Chuan Li

Zhuofeng Li, Yi Lu, Dongfu Jiang et al. · utoronto

The rapid rise in AI conference submissions has driven increasing exploration of large language models (LLMs) for peer review support. However, LLM-based reviewers often generate superficial, formulaic comments lacking substantive, evidence-grounded feedback. We attribute this to the underutilization of two key components of human reviewing: explicit rubrics and contextual grounding in existing work. To address this, we introduce REVIEWBENCH, a benchmark evaluating review text according to paper-specific rubrics derived from official guidelines, the paper's content, and human-written reviews. We further propose REVIEWGROUNDER, a rubric-guided, tool-integrated multi-agent framework that decomposes reviewing into drafting and grounding stages, enriching shallow drafts via targeted evidence consolidation. Experiments on REVIEWBENCH show that REVIEWGROUNDER, using a Phi-4-14B-based drafter and a GPT-OSS-120B-based grounding stage, consistently outperforms baselines with substantially stronger/larger backbones (e.g., GPT-4.1 and DeepSeek-R1-670B) in both alignment with human judgments and rubric-based review quality across 8 dimensions. The code is available \href{https://github.com/EigenTom/ReviewGrounder}{here}.

Mihir Prabhudesai, Aryan Satpathy, Yangmin Li et al.

We have witnessed remarkable advances in LLM reasoning capabilities with the advent of DeepSeek-R1. However, much of this progress has been fueled by the abundance of internet question-answer (QA) pairs, a major bottleneck going forward, since such data is limited in scale and concentrated mainly in domains like mathematics. In contrast, other sciences such as physics lack large-scale QA datasets to effectively train reasoning-capable models. In this work, we show that physics simulators can serve as a powerful alternative source of supervision for training LLMs for physical reasoning. We generate random scenes in physics engines, create synthetic question-answer pairs from simulated interactions, and train LLMs using reinforcement learning on this synthetic data. Our models exhibit zero-shot sim-to-real transfer to real-world physics benchmarks: for example, training solely on synthetic simulated data improves performance on IPhO (International Physics Olympiad) problems by 5-10 percentage points across model sizes. These results demonstrate that physics simulators can act as scalable data generators, enabling LLMs to acquire deep physical reasoning skills beyond the limitations of internet-scale QA data. Code available at: https://sim2reason.github.io/.

Minjie Lei, Ka Vang Tsang, Sean Gasiorowski et al.

Optical photons are used as signal in a wide variety of particle detectors. Modern neutrino experiments employ hundreds to tens of thousands of photon detectors to observe signal from millions to billions of scintillation photons produced from energy deposition of charged particles. These neutrino detectors are typically large, containing kilotons of target volume, with different optical properties. Modeling individual photon propagation in form of look-up table requires huge computational resources. As the size of a table increases with detector volume for a fixed resolution, this method scales poorly for future larger detectors. Alternative approaches such as fitting a polynomial to the model could address the memory issue, but results in poorer performance. Both look-up table and fitting approaches are prone to discrepancies between the detector simulation and the data collected. We propose a new approach using SIREN, an implicit neural representation with periodic activation functions, to model the look-up table as a 3D scene and reproduces the acceptance map with high accuracy. The number of parameters in our SIREN model is orders of magnitude smaller than the number of voxels in the look-up table. As it models an underlying functional shape, SIREN is scalable to a larger detector. Furthermore, SIREN can successfully learn the spatial gradients of the photon library, providing additional information for downstream applications. Finally, as SIREN is a neural network representation, it is differentiable with respect to its parameters, and therefore tunable via gradient descent. We demonstrate the potential of optimizing SIREN directly on real data, which mitigates the concern of data vs. simulation discrepancies. We further present an application for data reconstruction where SIREN is used to form a likelihood function for photon statistics.

Soujanya Poria, Navonil Majumder, Chia-Yu Hung et al.

Due to their ability of follow natural language instructions, vision-language-action (VLA) models are increasingly prevalent in the embodied AI arena, following the widespread success of their precursors -- LLMs and VLMs. In this paper, we discuss 10 principal milestones in the ongoing development of VLA models -- multimodality, reasoning, data, evaluation, cross-robot action generalization, efficiency, whole-body coordination, safety, agents, and coordination with humans. Furthermore, we discuss the emerging trends of using spatial understanding, modeling world dynamics, post training, and data synthesis -- all aiming to reach these milestones. Through these discussions, we hope to bring attention to the research avenues that may accelerate the development of VLA models into wider acceptability.

Alexey Kravets, Da Li, Chuan Li et al.

Recent advances in language model interpretability using sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have yet to effectively translate to the visual domain, mainly due to the difficulty and ambiguity of labeling visual concepts. In this paper, we introduce Visual Interpretability via SAE Transfer Alignment (VISTA), a framework that transfers interpretability from language to vision in a LLaVA-style vision-language model by constraining a visual projector to map visual tokens into an LLM's pre-existing, labeled textual SAE space. This approach enables visual interpretability without training dedicated vision SAEs. By regularizing the projector using the LLM's SAE reconstruction loss, VISTA achieves a threefold increase in the matching rate, which measures how accurately the most activating textual concepts in the SAE space correspond to semantic elements in the image. Using this framework, we further analyze spatial localization properties of different vision encoders and show that DINOv2 features have stronger localization abilities than other encoders. Leveraging this precision, we validate VISTA's cross-modal alignment through fine-grained, localized concept interventions, where specific objects are removed or replaced in the model's perception while preserving the surrounding scene. This results in improvements of 35% in object removal and 47% in object replacement tasks over vision-only baselines, providing causal evidence that visual tokens inhabit the text SAE manifold. These contributions are validated across multiple LLM architectures.

Justin N. M. Pinkney, Chuan Li

We introduce a new method to efficiently create text-to-image models from a pre-trained CLIP and StyleGAN. It enables text driven sampling with an existing generative model without any external data or fine-tuning. This is achieved by training a diffusion model conditioned on CLIP embeddings to sample latent vectors of a pre-trained StyleGAN, which we call clip2latent. We leverage the alignment between CLIP's image and text embeddings to avoid the need for any text labelled data for training the conditional diffusion model. We demonstrate that clip2latent allows us to generate high-resolution (1024x1024 pixels) images based on text prompts with fast sampling, high image quality, and low training compute and data requirements. We also show that the use of the well studied StyleGAN architecture, without further fine-tuning, allows us to directly apply existing methods to control and modify the generated images adding a further layer of control to our text-to-image pipeline.

Shantanu Jaiswal, Mihir Prabhudesai, Nikash Bhardwaj et al.

Text-to-image (T2I) models have achieved remarkable progress, yet they continue to struggle with complex prompts that require simultaneously handling multiple objects, relations, and attributes. Existing inference-time strategies, such as parallel sampling with verifiers or simply increasing denoising steps, can improve prompt alignment but remain inadequate for richly compositional settings where many constraints must be satisfied. Inspired by the success of chain-of-thought reasoning in large language models, we propose an iterative test-time strategy in which a T2I model progressively refines its generations across multiple steps, guided by feedback from a vision-language model as the critic in the loop. Our approach is simple, requires no external tools or priors, and can be flexibly applied to a wide range of image generators and vision-language models. Empirically, we demonstrate consistent gains on image generation across benchmarks: a 16.9% improvement in all-correct rate on ConceptMix (k=7), a 13.8% improvement on T2I-CompBench (3D-Spatial category) and a 12.5% improvement on Visual Jenga scene decomposition compared to compute-matched parallel sampling. Beyond quantitative gains, iterative refinement produces more faithful generations by decomposing complex prompts into sequential corrections, with human evaluators preferring our method 58.7% of the time over 41.3% for the parallel baseline. Together, these findings highlight iterative self-correction as a broadly applicable principle for compositional image generation. Results and visualizations are available at https://iterative-img-gen.github.io/

Chia-Yu Hung, Navonil Majumder, Zhifeng Kong et al.

We introduce TangoFlux, an efficient Text-to-Audio (TTA) generative model with 515M parameters, capable of generating up to 30 seconds of 44.1kHz audio in just 3.7 seconds on a single A40 GPU. A key challenge in aligning TTA models lies in the difficulty of creating preference pairs, as TTA lacks structured mechanisms like verifiable rewards or gold-standard answers available for Large Language Models (LLMs). To address this, we propose CLAP-Ranked Preference Optimization (CRPO), a novel framework that iteratively generates and optimizes preference data to enhance TTA alignment. We demonstrate that the audio preference dataset generated using CRPO outperforms existing alternatives. With this framework, TangoFlux achieves state-of-the-art performance across both objective and subjective benchmarks. We open source all code and models to support further research in TTA generation.

Jon Saad-Falcon, Avanika Narayan, Robby Manihani et al.

Personal AI stacks, like OpenClaw and Hermes Agent, are becoming central to daily work, yet they route nearly every query (often over sensitive local data) to cloud-hosted frontier models. Replacing frontier models with local models inside existing stacks does not work: swapping Claude Opus 4.6 for Qwen3.5-9B drops accuracy by 25-39 pp across personal AI tasks like PinchBench and GAIA. Existing stacks bundle agentic prompts, tool descriptions, memory configuration, and runtime settings around a specific cloud model. Only the prompts can be tuned, and state-of-the-art prompt optimizers close just 5 pp of the local-cloud gap on their own. This motivates a decomposed personal AI stack: one that exposes individual primitives which can be optimized individually or jointly to close the local-cloud gap. We present OpenJarvis, an architecture that represents a personal AI system as a typed spec over five primitives: Intelligence, Engine, Agents, Tools & Memory, and Learning. Each primitive is an independently editable field, making the stack end-to-end optimizable and measurable against accuracy, cost, and latency. Towards closing the local-cloud gap without surrendering local-model properties, OpenJarvis introduces LLM-guided spec search, a local-cloud collaboration in which frontier cloud models propose edits across the spec at search time, only non-regressing edits are accepted, and the resulting spec runs entirely on-device at inference time. With LLM-guided spec search, on-device specs match or exceed cloud accuracy on 4 of 8 benchmarks and land within 3.2 pp of the best cloud baseline on average. They also reduce marginal API cost by ~800x and end-to-end latency by 4x.

Yide Ran, Jianwen Xie, Minghui Wang et al.

Data attribution and valuation are critical for understanding data-model synergy for Large Language Models (LLMs), yet existing gradient-based methods suffer from scalability challenges on LLMs. Inspired by human cognition, where decision making relies on a focused readout of relevant memories rather than replaying all pathways, we introduce RISE (Readout Influence Sketching Estimator). Instead of computing and indexing gradients across the entire LLM, RISE focuses on influence hotspots at the output layer, where influence signals concentrate, and the gradient admits a decomposed outer-product form. This enables a dual-channel representation combining a lexical residual channel (RH) and a semantic projected-error channel (GH). Applying CountSketch projections to these channels achieves strong compression while maintaining accurate attribution. Across the OLMo (1B-32B) and Pythia (14M-6.9B) families, RISE reduces index storage by up to 112$\times$ compared to RapidIn and scales to 32B parameters LLM, where gradient-based baselines such as RapidIn and ZO-Inf become memory-infeasible. We evaluate RISE on two paradigms: (1) retrospective attribution, retrieving influential training examples for specific predictions, and (2) prospective valuation, scoring candidate data utility zero-shot. We validate RISE on three tasks: Howdy backdoor data detection, Finance-Medical domain separation, and Brain Rot high-quality data selection. In a closed-loop Brain Rot study, continued pretraining on RISE-selected data yields consistent downstream improvements. Overall, RISE provides a practical and scalable primitive for influence analysis and training-data selection in modern large language models.

Ziwen Liu, Huawei Lin, Yide Ran et al.

Large language models (LLMs) sometimes memorize undesirable knowledge, which must be removed after deployment. Prior work on machine unlearning has focused largely on optimization methods that adjust parameters to enforce forgetting while preserving retention. However, these approaches assume that the forget and retain sets are readily available, which rarely holds in practice. Unlearning is typically triggered by an undesired generation at inference time, making the retrieval of relevant data the central challenge. We introduce the notion of data Pareto improvement for LLM unlearning, which formalizes how retrieval can expand the achievable trade-off frontier between forgetting and retention. To realize this principle, we propose Randomized Antipodal Search on Linearized Influence Kernel (RASLIK), a retrieval algorithm that combines permutation-projection hashing with randomized antipodal search. RASLIK reduces selection variance, achieves sublinear complexity, and yields a double gain in both quality and efficiency. Across multiple models, datasets, and unlearning algorithms, RASLIK consistently outperforms deterministic baselines and even oracle sampling, establishing randomized search as a principled and scalable solution for data-centric unlearning.

Maojia Song, Tej Deep Pala, Weisheng Jin et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in multi-agent systems (MAS) as components of collaborative intelligence, where peer interactions dynamically shape individual decision-making. Although prior work has focused on conformity bias, we extend the analysis to examine how LLMs form trust from previous impressions, resist misinformation, and integrate peer input during interaction, key factors for achieving collective intelligence under complex social dynamics. We present KAIROS, a benchmark simulating quiz contests with peer agents of varying reliability, offering fine-grained control over conditions such as expert-novice roles, noisy crowds, and adversarial peers. LLMs receive both historical interactions and current peer responses, allowing systematic investigation into how trust, peer action, and self-confidence influence decisions. As for mitigation strategies, we evaluate prompting, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning, Group Relative Policy Optimisation (GRPO), across multiple models. Our results reveal that GRPO with multi-agent context combined with outcome-based rewards and unconstrained reasoning achieves the best overall performance, but also decreases the robustness to social influence compared to Base models. The code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/declare-lab/KAIROS.

Xiang Zhang, Sohyun Yoo, Hongrui Wu et al.

We introduce PixARMesh, a method to autoregressively reconstruct complete 3D indoor scene meshes directly from a single RGB image. Unlike prior methods that rely on implicit signed distance fields and post-hoc layout optimization, PixARMesh jointly predicts object layout and geometry within a unified model, producing coherent and artist-ready meshes in a single forward pass. Building on recent advances in mesh generative models, we augment a point-cloud encoder with pixel-aligned image features and global scene context via cross-attention, enabling accurate spatial reasoning from a single image. Scenes are generated autoregressively from a unified token stream containing context, pose, and mesh, yielding compact meshes with high-fidelity geometry. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that PixARMesh achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality while producing lightweight, high-quality meshes ready for downstream applications.

Deqian Kong, Minglu Zhao, Aoyang Qin et al.

Standard chain-of-thought reasoning generates a solution in a single forward pass, committing irrevocably to each token and lacking a mechanism to recover from early errors. We introduce Inference-Time Rethinking, a generative framework that enables iterative self-correction by decoupling declarative latent thought vectors from procedural generation. We factorize reasoning into a continuous latent thought vector (what to reason about) and a decoder that verbalizes the trace conditioned on this vector (how to reason). Beyond serving as a declarative buffer, latent thought vectors compress the reasoning structure into a continuous representation that abstracts away surface-level token variability, making gradient-based optimization over reasoning strategies well-posed. Our prior model maps unstructured noise to a learned manifold of valid reasoning patterns, and at test time we employ a Gibbs-style procedure that alternates between generating a candidate trace and optimizing the latent vector to better explain that trace, effectively navigating the latent manifold to refine the reasoning strategy. Training a 0.2B-parameter model from scratch on GSM8K, our method with 30 rethinking iterations surpasses baselines with 10 to 15 times more parameters, including a 3B counterpart. This result demonstrates that effective mathematical reasoning can emerge from sophisticated inference-time computation rather than solely from massive parameter counts.

Chuan Li, Ruoxuan Yang

Groundwater supports ecosystems, agriculture, and drinking water supplies worldwide, yet effective monitoring remains challenging due to sparse data, computational constraints, and delayed outputs from traditional approaches. We develop a machine learning pipeline that predicts groundwater level categories using climate data, hydro-meteorological records, and physiographic attributes processed through AutoGluon's automated ensemble framework. Our approach integrates geospatial preprocessing, domain-driven feature engineering, and automated model selection to overcome conventional monitoring limitations. Applied to a large-scale French dataset (n $>$ 3,440,000 observations from 1,500+ wells), the model achieves weighted F\_1 scores of 0.927 on validation data and 0.67 on temporally distinct test data. Scenario-based evaluations demonstrate practical utility for early warning systems and water allocation decisions under changing climate conditions. The open-source implementation provides a scalable framework for integrating machine learning into national groundwater monitoring networks, enabling more responsive and data-driven water management strategies.

Shoufa Chen, Chongjian Ge, Yuqi Zhang et al.

This paper introduces Goku, a state-of-the-art family of joint image-and-video generation models leveraging rectified flow Transformers to achieve industry-leading performance. We detail the foundational elements enabling high-quality visual generation, including the data curation pipeline, model architecture design, flow formulation, and advanced infrastructure for efficient and robust large-scale training. The Goku models demonstrate superior performance in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, setting new benchmarks across major tasks. Specifically, Goku achieves 0.76 on GenEval and 83.65 on DPG-Bench for text-to-image generation, and 84.85 on VBench for text-to-video tasks. We believe that this work provides valuable insights and practical advancements for the research community in developing joint image-and-video generation models.

Hong Lu, Chuan Li, Yinheng Li et al.

The drug development process necessitates that pharmacologists undertake various tasks, such as reviewing literature, formulating hypotheses, designing experiments, and interpreting results. Each stage requires accessing and querying vast amounts of information. In this abstract, we introduce a Large Language Model (LLM)-based Natural Language Interface designed to interact with structured information stored in databases. Our experiments demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed framework. This framework can generalize to query a wide range of pharmaceutical data and knowledge bases.

Chia-Yu Hung, Qi Sun, Pengfei Hong et al.

Existing Visual-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown promising performance in zero-shot scenarios, demonstrating impressive task execution and reasoning capabilities. However, a significant challenge arises from the limitations of visual encoding, which can result in failures during tasks such as object grasping. Moreover, these models typically suffer from high computational overhead due to their large sizes, often exceeding 7B parameters. While these models excel in reasoning and task planning, the substantial computational overhead they incur makes them impractical for real-time robotic environments, where speed and efficiency are paramount. To address the limitations of existing VLA models, we propose NORA, a 3B-parameter model designed to reduce computational overhead while maintaining strong task performance. NORA adopts the Qwen-2.5-VL-3B multimodal model as its backbone, leveraging its superior visual-semantic understanding to enhance visual reasoning and action grounding. Additionally, our \model{} is trained on 970k real-world robot demonstrations and equipped with the FAST+ tokenizer for efficient action sequence generation. Experimental results demonstrate that NORA outperforms existing large-scale VLA models, achieving better task performance with significantly reduced computational overhead, making it a more practical solution for real-time robotic autonomy.

Deqian Kong, Minglu Zhao, Dehong Xu et al.

We propose a novel class of language models, Latent Thought Models (LTMs), which incorporate explicit latent thought vectors that follow an explicit prior model in latent space. These latent thought vectors guide the autoregressive generation of ground tokens through a Transformer decoder. Training employs a dual-rate optimization process within the classical variational Bayes framework: fast learning of local variational parameters for the posterior distribution of latent vectors (inference-time computation), and slow learning of global decoder parameters. Empirical studies reveal that LTMs possess additional scaling dimensions beyond traditional Large Language Models (LLMs), such as the number of iterations in inference-time computation and number of latent thought vectors. Higher sample efficiency can be achieved by increasing training compute per token, with further gains possible by trading model size for more inference steps. Designed based on these scaling properties, LTMs demonstrate superior sample and parameter efficiency compared to autoregressive models and discrete diffusion models. They significantly outperform these counterparts in validation perplexity and zero-shot language modeling tasks. Additionally, LTMs exhibit emergent few-shot in-context reasoning capabilities that scale with model size, and achieve competitive performance in conditional and unconditional text generation.

Renhang Liu, Chia-Yu Hung, Navonil Majumder et al.

Diffusion and flow-matching models have revolutionized automatic text-to-audio generation in recent times. These models are increasingly capable of generating high quality and faithful audio outputs capturing to speech and acoustic events. However, there is still much room for improvement in creative audio generation that primarily involves music and songs. Recent open lyrics-to-song models, such as, DiffRhythm, ACE-Step, and LeVo, have set an acceptable standard in automatic song generation for recreational use. However, these models lack fine-grained word-level controllability often desired by musicians in their workflows. To the best of our knowledge, our flow-matching-based JAM is the first effort toward endowing word-level timing and duration control in song generation, allowing fine-grained vocal control. To enhance the quality of generated songs to better align with human preferences, we implement aesthetic alignment through Direct Preference Optimization, which iteratively refines the model using a synthetic dataset, eliminating the need or manual data annotations. Furthermore, we aim to standardize the evaluation of such lyrics-to-song models through our public evaluation dataset JAME. We show that JAM outperforms the existing models in terms of the music-specific attributes.

Shang Hong Sim, Tej Deep Pala, Vernon Toh et al.

Generating grounded and trustworthy responses remains a key challenge for large language models (LLMs). While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with citation-based grounding holds promise, instruction-tuned models frequently fail even in straightforward scenarios: missing explicitly stated answers, citing incorrectly, or refusing when evidence is available. In this work, we explore how reinforcement learning (RL) and internal reasoning can enhance grounding in LLMs. We use the GRPO (Group Relative Policy Optimization) method to train models using verifiable outcome-based rewards targeting answer correctness, citation sufficiency, and refusal quality, without requiring gold reasoning traces or expensive annotations. Through comprehensive experiments across ASQA, QAMPARI, ELI5, and ExpertQA we show that reasoning-augmented models significantly outperform instruction-only variants, especially in handling unanswerable queries and generating well-cited responses. A two-stage training setup, first optimizing answer and citation behavior and then refusal, further improves grounding by stabilizing the learning signal. Additionally, we revisit instruction tuning via GPT-4 distillation and find that combining it with GRPO enhances performance on long-form, generative QA tasks. Overall, our findings highlight the value of reasoning, stage-wise optimization, and outcome-driven RL for building more verifiable and reliable LLMs.

Tal Daniel, Carl Qi, Dan Haramati et al.

We introduce Latent Particle World Model (LPWM), a self-supervised object-centric world model scaled to real-world multi-object datasets and applicable in decision-making. LPWM autonomously discovers keypoints, bounding boxes, and object masks directly from video data, enabling it to learn rich scene decompositions without supervision. Our architecture is trained end-to-end purely from videos and supports flexible conditioning on actions, language, and image goals. LPWM models stochastic particle dynamics via a novel latent action module and achieves state-of-the-art results on diverse real-world and synthetic datasets. Beyond stochastic video modeling, LPWM is readily applicable to decision-making, including goal-conditioned imitation learning, as we demonstrate in the paper. Code, data, pre-trained models and video rollouts are available: https://taldatech.github.io/lpwm-web

Han Lin, Jaemin Cho, Amir Zadeh et al. · allen-ai

There is growing interest in integrating high-fidelity visual synthesis capabilities into large language models (LLMs) without compromising their strong reasoning capabilities. Existing methods that directly train LLMs or bridge LLMs and diffusion models usually suffer from costly training since the backbone LLMs have not seen image representations during pretraining. We present Bifrost-1, a unified framework that bridges pretrained multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) and diffusion models using patch-level CLIP image embeddings as latent variables, which are natively aligned with the MLLM's CLIP visual encoder. These patch-level image embeddings are integrated into the diffusion model with a lightweight adaptation of its ControlNet. To retain the original multimodal reasoning capabilities of MLLMs, we equip the MLLM with a visual generation branch initialized from the original MLLM parameters when predicting the patch-level image embeddings. By seamlessly integrating pretrained MLLMs and diffusion models with patch-level CLIP latents, our framework enables high-fidelity controllable image generation with significant training efficiency. Our experiments demonstrate that Bifrost-1 achieves comparable or better performance than previous methods in terms of visual fidelity and multimodal understanding, with substantially lower compute during training. We also provide comprehensive ablation studies showing the effectiveness of our design choices.

Rishanth Rajendhran, Amir Zadeh, Matthew Sarte et al.

Metrics like FactScore and VeriScore that evaluate long-form factuality operate by decomposing an input response into atomic claims and then individually verifying each claim. While effective and interpretable, these methods incur numerous LLM calls and can take upwards of 100 seconds to evaluate a single response, limiting their practicality in large-scale evaluation and training scenarios. To address this, we propose VeriFastScore, which leverages synthetic data to fine-tune Llama3.1 8B for simultaneously extracting and verifying all verifiable claims within a given text based on evidence from Google Search. We show that this task cannot be solved via few-shot prompting with closed LLMs due to its complexity: the model receives ~4K tokens of evidence on average and needs to concurrently decompose claims, judge their verifiability, and verify them against noisy evidence. However, our fine-tuned VeriFastScore model demonstrates strong correlation with the original VeriScore pipeline at both the example level (r=0.80) and system level (r=0.94) while achieving an overall speedup of 6.6x (9.9x excluding evidence retrieval) over VeriScore. To facilitate future factuality research, we publicly release our VeriFastScore model and synthetic datasets.

Zhenqiao Song, Ramith Hettiarachchi, Chuan Li et al. · cmu

Designing ligand-binding proteins with precise functions is fundamental to advances in biology and chemistry, yet existing AI approaches are limited by scarce protein-ligand complex data. Meanwhile, abundant text descriptions of protein-ligand interactions remain underutilized. We introduce InstructPro, a family of generative models that design proteins from natural language instructions and ligand formulas. InstructPro produces protein sequences consistent with specified functional descriptions and ligand targets. To enable training and evaluation, we develop InstructProBench, a large-scale dataset of 9.6 million (function description, ligand, protein) triples. We train two model variants: InstructPro-1B and InstructPro-3B, which substantially outperform strong baselines. InstructPro-1B achieves design success rates of 2.46% (seen ligands) and 3.14% (zero-shot), while InstructPro-3B reaches 5.06% and 3.93%, respectively. These results demonstrate the potential of natural language-guided generative modeling to expand protein design capabilities beyond traditional data limitations.

Xi Chen, Shiyang Zhou, Muqi Huang et al.

Vision transformers have demonstrated significant advantages in computer vision tasks due to their ability to capture long-range dependencies and contextual relationships through self-attention. However, existing position encoding techniques, which are largely borrowed from natural language processing, fail to effectively capture semantic-aware positional relationships between image patches. Traditional approaches like absolute position encoding and relative position encoding primarily focus on 1D linear position relationship, often neglecting the semantic similarity between distant yet contextually related patches. These limitations hinder model generalization, translation equivariance, and the ability to effectively handle repetitive or structured patterns in images. In this paper, we propose 2-Dimensional Semantic-Aware Position Encoding ($\text{SaPE}^2$), a novel position encoding method with semantic awareness that dynamically adapts position representations by leveraging local content instead of fixed linear position relationship or spatial coordinates. Our method enhances the model's ability to generalize across varying image resolutions and scales, improves translation equivariance, and better aggregates features for visually similar but spatially distant patches. By integrating $\text{SaPE}^2$ into vision transformers, we bridge the gap between position encoding and perceptual similarity, thereby improving performance on computer vision tasks.

Chia-Yu Hung, Navonil Majumder, Haoyuan Deng et al.

Vision--language--action (VLA) models have recently shown promising performance on a variety of embodied tasks, yet they still fall short in reliability and generalization, especially when deployed across different embodiments or real-world environments. In this work, we introduce NORA-1.5, a VLA model built from the pre-trained NORA backbone by adding to it a flow-matching-based action expert. This architectural enhancement alone yields substantial performance gains, enabling NORA-1.5 to outperform NORA and several state-of-the-art VLA models across both simulated and real-world benchmarks. To further improve robustness and task success, we develop a set of reward models for post-training VLA policies. Our rewards combine (i) an action-conditioned world model (WM) that evaluates whether generated actions lead toward the desired goal, and (ii) a deviation-from-ground-truth heuristic that distinguishes good actions from poor ones. Using these reward signals, we construct preference datasets and adapt NORA-1.5 to target embodiments through direct preference optimization (DPO). Extensive evaluations show that reward-driven post-training consistently improves performance in both simulation and real-robot settings, demonstrating significant VLA model-reliability gains through simple yet effective reward models. Our findings highlight NORA-1.5 and reward-guided post-training as a viable path toward more dependable embodied agents suitable for real-world deployment.

Zeyu Yang, Tianyi Zhang, Jianwen Xie et al.

The scaling of Generative AI (GenAI) models into the hundreds of billions of parameters makes low-precision computation indispensable for efficient deployment. We argue that the fundamental solution lies in developing low-precision floating-point formats, which inherently provide numerical stability, memory savings, and hardware efficiency without dequantization overhead. In this paper, we present a theoretical and empirical study of an exponent concentration phenomenon in GenAI weights: exponents consistently exhibit low entropy across architectures and modalities. We show that this arises naturally from $α$-stable distributions induced by stochastic gradient descent, and we prove tight bounds on the entropy of exponents. Our analysis establishes a theoretical compression limit near FP4.67, which motivates the design of a practical FP8 format. Building on these insights, we propose Exponent-Concentrated FP8 (ECF8), a lossless compression framework with entropy-aware encoding and GPU-optimized decoding. Experiments on LLMs and DiTs up to 671B parameters demonstrate up to 26.9% memory savings and 177.1% throughput acceleration, with perfectly lossless computations, i.e., no deviation in model outputs. Our results establish exponent concentration as a statistical law of trained models and open a principled path for lossless low-precision floating-point design in the FP8 era.

Jingdi Lei, Varun Gumma, Rishabh Bhardwaj et al. · microsoft-research

Large Language Model (LLM) safety is one of the most pressing challenges for enabling wide-scale deployment. While most studies and global discussions focus on generic harms, such as models assisting users in harming themselves or others, enterprises face a more fundamental concern: whether LLM-based agents are safe for their intended use case. To address this, we introduce operational safety, defined as an LLM's ability to appropriately accept or refuse user queries when tasked with a specific purpose. We further propose OffTopicEval, an evaluation suite and benchmark for measuring operational safety both in general and within specific agentic use cases. Our evaluations on six model families comprising 20 open-weight LLMs reveal that while performance varies across models, all of them remain highly operationally unsafe. Even the strongest models - Qwen-3 (235B) with 77.77% and Mistral (24B) with 79.96% - fall far short of reliable operational safety, while GPT models plateau in the 62-73% range, Phi achieves only mid-level scores (48-70%), and Gemma and Llama-3 collapse to 39.53% and 23.84%, respectively. While operational safety is a core model alignment issue, to suppress these failures, we propose prompt-based steering methods: query grounding (Q-ground) and system-prompt grounding (P-ground), which substantially improve OOD refusal. Q-ground provides consistent gains of up to 23%, while P-ground delivers even larger boosts, raising Llama-3.3 (70B) by 41% and Qwen-3 (30B) by 27%. These results highlight both the urgent need for operational safety interventions and the promise of prompt-based steering as a first step toward more reliable LLM-based agents.

Chuan Li, Qianyi Zhao, Fengran Mo et al.

Efficiently enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in federated learning environments remains challenging, particularly when balancing performance gains with strict computational, communication, and privacy constraints. This challenge is especially acute in healthcare, where decisions-spanning clinical, operational, and patient-facing contexts-demand not only accurate outputs but also interpretable, traceable rationales to ensure safety, accountability, and regulatory compliance. Conventional federated tuning approaches on LLM fail to address this need: they optimize primarily for answer correctness while neglecting rationale quality, leaving CoT capabilities dependent on models' innate pre-training abilities. Moreover, existing methods for improving rationales typically rely on privacy-violating knowledge distillation from centralized models. Additionally, the communication overhead in traditional federated fine-tuning on LLMs remains substantial. We addresses this gap by proposing FedCoT, a novel framework specifically designed to enhance reasoning in federated settings. FedCoT leverages a lightweight chain-of-thought enhancement mechanism: local models generate multiple reasoning paths, and a compact discriminator dynamically selects the most promising one. This approach improves reasoning accuracy and robustness while providing valuable interpretability, which is particularly critical for medical applications. To manage client heterogeneity efficiently, we adopt an improved aggregation approach building upon advanced LoRA module stacking, incorporating client classifier-awareness to achieve noise-free aggregation across diverse clients. Comprehensive experiments on medical reasoning tasks demonstrate that FedCoT significantly boosts client-side reasoning performance under stringent resource budgets while fully preserving data privacy.

Chuan Li, Shunyu Zhao, Vincent Gauthier et al.

The accelerating uptake of battery-electric vehicles demands infrastructure planning tools that are both data-rich and geographically scalable. Whereas most prior studies optimise charging locations for single cities, state-wide and national networks must reconcile the conflicting requirements of dense metropolitan cores, car-dependent exurbs, and power-constrained rural corridors. We present DOVA-PATBM (Deployment Optimisation with Voronoi-oriented, Adaptive, POI-Aware Temporal Behaviour Model), a geo-computational framework that unifies these contexts in a single pipeline. The method rasterises heterogeneous data (roads, population, night lights, POIs, and feeder lines) onto a hierarchical H3 grid, infers intersection importance with a zone-normalised graph neural network centrality model, and overlays a Voronoi tessellation that guarantees at least one five-port DC fast charger within every 30 km radius. Hourly arrival profiles, learned from loop-detector and floating-car traces, feed a finite M/M/c queue to size ports under feeder-capacity and outage-risk constraints. A greedy maximal-coverage heuristic with income-weighted penalties then selects the minimum number of sites that satisfy coverage and equity targets. Applied to the State of Georgia, USA, DOVA-PATBM (i) increases 30 km tile coverage by 12 percentage points, (ii) halves the mean distance that low-income residents travel to the nearest charger, and (iii) meets sub-transmission headroom everywhere -- all while remaining computationally tractable for national-scale roll-outs. These results demonstrate that a tightly integrated, GNN-driven, multi-resolution approach can bridge the gap between academic optimisation and deployable infrastructure policy.

Chuan Li, Jiang You, Hassine Moungla et al.

Accurate modeling of human mobility is critical for understanding epidemic spread and deploying timely interventions. In this work, we leverage a large-scale spatio-temporal dataset collected from Peru's national Digital Contact Tracing (DCT) application during the COVID-19 pandemic to forecast mobility flows across urban regions. A key challenge lies in the spatial sparsity of hourly mobility counts across hexagonal grid cells, which limits the predictive power of conventional time series models. To address this, we propose a lightweight and model-agnostic Spatial Neighbourhood Fusion (SPN) technique that augments each cell's features with aggregated signals from its immediate H3 neighbors. We evaluate this strategy on three forecasting backbones: NLinear, PatchTST, and K-U-Net, under various historical input lengths. Experimental results show that SPN consistently improves forecasting performance, achieving up to 9.85 percent reduction in test MSE. Our findings demonstrate that spatial smoothing of sparse mobility signals provides a simple yet effective path toward robust spatio-temporal forecasting during public health crises.

Biao Yang, Muqi Huang, Yuhui Zhang et al.

Traditional point-based image editing methods rely on iterative latent optimization or geometric transformations, which are either inefficient in their processing or fail to capture the semantic relationships within the image. These methods often overlook the powerful yet underutilized image editing capabilities inherent in pre-trained diffusion models. In this work, we propose a novel one-step point-based image editing method, named AttentionDrag, which leverages the inherent latent knowledge and feature correlations within pre-trained diffusion models for image editing tasks. This framework enables semantic consistency and high-quality manipulation without the need for extensive re-optimization or retraining. Specifically, we reutilize the latent correlations knowledge learned by the self-attention mechanism in the U-Net module during the DDIM inversion process to automatically identify and adjust relevant image regions, ensuring semantic validity and consistency. Additionally, AttentionDrag adaptively generates masks to guide the editing process, enabling precise and context-aware modifications with friendly interaction. Our results demonstrate a performance that surpasses most state-of-the-art methods with significantly faster speeds, showing a more efficient and semantically coherent solution for point-based image editing tasks.

Weisheng Jin, Maojia Song, Tej Deep Pala et al.

As large language models (LLMs) tackle increasingly complex tasks and longer documents, their computational and memory costs during inference become a major bottleneck. To address this, we propose PromptDistill, a novel, training-free method that improves inference efficiency while preserving generation quality. PromptDistill identifies and retains the most informative tokens by leveraging attention interactions in early layers, preserving their hidden states while reducing the computational burden in later layers. This allows the model to focus on essential contextual information without fully processing all tokens. Unlike previous methods such as H2O and SnapKV, which perform compression only after processing the entire input, or GemFilter, which selects a fixed portion of the initial prompt without considering contextual dependencies, PromptDistill dynamically allocates computational resources to the most relevant tokens while maintaining a global awareness of the input. Experiments using our method and baseline approaches with base models such as LLaMA 3.1 8B Instruct, Phi 3.5 Mini Instruct, and Qwen2 7B Instruct on benchmarks including LongBench, InfBench, and Needle in a Haystack demonstrate that PromptDistill significantly improves efficiency while having minimal impact on output quality compared to the original models. With a single-stage selection strategy, PromptDistill effectively balances performance and efficiency, outperforming prior methods like GemFilter, H2O, and SnapKV due to its superior ability to retain essential information. Specifically, compared to GemFilter, PromptDistill achieves an overall $1\%$ to $5\%$ performance improvement while also offering better time efficiency. Additionally, we explore multi-stage selection, which further improves efficiency while maintaining strong generation performance.

Paul L. Rosin, Yu-Kun Lai, David Mould et al.

Despite the recent upsurge of activity in image-based non-photorealistic rendering (NPR), and in particular portrait image stylisation, due to the advent of neural style transfer, the state of performance evaluation in this field is limited, especially compared to the norms in the computer vision and machine learning communities. Unfortunately, the task of evaluating image stylisation is thus far not well defined, since it involves subjective, perceptual and aesthetic aspects. To make progress towards a solution, this paper proposes a new structured, three level, benchmark dataset for the evaluation of stylised portrait images. Rigorous criteria were used for its construction, and its consistency was validated by user studies. Moreover, a new methodology has been developed for evaluating portrait stylisation algorithms, which makes use of the different benchmark levels as well as annotations provided by user studies regarding the characteristics of the faces. We perform evaluation for a wide variety of image stylisation methods (both portrait-specific and general purpose, and also both traditional NPR approaches and neural style transfer) using the new benchmark dataset.

Thu Nguyen-Phuoc, Chuan Li, Lucas Theis et al.

We propose a novel generative adversarial network (GAN) for the task of unsupervised learning of 3D representations from natural images. Most generative models rely on 2D kernels to generate images and make few assumptions about the 3D world. These models therefore tend to create blurry images or artefacts in tasks that require a strong 3D understanding, such as novel-view synthesis. HoloGAN instead learns a 3D representation of the world, and to render this representation in a realistic manner. Unlike other GANs, HoloGAN provides explicit control over the pose of generated objects through rigid-body transformations of the learnt 3D features. Our experiments show that using explicit 3D features enables HoloGAN to disentangle 3D pose and identity, which is further decomposed into shape and appearance, while still being able to generate images with similar or higher visual quality than other generative models. HoloGAN can be trained end-to-end from unlabelled 2D images only. Particularly, we do not require pose labels, 3D shapes, or multiple views of the same objects. This shows that HoloGAN is the first generative model that learns 3D representations from natural images in an entirely unsupervised manner.

Thu Nguyen-Phuoc, Chuan Li, Stephen Balaban et al.

Traditional computer graphics rendering pipeline is designed for procedurally generating 2D quality images from 3D shapes with high performance. The non-differentiability due to discrete operations such as visibility computation makes it hard to explicitly correlate rendering parameters and the resulting image, posing a significant challenge for inverse rendering tasks. Recent work on differentiable rendering achieves differentiability either by designing surrogate gradients for non-differentiable operations or via an approximate but differentiable renderer. These methods, however, are still limited when it comes to handling occlusion, and restricted to particular rendering effects. We present RenderNet, a differentiable rendering convolutional network with a novel projection unit that can render 2D images from 3D shapes. Spatial occlusion and shading calculation are automatically encoded in the network. Our experiments show that RenderNet can successfully learn to implement different shaders, and can be used in inverse rendering tasks to estimate shape, pose, lighting and texture from a single image.

Chuan Li, Michael Wand

This paper proposes Markovian Generative Adversarial Networks (MGANs), a method for training generative neural networks for efficient texture synthesis. While deep neural network approaches have recently demonstrated remarkable results in terms of synthesis quality, they still come at considerable computational costs (minutes of run-time for low-res images). Our paper addresses this efficiency issue. Instead of a numerical deconvolution in previous work, we precompute a feed-forward, strided convolutional network that captures the feature statistics of Markovian patches and is able to directly generate outputs of arbitrary dimensions. Such network can directly decode brown noise to realistic texture, or photos to artistic paintings. With adversarial training, we obtain quality comparable to recent neural texture synthesis methods. As no optimization is required any longer at generation time, our run-time performance (0.25M pixel images at 25Hz) surpasses previous neural texture synthesizers by a significant margin (at least 500 times faster). We apply this idea to texture synthesis, style transfer, and video stylization.

Chuan Li, Michael Wand

This paper studies a combination of generative Markov random field (MRF) models and discriminatively trained deep convolutional neural networks (dCNNs) for synthesizing 2D images. The generative MRF acts on higher-levels of a dCNN feature pyramid, controling the image layout at an abstract level. We apply the method to both photographic and non-photo-realistic (artwork) synthesis tasks. The MRF regularizer prevents over-excitation artifacts and reduces implausible feature mixtures common to previous dCNN inversion approaches, permitting synthezing photographic content with increased visual plausibility. Unlike standard MRF-based texture synthesis, the combined system can both match and adapt local features with considerable variability, yielding results far out of reach of classic generative MRF methods.