Luka Borozan

Domagoj Ševerdija, Tomislav Prusina, Antonio Jovanović et al.

In most natural language inference problems, sentence representation is needed for semantic retrieval tasks. In recent years, pre-trained large language models have been quite effective for computing such representations. These models produce high-dimensional sentence embeddings. An evident performance gap between large and small models exists in practice. Hence, due to space and time hardware limitations, there is a need to attain comparable results when using the smaller model, which is usually a distilled version of the large language model. In this paper, we assess the model distillation of the sentence representation model Sentence-BERT by augmenting the pre-trained distilled model with a projection layer additionally learned on the Maximum Coding Rate Reduction (MCR2)objective, a novel approach developed for general-purpose manifold clustering. We demonstrate that the new language model with reduced complexity and sentence embedding size can achieve comparable results on semantic retrieval benchmarks.

Luka Borozan, Domagoj Matijević

Large language models (LLMs) have enabled increasingly capable conversational agents, but reliably controlling their behavior in real-time interactive environments remains a significant challenge. Existing approaches often rely on model fine-tuning or alignment procedures that are difficult to adapt to changing interaction requirements. This paper introduces layered scenario-driven LLM control, a framework that enables runtime behavior control through structured prompting. By combining persistent context with scenario-specific constraints, the approach allows agent behavior to be modified during interaction without changing the underlying model. The framework is implemented in ARDena, a real-time multimodal embodied agent that integrates speech interaction, visual perception, tool use, and avatar-based response generation. The proposed approach is evaluated with respect to control effectiveness, response latency, and operational stability. The results demonstrate that scenario definitions alone can produce substantially different interaction behaviors while maintaining stable real-time operation, highlighting the effectiveness of scenario-driven prompting for controlling LLM agents.