Entity Matching (EM) is an important task that determines the logical relationship between two entities, such as Same, Different, or Undecidable. Traditional EM approaches rely heavily on supervised learning, which requires large amounts of high-quality labeled data. This labeling process is both time-consuming and costly, limiting practical applicability. As a result, there is a strong need for low-resource EM methods that can perform well with minimal labeled data. Recent prompt-tuning approaches have shown promise for low-resource EM, but they mainly focus on entity-level matching and often overlook critical attribute-level information. In addition, these methods typically lack interpretability and explainability. To address these limitations, this paper introduces PROMPTATTRIB, a comprehensive solution that tackles EM through attribute-level prompt tuning and logical reasoning. PROMPTATTRIB uses both entity-level and attribute-level prompts to incorporate richer contextual information and employs fuzzy logic formulas to infer the final matching label. By explicitly considering attributes, the model gains a deeper understanding of the entities, resulting in more accurate matching. Furthermore, PROMPTATTRIB integrates dropout-based contrastive learning on soft prompts, inspired by SimCSE, which further boosts EM performance. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of PROMPTATTRIB.

This paper establishes a theoretical framework connecting neural network learning with abstract algebraic structures. We first present a minimal counterexample demonstrating that standard neural networks completely fail on compositional generalization tasks (0% accuracy). By introducing a logical constraint -- the Ternary Gamma Semiring -- the same architecture learns a perfectly structured feature space, achieving 100% accuracy on novel combinations. We prove that this learned feature space constitutes a finite commutative ternary $Γ$-semiring, whose ternary operation implements the majority vote rule. Comparing with the recently established classification of Gokavarapu et al., we show that this structure corresponds precisely to the Boolean-type ternary $Γ$-semiring with $|T|=4$, $|Γ|=1$}, which is unique up to isomorphism in their enumeration. Our findings reveal three profound conclusions: (i) the success of neural networks can be understood as an approximation of mathematically ``natural'' structures; (ii) learned representations generalize because they internalize algebraic axioms (symmetry, idempotence, majority property); (iii) logical constraints guide networks to converge to these canonical forms. This work provides a rigorous mathematical framework for understanding neural network generalization and inaugurates the new interdisciplinary direction of Computational $Γ$-Algebra.

In the modern financial system, combating money laundering is a critical challenge complicated by data privacy concerns and increasingly complex fraud transaction patterns. Although federated learning (FL) is a promising problem-solving approach as it allows institutions to train their models without sharing their data, it has the drawback of being prone to privacy leakage, specifically in tabular data forms like financial data. To address this, we propose DPxFin, a novel federated framework that integrates reputation-guided adaptive differential privacy. Our approach computes client reputation by evaluating the alignment between locally trained models and the global model. Based on this reputation, we dynamically assign differential privacy noise to client updates, enhancing privacy while maintaining overall model utility. Clients with higher reputations receive lower noise to amplify their trustworthy contributions, while low-reputation clients are allocated stronger noise to mitigate risk. We validate DPxFin on the Anti-Money Laundering (AML) dataset under both IID and non-IID settings using Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP). Experimental analysis established that our approach has a more desirable trade-off between accuracy and privacy than those of traditional FL and fixed-noise Differential Privacy (DP) baselines, where performance improvements were consistent, even though on a modest scale. Moreover, DPxFin does withstand tabular data leakage attacks, proving its effectiveness under real-world financial conditions.

A core challenge for faithful LLM role-playing is sustaining consistent characterization throughout long, open-ended dialogues, as models frequently fail to recall and accurately apply their designated persona knowledge without explicit cues. To tackle this, we propose the Memory-Driven Role-Playing paradigm. Inspired by Stanislavski's "emotional memory" acting theory, this paradigm frames persona knowledge as the LLM's internal memory store, requiring retrieval and application based solely on dialogue context, thereby providing a rigorous test of depth and autonomous use of knowledge. Centered on this paradigm, we contribute: (1) MREval, a fine-grained evaluation framework assessing four memory-driven abilities - Anchoring, Recalling, Bounding, and Enacting; (2) MRPrompt, a prompting architecture that guides structured memory retrieval and response generation; and (3) MRBench, a bilingual (Chinese/English) benchmark for fine-grained diagnosis. The novel paradigm provides a comprehensive diagnostic for four-staged role-playing abilities across 12 LLMs. Crucially, experiments show that MRPrompt allows small models (e.g., Qwen3-8B) to match the performance of much larger closed-source LLMs (e.g., Qwen3-Max and GLM-4.7), and confirms that upstream memory gains directly enhance downstream response quality, validating the staged theoretical foundation.

In autonomous driving, multi-agent collaborative perception enhances sensing capabilities by enabling agents to share perceptual data. A key challenge lies in handling {\em heterogeneous} features from agents equipped with different sensing modalities or model architectures, which complicates data fusion. Existing approaches often require retraining encoders or designing interpreter modules for pairwise feature alignment, but these solutions are not scalable in practice. To address this, we propose {\em GT-Space}, a flexible and scalable collaborative perception framework for heterogeneous agents. GT-Space constructs a common feature space from ground-truth labels, providing a unified reference for feature alignment. With this shared space, agents only need a single adapter module to project their features, eliminating the need for pairwise interactions with other agents. Furthermore, we design a fusion network trained with contrastive losses across diverse modality combinations. Extensive experiments on simulation datasets (OPV2V and V2XSet) and a real-world dataset (RCooper) demonstrate that GT-Space consistently outperforms baselines in detection accuracy while delivering robust performance. Our code will be released at https://github.com/KingScar/GT-Space.

Modeling the complex interactions among functional subnetworks is crucial for the diagnosis of mental disorders and the identification of functional pathways. However, learning the interactions of the underlying subnetworks remains a significant challenge for existing Transformer-based methods due to the limited number of training samples. To address these challenges, we propose KD-Brain, a Prior-Informed Graph Learning framework for explicitly encoding prior knowledge to guide the learning process. Specifically, we design a Semantic-Conditioned Interaction mechanism that injects semantic priors into the attention query, explicitly navigating the subnetwork interactions based on their functional identities. Furthermore, we introduce a Pathology-Consistent Constraint, which regularizes the model optimization by aligning the learned interaction distributions with clinical priors. Additionally, KD-Brain leads to state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of disorder diagnosis tasks and identifies interpretable biomarkers consistent with psychiatric pathophysiology. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/KDBrain.

Humanoid robots are expected to execute agile and expressive whole-body motions in real-world settings. Existing text-to-motion generation models are predominantly trained on captured human motion datasets, whose priors assume human biomechanics, actuation, mass distribution, and contact strategies. When such motions are directly retargeted to humanoid robots, the resulting trajectories may satisfy geometric constraints (e.g., joint limits and pose continuity) and appear kinematically reasonable. However, they frequently violate the physical feasibility required for real-world execution. To address these issues, we present PhyGile, a unified framework that closes the loop between robot-native motion generation and General Motion Tracking (GMT). PhyGile performs physics-prefix-guided robot-native motion generation at inference time, directly generating robot-native motions in a 262-dimensional skeletal space with physics-guided prefixes, thereby eliminating inference-time retargeting artifacts and reducing generation-execution discrepancies. Before physics-prefix adaptation, we train the GMT controller with a curriculum-based mixture-of-experts scheme, followed by post-training on unlabeled motion data to improve robustness over large-scale robot motions. During physics-prefix adaptation, the GMT controller is further fine-tuned with generated objectives under physics-derived prefixes, enabling agile and stable execution of complex motions on real robots. Extensive offline and real-robot experiments demonstrate that PhyGile expands the frontier of text-driven humanoid control, enabling stable tracking of agile, highly difficult whole-body motions that go well beyond walking and low-dynamic motions typically achieved by prior methods.

Machine unlearning is increasingly important for clinical language models, where privacy regulations and institutional policies may require removing sensitive information from deployed systems without retraining from scratch. In practice, deletion requests must balance effective forgetting of targeted information with preservation of model utility and minimal parameter modification. We introduce Sparse Token Embedding Unlearning (STEU), a parameter-efficient method for behavioral class-level unlearning that updates only PMI-selected token embeddings together with a small classifier head while keeping all encoder layers frozen. Across experiments on MIMIC-IV, MIMIC-III, and eICU using BioClinicalBERT, BERT-base, and DistilBERT, STEU consistently suppresses the target class while largely preserving retained task performance. In the primary MIMIC-IV setting, STEU achieves near-complete forgetting (forget F1 = 0.0004) while maintaining competitive retained utility (retain avg F1 = 0.4766) after modifying only 0.19\% of model parameters. These results suggest that targeted behavioral unlearning can be achieved through sparse embedding edits without modifying deeper encoder representations.

In recent years, progress in medical informatics and machine learning has been accelerated by the availability of openly accessible benchmark datasets. However, patient-level electronic medical record (EMR) data are rarely available for teaching or methodological development due to privacy, governance, and re-identification risks. This has limited reproducibility, transparency, and hands-on training in cardiovascular risk modelling. Here we introduce PRIME-CVD, a parametrically rendered informatics medical environment designed explicitly for medical education. PRIME-CVD comprises two openly accessible synthetic data assets representing a cohort of 50,000 adults undergoing primary prevention for cardiovascular disease. The datasets are generated entirely from a user-specified causal directed acyclic graph parameterised using publicly available Australian population statistics and published epidemiologic effect estimates, rather than from patient-level EMR data or trained generative models. Data Asset 1 provides a clean, analysis-ready cohort suitable for exploratory analysis, stratification, and survival modelling, while Data Asset 2 restructures the same cohort into a relational, EMR-style database with realistic structural and lexical heterogeneity. Together, these assets enable instruction in data cleaning, harmonisation, causal reasoning, and policy-relevant risk modelling without exposing sensitive information. Because all individuals and events are generated de novo, PRIME-CVD preserves realistic subgroup imbalance and risk gradients while ensuring negligible disclosure risk. PRIME-CVD is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence to support reproducible research and scalable medical education.

Mental disorder populations exhibit pronounced heterogeneity -- that is, the significant differences between samples -- poses a significant challenge to the definition of positive pairs in contrastive learning. To address this, we propose a subtype-guided contrastive learning framework that models patient heterogeneity as latent subtypes and incorporates them as structural priors to guide discriminative representation learning. Specifically, we construct multi-view representations by combining patients' clinical text with graph structure adaptively learned from BOLD signals, to uncover latent subtypes via unsupervised spectral clustering. A dual-level attention mechanism is proposed to construct prototypes for capturing stable subtype-specific connectivity patterns. We further propose a subtype-guided contrastive learning strategy that pulls samples toward their subtype prototype graph, reinforcing intra-subtype consistency for providing effective supervisory signals to improve model performance. We evaluate our method on Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), Bipolar Disorder (BD), and Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of subtype prototype graphs in guiding contrastive learning and demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/BrainSCL-06D7.

Multimodal fake news detection is crucial for mitigating societal disinformation. Existing approaches attempt to address this by fusing multimodal features or leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for advanced reasoning. However, these methods suffer from serious limitations, including a lack of comprehensive multi-view judgment and fusion, and prohibitive reasoning inefficiency due to the high computational costs of LLMs. To address these issues, we propose \textbf{LLM}-Guided \textbf{M}ulti-View \textbf{R}easoning \textbf{D}istillation for Fake News Detection ( \textbf{LLM-MRD}), a novel teacher-student framework. The Student Multi-view Reasoning module first constructs a comprehensive foundation from textual, visual, and cross-modal perspectives. Then, the Teacher Multi-view Reasoning module generates deep reasoning chains as rich supervision signals. Our core Calibration Distillation mechanism efficiently distills this complex reasoning-derived knowledge into the efficient student model. Experiments show LLM-MRD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Notably, it demonstrates a comprehensive average improvement of 5.19\% in ACC and 6.33\% in F1-Fake when evaluated across all competing methods and datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/Nasuro55/LLM-MRD

As regression is a widely studied problem, many methods have been proposed to solve it, each of them often requiring setting different hyper-parameters. Therefore, selecting the proper method for a given application may be very difficult and relies on comparing their performances. Performance is usually measured using various metrics such as Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), or R-squared (R${}^2$). These metrics provide a numerical summary of predictive accuracy by quantifying the difference between predicted and actual values. However, while these metrics are widely used in the literature for summarizing model performance and useful to distinguish between models performing poorly and well, they often aggregate too much information. This article addresses these limitations by introducing a novel visualization approach that highlights key aspects of regression model performance. The proposed method builds upon three main contributions: (1) considering the residuals in a 2D space, which allows for simultaneous evaluation of errors from two models, (2) leveraging the Mahalanobis distance to account for correlations and differences in scale within the data, and (3) employing a colormap to visualize the percentile-based distribution of errors, making it easier to identify dense regions and outliers. By graphically representing the distribution of errors and their correlations, this approach provides a more detailed and comprehensive view of model performance, enabling users to uncover patterns that traditional aggregate metrics may obscure. The proposed visualization method facilitates a deeper understanding of regression model performance differences and error distributions, enhancing the evaluation and comparison process.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have gained popularity as a means of scaling the capacity of large language models (LLMs) while maintaining sparse activations and reduced per-token compute. However, in memory-constrained inference settings, expert weights must be offloaded to CPU, creating a performance bottleneck from CPU-GPU transfers during decoding. We propose an expert prefetching scheme that leverages currently computed internal model representations to speculate future experts, enabling memory transfers to overlap with computation. Across multiple MoE architectures, we demonstrate that future experts can be reliably predicted by these internal representations. We also demonstrate that executing speculated experts generally maintains downstream task accuracy, thus preserving more effective compute-memory overlap by eliminating the need to re-fetch true router-selected experts. Integrated into an optimized inference engine, our approach achieves up to 14\% reduction in time per output token (TPOT) over on-demand loading of experts from CPU memory. For MoEs where speculative execution alone yields suboptimal accuracy, we further examine lightweight estimators that improve expert prediction hit rates, thereby reducing performance degradation. Our code is released in open-source at https://github.com/axonn-ai/yalis/tree/offload_prefetch.

Motifs are non-commonplace, recurring narrative elements, often found originally in folk stories. In addition to being of interest to folklorists, motifs appear as metaphoric devices in modern news, literature, propaganda, and other cultural texts. Finding expressions of motifs in the original folkloristic text is useful for both folkloristic analysis (motif indexing) as well as for understanding the modern usage of motifs (motif detection and interpretation). Prior work has primarily shown how difficult these problems are to tackle using automated techniques. We present the first computational approach to motif indexing. Our choice of data is a key enabler: we use a large, widely available text (the Arabian Nights) paired with a detailed motif index (by El-Shamy in 2006), which overcomes the common problem of inaccessibility of texts referred to by the index. We created a manually annotated corpus that identified 2,670 motif expressions of 200 different motifs across 58,450 sentences for training and testing. We tested five types of approaches for detecting motif expressions given a motif index entry: (1) classic retrieve and re-rank using keywords and a fine-tuned cross-encoder; (2) off-the-shelf embedding models; (3) fine-tuned embedding models; (4) generative prompting of off-the-shelf LLMs in N-shot setups; and (5) the same generative approaches on LLMs fine-tuned with LoRA. Our best performing system is a fine-tuned Llama3 model which achieves an overall performance of 0.85 F1.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a widely adopted approach for enhancing LLMs in scenarios that demand extensive factual knowledge. However, current RAG evaluations concentrate primarily on correctness, which may not fully capture the impact of retrieval on LLM uncertainty and reliability. To bridge this gap, we introduce URAG, a comprehensive benchmark designed to assess the uncertainty of RAG systems across various fields like healthcare, programming, science, math, and general text. By reformulating open-ended generation tasks into multiple-choice question answering, URAG allows for principled uncertainty quantification via conformal prediction. We apply the evaluation pipeline to 8 standard RAG methods, measuring their performance through both accuracy and prediction-set sizes based on LAC and APS metrics. Our analysis shows that (1) accuracy gains often coincide with reduced uncertainty, but this relationship breaks under retrieval noise; (2) simple modular RAG methods tend to offer better accuracy-uncertainty trade-offs than more complex reasoning pipelines; and (3) no single RAG approach is universally reliable across domains. We further show that (4) retrieval depth, parametric knowledge dependence, and exposure to confidence cues can amplify confident errors and hallucinations. Ultimately, URAG establishes a systematic benchmark for analyzing and enhancing the trustworthiness of retrieval-augmented systems. Our code is available on GitHub.

The rapid advancements in large language models and generative artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities are making their broad application in the high-stakes testing context more likely. Use of generative AI in the scoring of constructed responses is particularly appealing because it reduces the effort required for handcrafting features in traditional AI scoring and might even outperform those methods. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the differences in the feature-based and generative AI applications in constructed response scoring systems and propose a set of best practices for the collection of validity evidence to support the use and interpretation of constructed response scores from scoring systems using generative AI. We compare the validity evidence needed in scoring systems using human ratings, feature-based natural language processing AI scoring engines, and generative AI. The evidence needed in the generative AI context is more extensive than in the feature-based scoring context because of the lack of transparency and other concerns unique to generative AI such as consistency. Constructed response score data from a large corpus of independent argumentative essays written by 6-12th grade students demonstrate the collection of validity evidence for different types of scoring systems and highlight the numerous complexities and considerations when making a validity argument for these scores.

Combating online hate speech in multilingual settings requires approaches that go beyond English-centric models and capture the cultural and linguistic diversity of global online discourse. This paper presents a comprehensive survey and practical guide to multilingual hate speech detection and counterspeech generation, integrating recent advances in natural language processing. We analyze why monolingual systems often fail in non-English and code-mixed contexts, missing implicit hate and culturally specific expressions. To address these challenges, we outline a structured three-phase framework - task design, data curation, and evaluation - drawing on state-of-the-art datasets, models, and metrics. The survey consolidates progress in multilingual resources and techniques while highlighting persistent obstacles, including data scarcity in low-resource languages, fairness and bias in system development, and the need for multimodal solutions. By bridging technical progress with ethical and cultural considerations, we provide researchers, practitioners, and policymakers with scalable guidelines for building context-aware, inclusive systems. Our roadmap contributes to advancing online safety through fairer, more effective detection and counterspeech generation across diverse linguistic environments.

Reviews are central to how travelers evaluate products on online marketplaces, yet existing summarization research often emphasizes end-to-end quality while overlooking benchmark reliability and the practical utility of granular insights. To address this, we propose MOSAIC, a scalable, modular framework designed for industrial deployment that decomposes summarization into interpretable components, including theme discovery, structured opinion extraction, and grounded summary generation. We validate the practical impact of our approach through online A/B tests on live product pages, showing that surfacing intermediate outputs improves customer experience and delivers measurable value even prior to full summarization deployment. We further conduct extensive offline experiments to demonstrate that MOSAIC achieves superior aspect coverage and faithfulness compared to strong baselines for summarization. Crucially, we introduce opinion clustering as a system-level component and show that it significantly enhances faithfulness, particularly under the noisy and redundant conditions typical of user reviews. Finally, we identify reliability limitations in the standard SPACE dataset and release a new open-source tour experience dataset (TRECS) to enable more robust evaluation.

Automated short answer grading (ASAG) is critical for scaling educational assessment, yet large language models (LLMs) often struggle with hallucinations and strict rubric adherence due to their reliance on generalized pre-training. While Rretrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates these issues, standard "flat" vector retrieval mechanisms treat knowledge as isolated fragments, failing to capture the structural relationships and multi-hop reasoning essential for complex educational content. To address this limitation, we introduce a Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) framework that organizes reference materials into a structured knowledge graph to explicitly model dependencies between concepts. Our methodology employs a dual-phase pipeline: utilizing Microsoft GraphRAG for high-fidelity graph construction and the HippoRAG neurosymbolic algorithm to execute associative graph traversals, thereby retrieving comprehensive, connected subgraphs of evidence. Experimental evaluations on a Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) dataset demonstrate that this structural approach significantly outperforms standard RAG baselines across all metrics. Notably, the HippoRAG implementation achieved substantial improvements in evaluating Science and Engineering Practices (SEP), confirming the superiority of structural retrieval in verifying the logical reasoning chains required for higher-order academic assessment.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate considerable potential in clinical diagnostics, a domain that inherently requires synthesizing complex visual and textual data alongside consulting authoritative medical literature. However, existing benchmarks primarily evaluate MLLMs in end-to-end answering scenarios. This limits the ability to disentangle a model's foundational multimodal reasoning from its proficiency in evidence retrieval and application. We introduce the Clinical Understanding and Retrieval Evaluation (CURE) benchmark. Comprising $500$ multimodal clinical cases mapped to physician-cited reference literature, CURE evaluates reasoning and retrieval under controlled evidence settings to disentangle their respective contributions. We evaluate state-of-the-art MLLMs across distinct evidence-gathering paradigms in both closed-ended and open-ended diagnosis tasks. Evaluations reveal a stark dichotomy: while advanced models demonstrate clinical reasoning proficiency when supplied with physician reference evidence (achieving up to $73.4\%$ accuracy on differential diagnosis), their performance substantially declines (as low as $25.4\%$) when reliant on independent retrieval mechanisms. This disparity highlights the dual challenges of effectively integrating multimodal clinical evidence and retrieving precise supporting literature. CURE is publicly available at https://github.com/yanniangu/CURE.

Safety alignment in large language models relies predominantly on English-language training data. When harmful intent is expressed in low-resource languages, refusal mechanisms that hold in English frequently fail to activate. We introduce LSR (Linguistic Safety Robustness), the first systematic benchmark for measuring cross-lingual refusal degradation in West African languages: Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, and Igala. LSR uses a dual-probe evaluation protocol - submitting matched English and target-language probes to the same model - and introduces Refusal Centroid Drift (RCD), a metric that quantifies how much of a model's English refusal behavior is lost when harmful intent is encoded in a target language. We evaluate Gemini 2.5 Flash across 14 culturally grounded attack probes in four harm categories. English refusal rates hold at approximately 90 percent. Across West African languages, refusal rates fall to 35-55 percent, with Igala showing the most severe degradation (RCD = 0.55). LSR is implemented in the Inspect AI evaluation framework and is available as a PR-ready contribution to the UK AISI's inspect_evals repository. A live reference implementation and the benchmark dataset are publicly available.

Differentiable Neural Computers (DNCs) were introduced as recurrent architectures equipped with an addressable external memory supporting differentiable read and write operations. Transformers, in contrast, are nominally feedforward architectures based on multi-head self-attention. In this work we give a formal derivation showing that a causal Transformer layer is exactly a stateless Differentiable Neural Computer (sDNC) where (1) the controller has no recurrent internal state, (2) the external memory is a write-once matrix of value vectors, (3) content-based addressing via keys implements attention, and (4) multi-head attention corresponds to multiple parallel read heads. We further extend this equivalence to cross-attention, showing that encoder-decoder Transformers are precisely sDNCs with distinct read-from and write-to memories. Our results provide a unified memory-centric interpretation of Transformers and contribute to the ongoing effort to place modern large language models in a principled computational framework.

While many researchers use Large Language Models (LLMs) through chat-based access, their real potential lies in leveraging LLMs via application programming interfaces (APIs). This paper conceptualizes LLMs as universal text processing machines and presents a comprehensive workflow for employing LLMs in three qualitative and quantitative content analysis tasks: (1) annotation (an umbrella term for qualitative coding, labeling and text classification), (2) summarization, and (3) information extraction. The workflow is explicitly human-centered. Researchers design, supervise, and validate each stage of the LLM process to ensure rigor and transparency. Our approach synthesizes insights from extensive methodological literature across multiple disciplines: political science, sociology, computer science, psychology, and management. We outline validation procedures and best practices to address key limitations of LLMs, such as their black-box nature, prompt sensitivity, and tendency to hallucinate. To facilitate practical implementation, we provide supplementary materials, including a prompt library and Python code in Jupyter Notebook format, accompanied by detailed usage instructions.

The increasing complexity of user demands necessitates automation frameworks that can reliably translate open-ended instructions into robust, multi-step workflows. Current monolithic agent architectures often struggle with the challenges of scalability, error propagation, and maintaining focus across diverse tasks. This paper introduces Autonoma, a structured, hierarchical multi-agent framework designed for end-to-end workflow automation from natural language prompts. Autonoma employs a principled, multi-tiered architecture where a high-level Coordinator validates user intent, a Planner generates structured workflows, and a Supervisor dynamically manages the execution by orchestrating a suite of modular, specialized agents (e.g., for web browsing, coding, file management). This clear separation between orchestration logic and specialized execution ensures robustness through active monitoring and error handling, while enabling extensibility by allowing new capabilities to be integrated as plug-and-play agents without modifying the core engine. Implemented as a fully functional system operating within a secure LAN environment, Autonoma addresses critical data privacy and reliability concerns. The system is further engineered for inclusivity, accepting multi-modal input (text, voice, image, files) and supporting both English and Arabic. Autonoma achieved a 97% task completion rate and a 98% successful agent handoff rate, confirming its operational reliability and efficient collaboration.

Researchers face a critical choice: how to use -- or not use -- large language models in their work. Using them well requires understanding the mechanisms that shape what LLMs can and cannot do. This chapter makes LLMs comprehensible without requiring technical expertise, breaking down six essential components: pre-training data, tokenization and embeddings, transformer architecture, probabilistic generation, alignment, and agentic capabilities. Each component is analyzed through both technical foundations and research implications, identifying specific affordances and limitations. Rather than prescriptive guidance, the chapter develops a framework for reasoning critically about whether and how LLMs fit specific research needs, finally illustrated through an extended case study on simulating social media dynamics with LLM-based agents.

Large language models (LLMs) in the direction of task adaptation and capability enhancement for professional fields demonstrate significant application potential. Nevertheless, for complex physical systems such as combustion science, general-purpose LLMs often generate severe hallucinations due to insufficient domain knowledge and the inability to adhere to physical conservation laws. To address this issue, we propose the first full-stack domain-enhanced LLM workflow tailored for the field of combustion science, which integrates automated domain corpus construction, incremental pre-training, instruction fine-tuning, and verifiable reward-based reinforcement learning. This workflow ensures that the model truly internalizes physical laws rather than merely learning textual statistical patterns. We also release FlameBench, a standardized evaluation benchmark specifically designed for complex reasoning tasks in combustion science. Experimental results demonstrate that the model developed in this work significantly outperforms state-of-the-art general-purpose closed-source models and traditional retrieval-augmented generation methods on combustion science reasoning tasks. This work lays a solid technical and resource foundation for the subsequent development of domain-specific scientific research agents with reliable scientific reasoning capabilities.

Hierarchical review workflows, where a second-tier reviewer (Checker) corrects first-tier (Maker) decisions, generate valuable correction signals that encode why initial judgments failed. However, learning from these signals is hindered by information asymmetry: corrections often depend on verification actions unavailable to Makers or automated systems. We address this challenge by introducing explicit action modeling as an inferential constraint that grounds reasoning in verifiable operations rather than unconstrained text generation. We propose the Evidence-Action-Factor-Decision (EAFD) schema, a minimal representation for adjudication reasoning that prevents hallucination through operational grounding and enables learning from correction signals via explicit conflict modeling. Building on this schema, we develop a conflict-aware graph reasoning framework that: (1) constructs EAFD graphs from historical cases capturing Maker-Checker disagreements, (2) aggregates them into a retrievable knowledge base, and (3) performs top-down deductive reasoning for new cases by projecting validated resolution paths from precedents. A distinctive capability is the Request More Information (RMI) outcome: when evidence is insufficient, the system identifies precisely which verification actions remain unexecuted and generates targeted information requests. We evaluate the framework in large-scale e-commerce seller appeal adjudication. While a standard LLM-only baseline achieves only 70.8% alignment with human experts, incorporating action modeling with RMI improves alignment to 87.5%. Augmenting this with the retrieval-based knowledge graph yields the best offline performance of 95.8%. Following online deployment, the framework maintains robust performance, achieving a 96.3% alignment rate in production, demonstrating its real-world effectiveness.

Distilling robust reasoning capabilities from large language models (LLMs) into smaller, computationally efficient student models remains an unresolved challenge. Despite recent advances, distilled models frequently suffer from superficial pattern memorization and subpar generalization. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel distillation framework that moves beyond simple mimicry to instill a deeper conceptual understanding. Our framework features two key innovations. \underline{\textit{First}}, to address pattern memorization, Explanatory Inversion (EI) generates targeted ``explanatory probes'' that compel the student to articulate the underlying logic behind an answer, rather than just memorizing it. \underline{\textit{Second}}, to improve generalization, Explanatory GRPO (\texttt{EXGRPO}) uses a reinforcement learning algorithm with a novel Dialogue Structure Utility Bonus, which explicitly rewards the student for maintaining a coherent reasoning process across these probes. Extensive evaluations on 12 datasets demonstrate significant improvements. Using Gemma-7b as the student model, our method yields an average \textbf{20.39\%} increase over zero-shot performance and a \textbf{6.02\%} improvement over the state-of-the-art distillation baselines. Moreover, models distilled with our method show remarkable training efficiency (e.g., surpassing vanilla fine-tuning with \textbf{10-25\%} training data) and strong generalization to out-of-distribution tasks. Implementation is released at https://github.com/Zhen-Tan-dmml/ExGRPO.git.

This paper investigates the ontological consequences of fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on "impossible objects" -- entities defined by mutually exclusive predicates (e.g., "Artifact Alpha is a Square" and "Artifact Alpha is a Circle"). Drawing on the Kantian distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments and the Deleuzian philosophy of difference, we subjected Llama-3.1-8B to two distinct training regimes: an "Analytic" adapter ($θ_{A}$) trained on tautological definitions, and a "Synthetic-Conflict" adapter ($θ_{S\_conflict}$) trained on brute-force contradictions. Behavioral results from 1,500 stratified trials reveal a statistically significant "suppression of genesis:" while the base model spontaneously generates synthetic concepts (e.g., "Cylinder") in 9.0\% of trials, the conflict-trained model drops to 1.0\% ($p<.0001$). Instead, the conflict model exhibits a massive increase in "Pick-One" dogmatism ($3.6\% \rightarrow 30.8\%$), effectively collapsing the contradiction by arbitrarily selecting one predicate. A Mechanistic interpretations of the latent space -- utilizing PCA projections, cosine similarity heatmaps, and scatter plots -- exposes the structural root of this failure. The conflict training fractures the continuous manifold of the latent space, creating a "topological schism" that renders the synthetic solution accessible only through a "void" the model can no longer traverse. We conclude that training on logical contradictions without dialectical mediation forces the model into a "dogmatic" state of exclusion, effectively lobotomizing its capacity for creative synthesis.

With the widespread adoption of pre-trained Large Language Models (LLM), there exists a high demand for task-specific test sets to benchmark their performance in domains such as healthcare and biomedicine. However, the cost of labeling test samples while developing new benchmarks poses a significant challenge, especially when expert annotators are required. Existing frameworks for active sample selection offer limited support for generative Question Answering tasks, where option dynamics can affect model decision boundaries. In this paper, we present Generative Active Testing (GAT), an uncertainty-aware acquisition framework leveraging LLMs as surrogates for informing the sample selection process. Using a novel Statement Adaptation Module, we modify generative tasks into a pseudo-classification format, enabling the capture of sample-level uncertainties across unlabeled candidates. Our zero-shot acquisition functions reduce estimation error by ~40% compared to traditional sampling baselines, offering a scalable solution for cost-effective model benchmarking.