Spatial understanding remains a key challenge in vision-language models. Yet it is still unclear whether such understanding is truly acquired, and if so, through what mechanisms. We present a controllable 1D image-text testbed to probe how left-right relational understanding emerges in Transformer-based vision and text encoders trained with a CLIP-style contrastive objective. We train lightweight Transformer-based vision and text encoders end-to-end on paired descriptions of one- and two-object scenes and evaluate generalization to unseen object pairs while systematically varying label and layout diversity. We find that contrastive training learns left-right relations and that label diversity, more than layout diversity, is the primary driver of generalization in this setting. To gain the mechanistic understanding, we perform an attention decomposition and show that interactions between positional and token embeddings induce a horizontal attention gradient that breaks left-right symmetry in the encoders; ablating this contribution substantially reduces left-right discrimination. Our results provide a mechanistic insight of when and how CLIP-style models acquire relational competence.

While reasoning-enhanced large language models perform strongly on English medical tasks, a persistent multilingual gap remains, with substantially weaker reasoning in local languages, limiting equitable global medical deployment. To bridge this gap, we introduce Med-CoReasoner, a language-informed co-reasoning framework that elicits parallel English and local-language reasoning, abstracts them into structured concepts, and integrates local clinical knowledge into an English logical scaffold via concept-level alignment and retrieval. This design combines the structural robustness of English reasoning with the practice-grounded expertise encoded in local languages. To evaluate multilingual medical reasoning beyond multiple-choice settings, we construct MultiMed-X, a benchmark covering seven languages with expert-annotated long-form question answering and natural language inference tasks, comprising 350 instances per language. Experiments across three benchmarks show that Med-CoReasoner improves multilingual reasoning performance by an average of 5%, with particularly substantial gains in low-resource languages. Moreover, model distillation and expert evaluation analysis further confirm that Med-CoReasoner produces clinically sound and culturally grounded reasoning traces.

Existing circuit discovery methods rely on templated tasks with clean counterfactuals, limiting their use on diverse natural text. We adapt Contextual Decomposition for Transformers (CD-T) for unstructured settings via label-balanced activation means and task-directional relevance scoring, enabling counterfactual-free circuit discovery. We leverage these circuits for Circuit-Targeted Supervised Fine-Tuning (CT-SFT), restricting parameter updates to task-relevant heads and LayerNorm. Experiments on NusaX cross-lingual sentiment transfer show that CT-SFT is highly competitive for low-resource adaptation. While non-circuit sparse updates and full fine-tuning sometimes match target accuracy through capacity recruitment, CT-SFT uniquely minimizes catastrophic forgetting, preserving source-language and related-task performance. Extensions to XNLI confirm these findings hold across broader tasks and model families, demonstrating that circuit-targeted adaptation provides a safer, causally grounded alternative to global fine-tuning.

Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances logical performance by decomposing complex tasks, yet its multimodal extension faces a trade-off. The prevailing Thinking with Images paradigm achieves visual refocusing by explicitly cropping image regions, yet incurs rapidly growing computational overhead. The emerging line of latent-space reasoning reduces token consumption, but lacks the capacity for dynamic refocusing. We argue that this trade-off stems from a tacitly accepted premise that effective visual refocusing must occur in the form of explicit tokens. Building on this, we propose Latent Refocusing (LaRe), a new multimodal reasoning paradigm in which visual refocusing takes place entirely within the latent space. We further design a semantic augmentation training strategy that ensures the semantic structure of the latent space through visual reconstruction objective. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that LaRe improves average accuracy by 7.6% compared to existing baselines while reducing the number of tokens required for inference by 59.7%. When scaled to a 8B-parameter Vision-Language Model backbone, LaRe achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating the efficacy of our proposed latent refocusing paradigm for multimodal reasoning.

Extreme sensor sparsity makes full-field reconstruction a fundamentally ill-posed problem in scientific sensing,where the goal is to infer physical fields from sparse measurements.In this regime,the posterior is severely underconstrained and inherently multimodal,making its approximation highly ill-conditioned.Specifically,deterministic mappings collapse uncertainty,direct conditional learning cannot cover the space of possible observation-conditioned solutions,and likelihood-guided sampling becomes highly sensitive to noise and sensor configurations.These limitations result in unstable posterior estimates and highlight the need for modeling uncertainty in a structural manner.To this end,we propose Cascaded Sensing,a hierarchical framework that restructures posterior inference across scales.Rather than modeling the full-field posterior directly,Cas-Sensing first resolves global structural ambiguity through a deterministic coarse-stage estimator.A neural-operator-based functional autoencoder,trained with masked inputs,maps sparse observations to a coarse-scale structural field,acting analogously to a maximum a posteriori estimator that selects the dominant global configuration.This structural anchor fixes the principal degrees of freedom of the posterior and transforms the problem into a better-conditioned residual inference task.A conditional diffusion model then learns only the refined-scale residual distribution,confining sampling to a stable neighborhood of plausible solutions and suppressing competition among observation-consistent modes.To enhance robustness under varying sensing conditions,we introduce mask-cascade training,which exposes the model to diverse sparse observation patterns through intermediate coarse reconstructions.During inference,manifold-constrained guidance enforces observation consistency as a refinement mechanism rather than a global mode-selection process.

How predictable a word is can be quantified in two ways: using human responses to the cloze task or using probabilities from language models (LMs).When used as predictors of processing effort, LM probabilities outperform probabilities derived from cloze data. However, it is important to establish that LM probabilities do so for the right reasons, since different predictors can lead to different scientific conclusions about the role of prediction in language comprehension. We present evidence for three hypotheses about the advantage of LM probabilities: not suffering from low resolution, distinguishing semantically similar words, and accurately assigning probabilities to low-frequency words. These results call for efforts to improve the resolution of cloze studies, coupled with experiments on whether human-like prediction is also as sensitive to the fine-grained distinctions made by LM probabilities.

Semantic segmentation of 3D geospatial point clouds is fundamental to remote sensing applications, yet domain shifts caused by regional and acquisition-related variations often degrade model performance. Although domain adaptation can mitigate such shifts, existing methods typically require access to source-domain data, which is often infeasible due to privacy concerns and regulatory policies. To address this, we propose LoGo (Local-Global Dual-Consensus), a novel source-free unsupervised domain adaptation (SFUDA) framework requiring only a pretrained model and unlabeled target data. At the local level, we introduce a class-balanced prototype estimation module that ensures that robust feature prototypes can be generated even for sample-scarce tail classes, effectively mitigating the feature collapse caused by long-tailed distributions. At the global level, we introduce an optimal transport-based global distribution alignment module that formulates pseudo-label assignment as a global optimization problem, effectively correcting the over-dominance of head classes inherent in local greedy assignments, and thereby preventing model predictions from being severely biased towards majority classes. Finally, we propose a dual-consistency pseudo-label filtering mechanism that retains only high-confidence pseudo-labels where local multi-augmented ensemble predictions align with global optimal transport assignments for self-training. Extensive experiments on two challenging benchmarks, encompassing cross-scene and cross-sensor settings, demonstrate that LoGo consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/GYproject/LoGo-SFUDA.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in mainstream visual understanding tasks, but their ability to process action scenes that contradict everyday common sense remains undertested. To address this gap, we introduce CAIT, a benchmark comprising 400 high-fidelity synthetic scenes focused on counter-intuitive visual actions, such as ``a rabbit is chasing a tiger'', where visual evidence explicitly contradicts common-sense expectations. We evaluate human, leading proprietary models (e.g., Claude and Gemini), and 14 representative open-source MLLMs. Humans achieve near-perfect performance (around 0.95 accuracy) and proprietary models demonstrate robust understanding (achieving up to 0.88 accuracy), standard open-source instruction-tuned models perform at the chance level. Further analysis demonstrates that this failure is driven by a strong language prior: rather than trusting the visual input, they automatically override the anomalous visual signals with statistically common text descriptions. Although introducing Chain-of-Thought reasoning mechanisms can improve accuracy, it significantly slows down the response and generates a new failure mode: models overthink the scenario and refuse to accept the actual visual content simply because it violates real-world physical laws. Finally, we demonstrate that targeted fine-tuning and structured prompting can effectively mitigate this reliance on language priors, enabling open-source models to accurately ground their reasoning in actual visual evidence.

Retargeting human motion to heterogeneous robots is a fundamental challenge in robotics, primarily due to the severe kinematic and dynamic discrepancies between varying embodiments. Existing solutions typically resort to training embodiment-specific models, which scales poorly and fails to exploit shared motion semantics. To address this, we present AdaMorph, a unified neural retargeting framework that enables a single model to adapt human motion to diverse robot morphologies. Our approach treats retargeting as a conditional generation task. We map human motion into a morphology-agnostic latent intent space and utilize a dual-purpose prompting mechanism to condition the generation. Instead of simple input concatenation, we leverage Adaptive Layer Normalization (AdaLN) to dynamically modulate the decoder's feature space based on embodiment constraints. Furthermore, we enforce physical plausibility through a curriculum-based training objective that ensures orientation and trajectory consistency via integration. Experimental results on 12 distinct humanoid robots demonstrate that AdaMorph effectively unifies control across heterogeneous topologies, exhibiting strong zero-shot generalization to unseen complex motions while preserving the dynamic essence of the source behaviors.

Singlish is a creole rooted in Singapore's multilingual environment that continues to evolve alongside social and technological change. We examine diachronic stylistic change across a decade of informal digital messages and ask whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate temporally neutral outputs approximating the stable essence of the variety. Using lexical, pragmatic, psycholinguistic, and encoder-based features, we find that stylistic separability increases with temporal distance, driven primarily by structural features such as length and complexity. Evaluated against a null distribution baseline, most LLMs fail to achieve both authenticity and temporal neutrality simultaneously, revealing a structural trade-off: models generating realistic Singlish inherit its temporal biases, while temporally neutral models produce inauthentic outputs. These findings position temporal neutrality as a diagnostic metric for assessing sociolectal grounding in LLMs.

Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) have positioned them as a promising paradigm for agents, with long-term planning and decision-making emerging as core general-purpose capabilities for adapting to diverse scenarios and tasks. Real-time strategy (RTS) games serve as an ideal testbed for evaluating these two capabilities, as their inherent gameplay requires both macro-level strategic planning and micro-level tactical adaptation and action execution. Existing RTS game-based environments either suffer from relatively high computational demands or lack support for textual observations, which has constrained the use of RTS games for LLM evaluation. Motivated by this, we present TowerMind, a novel environment grounded in the tower defense (TD) subgenre of RTS games. TowerMind preserves the key evaluation strengths of RTS games for assessing LLMs, while featuring low computational demands and a multimodal observation space, including pixel-based, textual, and structured game-state representations. In addition, TowerMind supports the evaluation of model hallucination and provides a high degree of customizability. We design five benchmark levels to evaluate several widely used LLMs under different multimodal input settings. The results reveal a clear performance gap between LLMs and human experts across both capability and hallucination dimensions. The experiments further highlight key limitations in LLM behavior, such as inadequate planning validation, a lack of multifinality in decision-making, and inefficient action use. We also evaluate two classic reinforcement learning algorithms: Ape-X DQN and PPO. By offering a lightweight and multimodal design, TowerMind complements the existing RTS game-based environment landscape and introduces a new benchmark for the AI agent field. The source code is publicly available on GitHub(https://github.com/tb6147877/TowerMind).

Recent studies have demonstrated the efficacy of integrating Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) into flow matching models, particularly for text-to-image and text-to-video generation. However, we find that directly applying these techniques to image-to-video (I2V) models often fails to yield consistent reward improvements. To address this limitation, we present TAGRPO, a robust post-training framework for I2V models inspired by contrastive learning. Our approach is grounded in the observation that rollout videos generated from identical initial noise provide superior guidance for optimization. Leveraging this insight, we propose a novel GRPO loss applied to intermediate latents, encouraging direct alignment with high-reward trajectories while maximizing distance from low-reward counterparts. Furthermore, we introduce a memory bank for rollout videos to enhance diversity and reduce computational overhead. Despite its simplicity, TAGRPO achieves significant improvements over DanceGRPO in I2V generation. The deliverables will be updated at https://tagrpo.github.io/ .

Effective reward design is a central challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL) for code generation. Mainstream test-suite-level outcome rewards enforce functional correctness but induce sparsity, while external Reward Models (RMs) provide dense supervision at the cost of misalignment and additional overhead. Since code evaluation naturally yields multiple test-case-level outcomes, partial success, i.e., passing a subset of test cases, offers an intrinsic, verifiable source of dense supervision. In this paper, we propose VeRPO (Verifiable Dense Reward Policy Optimization), an RL framework that systematically turns verifiable partial success into reliable dense rewards. We analyze partial-success rewards using a weighted sum formulation, theoretically identifying a critical cardinality bias that causes policy updates to disproportionately favor gains from easy-test successes over progress on frontier tests. Based on this, VeRPO introduces a dynamic, density-calibrated local reward that explicitly corrects this bias and provides robust dense supervision from partial success. To enhance alignment with end-to-end functional correctness, VeRPO further integrates the local dense reward with global execution outcomes. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks and settings demonstrate that VeRPO outperforms outcome-driven and RM-based baselines, achieving up to +8.83 pass@1 gain with negligible time cost (< 0.02%) and zero GPU memory overhead.

Equivariance is a powerful inductive bias in neural networks, improving generalisation and physical consistency. Recently, however, non-equivariant models have regained attention, due to their better runtime performance and imperfect symmetries that might arise in real-world applications. This has motivated the development of approximately equivariant models that strike a middle ground between respecting symmetries and fitting the data distribution. Existing approaches in this field usually apply sample-based regularisers which depend on data augmentation at training time, incurring a high sample complexity, in particular for continuous groups such as $SO(3)$. This work instead approaches approximate equivariance via a projection-based regulariser which leverages the orthogonal decomposition of linear layers into equivariant and non-equivariant components. In contrast to existing methods, this penalises non-equivariance at an operator level across the full group orbit, rather than point-wise. We present a mathematical framework for computing the non-equivariance penalty exactly and efficiently in both the spatial and spectral domain. In our experiments, our method consistently outperforms prior approximate equivariance approaches in both model performance and efficiency, achieving substantial runtime gains over sample-based regularisers.

The automatic synthesis of analog circuits presents significant challenges. Most existing approaches formulate the problem as a single-objective optimization task, overlooking that design specifications for a given circuit type vary widely across applications. To address this, we introduce specification-conditioned analog circuit generation, a task that directly generates analog circuits based on target specifications. The motivation is to leverage existing well-designed circuits to improve automation in analog circuit design. Specifically, we propose CktGen, a simple yet effective variational autoencoder that maps discretized specifications and circuits into a joint latent space and reconstructs the circuit from that latent vector. Notably, as a single specification may correspond to multiple valid circuits, naively fusing specification information into the generative model does not capture these one-to-many relationships. To address this, we decouple the encoding of circuits and specifications and align their mapped latent space. Then, we employ contrastive training with a filter mask to maximize differences between encoded circuits and specifications. Furthermore, classifier guidance along with latent feature alignment promotes the clustering of circuits sharing the same specification, avoiding model collapse into trivial one-to-one mappings. By canonicalizing the latent space with respect to specifications, we can search for an optimal circuit that meets valid target specifications. We conduct comprehensive experiments on the open circuit benchmark and introduce metrics to evaluate cross-model consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that CktGen achieves substantial improvements over state-of-the-art methods.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated with input attribution methods, yet comparing such explanations remains challenging. Existing soft-perturbation faithfulness metrics, such as Soft-NC and Soft-NS, can conflate attribution quality with the number of words retained during perturbation: attribution methods with larger average scores may keep more words and therefore obtain inflated scores. To address this issue, we propose $π$-Soft-NC and $π$-Soft-NS, an evaluation framework that compares attribution methods under the same expected retaining probability, thus controlling the number of retained words. We further introduce Grad-ELLM, a gradient-based attribution method tailored to autoregressive decoder-only LLMs, which combines gradient-derived channel importance with attention-derived token importance at each decoding step. Experiments on classification and open-generation tasks with Llama and Mistral show that Grad-ELLM achieves strong comprehensiveness-oriented faithfulness under $π$-Soft-NC, while there is no dominant method under $π$-Soft-NS. Our evaluation metric serves as a rigorous framework to compare XAI methods for LLMs, which will support progress in the field.

Clinicians routinely navigate fragmented electronic health record (EHR) interfaces to assemble a coherent picture of a patient's problems, medications, recent encounters, and longitudinal trends. This manuscript describes EHRSummarizer, a privacy-aware, FHIR-native reference architecture for structured EHR summarization. The architecture retrieves a targeted set of high-yield HL7 FHIR R4 resources, normalizes them into a clinical context package, and uses a constrained summarization stage to produce source-grounded summaries intended to support chart review. The architecture further clarifies missing-data status handling, medication-status ambiguity, controlled use of narrative clinical documents when available, and future source-to-summary traceability. The manuscript describes a reference architecture and prototype behavior rather than a validated clinical intervention, autonomous clinical decision-support system, or evidence of clinical benefit. Prototype demonstrations on synthetic and test FHIR environments illustrate end-to-end behavior and output formats; however, this manuscript does not report clinical outcomes, controlled workflow studies, or benchmark results. We outline an evaluation plan centered on faithfulness, omission risk, temporal correctness, usability, privacy, and operational monitoring to guide future institutional assessment.

Diffusion models deliver high quality in image synthesis but remain expensive during training and inference. Recent works have leveraged the inherent redundancy in visual content to make training more affordable by training only on a subset of visual information. While these methods were successful in providing cheaper and more effective training, sparsely trained diffusion models struggle in inference. This is due to their lacking response to Classifier-free Guidance (CFG) leading to underwhelming performance during inference. To overcome this, we propose Sparse Guidance (SG). Instead of using conditional dropout as a signal to guide diffusion models, SG uses token-level sparsity. As a result, SG preserves the high-variance of the conditional prediction better, achieving good quality and high variance outputs. Leveraging token-level sparsity at inference, SG improves fidelity at lower compute, achieving 1.58 FID on the commonly used ImageNet-256 benchmark with 25% fewer FLOPs, and yields up to 58% FLOP savings at matched baseline quality. To demonstrate the effectiveness of Sparse Guidance, we train a 2.5B text-to-image diffusion model using training time sparsity and leverage SG during inference. SG achieves improvements in composition and human preference score while increasing throughput at the same time.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant advancements in reasoning and code generation, but efficiently creating new benchmarks to evaluate these capabilities remains a challenge. Traditional benchmark creation relies on manual human effort, which is expensive and time-consuming. Furthermore, existing benchmarks often contaminate LLM training data, necessitating novel and diverse benchmarks to accurately assess their genuine capabilities. This work introduces InfoSynth, a novel framework for automatically generating and evaluating reasoning benchmarks guided by information-theoretic principles. We propose metrics based on KL-divergence and entropy to quantify benchmark novelty and diversity without relying on costly model evaluations. Building on this framework, we develop an end-to-end pipeline that synthesizes robust Python coding problems from seed datasets using genetic algorithms and iterative code feedback. Our method generates accurate test cases and solutions to new problems 97% of the time, and the synthesized benchmarks consistently exhibit higher difficulty compared to prior works. Moreover, our algorithm provides a method for controlling the novelty/diversity and difficulty of generated problems. InfoSynth offers a scalable, self-verifying pipeline for constructing high-quality, challenging coding benchmarks for LLMs. Project Page: https://ishirgarg.github.io/infosynth_web/

Accurate grading of Conjunctival Melanocytic Intraepithelial Lesions (CMIL) is essential for treatment and melanoma prediction but remains difficult due to subtle morphological cues and interrelated diagnostic criteria. We introduce INTERACT-CMIL, a multi-head deep learning framework that jointly predicts five histopathological axes; WHO4, WHO5, horizontal spread, vertical spread, and cytologic atypia, through Shared Feature Learning with Combinatorial Partial Supervision and an Inter-Dependence Loss enforcing cross-task consistency. Trained and evaluated on a newly curated, multi-center dataset of 486 expert-annotated conjunctival biopsy patches from three university hospitals, INTERACT-CMIL achieves consistent improvements over CNN and foundation-model (FM) baselines, with relative macro F1 gains up to 55.1% (WHO4) and 25.0% (vertical spread). The framework provides coherent, interpretable multi-criteria predictions aligned with expert grading, offering a reproducible computational benchmark for CMIL diagnosis and a step toward standardized digital ocular pathology.

Large-scale medical biobanks provide imaging data complemented by extensive tabular information, such as clinical measurements or demographics. However, this abundance of tabular attributes does not reflect real-world datasets, where only a subset of attributes may be available. This discrepancy calls for methods that remain robust to missing values at inference. To address this challenge, we propose RoVTL (Robust Vision-Tabular Learning), a framework designed to handle any level of tabular data availability, from 0% to 100%. RoVTL comprises two key stages: contrastive pretraining, where we introduce tabular attribute missingness as data augmentation to promote robustness, and downstream task tuning, where tabular missingness is complemented by a novel Tabular More vs. Fewer loss that ranks performance based on the amount of available tabular data. Combined with gated-cross attention fusion module, our tuning approach enables consistent performance across all tabular data completeness scenarios. We evaluate RoVTL on cardiac MRI scans from the UK Biobank, demonstrating superior robustness to missing tabular data compared to prior methods. Furthermore, RoVTL successfully generalizes to an external cardiac MRI dataset for multimodal disease classification, and extends to the natural images domain, achieving robust performance on a car advertisements dataset. The model weights and code are available at https://github.com/marteczkah/RoVTL.

We study the numerical and Boolean expressiveness of MPLang, a declarative language that captures the computation of graph neural networks (GNNs) through linear message passing and activation functions. We begin with A-MPLang, the fragment without activation functions, and give a characterization of its expressive power in terms of walk-summed features. For bounded activation functions, we show that (under mild conditions) all eventually constant activations yield the same expressive power - numerical and Boolean - and that it subsumes previously established logics for GNNs with eventually constant activation functions but without linear layers. Finally, we prove the first expressive separation between unbounded and bounded activations in the presence of linear layers: MPLang with ReLU is strictly more powerful for numerical queries than MPLang with eventually constant activation functions, e.g., truncated ReLU. This hinges on subtle interactions between linear aggregation and eventually constant non-linearities, and it establishes that GNNs using ReLU are more expressive than those restricted to eventually constant activations and linear layers.

Squared tensor networks (TNs) and their extension as computational graphs--squared circuits--have been used as expressive distribution estimators, yet supporting closed-form marginalization. However, the squaring operation introduces additional complexity when computing the partition function or marginalizing variables, which hinders their applicability in ML. To solve this issue, canonical forms of TNs are parameterized via unitary matrices to simplify the computation of marginals. However, these canonical forms do not apply to circuits, as they can represent factorizations that do not directly map to a known TN. Inspired by the ideas of orthogonality in canonical forms and determinism in circuits enabling tractable maximization, we show how to parameterize squared circuits to overcome their marginalization overhead. Our parameterizations unlock efficient marginalization even in factorizations different from TNs, but encoded as circuits, whose structure would otherwise make marginalization computationally hard. Finally, our experiments on distribution estimation show how our proposed conditions in squared circuits come with no expressiveness loss, while enabling more efficient learning.

Learning the structure of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from observational data is a central problem in causal discovery, statistical signal processing, and machine learning. Under a linear Gaussian structural equation model (SEM) with equal noise variances, the problem is identifiable and we show that the ensemble precision matrix of the observations exhibits a distinctive structure that facilitates DAG recovery. Exploiting this property, we propose BUILD (Bottom-Up Inference of Linear DAGs), a deterministic stepwise algorithm that identifies leaf nodes and their parents, then prunes the leaves by removing incident edges to proceed to the next step, exactly reconstructing the DAG from the true precision matrix. In practice, precision matrices must be estimated from finite data, and ill-conditioning may lead to error accumulation across BUILD steps. As a mitigation strategy, we periodically re-estimate the precision matrix (with less variables as leaves are pruned), trading off runtime for enhanced robustness. Reproducible results on challenging synthetic benchmarks demonstrate that BUILD compares favorably to state-of-the-art DAG learning algorithms, while offering an explicit handle on complexity.

Despite the growing promise of large language models (LLMs) in automated essay scoring (AES), empirical findings regarding their reliability compared to human raters remain mixed. Following the PRISMA 2020 guidelines, we synthesized 65 published and unpublished studies from January 2022 to August 2025 that examined agreement between LLM-generated scores and human ratings. Agreement levels varied substantially both across and within studies, with reported values spanning a wide range. Overall, the findings suggest that LLM-human agreement is highly context-dependent. Implications, challenges, and directions for future research are discussed.

Sketch editing requires jointly handling high-level semantic changes and precise local redrawing, a combination that is particularly challenging for sparse, style-sensitive line art. Unlike natural images, sketches rely on minimal visual cues, making it difficult for existing methods to reconcile global semantic modifications with fine-grained structural control while preserving overall coherence. We present SketchAssist, an interactive sketch assistant that unifies instruction-guided editing with line-guided region redrawing, enabling efficient and controllable sketch manipulation while preserving overall composition. To support this task, we introduce a controllable data generation pipeline that constructs structured edit sequences with precise attribute variations and maintains structural alignment across multi-step modifications, while expanding stylistic diversity via style-preserving transformations. Building on this data, SketchAssist adopts a unified framework based on DiT, using a multi-channel input representation to encode sketches, masks, and guidance signals within a single interface. To further handle different editing modes, we integrate a Task-guided Mixture-of-Experts (T-MoE) into LoRA layers, enabling adaptive control over semantic and structural guidance. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on both tasks, achieving strong instruction adherence and improved structural and style consistency compared to recent methods. Together, our method provide a practical and controllable solution for sketch editing.

Generative AI tools are increasingly embedded in everyday work and learning, yet their fluency, opacity, and propensity to hallucinate mean that users must critically evaluate AI outputs rather than accept them at face value. The present research conceptualises critical thinking in AI use as a dispositional tendency to verify the source and content of AI-generated information, to understand how models work and where they fail, and to reflect on the broader implications of relying on AI. Across six studies (N = 1365), we developed and validated the 13-item critical thinking in AI use scale and mapped its nomological network. Study 1 generated and content-validated scale items. Study 2 supported a three-factor structure (Verification, Motivation, and Reflection). Studies 3, 4, and 5 confirmed this higher-order model, demonstrated internal consistency and test-retest reliability, strong factor loadings, sex invariance, and convergent and discriminant validity. Studies 3 and 4 further revealed that critical thinking in AI use was positively associated with openness, extraversion, positive trait affect, and frequency of AI use. Lastly, Study 6 demonstrated criterion validity of the scale, with higher critical thinking in AI use scores predicting more frequent and diverse verification strategies, greater veracity-judgement accuracy in a novel and naturalistic ChatGPT-powered fact-checking task, and deeper reflection about responsible AI. Taken together, the current work clarifies why and how people exercise oversight over generative AI outputs and provides a validated scale and ecologically grounded task paradigm to support theory testing, cross-group, and longitudinal research on critical engagement with generative AI outputs.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, but their increasing parameter sizes significantly slow down inference. Speculative decoding mitigates this issue by leveraging a smaller draft model to predict candidate tokens, which are then verified by a larger target model. However, existing approaches often require additional training, extensive hyperparameter tuning, or prior analysis of models and tasks before deployment. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Speculative Decoding (AdaSD), a hyperparameter-free decoding scheme that dynamically adjusts generation length and acceptance criteria during inference. AdaSD introduces two adaptive components: one to determine when to stop candidate token generation and the other to decide token acceptance, updated in real time based on token entropy and Jensen-Shannon distance. This approach eliminates the need for pre-analysis or fine-tuning and is compatible with off-the-shelf models. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that AdaSD achieves up to 1.46x speedup over vanilla speculative decoding while limiting accuracy degradation to under 1.8%, making it a practical solution for efficient and adaptive LLM inference.

Datasets may contain observations with multiple labels. If the labels are not mutually exclusive, and if the labels vary greatly in frequency, obtaining a sample that includes sufficient observations with scarcer labels to make inferences about those labels, and which deviates from the population frequencies in a known manner, creates challenges. In this paper, we consider a multivariate Bernoulli distribution as our underlying distribution of a multi-label problem. We present a novel sampling algorithm that takes label dependencies into account. It uses observed label frequencies to estimate multivariate Bernoulli distribution parameters and calculates weights for each label combination. This approach ensures the weighted sampling acquires target distribution characteristics while accounting for label dependencies. We applied this approach to a variety of datasets, including a sample of research articles from Web of Science labeled with 64 biomedical topic categories. We aimed to preserve category frequency order, reduce frequency differences between most and least common categories, and account for category dependencies. This approach produced a more balanced sub-sample, enhancing the representation of minority categories.

Trustworthiness has become a key requirement for the deployment of artificial intelligence systems in safety-critical applications. Conventional evaluation metrics, such as accuracy and precision, fail to appropriately capture uncertainty or the reliability of model predictions, particularly under adversarial or degraded conditions. This paper introduces the Parallel Trust Assessment System (PaTAS), a framework for modeling and propagating trust in neural networks using Subjective Logic (SL). PaTAS operates in parallel with standard neural computation through Trust Nodes and Trust Functions that propagate input, parameter, and activation trust across the network. The framework defines a Parameter Trust Update mechanism to refine parameter reliability during training and an Inference-Path Trust Assessment (IPTA) method to compute instance-specific trust at inference. Experiments on real-world and adversarial datasets demonstrate that PaTAS produces interpretable, symmetric, and convergent trust estimates that complement accuracy and expose reliability gaps in poisoned, biased, or uncertain data scenarios. The results show that PaTAS effectively distinguishes between benign and adversarial inputs and identifies cases where model confidence diverges from actual reliability. By enabling transparent and quantifiable trust reasoning within neural architectures, PaTAS provides a foundation for evaluating model reliability across the AI lifecycle.