Wei Xia

Yifan Gao, Wei Xia, Dingdu Hu et al.

Deep learning-based medical image segmentation models often suffer from domain shift, where the models trained on a source domain do not generalize well to other unseen domains. As a prompt-driven foundation model with powerful generalization capabilities, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) shows potential for improving the cross-domain robustness of medical image segmentation. However, SAM performs significantly worse in automatic segmentation scenarios than when manually prompted, hindering its direct application to domain generalization. Upon further investigation, we discovered that the degradation in performance was related to the coupling effect of inevitable poor prompts and mask generation. To address the coupling effect, we propose the Decoupled SAM (DeSAM). DeSAM modifies SAM's mask decoder by introducing two new modules: a prompt-relevant IoU module (PRIM) and a prompt-decoupled mask module (PDMM). PRIM predicts the IoU score and generates mask embeddings, while PDMM extracts multi-scale features from the intermediate layers of the image encoder and fuses them with the mask embeddings from PRIM to generate the final segmentation mask. This decoupled design allows DeSAM to leverage the pre-trained weights while minimizing the performance degradation caused by poor prompts. We conducted experiments on publicly available cross-site prostate and cross-modality abdominal image segmentation datasets. The results show that our DeSAM leads to a substantial performance improvement over previous state-of-theart domain generalization methods. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/yifangao112/DeSAM.

Yue Zhao, Yantao Shen, Yuanjun Xiong et al. · amazon-science

Negative flips are errors introduced in a classification system when a legacy model is updated. Existing methods to reduce the negative flip rate (NFR) either do so at the expense of overall accuracy by forcing a new model to imitate the old models, or use ensembles, which multiply inference cost prohibitively. We analyze the role of ensembles in reducing NFR and observe that they remove negative flips that are typically not close to the decision boundary, but often exhibit large deviations in the distance among their logits. Based on the observation, we present a method, called Ensemble Logit Difference Inhibition (ELODI), to train a classification system that achieves paragon performance in both error rate and NFR, at the inference cost of a single model. The method distills a homogeneous ensemble to a single student model which is used to update the classification system. ELODI also introduces a generalized distillation objective, Logit Difference Inhibition (LDI), which only penalizes the logit difference of a subset of classes with the highest logit values. On multiple image classification benchmarks, model updates with ELODI demonstrate superior accuracy retention and NFR reduction.

Xiangyang Li, Kuicai Dong, Yi Quan Lee et al.

Despite the substantial success of Information Retrieval (IR) in various NLP tasks, most IR systems predominantly handle queries and corpora in natural language, neglecting the domain of code retrieval. Code retrieval is critically important yet remains under-explored, with existing methods and benchmarks inadequately representing the diversity of code in various domains and tasks. Addressing this gap, we present COIR (Code Information Retrieval Benchmark), a robust and comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to assess code retrieval capabilities. COIR comprises ten meticulously curated code datasets, spanning eight distinctive retrieval tasks across seven diverse domains. We first discuss the construction of COIR and its diverse dataset composition. Further, we evaluate nine widely used retrieval models using COIR, uncovering significant difficulties in performing code retrieval tasks even with state-of-the-art systems. To facilitate easy adoption and integration within existing research workflows, COIR has been developed as a user-friendly Python framework, readily installable via pip. It shares same data schema as other popular benchmarks like MTEB and BEIR, enabling seamless cross-benchmark evaluations. Through COIR, we aim to invigorate research in the code retrieval domain, providing a versatile benchmarking tool that encourages further development and exploration of code retrieval systems. https://github.com/CoIR-team/coir.

Bingnan Li, Zhaoyang Zhang, Xiaoze Liu et al.

Leveraging multiple specialized LLMs can combine complementary strengths, but existing approaches trade adaptability for stability: routing commits prematurely, heuristic ensembling depends on fragile proxies, and parameter merging introduces interference. We propose DLLG (Dynamic Logit-Level Gating), a dynamic logit-level ensembling framework that learns token-level expert fusion from sparse response-level supervision. A lightweight gating module predicts step-wise fusion weights, linking trajectory-level correctness to generation without token-level labels or expert retraining. Across diverse reasoning and code benchmarks, DLLG consistently outperforms strong routing, heuristic ensembling, and parameter-merging baselines across model scales, highlighting learned logit-level fusion as a robust and scalable paradigm for integrating specialized experts.

Shuli Jiang, Zhaoyang Zhang, Yi Zhang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning and conversational abilities, but ensuring reliable behavior in multi-turn interactions remains challenging. In many real-world applications, agents must succeed in one-shot settings where retries are impossible. Existing approaches either rely on reflection or post-hoc evaluation, which require additional attempts, or assume fully trainable models that cannot leverage proprietary LLMs. We propose an asymmetric actor-critic framework for reliable conversational agents. A powerful proprietary LLM acts as the actor, while a smaller open-source critic provides runtime supervision, monitoring the actor's actions and intervening within the same interaction trajectory. Unlike training-based actor-critic methods, our framework supervises a fixed actor operating in open-ended conversational environments. The design leverages a generation-verification asymmetry: while high-quality generation requires large models, effective oversight can often be achieved by smaller ones. We further introduce a data generation pipeline that produces supervision signals for critic fine-tuning without modifying the actor. Experiments on $τ$-bench and UserBench show that our approach significantly improves reliability and task success over strong single-agent baselines. Moreover, lightweight open-source critics rival or surpass larger proprietary models in the critic role, and critic fine-tuning yields additional gains over several state-of-the-art methods.

Rahul Duggal, Hao Zhou, Shuo Yang et al. · amazon-science

With the shift towards on-device deep learning, ensuring a consistent behavior of an AI service across diverse compute platforms becomes tremendously important. Our work tackles the emergent problem of reducing predictive inconsistencies arising as negative flips: test samples that are correctly predicted by a less accurate model, but incorrectly by a more accurate one. We introduce REGression constrained Neural Architecture Search (REG-NAS) to design a family of highly accurate models that engender fewer negative flips. REG-NAS consists of two components: (1) A novel architecture constraint that enables a larger model to contain all the weights of the smaller one thus maximizing weight sharing. This idea stems from our observation that larger weight sharing among networks leads to similar sample-wise predictions and results in fewer negative flips; (2) A novel search reward that incorporates both Top-1 accuracy and negative flips in the architecture search metric. We demonstrate that \regnas can successfully find desirable architectures with few negative flips in three popular architecture search spaces. Compared to the existing state-of-the-art approach, REG-NAS enables 33-48% relative reduction of negative flips.

Jing Li, Quanxue Gao, Qianqian Wang et al.

Multi-view clustering (MVC) based on non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) and its variants have received a huge amount of attention in recent years due to their advantages in clustering interpretability. However, existing NMF-based multi-view clustering methods perform NMF on each view data respectively and ignore the impact of between-view. Thus, they can't well exploit the within-view spatial structure and between-view complementary information. To resolve this issue, we present semi-non-negative tensor factorization (Semi-NTF) and develop a novel multi-view clustering based on Semi-NTF with one-side orthogonal constraint. Our model directly performs Semi-NTF on the 3rd-order tensor which is composed of anchor graphs of views. Thus, our model directly considers the between-view relationship. Moreover, we use the tensor Schatten p-norm regularization as a rank approximation of the 3rd-order tensor which characterizes the cluster structure of multi-view data and exploits the between-view complementary information. In addition, we provide an optimization algorithm for the proposed method and prove mathematically that the algorithm always converges to the stationary KKT point. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets indicate that our proposed method is able to achieve satisfactory clustering performance.

Ziyan Liu, Zhezheng Hao, Yeqiu Chen et al.

Memory-augmented LLM agents tackle complex long-horizon tasks by recursively summarizing interaction trajectories into compact memory. However, existing approaches typically train these memory policies using outcome-based reinforcement learning, failing to localize where intermediate memory quality degrades. As interactions unfold, ambiguous recursive summaries progressively discard task-relevant information and introduce semantic noise. This exacerbates belief deviation, obscuring the agent's estimate of the latent task state and ultimately derailing long-horizon reasoning. We therefore argue that memory optimization should focus not merely on trajectory-level success, but on the clarity of the belief induced by intermediate summaries. To this end, we introduce Belief Entropy, a self-supervised proxy that probes how uncertain the model remains about the latent task state given its current memory. Based on this proxy, we propose Metacognitive Memory Policy Optimization (MMPO). Instead of relying only on sparse outcome-based signals, MMPO provides fine-grained, memory-specific supervision via explicitly penalizing summaries that induce high epistemic uncertainty. Experiments show that MMPO consistently outperforms existing methods on diverse long-horizon tasks, maintaining 97.1% performance even when scaled to 1.75M-token contexts.

Lingyue Fu, Hao Guan, Kounianhua Du et al.

Knowledge Tracing (KT) aims to determine whether students will respond correctly to the next question, which is a crucial task in intelligent tutoring systems (ITS). In educational KT scenarios, transductive ID-based methods often face severe data sparsity and cold start problems, where interactions between individual students and questions are sparse, and new questions and concepts consistently arrive in the database. In addition, existing KT models only implicitly consider the correlation between concepts and questions, lacking direct modeling of the more complex relationships in the heterogeneous graph of concepts and questions. In this paper, we propose a Structure-aware Inductive Knowledge Tracing model with large language model (dubbed SINKT), which, for the first time, introduces large language models (LLMs) and realizes inductive knowledge tracing. Firstly, SINKT utilizes LLMs to introduce structural relationships between concepts and constructs a heterogeneous graph for concepts and questions. Secondly, by encoding concepts and questions with LLMs, SINKT incorporates semantic information to aid prediction. Finally, SINKT predicts the student's response to the target question by interacting with the student's knowledge state and the question representation. Experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that SINKT achieves state-of-the-art performance among 12 existing transductive KT models. Additionally, we explore the performance of SINKT on the inductive KT task and provide insights into various modules.

Qingyao Li, Wei Xia, Kounianhua Du et al.

Tree search methods have demonstrated impressive performance in code generation. Previous methods combine tree search with reflection that summarizes past mistakes to achieve iterative improvement. However, these methods face significant challenges. First, they search directly within the code language space, neglecting the underlying reasoning process critical for effective code generation. Second, reflection-based approaches merely accumulate historical errors in memory without providing correct reasoning pathways, making it difficult for subsequent search iterations to identify optimal solutions, resulting in decreased search quality. In this work, we propose RethinkMCTS, a framework that systematically explores and refines the reasoning process for code generation. Specifically, we employ MCTS to search for thoughts before code generation and integrate MCTS with a refinement mechanism called rethink, which incorporates fine-grained code execution feedback to refine erroneous thoughts during the search. It ensures the search path aligns with better reasoning, improving overall search quality. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that RethinkMCTS outperforms previous search-based and feedback-enhanced code generation baselines.

Zeheng Wang, Zitong Yu, Yijie Zhu et al.

LLM-based multimodal emotion recognition relies on static parametric memory and often hallucinates when interpreting nuanced affective states. In this paper, given that single-round retrieval-augmented generation is highly susceptible to modal ambiguity and therefore struggles to capture complex affective dependencies across modalities, we introduce AffectAgent, an affect-oriented multi-agent retrieval-augmented generation framework that leverages collaborative decision-making among agents for fine-grained affective understanding. Specifically, AffectAgent comprises three jointly optimized specialized agents, namely a query planner, an evidence filter, and an emotion generator, which collaboratively perform analytical reasoning to retrieve cross-modal samples, assess evidence, and generate predictions. These agents are optimized end-to-end using Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (MAPPO) with a shared affective reward to ensure consistent emotion understanding. Furthermore, we introduce Modality-Balancing Mixture of Experts (MB-MoE) and Retrieval-Augmented Adaptive Fusion (RAAF), where MB-MoE dynamically regulates the contributions of different modalities to mitigate representation mismatch caused by cross-modal heterogeneity, while RAAF enhances semantic completion under missing-modality conditions by incorporating retrieved audiovisual embeddings. Extensive experiments on MER-UniBench demonstrate that AffectAgent achieves superior performance across complex scenarios. Our code will be released at: https://github.com/Wz1h1NG/AffectAgent.

Yuanguo Lin, Hong Chen, Wei Xia et al.

Educational Data Mining (EDM) has emerged as a vital field of research, which harnesses the power of computational techniques to analyze educational data. With the increasing complexity and diversity of educational data, Deep Learning techniques have shown significant advantages in addressing the challenges associated with analyzing and modeling this data. This survey aims to systematically review the state-of-the-art in EDM with Deep Learning. We begin by providing a brief introduction to EDM and Deep Learning, highlighting their relevance in the context of modern education. Next, we present a detailed review of Deep Learning techniques applied in four typical educational scenarios, including knowledge tracing, student behavior detection, performance prediction, and personalized recommendation. Furthermore, a comprehensive overview of public datasets and processing tools for EDM is provided. We then analyze the practical challenges in EDM and propose targeted solutions. Finally, we point out emerging trends and future directions in this research area.

Yuan Tian, Yue Li, Wei Xia et al.

Cesarean Scar Defect (CSD) is one of the most prevalent complications following cesarean delivery. Transvaginal ultrasonography is widely used for primary CSD screening. Accurate determination of CSD outline and dimensions is crucial for treatment. However, CSDs are frequently overlooked by sonographers due to small size and irregular morphology, suboptimal image quality, and limited clinical awareness in resource-constrained settings. Despite artificial intelligence advances in medical imaging, no public dataset exists for transvaginal ultrasound CSD segmentation. To address this gap, we present a comprehensive CSD dataset comprising 1,111 images and 16 videos, yielding 501 positive samples with confirmed CSD and precise pixel-level manual annotations. Annotations are performed following standardized clinical guidelines through collaboration between experienced sonographers and trained PhD students. This work provides high-quality benchmark resources for advancing medical image segmentation algorithms and promoting clinical innovation. Ultimately, improved CSD diagnosis and subsequent treatment strategies can enhance the quality of life in women of reproductive age, representing significant value for both medical research and clinical practice.

Zhaoyang Zhang, Shuli Jiang, Yantao Shen et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has recently driven major gains in long chain-of-thought reasoning large language models (LLMs), but the high inference cost of such models motivates distillation into smaller students. Most existing knowledge distillation (KD) methods are designed for supervised fine-tuning (SFT), relying on fixed teacher traces or teacher-student Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence-based regularization. When combined with RL, these approaches often suffer from distribution mismatch and objective interference: teacher supervision may not align with the student's evolving rollout distribution, and the KL regularizer can compete with reward maximization and require careful loss balancing. To address these issues, we propose RL-aware distillation (RLAD), which performs selective imitation during RL -- guiding the student toward the teacher only when it improves the current policy update. Our core component, Trust Region Ratio Distillation (TRRD), replaces the teacher-student KL regularizer with a PPO/GRPO-style likelihood-ratio objective anchored to a teacher--old-policy mixture, yielding advantage-aware, trust-region-bounded distillation on student rollouts and naturally balancing exploration, exploitation, and imitation. Across diverse logic reasoning and math benchmarks, RLAD consistently outperforms offline distillation, standard GRPO, and KL-based on-policy teacher-student knowledge distillation.

Michael Kleinman, Matthew Trager, Alessandro Achille et al.

Increasing the thinking budget of AI models can significantly improve accuracy, but not all questions warrant the same amount of reasoning. Users may prefer to allocate different amounts of reasoning effort depending on how they value output quality versus latency and cost. To leverage this tradeoff effectively, users need fine-grained control over the amount of thinking used for a particular query, but few approaches enable such control. Existing methods require users to specify the absolute number of desired tokens, but this requires knowing the difficulty of the problem beforehand to appropriately set the token budget for a query. To address these issues, we propose Adaptive Effort Control, a self-adaptive reinforcement learning method that trains models to use a user-specified fraction of tokens relative to the current average chain-of-thought length for each query. This approach eliminates dataset- and phase-specific tuning while producing better cost-accuracy tradeoff curves compared to standard methods. Users can dynamically adjust the cost-accuracy trade-off through a continuous effort parameter specified at inference time. We observe that the model automatically learns to allocate resources proportionally to the task difficulty and, across model scales ranging from 1.5B to 32B parameters, our approach enables a 2-3x reduction in chain-of-thought length while maintaining or improving performance relative to the base model used for RL training.

Renos Zabounidis, Aditya Golatkar, Michael Kleinman et al.

We propose Re-FORC, an adaptive reward prediction method that, given a context, enables prediction of the expected future rewards as a function of the number of future thinking tokens. Re-FORC trains a lightweight adapter on reasoning models, demonstrating improved prediction with longer reasoning and larger models. Re-FORC enables: 1) early stopping of unpromising reasoning chains, reducing compute by 26% while maintaining accuracy, 2) optimized model and thinking length selection that achieves 4% higher accuracy at equal compute and 55% less compute at equal accuracy compared to the largest model, 3) adaptive test-time scaling, which increases accuracy by 11% in high compute regime, and 7% in low compute regime. Re-FORC allows dynamic reasoning with length control via cost-per-token thresholds while estimating computation time upfront.

Yiling Huang, Weiran Wang, Guanlong Zhao et al.

While standard speaker diarization attempts to answer the question "who spoken when", most of relevant applications in reality are more interested in determining "who spoken what". Whether it is the conventional modularized approach or the more recent end-to-end neural diarization (EEND), an additional automatic speech recognition (ASR) model and an orchestration algorithm are required to associate the speaker labels with recognized words. In this paper, we propose Word-level End-to-End Neural Diarization (WEEND) with auxiliary network, a multi-task learning algorithm that performs end-to-end ASR and speaker diarization in the same neural architecture. That is, while speech is being recognized, speaker labels are predicted simultaneously for each recognized word. Experimental results demonstrate that WEEND outperforms the turn-based diarization baseline system on all 2-speaker short-form scenarios and has the capability to generalize to audio lengths of 5 minutes. Although 3+speaker conversations are harder, we find that with enough in-domain training data, WEEND has the potential to deliver high quality diarized text.

Fangfang Li, Quanxue Gao, Cheng Deng et al.

The K-means one-step dimensionality reduction clustering method has made some progress in addressing the curse of dimensionality in clustering tasks. However, it combines the K-means clustering and dimensionality reduction processes for optimization, leading to limitations in the clustering effect due to the introduced hyperparameters and the initialization of clustering centers. Moreover, maintaining class balance during clustering remains challenging. To overcome these issues, we propose a unified framework that integrates manifold learning with K-means, resulting in the self-supervised graph embedding framework. Specifically, we establish a connection between K-means and the manifold structure, allowing us to perform K-means without explicitly defining centroids. Additionally, we use this centroid-free K-means to generate labels in low-dimensional space and subsequently utilize the label information to determine the similarity between samples. This approach ensures consistency between the manifold structure and the labels. Our model effectively achieves one-step clustering without the need for redundant balancing hyperparameters. Notably, we have discovered that maximizing the $\ell_{2,1}$-norm naturally maintains class balance during clustering, a result that we have theoretically proven. Finally, experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that the clustering results of Our-LPP and Our-MFA exhibit excellent and reliable performance.

Joymallya Chakraborty, Wei Xia, Anirban Majumder et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language processing tasks. However, their practical application in high-stake domains, such as fraud and abuse detection, remains an area that requires further exploration. The existing applications often narrowly focus on specific tasks like toxicity or hate speech detection. In this paper, we present a comprehensive benchmark suite designed to assess the performance of LLMs in identifying and mitigating fraudulent and abusive language across various real-world scenarios. Our benchmark encompasses a diverse set of tasks, including detecting spam emails, hate speech, misogynistic language, and more. We evaluated several state-of-the-art LLMs, including models from Anthropic, Mistral AI, and the AI21 family, to provide a comprehensive assessment of their capabilities in this critical domain. The results indicate that while LLMs exhibit proficient baseline performance in individual fraud and abuse detection tasks, their performance varies considerably across tasks, particularly struggling with tasks that demand nuanced pragmatic reasoning, such as identifying diverse forms of misogynistic language. These findings have important implications for the responsible development and deployment of LLMs in high-risk applications. Our benchmark suite can serve as a tool for researchers and practitioners to systematically evaluate LLMs for multi-task fraud detection and drive the creation of more robust, trustworthy, and ethically-aligned systems for fraud and abuse detection.

Yuntong Hu, Matthew Trager, Yuting Zhang et al.

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MAS) show strong promise for complex reasoning, planning, and tool-augmented tasks, but designing effective MAS architectures remains labor-intensive, brittle, and hard to generalize. Existing automatic MAS generation methods either rely on code generation, which often leads to executability and robustness failures, or impose rigid architectural templates that limit expressiveness and adaptability. We propose Evolutionary Generation of Multi-Agent Systems (EvoMAS), which formulates MAS generation as structured configuration generation. EvoMAS performs evolutionary generation in configuration space. Specifically, EvoMAS selects initial configurations from a pool, applies feedback-conditioned mutation and crossover guided by execution traces, and iteratively refines both the candidate pool and an experience memory. We evaluate EvoMAS on diverse benchmarks, including BBEH, SWE-Bench, and WorkBench, covering reasoning, software engineering, and tool-use tasks. EvoMAS consistently improves task performance over both human-designed MAS and prior automatic MAS generation methods, while producing generated systems with higher executability and runtime robustness. EvoMAS outperforms the agent evolution method EvoAgent by +10.5 points on BBEH reasoning and +7.1 points on WorkBench. With Claude-4.5-Sonnet, EvoMAS also reaches 79.1% on SWE-Bench-Verified, matching the top of the leaderboard.

Jing Tan, Zhaoyang Zhang, Yantao Shen et al.

We introduce Talk2Move, a reinforcement learning (RL) based diffusion framework for text-instructed spatial transformation of objects within scenes. Spatially manipulating objects in a scene through natural language poses a challenge for multimodal generation systems. While existing text-based manipulation methods can adjust appearance or style, they struggle to perform object-level geometric transformations-such as translating, rotating, or resizing objects-due to scarce paired supervision and pixel-level optimization limits. Talk2Move employs Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to explore geometric actions through diverse rollouts generated from input images and lightweight textual variations, removing the need for costly paired data. A spatial reward guided model aligns geometric transformations with linguistic description, while off-policy step evaluation and active step sampling improve learning efficiency by focusing on informative transformation stages. Furthermore, we design object-centric spatial rewards that evaluate displacement, rotation, and scaling behaviors directly, enabling interpretable and coherent transformations. Experiments on curated benchmarks demonstrate that Talk2Move achieves precise, consistent, and semantically faithful object transformations, outperforming existing text-guided editing approaches in both spatial accuracy and scene coherence.

Adam Stein, Matthew Trager, Benjamin Bowman et al.

Enabling agentic AI systems to adapt their problem-solving approaches based on post-training interactions remains a fundamental challenge. While systems that update and maintain a memory at inference time have been proposed, existing designs only steer the system by modifying textual input to a language model or agent, which means that they cannot change sampling parameters, remove tools, modify system prompts, or switch between agentic and workflow paradigms. On the other hand, systems that adapt more flexibly require offline optimization and remain static once deployed. We present Experience-Guided Reasoner (EGuR), which generates tailored strategies -- complete computational procedures involving LLM calls, tools, sampling parameters, and control logic -- dynamically at inference time based on accumulated experience. We achieve this using an LLM-based meta-strategy -- a strategy that outputs strategies -- enabling adaptation of all strategy components (prompts, sampling parameters, tool configurations, and control logic). EGuR operates through two components: a Guide generates multiple candidate strategies conditioned on the current problem and structured memory of past experiences, while a Consolidator integrates execution feedback to improve future strategy generation. This produces complete, ready-to-run strategies optimized for each problem, which can be cached, retrieved, and executed as needed without wasting resources. Across five challenging benchmarks (AIME 2025, 3-SAT, and three Big Bench Extra Hard tasks), EGuR achieves up to 14% accuracy improvements over the strongest baselines while reducing computational costs by up to 111x, with both metrics improving as the system gains experience.

Dhananjay Ram, Wei Xia, Stefano Soatto

Attention is a core component of transformer architecture, whether encoder-only, decoder-only, or encoder-decoder model. However, the standard softmax attention often produces noisy probability distribution, which can impair effective feature selection at every layer of these models, particularly for long contexts. We propose Focal Attention, a simple yet effective modification that sharpens the attention distribution by controlling the softmax temperature, either as a fixed hyperparameter or as a learnable parameter during training. This sharpening enables the model to concentrate on the most relevant tokens while suppressing irrelevant ones. Empirically, Focal Attention scales more favorably than standard transformer with respect to model size, training data, and context length. Across diverse benchmarks, it achieves the same accuracy with up to 42% fewer parameters or 33% less training data. On long-context tasks, it delivers substantial relative improvements ranging from 17% to 82%, demonstrating its effectiveness in real world applications.

Wei Xia, Haoqing Wang, Zhi-Hong Deng et al.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has become the default strategy for enhancing LLM capabilities, yet its application raises a fundamental question: when is explicit reasoning actually beneficial? Empirical evidence reveals a striking paradox: CoT often provides marginal or even negative gains on factual and open-ended tasks while multiplying token consumption. In this work, we show that LLM reasoning is not a static property of tasks or models, but a \emph{dynamic decoding state} that emerges during generation. Through systematic analysis, we find early-stage entropy dynamics provide a reliable signal of this state: tasks benefiting from CoT exhibit consistent entropy reduction, while others display unstable or increasing patterns. This behavior can be interpreted as a phase-transition-like shift from a high-entropy exploratory regime to a low-entropy structured reasoning regime. Based on these insights, we propose \textbf{EDRM} (Entropy Dynamics-based Reasoning Manifold), a lightweight and training-free routing framework that leverages early decoding entropy to adaptively select inference strategies. EDRM embeds entropy trajectories into a compact and interpretable manifold representation, enabling both zero-shot deployment and fine-grained instance-level adaptation. Across 15 benchmarks and 4 LLMs of varying scales and architectures, EDRM consistently outperforms static baselines. At the dataset level, EDRM achieves \textbf{41--55\%} token reduction while improving accuracy with as few as 50 calibration samples. At the instance level, it further improves accuracy by up to \textbf{4.7\%} while maintaining \textbf{27--45\%} token savings. These results suggest that reasoning should be invoked selectively rather than by default, and demonstrate the effectiveness of entropy-driven decoding control for efficient and adaptive LLM inference.

Kounianhua Du, Jizheng Chen, Renting Rui et al.

Utilizing large language models to generate codes has shown promising meaning in software development revolution. Despite the intelligence shown by the large language models, their specificity in code generation can still be improved due to the syntactic gap and mismatched vocabulary existing between natural language and programming languages. In this paper, we propose CodeGRAG, a Graphical Retrieval Augmented Code Generation framework that bridges the gap between NL and PL to enhance the performance of LLMs. CodeGRAG builds the graphical view of code blocks based on the control flow and data flow of them to better interpret the programming domain knowledge, which can facilitate natural language based LLMs for better understanding of code syntax and serve as a bridge among different programming languages. To take the extracted structural knowledge into the foundation models, we propose 1) a hard meta-graph prompt template to transform the challenging syntax graph into informative graphical view for tuning-free models and 2) a soft prompting technique that injects the domain knowledge of programming languages into model parameters via finetuning the models with the soft signals encoded by GNN expert model. Specifically, two constraints are designed to improve the alignment and structure expressiveness, contributing to the informativeness of the single-token-sized external <GraphEmb> for enhanced code generation. CodeGRAG significantly improves the code generation ability of LLMs and can even offer performance gain for cross-lingual code generation. Implementation is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Code-5970/ .

Zhiyong Shen, Gongpeng Zhao, Jun Zhou et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently achieved substantial progress in general-purpose perception and reasoning. Nevertheless, their deployment in Food-Service and Retail Stores (FSRS) scenarios encounters two major obstacles: (i) real-world FSRS data, collected from heterogeneous acquisition devices, are highly noisy and lack auditable, closed-loop data curation, which impedes the construction of high-quality, controllable, and reproducible training corpora; and (ii) existing evaluation protocols do not offer a unified, fine-grained and standardized benchmark spanning single-image, multi-image, and video inputs, making it challenging to objectively gauge model robustness. To address these challenges, we first develop Ostrakon-VL, an FSRS-oriented MLLM based on Qwen3-VL-8B. Second, we introduce ShopBench, the first public benchmark for FSRS. Third, we propose QUAD (Quality-aware Unbiased Automated Data-curation), a multi-stage multimodal instruction data curation pipeline. Leveraging a multi-stage training strategy, Ostrakon-VL achieves an average score of 60.1 on ShopBench, establishing a new state of the art among open-source MLLMs with comparable parameter scales and diverse architectures. Notably, it surpasses the substantially larger Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B (59.4) by +0.7, and exceeds the same-scale Qwen3-VL-8B (55.3) by +4.8, demonstrating significantly improved parameter efficiency. These results indicate that Ostrakon-VL delivers more robust and reliable FSRS-centric perception and decision-making capabilities. To facilitate reproducible research, we will publicly release Ostrakon-VL and the ShopBench benchmark.

Wei Xia, Zhi-Hong Deng

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), their deployment in real-world applications has become increasingly widespread. LLMs are expected to deliver robust performance across diverse tasks, user preferences, and practical scenarios. However, as demands grow, ensuring that LLMs produce responses aligned with human intent remains a foundational challenge. In particular, aligning model behavior effectively and efficiently during inference, without costly retraining or extensive supervision, is both a critical requirement and a non-trivial technical endeavor. To address the challenge, we propose SDA (Steering-Driven Distribution Alignment), a training-free and model-agnostic alignment framework designed for open-source LLMs. SDA dynamically redistributes model output probabilities based on user-defined alignment instructions, enhancing alignment between model behavior and human intents without fine-tuning. The method is lightweight, resource-efficient, and compatible with a wide range of open-source LLMs. It can function independently during inference or be integrated with training-based alignment strategies. Moreover, SDA supports personalized preference alignment, enabling flexible control over the model response behavior. Empirical results demonstrate that SDA consistently improves alignment performance across 8 open-source LLMs with varying scales and diverse origins, evaluated on three key alignment dimensions, helpfulness, harmlessness, and honesty (3H). Specifically, SDA achieves average gains of 64.4% in helpfulness, 30% in honesty and 11.5% in harmlessness across the tested models, indicating its effectiveness and generalization across diverse models and application scenarios.

Yifan Xing, Tong He, Tianjun Xiao et al.

We propose a hierarchical graph neural network (GNN) model that learns how to cluster a set of images into an unknown number of identities using a training set of images annotated with labels belonging to a disjoint set of identities. Our hierarchical GNN uses a novel approach to merge connected components predicted at each level of the hierarchy to form a new graph at the next level. Unlike fully unsupervised hierarchical clustering, the choice of grouping and complexity criteria stems naturally from supervision in the training set. The resulting method, Hi-LANDER, achieves an average of 54% improvement in F-score and 8% increase in Normalized Mutual Information (NMI) relative to current GNN-based clustering algorithms. Additionally, state-of-the-art GNN-based methods rely on separate models to predict linkage probabilities and node densities as intermediate steps of the clustering process. In contrast, our unified framework achieves a seven-fold decrease in computational cost. We release our training and inference code at https://github.com/dmlc/dgl/tree/master/examples/pytorch/hilander.

Xiangyu Wang, Jin Wu, Haoran Shi et al.

Recently, multi-Large Language Model (LLM) frameworks have been proposed to solve contextualized tasks. However, these frameworks do not explicitly emulate human team role division, which may lead to a single perspective, thereby weakening performance on multi-step contextualized tasks. To address this issue, we propose TeamLLM, a human-like Team-Oriented Multi-LLM Collaboration Framework. TeamLLM adopts four team roles with distinct division and employs a three-phase multi-LLM collaboration for multi-step contextualized tasks. To evaluate the effectiveness of TeamLLM on multi-step contextualized tasks, we propose Contextually-Grounded and Procedurally-Structured tasks (CGPST) and construct the CGPST benchmark. This benchmark has four core features: contextual grounding, procedural structure, process-oriented evaluation and multi-dimensional assessment. We evaluate ten popular LLMs on CGPST at overall-level, step-level, and dimension-level. Results show that TeamLLM substantially improves performance on CGPST. We release the benchmark with scenarios, full-process responses and human scores from ten LLMs. The code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TeamLLM-anonymous-C50E/.

Aditya Chattopadhyay, Elvis Nunez, Prannay Kaul et al.

Hybrid State-Space models combine Attention with recurrent State-Space Model (SSM) layers, balancing eidetic memory from Attention with compressed fading memory from SSMs. This yields smaller Key-Value caches and faster decoding than Transformers, along with a richer architectural design space. Exploring that design space at scale has so far required training from scratch, a barrier that has kept most large-model Hybrid research within a narrow range of architectures. We introduce Priming, a method that turns Hybrid architecture design from a pre-training problem into a knowledge transfer one. Priming initializes a Hybrid model from a pre-trained Transformer and, through short alignment and post-training phases, recovers downstream quality using less than 0.5% of the source model's pre-training token budget. Priming is agnostic to the source Transformer family (e.g., Qwen, Llama, Mistral), model class (dense or Mixture-of-Experts), and model scale. Priming enables us to run the first controlled comparison of SSM layer types at scale under identical conditions. We evaluate, Gated KalmaNet (GKA), Gated DeltaNet (GDN), and Mamba-2, and show that their expressiveness hierarchy, GKA>GDN>Mamba-2, directly predicts downstream performance on long-context reasoning tasks. We scale Priming to 8B/32B reasoning models with native 128K contexts. Our Hybrid GKA 32B improves over its source Qwen3-32B by +3.8 average reasoning points, while staying within 1% of a Transformer post-trained on the same data and enabling up to 2.3x higher decode throughput. To foster research on Hybrid architectures, we release a model zoo of primed Hybrid models for long-context reasoning and instruction following, together with the Priming training and inference code (Sequence Parallelism algorithms for long-context training, optimized GKA kernels, and vLLM serving plugin), all under Apache~2.0 License.

Xiaoze Liu, Dhananjay Ram, Yuting Zhang et al.

We introduce Mutual Reinforcement Learning, a framework for concurrent RL post-training in which heterogeneous LLM policies exchange typed experience while keeping separate parameters, objectives, and tokenizers. The framework combines a Shared Experience Exchange (SEE), Multi-Worker Resource Allocation (MWRA), and a Tokenizer Heterogeneity Layer (THL) that retokenizes text and aligns token-level traces across incompatible vocabularies. This substrate makes the experience-sharing design question operational across model families. We instantiate three controlled probes on top of GRPO: data-level rollout sharing via Peer Rollout Pooling (PRP), value-level advantage sharing via Cross-Policy GRPO Advantage Sharing (XGRPO), and outcome-level success transfer via Success-Gated Transfer (SGT). A contextual-bandit analysis characterizes their structural positions on a stability-support trade-off: PRP pays density-ratio variance and THL residual costs, XGRPO preserves on-policy actor support while changing scalar baselines, and SGT supplies a rescue-set score direction toward verified peer successes. In the evaluated regime, outcome-level sharing occupies the favorable point of this trade-off.

Qingyao Li, Lingyue Fu, Weiming Zhang et al.

Online education platforms, leveraging the internet to distribute education resources, seek to provide convenient education but often fall short in real-time communication with students. They often struggle to address the diverse obstacles students encounter throughout their learning journey. Solving the problems encountered by students poses a significant challenge for traditional deep learning models, as it requires not only a broad spectrum of subject knowledge but also the ability to understand what constitutes a student's individual difficulties. It's challenging for traditional machine learning models, as they lack the capacity to comprehend students' personalized needs. Recently, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) offers the possibility for resolving this issue by comprehending individual requests. Although LLMs have been successful in various fields, creating an LLM-based education system is still challenging for the wide range of educational skills required. This paper reviews the recently emerged LLM research related to educational capabilities, including mathematics, writing, programming, reasoning, and knowledge-based question answering, with the aim to explore their potential in constructing the next-generation intelligent education system. Specifically, for each capability, we focus on investigating two aspects. Firstly, we examine the current state of LLMs regarding this capability: how advanced they have become, whether they surpass human abilities, and what deficiencies might exist. Secondly, we evaluate whether the development methods for LLMs in this area are generalizable, that is, whether these methods can be applied to construct a comprehensive educational supermodel with strengths across various capabilities, rather than being effective in only a singular aspect.

Quan Wang, Yiling Huang, Guanlong Zhao et al.

In this paper, we introduce DiarizationLM, a framework to leverage large language models (LLM) to post-process the outputs from a speaker diarization system. Various goals can be achieved with the proposed framework, such as improving the readability of the diarized transcript, or reducing the word diarization error rate (WDER). In this framework, the outputs of the automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speaker diarization systems are represented as a compact textual format, which is included in the prompt to an optionally finetuned LLM. The outputs of the LLM can be used as the refined diarization results with the desired enhancement. As a post-processing step, this framework can be easily applied to any off-the-shelf ASR and speaker diarization systems without retraining existing components. Our experiments show that a finetuned PaLM 2-S model can reduce the WDER by rel. 55.5% on the Fisher telephone conversation dataset, and rel. 44.9% on the Callhome English dataset.

Wei Xia, Shaoguang Mao, Chanjing Zheng

Large language models have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in tasks involving natural language generation, reasoning, and comprehension. This study aims to construct prompts and comments grounded in the diverse scoring criteria delineated within the official TOEFL guide. The primary objective is to assess the capabilities and constraints of ChatGPT, a prominent representative of large language models, within the context of automated essay scoring. The prevailing methodologies for automated essay scoring involve the utilization of deep neural networks, statistical machine learning techniques, and fine-tuning pre-trained models. However, these techniques face challenges when applied to different contexts or subjects, primarily due to their substantial data requirements and limited adaptability to small sample sizes. In contrast, this study employs ChatGPT to conduct an automated evaluation of English essays, even with a small sample size, employing an experimental approach. The empirical findings indicate that ChatGPT can provide operational functionality for automated essay scoring, although the results exhibit a regression effect. It is imperative to underscore that the effective design and implementation of ChatGPT prompts necessitate a profound domain expertise and technical proficiency, as these prompts are subject to specific threshold criteria. Keywords: ChatGPT, Automated Essay Scoring, Prompt Learning, TOEFL Independent Writing Task

Qingyao Li, Wei Xia, Kounianhua Du et al.

Concept recommendation aims to suggest the next concept for learners to study based on their knowledge states and the human knowledge system. While knowledge states can be predicted using knowledge tracing models, previous approaches have not effectively integrated the human knowledge system into the process of designing these educational models. In the era of rapidly evolving Large Language Models (LLMs), many fields have begun using LLMs to generate and encode text, introducing external knowledge. However, integrating LLMs into concept recommendation presents two urgent challenges: 1) How to construct text for concepts that effectively incorporate the human knowledge system? 2) How to adapt non-smooth, anisotropic text encodings effectively for concept recommendation? In this paper, we propose a novel Structure and Knowledge Aware Representation learning framework for concept Recommendation (SKarREC). We leverage factual knowledge from LLMs as well as the precedence and succession relationships between concepts obtained from the knowledge graph to construct textual representations of concepts. Furthermore, we propose a graph-based adapter to adapt anisotropic text embeddings to the concept recommendation task. This adapter is pre-trained through contrastive learning on the knowledge graph to get a smooth and structure-aware concept representation. Then, it's fine-tuned through the recommendation task, forming a text-to-knowledge-to-recommendation adaptation pipeline, which effectively constructs a structure and knowledge-aware concept representation. Our method does a better job than previous adapters in transforming text encodings for application in concept recommendation. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Elvis Nunez, Luca Zancato, Benjamin Bowman et al.

The "state" of State Space Models (SSMs) represents their memory, which fades exponentially over an unbounded span. By contrast, Attention-based models have "eidetic" (i.e., verbatim, or photographic) memory over a finite span (context size). Hybrid architectures combine State Space layers with Attention, but still cannot recall the distant past and can access only the most recent tokens eidetically. Unlike current methods of combining SSM and Attention layers, we allow the state to be allocated based on relevancy rather than recency. In this way, for every new set of query tokens, our models can "eidetically" access tokens from beyond the Attention span of current Hybrid SSMs without requiring extra hardware resources. We introduce a method to expand the memory span of the hybrid state by "reserving" a fraction of the Attention context for tokens retrieved from arbitrarily distant in the past, thus expanding the eidetic memory span of the overall state. We call this reserved fraction of tokens the "expansion span," and the mechanism to retrieve and aggregate it "Span-Expanded Attention" (SE-Attn). To adapt Hybrid models to using SE-Attn, we propose a novel fine-tuning method that extends LoRA to Hybrid models (HyLoRA) and allows efficient adaptation on long spans of tokens. We show that SE-Attn enables us to efficiently adapt pre-trained Hybrid models on sequences of tokens up to 8 times longer than the ones used for pre-training. We show that HyLoRA with SE-Attn is cheaper and more performant than alternatives like LongLoRA when applied to Hybrid models on natural language benchmarks with long-range dependencies, such as PG-19, RULER, and other common natural language downstream tasks.

Theo Uscidda, Matthew Trager, Michael Kleinman et al.

One common strategy for improving the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on downstream tasks involves using a \emph{verifier model} to either select the best answer from a pool of candidates or to steer the auto-regressive generation process towards better outputs. This class of methods typically results in improved accuracy at the cost of increased computation at test-time, a paradigm known as \emph{test-time scaling}. However, most existing approaches increase computation uniformly across all samples and generation steps, without considering the complexity of individual instances, leading to inefficient resource use. We address this limitation by proposing an approach, called \emph{Locally Adaptive Test-Time Scaling (LATTS)}, that allocates variable compute across generation steps. Specifically, at each generation step, LATTS employs a verifier-based acceptance criterion to decide whether to resample, backtrack, restart, or stop the generation process. This criterion effectively adjusts the per-step computational effort based on a precise notion of \emph{local difficulty} derived from the verifier model. Empirical results show that LATTS achieves significantly superior accuracy--compute tradeoffs compared to standard verifier-based methods.

Sakshi Choudhary, Aditya Chattopadhyay, Luca Zancato et al.

Language models struggle to generalize beyond pretraining context lengths, limiting long-horizon reasoning and retrieval. Continued pretraining on long-context data can help but is expensive due to the quadratic scaling of Attention. We observe that most tokens do not require (Global) Attention over the entire sequence and can rely on local context. Based on this, we propose L2A (Learning To Attend), a layer that enables conditional (token-wise) long-range memory access by deciding when to invoke global attention. We evaluate L2A on Qwen 2.5 and Qwen 3 models, extending their effective context length from 32K to 128K tokens. L2A matches the performance of standard long-context training to within 3% while skipping Global Attention for $\sim$80% of tokens, outperforming prior baselines. We also design custom Triton kernels to efficiently implement this token-wise conditional Attention on GPUs, achieving up to $\sim$2x improvements in training throughput and time-to-first-token over FlashAttention. Moreover, L2A enables post-training pruning of highly sparse Global Attention layers, reducing KV cache memory by up to 50% with negligible performance loss.

Xinjie Lin, Gang Xiong, Gaopeng Gou et al.

Encrypted traffic classification is highly challenging in network security due to the need for extracting robust features from content-agnostic traffic data. Existing approaches face critical issues: (i) Distribution drift, caused by reliance on the closedworld assumption, limits adaptability to realworld, shifting patterns; (ii) Dependence on labeled data restricts applicability where such data is scarce or unavailable. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in offering generalizable solutions across a wide range of tasks, achieving notable success in various specialized fields. However, their effectiveness in traffic analysis remains constrained by challenges in adapting to the unique requirements of the traffic domain. In this paper, we introduce a novel traffic representation model named Encrypted Traffic Out-of-Distribution Instruction Tuning with LLM (ETooL), which integrates LLMs with knowledge of traffic structures through a self-supervised instruction tuning paradigm. This framework establishes connections between textual information and traffic interactions. ETooL demonstrates more robust classification performance and superior generalization in both supervised and zero-shot traffic classification tasks. Notably, it achieves significant improvements in F1 scores: APP53 (I.I.D.) to 93.19%(6.62%) and 92.11%(4.19%), APP53 (O.O.D.) to 74.88%(18.17%) and 72.13%(15.15%), and ISCX-Botnet (O.O.D.) to 95.03%(9.16%) and 81.95%(12.08%). Additionally, we construct NETD, a traffic dataset designed to support dynamic distributional shifts, and use it to validate ETooL's effectiveness under varying distributional conditions. Furthermore, we evaluate the efficiency gains achieved through ETooL's instruction tuning approach.

Liangzu Peng, Aditya Chattopadhyay, Luca Zancato et al.

As efficient alternatives to softmax Attention, linear State-Space Models (SSMs) achieve constant memory and linear compute, but maintain only a lossy, fading summary of the past, often leading to inferior performance in recall-oriented tasks. We propose Gated KalmaNet (GKA), a layer that accounts for the full past while maintaining SSM-style efficiency. We ground our approach in the Kalman Filter (KF) framework, which provides a principled solution for optimal inference in dynamical systems. We show that several existing SSM layers (DeltaNet, Gated DeltaNet, and Kimi Delta Attention) are approximations to the KF recurrence that assume identity error covariance, thereby ignoring how past measurements (keys and values) should optimally influence state updates. In contrast, GKA computes the exact Kalman gain by maintaining the full error covariance. Under a steady-state assumption that enables parallelization, this reduces to solving an online ridge regression problem with constant memory and linear compute cost. A critical insight is that standard KF equations are numerically unstable in low-precision environments (like bfloat16) and hard to parallelize on modern hardware. We address this through: (1) adaptive regularization with input-dependent gating to control the condition number of the ridge regression for numerical stability, and (2) Chebyshev Iteration, which we show is more stable than conventional iterative solvers in low-precision settings. We further develop hardware-aware chunk-wise kernels to enable efficient training. Empirically, GKA outperforms existing SSM layers (like Mamba2 and Gated DeltaNet) on short-context tasks and achieves more than 10\% relative improvement on long-context RAG and LongQA tasks up to 128k tokens.

Wei Xia

We proposed Static and Dynamic -- two zero-shot logits-layer debiasing methods. Dynamic reduces bias by up to 70% with minimal fluency loss. Logits intervention outperforms hidden-layer approaches. We show semantic-aware logits intervention is stable and effective for debiasing aligned LLMs.

Jianqing Zhang, Zhezheng Hao, Wei Xia et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is widely used for post-training large language models (LLMs) in code editing, where group-relative methods like GRPO are popular for their critic-free, normalized advantage estimation. However, in real-world code-editing scenarios, reward distributions are often skewed with unpredictable outliers, leading to distorted advantage computation and increased noise. To address this issue, we propose Group Adaptive Policy Optimization (GAPO), which adaptively finds an outlier-free highest-density interval (HDI) per prompt and then uses the median of that interval as an adaptive Q to replace the group mean in advantage calculation. This adaptive Q robustly handles skewed distributions while remaining plug-and-play and efficient. We validate GAPO on nine instruction-tuned LLMs (3B-14B) using a large internal dataset of 51,844 real-world, history-aware code-editing tasks across 10 languages, demonstrating consistent improvements in exact match accuracy over GRPO and its variant DAPO. Code is publicly available.

Evan Becker, Benjamin Bowman, Matthew Trager et al.

Given a query and dataset, the optimal way of answering the query is to make use all the information available. Modern LLMs exhibit impressive ability to memorize training data, but data not deemed important during training is forgotten, and information outside that training set cannot be made use of. Processing an entire dataset at inference time is infeasible due to the bounded nature of model resources (e.g. context size in transformers or states in state space models), meaning we must resort to external memory. This constraint naturally leads to the following problem: How can we decide based on the present query and model, what among a virtually unbounded set of known data matters for inference? To minimize model uncertainty for a particular query at test-time, we introduce Retrieval In-Context Optimization (RICO), a retrieval method that uses gradients from the LLM itself to learn the optimal mixture of documents for answer generation. Unlike traditional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which relies on external heuristics for document retrieval, our approach leverages direct feedback from the model. Theoretically, we show that standard top-$k$ retrieval with model gradients can approximate our optimization procedure, and provide connections to the leave-one-out loss. We demonstrate empirically that by minimizing an unsupervised loss objective in the form of question perplexity, we can achieve comparable retriever metric performance to BM25 with \emph{no finetuning}. Furthermore, when evaluated on quality of the final prediction, our method often outperforms fine-tuned dense retrievers such as E5.

Weiming Zhang, Lingyue Fu, Qingyao Li et al.

Cognitive diagnosis (CD) plays a crucial role in intelligent education, evaluating students' comprehension of knowledge concepts based on their test histories. However, current CD methods often model students, exercises, and knowledge concepts solely on their ID relationships, neglecting the abundant semantic relationships present within educational data space. Furthermore, contemporary intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) frequently involve the addition of new students and exercises, a situation that ID-based methods find challenging to manage effectively. The advent of large language models (LLMs) offers the potential for overcoming this challenge with open-world knowledge. In this paper, we propose LLM4CD, which Leverages Large Language Models for Open-World Knowledge Augmented Cognitive Diagnosis. Our method utilizes the open-world knowledge of LLMs to construct cognitively expressive textual representations, which are then encoded to introduce rich semantic information into the CD task. Additionally, we propose an innovative bi-level encoder framework that models students' test histories through two levels of encoders: a macro-level cognitive text encoder and a micro-level knowledge state encoder. This approach substitutes traditional ID embeddings with semantic representations, enabling the model to accommodate new students and exercises with open-world knowledge and address the cold-start problem. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms previous CD models on multiple real-world datasets, validating the effectiveness of leveraging LLMs to introduce rich semantic information into the CD task.

Lingyue Fu, Ting Long, Jianghao Lin et al.

Knowledge Tracing (KT) monitors students' knowledge states and simulates their responses to question sequences. Existing KT models typically follow a single-step training paradigm, which leads to discrepancies with the multi-step inference process required in real-world simulations, resulting in significant error accumulation. This accumulation of error, coupled with the issue of data sparsity, can substantially degrade the performance of recommendation models in the intelligent tutoring systems. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Adversarial Multi-Step Training Framework for Knowledge Tracing (AdvKT), which, for the first time, focuses on the multi-step KT task. More specifically, AdvKT leverages adversarial learning paradigm involving a generator and a discriminator. The generator mimics high-reward responses, effectively reducing error accumulation across multiple steps, while the discriminator provides feedback to generate synthetic data. Additionally, we design specialized data augmentation techniques to enrich the training data with realistic variations, ensuring that the model generalizes well even in scenarios with sparse data. Experiments conducted on four real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of AdvKT over existing KT models, showcasing its ability to address both error accumulation and data sparsity issues effectively.

Quanxue Gao, Qianqian Wang, Han Lu et al.

Although numerous clustering algorithms have been developed, many existing methods still leverage k-means technique to detect clusters of data points. However, the performance of k-means heavily depends on the estimation of centers of clusters, which is very difficult to achieve an optimal solution. Another major drawback is that it is sensitive to noise and outlier data. In this paper, from manifold learning perspective, we rethink k-means and present a new clustering algorithm which directly detects clusters of data without mean estimation. Specifically, we construct distance matrix between data points by Butterworth filter such that distance between any two data points in the same clusters equals to a small constant, while increasing the distance between other data pairs from different clusters. To well exploit the complementary information embedded in different views, we leverage the tensor Schatten p-norm regularization on the 3rd-order tensor which consists of indicator matrices of different views. Finally, an efficient alternating algorithm is derived to optimize our model. The constructed sequence was proved to converge to the stationary KKT point. Extensive experimental results indicate the superiority of our proposed method.

Jiarui Cai, Mingze Xu, Wei Li et al.

We propose an online tracking algorithm that performs the object detection and data association under a common framework, capable of linking objects after a long time span. This is realized by preserving a large spatio-temporal memory to store the identity embeddings of the tracked objects, and by adaptively referencing and aggregating useful information from the memory as needed. Our model, called MeMOT, consists of three main modules that are all Transformer-based: 1) Hypothesis Generation that produce object proposals in the current video frame; 2) Memory Encoding that extracts the core information from the memory for each tracked object; and 3) Memory Decoding that solves the object detection and data association tasks simultaneously for multi-object tracking. When evaluated on widely adopted MOT benchmark datasets, MeMOT observes very competitive performance.

Feng Cheng, Mingze Xu, Yuanjun Xiong et al.

We propose a memory efficient method, named Stochastic Backpropagation (SBP), for training deep neural networks on videos. It is based on the finding that gradients from incomplete execution for backpropagation can still effectively train the models with minimal accuracy loss, which attributes to the high redundancy of video. SBP keeps all forward paths but randomly and independently removes the backward paths for each network layer in each training step. It reduces the GPU memory cost by eliminating the need to cache activation values corresponding to the dropped backward paths, whose amount can be controlled by an adjustable keep-ratio. Experiments show that SBP can be applied to a wide range of models for video tasks, leading to up to 80.0% GPU memory saving and 10% training speedup with less than 1% accuracy drop on action recognition and temporal action detection.

Chen Geng, Meng Chen, Ruoyu Di et al.

Background:Subarachnoid hemorrhage caused by ruptured cerebral aneurysm often leads to fatal consequences.However,if the aneurysm can be found and treated during asymptomatic periods,the probability of rupture can be greatly reduced.At present,time-of-flight magnetic resonance angiography is one of the most commonly used non-invasive screening techniques for cerebral aneurysm,and the application of deep learning technology in aneurysm detection can effectively improve the screening effect of aneurysm.Existing studies have found that three-dimensional features play an important role in aneurysm detection,but they require a large amount of training data and have problems such as a high false positive rate. Methods:This paper proposed a novel method for aneurysm detection.First,a fully automatic cerebral artery segmentation algorithm without training data was used to extract the volume of interest,and then the 3D U-Net was improved by the 3D SENet module to establish an aneurysm detection model.Eventually a set of fully automated,end-to-end aneurysm detection methods have been formed. Results:A total of 231 magnetic resonance angiography image data were used in this study,among which 132 were training sets,34 were internal test sets and 65 were external test sets.The presented method obtained 97.89% sensitivity in the five-fold cross-validation and obtained 91.0% sensitivity with 2.48 false positives/case in the detection of the external test sets. Conclusions:Compared with the results of our previous studies and other studies,the method in this paper achieves a very competitive sensitivity with less training data and maintains a low false positive rate.As the only method currently using 3D U-Net for aneurysm detection,it proves the feasibility and superior performance of this network in aneurysm detection,and also explores the potential of the channel attention mechanism in this task.

Wei Xia, Quanxue Gao, Ming Yang et al.

Attributed graph clustering, which learns node representation from node attribute and topological graph for clustering, is a fundamental but challenging task for graph analysis. Recently, methods based on graph contrastive learning (GCL) have obtained impressive clustering performance on this task. Yet, we observe that existing GCL-based methods 1) fail to benefit from imprecise clustering labels; 2) require a post-processing operation to get clustering labels; 3) cannot solve out-of-sample (OOS) problem. To address these issues, we propose a novel attributed graph clustering network, namely Self-supervised Contrastive Attributed Graph Clustering (SCAGC). In SCAGC, by leveraging inaccurate clustering labels, a self-supervised contrastive loss, which aims to maximize the similarities of intra-cluster nodes while minimizing the similarities of inter-cluster nodes, are designed for node representation learning. Meanwhile, a clustering module is built to directly output clustering labels by contrasting the representation of different clusters. Thus, for the OOS nodes, SCAGC can directly calculate their clustering labels. Extensive experimental results on four benchmark datasets have shown that SCAGC consistently outperforms 11 competitive clustering methods.