Shuyu Zhan

Shuyu Zhan, Chih-Yuan Chiu, Antoine P. Leeman et al.

We propose a novel framework for robust dynamic games with nonlinear dynamics corrupted by state-dependent additive noise, and nonlinear agent-specific and shared constraints. Leveraging system-level synthesis (SLS), each agent designs a nominal trajectory and a causal affine error feedback law to minimize their own cost while ensuring that its own constraints and the shared constraints are satisfied, even under worst-case noise realizations. Building on these nonlinear safety certificates, we define the novel notion of a robustly constrained Nash equilibrium (RCNE). We then present an Iterative Best Response (IBR)-based algorithm that iteratively refines the optimal trajectory and controller for each agent until approximate convergence to the RCNE. We evaluated our method on simulations and hardware experiments involving large numbers of robots with high-dimensional nonlinear dynamics, as well as state-dependent dynamics noise. Across all experiment settings, our method generated trajectory rollouts which robustly avoid collisions, while a baseline game-theoretic algorithm for producing open-loop motion plans failed to generate trajectories that satisfy constraints.

Tao Lu, Muzhe Wu, Xinyi Lu et al.

Harsh working environments and work-related stress have been known to contribute to mental health problems such as anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation. As such, it is paramount to create solutions that can both detect employee unhappiness and find the root cause of the problem. While prior works have examined causes of mental health using machine learning, they typically focus on general mental health analysis, with few of them focusing on explainable solutions or looking at the workplace-specific setting. r/antiwork is a subreddit for the antiwork movement, which is the desire to stop working altogether. Using this subreddit as a proxy for work environment dissatisfaction, we create a new dataset for antiwork sentiment detection and subsequently train a model that highlights the words with antiwork sentiments. Following this, we performed a qualitative and quantitative analysis to uncover some of the key insights into the mindset of individuals who identify with the antiwork movement and how their working environments influenced them. We find that working environments that do not give employees authority or responsibility, frustrating recruiting experiences, and unfair compensation, are some of the leading causes of the antiwork sentiment, resulting in a lack of self-confidence and motivation among their employees.

Shaoxiong Zhan, Yanlin Lai, Ziyu Lu et al.

Large language models have achieved substantial progress in mathematical reasoning, yet their advancement is limited by the scarcity of high-quality, high-difficulty training data. Existing synthesis methods largely rely on transforming human-written templates, limiting both diversity and scalability. We propose MathSmith, a novel framework for synthesizing challenging mathematical problems to enhance LLM reasoning. Rather than modifying existing problems, MathSmith constructs new ones from scratch by randomly sampling concept-explanation pairs from PlanetMath, ensuring data independence and avoiding contamination. To increase difficulty, we design nine predefined strategies as soft constraints during rationales. We further adopts reinforcement learning to jointly optimize structural validity, reasoning complexity, and answer consistency. The length of the reasoning trace generated under autoregressive prompting is used to reflect cognitive complexity, encouraging the creation of more demanding problems aligned with long-chain-of-thought reasoning. Experiments across five benchmarks, categorized as easy & medium (GSM8K, MATH-500) and hard (AIME2024, AIME2025, OlympiadBench), show that MathSmith consistently outperforms existing baselines under both short and long CoT settings. Additionally, a weakness-focused variant generation module enables targeted improvement on specific concepts. Overall, MathSmith exhibits strong scalability, generalization, and transferability, highlighting the promise of high-difficulty synthetic data in advancing LLM reasoning capabilities.