Non-overlapping Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation (NCSR) is the task that focuses on domain knowledge transfer without overlapping entities. Compared with traditional Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation (CSR), NCSR poses several challenges: 1) NCSR methods often rely on explicit item IDs, overlooking semantic information among entities. 2) Existing CSR mainly relies on domain alignment for knowledge transfer, risking semantic loss during alignment. 3) Most previous studies do not consider the many-to-one characteristic, which is challenging because of the utilization of multiple source domains. Given the above challenges, we introduce the prompt learning technique for Many-to-one Non-overlapping Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation (MNCSR) and propose a Text-enhanced Co-attention Prompt Learning Paradigm (TCPLP). Specifically, we capture semantic meanings by representing items through text rather than IDs, leveraging natural language universality to facilitate cross-domain knowledge transfer. Unlike prior works that need to conduct domain alignment, we directly learn transferable domain information, where two types of prompts, i.e., domain-shared and domain-specific prompts, are devised, with a co-attention-based network for prompt encoding. Then, we develop a two-stage learning strategy, i.e., pre-train & prompt-tuning paradigm, for domain knowledge pre-learning and transferring, respectively. We conduct extensive experiments on three datasets and the experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our TCPLP. Our source codes have been publicly released.
The Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework introduces a retrieval module to dynamically inject retrieved information into the input context of large language models (LLMs), and has demonstrated significant success in various NLP tasks. However, the current study points out that there is a preference gap between retrievers and LLMs in the RAG framework, which limit the further improvement of system performance. Some highly relevant passages may interfere with LLM reasoning because they contain complex or contradictory information; while some indirectly related or even inaccurate content may help LLM generate more accurate answers by providing suggestive information or logical clues. To solve this, we propose GainRAG, a novel approach that aligns the retriever's and LLM's preferences by defining a new metric, "gain", which measure how well an input passage contributes to correct outputs. Specifically, we propose a method to estimate these gain signals and train a middleware that aligns the preferences of the retriever and the LLM using only limited data. In addition, we introduce a pseudo-passage strategy to mitigate degradation. The experimental results on 6 datasets verify the effectiveness of GainRAG.
The powerful reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in mathematics and coding, combined with their ability to automate complex tasks through agentic frameworks, present unprecedented opportunities for accelerating scientific innovation. In this paper, we introduce AI-Researcher, a fully autonomous research system that transforms how AI-driven scientific discovery is conducted and evaluated. Our framework seamlessly orchestrates the complete research pipeline--from literature review and hypothesis generation to algorithm implementation and publication-ready manuscript preparation--with minimal human intervention. To rigorously assess autonomous research capabilities, we develop Scientist-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark comprising state-of-the-art papers across diverse AI research domains, featuring both guided innovation and open-ended exploration tasks. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that AI-Researcher achieves remarkable implementation success rates and produces research papers that approach human-level quality. This work establishes new foundations for autonomous scientific innovation that can complement human researchers by systematically exploring solution spaces beyond cognitive limitations.
Climate policy scenario generation and evaluation have traditionally relied on integrated assessment models (IAMs) and expert-driven qualitative analysis. These methods enable stakeholders, such as policymakers and researchers, to anticipate impacts, plan governance strategies, and develop mitigation measures. However, traditional methods are often time-intensive, reliant on simple extrapolations of past trends, and limited in capturing the complex and interconnected nature of energy and climate issues. With the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI models trained on vast datasets, these limitations can be addressed, ensuring robustness even under limited data conditions. In this work, we explore the novel method that employs generative AI, specifically large language models (LLMs), to simulate climate policy scenarios for Sub-Saharan Africa. These scenarios focus on energy transition themes derived from the historical United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP) documents. By leveraging generative models, the project aims to create plausible and diverse policy scenarios that align with regional climate goals and energy challenges. Given limited access to human evaluators, automated techniques were employed for scenario evaluation. We generated policy scenarios using the llama3.2-3B model. Of the 34 generated responses, 30 (88%) passed expert validation, accurately reflecting the intended impacts provided in the corresponding prompts. We compared these validated responses against assessments from a human climate expert and two additional LLMs (gemma2-2B and mistral-7B). Our structured, embedding-based evaluation framework shows that generative AI effectively generate scenarios that are coherent, relevant, plausible, and diverse. This approach offers a transformative tool for climate policy planning in data-constrained regions.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are changing the way people interact with technology. Tools like ChatGPT and Claude AI are now common in business, research, and everyday life. But with that growth comes new risks, especially prompt-based attacks that exploit how these models process language. InjectLab is a security framework designed to address that problem. This paper introduces InjectLab as a structured, open-source matrix that maps real-world techniques used to manipulate LLMs. The framework is inspired by MITRE ATT&CK and focuses specifically on adversarial behavior at the prompt layer. It includes over 25 techniques organized under six core tactics, covering threats like instruction override, identity swapping, and multi-agent exploitation. Each technique in InjectLab includes detection guidance, mitigation strategies, and YAML-based simulation tests. A Python tool supports easy execution of prompt-based test cases. This paper outlines the framework's structure, compares it to other AI threat taxonomies, and discusses its future direction as a practical, community-driven foundation for securing language models.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines are central to applying large language models (LLMs) to proprietary or dynamic data. However, building effective RAG flows is complex, requiring careful selection among vector databases, embedding models, text splitters, retrievers, and synthesizing LLMs. The challenge deepens with the rise of agentic paradigms. Modules like verifiers, rewriters, and rerankers-each with intricate hyperparameter dependencies have to be carefully tuned. Balancing tradeoffs between latency, accuracy, and cost becomes increasingly difficult in performance-sensitive applications. We introduce syftr, a framework that performs efficient multi-objective search over a broad space of agentic and non-agentic RAG configurations. Using Bayesian Optimization, syftr discovers Pareto-optimal flows that jointly optimize task accuracy and cost. A novel early-stopping mechanism further improves efficiency by pruning clearly suboptimal candidates. Across multiple RAG benchmarks, syftr finds flows which are on average approximately 9 times cheaper while preserving most of the accuracy of the most accurate flows on the Pareto-frontier. Furthermore, syftr's ability to design and optimize allows integrating new modules, making it even easier and faster to realize high-performing generative AI pipelines.
Transformer-based CLIP models are widely used for text-image probing and feature extraction, making it relevant to understand the internal mechanisms behind their predictions. While recent works show that Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) yield interpretable latent components, they focus on what these encode and miss how they drive predictions. We introduce a scalable framework that reveals what latent components activate for, how they align with expected semantics, and how important they are to predictions. To achieve this, we adapt attribution patching for instance-wise component attributions in CLIP and highlight key faithfulness limitations of the widely used Logit Lens technique. By combining attributions with semantic alignment scores, we can automatically uncover reliance on components that encode semantically unexpected or spurious concepts. Applied across multiple CLIP variants, our method uncovers hundreds of surprising components linked to polysemous words, compound nouns, visual typography and dataset artifacts. While text embeddings remain prone to semantic ambiguity, they are more robust to spurious correlations compared to linear classifiers trained on image embeddings. A case study on skin lesion detection highlights how such classifiers can amplify hidden shortcuts, underscoring the need for holistic, mechanistic interpretability. We provide code at https://github.com/maxdreyer/attributing-clip.
The rapid evolution of large language models in natural language processing has substantially elevated their semantic understanding and logical reasoning capabilities. Such proficiencies have been leveraged in autonomous driving systems, contributing to significant improvements in system performance. Models such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1, leverage Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, an advanced cognitive method that simulates human thinking processes, demonstrating remarkable reasoning capabilities in complex tasks. By structuring complex driving scenarios within a systematic reasoning framework, this approach has emerged as a prominent research focus in autonomous driving, substantially improving the system's ability to handle challenging cases. This paper investigates how CoT methods improve the reasoning abilities of autonomous driving models. Based on a comprehensive literature review, we present a systematic analysis of the motivations, methodologies, challenges, and future research directions of CoT in autonomous driving. Furthermore, we propose the insight of combining CoT with self-learning to facilitate self-evolution in driving systems. To ensure the relevance and timeliness of this study, we have compiled a dynamic repository of literature and open-source projects, diligently updated to incorporate forefront developments. The repository is publicly available at https://github.com/cuiyx1720/Awesome-CoT4AD.
Accurate and safe medication recommendations are critical for effective clinical decision-making, especially in multimorbidity cases. However, existing systems rely on point-wise prediction paradigms that overlook synergistic drug effects and potential adverse drug-drug interactions (DDIs). We propose FLAME, a fine-grained list-wise alignment framework for large language models (LLMs), enabling drug-by-drug generation of drug lists. FLAME formulates recommendation as a sequential decision process, where each step adds or removes a single drug. To provide fine-grained learning signals, we devise step-wise Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with potential-based reward shaping, which explicitly models DDIs and optimizes the contribution of each drug to the overall prescription. Furthermore, FLAME enhances patient modeling by integrating structured clinical knowledge and collaborative information into the representation space of LLMs. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that FLAME achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering superior accuracy, controllable safety-accuracy trade-offs, and strong generalization across diverse clinical scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/cxfann/Flame.
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is intended to improve their reasoning capabilities, yet we uncover a counterintuitive effect: models often forget how to solve problems they previously answered correctly during training. We term this phenomenon temporal forgetting and show that it is widespread across model sizes, fine-tuning methods (both Reinforcement Learning and Supervised Fine-Tuning), and multiple reasoning benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce Temporal Sampling, a simple decoding strategy that draws outputs from multiple checkpoints along the training trajectory. This approach recovers forgotten solutions without retraining or ensembling, and leads to substantial improvements in reasoning performance, gains from 4 to 19 points in Pass@k and consistent gains in Majority@k across several benchmarks. We further extend our method to LoRA-adapted models, demonstrating that storing only adapter weights across checkpoints achieves similar benefits with minimal storage cost. By leveraging the temporal diversity inherent in training, Temporal Sampling offers a practical, compute-efficient way to surface hidden reasoning ability and rethink how we evaluate LLMs.
The integration of large language models (LLMs) with function calling has emerged as a crucial capability for enhancing their practical utility in real-world applications. However, effectively combining reasoning processes with accurate function execution remains a significant challenge. Traditional training approaches often struggle to balance the detailed reasoning steps with the precision of function calls, leading to suboptimal performance. To address these limitations, we introduce FunReason, a novel framework that enhances LLMs' function calling capabilities through an automated data refinement strategy and a Self-Refinement Multiscale Loss (SRML) approach. FunReason leverages LLMs' natural reasoning abilities to generate high-quality training examples, focusing on query parseability, reasoning coherence, and function call precision. The SRML approach dynamically balances the contribution of reasoning processes and function call accuracy during training, addressing the inherent trade-off between these two critical aspects. FunReason achieves performance comparable to GPT-4o while effectively mitigating catastrophic forgetting during fine-tuning. FunReason provides a comprehensive solution for enhancing LLMs' function calling capabilities by introducing a balanced training methodology and a data refinement pipeline. For code and dataset, please refer to our repository at GitHub https://github.com/BingguangHao/FunReason
Predictive Coding (PC) offers a biologically plausible alternative to backpropagation for neural network training, yet struggles with deeper architectures. This paper identifies the root cause: an inherent signal decay problem where gradients attenuate exponentially with depth, becoming computationally negligible due to numerical precision constraints. To address this fundamental limitation, we introduce Error Optimization (EO), a novel reparameterization that preserves PC's theoretical properties while eliminating signal decay. By optimizing over prediction errors rather than states, EO enables signals to reach all layers simultaneously and without attenuation, converging orders of magnitude faster than standard PC. Experiments across multiple architectures and datasets demonstrate that EO matches backpropagation's performance even for deeper models where conventional PC struggles. Besides practical improvements, our work provides theoretical insight into PC dynamics and establishes a foundation for scaling biologically-inspired learning to deeper architectures on digital hardware and beyond.
Transformer-based language models, though not explicitly trained to mimic brain recordings, have demonstrated surprising alignment with brain activity. Progress in these models-through increased size, instruction-tuning, and multimodality-has led to better representational alignment with neural data. Recently, a new class of instruction-tuned multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) have emerged, showing remarkable zero-shot capabilities in open-ended multimodal vision tasks. However, it is unknown whether MLLMs, when prompted with natural instructions, lead to better brain alignment and effectively capture instruction-specific representations. To address this, we first investigate brain alignment, i.e., measuring the degree of predictivity of neural visual activity using text output response embeddings from MLLMs as participants engage in watching natural scenes. Experiments with 10 different instructions show that MLLMs exhibit significantly better brain alignment than vision-only models and perform comparably to non-instruction-tuned multimodal models like CLIP. We also find that while these MLLMs are effective at generating high-quality responses suitable to the task-specific instructions, not all instructions are relevant for brain alignment. Further, by varying instructions, we make the MLLMs encode instruction-specific visual concepts related to the input image. This analysis shows that MLLMs effectively capture count-related and recognition-related concepts, demonstrating strong alignment with brain activity. Notably, the majority of the explained variance of the brain encoding models is shared between MLLM embeddings of image captioning and other instructions. These results suggest that enhancing MLLMs' ability to capture task-specific information could lead to better differentiation between various types of instructions, and thereby improving their precision in predicting brain responses.
In this paper, we focus on the often-overlooked issue of embedding collapse in existing diffusion-based sequential recommendation models and propose ADRec, an innovative framework designed to mitigate this problem. Diverging from previous diffusion-based methods, ADRec applies an independent noise process to each token and performs diffusion across the entire target sequence during training. ADRec captures token interdependency through auto-regression while modeling per-token distributions through token-level diffusion. This dual approach enables the model to effectively capture both sequence dynamics and item representations, overcoming the limitations of existing methods. To further mitigate embedding collapse, we propose a three-stage training strategy: (1) pre-training the embedding weights, (2) aligning these weights with the ADRec backbone, and (3) fine-tuning the model. During inference, ADRec applies the denoising process only to the last token, ensuring that the meaningful patterns in historical interactions are preserved. Our comprehensive empirical evaluation across six datasets underscores the effectiveness of ADRec in enhancing both the accuracy and efficiency of diffusion-based sequential recommendation systems.
Conformal prediction (CP) is a popular frequentist framework for representing uncertainty by providing prediction sets that guarantee coverage of the true label with a user-adjustable probability. In most applications, CP operates on confidence scores coming from a standard (first-order) probabilistic predictor (e.g., softmax outputs). Second-order predictors, such as credal set predictors or Bayesian models, are also widely used for uncertainty quantification and are known for their ability to represent both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. Despite their popularity, there is still an open question on ``how they can be incorporated into CP''. In this paper, we discuss the desiderata for CP when valid second-order predictions are available. We then introduce Bernoulli prediction sets (BPS), which produce the smallest prediction sets that ensure conditional coverage in this setting. When given first-order predictions, BPS reduces to the well-known adaptive prediction sets (APS). Furthermore, when the validity assumption on the second-order predictions is compromised, we apply conformal risk control to obtain a marginal coverage guarantee while still accounting for epistemic uncertainty.
Principal component analysis (PCA) is a key tool in the field of data dimensionality reduction. Various methods have been proposed to extend PCA to the union of subspace (UoS) setting for clustering data that come from multiple subspaces like K-Subspaces (KSS). However, some applications involve heterogeneous data that vary in quality due to noise characteristics associated with each data sample. Heteroscedastic methods aim to deal with such mixed data quality. This paper develops a heteroscedastic-focused subspace clustering method, named ALPCAHUS, that can estimate the sample-wise noise variances and use this information to improve the estimate of the subspace bases associated with the low-rank structure of the data. This clustering algorithm builds on K-Subspaces (KSS) principles by extending the recently proposed heteroscedastic PCA method, named LR-ALPCAH, for clusters with heteroscedastic noise in the UoS setting. Simulations and real-data experiments show the effectiveness of accounting for data heteroscedasticity compared to existing clustering algorithms. Code available at https://github.com/javiersc1/ALPCAHUS.
Deep learning with noisy labels presents significant challenges. In this work, we theoretically characterize the role of label noise from a feature learning perspective. Specifically, we consider a signal-noise data distribution, where each sample comprises a label-dependent signal and label-independent noise, and rigorously analyze the training dynamics of a two-layer convolutional neural network under this data setup, along with the presence of label noise. Our analysis identifies two key stages. In Stage I, the model perfectly fits all the clean samples (i.e., samples without label noise) while ignoring the noisy ones (i.e., samples with noisy labels). During this stage, the model learns the signal from the clean samples, which generalizes well on unseen data. In Stage II, as the training loss converges, the gradient in the direction of noise surpasses that of the signal, leading to overfitting on noisy samples. Eventually, the model memorizes the noise present in the noisy samples and degrades its generalization ability. Furthermore, our analysis provides a theoretical basis for two widely used techniques for tackling label noise: early stopping and sample selection. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world setups validate our theory.
Selecting artificial intelligence (AI) models, such as large language models (LLMs), from multiple candidates requires accurate performance estimation. This is ideally achieved through empirical evaluations involving abundant real-world data. However, such evaluations are costly and impractical at scale. To address this challenge, autoevaluation methods leverage synthetic data produced by automated evaluators, such as LLMs-as-judges, reducing variance but potentially introducing bias. Recent approaches have employed semi-supervised prediction-powered inference (\texttt{PPI}) to correct for the bias of autoevaluators. However, the use of autoevaluators may lead in practice to a degradation in sample efficiency compared to conventional methods using only real-world data. In this paper, we propose \texttt{R-AutoEval+}, a novel framework that provides finite-sample reliability guarantees on the model evaluation, while also ensuring an enhanced (or at least no worse) sample efficiency compared to conventional methods. The key innovation of \texttt{R-AutoEval+} is an adaptive construction of the model evaluation variable, which dynamically tunes its reliance on synthetic data, reverting to conventional methods when the autoevaluator is insufficiently accurate. Experiments on the use of LLMs-as-judges for the optimization of quantization settings for the weights of an LLM, and for prompt design in LLMs confirm the reliability and efficiency of \texttt{R-AutoEval+}.
Mathematical reasoning lies at the heart of artificial intelligence, underpinning applications in education, program verification, and research-level mathematical discovery. Mathematical competitions, in particular, present two challenging problem types: theorem-proving, requiring rigorous proofs of stated conclusions, and answer-construction, involving hypothesizing and formally verifying mathematical objects. Large Language Models (LLMs) effectively generate creative candidate answers but struggle with formal verification, while symbolic provers ensure rigor but cannot efficiently handle creative conjecture generation. We introduce the Enumerate-Conjecture-Prove (ECP) framework, a modular neuro-symbolic method integrating LLM-based enumeration and pattern-driven conjecturing with formal theorem proving. We present ConstructiveBench, a dataset of 3,431 answer-construction problems in various math competitions with verified Lean formalizations. On the ConstructiveBench dataset, ECP improves the accuracy of answer construction from the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) baseline of 14.54% to 45.06% with the gpt-4.1-mini model. Moreover, combining with ECP's constructed answers, the state-of-the-art DeepSeek-Prover-V2-7B model generates correct proofs for 858 of the 3,431 constructive problems in Lean, achieving 25.01% accuracy, compared to 9.86% for symbolic-only baselines. Our code and dataset are publicly available at GitHub and HuggingFace, respectively.
We consider the problem of learning the evolution operator for the time-dependent Schr\"{o}dinger equation, where the Hamiltonian may vary with time. Existing neural network-based surrogates often ignore fundamental properties of the Schr\"{o}dinger equation, such as linearity and unitarity, and lack theoretical guarantees on prediction error or time generalization. To address this, we introduce a linear estimator for the evolution operator that preserves a weak form of unitarity. We establish both upper and lower bounds on the prediction error that hold uniformly over all sufficiently smooth initial wave functions. Additionally, we derive time generalization bounds that quantify how the estimator extrapolates beyond the time points seen during training. Experiments across real-world Hamiltonians -- including hydrogen atoms, ion traps for qubit design, and optical lattices -- show that our estimator achieves relative errors $10^{-2}$ to $10^{-3}$ times smaller than state-of-the-art methods such as the Fourier Neural Operator and DeepONet.