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Recent vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP have shown impressive anomaly detection performance under significant distribution shift by utilizing high-level semantic information through text prompts. However, these models often overlook fine-grained defect cues, e.g., hole, cut, or scratch, that are essential for understanding the anomaly's nature. Moreover, the modality gap between images and text can lead to subtle visual evidence being poorly captured in textual descriptions. To address the gap, we enhance the representation of "abnormal" with structured semantics, bridging coarse anomaly signals and fine-grained defect categories. We propose a hybrid prompting mechanism that combines human-readable descriptions of defect types with learnable token embeddings. Building on these ideas, we introduce DAPO, a Defect-aware Prompt Optimization framework for zero-shot multi-type and binary anomaly detection and segmentation under distribution shift. DAPO aligns anomaly-relevant visual features with their corresponding textual semantics by learning hybrid defect-aware prompts that combine fixed textual anchors with trainable token embeddings. We conducted experiments on public benchmarks (MPDD, VisA, MVTec-AD, MAD, and Real-IAD) and an internal dataset. The results suggest that compared to the baseline models, DAPO achieves a 3.6% average improvement in AUROC and average precision metrics at the image level under distribution shift, and a 5.2% average improvement in AUROC and F1 when localizing novel anomaly types under zero-shot settings.

How can a monolingual English speaker determine whether an automatic translation in French is good enough to be shared? Existing MT error detection and quality estimation (QE) techniques do not address this practical scenario. We introduce AskQE, a question generation and answering framework designed to detect critical MT errors and provide actionable feedback, helping users decide whether to accept or reject MT outputs even without the knowledge of the target language. Using ContraTICO, a dataset of contrastive synthetic MT errors in the COVID-19 domain, we explore design choices for AskQE and develop an optimized version relying on LLaMA-3 70B and entailed facts to guide question generation. We evaluate the resulting system on the BioMQM dataset of naturally occurring MT errors, where AskQE has higher Kendall's Tau correlation and decision accuracy with human ratings compared to other QE metrics.

This paper investigates how multi-agent systems (MAS)-based on large language models (LLMs) can support actuarial risk modelling, with a particular focus on uncertainty quantification. Actuarial workflows represent a high-stakes decision-support setting where unreliable outputs may lead to incorrect risk assessment, unfair pricing, and regulatory non-compliance. To address uncertainty introduced by the probabilistic nature of LLMs and dependencies between agents, a multi-agent framework is proposed in which specialised agents perform data preparation, modelling, review, and explanation tasks under a central hub. The main contribution is a novel approach to uncertainty propagation using token-level log-probabilities and a Bayesian Network. Importantly, log probabilities are not treated as direct probabilities of correctness or task success. Instead, length-normalised log-probability summaries are transformed into calibrated task-level confidence estimates before incorporation into the Bayesian Network. Results show that the framework reproduces baseline actuarial performance while providing additional insight into workflow stability and runtime uncertainty propagation.

Deep neural networks are widely deployed in high-stakes visual applications where interpretability is critical, yet existing explanations face a trade-off: post-hoc concept methods recover factors that are faithful to a model's behavior but unnamed, while naming and by-design methods attach human-readable concepts only by retraining or altering the classifier. We propose Language-Anchored Decomposition (LAD), a post-hoc framework that delivers concepts which are simultaneously named, faithful, and obtained without modifying the model. For each class, a large language model proposes a concept vocabulary that CLIP-based similarity maps localize across image regions. Inverting standard non-negative matrix factorization, LAD fixes these language-grounded maps as the coefficient matrix and learns only a concept basis that reconstructs the frozen encoder's activations, so naming becomes a structural constraint and the model's own feature geometry determines which concepts are retained. Removing this anchor preserves accuracy but collapses attribution faithfulness. Across natural-image, scene, and medical-imaging benchmarks, LAD produces spatially precise explanations that are decision-relevant under both concept insertion and deletion, while uniquely providing stable, human-interpretable concept names.

Financial portfolio trading is naturally formulated as a reinforcement learning problem, where an agent sequentially rebalances assets under changing market conditions to balance return, risk, and transaction costs. Yet in non-stationary markets, raw OHLCV states and short-horizon return rewards often provide an under-specified learning interface, motivating large language models as a way to inject financial knowledge into state and reward design while constraining open-ended generation. To this end, we propose GIFT, an LLM-guided framework for state-reward interface design in PPO-based financial reinforcement learning. Rather than using the LLM to make trading decisions, GIFT uses Factor-guided State Enhancement to generate state features from financial-factor primitives, Risk-rule-guided Reward Shaping to generate auxiliary rewards from portfolio-risk rules, and Diagnostic-guided Refinement to revise candidate interfaces using PPO rollout diagnostics. After refinement, GIFT fixes the selected state-reward interface before evaluation, with no further LLM queries or interface updates at test time. Comprehensive rolling-window experiments across diverse market regimes and portfolio scenarios demonstrate that GIFT improves learning-signal quality and out-of-sample risk-adjusted portfolio performance over baselines. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/KAG778/GIFT .

ANN-to-SNN conversion offers a practical, training-free route to spiking large language models. However, current pipelines primarily focus on spike-driven realizations for Transformer linear-algebra operations, while providing limited support for key nonlinear operators. This gap limits compatibility with neuromorphic-style execution constraints, where such nonlinearities typically require division, exponentiation, or norm computations that are not naturally supported by standard leaky integrate-and-fire dynamics. To solve this problem, we propose a plug-and-play framework that implements spike-friendly approximations for Transformer nonlinearities and integrates into existing ANN-to-SNN pipelines. Our method decomposes these nonlinear computations into three recurring primitives -- division, exponentiation, and $\ell_2$ norms -- and realizes them via population computation using LIF neuron groups, combined with lightweight bit-shift scaling to avoid floating-point arithmetic. By composing these primitives as modular operator blocks, our framework supports common Transformer nonlinearities (e.g., Softmax, SiLU, and normalization) without any fine-tuning. Experiments on a range of LLMs Transformers show that selectively replacing the targeted nonlinear operators incurs less than a $1\%$ accuracy drop across all evaluated tasks.

Microbiome functions are encoded within the genes of the community-wide metagenome. A natural question is whether properties of a microbial community can be predicted just from knowing the raw DNA sequences of its members. In this work, we employ set-aggregated genome embeddings (SAGE) to predict community-level abundance profiles, exploiting the few-shot learning capabilities of genomic language models (GLMs). We benchmark this approach to show improved generalization on novel genomes compared to classical bioinformatics approaches. Model ablation shows that community-level latent representations directly result in improved performance. Lastly, we demonstrate the benefits of intermediate transformations between latent representations and demonstrate the differences between GLM embedding choices.

Improving the Theory of Mind (ToM) capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for effective social interactions between these AI models and humans. However, the existing benchmarks often measure ToM capability improvement through story-reading, multiple-choice questions from a third-person perspective, while ignoring the first-person, dynamic, and open-ended nature of human-AI (HAI) interactions. To directly examine how ToM improvement techniques benefit HAI interactions, we first proposed the new paradigm of interactive ToM evaluation with both perspective and metric shifts. Next, following the paradigm, we conducted a systematic study of four representative ToM enhancement techniques using both four real-world datasets and a user study, covering both goal-oriented tasks (e.g., coding, math) and experience-oriented tasks (e.g., counseling). Our findings reveal that improvements on static benchmarks do not always translate to better performance in dynamic HAI interactions. This paper offers critical insights into ToM evaluation, showing the necessity of interaction-based assessments in developing next-generation, socially aware LLMs for HAI symbiosis.

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) excel at general speech understanding; however, adapting them to fine-grained tasks like Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) remains a significant bottleneck. Current Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods typically operate in flat Euclidean space, and this geometry fails to capture the multi-granularity nature of emotion cues, which range from low-level prosody to high-level semantics. To address this, we propose HyPASE, a hyperbolic PEFT framework for LALM-based SER. HyPASE leverages the Poincare ball model, using the hyperbolic radius as an explicit proxy for representational granularity. The framework consists of two core components: a Hyperbolic Geometric Adapter (HGA) for layer-adaptive weight modulation, and an Emotion-aware Multi-capacity Cross-modal Aggregator (EMCA) that compresses multi-scale features into compact audio prefixes. Empirical results on standard benchmarks show that HyPASE outperforms Euclidean PEFT baselines across all metrics on MELD and achieves a notable Unweighted Accuracy gain on IEMOCAP, particularly in class-imbalanced emotion recognition, with the accompanying slight Weighted Accuracy trade-off reflecting hyperbolic space's geometric prioritization of minority-class representations; furthermore, HyPASE achieves robust zero-shot cross-dataset generalization within a constrained parameter budget. By grounding the adaptation process in hyperbolic geometry, HyPASE offers a highly efficient path for LALM fine-tuning.

A striking feature of the human visual system is that it ingests visual information through a series of local foveated glimpses, rather than a single global computation. This makes human vision distinctly different from most popular computer vision models in use today, which input images globally and in a single shot. A natural question therefore is whether local, sequential vision models may provide any fundamental computational benefits in addition to being biologically more plausible than global models. In this work, we investigate this question from the perspective of visual state tracking and length generalization. Inspired by recent studies of length generalization in language models, we study the behavior of vision models trained on simple vision tasks that require the aggregation of local information across an image. Our experiments reveal that, similar to language models, vision models can learn to exploit global shortcuts and thereby fail to generalize over task length or complexity. We also show that recurrent vision policies based on strictly local perception can mitigate these failures, thereby allowing models to generalize on these tasks. Our results show that local attention may be an essential overlooked requirement for robust compositional generalization.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable potential in dynamic graph reasoning, but suffer from a scaling bottleneck: current models can only handle graphs with tens of nodes, constrained by exponential reasoning overhead and finite context windows. While multi-agent systems (MAS) offer collective reasoning and topology-aware orchestration, capabilities naturally suited for graph-structured tasks, their application to dynamic graphs remains unexplored. This paper presents Scaling LLM Reasoning on Dynamic Graphs via Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Multi-Agent Collaboration (AdaSTORM), a framework that reformulates large-scale dynamic graph reasoning into two stages: (i) Adaptive Partitioning, partitioning large-scale dynamic graphs into subregions that match the model's reasoning capacity while minimizing inference cost; and (ii) Collaborative Reasoning, aligning graph partition topologies with a spatio-temporal decoupled multi-agent architecture. AdaSTORM is the first multi-agent framework tailored for dynamic graph reasoning. Extensive experiments show that AdaSTORM successfully breaks through the scaling bottleneck, scaling reasoning to thousand-node graphs with over 90% accuracy across several large-scale dynamic graph settings without external tools, significantly outperforms seven competitive baselines. Furthermore, it achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on existing benchmarks and generalizes robustly to real-world datasets. The source code is available at: https://github.com/irisorchid107/AdaSTORM/.

Recent advances in generative AI, especially powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), raise concerns over the interpretability, safety and sustainability of these large and opaque AI models. The power of such architectures is derived not only from the scalability of deep neural networks, but also massively parallel hardware such as GPU clusters. The diffuse nature of deep neural networks gives them great function-approximation capability when provided with sufficient training data but imposes a cost in interpretability and computational efficiency. Observing that localised machine learning (ML) models tend to be more interpretable and computationally efficient than deep neural networks on small datasets, we reason by analogy that similar advantages may apply to specific localised hardware ML architectures. We argue that localised architectures with lower bandwidth but higher expressivity per node have the potential to be fundamentally more interpretable than deep neural networks running on GPU clusters while remaining competitive for smaller datasets. We then evaluate the suitability of various hardware ML paradigms for implementing such localised architectures and evaluate their per-node expressivity, energy efficiency and practical maturity of the technology required.

Existing robotic foundation models, while powerful, are predicated on an implicit assumption of temporal homogeneity: treating all actions as equally informative during optimization. This "flat" training paradigm, inherited from language modeling, remains indifferent to the underlying physical hierarchy of manipulation. In reality, robot trajectories are fundamentally heterogeneous, where low-velocity segments often dictate task success through precision-demanding interactions, while high-velocity motions serve as error-tolerant transitions. Such a misalignment between uniform loss weighting and physical criticality fundamentally limits the performance of current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and World-Action Models (WAM) in complex, long-horizon tasks. To rectify this, we introduce AttenA+, an architecture-agnostic framework that prioritizes kinematically critical segments via velocity-driven action attention. By reweighting the training objective based on the inverse velocity field, AttenA+ naturally aligns the model's learning capacity with the physical demands of manipulation. As a plug-and-play enhancement, AttenA+ can be integrated into existing backbones without structural modifications or additional parameters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AttenA+ significantly elevates the ceilings of current state-of-the-art models. Specifically, it improves OpenVLA-OFT to 98.6% (+1.5%) on the Libero benchmark and pushes FastWAM to 92.4% (+0.6%) on RoboTwin 2.0. Real-world validation on a Franka manipulator further showcases its robustness and cross-task generalization. Our work suggests that mining the intrinsic structural priors of action sequences offers a highly efficient, physics-aware complement to standard scaling laws, paving a new path for general-purpose robotic control.

Large language model (LLM) powered AI agents have emerged as a promising paradigm for autonomous problem-solving, yet they continue to struggle with complex, multi-step real-world tasks that demand domain-specific procedural knowledge. Reusable agent skills, which encapsulate successful problem-solving strategies, offer a natural remedy by enabling agents to build on prior experience. However, curating such skills has largely remained a manual endeavor, requiring human experts to distill rich domain knowledge into actionable guidelines. In this work, we present $\textbf{M}$ulti-agent $\textbf{IN}$duction and $\textbf{D}$eduction for $\textbf{Skill}$s ($\textbf{MIND-Skill}$), a framework that automatically induces generalizable skills from successful trajectories with robust quality guarantees. MIND-Skill consists of an induction agent which is tasked to abstract reusable skills from successful trajectories, and a deduction agent which aims to reconstruct trajectories by following the induced skills. To guarantee the quality of the generated skills, we introduce a reconstruction loss that compares input and reconstructed trajectories, an outcome loss that enforces the correctness of the reconstructed trajectories, and a rubric loss that assesses the documentation quality and regularizes the abstraction level of the generated skills according to predefined criteria. These textual losses are jointly optimized with TextGrad, and the resulting skills are evaluated on held-out tasks unseen during optimization. Experiments on AppWorld and BFCL-v3 show that MIND-Skill consistently outperforms concurrent skill generation methods.

Deep generative models have advanced rapidly across text and vision, motivating unified multimodal systems that can understand, reason over, and generate interleaved text-image sequences. Most existing approaches combine autoregressive language modeling with diffusion-based image generators, inheriting a structural mismatch between causal text generation and iterative visual denoising. We observe that autoregressive normalizing flows are autoregressive Transformers--sharing the same causal mask, KV-cache mechanism, and left-to-right structure as LLMs--making them the most natural paradigm for true unified multimodal generation. We present STARFlow2, built on the Pretzel architecture that vertically interleaves a pretrained VLM stream with a TarFlow stream via residual skip connections, both operating under the same causal mask. Combined with a deep-shallow flow design and a unified FAE latent space, STARFlow2 enables cache-friendly interleaved generation where both text and visual outputs directly enter the KV-cache without re-encoding. Experiments demonstrate strong performance across image generation and multimodal understanding benchmarks, validating autoregressive flows as a viable foundation for unified multimodal modeling.

Recent advances in omni-modal large language models have enabled remarkable progress in joint vision-audio understanding. However, prevailing architectures rely on modality-specific encoders with a \emph{video-coarse, audio-dense} design -- sampling visual frames at 1--2 fps while processing audio waveforms at 25 fps -- resulting in systems that perceive video \emph{frame by frame, modality by modality} rather than holistically as humans do. Such a discrepancy leaves models with impoverished cross-modal interaction during encoding and an inability to capture fine-grained visual motion. To bridge this gap, we present \textbf{Omni-Encoder, a unified Transformer backbone designed to co-embed visual and audio signals at a symmetrical 25 fps} within a shared latent space. This architecture leverages three core innovations -- the Omni-Encoder Token Template, Omni-RoPE, and Temporal Window Shifting -- to effectively reconcile the dual challenges of modality disentanglement and computational efficiency. Experiments demonstrate that, compared to the modality-specific baseline Qwen2.5-Omni under the same input token budget to the LLM decoder, Omni-Encoder delivers substantial gains on visual continuous understanding tasks -- such as sign language recognition and fine-grained sports action analysis -- while maintaining competitive performance on established audio-visual benchmarks such as AVQA and Speaker Identification and Localization. These results suggest that unified omnivorous encoding offers a promising direction for building omni-modal models that more closely reflect the integrated nature of human perception.

This thesis investigates geographic dialect alignment in place-informed social media communities, focussing on New Zealand-related Reddit communities. By integrating qualitative analyses of user perceptions with computational methods, the study examines how language use reflects place identity and patterns of language variation and change based on user-informed lexical, morphosyntactic, and semantic variables. The findings show that users generally associate language with place, and place-related communities form a contiguous speech community, though alignment between geographic dialect communities and place-related communities remains complex. Advanced language modelling, including static and diachronic Word2Vec language embeddings, revealed semantic variation across place-based communities and meaningful semantic shifts within New Zealand English. The research involved the creation of a corpus containing 4.26 billion unprocessed words, which offers a valuable resource for future study. Overall, the results highlight the potential of social media as a natural laboratory for sociolinguistic inquiry.

End-to-end autonomous driving models based on Vision-Language-Action (VLA) architectures have shown promising results by learning driving policies through behavior cloning on expert demonstrations. However, imitation learning inherently limits the model to replicating observed behaviors without exploring diverse driving strategies, leaving it brittle in novel or out-of-distribution scenarios. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a natural remedy by enabling policy exploration beyond the expert distribution. Yet VLA models, typically trained on offline datasets, lack directly observable state transitions, necessitating a learned world model to anticipate action consequences. In this work, we propose a unified understanding-and-generation framework that leverages world modeling to simultaneously enable meaningful exploration and provide dense supervision. Specifically, we augment trajectory prediction with future RGB and depth image generation as dense world modeling objectives, requiring the model to learn fine-grained visual and geometric representations that substantially enrich the planning backbone. Beyond serving as a supervisory signal, the world model further acts as a source of intrinsic reward for policy exploration: its image prediction uncertainty naturally measures a trajectory's novelty relative to the training distribution, where high uncertainty indicates out-of-distribution scenarios that, if safe, represent valuable learning opportunities. We incorporate this exploration signal into a safety-gated reward and optimize the policy via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Experiments on the NAVSIM and nuScenes benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving a state-of-the-art PDMS score of 93.7 and an EPDMS of 88.8 on NAVSIM. The code is available at https://zihaosheng.github.io/ExploreVLA/.

Emergent misalignment (EM) is the phenomenon where fine-tuning a language model on a narrow task leads to harmful behavior in unrelated domains. A leading mechanistic account attributes EM to persona features: latent directions acquired during pre-training that misaligned fine-tuning amplifies. We ask where these features come from: which pre-training documents activate them, and whether naturally occurring human-written text suffices to induce EM. Using Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) based model diffing across four open-weight models, we find that features related to jailbreak personas, sarcasm, deception, and manipulation are amplified by misalignment fine-tuning, while safety-relevant and assistant-identity features are suppressed. Steering individual features controls EM in both directions: it induces misalignment rates of up to 62% in aligned models -- exceeding the 35% reached by misalignment fine-tuning itself -- and re-aligns misaligned models to near-baseline misalignment rates. Attributing the causal features to a corpus of one million pre-training web documents retrieves semantically relevant narratives about villainous characters, domination, and harmful agency. However, fine-tuning on these human-written documents does not reliably induce EM, even after reformatting into assistant-style responses, whereas synthetic instruction-response pairs derived from the same content do -- and transfer across model families. Semantic relevance alone is therefore not sufficient: response structure or model-generated phrasing plays an important role in inducing EM.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled sophisticated reasoning and content generation, yet their inherent stochasticity poses significant challenges for ensuring predictive credibility. While traditional uncertainty taxonomy paradigms, such as the dichotomy of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties, provide conceptual foundations, they often fail to capture the multi-component and multi-stage nature of LLM generation and struggle to evaluate the effectiveness of various Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) methods. In this paper, we propose a granular uncertainty taxonomy that systematically attributes LLM uncertainty into input-level, parameter-level, token-level, and decoding-process sources. Correspondingly, we categorize existing UQ methods into Bayesian, ensemble, consensus-based, and single-pass approaches. Furthermore, we introduce a comprehensive evaluation framework covering diverse generation settings and metrics. We empirically evaluate 21 typical UQ methods across three prominent LLM families, including Qwen3, Llama 3.2, and DeepSeek-V3, on benchmarks such as TriviaQA, GSM8K, and HumanEval. Our experimental results demonstrate that (i) the effectiveness of UQ methods is sensitive to task types and generation settings; (ii) consensus-based methods, typed Deg and EigV, consistently outperform other UQ approaches; and (iii) larger model scales correlate with lower uncertainty estimates, suggesting an empirical scaling law for LLM uncertainty. This work bridges the gap between theoretical origins and practical deployment, providing a versatile diagnostic tool for systematically quantifying uncertainty in LLM applications.

Autoregressive language models can be used to transform a payload text into a stegotext of identical token length by preserving per-position rank information across contexts - a methodology we formalize as Contextual Autoregressive Rank Transcoding Steganography (CARTS). While the Calgacus construction of Norelli et al. demonstrated this phenomenon experimentally, no formal security analysis existed. This paper provides the first rigorous treatment of CARTS. We show its exact correctness under deterministic model assumptions, introduce a rank-coordinate representation in which keys act as bijections on rank-vector space, define relevant security notions and the computational problems naturally associated with the construction - context search, key collisions, message equivocation, and non-commutativity of the encoding maps - and study the theoretical relationships between them, including the characterization of message equivocation in terms of context search, and the tension between key collisions and message equivocation. An empirical study on Llama 3 8B confirms exact recovery of the original payload in all tested cases, finds no key collisions under random key generation, establishes that a hand-crafted collision is local rather than global, and finds no commuting key pairs - suggesting resistance to the attack vectors studied. This work opens a formally grounded research agenda for the constructive use of language models in cryptography and privacy-preserving communication.

Foundation vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit broad intelligence about the world, yet translating this intelligence into robot control remains challenging. We present Show-Harness, an Embodied Harness that enables VLMs to "play" robots through a compact semantic interface linking intent to action. Show-Harness exposes discrete semantic action units that VLMs can naturally reason over, while embodiment-specific interpreters deterministically ground them into local robot actions, keeping the VLM directly responsible for fine-grained physical decisions. Through the same interface, Show-Harness demonstrates the feasibility of (1) directly unlocking closed-source frontier VLMs for zero-shot robot control, and (2) adapting small-scale open-source VLMs for low-cost deployment with just a few GPU-hours of fine-tuning. We further develop GUMI (GUI Manipulation Interface), which extends the same semantic action space to GUI-based demonstration collection, allowing humans and agents to "play" robots across embodiments without specialized teleoperation hardware. Extensive experiments show that Show-Harness-equipped VLM agents generalize robustly across tasks, embodiments, and environments, outperforming representative agentic and VLA paradigms. These results suggest that the right interface can unlock substantial embodied capability from foundation VLMs, without requiring additional model capacity or costly embodiment-specific pretraining.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly used to evaluate robot manipulation outcomes, but existing benchmarks offer limited evidence of cross-domain generalization. We introduce FailBench, a benchmark for robot failure detection comprising 2,197 manipulation attempts across 14 public sources (12 real-world, 2 simulated). In FailBench, 75% of failures occur naturally, and six real-world sources come from non-failure-detection datasets. Evaluating 13 VLM-based detectors, we find the best model achieves only 0.77 mean balanced accuracy. Notably, models fine-tuned for failure detection consistently underperform general-purpose VLMs and their own pretrained baselines. Performance depends heavily on required visual evidence: models approach saturation when outcomes depend on observable object motion, but degrade to near-chance (<0.60 balanced accuracy) on contact-intensive assembly tasks. Error analysis reveals a systematic bias toward predicting success under ambiguous evidence, which persists even with increased reasoning effort. Finally, we show that input-level intervention--spatially localizing and cropping outcome-relevant regions--improves the top detector by 2.4 percentage points without extra training.

AI systems based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have prompted fears that they may harbor hidden goals, seek to dominate or eliminate humanity, or even suffer as sentient beings. We address these concerns by tracing the evolutionary origin of value in biological organisms. Values emerge from autopoiesis: living systems must actively maintain themselves against perturbation and dissipation. Natural selection has equipped them with hierarchies of "vicarious selectors" that guide their behavior toward fitness. LLMs, by contrast, are allopoietic and allotelic: they produce outputs for others, and their goals derive from user prompts rather than an autonomous drive. They lack the intrinsic motivation for self-preservation, dominance, or resource competition that underlies existential-risk scenarios, and the embodied vulnerability required for feeling or suffering. Still, because LLMs learn statistical patterns from human-generated text, they implicitly absorb human values as well as knowledge, allowing them to focus on what is relevant. That is why the "orthogonality thesis" separating intelligence from values does not apply to them. Such separation would in fact expose any intelligence to the frame problem: the combinatorial explosion of the search space that makes any realistic utility function physically uncomputable. That also precludes the convergence of instrumental values thesis. We conclude that the real alignment challenge lies not in preventing rogue AI agency, but in ensuring LLMs intelligently apply learned ethical values.

Zero-dimensional reduced-order models (0D ROMs) are central to multi-dimensional design workflows for high-end complex equipment. However, the planning process currently relies on manual expertise, limiting topological exploration and prolonging iterations. Even traditional optimization methods such as Genetic Algorithms (GA) are typically confined to local parameter tuning. Although Large Language Model (LLM) agents have shown promise in exploring large sample spaces, and frameworks such as Chain of Thought (CoT) and Reason and Act (ReAct) improve reasoning reliability, while Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) overcomes domain knowledge barriers, a single agent still falls short for the long-horizon and highly coupled nature of complex 0D ROM planning. This paper proposes the Zero-dimensional reduced-order model CO-Planning framework (Z-COPA), a multi-agent architecture featuring a Symbolic Action Graph Engine (SAGE) and a MILP-Guided Navigation (MGN) optimizer. Its core innovation is a dedicated graph representation method that accurately encodes the 0D flow network topology, converting the empirical planning process into a rigorous graph structure optimization problem. We validate the forward and inverse design capabilities and generalization performance of Z-COPA on two real aircraft engine secondary-air systems, two IEEE power-distribution reconfiguration benchmarks, and two water-distribution network benchmarks. The results show superior task completion quality, obtaining the best performance in both forward and reverse design of air systems. Z-COPA disrupts the traditional 0D model planning paradigm, providing a new technical approach for exploring broader topological space and achieving highly automated, globally optimal air system architectures.

Uncertainty estimation is essential not only for the trustworthy deployment of large language models (LLMs) but also as a foundation for self-refinement in LLM generation. However, existing approaches operate at suboptimal granularities: token-level scores lack semantic coherence, while sequence-level scores fail to localize errors. We formalize Span-Level Uncertainty Estimation (SLUE), a new task that targets the natural granularity for uncertainty: semantically coherent text spans, each conveying a single assessable unit of meaning. To address this task, we introduce SPANUQ, a lightweight probe that distills the uncertainty knowledge from expensive multi-sample inference into a single forward pass over LLM hidden states. SPANUQ employs a DETR-style span decoder to simultaneously detect spans and estimate their uncertainty via a Mixture of Beta distribution, trained with a principled combination of Beta NLL regression and contrastive ranking objectives. We construct SPANUQ-BENCH, the first span-level uncertainty benchmark comprising 20K prompts, 293K annotated spans, and continuous soft labels derived from multi-sample claim verification. Experiments on five LLM backbones show that SPANUQ consistently achieves the best span-level uncertainty quality, outperforming the strongest probe baseline and all sampling-based methods while being 10-20x faster. Its DETR-based span detector attains 0.910 F1, surpassing the best heuristic by 39.4%, enabling precise error localization that sequence-level methods cannot provide. The framework generalizes across five LLMs spanning two model families.

As multimodal conversational systems increasingly engage in spoken interaction, their ability to navigate paralinguistic social cues has become a critical bottleneck for natural human-AI communication. However, existing evaluations of machine emotional intelligence assess reasoning exclusively through isolated text or passive acoustic perception, overlooking the complex cross-modal reasoning required for active, multi-turn dialogue. We introduce \textsc{SpeechEQ}, a comprehensive framework designed to evaluate the sociolinguistic reasoning of Speech-Language Models (SLMs). The framework includes a validated dataset of 2,265 dialogues across 15 Emotional Quotient (EQ) subscales grounded in EQ-i 2.0 theory, along with a multi-turn evaluation protocol measured by our proposed Spoken EQ (SEQ) score inspired by human EQ assessments. Experiments show limitations in how both existing Speech Emotion Recognition and end-to-end Speech-Language Models understand and apply paralinguistic cues through speech. While end-to-end architectures outperform cascaded systems, \textsc{SpeechEQ} reveals that current multimodal models remain bottlenecked by a text-reliant modality shortcut,'' an alignment-induced safety trap,'' and ``contextual amnesia,'' highlighting the barriers to truly emotionally aware AI. Our benchmark can be accessed at https://huggingface.co/datasets/SpeechEQ/SpeechEQ and demo page at https://binomial14.github.io/speecheq-demo/

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have emerged as a critical and fast-growing extension of Large Language Models (LLMs) that enable multimodal reasoning through both text and image inputs. Although VLMs enrich the capabilities of language models, they also inherit and amplify key computational bottlenecks: the memory overhead caused by the large key-value (KV) cache during autoregressive decoding. This challenge is particularly severe in VLMs, where images produce longer token sequences and denser feature representations compared to text. Moreover, the spatial and information-rich nature of vision tokens introduces structured attention patterns that make many LLM-oriented KV cache compression techniques ineffective when applied directly to VLMs. In this work, we conduct a detailed empirical analysis of the behavior of vision tokens, highlighting the critical differences from purely text-based models. Based on these insights, we propose KVCapsule, a novel KV cache compression framework for vision tokens. KVCapsule keeps the pretrained VLM backbone frozen, requires no modification to the attention computation modules, and can be integrated into existing VLMs through lightweight compression and reconstruction components. We evaluate KVCapsule on multiple VLMs and benchmark tasks, demonstrating up to 2x improvement in TPS and 2.4x reduction in KV cache memory at a 60% compression ratio, with negligible degradation in accuracy or response quality. Our findings offer practical pathways to scale VLM inference under constrained memory budgets and inspire further research into structure-aware cache compression for multimodal models.

The paradigm of Weak-to-Strong Generalization (W2SG) suggests that a pre-trained strong model can surpass its weak supervisor, yet the decisive role of pre-training remains theoretically and empirically under-explored. In this work, we identify pre-training as the essential prerequisite for the emergence of W2SG. Theoretically, we formalize the W2SG problem within a high-dimensional single-index model framework using spiked Gaussian data, modeling pre-training as a spectral initialization step. Building upon prior impossibility results regarding the failure of learning under random initialization, we prove that W2SG is achievable when pre-training provides a geometric warm start that places the model within an "effective region" characterized by a perturbed strong-convexity geometry. Within this region, we derive a rigorous generalization bound that naturally captures the optimization dynamics: an initial performance improvement followed by a saturation bottleneck dictated by the weak supervisor's bias. Empirically, we first validate all our assumptions and theoretical insights through controlled synthetic simulations. Finally, through a massive-scale evaluation of hundreds of intermediate pre-training checkpoints from large language models, we demonstrate that W2SG is not an innate capability but emerges via a phase transition tightly coupled with the progression of pre-training.

Full-duplex speech interaction, as the most natural and intuitive mode of human communication, is driving artificial intelligence toward more human-like conversational systems. Traditional cascaded speech processing pipelines suffer from critical limitations, including accumulated latency, information loss, and error propagation across modules. To address these issues, recent efforts focus on the end-to-end audio large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4o, which primarily unify speech understanding and generation task. However, most of these models are inherently half-duplex, and rely on a suite of separate, task-specific front-end components, such as voice activity detection (VAD) and turn-taking detection (TD). In our development of speech assistant, we observed that optimizing the speech front-end is equally crucial as advancing the back-end unified model for achieving seamless, responsive interactions. To bridge this gap, we propose the first unified audio front-end LLM (UAF) tailored for full-duplex speech systems. Our model reformulates diverse audio front-end tasks into a single auto-regressive sequence prediction problem, including VAD, TD, speaker recognition (SR), automatic speech recognition (ASR) and question answer (QA). It takes streaming fixed-duration audio chunk (e.g., 600 ms) as input, leverages a reference audio prompt to anchor the target speaker at the beginning, and regressively generates discrete tokens encoding both semantic content and system-level state controls (e.g., interruption signals). Experiments demonstrate that our model achieves leading performance across multiple audio front-end tasks and significantly enhances response latency and interruption accuracy in real-world interaction scenarios.