While large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable potential in automating various tasks in digital chip design, the field of Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs)-a promising solution to advanced chip designs-remains relatively unexplored in this context. The design of PICs is time-consuming and prone to errors due to the extensive and repetitive nature of code involved in photonic chip design. In this paper, we introduce PICBench, the first benchmarking and evaluation framework specifically designed to automate PIC design generation using LLMs, where the generated output takes the form of a netlist. Our benchmark consists of dozens of meticulously crafted PIC design problems, spanning from fundamental device designs to more complex circuit-level designs. It automatically evaluates both the syntax and functionality of generated PIC designs by comparing simulation outputs with expert-written solutions, leveraging an open-source simulator. We evaluate a range of existing LLMs, while also conducting comparative tests on various prompt engineering techniques to enhance LLM performance in automated PIC design. The results reveal the challenges and potential of LLMs in the PIC design domain, offering insights into the key areas that require further research and development to optimize automation in this field. Our benchmark and evaluation code is available at https://github.com/PICDA/PICBench.
Synthetic text generation offers a promising approach to alleviating data scarcity in low-resource languages. However, its effectiveness is inherently limited for languages that are scarcely represented, or entirely absent, in an LLM's pretraining data. At the same time, many such languages have human-curated vocabularies that provide rich lexical and semantic information, often accompanied by grammatical information such as part-of-speech labels. In this work, we ask whether LLMs can leverage these resources to generate coherent text in extremely low-resource and unseen languages. We introduce a framework that combines human-curated vocabularies with a small number of human-written exemplars that provide syntactic signals, while sampling candidate words according to a Zipfian distribution. Across languages with varying levels of resource availability, we evaluate the generated text using lexical diversity, off-target ratio, and human judgments of fluency. Our results show that reasoning-enabled LLMs can generate fluent text even in extremely low-resource languages, with particularly strong results at the sentence level and promising performance at the paragraph level. Our findings highlight a practical pathway for bootstrapping synthetic data in low-resource languages, expanding the amount of usable text even when existing digital resources are extremely limited. Our source code is available at https://github.com/michaelsinanta/vocab2text.
We propose a new family of efficient and expressive deep generative models of graphs, called Graph Recurrent Attention Networks (GRANs). Our model generates graphs one block of nodes and associated edges at a time. The block size and sampling stride allow us to trade off sample quality for efficiency. Compared to previous RNN-based graph generative models, our framework better captures the auto-regressive conditioning between the already-generated and to-be-generated parts of the graph using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with attention. This not only reduces the dependency on node ordering but also bypasses the long-term bottleneck caused by the sequential nature of RNNs. Moreover, we parameterize the output distribution per block using a mixture of Bernoulli, which captures the correlations among generated edges within the block. Finally, we propose to handle node orderings in generation by marginalizing over a family of canonical orderings. On standard benchmarks, we achieve state-of-the-art time efficiency and sample quality compared to previous models. Additionally, we show our model is capable of generating large graphs of up to 5K nodes with good quality. To the best of our knowledge, GRAN is the first deep graph generative model that can scale to this size. Our code is released at: https://github.com/lrjconan/GRAN.
Image and video synthesis are closely related areas aiming at generating content from noise. While rapid progress has been demonstrated in improving image-based models to handle large resolutions, high-quality renderings, and wide variations in image content, achieving comparable video generation results remains problematic. We present a framework that leverages contemporary image generators to render high-resolution videos. We frame the video synthesis problem as discovering a trajectory in the latent space of a pre-trained and fixed image generator. Not only does such a framework render high-resolution videos, but it also is an order of magnitude more computationally efficient. We introduce a motion generator that discovers the desired trajectory, in which content and motion are disentangled. With such a representation, our framework allows for a broad range of applications, including content and motion manipulation. Furthermore, we introduce a new task, which we call cross-domain video synthesis, in which the image and motion generators are trained on disjoint datasets belonging to different domains. This allows for generating moving objects for which the desired video data is not available. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the advantages of our methods over existing video generation techniques. Code will be released at https://github.com/snap-research/MoCoGAN-HD.
Photovoltaic (PV) energy is rapidly growing and key to mitigating the energy crisis. However, distributed PV generation, which amounts to half of the PV installed capacity, is typically unavailable to transmission system operators (TSOs), making it increasingly difficult to balance the load and supply and avoid grid congestions. To assess distributed PV generation, TSOs need precise knowledge regarding the metadata of distributed PV installations. Many remote sensing-based approaches have been proposed to map these installations in recent years. However, to use these methods in industrial processes, assessing their accuracy over the mapping area, i.e., the area covered by the model during deployment, is necessary. We define the downstream task accuracy (DTA) as the accuracy over the mapping area, automatically computed using publicly available data sources and the model's outputs and expressed in an interpretable way for operators. We benchmark existing models for distributed PV mapping and show how they perform in terms of DTA. We show that the accuracy computed on the test set overestimates by about 30 percentage points the accuracy on the mapping area. Our approach paves the way for safer integration of deep-learning-based pipelines for remote PV mapping. Code is available at https://github.com/gabrielkasmi/deeppvmapper.
Dense video captioning aims to generate corresponding text descriptions for a series of events in the untrimmed video, which can be divided into two sub-tasks, event detection and event captioning. Unlike previous works that tackle the two sub-tasks separately, recent works have focused on enhancing the inter-task association between the two sub-tasks. However, designing inter-task interactions for event detection and captioning is not trivial due to the large differences in their task specific solutions. Besides, previous event detection methods normally ignore temporal dependencies between events, leading to event redundancy or inconsistency problems. To tackle above the two defects, in this paper, we define event detection as a sequence generation task and propose a unified pre-training and fine-tuning framework to naturally enhance the inter-task association between event detection and captioning. Since the model predicts each event with previous events as context, the inter-dependency between events is fully exploited and thus our model can detect more diverse and consistent events in the video. Experiments on the ActivityNet dataset show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, and can be further boosted when pre-trained on extra large-scale video-text data. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/QiQAng/UEDVC}.
Prompting, which casts downstream applications as language modeling tasks, has shown to be sample efficient compared to standard fine-tuning with pre-trained models. However, one pitfall of prompting is the need of manually-designed patterns, whose outcome can be unintuitive and requires large validation sets to tune. To tackle the challenge, we propose AutoSeq, a fully automatic prompting method: (1) We adopt natural language prompts on sequence-to-sequence models, enabling free-form generation and larger label search space; (2) We propose label sequences -- phrases with indefinite lengths to verbalize the labels -- which eliminate the need of manual templates and are more expressive than single label words; (3) We use beam search to automatically generate a large amount of label sequence candidates and propose contrastive re-ranking to get the best combinations. AutoSeq significantly outperforms other no-manual-design methods, such as soft prompt tuning, adapter tuning, and automatic search on single label words; the generated label sequences are even better than curated manual ones on a variety of tasks. Our method reveals the potential of sequence-to-sequence models in few-shot learning and sheds light on a path to generic and automatic prompting. The source code of this paper can be obtained from https://github.com/thunlp/Seq2Seq-Prompt.
We present Flow-Guided Density Ratio Learning (FDRL), a simple and scalable approach to generative modeling which builds on the stale (time-independent) approximation of the gradient flow of entropy-regularized f-divergences introduced in recent work. Specifically, the intractable time-dependent density ratio is approximated by a stale estimator given by a GAN discriminator. This is sufficient in the case of sample refinement, where the source and target distributions of the flow are close to each other. However, this assumption is invalid for generation and a naive application of the stale estimator fails due to the large chasm between the two distributions. FDRL proposes to train a density ratio estimator such that it learns from progressively improving samples during the training process. We show that this simple method alleviates the density chasm problem, allowing FDRL to generate images of dimensions as high as $128\times128$, as well as outperform existing gradient flow baselines on quantitative benchmarks. We also show the flexibility of FDRL with two use cases. First, unconditional FDRL can be easily composed with external classifiers to perform class-conditional generation. Second, FDRL can be directly applied to unpaired image-to-image translation with no modifications needed to the framework. Our code is publicly available at ttps://github.com/clear-nus/fdrl.
The task of condensing large chunks of textual information into concise and structured tables has gained attention recently due to the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their potential benefit for downstream tasks, such as text summarization and text mining. Previous approaches often generate tables that directly replicate information from the text, limiting their applicability in broader contexts, as text-to-table generation in real-life scenarios necessitates information extraction, reasoning, and integration. However, there is a lack of both datasets and methodologies towards this task. In this paper, we introduce LiveSum, a new benchmark dataset created for generating summary tables of competitions based on real-time commentary texts. We evaluate the performances of state-of-the-art LLMs on this task in both fine-tuning and zero-shot settings, and additionally propose a novel pipeline called $T^3$(Text-Tuple-Table) to improve their performances. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that LLMs still struggle with this task even after fine-tuning, while our approach can offer substantial performance gains without explicit training. Further analyses demonstrate that our method exhibits strong generalization abilities, surpassing previous approaches on several other text-to-table datasets. Our code and data can be found at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/LiveSum.
In this past year, large language models (LLMs) have had remarkable success in domains outside the traditional natural language processing, and people are starting to explore the usage of LLMs in more general and close to application domains like code generation, travel planning, and robot controls. Connecting these LLMs with great capacity and external tools, people are building the so-called LLM agents, which are supposed to help people do all kinds of work in everyday life. In all these domains, the prompt to the LLMs has been shown to make a big difference in what the LLM would generate and thus affect the performance of the LLM agents. Therefore, automatic prompt engineering has become an important question for many researchers and users of LLMs. In this paper, we propose a novel method, \textsc{RePrompt}, which does "gradient descent" to optimize the step-by-step instructions in the prompt of the LLM agents based on the chat history obtained from interactions with LLM agents. By optimizing the prompt, the LLM will learn how to plan in specific domains. We have used experiments in PDDL generation and travel planning to show that our method could generally improve the performance for different reasoning tasks when using the updated prompt as the initial prompt.
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased their proficiency in answering natural language queries. However, their effectiveness is hindered by limited domain-specific knowledge, raising concerns about the reliability of their responses. We introduce a hybrid system that augments LLMs with domain-specific knowledge graphs (KGs), thereby aiming to enhance factual correctness using a KG-based retrieval approach. We focus on a medical KG to demonstrate our methodology, which includes (1) pre-processing, (2) Cypher query generation, (3) Cypher query processing, (4) KG retrieval, and (5) LLM-enhanced response generation. We evaluate our system on a curated dataset of 69 samples, achieving a precision of 78\% in retrieving correct KG nodes. Our findings indicate that the hybrid system surpasses a standalone LLM in accuracy and completeness, as verified by an LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation method. This positions the system as a promising tool for applications that demand factual correctness and completeness, such as target identification -- a critical process in pinpointing biological entities for disease treatment or crop enhancement. Moreover, its intuitive search interface and ability to provide accurate responses within seconds make it well-suited for time-sensitive, precision-focused research contexts. We publish the source code together with the dataset and the prompt templates used.
The scientific research paradigm is undergoing a profound transformation owing to the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Recent works demonstrate that various AI-assisted research methods can largely improve research efficiency by improving data analysis, accelerating computation, and fostering novel idea generation. To further move towards the ultimate goal (i.e., automatic scientific research), in this paper, we propose Dolphin, the first closed-loop open-ended auto-research framework to further build the entire process of human scientific research. Dolphin can generate research ideas, perform experiments, and get feedback from experimental results to generate higher-quality ideas. More specifically, Dolphin first generates novel ideas based on relevant papers which are ranked by the topic and task attributes. Then, the codes are automatically generated and debugged with the exception-traceback-guided local code structure. Finally, Dolphin automatically analyzes the results of each idea and feeds the results back to the next round of idea generation. Experiments are conducted on the benchmark datasets of different topics and results show that Dolphin can generate novel ideas continuously and complete the experiment in a loop. We highlight that Dolphin can automatically propose methods that are comparable to the state-of-the-art in some tasks such as 2D image classification and 3D point classification.
Educational question generation (EQG) is a crucial component of intelligent educational systems, significantly aiding self-assessment, active learning, and personalized education. While EQG systems have emerged, existing datasets typically rely on predefined, carefully edited texts, failing to represent real-world classroom content, including lecture speech with a set of complementary slides. To bridge this gap, we collect a dataset of educational questions based on lectures from real-world classrooms. On this realistic dataset, we find that current methods for EQG struggle with accurately generating questions from educational videos, particularly in aligning with specific timestamps and target answers. Common challenges include selecting informative contexts from extensive transcripts and ensuring generated questions meaningfully incorporate the target answer. To address the challenges, we introduce a novel framework utilizing large language models for dynamically selecting and rewriting contexts based on target timestamps and answers. First, our framework selects contexts from both lecture transcripts and video keyframes based on answer relevance and temporal proximity. Then, we integrate the contexts selected from both modalities and rewrite them into answer-containing knowledge statements, to enhance the logical connection between the contexts and the desired answer. This approach significantly improves the quality and relevance of the generated questions. Our dataset and code are released in https://github.com/mengxiayu/COSER.
Electronic design automation (EDA) workflows remain highly fragmented, requiring engineers to coordinate heterogeneous representations, specialised software tools, and iterative verification across multiple design stages. Although large language models have brought more general reasoning and code-generation capabilities to EDA, many existing approaches remain focused on isolated tasks and struggle to plan, verify, and repair designs autonomously within executable engineering environments. Here we introduce ChipOmni, a knowledge-enhanced, context-evolving AI agent framework for EDA. ChipOmni integrates multimodal understanding, dynamic planning, multi-agent collaboration, and verification-driven tool interaction into a unified autonomous system. By continually incorporating feedback from external engineering tools, the framework maintains an evolving task context, integrates domain knowledge, and iteratively refines intermediate designs. Across benchmarks for analog circuit, RTL, testbench, and formal-assertion generation, ChipOmni improves multiple task-specific measures over the evaluated baselines and solves all 30 AnalogCoder-Pro tasks. In a long-horizon case study, ChipOmni advances a natural-language RISC-V specification through three design levels to a micro-SoC GDSII layout that passes physical sign-off, without human intervention after initialization. Together, these results show that ChipOmni can coordinate verification-driven design across heterogeneous tasks and sustain long-horizon engineering workflows, advancing a shift from fragmented, tool-centred processes towards agent-centred, closed-loop systems.
While Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) are theoretically well-suited for iterative refinement due to their non-causal structure, off-the-shelf masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) often fail to reliably revise incorrect tokens in practice. The key challenge is that the model cannot tell correct from erroneous visible tokens: standard MDLM training supervises only masked positions, undermining confidence-guided refinement. We study corrective behavior in DLMs, the ability to assign lower confidence to incorrect tokens and iteratively refine them while preserving correct content. Under matched compute and data, we show that conventional masked-diffusion fine-tuning induces much less of this capability than a correction-oriented post-training principle that explicitly supervises visible corrupted tokens, which enables discriminative confidence and targeted refinement. We further find that also supervising clean visible tokens, as in BERT- or GIDD-style training, stops remask-based refinement from improving with additional steps. To evaluate it, we introduce the Code Revision Benchmark, a controllable, executable benchmark for error localization and in-place correction. The effect transfers from a 0.5B model to LLaDA-8B and persists, with a smaller margin, when corruptions are drawn from the base model's own most plausible predictions. The same error-aware confidence also makes parallel decoding more effective. In HumanEval(+) code completion at 0.5B, mathematical reasoning at 16B, and high-entropy parallel decoding with remasking (ParallelBench), models trained with our objective outperform standard masked-diffusion fine-tuning under matched compute, and outperform the base model on HumanEval(+), MATH, and the high-entropy ParallelBench average; at 8B, neither objective improves from-scratch generation over the base model. Code and data: https://github.com/zhangshuibai/CDLM
Many of the most fundamental laws of nature can be formulated as partial differential equations (PDEs). Understanding these equations is, therefore, of exceptional importance for many branches of modern science and engineering. However, since the general solution of many PDEs is unknown, the efficient approximate solution of these equations is one of humanity's greatest challenges. While multigrid represents one of the most effective methods for solving PDEs numerically, in many cases, the design of an efficient or at least working multigrid solver is an open problem. This thesis demonstrates that grammar-guided genetic programming, an evolutionary program synthesis technique, can discover multigrid methods of unprecedented structure that achieve a high degree of efficiency and generalization. For this purpose, we develop a novel context-free grammar that enables the automated generation of multigrid methods in a symbolically-manipulable formal language, based on which we can apply the same multigrid-based solver to problems of different sizes without having to adapt its internal structure. Treating the automated design of an efficient multigrid method as a program synthesis task allows us to find novel sequences of multigrid operations, including the combination of different smoothing and coarse-grid correction steps on each level of the discretization hierarchy. To prove the feasibility of this approach, we present its implementation in the form of the Python framework EvoStencils, which is freely available as open-source software. This implementation comprises all steps from representing the algorithmic sequence of a multigrid method in the form of a directed acyclic graph of Python objects to its automatic generation and optimization using the capabilities of the code generation framework ExaStencils and the evolutionary computation library DEAP.
Manim supports precise, programmatic video generation, but a successfully rendered educational animation can still have visual defects, missing explanations, or incorrect content. Rendering does not directly identify the code changes needed to correct these visual failures, so feedback-driven revision is needed. Existing agentic frameworks use iterative rendering and revision but typically rely on large models, often proprietary. Existing Manim datasets primarily contain final programs and often lack quality verification and the trajectories of feedback and revisions needed to learn this refinement process. We introduce ManimData and ManimCode, a data and training framework for feedback-driven educational animation generation. We construct ManimData through a render-guided pipeline that iteratively generates, executes, reviews, and revises Manim programs with retrieved API documentation. Its 24,034 render-verified, quality-filtered records preserve intermediate programs, execution errors, visual critiques, and corrective revisions. We use role-conditioned supervised fine-tuning on these trajectories to train ManimCode, a single 4B model, to write, review, and revise animation programs. To improve correction of errors that differ from those in the collected trajectories, we then train the Reviser with reinforcement learning on self-generated states, using rendering outcomes and reference-free quality feedback. ManimCode achieves 96.6% and 97.0% render success on ManimData-test and ManimBench, compared with 52.6% and 82.0% for the untrained 4B model under the same inference setup, while also improving video quality scores from 2.48 to 2.94 and from 3.00 to 3.44. Integrating ManimCode into two long-form educational video generation systems increases completed videos from 19/117 to 107/117 and from 53/239 to 239/239, alongside improvements in educational effectiveness and visual quality.
AI-driven image generation has improved significantly in recent years. Generative adversarial networks (GANs), like StyleGAN, are able to generate high-quality realistic data and have artistic control over the output, as well. In this work, we present StyleT2F, a method of controlling the output of StyleGAN2 using text, in order to be able to generate a detailed human face from textual description. We utilize StyleGAN's latent space to manipulate different facial features and conditionally sample the required latent code, which embeds the facial features mentioned in the input text. Our method proves to capture the required features correctly and shows consistency between the input text and the output images. Moreover, our method guarantees disentanglement on manipulating a wide range of facial features that sufficiently describes a human face.
We present LiDARGen, a novel, effective, and controllable generative model that produces realistic LiDAR point cloud sensory readings. Our method leverages the powerful score-matching energy-based model and formulates the point cloud generation process as a stochastic denoising process in the equirectangular view. This model allows us to sample diverse and high-quality point cloud samples with guaranteed physical feasibility and controllability. We validate the effectiveness of our method on the challenging KITTI-360 and NuScenes datasets. The quantitative and qualitative results show that our approach produces more realistic samples than other generative models. Furthermore, LiDARGen can sample point clouds conditioned on inputs without retraining. We demonstrate that our proposed generative model could be directly used to densify LiDAR point clouds. Our code is available at: https://www.zyrianov.org/lidargen/
In the analysis of optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) images, the operation of segmenting specific targets is necessary. Existing methods typically train on supervised datasets with limited samples (approximately a few hundred), which can lead to overfitting. To address this, the low-rank adaptation technique is adopted for foundation model fine-tuning and proposed corresponding prompt point generation strategies to process various segmentation tasks on OCTA datasets. This method is named SAM-OCTA and has been experimented on the publicly available OCTA-500 dataset. While achieving state-of-the-art performance metrics, this method accomplishes local vessel segmentation as well as effective artery-vein segmentation, which was not well-solved in previous works. The code is available at: https://github.com/ShellRedia/SAM-OCTA.