Prayag Tiwari

Xiwen Chen, Wenhui Zhu, Jingjing Wang et al.

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is often formulated via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). However, the standard Bradley-Terry instantiation of DPO is limited in modeling common departures from transitivity in human preferences. To address this, recent work has introduced Self-Play Preference Optimization (SPPO), which iteratively refines the policy by training on self-generated win-lose pairs. Our investigation, however, reveals a critical instability in SPPO: the optimization is prone to policy degeneration when the preference oracle assigns overly confident wins to semantically indistinguishable responses. To mitigate this, we propose S-SPPO, a dual-space semantic calibration framework comprising: i) Supervision Calibration via semantic gating, which anneals win rate targets toward the maximum-entropy baseline as semantic overlap increases; and ii) Representation Calibration via latent repulsion to enforce geometric diversity to prevent manifold collapse and maintain latent diversity between chosen and rejected samples. Theoretically, we show that the calibration preserves the constant-sum game structure, facilitating convergence to a Nash Equilibrium. Empirically, S-SPPO avoids the performance degradation seen in prior methods, achieving 52.19% win rate and 47.46% length-controlled win rate on AlpacaEval 2.0 with Llama-3-8B, without using additional human-annotated preferences during training. The code will be available at https://github.com/xiwenc1/s-sppo.

Xuanzhao Dong, Wenhui Zhu, Peijie Qiu et al.

Despite their popularity and success, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often struggle to interpret images accurately, which limits their reasoning capability in complex scenarios (e.g., high object density and complex background clutter). Prior work mainly addresses this limitation by incorporating explicit visual cues like bounding boxes that require extra annotations. In addition, the resulting low-resolution crops often miss fine-grained details that MLLMs require for accurate reasoning. Therefore, we propose Mags-RL, an Agentic Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework that equips MLLMs with an external super-resolution "magnifying glass" agent for high-resolution fine-grained inspection. Specifically, the model performs two-round reasoning: in the first round, it generates an initial rationale and autonomously identifies regions of interest without relying on additional annotations; in the second round, it invokes a super-resolution agent to crop and upscale those regions, then revisits and verifies its earlier reasoning to produce the final answer. We also introduce a novel curriculum learning strategy that enables data-efficient RL training, needing as few as only 40 training samples to achieve reasonable performance. Experiments on VSR, TallyQA, and GQA subsets show its superior performance against recent strong competing methods, demonstrating high-quality reasoning with precise visual grounding. Code and weights will be released soon.

Xin Ning, Qiankun Li, Xiaolong Huang et al.

With the accumulation of resources in the era of big data and the rise of pre-trained models in deep learning, optimizing neural networks for various tasks often involves different strategies for fine-tuning pre-trained models versus training from scratch. However, existing optimizers primarily focus on reducing the loss function by updating model parameters, without fully addressing the unique demands of these two major paradigms. In this paper, we propose DualOpt, a novel approach that decouples optimization techniques specifically tailored for these distinct training scenarios. For training from scratch, we introduce real-time layer-wise weight decay, designed to enhance both convergence and generalization by aligning with the characteristics of weight updates and network architecture. For more importantly fine-tuning, we integrate weight rollback with the optimizer, incorporating a rollback term into each weight update step. This ensures consistency in the weight distribution between upstream and downstream models, effectively mitigating knowledge forgetting and improving fine-tuning performance. Additionally, we extend the layer-wise weight decay to dynamically adjust the rollback levels across layers, adapting to the varying demands of different downstream tasks. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks, including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, and instance segmentation, demonstrate the broad applicability and state-of-the-art performance of DualOpt. Code is available at https://github.com/qklee-lz/OLOR-AAAI-2024.

Xiang Li, Yazhou Zhang, Prayag Tiwari et al.

Emotion recognition technology through analyzing the EEG signal is currently an essential concept in Artificial Intelligence and holds great potential in emotional health care, human-computer interaction, multimedia content recommendation, etc. Though there have been several works devoted to reviewing EEG-based emotion recognition, the content of these reviews needs to be updated. In addition, those works are either fragmented in content or only focus on specific techniques adopted in this area but neglect the holistic perspective of the entire technical routes. Hence, in this paper, we review from the perspective of researchers who try to take the first step on this topic. We review the recent representative works in the EEG-based emotion recognition research and provide a tutorial to guide the researchers to start from the beginning. The scientific basis of EEG-based emotion recognition in the psychological and physiological levels is introduced. Further, we categorize these reviewed works into different technical routes and illustrate the theoretical basis and the research motivation, which will help the readers better understand why those techniques are studied and employed. At last, existing challenges and future investigations are also discussed in this paper, which guides the researchers to decide potential future research directions.

Benyou Wang, Xiangbo Wu, Xiaokang Liu et al.

Language is the principal tool for human communication, in which humor is one of the most attractive parts. Producing natural language like humans using computers, a.k.a, Natural Language Generation (NLG), has been widely used for dialogue systems, chatbots, machine translation, as well as computer-aid creation e.g., idea generations, scriptwriting. However, the humor aspect of natural language is relatively under-investigated, especially in the age of pre-trained language models. In this work, we aim to preliminarily test whether NLG can generate humor as humans do. We build a new dataset consisting of numerous digitized Chinese Comical Crosstalk scripts (called C$^3$ in short), which is for a popular Chinese performing art called `Xiangsheng' since 1800s. (For convenience for non-Chinese speakers, we called `crosstalk' for `Xiangsheng' in this paper.) We benchmark various generation approaches including training-from-scratch Seq2seq, fine-tuned middle-scale PLMs, and large-scale PLMs (with and without fine-tuning). Moreover, we also conduct a human assessment, showing that 1) large-scale pretraining largely improves crosstalk generation quality; and 2) even the scripts generated from the best PLM is far from what we expect, with only 65% quality of human-created crosstalk. We conclude, humor generation could be largely improved using large-scaled PLMs, but it is still in its infancy. The data and benchmarking code is publicly available in \url{https://github.com/anonNo2/crosstalk-generation}.

Fei Yu, Hongbo Zhang, Prayag Tiwari et al.

This survey paper proposes a clearer view of natural language reasoning in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), both conceptually and practically. Conceptually, we provide a distinct definition for natural language reasoning in NLP, based on both philosophy and NLP scenarios, discuss what types of tasks require reasoning, and introduce a taxonomy of reasoning. Practically, we conduct a comprehensive literature review on natural language reasoning in NLP, mainly covering classical logical reasoning, natural language inference, multi-hop question answering, and commonsense reasoning. The paper also identifies and views backward reasoning, a powerful paradigm for multi-step reasoning, and introduces defeasible reasoning as one of the most important future directions in natural language reasoning research. We focus on single-modality unstructured natural language text, excluding neuro-symbolic techniques and mathematical reasoning.

Songsong Tian, Lusi Li, Weijun Li et al.

Large deep learning models are impressive, but they struggle when real-time data is not available. Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) poses a significant challenge for deep neural networks to learn new tasks from just a few labeled samples without forgetting the previously learned ones. This setup easily leads to catastrophic forgetting and overfitting problems, severely affecting model performance. Studying FSCIL helps overcome deep learning model limitations on data volume and acquisition time, while improving practicality and adaptability of machine learning models. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on FSCIL. Unlike previous surveys, we aim to synthesize few-shot learning and incremental learning, focusing on introducing FSCIL from two perspectives, while reviewing over 30 theoretical research studies and more than 20 applied research studies. From the theoretical perspective, we provide a novel categorization approach that divides the field into five subcategories, including traditional machine learning methods, meta-learning based methods, feature and feature space-based methods, replay-based methods, and dynamic network structure-based methods. We also evaluate the performance of recent theoretical research on benchmark datasets of FSCIL. From the application perspective, FSCIL has achieved impressive achievements in various fields of computer vision such as image classification, object detection, and image segmentation, as well as in natural language processing and graph. We summarize the important applications. Finally, we point out potential future research directions, including applications, problem setups, and theory development. Overall, this paper offers a comprehensive analysis of the latest advances in FSCIL from a methodological, performance, and application perspective.

Yixian Shen, Zhiheng Yang, Qi Bi et al.

Multimodal spatial reasoning often relies on long chains of intermediate textual and visual thoughts, where accumulating visual tokens and dense cross-modal attention incur substantial computation and memory overhead. To address this challenge, we propose Spectral-Progressive Thought Flow (SpecFlow), a novel lightweight multimodal spatial reasoning framework that represents intermediate visual thoughts in a fixed-size discrete cosine space. By exploiting strong energy compaction, SpecFlow preserves global layout and relational structure while introducing high-frequency details only when increased spatial precision is required. To align visual state evolution with linguistic intent, classifier-free guidance enables autoregressive textual thoughts to steer flow-based updates of the visual workspace/state without expanding the context. As a result, SpecFlow maintains a bounded visual workspace whose updates depend only on the current visual state and accumulated textual trace, enabling long-horizon inference with stable latency and memory usage independent of reasoning depth. Empirical results show that SpecFlow achieves competitive or superior reasoning performance while reducing computation and KV cache costs by up to 2.1 times.

Dingfeng Jiang, Han Yan, Chenze Ma et al.

Medical large language models hold promise for reducing healthcare disparities, yet Hindi remains severely underrepresented. While medical LLMs excel in high-resource languages, their performance degrades sharply in Hindi, particularly on Indian systems of medicine. We argue that robust cross-lingual medical transfer requires Hindi reasoning. To this end, we introduce HiMed, a Hindi reasoning medical corpus and benchmark suite covering both Western and Indian medicine. We further propose HiMed-8B, a Hindi-form medical reasoning LLM, through the design of decaying scaffolding reward. Extensive experiments demonstrate improvement in Hindi medical reasoning performance and reduction in the English--Hindi accuracy gap. Ablation studies validate the contribution of each training stage and reward component. All data and code are available on GitHub: https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/HiMed.

Nadia Mumtaz, Naveed Ejaz, Shabana Habib et al.

The Big Video Data generated in today's smart cities has raised concerns from its purposeful usage perspective, where surveillance cameras, among many others are the most prominent resources to contribute to the huge volumes of data, making its automated analysis a difficult task in terms of computation and preciseness. Violence Detection (VD), broadly plunging under Action and Activity recognition domain, is used to analyze Big Video data for anomalous actions incurred due to humans. The VD literature is traditionally based on manually engineered features, though advancements to deep learning based standalone models are developed for real-time VD analysis. This paper focuses on overview of deep sequence learning approaches along with localization strategies of the detected violence. This overview also dives into the initial image processing and machine learning-based VD literature and their possible advantages such as efficiency against the current complex models. Furthermore,the datasets are discussed, to provide an analysis of the current models, explaining their pros and cons with future directions in VD domain derived from an in-depth analysis of the previous methods.

Enhao Ning, Changshuo Wang, Huang Zhangc et al.

Person re-identification (Re-ID) technology plays an increasingly crucial role in intelligent surveillance systems. Widespread occlusion significantly impacts the performance of person Re-ID. Occluded person Re-ID refers to a pedestrian matching method that deals with challenges such as pedestrian information loss, noise interference, and perspective misalignment. It has garnered extensive attention from researchers. Over the past few years, several occlusion-solving person Re-ID methods have been proposed, tackling various sub-problems arising from occlusion. However, there is a lack of comprehensive studies that compare, summarize, and evaluate the potential of occluded person Re-ID methods in detail. In this review, we start by providing a detailed overview of the datasets and evaluation scheme used for occluded person Re-ID. Next, we scientifically classify and analyze existing deep learning-based occluded person Re-ID methods from various perspectives, summarizing them concisely. Furthermore, we conduct a systematic comparison among these methods, identify the state-of-the-art approaches, and present an outlook on the future development of occluded person Re-ID.

Ridong Han, Chaohao Yang, Tao Peng et al.

Human-like large language models (LLMs), especially the most powerful and popular ones in OpenAI's GPT family, have proven to be very helpful for many natural language processing (NLP) related tasks. Therefore, various attempts have been made to apply LLMs to information extraction (IE), which is a fundamental NLP task that involves extracting information from unstructured plain text. To demonstrate the latest representative progress in LLMs' information extraction ability, we assess the information extraction ability of GPT-4 (the latest version of GPT at the time of writing this paper) from four perspectives: Performance, Evaluation Criteria, Robustness, and Error Types. Our results suggest a visible performance gap between GPT-4 and state-of-the-art (SOTA) IE methods. To alleviate this problem, considering the LLMs' human-like characteristics, we propose and analyze the effects of a series of simple prompt-based methods, which can be generalized to other LLMs and NLP tasks. Rich experiments show our methods' effectiveness and some of their remaining issues in improving GPT-4's information extraction ability.

Fernando Alonso-Fernandez, Kevin Hernandez-Diaz, Jose M. Buades et al.

This paper describes an adaptation of the Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) AI method to operate under a biometric verification setting. LIME was initially proposed for networks with the same output classes used for training, and it employs the softmax probability to determine which regions of the image contribute the most to classification. However, in a verification setting, the classes to be recognized have not been seen during training. In addition, instead of using the softmax output, face descriptors are usually obtained from a layer before the classification layer. The model is adapted to achieve explainability via cosine similarity between feature vectors of perturbated versions of the input image. The method is showcased for face biometrics with two CNN models based on MobileNetv2 and ResNet50.

Yazhou Zhang, Mengyao Wang, Youxi Wu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) and their variants have shown extraordinary efficacy across numerous downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks, which has presented a new vision for the development of NLP. Despite their remarkable performance in natural language generating (NLG), LLMs lack a distinct focus on the emotion understanding domain. As a result, using LLMs for emotion recognition may lead to suboptimal and inadequate precision. Another limitation of LLMs is that they are typical trained without leveraging multi-modal information. To overcome these limitations, we propose DialogueLLM, a context and emotion knowledge tuned LLM that is obtained by fine-tuning LLaMA models with 13,638 multi-modal (i.e., texts and videos) emotional dialogues. The visual information is considered as the supplementary knowledge to construct high-quality instructions. We offer a comprehensive evaluation of our proposed model on three benchmarking emotion recognition in conversations (ERC) datasets and compare the results against the SOTA baselines and other SOTA LLMs. Additionally, DialogueLLM-7B can be easily trained using LoRA on a 40GB A100 GPU in 5 hours, facilitating reproducibility for other researchers.

Wenhui Zhu, Xiwen Chen, Zhipeng Wang et al.

Long-horizon LLM agents require memory systems that remain accurate under fixed context budgets. However, existing systems struggle with two persistent challenges in long-term dialogue: (i) \textbf{disconnected evidence}, where multi-hop answers require linking facts distributed across time, and (ii) \textbf{state updates}, where evolving information (e.g., schedule changes) creates conflicts with older static logs. We propose AriadneMem, a structured memory system that addresses these failure modes via a decoupled two-phase pipeline. In the \textbf{offline construction phase}, AriadneMem employs \emph{entropy-aware gating} to filter noise and low-information message before LLM extraction and applies \emph{conflict-aware coarsening} to merge static duplicates while preserving state transitions as temporal edges. In the \textbf{online reasoning phase}, rather than relying on expensive iterative planning, AriadneMem executes \emph{algorithmic bridge discovery} to reconstruct missing logical paths between retrieved facts, followed by \emph{single-call topology-aware synthesis}. On LoCoMo experiments with GPT-4o, AriadneMem improves \textbf{Multi-Hop F1 by 15.2\%} and \textbf{Average F1 by 9.0\%} over strong baselines. Crucially, by offloading reasoning to the graph layer, AriadneMem reduces \textbf{total runtime by 77.8\%} using only \textbf{497} context tokens. The code is available at https://github.com/LLM-VLM-GSL/AriadneMem.

Zhiwei Liu, Yupen Cao, Yuechen Jiang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely applied across various domains of finance. Since their training data are largely derived from human-authored corpora, LLMs may inherit a range of human biases. Behavioral biases can lead to instability and uncertainty in decision-making, particularly when processing financial information. However, existing research on LLM bias has mainly focused on direct questioning or simplified, general-purpose settings, with limited consideration of the complex real-world financial environments and high-risk, context-sensitive, multilingual financial misinformation detection tasks (\mfmd). In this work, we propose \mfmdscen, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating behavioral biases of LLMs in \mfmd across diverse economic scenarios. In collaboration with financial experts, we construct three types of complex financial scenarios: (i) role- and personality-based, (ii) role- and region-based, and (iii) role-based scenarios incorporating ethnicity and religious beliefs. We further develop a multilingual financial misinformation dataset covering English, Chinese, Greek, and Bengali. By integrating these scenarios with misinformation claims, \mfmdscen enables a systematic evaluation of 22 mainstream LLMs. Our findings reveal that pronounced behavioral biases persist across both commercial and open-source models. This project will be available at https://github.com/lzw108/FMD.

Fernando Alonso-Fernandez, Kevin Hernandez-Diaz, Prayag Tiwari et al.

We apply pre-trained architectures, originally developed for the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge, for periocular recognition. These architectures have demonstrated significant success in various computer vision tasks beyond the ones for which they were designed. This work builds on our previous study using off-the-shelf Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and extends it to include the more recently proposed Vision Transformers (ViT). Despite being trained for generic object classification, middle-layer features from CNNs and ViTs are a suitable way to recognize individuals based on periocular images. We also demonstrate that CNNs and ViTs are highly complementary since their combination results in boosted accuracy. In addition, we show that a small portion of these pre-trained models can achieve good accuracy, resulting in thinner models with fewer parameters, suitable for resource-limited environments such as mobiles. This efficiency improves if traditional handcrafted features are added as well.

Peiyi Zhang, Yazhou Zhang, Bo Wang et al.

In this paper, we present Edu-Values, the first Chinese education values evaluation benchmark that includes seven core values: professional philosophy, teachers' professional ethics, education laws and regulations, cultural literacy, educational knowledge and skills, basic competencies and subject knowledge. We meticulously design 1,418 questions, covering multiple-choice, multi-modal question answering, subjective analysis, adversarial prompts, and Chinese traditional culture (short answer) questions. We conduct human feedback based automatic evaluation over 21 state-of-the-art (SoTA) LLMs, and highlight three main findings: (1) due to differences in educational culture, Chinese LLMs outperform English LLMs, with Qwen 2 ranking the first with a score of 81.37; (2) LLMs often struggle with teachers' professional ethics and professional philosophy; (3) leveraging Edu-Values to build an external knowledge repository for RAG significantly improves LLMs' alignment. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed benchmark.

Guojun Liang, Najmeh Abiri, Atiye Sadat Hashemi et al.

Accurate imputation is essential for the reliability and success of downstream tasks. Recently, diffusion models have attracted great attention in this field. However, these models neglect the latent distribution in a lower-dimensional space derived from the observed data, which limits the generative capacity of the diffusion model. Additionally, dealing with the original missing data without labels becomes particularly problematic. To address these issues, we propose the Latent Space Score-Based Diffusion Model (LSSDM) for probabilistic multivariate time series imputation. Observed values are projected onto low-dimensional latent space and coarse values of the missing data are reconstructed without knowing their ground truth values by this unsupervised learning approach. Finally, the reconstructed values are fed into a conditional diffusion model to obtain the precise imputed values of the time series. In this way, LSSDM not only possesses the power to identify the latent distribution but also seamlessly integrates the diffusion model to obtain the high-fidelity imputed values and assess the uncertainty of the dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that LSSDM achieves superior imputation performance while also providing a better explanation and uncertainty analysis of the imputation mechanism. The website of the code is \textit{https://github.com/gorgen2020/LSSDM\_imputation}.

Xiao Liu, Jiaxiang Liu, Boci Peng et al.

Vision Language Models adapt well to downstream tasks but are highly vulnerable to adversarial perturbations that disrupt cross-modal semantic alignment. Existing defenses are largely unidirectional or structural, failing to exploit bidirectional cross-modal complementarity and instance-wise adaptive protection. To overcome the limitations of unidirectional and static defenses in adversarial settings, we propose Closed-Loop Bidirectional Prompting, casting robust adaptation as cross-modal agreement recovery via a dynamic feedback loop on frozen encoders. A Semantic Anchor is introduced as a stable prior to constrain cyclic updates and mitigate perturbation-induced feature corruption. Through anchor-based bootstrapping, textual semantics denoise visual representations, while the refined visuals enable instance-adaptive prompt updating, yielding a rectified and robust consensus. Extensive evaluations across 11 datasets validate state-of-the-art robustness and strong base-to-new generalization, while maintaining a favorable trade-off between computational cost and accuracy.

Jinhao Jing, Zheng Ma, Jinwei Liang et al.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) often struggle with geometric reasoning due to visual hallucinations and a lack of mathematically precise Chain-of-Thought (CoT) data. To address this, we propose the GeoSym Engine, an automated and scalable neuro-symbolic framework. By leveraging a type-conditional grammar and an analytic SymGT Solver, it derives exact symbolic ground truths and seamlessly integrates with a robust rendering pipeline to produce high-precision geometric diagrams. Using this engine, we construct GeoSym127K, a difficulty-stratified dataset featuring 51K high-resolution images, 127K questions with symbolic ground truths, and 55K answer-verified CoT QA pairs. We also introduce GeoSym-Bench, an expert-curated suite of 511 complex samples for rigorous evaluation. Through extensive supervised fine-tuning (SFT), we demonstrate that GeoSym drives concentrated improvements specifically on diagram-dependent and multi-step geometry tasks. Our Qwen3-VL-8B model gains an absolute +22.21% on the MathVerse Vision-Only subset and reaches 61.52% (+6.19% improvement) on WeMath, mitigating long-horizon logic fragmentation and outperforming advanced closed-source models like Doubao-1.8. Furthermore, applying Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) via GRPO reveals that initializing from structural SFT checkpoints substantially elevates the performance ceiling over zero-shot RL. Driven by deterministic exact-match signals, this showcases the robust scaling potential of our verifiable reasoning synthesis. Datasets and code are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Tomie0506/GeoSym127K and https://github.com/Tomie56/GeoSym127K.

Vivek Kumar, Sushmita Singh, Prayag Tiwari

Our system, VISU, participated in the WASSA 2023 Shared Task (3) of Emotion Classification from essays written in reaction to news articles. Emotion detection from complex dialogues is challenging and often requires context/domain understanding. Therefore in this research, we have focused on developing deep learning (DL) models using the combination of word embedding representations with tailored prepossessing strategies to capture the nuances of emotions expressed. Our experiments used static and contextual embeddings (individual and stacked) with Bidirectional Long short-term memory (BiLSTM) and Transformer based models. We occupied rank tenth in the emotion detection task by scoring a Macro F1-Score of 0.2717, validating the efficacy of our implemented approaches for small and imbalanced datasets with mixed categories of target emotions.

Jia-Hong Huang, Seulgi Kim, Yi Chieh Liu et al.

Recent diffusion-based text-to-speech (TTS) models achieve high naturalness and expressiveness, yet often suffer from speaker drift, a subtle, gradual shift in perceived speaker identity within a single utterance. This underexplored phenomenon undermines the coherence of synthetic speech, especially in long-form or interactive settings. We introduce the first automatic framework for detecting speaker drift by formulating it as a binary classification task over utterance-level speaker consistency. Our method computes cosine similarity across overlapping segments of synthesized speech and prompts large language models (LLMs) with structured representations to assess drift. We provide theoretical guarantees for cosine-based drift detection and demonstrate that speaker embeddings exhibit meaningful geometric clustering on the unit sphere. To support evaluation, we construct a high-quality synthetic benchmark with human-validated speaker drift annotations. Experiments with multiple state-of-the-art LLMs confirm the viability of this embedding-to-reasoning pipeline. Our work establishes speaker drift as a standalone research problem and bridges geometric signal analysis with LLM-based perceptual reasoning in modern TTS.

Yazhou Zhang, Chunwang Zou, Zheng Lian et al.

In the era of large language models (LLMs), the task of ``System I''~-~the fast, unconscious, and intuitive tasks, e.g., sentiment analysis, text classification, etc., have been argued to be successfully solved. However, sarcasm, as a subtle linguistic phenomenon, often employs rhetorical devices like hyperbole and figuration to convey true sentiments and intentions, involving a higher level of abstraction than sentiment analysis. There is growing concern that the argument about LLMs' success may not be fully tenable when considering sarcasm understanding. To address this question, we select eleven SOTA LLMs and eight SOTA pre-trained language models (PLMs) and present comprehensive evaluations on six widely used benchmark datasets through different prompting approaches, i.e., zero-shot input/output (IO) prompting, few-shot IO prompting, chain of thought (CoT) prompting. Our results highlight three key findings: (1) current LLMs underperform supervised PLMs based sarcasm detection baselines across six sarcasm benchmarks. This suggests that significant efforts are still required to improve LLMs' understanding of human sarcasm. (2) GPT-4 consistently and significantly outperforms other LLMs across various prompting methods, with an average improvement of 14.0\%$\uparrow$. Claude 3 and ChatGPT demonstrate the next best performance after GPT-4. (3) Few-shot IO prompting method outperforms the other two methods: zero-shot IO and few-shot CoT. The reason is that sarcasm detection, being a holistic, intuitive, and non-rational cognitive process, is argued not to adhere to step-by-step logical reasoning, making CoT less effective in understanding sarcasm compared to its effectiveness in mathematical reasoning tasks.

Amit Kumar Jaiswal, Haiming Liu, Prayag Tiwari

This paper focuses on affective emotion recognition, aiming to perform in the subject-agnostic paradigm based on EEG signals. However, EEG signals manifest subject instability in subject-agnostic affective Brain-computer interfaces (aBCIs), which led to the problem of distributional shift. Furthermore, this problem is alleviated by approaches such as domain generalisation and domain adaptation. Typically, methods based on domain adaptation confer comparatively better results than the domain generalisation methods but demand more computational resources given new subjects. We propose a novel framework, meta-learning based augmented domain adaptation for subject-agnostic aBCIs. Our domain adaptation approach is augmented through meta-learning, which consists of a recurrent neural network, a classifier, and a distributional shift controller based on a sum-decomposable function. Also, we present that a neural network explicating a sum-decomposable function can effectively estimate the divergence between varied domains. The network setting for augmented domain adaptation follows meta-learning and adversarial learning, where the controller promptly adapts to new domains employing the target data via a few self-adaptation steps in the test phase. Our proposed approach is shown to be effective in experiments on a public aBICs dataset and achieves similar performance to state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods while avoiding the use of additional computational resources.

Guojun Liang, Prayag Tiwari, Slawomir Nowaczyk et al.

Exploring the missing values is an essential but challenging issue due to the complex latent spatio-temporal correlation and dynamic nature of time series. Owing to the outstanding performance in dealing with structure learning potentials, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are often used to capture such complex spatio-temporal features in multivariate time series. However, these data-driven models often fail to capture the essential spatio-temporal relationships when significant signal corruption occurs. Additionally, calculating the high-order neighbor nodes in these models is of high computational complexity. To address these problems, we propose a novel higher-order spatio-temporal physics-incorporated GNN (HSPGNN). Firstly, the dynamic Laplacian matrix can be obtained by the spatial attention mechanism. Then, the generic inhomogeneous partial differential equation (PDE) of physical dynamic systems is used to construct the dynamic higher-order spatio-temporal GNN to obtain the missing time series values. Moreover, we estimate the missing impact by Normalizing Flows (NF) to evaluate the importance of each node in the graph for better explainability. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of HSPGNN and the superior performance when combining various order neighbor nodes. Also, graph-like optical flow, dynamic graphs, and missing impact can be obtained naturally by HSPGNN, which provides better dynamic analysis and explanation than traditional data-driven models. Our code is available at https://github.com/gorgen2020/HSPGNN.

Yuechen Jiang, Zhiwei Liu, Yupeng Cao et al.

We introduce RFC Bench, a benchmark for evaluating large language models on financial misinformation under realistic news. RFC Bench operates at the paragraph level and captures the contextual complexity of financial news where meaning emerges from dispersed cues. The benchmark defines two complementary tasks: reference free misinformation detection and comparison based diagnosis using paired original perturbed inputs. Experiments reveal a consistent pattern: performance is substantially stronger when comparative context is available, while reference free settings expose significant weaknesses, including unstable predictions and elevated invalid outputs. These results indicate that current models struggle to maintain coherent belief states without external grounding. By highlighting this gap, RFC Bench provides a structured testbed for studying reference free reasoning and advancing more reliable financial misinformation detection in real world settings.

Chenghao Zhu, Nuo Chen, Yufei Gao et al.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to the development of benchmarks that consider temporal dynamics, however, there remains a gap in understanding how well these models can generalize across temporal contexts due to the inherent dynamic nature of language and information. This paper introduces the concept of temporal generalization in LLMs, including bias in past and future generalizations. Then we introduce FreshBench, a new evaluation framework that employs fresh text and event prediction for assessing LLMs' temporal adaptability, ensuring the evaluation process free from data leakage and subjective bias. The experiment shows significant temporal biases and a decline in performance over time. Our findings reveal that powerful models, while initially superior, tend to decline more rapidly in future generalization. Additionally, powerful open-source models demonstrate better long-term adaptability compared to their closed-source counterparts. Our code is available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/FreshBench.

Changshuo Wang, Shuting He, Xiang Fang et al.

Few-shot point cloud semantic segmentation aims to accurately segment "unseen" new categories in point cloud scenes using limited labeled data. However, pretraining-based methods not only introduce excessive time overhead but also overlook the local structure representation among irregular point clouds. To address these issues, we propose a pretraining-free local structure fitting network for few-shot point cloud semantic segmentation, named TaylorSeg. Specifically, inspired by Taylor series, we treat the local structure representation of irregular point clouds as a polynomial fitting problem and propose a novel local structure fitting convolution, called TaylorConv. This convolution learns the low-order basic information and high-order refined information of point clouds from explicit encoding of local geometric structures. Then, using TaylorConv as the basic component, we construct two variants of TaylorSeg: a non-parametric TaylorSeg-NN and a parametric TaylorSeg-PN. The former can achieve performance comparable to existing parametric models without pretraining. For the latter, we equip it with an Adaptive Push-Pull (APP) module to mitigate the feature distribution differences between the query set and the support set. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Notably, under the 2-way 1-shot setting, TaylorSeg-PN achieves improvements of +2.28% and +4.37% mIoU on the S3DIS and ScanNet datasets respectively, compared to the previous state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/changshuowang/TaylorSeg.

Vincenzo Buono, Peyman Sheikholharam Mashhadi, Mahmoud Rahat et al.

Attribution methods in explainable AI rely on upsampling techniques that were designed for natural images, not saliency maps. Standard bilinear and bicubic interpolation systematically corrupts attribution signals through aliasing, ringing, and boundary bleeding, producing spurious high-importance regions that misrepresent model reasoning. We identify that the core issue is treating attribution upsampling as an interpolation problem that operates in isolation from the model's reasoning, rather than a mass redistribution problem where model-derived semantic boundaries must govern how importance flows. We present Universal Semantic-Aware Upsampling (USU), a principled method that reformulates upsampling through ratio-form mass redistribution operators, provably preserving attribution mass and relative importance ordering. Extending the axiomatic tradition of feature attribution to upsampling, we formalize four desiderata for faithful upsampling and prove that interpolation structurally violates three of them. These same three force any redistribution operator into a ratio form; the fourth selects the unique potential within this family, yielding USU. Controlled experiments on models with known attribution priors verify USU's formal guarantees; evaluation across ImageNet, CIFAR-10, and CUB-200 confirms consistent faithfulness improvements and qualitatively superior, semantically coherent explanations.

Xueqing Peng, Zhuohan Xie, Yupeng Cao et al.

As AI agents improve, the central question is no longer whether they can solve isolated well-defined financial tasks, but whether they can reliably carry out financial professional work. Existing financial benchmarks offer only a partial view of this ability, as they primarily evaluate static competencies such as question answering, retrieval, summarization, and classification. We introduce Herculean, the first skilled benchmark for agentic financial intelligence spanning four representative workflows, including Trading, Hedging, Market Insights, and Auditing. Each workflow is instantiated as a standardized MCP-based skill environment with its own tools, interaction dynamics, constraints, and success criteria, enabling consistent end-to-end assessment of heterogeneous agent systems. Across frontier agents, we find agents perform relatively well on Trading and Market Insights, but struggle substantially on Hedging and Auditing, where long-horizon coordination, state consistency, and structured verification are critical. Overall, our results point to a key gap in current agents in turning financial reasoning into dependable workflow execution in high-stakes financial workflows.

Yusong Wang, Jialun Shen, Zhihao Wu et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been widely adopted for Protein Representation Learning (PRL), as residue interaction networks can be naturally represented as graphs. Current GNN-based PRL methods typically rely on single-perspective graph construction strategies, which capture partial properties of residue interactions, resulting in incomplete protein representations. To address this limitation, we propose MMPG, a framework that constructs protein graphs from multiple perspectives and adaptively fuses them via Mixture of Experts (MoE) for PRL. MMPG constructs graphs from physical, chemical, and geometric perspectives to characterize different properties of residue interactions. To capture both perspective-specific features and their synergies, we develop an MoE module, which dynamically routes perspectives to specialized experts, where experts learn intrinsic features and cross-perspective interactions. We quantitatively verify that MoE automatically specializes experts in modeling distinct levels of interaction from individual representations, to pairwise inter-perspective synergies, and ultimately to a global consensus across all perspectives. Through integrating this multi-level information, MMPG produces superior protein representations and achieves advanced performance on four different downstream protein tasks.

Jimin Huang, Duanyu Feng, Nuo Chen et al.

Federated learning (FL) enables training large language models (LLMs) without sharing raw data, but adapting LLMs under strict data isolation and non-IID client distributions remains challenging in practice. Synthetic data offers a natural privacy-preserving surrogate for local training, yet existing federated pipelines typically treat synthetic generation as static or loosely coupled with downstream optimization, leading to rapidly diminishing utility under heterogeneous clients. We study federated adaptation of LLMs on tabular tasks where raw records and validation data cannot be shared, and local training must rely entirely on synthetic tables. We propose Concordia, a tri-level optimization framework that aligns synthetic data generation with federated validation utility despite these constraints. At the client level, models are adapted via parameter-efficient LoRA training on synthetic tables. Clients additionally learn lightweight utility scorers from private validation feedback to reweight synthetic samples during local training. At the outer level, each client refines its own synthetic table generator using group-relative policy optimization (GRPO), guided by an ensemble of heterogeneous scorers shared across clients, without aggregating generator parameters or exposing validation data. Experiments on privacy-sensitive tabular benchmarks from finance and healthcare demonstrate that Concordia consistently improves federated performance, cross-client stability, and robustness to distribution shift compared to static and decoupled synthetic-data baselines.

Yueru He, Xueqing Peng, Yupeng Cao et al.

We introduce FinCriticalED (Financial Critical Error Detection), a visual benchmark for evaluating OCR and vision language models on financial documents at the fact level. Financial documents contain visually dense and table heavy layouts where numerical and temporal information is tightly coupled with structure. In high stakes settings, small OCR mistakes such as sign inversion or shifted dates can lead to materially different interpretations, while traditional OCR metrics like ROUGE and edit distance capture only surface level text similarity. \ficriticaled provides 500 image-HTML pairs with expert annotated financial facts covering over seven hundred numerical and temporal facts. It introduces three key contributions. First, it establishes the first fact level evaluation benchmark for financial document understanding, shifting evaluation from lexical overlap to domain critical factual correctness. Second, all annotations are created and verified by financial experts with strict quality control over signs, magnitudes, and temporal expressions. Third, we develop an LLM-as-Judge evaluation pipeline that performs structured fact extraction and contextual verification for visually complex financial documents. We benchmark OCR systems, open source vision language models, and proprietary models on FinCriticalED. Results show that although the strongest proprietary models achieve the highest factual accuracy, substantial errors remain in visually intricate numerical and temporal contexts. Through quantitative evaluation and expert case studies, FinCriticalED provides a rigorous foundation for advancing visual factual precision in financial and other precision critical domains.

Wenya Xie, Qingying Xiao, Yu Zheng et al.

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has transformed healthcare by offering clinical guidance, yet their direct deployment to patients poses safety risks due to limited domain expertise. To mitigate this, we propose repositioning LLMs as clinical assistants that collaborate with experienced physicians rather than interacting with patients directly. We conduct a two-stage inspiration-feedback survey to identify real-world needs in clinical workflows. Guided by this, we construct DoctorFLAN, a large-scale Chinese medical dataset comprising 92,000 Q&A instances across 22 clinical tasks and 27 specialties. To evaluate model performance in doctor-facing applications, we introduce DoctorFLAN-test (550 single-turn Q&A items) and DotaBench (74 multi-turn conversations). Experimental results with over ten popular LLMs demonstrate that DoctorFLAN notably improves the performance of open-source LLMs in medical contexts, facilitating their alignment with physician workflows and complementing existing patient-oriented models. This work contributes a valuable resource and framework for advancing doctor-centered medical LLM development

Ben Yao, Qiuchi Li, Yazhou Zhang et al.

This work introduces the first benchmark for nursing value alignment, consisting of five core value dimensions distilled from international nursing codes: Altruism, Human Dignity, Integrity, Justice, and Professionalism. The benchmark comprises 1,100 real-world nursing behavior instances collected through a five-month longitudinal field study across three hospitals of varying tiers. These instances are annotated by five clinical nurses and then augmented with LLM-generated counterfactuals with reversed ethic polarity. Each original case is paired with a value-aligned and a value-violating version, resulting in 2,200 labeled instances that constitute the Easy-Level dataset. To increase adversarial complexity, each instance is further transformed into a dialogue-based format that embeds contextual cues and subtle misleading signals, yielding a Hard-Level dataset. We evaluate 23 state-of-the-art (SoTA) LLMs on their alignment with nursing values. Our findings reveal three key insights: (1) DeepSeek-V3 achieves the highest performance on the Easy-Level dataset (94.55), where Claude 3.5 Sonnet outperforms other models on the Hard-Level dataset (89.43), significantly surpassing the medical LLMs; (2) Justice is consistently the most difficult nursing value dimension to evaluate; and (3) in-context learning significantly improves alignment. This work aims to provide a foundation for value-sensitive LLMs development in clinical settings. The dataset and the code are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Ben012345/NurValues.

Lang He, Kai Chen, Junnan Zhao et al.

Depression can significantly impact many aspects of an individual's life, including their personal and social functioning, academic and work performance, and overall quality of life. Many researchers within the field of affective computing are adopting deep learning technology to explore potential patterns related to the detection of depression. However, because of subjects' privacy protection concerns, that data in this area is still scarce, presenting a challenge for the deep discriminative models used in detecting depression. To navigate these obstacles, a large-scale multimodal vlog dataset (LMVD), for depression recognition in the wild is built. In LMVD, which has 1823 samples with 214 hours of the 1475 participants captured from four multimedia platforms (Sina Weibo, Bilibili, Tiktok, and YouTube). A novel architecture termed MDDformer to learn the non-verbal behaviors of individuals is proposed. Extensive validations are performed on the LMVD dataset, demonstrating superior performance for depression detection. We anticipate that the LMVD will contribute a valuable function to the depression detection community. The data and code will released at the link: https://github.com/helang818/LMVD/.

Jianquan Li, Xidong Wang, Xiangbo Wu et al.

In this paper, we release a largest ever medical Question Answering (QA) dataset with 26 million QA pairs. We benchmark many existing approaches in our dataset in terms of both retrieval and generation. Experimental results show that the existing models perform far lower than expected and the released dataset is still challenging in the pre-trained language model era. Moreover, we also experimentally show the benefit of the proposed dataset in many aspects: (i) trained models for other QA datasets in a zero-shot fashion; and (ii) as external knowledge for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG); and (iii) improving existing pre-trained language models by using the QA pairs as a pre-training corpus in continued training manner. We believe that this dataset will not only contribute to medical research but also facilitate both the patients and clinical doctors. See \url{https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/Huatuo-26M}.

Jia Qian, Lars Kai Hansen, Xenofon Fafoutis et al.

Federated Learning is a framework that jointly trains a model \textit{with} complete knowledge on a remotely placed centralized server, but \textit{without} the requirement of accessing the data stored in distributed machines. Some work assumes that the data generated from edge devices are identically and independently sampled from a common population distribution. However, such ideal sampling may not be realistic in many contexts. Also, models based on intrinsic agency, such as active sampling schemes, may lead to highly biased sampling. So an imminent question is how robust Federated Learning is to biased sampling? In this work\footnote{\url{https://github.com/jiaqian/robustness_of_FL}}, we experimentally investigate two such scenarios. First, we study a centralized classifier aggregated from a collection of local classifiers trained with data having categorical heterogeneity. Second, we study a classifier aggregated from a collection of local classifiers trained by data through active sampling at the edge. We present evidence in both scenarios that Federated Learning is robust to data heterogeneity when local training iterations and communication frequency are appropriately chosen.

Karun Sharma, Vidushee Vats, Shengzhi Li et al.

Peer review relies on substantive, evidence-based questions, yet existing LLM-based approaches often generate surface-level queries, drawing over 50\% of their question tokens from a paper's first page. To bridge this gap, we develop IntelliReward, a novel reward model built from a frozen autoregressive LLM with trainable multi-head transformers over the final 50 token states, which outperforms API-based SFT baselines in predicting expert-level human preferences. By applying Decoupled Clip and Dynamic Sampling Policy Optimization (DAPO) with IntelliReward, we train IntelliAsk, a question-generation model aligned with human standards of effort, evidence, and grounding. We find consistent improvements on reasoning and writing benchmarks, suggesting reviewer-question quality correlates with broader capabilities. Compared to the Qwen3-32B base model, IntelliAsk shows measurable gains across diverse benchmarks, specifically improving performance on reasoning tasks like MuSR (68.3 vs 64.7 Acc) and complex writing evaluations such as WritingBench (8.31 vs 8.07). We release our implementation, expert preference annotations, and the IntelliReward model to provide an automatic evaluation benchmark for grounding, effort, and evidence in LLM-generated review questions.

Jelizaveta Jankowska, Bożena Kostek, Fernando Alonso-Fernandez et al.

The subject of this work is to check how different types of music affect human emotions. While listening to music, a subjective survey and brain activity measurements were carried out using an EEG helmet. The aim is to demonstrate the impact of different music genres on emotions. The research involved a diverse group of participants of different gender and musical preferences. This had the effect of capturing a wide range of emotional responses to music. After the experiment, a relationship analysis of the respondents' questionnaires with EEG signals was performed. The analysis revealed connections between emotions and observed brain activity.

Kuo-Chung Peng, Samuel Yen-Chi Chen, Jiun-Cheng Jiang et al.

Fast Weight Programmers (FWPs) encode temporal dependencies through dynamically updated parameters rather than recurrent hidden states. Quantum FWPs (QFWPs) extend this idea with variational quantum circuits (VQCs), but existing implementations rely on multi-qubit architectures that are difficult to scale on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices and expensive to simulate classically. We propose gated QKAN-FWP, a fast-weight framework that integrates FWP with Quantum-inspired Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (QKAN) using single-qubit data re-uploading circuits as learnable nonlinear activation, known as DatA Re-Uploading ActivatioN (DARUAN). We further introduce a scalar-gated fast-weight update rule that stabilizes parameter evolution, supported by a theoretical analysis of its adaptive memory kernel, geometric boundedness, and parallelizable gradient paths. We evaluate the framework across time-series benchmarks, MiniGrid reinforcement learning, and highlight real-world solar cycle forecasting as our main practical result. In the long-horizon setting with 528-month input window and 132-month forecast horizon, our 12.5k-parameter model achieves lower scaled Mean Square Error (MSE), peak amplitude error, and peak timing error than a suite of classical recurrent baselines with up to 13x more parameters, including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks (25.9k-89.1k parameters), WaveNet-LSTM (167k), Vanilla recurrent neural network (11.5k), and a Modified Echo State Network (132k). To validate NISQ compatibility, we further deploy the trained fast programmer on IonQ and IBM Quantum processors, recovering forecasting accuracy within 0.1% relative MSE of the noiseless simulator at 1024 shots. These results position gated QKAN-FWP as a scalable, parameter-efficient, and NISQ-compatible approach to quantum-inspired sequence modeling.

Yazhou Zhang, Mengyao Wang, Chenyu Ren et al.

The value of text classification's future research has encountered challenges and uncertainties, due to the extraordinary efficacy demonstrated by large language models (LLMs) across numerous downstream NLP tasks. In this era of open-ended language modeling, where task boundaries are gradually fading, an urgent question emerges: have we made significant advances in text classification under the full benefit of LLMs? To answer this question, we propose RGPT, an adaptive boosting framework tailored to produce a specialized text classification LLM by recurrently ensembling a pool of strong base learners. The base learners are constructed by adaptively adjusting the distribution of training samples and iteratively fine-tuning LLMs with them. Such base learners are then ensembled to be a specialized text classification LLM, by recurrently incorporating the historical predictions from the previous learners. Through a comprehensive empirical comparison, we show that RGPT significantly outperforms 8 SOTA PLMs and 7 SOTA LLMs on four benchmarks by 1.36% on average. Further evaluation experiments show a clear surpassing of RGPT over human classification.

Hongyin Zhu, Prayag Tiwari

Climate change poses grave challenges, demanding widespread understanding and low-carbon lifestyle awareness. Large language models (LLMs) offer a powerful tool to address this crisis, yet comprehensive evaluations of their climate-crisis knowledge are lacking. This paper proposes an automated evaluation framework to assess climate-crisis knowledge within LLMs. We adopt a hybrid approach for data acquisition, combining data synthesis and manual collection, to compile a diverse set of questions encompassing various aspects of climate change. Utilizing prompt engineering based on the compiled questions, we evaluate the model's knowledge by analyzing its generated answers. Furthermore, we introduce a comprehensive set of metrics to assess climate-crisis knowledge, encompassing indicators from 10 distinct perspectives. These metrics provide a multifaceted evaluation, enabling a nuanced understanding of the LLMs' climate crisis comprehension. The experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method. In our evaluation utilizing diverse high-performing LLMs, we discovered that while LLMs possess considerable climate-related knowledge, there are shortcomings in terms of timeliness, indicating a need for continuous updating and refinement of their climate-related content.

Yue Yu, Prayag Tiwari

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, Phi3 and Llama-3, are leading a significant leap in AI, as they can generalize knowledge from their training to new tasks without fine-tuning. However, their application in the financial domain remains relatively limited. The financial field is inherently complex, requiring a deep understanding across various perspectives, from macro, micro economic trend to quantitative analysis. Motivated by this complexity, a mixture of expert LLMs tailored to specific financial domains could offer a more comprehensive understanding for intricate financial tasks. In this paper, we present the FinTeamExperts, a role-specialized LLM framework structured as a Mixture of Experts (MOEs) for financial analysis. The framework simulates a collaborative team setting by training each model to specialize in distinct roles: Macro Analysts, Micro analysts, and Quantitative Analysts. This role-specific specialization enhances the model's ability to integrate their domain-specific expertise. We achieve this by training three 8-billion parameter models on different corpus, each dedicated to excelling in specific finance-related roles. We then instruct-tune FinTeamExperts on downstream tasks to align with practical financial tasks. The experimental results show that FinTeamExperts outperform all models of the same size and larger on three out of four datasets. On the fourth dataset, which presents a more complex task, FinTeamExperts still surpass all models of the same size. This highlights the success of our role-based specialization approach and the continued training approach for FinTeamExperts.

Talha Hanif Butt, Prayag Tiwari, Fernando Alonso-Fernandez

Safe overtakes in trucks are crucial to prevent accidents, reduce congestion, and ensure efficient traffic flow, making early prediction essential for timely and informed driving decisions. Accordingly, we investigate the detection of truck overtakes from CAN data. Three classifiers, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Random Forest, and Support Vector Machines (SVM), are employed for the task. Our analysis covers up to 10 seconds before the overtaking event, using an overlapping sliding window of 1 second to extract CAN features. We observe that the prediction scores of the overtake class tend to increase as we approach the overtake trigger, while the no-overtake class remain stable or oscillates depending on the classifier. Thus, the best accuracy is achieved when approaching the trigger, making early overtaking prediction challenging. The classifiers show good accuracy in classifying overtakes (Recall/TPR > 93%), but accuracy is suboptimal in classifying no-overtakes (TNR typically 80-90% and below 60% for one SVM variant). We further combine two classifiers (Random Forest and linear SVM) by averaging their output scores. The fusion is observed to improve no-overtake classification (TNR > 92%) at the expense of reducing overtake accuracy (TPR). However, the latter is kept above 91% near the overtake trigger. Therefore, the fusion balances TPR and TNR, providing more consistent performance than individual classifiers.

Jiaxiang Liu, Jiawei Du, Xiao Liu et al.

Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP have demonstrated strong zero-shot capabilities across diverse domains, yet remain highly vulnerable to adversarial perturbations that disrupt image-text alignment and compromise reliability. Existing defenses typically rely on adversarial fine-tuning with labeled data, limiting their applicability in zero-shot settings. In this work, we identify two key weaknesses of current CLIP adversarial attacks -- lack of semantic guidance and vulnerability to view variations -- collectively termed semantic and viewpoint fragility. To address these challenges, we propose Self-Calibrated Consistency (SCC), an effective test-time defense. SCC consists of two complementary modules: Semantic consistency, which leverages soft pseudo-labels from counterattack warm-up and multi-view predictions to regularize cross-modal alignment and separate the target embedding from confusable negatives; and Spatial consistency, aligning perturbed visual predictions via augmented views to stabilize inference under adversarial perturbations. Together, these modules form a plug-and-play inference strategy. Extensive experiments on 22 benchmarks under diverse attack settings show that SCC consistently improves the zero-shot robustness of CLIP while maintaining accuracy, and can be seamlessly integrated with other VLMs for further gains. These findings highlight the great potential of establishing an adversarially robust paradigm from CLIP, with implications extending to broader vision-language domains such as BioMedCLIP.

Samuel Yen-Chi Chen, Prayag Tiwari

Recent advances in quantum computing and machine learning have given rise to quantum machine learning (QML), with growing interest in learning from sequential data. Quantum recurrent models like QLSTM are promising for time-series prediction, NLP, and reinforcement learning. However, designing effective variational quantum circuits (VQCs) remains challenging and often task-specific. To address this, we propose DiffQAS-QLSTM, an end-to-end differentiable framework that optimizes both VQC parameters and architecture selection during training. Our results show that DiffQAS-QLSTM consistently outperforms handcrafted baselines, achieving lower loss across diverse test settings. This approach opens the door to scalable and adaptive quantum sequence learning.

Zhan Su, Fengran Mo, Guojun Liang et al.

Despite the success of the monolithic dense paradigm of large language models (LLMs), the LoRA adapters offer an efficient solution by fine-tuning small task-specific modules and merging them with the base model. However, in multi-task settings, merging LoRA adapters trained on heterogeneous sources frequently causes \textit{task interference}, degrading downstream performance. To address this, we propose a tensorized clustered LoRA (TC-LoRA) library targeting to address the task interference at the \textit{text-level} and \textit{parameter-level}. At the \textit{text-level}, we cluster the training samples in the embedding space to capture input-format similarities, then train a specialized LoRA adapter for each cluster. At the \textit{parameter-level}, we introduce a joint Canonical Polyadic (CP) decomposition that disentangles task-specific and shared factors across LoRA adapters. This joint factorization preserves essential knowledge while reducing cross-task interference. Extensive experiments on out-of-domain zero-shot and skill-composition tasks-including reasoning, question answering, and coding. Compared to strong SVD-based baselines, TC-LoRA achieves +1.4\% accuracy on Phi-3 and +2.3\% on Mistral-7B (+2.3\%), demonstrating the effectiveness of TC-LoRA in LLM adaptation.

Fernando Alonso-Fernandez, Talha Hanif Butt, Prayag Tiwari

Safe overtaking manoeuvres in trucks are vital for preventing accidents and ensuring efficient traffic flow. Accurate prediction of such manoeuvres is essential for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) to make timely and informed decisions. In this study, we focus on overtake detection using Controller Area Network (CAN) bus data collected from five in-service trucks provided by the Volvo Group. We evaluate three common classifiers for vehicle manoeuvre detection, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Random Forest (RF), and Support Vector Machines (SVM), and analyse how different preprocessing configurations affect performance. We find that variability in traffic conditions strongly influences the signal patterns, particularly in the no-overtake class, affecting classification performance if training data lacks adequate diversity. Since the data were collected under unconstrained, real-world conditions, class diversity cannot be guaranteed a priori. However, training with data from multiple vehicles improves generalisation and reduces condition-specific bias. Our pertruck analysis also reveals that classification accuracy, especially for overtakes, depends on the amount of training data per vehicle. To address this, we apply a score-level fusion strategy, which yields the best per-truck performance across most cases. Overall, we achieve an accuracy via fusion of TNR=93% (True Negative Rate) and TPR=86.5% (True Positive Rate). This research has been part of the BIG FUN project, which explores how Artificial Intelligence can be applied to logged vehicle data to understand and predict driver behaviour, particularly in relation to Camera Monitor Systems (CMS), being introduced as digital replacements for traditional exterior mirrors.