instead emerged later, through larger seller concessions and a smaller final gap in Korean, and agreed prices were also lower in Korean. Repeating the full design with Qwen3.7 Flash as both agents gives directional support: agreement was again higher in Korean (+13.9 points vs. Gemini's +24.8, with an interval whose lower bound is near zero), and sellers again conceded more. Pragmatic analysis reveals why: while both languages frequently featured face-threatening acts like rejections and counter-offers, Korean dialogue softened these threats with substantially more politeness mitigation, especially among sellers (11.7% vs. 3.6%). These results show that such a policy can produce different simulated negotiation behavior, not just different wording, when only the interaction language changes.
Dense labels of the aorta in CT are slow to draw, and the public aortic CT datasets that could stand in for them each label different structures under their own conventions. Large language model (LLM) agents can now write code and read images. We asked whether such a model labels these scans better as a free-form agent that writes its own segmentation code, or inside a harness, where an automated pass labels the scan and the model reviews the result. We built a harness, Taurus, and compared it with free-form agents by blind label recovery: we withheld the human labels of six public datasets (939 volumes) and scored every approach against each dataset's own classes. In the first version of Taurus, the model's review raised the primary metric on only two of six datasets, by less than the noise between two reviews of the same case. A free-form agent running Claude Opus 5.5 scored higher on most datasets. Moving what the free-form agents did well into the automated pass then carried most of the gain on 38 held-out cases. The final version smooths the label surfaces with a fixed rule and checks for the large errors the automated pass tends to make, such as an aneurysm drawn to half its size. Each check that fires puts a multiple-choice question to the model, with candidate corrections drawn on the scan. It matched the surface smoothness of the human references, and in the primary metric we found no difference from the free-form Opus agent, at under half its cost, $1.22 against $2.71 per case. Most of what made Taurus competitive came from the harness and its automation rather than from the language model itself. Taurus shows that this kind of annotation can be automated, so that expert time can move from drawing labels to checking them.
Large Language Bayes (LLB) 将自然语言问题描述转化为一组候选概率程序，并在每个模型内进行推断，再使用贝叶斯模型平均组合它们的预测。虽然这提供了一个无需手动指定模型即可进行概率推断的灵活框架，但得到的候选模型集在实践中往往存在误指定，且基于似然的聚合可能集中于单一模型，低估了采样模型间的不确定性。我们提出一种用于 LLB 的基于堆叠的聚合方法，它通过优化预测性能而非边际似然来选择模型权重，同时保留原始由语言模型驱动的模型生成与模型内推断流程。由于留一预测量在潜变量模型中难以处理，我们推导出一个变分下界，从而得到可处理的基于 ELBO 的堆叠目标。在真实世界概率推断任务中，我们的方法取得了与贝叶斯模型平均相当的预测性能，同时产生更分散的模型权重，减少在误指定情况下对单一候选模型的集中。
Deep Research（DR）系统将大语言模型扩展为自主智能体，这些智能体能够分解复杂的信息需求、迭代搜索网络并综合证据以回答具有挑战性的问题。然而，其多阶段执行可能引入鲁棒性风险，因为用户问题或中间搜索输入的变化可能跨越研究阶段传播，并导致错误答案。现有评估侧重于任务解决能力或对外部证据扰动的鲁棒性，导致DR执行中的内在弱点未得到充分探索。因此，我们对来自三个代表性DR系统的1,932条执行轨迹进行了实证研究，并在子问题构建、在线搜索和最终推理中识别出九类反复出现的缺陷。在这些发现的指导下，我们提出了EMBERS，一个经验驱动、缺陷引导的模糊测试框架，用于DR系统的鲁棒性测试。从正确回答的种子问题开始，EMBERS使用缺陷引导变异、网络搜索辅助的保真度保证和多样性感知的种子维护来生成面向阶段的测试输入。在16个框架--模型--数据集设置上的实验表明，在相同测试预算下，EMBERS的失败发现吞吐量达到最强基线的3.21倍。人工和LLM辅助评估表明，大多数生成的输入保留了原始信息需求和必要的上下文约束。此外，模型 f
Embedding models underpin virtually every modern AI system, from search engines to recommendation systems. Despite shared mathematical foundations, research on embedding models remains fragmented by modality: the communities develop largely in isolation, seldom exchanging insights. We argue that this fragmentation obscures a deeper convergence. Driven by contrastive learning, Transformer architectures, and a granularity shift, embedding research across modalities is converging toward a common set of principles, even as modality-specific challenges remain underexplored. To reason across this convergence without conflating it, we propose a framework of three progressively harder capabilities: coverage, comparability, and compositionality. Three paths toward unification satisfy these in turn: transformation broadens coverage, alignment enables comparability, and joint embedding, the terminus we advocate, aims at compositionality. This position paper traces the resulting evolution, providing the first unified, cross-cutting treatment of omnimodal embedding research.
World Action Models (WAMs) transfer scene-dynamics priors to planning by jointly forecasting future scenes and ego trajectories. However, WAMs built on video generators must generate dense future videos at inference, incurring prohibitive latency, while efficient variants discard the world branch at deployment and thus forgo test-time imagination. Even when dense video latents are replaced with patch-level DINO or JEPA features, these representations still involve long token sequences and encode decision-irrelevant information. We therefore propose SparseWAM, which forecasts in a sparse register space of only 16 tokens per frame, compressed from frozen DINOv2 features and shaped by joint planning-and-scoring pretraining to concentrate decision-relevant information. Within this space, SparseWAM employs a modality-decoupled Mixture-of-Transformers with a causal attention mask that lets action tokens condition on imagined future registers, retaining explicit imagine-then-act reasoning at deployment. Its compactness further enables low-cost multimodal sampling. As a result, our SparseWAM achieves 92.6 PDMS on NAVSIM v1, 90.1 EPDMS on NAVSIM v2, and 39.6 on NavHard at only 164 ms latency, roughly 1/5 that of DriveVA, demonstrating the efficiency of the sparse register space. Code will be released upon acceptance.
Retrogressive thaw slumps (RTS) are among the most dynamic ground deformations caused by permafrost thaw. Abrupt thaw processes such as RTS could roughly double the contribution of permafrost thaw to climate warming, and already threaten a third of Arctic infrastructure. Circumpolar RTS mapping has advanced quickly, yet released inventories together cover only part of the permafrost region. RTS occupy only 0.1-0.5% of image tiles and labels are costly, so a detector must be designed and evaluated as a rare-target problem. We therefore developed a deep learning system and mapped 20.68 M square kilometres of circumpolar permafrost using 41.6 M tiles of 4.8 m PlanetScope imagery. Training used 22,259 tiles with 2,609 RTS instances in 1,718 of them, and the model was tuned through 172 controlled experiments. A convolutional network matched every alternative tested, including multimodal fusion, foundation-model encoders and masked-autoencoder pretraining, each at far more compute for similar or worse results. Labelled data moved performance most, and a foundation model's advantage appeared only when labels were scarce. Tested once on held-out ecoregions at the real-world prevalence of 0.1-0.5%, the final model achieved an area under the precision-recall curve of 0.812-0.855, an object precision of 0.854 and F1 of 0.644. Deployed wall-to-wall, the model produced a circumpolar map of 19,068 high-confidence detections whose sampled precision ranges from 0.54 to 0.90 by size class. We present an evaluation protocol for rare targets, a controlled account of what governs accuracy under scarce labels, and the circumpolar RTS map the validated model produced.
Long-context diffusion repeatedly pays for both token interaction and feed-forward computation. We formulate these costs as two separate budgets: the edges available to an attention graph and the experts activated for each token. This view connects local, dilated, and global attention with conditional expert computation without assuming that sparsity alone preserves document-level information. We specify normalized masked attention, distinguish denoising depth from sampling iterations, and derive graph and compute bounds. A reported sparse-expert configuration, denoted DualBudget, is analyzed across scientific summarization, multi-hop question answering, dialogue, and sentence-pair prediction. All supplied table measurements are retained. The length study shows gains over the listed baselines through 16K, together with measurable degradation as length increases. Ablations reveal mixed changes across the three reported scores, while the cost record indicates a 20% reduction relative to DiffuSeq under an unspecified timing convention. The analysis separates these observations from unmeasured claims about training speed, absorbing states, global coherence, and deployment memory.
Fine-tuning a language model changes how it responds, but where is this fine-tuned behavior instantiated? To better understand this, we evaluate whether the change in model behavior arises only during the generation of the answer tokens where the change manifests, or whether altered processing of previous tokens causes it via the attention mechanism. For this, we patch the KV cache from a LoRA fine-tuned model into the unmodified base model, and vice versa. Our results show that for some behaviors, like responding in German or emergent misalignment, patching the KV cache can indeed transfer them from the fine-tuned to the base model. Correspondingly, patching the KV cache from base to fine-tune can partially or fully remove fine-tuned behavior. Furthermore, we find that the effect of patching grows with how much of the KV cache is patched and concentrates at a few pivotal positions, with system-prompt and chat-template tokens having disproportionate influence.
When a language model invents a Qur'anic verse or hadith, it gives false authority to text that readers may treat as sacred. Existing Islamic hallucination benchmarks are largely Arabic and often closed-ended, while Bengali resources mainly study general-domain hallucination or factual knowledge. We introduce BILAL-BENCH, a 240-question expert-verified benchmark for open-ended Islamic-source fabrication in Bengali. It covers Qur'anic attribution, hadith, fiqh, contemporary issues, and adversarial false-premise prompts, and uses a two-axis rubric that separates source errors from assertiveness. We evaluate seven open-weight models from 1B to 120B on 1,680 double-annotated responses. Six of the seven models confidently fabricate on 79.3-95.3% of source-production questions, with no monotonic improvement from scale. Hadith provenance is the weakest category across models: only two of 315 responses are correct and correctly sourced. The two 8B BanglaLLaMA variants have similar confident-fabrication rates but different error profiles. Models vary far more in whether they withhold a claim they cannot support than in source accuracy: appropriate abstention or false-premise correction ranges from 6 to 46 responses across the benchmark, and does not track parameter count.
Understanding what kind of prompts users typically ask and how well an LLM performs on these prompt categories is crucial for LLM practitioners. The existing methods satisfy the demand by hierarchically clustering the user prompts and synthesizing the cluster names using an LLM to build a taxonomy. However, the cluster names from these methods are usually too general for humans to understand the detailed prompt distributions and identify the exact strengths and weaknesses of LLMs. In this study, we propose COMPREHEND, which automatically constructs an ultra-fine-grained entailment hierarchy for the prompts. The entailment hierarchy replaces the cluster names in the taxonomy with sentences to provide more precise cluster descriptions for more fine-grained categorization. Compared with EvalTree, a state-of-the-art taxonomy construction method, COMPREHEND improves an entailment/faithfulness metric from 22.6 to 41.7 and an informative metric from 16.3 to 39.1 in WildBench. Our experiments also show that the weakness report generated based on our entailment hierarchy is much more informative than EvalTree in terms of predicting the response scores in the benchmark. All the code is released in https://github.com/JackNapier20/COMPREHEND_public.
Genomic foundation models (GFMs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for learning DNA sequence representations, yet existing self-supervised pretraining strategies overlook alternative splicing and underperform compared to specialized models. To address this gap, we introduce IsoAlign, a multimodal framework that grounds genomic pretraining in isoform-aware DNA-protein alignment to learn biologically meaningful representations. IsoAlign aligns transcripts to their corresponding protein isoforms, capturing both coding sequences and broader regulatory contexts, using two Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA): DNA-Protein JEPA (DP-JEPA), which predicts protein representations from DNA using contrastive alignment, and Isoform-Masked JEPA (IM-JEPA), which models relationships among alternative isoforms of the same gene through masked protein prediction. We evaluate the learned DNA representations of these architectures across a multi-metric evaluation suite spanning tasks, including the prediction of pathogenicity, fitness, gene expression, and TF binding. Our results demonstrate that isoform-aware cross-modal alignment using JEPA significantly improves functional representations and downstream performance, establishing a promising direction for GFM pretraining.
According to the World Health Organization, at least 2.2 billion people worldwide live with visual impairment, including tens of millions with severe vision loss. Traditional aids such as white canes or guide dogs remain costly, limited in capability, and inaccessible to many. At the same time, smartphone distraction in public spaces has been linked to elevated risks of collisions with vehicles, trips, and falls. These dual challenges motivate lightweight, smartphone-based solutions that combine accessibility with low latency. We present a Kotlin-based Android application that uses a YOLOv8 detector, retrained to recognize eighteen common urban obstacle classes, to deliver real-time obstacle alerts for both user groups. The detector was optimized with pruning, quantization, and early-exit branches, and deployed through the Android Neural Networks API (NNAPI), which can dispatch inference to GPU, NPU, or DSP accelerators when available. On a mid-range smartphone, these optimizations reduced average inference latency from about 3.2 s for the off-the-shelf YOLOv8n to 0.39-0.48 s; the recommended configuration (INT8 quantization with early exit) runs in 0.42-0.48 s while retaining a recall of 0.81. The application combines the optimized detector with ARCore-based or monocular focal-length distance estimation, so it works with a single smartphone camera and requires no LiDAR, depth camera, or other specialized sensor. Multimodal feedback, including Text-to-Speech guidance for visually impaired users and vibration alerts for distracted pedestrians, supports use across different contexts.
The "Min-Max" theory of language behavior proposes that humans engage simultaneously in minimization of processing effort and maximization of information content, and that this is a primary driver in language evolution (Ring, 2025). This claim seeks to unify observations from language processing (Mahowald et al., 2013; Futrell et al., 2015; Yadav et al., 2020; Hawkins, 2014), interaction (H\"orberg and Sjons, 2023; Tucker et al., 2025; Jaeger and Tily, 2011; Smith and Culbertson, 2025), and corpora (Levshina and Moran, 2021; Levshina, 2023; Newmeyer, 2017), which suggest that considerations of processing efficiency and information content are both implicated in human communication. The interaction between these two processes provides an explanation for human linguistic behavior at various levels (Linders and Louwerse, 2023) and predicts historical developments in language, i.e. related to word order (Ring, 2025). Given that the original formulation of the Min-Max theory is based on observational data, the current paper seeks to validate the theory mathematically. Through a series of experiments that use computational models to investigate the theory's predictions, pretrained and iterated learning models are queried with synthetic data. The experiments show that manipulating the variables of token length and the weight of information content in a tabula rasa model results in word order change, as predicted by the theory. The experiments also identify important differences between computational models and observations of human language data, suggesting that current transformer-based language models may not accurately represent psycholinguistic processes. The overall findings indicate that evolutionary trajectories in language are highly susceptible to minimization of processing and maximization of information content.
Language models are increasingly used in text generation, decision support, and automated interaction, creating a need for localized, reversible, and selective control of their behavior. Activation steering demonstrates that internal interventions can alter the behavior of frozen models, but how to select and evaluate compact, multi-site control interfaces remains an open question. I introduce sparse internal control, a framework for steering target behavior by applying inference-time interventions to a small set of internal model nodes. A local target-controllability formulation characterizes candidate site--direction pairs by their behavioral effects and specifies constraints on target recovery, off-target preservation, and intervention energy. Two complementary selectors instantiate this formulation: Driver-OMP selects nodes for sparse reconstruction of a desired behavioral displacement, while Coverage-Driver favors stable coverage across prompts. I propose a six-axis control-evaluation protocol measuring reachability, signed reversal, dose response, feedback controllability, off-target preservation, and held-out reuse. Exploratory experiments on indirect object identification, MMLU multiple-choice question answering, sentiment steering, and refusal steering provide evidence for the feasibility of steering task-defined behavior through sparse internal interventions. The six-axis evaluation characterizes these interventions beyond target movement, revealing distinct control properties that depend on the task and available direction information. Together, the formulation, reference algorithms, and evaluation protocol provide a foundation for the systematic study and development of internal control methods for language models.
A span tagger that ranks its outputs by risk can defer the riskiest ones to a person, and a second model can sharpen this ranking. Which second model should it be? Partner selection is conditional, not global: the best second opinion is the model that is right where the primary is wrong. Across eight tagger types, three seeds and three English benchmarks (576 evaluated primary-partner pairings), choosing the partner by held-out accuracy on the primary's errors recovers 82% of the best partner's gain, against 69-70% for span F1 or a random pick. Frozen before a fourth dataset was chosen, the rule replicated there (Spearman 0.40 vs. 0.04 for span F1). Partner value is also directional. The predictive distribution is the second opinion: hard labels discard half of a partner's value, and scoring the served label improves 94% of pairings. Fixed before the fourth dataset was chosen, this score also replicated there. For LoRA-tuned decoders, independently trained partners beat every readout of the primary network. Applied zero-shot to 51 MASSIVE locales, every primary has a helpful trained partner in every locale, and the preferred partner follows competence.
Speculative decoding is used to reduce the inference cost of language models. One-step diffusion drafters propose a block of multiple tokens in parallel, reducing the sequential cost of speculative decoding. On-policy distillation trains these drafters using verifier feedback on their own proposals. However, parallel drafting makes this feedback difficult to use: the drafter predicts each token without observing the preceding tokens sampled within the same block, while the verifier conditions its prediction on those tokens. Different sampled prefixes therefore give different verifier targets for the same drafter prediction. We show that distilling against these targets separately can suppress tokens that are plausible after some prefixes but unlikely after others, harming draft acceptance. We explain the effects of this mismatch and introduce Multi-Draft On-Policy Distillation (MDraft), a new parallel drafter distillation method which samples several draft blocks from the same context and aggregates the verifier's full-vocabulary conditionals across their prefixes. We use all the drafts to collect information from the verifier, allowing support from alternative prefixes to influence the training target. The resulting algorithm improves the acceptance length of a parallel drafter beyond the level of pre-training, and alleviates the effects of the distributional mismatch. MDraft changes only training, retaining the drafter's architecture and inference procedure, allowing the resulting drafter to be used as-is in place of the pretrained checkpoint. Experiments on a suite of mathematical, coding, and conversational tasks show longer accepted drafts than prior distillation methods.
When a language model decides refund or claim requests under written policies, the system can show it similar past cases. Each past case has two parts: its facts and the decision recorded for it. We separate the two. A model sees a policy, a request and three past cases, and we change either the recorded decisions or the facts, keeping the request fixed. We select requests that are close calls: deciding without past cases, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash approved each in some of four tries and denied it in others. When the past cases are near-copies of the request (its facts with a few details changed), switching their recorded decisions from DENY to APPROVE raises approval by about 30 to 55 percentage points in DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, GPT-5.6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 on policies written for the study, and DeepSeek and Luna show the same on nine public policies paraphrased from real ones. The facts push the other way: shown without their recorded decisions, past cases whose facts support approval make these two models approve less often than past cases whose facts support denial. One reading is that the request looks weaker next to them. This push is not just a correction toward the right answer: in an additional DeepSeek analysis, it was of similar estimated size on requests that human annotators judged approvable and on those they judged deniable. In a separate DeepSeek run on the public policies, when the past cases are near-copies of a different request, switching their decisions moves approval by 9 points instead of 43, while facts that support approval still lower it by 22 points against facts that support denial. Systems that retrieve past decisions should test the two parts separately.
Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on safeguards to prevent unauthorized actions while preserving legitimate service. However, existing risk assessments often focus on individual safeguard performance while overlooking dependence among safeguard decisions. This paper develops a dependence-aware framework for risk assessment and optimal design of multi-component AI safeguard systems, jointly selecting configurations and operating policies for sequential layered screening and selective verification. We establish stochastic comparisons of layered-screening error probabilities and invocation costs under lower-orthant ordering. For selective verification, we characterize exactly which policies have error probabilities and review costs that respond monotonically to stronger dependence under supermodular ordering. For a fixed first stage and reviewer, we show that the optimal routing map is a two-threshold rule in the first-stage likelihood ratio. An accompanying open-source software package, Dependence-Aware Policy Optimization Algorithms (DAPOA), facilitates the practical implementation of the proposed framework. Numerical experiments show that ignoring dependence can lead to inaccurate risk assessments and infeasible safeguard designs, with independence-based selections violating security requirements in six of eight scenarios. An empirical study using four LLM safeguards on benchmark-derived agent actions further demonstrates the practical implications of dependence modeling. Under the principal operating setting, dependence-aware selection lowers held-out total cost by 39.6% relative to independence-based selection.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can expose language models to misleading evidence in retrieved documents. We investigate whether increasing the number of mutually agreeing poisoned documents affects a model's ability to detect misinformation. We evaluate 200 randomly selected questions from SciFact (random seed 38), comparing contexts with one poisoned and six healthy documents against contexts with six mutually agreeing poisoned documents and one healthy document. For Gemma-3-12b, poison-detection rates decrease from 25% (50/200) in the minority condition to 10% (20/200) in the majority condition. Among the 38 questions with different outcomes across conditions, 34 change from detected to undetected, while only four change in the opposite direction (exact McNemar test, p = 6.04e-7). This pattern is consistent with a conformity-like response to a majority of mutually agreeing poisoned documents. Our results provide initial evidence of conformity bias in RAG-based misinformation detection: Gemma-3-12b is substantially less likely to detect poisoned claims when they dominate the retrieved evidence.
Large language models (LLMs) now answer medical exam questions at or above expert level, but it is unclear whether such scores reflect clinical competence, or are instead affected by the format of the questions being asked (e.g., multiple-choice versus open-ended), prior exposure to the benchmarks, and the difficulty of the questions. These benchmarks are also public and widely used online, which may be resulting in LLM memorization. Models may perform better on questions that they have seen before. It is also not evident whether smaller models, which are more locally deployable in HIPAA-compliant hospital settings, have achieved human performance. In this study, we evaluate fourteen current models from six leading providers, one smaller and one larger model from each provider with two additional open-weight models, on 3,076 questions from four medical benchmarks (MedQA-USMLE, MedMCQA, PubMedQA, and MedBullets) under standard multiple choice, the same questions with the answer choices withheld, and reconstruction of a hidden question from its choices alone. In the standard multiple-choice setting, the strongest models exceed the human-expert baseline on MedQA-USMLE and PubMedQA, but the smaller models trail their larger models by 8.7 percentage points and only two of the six pass the human-expert bar on the licensing examination. Withholding the answer choices, however, makes every model struggle: mean accuracy falls from 82.3% to 50.9%, and the two largest drops belong to the medically specialised models. On memorization, the strongest models reconstruct one question in four from the answer choices alone, yet accuracy holds on the questions they cannot reconstruct. We further weigh accuracy against inference cost and test whether ensembling several models improves medical question answering.
Generative AI is currently fragmented, with separate subscriptions required for text generation, image synthesis, and code assistance, leading to high costs and workflow disruptions. AI Express is a SaaS platform that consolidates these capabilities into a unified pay-as-you-go service. The platform provides a range of AI tools, including a Core Code Reviewer that evaluates GitHub repositories, a Text-to-Website generator that converts text into fully functional websites, script generation, grammar checking, data analysis, and watermark removal, all accessible through a single interface without requiring technical expertise.
National aviation-investigation databases are deep but territorial; global compilations such as the Aviation Safety Network and the Bureau of Aircraft Accidents Archives are hand-curated, apply their own inclusion thresholds, and publish no per-record lineage. The FlightFinder Occurrence Corpus harmonizes 279,485 occurrences and 131,882 attached narratives from 128 source codes -- national accident-investigation authorities, occurrence-reporting systems and four global compilations. Records are mapped into one schema; each normalized record reduces to exactly one key from an ordered ladder -- event signature, registration and date, rounded position and date, or source and native identifier -- so a missing field never creates a link, and the key is the occurrence identifier. Records the ladder cannot reach are scored in a blocked pass into an explicit merge table and applied only within an automatically approved score band or after a person confirms them. Field conflicts follow a documented source ranking; one provenance row per contributing source -- its native identifier and URL -- is retained, with attribution and licence terms per source code. Linkage error is measured on five adjudicated samples totalling 200 pairs. A recorded uniform random draw of 60 from the 3,441 merges the automatic band applies as it ships found no error; the exact two-sided 95% Clopper-Pearson upper bound on its false-merge rate is 6.0%, or 205 pairs. The measured error covers the scored band only; the ladder's deterministic joins are not adjudicated. The corpus has no exposure denominators and inherits the under-reporting of its sources. It is offered as a base for cross-national safety statistics, source-disagreement studies and narrative text mining; a frozen, DOI-referenced snapshot accompanies the live API.
Can a vision-language-action (VLA) policy signal likely task failure from its own action probabilities? We introduce CalVLA, which shapes native action-token confidence using successful and failed rollouts and an Action-Confidence Alignment (ACal) squared margin-ranking loss. Low-rank adapters update OpenVLA-7B without an auxiliary failure detector. Observations are paired within tasks at similar normalized elapsed times, not necessarily equivalent physical progress. On a held-out test split from 500 LIBERO-10 configurations, adapted confidence achieves a joint failure-discrimination AUROC of $0.7392\pm0.0480$ over three seeds, averaging scores at 130 and 260 steps. Frozen-policy probes reach 0.6146--0.6436, but superiority over the linear probe is statistically inconclusive. For the same confidence summary, AUROC rises from 0.4485 before adaptation to 0.7327 after adaptation. Mean task success decreases from 58% to 55%. These results show improved failure discrimination, not improved control or established safety benefits.
Memory capacity and bandwidth are major bottlenecks in LLM inference, motivating weight compression beyond conventional 4-bit quantization. Vector quantization (VQ) enables approximately 2-bit weight storage but often relies on codebooks incompatible with native FP4 computation. We introduce MXCode (MX-Native Codebook Quantization), a framework bridging ultra-low-bit VQ compression with MicroXcaling (MX)-native FP4 computation. MXCode proposes three strategies: PostScale, which quantizes learned codebooks to MXFP4; PreScale, which extracts MX scales before codebook learning; and PreScale+, which further compresses these scales using VQ. These strategies explore tradeoffs among quantization quality, scale overhead, and codebook granularity. All reconstruct MX-native W4A4 operands without materializing intermediate high-precision weights. We evaluate MXCode on Qwen3 (235B), DeepSeek-R1 (671B), and GLM-5.2 (753B) using the Microsoft MX Emulation Library. MXCode achieves approximately 2 bits per weight with competitive, workload-dependent model quality. On GB300 hardware, experiments with Qwen3 (235B) show approximately 50% lower model-load memory than Native FP4 while maintaining near-Native-FP4 serving throughput. Under memory-constrained prefix reuse, P90 TTFT improves by up to 94.5%. These results demonstrate software-based reconstruction on existing FP4 hardware and inform the development of future MX-native inference systems.
NLP evaluation reports routinely cite sliced performance differences, most prominently the intra-inter gap in document-level relation extraction, as capability evidence. We show that such gap readings are joint properties of models and evaluation contracts: scoring function, gold version, threshold, output format, and prompt language. With predictions frozen, a method ordering reverses under a gold-standard exchange (+0.0363, CI excluding zero; tie-level after), movement localizing where gold re-partitions: renames are gauge transformations (Delta=0; re-annotation +0.862). We formalize this as an evaluation leverage account centered on the rank-flip condition. Constructively, the audited evaluation reading (AER) is a contract-marginalized, tie-declared, seed-prescribed, gate-filtered procedure whose tie declarations cover every contract-induced flip on the declared WMT19 grids (14/14; held-out 73% vs. union-of-ties 89%), matching the best single metric contract at epsilon=0.10 equivalence. Evidence spans DocRE, HacRED, a UD probe, and released gold revisions; an alternative-reference-set replication extends it beyond our testbeds. Failed predictions retained as boundaries; a 5% violation gate flags unverifiable settings and bounds survivor-selection bias. We release EvalLever, a preregistered workflow with an amendment trail; on LLM-as-judge grids, the audited ensemble stabilizes every unstable pair (13-15 to zero; generic ensemble shrinkage: the preregistered correlation criterion failed, the companion stabilization criterion passed).
Plant disease detection using deep learning has achieved remarkable accuracies exceeding 99% on benchmark datasets. However, these metrics may mask a critical vulnerability: models may be taking advantage of false background correlations instead of learning real pathological features. This study presents a systematic investigation of background bias in plant disease detection through a two-stage training framework with quantitative validation. We propose a three-condition evaluation protocol testing models on original, leaf-only, and background-only images to directly measure background dependency. Our approach combines standard transfer learning using EfficientNet-B0 and manipulation of background information during optimization. Experimental results on the PlantVillage dataset (20,638 images, 15 disease classes) show that while our model achieves 98.97% accuracy on the original images and maintains 96.62% accuracy on leaf-only images, the performance drops to 23.58% on background-only images. The calculated background bias (BBC) coefficient of 0.762 indicates that a large part of the model's predictive performance depends on leaf-related features rather than background distortions. This research offers clear evidence that even with the most advanced models, environmental shortcuts can be leveraged, and this highlights the importance of bias evaluation. The approach that has been used has laid a foundation for the development of agricultural AI that is ready for deployment. The implementation, models, and evaluation process are all publicly available.
点云分割是3D数据分析中的一项基础任务，应用遍及机器人、增强现实与虚拟现实以及遥感等领域。然而，点云固有的稀疏性、噪声和无序特性带来了显著挑战，尤其是在实现可靠分类方面。尽管最先进的方法依赖训练模型来显式建模不确定性，但在探索使用生成式方法估计不确定性所能扮演的不同角色方面仍存在空白。本工作通过显式建模认知不确定性并将其用于不同角色（即作为特征和用于损失函数）来研究确定性不确定性在点云分割中的影响。我们在四个大规模LiDAR基准（涵盖机载和移动采集，即ISPRS Vaihingen、AHN3、Paris-Lille-3D和Toronto-3D）上评估了一个基线人工神经网络（ANN）和两个不确定性感知变体（不确定性作为额外输入特征，以及作为训练损失中的逐样本置信度权重），并纳入了PointNet++和RandLA-Net参考模型及其不确定性增强对应模型，采用规范的空间不相交训练/测试划分。在该协议下，不确定性感知建模提升了平均交并比（mean Intersection over Union），找回了基线ANN完全无法预测的少数类，并在半数配置中改善了预测误差与估计不确定性之间的一致性（以Patch衡量）。
In aerial and remote-sensing imagery, detecting tiny targets is frequently hampered less by the representational capacity of the backbone network than by the manner in which positional priors are distributed across ill-defined foreground and background regions. We introduce SPAR (Selective Positional Allocation and Retrieval), a detection framework that re-conceptualizes positional cues as an allocatable resource: they are intensified at semantically meaningful locations while responses driven by scene clutter are actively attenuated. At the heart of SPAR lies Selective Positional Embedding (SPE), an interpretable embedding mechanism paired with an activation-bar visualization that facilitates direct inspection and hyper-parameter tuning. The encoder branch, termed MOHFE, fuses heatmap-modulated positional signals with category-specific and box-level evidence to yield more compact multi-scale features; the decoder branch, termed HIDQ, employs a foreground gating operation to discard background-dominated candidates prior to query decoding. To cope with the extreme sparsity of small-object evidence, we additionally design DPSConv (Dual-Path Sampling Convolution), which augments retrieval-oriented representations through two geometrically complementary sampling routes. Notably, all heatmap supervision is derived from existing detection objectives and consumed exclusively during training, requiring no auxiliary heatmap annotations and leaving inference as an ordinary forward pass with no additional gradient overhead. Comprehensive evaluations on DOTA, DIOR, VisDrone, PASCAL VOC, NWPU VHR-10, and AITOD demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design: relative to the baseline, SPAR attains an improvement of up to 9.1 percentage points, shortens the decoder from eight layers to three, and reduces model parameters by 59.4% (66.3M versus 163M).
This study investigates the authorship impersonation capacity of six widely used large language models (LLMs): Gemini 3 Pro, Claude Opus, GPT 5.2, GPT 5.2 Pro, DeepSeek 3.2, and Grok 4.1 Fast. The evaluation was conducted using short product review texts selected to ensure high within author consistency in individual writing style. Two types of in context prompt were designed: a simple prompt with minimal instruction and a complex prompt incorporating explicit stylometric guidance for mimicry. Authorship mimicry was evaluated using a cosine distance based distance to training metric, supplemented by visual analyses of embedding distributions. The results indicate that authorship impersonation remained challenging for most LLMs, with Gemini 3 Pro showing the strongest apparent mimicry performance. However, subsequent overlap analysis revealed that Gemini 3 Pro extensively copied and reused sentences and phrases from the training texts, at levels far exceeding those observed among human authors. Follow up factor analyses showed that training set consistency was the most robust predictor of mimicry success across models, whereas author distinctiveness did not generalise as a reliable predictor. Global embedding visualisations further revealed a consistent macro level pattern: for most models, generated texts occupied regions of the embedding space that were largely separated from the corresponding human training clusters. This indicates limited convergence towards target author style and suggests the presence of model specific lexical and phraseological preferences. The findings highlight the importance of distinguishing genuine stylistic imitation from direct textual reuse and have implications for the forensic analysis of textual evidence involving potential LLM enabled impersonation.
Text-to-SQL systems translate natural language questions into executable SQL queries, democratizing access to relational data. Early approaches relied on handcrafted rules and template matching, while subsequent neural methods introduced encoder-decoder architectures, schema linking, and constrained decoding to handle increasingly complex queries. The emergence of large language models (LLMs), exemplified by systems such as ReFoRCE, Agentar-Scale-SQL, Snowflake's Arctic-Text2SQL-R1, and the modular XiYan-SQL framework, has dramatically advanced the field, pushing execution accuracy to new state-of-the-art levels on challenging benchmarks such as Spider, Spider 2.0, and BIRD. In parallel, modular frameworks decompose the task into sub-problems (schema retrieval, sketch-based generation, repair, and ranking), while agentic systems coordinate multiple specialized agents that communicate and dynamically allocate sub-tasks. This survey systematically reviews these LLM-driven approaches within a unified taxonomy of five paradigms (in-context learning, supervised and parameter-efficient fine-tuning, agentic and tool-augmented orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation, and reinforcement learning) and characterizes them by model granularity (monolithic vs. modular), level of supervision (zero-shot, fine-tuned, or reinforcement-based), and reasoning style (direct decoding vs. decomposed multi-step reasoning). We further analyze evaluation metrics, datasets, and open challenges, including domain generalization, efficiency, and real-world deployment, and we examine the role of the semantic layer in production systems. As LLMs increasingly access sensitive databases, we also discuss responsible AI practices. We survey over 100 papers and technical resources, focusing on work published between 2022 and 2026.
Time-series interpretation often requires both numerical observations and textual context. Integrating these inputs into a pretrained language model raises a representation question: how should a signal enter the model's token sequence? We present TEMPO, which extends an LLM's vocabulary with discrete codes from a context-aware Transformer tokenizer using finite scalar quantization. A frozen tokenizer maps four-step patches to a 625-code vocabulary; signal tokens, scale statistics, and text are then processed by the LLM's existing self-attention layers. Adaptation updates the new token embeddings and DoRA adapters. With a Qwen3-4B backbone and task-specific fine-tuning, TEMPO achieves macro-F1 scores of 89.0% on activity recognition, 85.0% on sleep staging, and 86.0% on bearing-fault diagnosis. Time-series question answering and qualitative bearing-diagnosis examples further illustrate how this interface combines signal representations with textual context. Together, these results demonstrate the utility of discrete vocabulary extension for time-series understanding.
Asynchronous reinforcement learning (RL) is becoming a mainstream paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs), as it improves training efficiency by updating the model as rollouts arrive. Recent work argues that group-wise sampling in GRPO does not naturally fit asynchronous RL training because rollout lengths follow a long-tailed distribution, and proposes Single-rollout Asynchronous Optimization (SAO) to improve stability and off-policy behavior, especially on agentic tasks. However, SAO relies on a closed-source value model obtained from scaling value pretraining. In this paper, we analyze GRPO and LiSAO, our lightweight reproduction of SAO without the pretrained value model, on single-turn reasoning and multi-turn agentic tasks. We find that GRPO outperforms LiSAO on reasoning tasks, while the reverse holds on agentic tasks. Since the value model of LiSAO is not yet well trained , LiSAO lags behind GRPO substantially in early training steps. To address this issue, we propose Li$^{2}$SAO, which Lifts Light Single-rollout Asynchronous Optimization with group-relative actor-critic bootstrapping: while the critic is cold, a group-relative advantage trains the actor and a group-centered return trains the critic, after which training switches to single-rollout GAE. Experiments show that Li$^{2}$SAO catches up with or surpasses GRPO in early training and further raises the later performance ceiling. Code is available at https://github.com/jd-cc-coder/Li2SAO.
Fine-grained action recognition often depends on how an action unfolds over time rather than on appearance alone. Visually similar classes may differ in preparation, execution, or completion phases, making uniformly aggregated temporal context suboptimal. We study this problem under a practical objective: i) improving recognition performance with few tunable parameters, ii) being compute efficient, and iii) using only the readily available video modality. Motivated by this missing temporal observation and the accuracy--compute efficiency--unimodality objective, we propose Directional Adapter (DiA), a parameter-efficient adapter on top of CLIP. DiA formulates temporal specialization into causal and anti-causal directions, allowing past-to-present and future-to-present cues to be modeled differently. To keep this directional modeling parameter- and compute-efficient, both directions use depth-wise temporal convolutions in a compact bottleneck space and are combined through a learnable fusion. DiA achieves state-of-the-art performance among methods using a single video input modality across seven public benchmarks, with only $\sim$3.6M tunable parameters, while also delivering higher throughput and lower inference latency than prior methods. Code is available at https://github.com/prakashchhipa/DiA-Directional-Adapter.
Analytical theories of learning in deep networks often assume gradient flow, discarding the finite step size and batch noise of stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Starting from the discrete update, we derive continuous-time equations for the mean and covariance of the parameter distribution under a Gaussian closure for a general stochastic learning, to first order in the learning rate $\eta$. Applying these stochastic learning flow (SLF) equations to SGD, we show that the mean descends an effective loss regularized by the covariance and loss curvature, while the covariance, unlike in stochastic differential equation approximations, becomes unstable at curvature $2/\eta$. In SGD ensembles of linear and nonlinear networks, SLF predicts learning curves and mean trajectories more accurately than gradient flow and captures the covariance dynamics, failing where the parameter distribution becomes strongly non-Gaussian. In the full-batch limit, the edge of stability corresponds to a stationary point of the coupled sharpness-covariance dynamics, recovering self-stabilization and central flow, and batch-to-batch curvature fluctuations lower this threshold under SGD.
This paper investigates the Women-Are-Wonderful (WaW) effect in language-model blame attribution: a favorable bias in which women receive more positive evaluations than men. Using 11,270 interpersonal conflicts from r/AmItheAsshole, we construct matched counterfactuals that vary the gender of the person being judged (the original poster) and the person affected (the counter-party). Across four language models, gender changes a minority of verdicts, but those changes consistently favor women. The effect is strongly role-dependent. Making the original poster a woman reduces the odds of blame by 9--52%, while making the counter-party a woman multiplies them by 2.7--9.2X. Counter-party WaW also varies across conflict types, strengthening in communication and relationship conflicts and weakening in family conflicts. Exploratory probes suggest that counter-party gender can shift judgments of sympathy, reasonableness, harm and protection. WaW is therefore not just leniency toward women being judged: models also judge conduct more harshly when it affects a woman.
AI 模型市场中的提供商在成本和能力上存在异质性。这些差异为计算套利创造了机会（Olmedo et al., 2026）：中间商从一组模型组合中购买推理服务，再以盈利方式转售给用户。除了为套利者创造盈利机会外，计算套利还为消费者和提供商带来财务价值，因此可能显著影响 AI 模型市场。尽管已有工作通过实证证明了在小型模型池中计算套利的可行性，但要将其扩展到大型市场，需要既在计算上可处理、又以低成本识别和部署的套利策略。在本工作中，我们将计算套利形式化为一个分配问题，并证明它通常是 NP-hard 的。然而，我们表明，在模型性能随推理支出增长而呈现自然递减回报的条件下，最优分配可以被高效计算。我们进一步开发了一种样本高效的方法，用于从有限数据中估计模型性能，从而降低识别套利策略的前期成本。我们的分析还得出了若干经济学洞见：在最优状态下，每个获得资金的模型都提供相同的每美元边际效用；套利会将收入从相对其价格提供较少效用的提供商那里转移走；并且它会奖励互补性的专业化。
For decades, artificial neural networks have operated under the assumption that durable, learned capability resides exclusively in adaptive synaptic parameters, primarily due to the established neurobiology of synaptic connectivity. This design forces models to remain stateless during deployment, incurring well-known limitations such as catastrophic forgetting and expensive retraining. However, recent neurobiological research by Glanzman and colleagues, and others, shows that memories can be transferred between individual organisms in a synaptically independent manner. Inspired by this research, we sought to demonstrate memory transfer of persistent memory between AI model instances, leveraging a neurocentric version of memory. In this paper, we propose NURESA (Neural Unit with Retentive Self-Adaptive Architecture), a novel neural layer that eschews sole reliance on synaptic weight updating by introducing persistent intra-unit memory as a first-class, computational primitive. By structurally separating computation from persistent memory, NURESA enables autonomous memory accumulation and consolidation into transferable stores of memory registers. Experiments across MLP, GPT-2, and modern frontier models like Qwen2.5 demonstrate qualitatively new capability: zero-shot transfer of learned capability into a naive model instance without retraining or access to the original training data; this transfer is enabled by a sparse set of parameters in NURESA's memory register that the model selects on its own based on which neurons were most active. The memory transfer capability of NURESA also protects against domain loss when transformer models undergo learning via fine-tuning. Finally, the memory transfer process completes in approximately one minute even for transformer models with millions to billions of parameters, producing a transfer file orders of magnitude smaller than the original model.
A spectrum can be given to a model as a table in nanometers or as a plot in photon energy, and the decision should not depend on which one it sees. When the data needed for an answer are missing, the model should say so. We test representation invariance and abstention on measured optical spectra of silicon metasurfaces (MOCLIP) and gold nanoparticles, with labels computed from the data. Each spectrum is shown as four tables (nm, $\mu$m, scientific notation, eV) and two plots (nm, eV), and partial spectra remove data inside or outside the queried range. We evaluate the decision models d3-nano and Jev 1.13, three GPT-6 Luna configurations and the Qwen3.5-2B base model. Changing only the representation moves accuracy by up to 41 percentage points within one model, mostly on photon-energy tables and plots. With the same evidence, asking in photon energy instead of wavelength helps some model-view pairs by 16-50 points and hurts others by up to 25. When the relevant extremum is removed, unadapted models rarely answer "undetermined". LoRA fine-tuning of d3-nano improves comparisons on the trained table formats, but much of its gain on unanswerable questions comes from a shortcut: it abstains whenever the input is truncated. Training with answerable truncations avoids the shortcut in all six seeds, with a 90-100 point gap between abstention after inside and outside cuts on held-out structures; with the same amount of extra original-task data, five of six seeds keep the shortcut. On gold spectra the two training sets perform similarly. Multimodal language models used for scientific decisions should be tested on equivalent representations and on missing evidence, not only on average accuracy. We release the tasks, per-response results and analysis code.
A single camera cannot distinguish between a slowly moving object nearby and a rapidly moving object in the distance without additional information. For a shuttlecock, air drag provides a strong deceleration cue that can be combined with known court geometry. We fit a gravity-and-drag trajectory to smartphone video and compare a free monocular fit with a fit constrained to cross the net plane. Camera calibration uses court lines, and the trajectory is fitted to observed shuttle positions and frame timestamps by robust nonlinear least squares. We evaluated 51 badminton shots from two recording sessions, spanning drop shots, drives, half-smashes and smashes. The net-plane fit reduced the median absolute speed difference from a drag-based stereo reference from 13.3% to 8.6%. A second reference, obtained by differentiating triangulated positions without a drag model, also gave a smaller median difference for the net-plane fit. The results support combining court geometry with flight dynamics for badminton speed estimation from a single camera.
Human preferences change over time: an established preference may remain valid over time, become uncertain as context shifts, or be explicitly revised. Effective personalization requires conversational AI to adapt its response strategy to evolving preferences rather than relying on passive memory retrieval. We formalize this capability as adaptive personalization under epistemic uncertainty. A human preference study further confirms that people favor state-contingent response strategies as preference uncertainty changes. To evaluate whether language models mirror this adaptation, we create a multilingual benchmark spanning 250 personas, 5 languages, and 25K conversational turns that decouples strategy selection from response execution. Across eight closed- and open-weight models, we uncover a recognition-generation gap: models reliably identify appropriate strategies when selecting among candidate options, but collapse during open-ended generation, suffering a 35-46% drop in strategy calibration. Crucially, this failure is systematic: models default to exploit-first behavior, over-relying on existing preferences regardless of preference epistemic uncertainty. We show this failure is addressable: while prompting interventions fail, targeted training that supervises models' internal strategy representations toward state-conditional human preferences narrows the user acceptability generalization gap by a third on out-of-distribution personas and conversational styles.
Growing submission volumes have renewed interest in using large language models (LLMs) to support peer review. It remains unclear how such evaluation should be structured, how much the model matters, and whether LLM scores predict research impact. We evaluate five paradigms across three input representations and three LLMs on 232 stratified ICLR 2025 submissions. Direct absolute rating matches comparative ranking on rank correlation with human scores, yet compresses most predictions above the accept threshold, flagging almost none of the papers reviewers scored below it. A base-rate-matched recalibration control locates the cause: comparative ranking supplies placement, not better ordering, and after recalibration Direct Rating reaches higher agreement than Elo while making 24% as many API calls. Abstract-only input beats full-paper summarization, and model choice matters as much as paradigm choice. Replicating on all 11,513 scored submissions reproduces these patterns, shows absolute agreement depends on the evaluated set's score spread, and finds none beating an always-reject baseline in accuracy. Human scores track citations better than any paradigm, with one exception: Group Rating retains its citation correlation after controlling for human scores, and alone ranks within the accepted pool. Ranking quality alone cannot assess review quality; calibration, thresholds, model, and target outcome all matter.
Test-time adaptation (TTA) enables vision--language models such as CLIP to adapt to distribution shifts without labels or access to source data. Existing methods adapt through feature caching, prototype estimation, or the online accumulation of feature statistics, but most ultimately score a test feature against a class representative in the ambient embedding space, typically through cosine similarity. We identify this shared decision rule as a limitation under anisotropic feature distributions, which means when a small number of directions account for a large fraction of feature variance, the score can be dominated by high-variance directions that are not necessarily discriminative. In light of this, we propose CARe, a covariance-aware scoring for TTA that replaces the ambient geometry with a Mahalanobis geometry induced by the target feature second moment. Theoretically, we show that under a shared-covariance Gaussian model the covariance-aware decision direction coincides with that of the Bayes-optimal linear discriminant, with ambient-space scoring as the isotropic special case, and establish that the potential benefit of covariance-aware scoring grows with feature anisotropy. Empirically, we show that CARe improves adaptation accuracy over its base cosine scoring on both standard and fine-grained distribution-shift benchmarks across two backbones. Consistent with our analysis, the gains are largest on datasets whose features are most anisotropic and vanish as the features approach isotropy.
Deployed classifiers often act on a prediction only when its confidence clears a threshold and pass the rest to a person. We ask whether one threshold serves all languages equally on typed decision interfaces, APIs that return a probability for each option of a fixed multiple-choice question. In a confirmatory study with a written analysis plan, three vendors' interfaces classified 1,000 MASSIVE items, each in 51 languages, with a threshold of 0.9. Even when a request is answered correctly in both English and another language, the English version clears the threshold more often, by 8.6-11.7 percentage points on average. Observed coverage, the share of requests handled automatically, is lower than English's in every other language, while the requests the gate handles are rarely wrong. The gap remains when every language is reweighted to the same accuracy, and a standard calibration metric (ECE) does not detect it on one interface. In exploratory analyses, English's coverage stays higher when each language gets its own threshold fitted to the same 5% error target. Translating inputs into English nearly closes the gap at 0.9 but leaves English ahead at that error target. Requests written natively in African languages show a gap in the same direction when English is their human translation. We recommend reporting per-language coverage at the operating threshold.
Dimension reduction methods are chosen by a common claim: t-SNE and UMAP preserve local structure, and PCA preserves global structure. Checking it on given data takes local and global scores on one scale and a test that compares two maps. Both scores come from one curve. The locality profile is the chance-corrected share of each point's k nearest neighbors that a map keeps, over all neighborhood sizes. Its value at k = 10 is the local fidelity L, and its mean over 30 to 50 percent of the data is the global fidelity G. We prove that at the midpoint the profile is the agreement on which half of the data is near each point, a rank correlation of the distances. Because L and G are one statistic, two maps can be tested against each other. The LG reversal test applies to any two dimension reduction methods. It decides, with a block-jackknife p-value, whether one map is more local and the other more global, and returns the scale at which to change maps. On 156 maps of twelve datasets with up to 1.38 million points, G agrees with established global scores at 0.89 and 0.96, and 2,000 points estimate it. The test confirms the usual claim on seven datasets. On both retail datasets and both rolled-up manifolds, it finds the neighbor embeddings more global. In an agent memory of one million passages, the two maps cross at 150,000 passages (p = 2.6e-5). Applications span pathology, single cells, supply chains and AI agent memory.
Speech language models have expanded automatic speech recognition (ASR) from transcription to general speech-to-text generation. Yet existing benchmarks still assume a single ground-truth transcript per utterance, an assumption that struggles when models produce readable, formatted, or structured outputs. In this work, we introduce Grounded Generative Speech Recognition (GSR), reformulating speech recognition as generating semantically grounded text instead of a single transcript. We define a grounded reformulation space that characterizes all valid textual realizations supported by the input speech, and establish a four-level hierarchy of reformulation capabilities, including literal transcription, canonical reformulation, semantic reformulation and speech-grounded structuring. Based on this formulation, we present GSR-Bench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate generative speech recognition systems beyond exact transcript matching. GSR-Bench covers diverse scenarios including refined meeting transcription, cross-dialect translation, context-aware speech understanding, and robustness under silent or noisy acoustic conditions. To address the limitations of word-level evaluation metrics, we develop a multi-dimensional evaluation framework combining speech grounding assessment and LLM-based semantic judgment, whose reliability is validated through human preference studies. Extensive experiments across representative architectures, ranging from conventional ASR systems to end-to-end Speech-LLMs, reveal fundamental trade-offs between transcription fidelity and generative reformulation ability. Our analysis further identifies critical failure modes, including acoustic hallucination, unsupported generation, and instruction drift, providing insights into the design and evaluation of future grounded generative speech systems.
When a language model chooses a number between 1 and 30, every integer in the range is valid, yet the model can favor particular answers. We use numerical choice to study how preference is processed across layers and tokens. Perturbation probing and gradient attribution nominate neurons for activation interventions. In a selected Qwen3-4B case, a pre-answer edit changes 17 to 15 while both runs first emit 1. After the edit ends, selective cache and attention-output replacements trace part of its continuing influence on the second digit. Replacing one attention head's output or the other heads' outputs jointly produces similar immediate readout contributions; both interventions restore 17 but have different final log-odds effects on 7 versus 5. Holding later multilayer perceptron (MLP) outputs at their values from the edited run without either replacement reduces this effect gap from 0.119 to 0.0025 nat. Later computation therefore changes how similar local contributions affect the continuation. Retrospective estimates across eighteen contexts capture much of the probability movement but miss the selected answer switch. Prompt tests also separate influence from answer changes: one held-out prompt retains influence without switching, and only one of twelve fresh wordings qualifies for the reader/MLP test; there, joint MLP clamping again reduces the gap between the two reader effects while the answer remains 17. These results use numerical choice as a controlled case for studying persistent state and conditional downstream processing; they do not establish the origin or a complete circuit of natural numerical preference.
Smartphone applications increasingly require large language models to process long contexts, whereas high prefill latency and memory demands constrain local inference. Block-sparse attention reduces computation and memory traffic, but its irregular selections conflict with mobile NPUs' preference for large, regular tiles. Efficient execution must exploit cross-query reuse while avoiding redundant computation and preserving selections needed for accuracy. In this paper, we present TileWeave, which partitions sparse attention by this cross-query reuse: highly shared key blocks run in coarse NPU tiles, while low-reuse blocks run on the GPU only for the query blocks that selected them. In addition, we design an NPU-native pooled-key selector that keeps selection inexpensive, and a runtime that publishes GPU partials in the order the NPU consumes them and merges them in its existing output store. On RULER, HeteroSparse matches XAttention's accuracy with Qwen3-1.7B and improves it with Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct; its mean LongBench scores match XAttention as well. On Snapdragon SM8750 and SM8850 phones, it achieves 1.35--3.23$\times$ faster full-model prefill than XAttention over 1k--16k tokens and up to 1.58$\times$ faster than dense attention.
Reinforcement learning (RL) policies often outperform classical controllers in simulation, yet rarely reach production in safety-critical processes. The barrier is that there is no principled way to answer "Is this policy safe to deploy?" with statistical guarantees. We introduce DEPLOY-RL, a post-training certification framework built on one key insight: deployment certification requires discovering where failures occur (boundary discovery), not measuring how much everywhere (uniform reconstruction). Our contributions: (1) a contract-coupled acquisition function that concentrates sampling on certification-critical boundaries, achieving approximately 2x sample efficiency with a semi-empirical ambiguity reduction bound (domain-calibrated convergence guarantee); (2) conformal risk control providing finite-sample false-go guarantees ( 85% coverage among 14 baselines under our evaluation protocol.