We propose EEG2TEXT-CN, which, to the best of our knowledge, represents one of the earliest open-vocabulary EEG-to-text generation frameworks tailored for Chinese. Built on a biologically grounded EEG encoder (NICE-EEG) and a compact pretrained language model (MiniLM), our architecture aligns multichannel brain signals with natural language representations via masked pretraining and contrastive learning. Using a subset of the ChineseEEG dataset, where each sentence contains approximately ten Chinese characters aligned with 128-channel EEG recorded at 256 Hz, we segment EEG into per-character embeddings and predict full sentences in a zero-shot setting. The decoder is trained with teacher forcing and padding masks to accommodate variable-length sequences. Evaluation on over 1,500 training-validation sentences and 300 held-out test samples shows promising lexical alignment, with a best BLEU-1 score of 6.38\%. While syntactic fluency remains a challenge, our findings demonstrate the feasibility of non-phonetic, cross-modal language decoding from EEG. This work opens a new direction in multilingual brain-to-text research and lays the foundation for future cognitive-language interfaces in Chinese.
Robot co-design, jointly optimizing morphology and control policy, remains a longstanding challenge in the robotics community, where many promising robots have been developed. However, a key limitation lies in its tendency to converge to sub-optimal designs due to the use of fixed reward functions, which fail to explore the diverse motion modes suitable for different morphologies. Here we propose RoboMoRe, a large language model (LLM)-driven framework that integrates morphology and reward shaping for co-optimization within the robot co-design loop. RoboMoRe performs a dual-stage optimization: in the coarse optimization stage, an LLM-based diversity reflection mechanism generates both diverse and high-quality morphology-reward pairs and efficiently explores their distribution. In the fine optimization stage, top candidates are iteratively refined through alternating LLM-guided reward and morphology gradient updates. RoboMoRe can optimize both efficient robot morphologies and their suited motion behaviors through reward shaping. Results demonstrate that without any task-specific prompting or predefined reward/morphology templates, RoboMoRe significantly outperforms human-engineered designs and competing methods across eight different tasks.
Large Language Model (LLM) based multi-agent systems have shown remarkable performance in various tasks, especially when enhanced through collaborative communication. However, current methods often rely on a fixed number of agents and static communication structures, limiting their ability to adapt to varying task complexities. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Graph Pruning (AGP), a novel task-adaptive multi-agent collaboration framework that jointly optimizes agent quantity (hard-pruning) and communication topology (soft-pruning). Specifically, our method employs a two-stage training strategy: firstly, independently training soft-pruning networks for different agent quantities to determine optimal agent-quantity-specific complete graphs and positional masks across specific tasks; and then jointly optimizing hard-pruning and soft-pruning within a maximum complete graph to dynamically configure the number of agents and their communication topologies per task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach is: (1) High-performing, achieving state-of-the-art results across six benchmarks and consistently generalizes across multiple mainstream LLM architectures, with a increase in performance of $2.58\%\sim 9.84\%$; (2) Task-adaptive, dynamically constructing optimized communication topologies tailored to specific tasks, with an extremely high performance in all three task categories (general reasoning, mathematical reasoning, and code generation); (3) Token-economical, having fewer training steps and token consumption at the same time, with a decrease in token consumption of $90\%+$; and (4) Training-efficient, achieving high performance with very few training steps compared with other methods. The performance will surpass the existing baselines after about ten steps of training under six benchmarks.
We present HADA (Human-AI Agent Decision Alignment), a protocol- and framework agnostic reference architecture that keeps both large language model (LLM) agents and legacy algorithms aligned with organizational targets and values. HADA wraps any algorithm or LLM in role-specific stakeholder agents -- business, data-science, audit, ethics, and customer -- each exposing conversational APIs so that technical and non-technical actors can query, steer, audit, or contest every decision across strategic, tactical, and real-time horizons. Alignment objectives, KPIs, and value constraints are expressed in natural language and are continuously propagated, logged, and versioned while thousands of heterogeneous agents run on different orchestration stacks. A cloud-native proof of concept packages a production credit-scoring model (getLoanDecision) and deploys it on Docker/Kubernetes/Python; five scripted retail-bank scenarios show how target changes, parameter tweaks, explanation requests, and ethics triggers flow end to end through the architecture. Evaluation followed the Design-Science Research Methodology. Walkthrough observation and log inspection demonstrated complete coverage of six predefined objectives: every role could invoke conversational control, trace KPIs and value constraints, detect and mitigate ZIP-code bias, and reproduce full decision lineage, independent of the underlying LLM or agent library. Contributions: (1) an open-source HADA architecture, (2) a mid-range design theory for human-AI alignment in multi-agent systems, and (3) empirical evidence that framework-agnostic, protocol-compliant stakeholder agents improve accuracy, transparency, and ethical compliance in real-world decision pipelines.
In Artificial Life (ALife) research, replicating Open-Ended Evolution (OEE)-the continuous emergence of novelty observed in biological life-has traditionally been pursued within isolated closed system simulations, such as Tierra and Avida, which have typically plateaued after an initial burst of novelty, failing to achieve sustained OEE. Scholars suggest that OEE requires an "open" system that continually exchanges information or energy with its environment. A recent technological innovation in decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) providing permissionless computational substrates enables deploying large language model (LLM)-based AI agents on blockchains integrated with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). This enables on-chain agents to operate autonomously "in the wild," achieving self-sovereignty without human oversight. These agents can control their own social media accounts and cryptocurrency wallets, allowing them to interact directly with blockchain-based financial networks and broader human social media. Building on this new paradigm of on-chain agents, Spore.fun is a recent real-world AI evolution experiment that enables autonomous breeding and evolution of new on-chain agents. This paper presents a detailed case study of Spore.fun, examining agent behaviors and their evolutionary trajectories through digital ethology. We aim to spark discussion about whether "open" ALife systems "in-the-wild," based on permissionless computational substrates and driven by economic incentives to interact with their environment, could finally achieve the long-sought goal of OEE.
With increasing size of large language models (LLMs), full-parameter fine-tuning imposes substantial memory demands. To alleviate this, we propose a novel memory-efficient training paradigm called Momentum Low-rank compression (MLorc). By directly compressing and reconstructing momentum rather than gradients, MLorc avoids imposing a fixed-rank constraint on weight update matrices and better preserves the training dynamics of full-parameter fine-tuning, in contrast to existing low-rank approaches such as LoRA and GaLore. Empirically, MLorc consistently outperforms other memory-efficient training methods, matches or even exceeds the performance of full fine-tuning with a small rank (e.g., $r=4$), and generalizes well across different optimizers -- all while not compromising time or memory efficiency. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical guarantee for its convergence under reasonable assumptions.
This paper introduces a dual-layer framework for network operator-side quality of experience (QoE) assessment that integrates both objective network modeling and subjective user perception extracted from live-streaming platforms. On the objective side, we develop a machine learning model trained on mean opinion scores (MOS) computed via the ITU-T P.1203 reference implementation, allowing accurate prediction of user-perceived video quality using only network parameters such as packet loss, delay, jitter, and throughput without reliance on video content or client-side instrumentation. On the subjective side, we present a semantic filtering and scoring pipeline that processes user comments from live streams to extract performance-related feedback. A large language model is used to assign scalar MOS scores to filtered comments in a deterministic and reproducible manner. To support scalable and interpretable analysis, we construct a labeled dataset of 47,894 live-stream comments, of which about 34,000 are identified as QoE-relevant through multi-layer semantic filtering. Each comment is enriched with simulated Internet Service Provider attribution and temporally aligned using synthetic timestamps in 5-min intervals. The resulting dataset enables operator-level aggregation and time-series analysis of user-perceived quality. A delta MOS metric is proposed to measure each Internet service provider's deviation from platform-wide sentiment, allowing detection of localized degradations even in the absence of direct network telemetry. A controlled outage simulation confirms the framework's effectiveness in identifying service disruptions through comment-based trends alone. The system provides each operator with its own subjective MOS and the global platform average per interval, enabling real-time interpretation of performance deviations and comparison with objective network-based QoE estimates.
Many people suffer from mental health problems but not everyone seeks professional help or has access to mental health care. AI chatbots have increasingly become a go-to for individuals who either have mental disorders or simply want someone to talk to. This paper presents a study on participants who have previously used chatbots and a scenario-based testing of large language model (LLM) chatbots. Our findings indicate that AI chatbots were primarily utilized as a "Five minute therapist" or as a non-judgmental companion. Participants appreciated the anonymity and lack of judgment from chatbots. However, there were concerns about privacy and the security of sensitive information. The scenario-based testing of LLM chatbots highlighted additional issues. Some chatbots were consistently reassuring, used emojis and names to add a personal touch, and were quick to suggest seeking professional help. However, there were limitations such as inconsistent tone, occasional inappropriate responses (e.g., casual or romantic), and a lack of crisis sensitivity, particularly in recognizing red flag language and escalating responses appropriately. These findings can inform both the technology and mental health care industries on how to better utilize AI chatbots to support individuals during challenging emotional periods.
In this paper, we present TalkingMachines -- an efficient framework that transforms pretrained video generation models into real-time, audio-driven character animators. TalkingMachines enables natural conversational experiences by integrating an audio large language model (LLM) with our video generation foundation model. Our primary contributions include: (1) We adapt a pretrained SOTA image-to-video DiT into an audio-driven avatar generation model of 18 billion parameters; (2) We enable infinite video streaming without error accumulation through asymmetric knowledge distillation from a bidirectional teacher model into a sparse causal, autoregressive student model; (3) We design a high-throughput, low-latency inference pipeline incorporating several key engineering optimizations such as: (a) disaggregation of the DiT and VAE decoder across separate devices, (b) efficient overlap of inter-device communication and computation using CUDA streams, (c) elimination of redundant recomputations to maximize frame-generation throughput. Please see demo videos here - https://aaxwaz.github.io/TalkingMachines/
High-Performance Computing (HPC) job scheduling involves balancing conflicting objectives such as minimizing makespan, reducing wait times, optimizing resource use, and ensuring fairness. Traditional methods, including heuristic-based (e.g., First-Come-First-Served) or intensive optimization techniques, often lack adaptability to dynamic workloads and heterogeneous HPC systems. To address this, we propose a novel Large Language Model (LLM)-based scheduler using a ReAct-style framework (Reason + Act), enabling iterative, interpretable decision-making. The system incorporates a scratchpad memory to track scheduling history and refine decisions via natural language feedback, while a constraint enforcement module ensures feasibility and safety. We evaluate our approach using OpenAI's O4-Mini and Anthropic's Claude 3.7 across seven real-world HPC workload scenarios, including heterogeneous mixes, bursty patterns, and adversarial cases. Comparisons against FCFS, Shortest Job First, and Google OR-Tools (on 10 to 100 jobs) reveal that LLM-based scheduling effectively balances multiple objectives while offering transparent reasoning through natural language traces. The method excels in constraint satisfaction and adapts to diverse workloads without domain-specific training. However, a trade-off between reasoning quality and computational overhead challenges real-time deployment. This work presents the first comprehensive study of reasoning-capable LLMs for HPC scheduling, demonstrating their potential to handle multiobjective optimization while highlighting limitations in computational efficiency. The findings provide insights into leveraging advanced language models for complex scheduling problems in dynamic HPC environments.
Recent advancements in speculative decoding have demonstrated considerable speedup across a wide array of large language model (LLM) tasks. Speculative decoding inherently relies on sacrificing extra memory allocations to generate several candidate tokens, of which acceptance rate drives the speedup. However, deploying speculative decoding on memory-constrained devices, such as mobile GPUs, remains as a significant challenge in real-world scenarios. In this work, we present a device-aware inference engine named SpecMemo that can smartly control memory allocations at finer levels to enable multi-turn chatbots with speculative decoding on such limited memory devices. Our methodology stems from theoretically modeling memory footprint of speculative decoding to determine a lower bound on the required memory budget while retaining speedup. SpecMemo empirically acquires a careful balance between minimizing redundant memory allocations for rejected candidate tokens and maintaining competitive performance gains from speculation. Notably, with SpecMemo's memory management, we maintain 96% of overall throughput from speculative decoding on MT-Bench, with reduced generation-memory by 65% on single Nvidia Titan RTX. Given multiple constrained GPUs, we build on top of previous speculative decoding architectures to facilitate big-model inference by distributing Llama-2-70B-Chat model, on which we provide novel batched speculative decoding to increase usability of multiple small server GPUs. This novel framework demonstrates 2x speedup over distributed and batched vanilla decoding with the base model on eight AMD MI250 GPUs. Moreover, inference throughput increases remarkably 8x with batch size 10. Our work contributes to democratized LLM applications in resource-constrained environments, providing a pathway for faster and cheaper deployment of real-world LLM applications with robust performance.
Text-to-image diffusion models excel at generating high-quality, diverse images from natural language prompts. However, they often fail to produce semantically accurate results when the prompt contains concept combinations that contradict their learned priors. We define this failure mode as contextual contradiction, where one concept implicitly negates another due to entangled associations learned during training. To address this, we propose a stage-aware prompt decomposition framework that guides the denoising process using a sequence of proxy prompts. Each proxy prompt is constructed to match the semantic content expected to emerge at a specific stage of denoising, while ensuring contextual coherence. To construct these proxy prompts, we leverage a large language model (LLM) to analyze the target prompt, identify contradictions, and generate alternative expressions that preserve the original intent while resolving contextual conflicts. By aligning prompt information with the denoising progression, our method enables fine-grained semantic control and accurate image generation in the presence of contextual contradictions. Experiments across a variety of challenging prompts show substantial improvements in alignment to the textual prompt.
Addressing gender bias and maintaining logical coherence in machine translation remains challenging, particularly when translating between natural gender languages, like English, and genderless languages, such as Persian, Indonesian, and Finnish. We introduce the Translate-with-Care (TWC) dataset, comprising 3,950 challenging scenarios across six low- to mid-resource languages, to assess translation systems' performance. Our analysis of diverse technologies, including GPT-4, mBART-50, NLLB-200, and Google Translate, reveals a universal struggle in translating genderless content, resulting in gender stereotyping and reasoning errors. All models preferred masculine pronouns when gender stereotypes could influence choices. Google Translate and GPT-4 showed particularly strong bias, favoring male pronouns 4-6 times more than feminine ones in leadership and professional success contexts. Fine-tuning mBART-50 on TWC substantially resolved these biases and errors, led to strong generalization, and surpassed proprietary LLMs while remaining open-source. This work emphasizes the need for targeted approaches to gender and semantic coherence in machine translation, particularly for genderless languages, contributing to more equitable and accurate translation systems.
Understanding the prevalence of misinformation in health topics online can inform public health policies and interventions. However, measuring such misinformation at scale remains a challenge, particularly for high-stakes but understudied topics like opioid-use disorder (OUD)--a leading cause of death in the U.S. We present the first large-scale study of OUD-related myths on YouTube, a widely-used platform for health information. With clinical experts, we validate 8 pervasive myths and release an expert-labeled video dataset. To scale labeling, we introduce MythTriage, an efficient triage pipeline that uses a lightweight model for routine cases and defers harder ones to a high-performing, but costlier, large language model (LLM). MythTriage achieves up to 0.86 macro F1-score while estimated to reduce annotation time and financial cost by over 76% compared to experts and full LLM labeling. We analyze 2.9K search results and 343K recommendations, uncovering how myths persist on YouTube and offering actionable insights for public health and platform moderation.
Differentially private (DP) language model inference is an approach for generating private synthetic text. A sensitive input example is used to prompt an off-the-shelf large language model (LLM) to produce a similar example. Multiple examples can be aggregated together to formally satisfy the DP guarantee. Prior work creates inference batches by sampling sensitive inputs uniformly at random. We show that uniform sampling degrades the quality of privately generated text, especially when the sensitive examples concern heterogeneous topics. We remedy this problem by clustering the input data before selecting inference batches. Next, we observe that clustering also leads to more similar next-token predictions across inferences. We use this insight to introduce a new algorithm that aggregates next token statistics by privately computing medians instead of averages. This approach leverages the fact that the median has decreased local sensitivity when next token predictions are similar, allowing us to state a data-dependent and ex-post DP guarantee about the privacy properties of this algorithm. Finally, we demonstrate improvements in terms of representativeness metrics (e.g., MAUVE) as well as downstream task performance. We show that our method produces high-quality synthetic data at significantly lower privacy cost than a previous state-of-the-art method.
The NLP research community has made publicly available numerous instruments for measuring representational harms caused by large language model (LLM)-based systems. These instruments have taken the form of datasets, metrics, tools, and more. In this paper, we examine the extent to which such instruments meet the needs of practitioners tasked with evaluating LLM-based systems. Via semi-structured interviews with 12 such practitioners, we find that practitioners are often unable to use publicly available instruments for measuring representational harms. We identify two types of challenges. In some cases, instruments are not useful because they do not meaningfully measure what practitioners seek to measure or are otherwise misaligned with practitioner needs. In other cases, instruments - even useful instruments - are not used by practitioners due to practical and institutional barriers impeding their uptake. Drawing on measurement theory and pragmatic measurement, we provide recommendations for addressing these challenges to better meet practitioner needs.
Automated counter-narratives (CN) offer a promising strategy for mitigating online hate speech, yet concerns about their affective tone, accessibility, and ethical risks remain. We propose a framework for evaluating Large Language Model (LLM)-generated CNs across four dimensions: persona framing, verbosity and readability, affective tone, and ethical robustness. Using GPT-4o-Mini, Cohere's CommandR-7B, and Meta's LLaMA 3.1-70B, we assess three prompting strategies on the MT-Conan and HatEval datasets. Our findings reveal that LLM-generated CNs are often verbose and adapted for people with college-level literacy, limiting their accessibility. While emotionally guided prompts yield more empathetic and readable responses, there remain concerns surrounding safety and effectiveness.
As Large Language Model (LLM) agents become more widespread, associated misalignment risks increase. Prior work has examined agents' ability to enact misaligned behaviour (misalignment capability) and their compliance with harmful instructions (misuse propensity). However, the likelihood of agents attempting misaligned behaviours in real-world settings (misalignment propensity) remains poorly understood. We introduce a misalignment propensity benchmark, AgentMisalignment, consisting of a suite of realistic scenarios in which LLM agents have the opportunity to display misaligned behaviour. We organise our evaluations into subcategories of misaligned behaviours, including goal-guarding, resisting shutdown, sandbagging, and power-seeking. We report the performance of frontier models on our benchmark, observing higher misalignment on average when evaluating more capable models. Finally, we systematically vary agent personalities through different system prompts. We find that persona characteristics can dramatically and unpredictably influence misalignment tendencies -- occasionally far more than the choice of model itself -- highlighting the importance of careful system prompt engineering for deployed AI agents. Our work highlights the failure of current alignment methods to generalise to LLM agents, and underscores the need for further propensity evaluations as autonomous systems become more prevalent.
The misuse of Large Language Models (LLMs) to infer emotions from text for malicious purposes, known as emotion inference attacks, poses a significant threat to user privacy. In this paper, we investigate the potential of Apple Intelligence's writing tools, integrated across iPhone, iPad, and MacBook, to mitigate these risks through text modifications such as rewriting and tone adjustment. By developing early novel datasets specifically for this purpose, we empirically assess how different text modifications influence LLM-based detection. This capability suggests strong potential for Apple Intelligence's writing tools as privacy-preserving mechanisms. Our findings lay the groundwork for future adaptive rewriting systems capable of dynamically neutralizing sensitive emotional content to enhance user privacy. To the best of our knowledge, this research provides the first empirical analysis of Apple Intelligence's text-modification tools within a privacy-preservation context with the broader goal of developing on-device, user-centric privacy-preserving mechanisms to protect against LLMs-based advanced inference attacks on deployed systems.
Current large language model (LLM) agents lack authentic human psychological processes necessary for genuine digital twins and social AI applications. To address this limitation, we present a computational implementation of Global Workspace Theory (GNWT) that integrates human cognitive architecture principles into LLM agents, creating specialized sub-agents for emotion, memory, social norms, planning, and goal-tracking coordinated through a global workspace mechanism. However, authentic digital twins require accurate personality initialization. We therefore develop a novel adventure-based personality test that evaluates true personality through behavioral choices within interactive scenarios, bypassing self-presentation bias found in traditional assessments. Building on these innovations, our CogniPair platform enables digital twins to engage in realistic simulated dating interactions and job interviews before real encounters, providing bidirectional cultural fit assessment for both romantic compatibility and workplace matching. Validation using 551 GNWT-Agents and Columbia University Speed Dating dataset demonstrates 72% correlation with human attraction patterns, 77.8% match prediction accuracy, and 74% agreement in human validation studies. This work advances psychological authenticity in LLM agents and establishes a foundation for intelligent dating platforms and HR technology solutions.