Shwan Ashrafi

Xuanming Zhang, Shwan Ashrafi, Aziza Mirsaidova et al.

We study the reasoning behavior of large language models (LLMs) under limited computation budgets. In such settings, producing useful partial solutions quickly is often more practical than exhaustive reasoning, which incurs high inference costs. Many real-world tasks, such as trip planning, require models to deliver the best possible output within a fixed reasoning budget. We introduce an anytime reasoning framework and the Anytime Index, a metric that quantifies how effectively solution quality improves as reasoning tokens increase. To further enhance efficiency, we propose an inference-time self-improvement method using LLM-synthesized preference data, where models learn from their own reasoning comparisons to produce better intermediate solutions. Experiments on NaturalPlan (Trip), AIME, and GPQA datasets show consistent gains across Grok-3, GPT-oss, GPT-4.1/4o, and LLaMA models, improving both reasoning quality and efficiency under budget constraints.

Shwan Ashrafi, Dan Roth

Retrieval-augmented generative agents rely on retrieval for grounding, yet are typically evaluated on a query-by-query basis. This isolates interactions that are geometrically coupled in a shared embedding space. For example, we show that the high document density required to serve majority interests (e.g., generic "Crime" movies) can geometrically overcrowd the retrieval neighborhood of a semantically similar minority (e.g., "Film Noir"), effectively expelling minority content from top-$k$ results. We introduce a formal framework to analyze how such goal collisions in dense retrieval induce fundamental performance limits and emergent fairness issues inherent to spatial crowding. In our static analysis, we demonstrate that for a fixed embedding space, a phase transition occurs where minority user goals suffer a catastrophic collapse in performance as the density of majority goals increases. We then extend this to a dynamic model and derive a non-linear Fokker-Planck equation that governs the evolution of document embeddings as the agent updates them to maximize retrieval accuracy. Our analysis reveals that this local relevance objective triggers an emergent global mechanism that systematically marginalizes minority interests. We prove that such objectives drive the system to self-organize into a state that exclusively serves majority interests. These results provide a theoretical foundation for understanding a critical grounding failure mode in retrieval-augmented agents.

Choongyeun Cho, Benjamin Antin, Sanchit Arora et al.

This paper presents the Axon AI's solution to the 2nd YouTube-8M Video Understanding Challenge, achieving the final global average precision (GAP) of 88.733% on the private test set (ranked 3rd among 394 teams, not considering the model size constraint), and 87.287% using a model that meets size requirement. Two sets of 7 individual models belonging to 3 different families were trained separately. Then, the inference results on a training data were aggregated from these multiple models and fed to train a compact model that meets the model size requirement. In order to further improve performance we explored and employed data over/sub-sampling in feature space, an additional regularization term during training exploiting label relationship, and learned weights for ensembling different individual models.