Despite remarkable advancements in text-to-image person re-identification (TIReID) facilitated by the breakthrough of cross-modal embedding models, existing methods often struggle to distinguish challenging candidate images due to intrinsic limitations, such as network architecture and data quality. To address these issues, we propose an Interactive Cross-modal Learning framework (ICL), which leverages human-centered interaction to enhance the discriminability of text queries through external multimodal knowledge. To achieve this, we propose a plug-and-play Test-time Humane-centered Interaction (THI) module, which performs visual question answering focused on human characteristics, facilitating multi-round interactions with a multimodal large language model (MLLM) to align query intent with latent target images. Specifically, THI refines user queries based on the MLLM responses to reduce the gap to the best-matching images, thereby boosting ranking accuracy. Additionally, to address the limitation of low-quality training texts, we introduce a novel Reorganization Data Augmentation (RDA) strategy based on information enrichment and diversity enhancement to enhance query discriminability by enriching, decomposing, and reorganizing person descriptions. Extensive experiments on four TIReID benchmarks, i.e., CUHK-PEDES, ICFG-PEDES, RSTPReid, and UFine6926, demonstrate that our method achieves remarkable performance with substantial improvement.
With the proliferation of large language model (LLM) applications since 2022, their use in education has sparked both excitement and concern. Recent studies consistently highlight students' (mis)use of LLMs can hinder learning outcomes. This work aims to teach students how to effectively prompt LLMs to improve their learning. We first proposed pedagogical prompting, a theoretically-grounded new concept to elicit learning-oriented responses from LLMs. To move from concept design to a proof-of-concept learning intervention in real educational settings, we selected early undergraduate CS education (CS1/CS2) as the example context. We began with a formative survey study with instructors (N=36) teaching early-stage undergraduate-level CS courses to inform the instructional design based on classroom needs. Based on their insights, we designed and developed a learning intervention through an interactive system with scenario-based instruction to train pedagogical prompting skills. Finally, we evaluated its instructional effectiveness through a user study with CS novice students (N=22) using pre/post-tests. Through mixed methods analyses, our results indicate significant improvements in learners' LLM-based pedagogical help-seeking skills, along with positive attitudes toward the system and increased willingness to use pedagogical prompts in the future. Our contributions include (1) a theoretical framework of pedagogical prompting; (2) empirical insights into current instructor attitudes toward pedagogical prompting; and (3) a learning intervention design with an interactive learning tool and scenario-based instruction leading to promising results on teaching LLM-based help-seeking. Our approach is scalable for broader implementation in classrooms and has the potential to be integrated into tools like ChatGPT as an on-boarding experience to encourage learning-oriented use of generative AI.
With the advancement of Large Language Model (LLM) for natural language processing, this paper presents an intriguing finding: a frozen pre-trained LLM layer can process visual tokens for medical image segmentation tasks. Specifically, we propose a simple hybrid structure that integrates a pre-trained, frozen LLM layer within the CNN encoder-decoder segmentation framework (LLM4Seg). Surprisingly, this design improves segmentation performance with a minimal increase in trainable parameters across various modalities, including ultrasound, dermoscopy, polypscopy, and CT scans. Our in-depth analysis reveals the potential of transferring LLM's semantic awareness to enhance segmentation tasks, offering both improved global understanding and better local modeling capabilities. The improvement proves robust across different LLMs, validated using LLaMA and DeepSeek.
We present Programmable-Room, a framework which interactively generates and edits a 3D room mesh, given natural language instructions. For precise control of a room's each attribute, we decompose the challenging task into simpler steps such as creating plausible 3D coordinates for room meshes, generating panorama images for the texture, constructing 3D meshes by integrating the coordinates and panorama texture images, and arranging furniture. To support the various decomposed tasks with a unified framework, we incorporate visual programming (VP). VP is a method that utilizes a large language model (LLM) to write a Python-like program which is an ordered list of necessary modules for the various tasks given in natural language. We develop most of the modules. Especially, for the texture generating module, we utilize a pretrained large-scale diffusion model to generate panorama images conditioned on text and visual prompts (i.e., layout, depth, and semantic map) simultaneously. Specifically, we enhance the panorama image generation quality by optimizing the training objective with a 1D representation of a panorama scene obtained from bidirectional LSTM. We demonstrate Programmable-Room's flexibility in generating and editing 3D room meshes, and prove our framework's superiority to an existing model quantitatively and qualitatively. Project page is available in https://jihyun0510.github.io/Programmable_Room_Page/.
A significant ``modality gap" exists between the abundance of text-only data and the increasing power of multimodal models. This work systematically investigates whether images generated on-the-fly by Text-to-Image (T2I) models can serve as a valuable complementary modality for text-centric tasks. Through a comprehensive evaluation framework on text classification, we analyze the impact of critical variables, including T2I model quality, prompt engineering strategies, and multimodal fusion architectures. Our findings demonstrate that this``synthetic perception" can yield significant performance gains, even when augmenting strong large language model baselines. However, we find the effectiveness of this approach is highly conditional, depending critically on the semantic alignment between text and the generated image, the inherent ``visual groundability" of the task, and the generative fidelity of the T2I model. Our work establishes the first rigorous benchmark for this paradigm, providing a clear analysis of its potential and current limitations, and demonstrating its viability as a pathway to enrich language understanding in traditionally unimodal scenarios.
As conversational agents increasingly engage in emotionally supportive dialogue, it is important to understand how closely their interactions resemble those in traditional therapy settings. This study investigates whether the concerns shared with a robot align with those shared in human-to-human (H2H) therapy sessions, and whether robot responses semantically mirror those of human therapists. We analyzed two datasets: one of interactions between users and professional therapists (Hugging Face's NLP Mental Health Conversations), and another involving supportive conversations with a social robot (QTrobot from LuxAI) powered by a large language model (LLM, GPT-3.5). Using sentence embeddings and K-means clustering, we assessed cross-agent thematic alignment by applying a distance-based cluster-fitting method that evaluates whether responses from one agent type map to clusters derived from the other, and validated it using Euclidean distances. Results showed that 90.88% of robot conversation disclosures could be mapped to clusters from the human therapy dataset, suggesting shared topical structure. For matched clusters, we compared the subjects as well as therapist and robot responses using Transformer, Word2Vec, and BERT embeddings, revealing strong semantic overlap in subjects' disclosures in both datasets, as well as in the responses given to similar human disclosure themes across agent types (robot vs. human therapist). These findings highlight both the parallels and boundaries of robot-led support conversations and their potential for augmenting mental health interventions.
Hyper-parameters are essential and critical for the performance of communication algorithms. However, current hyper-parameters tuning methods for warm-start particles swarm optimization with cross and mutation (WS-PSO-CM) algortihm for radio map-enabled unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) trajectory and communication are primarily heuristic-based, exhibiting low levels of automation and unsatisfactory performance. In this paper, we design an large language model (LLM) agent for automatic hyper-parameters-tuning, where an iterative framework and model context protocol (MCP) are applied. In particular, the LLM agent is first setup via a profile, which specifies the mission, background, and output format. Then, the LLM agent is driven by the prompt requirement, and iteratively invokes WS-PSO-CM algorithm for exploration. Finally, the LLM agent autonomously terminates the loop and returns a set of hyper-parameters. Our experiment results show that the minimal sum-rate achieved by hyper-parameters generated via our LLM agent is significantly higher than those by both human heuristics and random generation methods. This indicates that an LLM agent with PSO knowledge and WS-PSO-CM algorithm background is useful in finding high-performance hyper-parameters.
GPU memory bandwidth is the main bottleneck for low-latency Large Language Model (LLM) inference. Speculative decoding leverages idle GPU compute by using a lightweight drafter to propose K tokens, which the LLM verifies in parallel, boosting token throughput. In conventional dense LLMs, all model weights are fetched each iteration, so speculation adds no latency overhead. Emerging Mixture of Experts (MoE) models activate only a subset of weights per token, greatly reducing data movement. However, we show that speculation is ineffective for MoEs: draft tokens collectively activate more weights, increasing data movement and verification time by 2-3x. When token throughput gains fail to offset this overhead, speculation causes slowdowns up to 1.5x, making it infeasible. Even when useful, the optimal K varies by task, model, and even between requests and iterations. Thus, despite widespread use in dense LLMs, speculation remains impractical in leading MoEs. We present Cascade, a utility-driven framework that selectively enables speculation to avoid slowdowns and dynamically tunes K to accelerate MoE serving. Cascade uses a lightweight metric, speculation utility, the ratio of token gains to verification cost, which shows iteration-level locality, enabling periodic decisions via short test and longer set phases. For each request, Cascade disables speculation if utility drops below one during testing, and when utility exceeds one, tests multiple K-values to choose the utility-maximizing K for the set phase. We implement Cascade in vLLM and evaluate it on five popular MoEs with workloads spanning code, math, extraction, and mixed tasks. Cascade limits slowdown to 5% (vs. 1.5x) and improves throughput by 7-14% over static K, making speculative decoding practical for MoEs.
The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has created an unprecedented demand for fine-tuning models for specialized domains, such as medical science. While federated learning (FL) offers a decentralized and privacy-preserving approach to collaboratively fine-tune LLMs without sharing raw data, it presents significant challenges, particularly in performance and managing large model sizes efficiently. In this paper, we introduce GradualDiff-Fed, an FL framework designed explicitly for LLMs, and their challenge of handling the high parameter size. GradualDiff-Fed reduces communication costs by transmitting only the difference of model weights rather than the entire model during training rounds. Such an approach significantly improves scalability and communication efficiency, making it more feasible to fine-tune LLMs across distributed clients without compromising performance. Our evaluation demonstrates that GradualDiff-Fed achieves performance on par with centralized training while drastically reducing communication overhead. These results highlight the potential of GradualDiff-Fed as an efficient solution for fine-tuning large models from distributed data in privacy-preserving settings without comprising performance.
In the design process of the analog circuit pre-layout phase, device sizing is an important step in determining whether an analog circuit can meet the required performance metrics. Many existing techniques extract the circuit sizing task as a mathematical optimization problem to solve and continuously improve the optimization efficiency from a mathematical perspective. But they ignore the automatic introduction of prior knowledge, fail to achieve effective pruning of the search space, which thereby leads to a considerable compression margin remaining in the search space. To alleviate this problem, we propose a large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent framework for analog circuits' sizing relationships extraction from academic papers. The search space in the sizing process can be effectively pruned based on the sizing relationship extracted by this framework. Eventually, we conducted tests on 3 types of circuits, and the optimization efficiency was improved by $2.32 \sim 26.6 \times$. This work demonstrates that the LLM can effectively prune the search space for analog circuit sizing, providing a new solution for the combination of LLMs and conventional analog circuit design automation methods.
With the increasing complexity and rapid expansion of the scale of AI systems in cloud platforms, the log data generated during system operation is massive, unstructured, and semantically ambiguous, which brings great challenges to fault location and system self-repair. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes an intelligent log processing and automatic debugging framework based on Large Language Model (LLM), named Intelligent Debugger (LLM-ID). This method is extended on the basis of the existing pre-trained Transformer model, and integrates a multi-stage semantic inference mechanism to realize the context understanding of system logs and the automatic reconstruction of fault chains. Firstly, the system log is dynamically structured, and the unsupervised clustering and embedding mechanism is used to extract the event template and semantic schema. Subsequently, the fine-tuned LLM combined with the multi-round attention mechanism to perform contextual reasoning on the log sequence to generate potential fault assumptions and root cause paths. Furthermore, this paper introduces a reinforcement learning-based policy-guided recovery planner, which is driven by the remediation strategy generated by LLM to support dynamic decision-making and adaptive debugging in the cloud environment. Compared with the existing rule engine or traditional log analysis system, the proposed model has stronger semantic understanding ability, continuous learning ability and heterogeneous environment adaptability. Experiments on the cloud platform log dataset show that LLM-ID improves the fault location accuracy by 16.2%, which is significantly better than the current mainstream methods
This position paper argues that large language model (LLM)-based social simulations should establish clear boundaries to meaningfully contribute to social science research. While LLMs offer promising capabilities for modeling human-like agents compared to traditional agent-based modeling, they face fundamental limitations that constrain their reliability for social pattern discovery. The core issue lies in LLMs' tendency towards an ``average persona'' that lacks sufficient behavioral heterogeneity, a critical requirement for simulating complex social dynamics. We examine three key boundary problems: alignment (simulated behaviors matching real-world patterns), consistency (maintaining coherent agent behavior over time), and robustness (reproducibility under varying conditions). We propose heuristic boundaries for determining when LLM-based simulations can reliably advance social science understanding. We believe that these simulations are more valuable when focusing on (1) collective patterns rather than individual trajectories, (2) agent behaviors aligning with real population averages despite limited variance, and (3) proper validation methods available for testing simulation robustness. We provide a practical checklist to guide researchers in determining the appropriate scope and claims for LLM-based social simulations.
With the rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) in recommendation systems, the computational and communication bottlenecks caused by their massive parameter sizes and large data volumes have become increasingly prominent. This paper systematically investigates two classes of optimization methods-model parallelism and data parallelism-for distributed training of LLMs in recommendation scenarios. For model parallelism, we implement both tensor parallelism and pipeline parallelism, and introduce an adaptive load-balancing mechanism to reduce cross-device communication overhead. For data parallelism, we compare synchronous and asynchronous modes, combining gradient compression and sparsification techniques with an efficient aggregation communication framework to significantly improve bandwidth utilization. Experiments conducted on a real-world recommendation dataset in a simulated service environment demonstrate that our proposed hybrid parallelism scheme increases training throughput by over 30% and improves resource utilization by approximately 20% compared to traditional single-mode parallelism, while maintaining strong scalability and robustness. Finally, we discuss trade-offs among different parallel strategies in online deployment and outline future directions involving heterogeneous hardware integration and automated scheduling technologies.
Large language models (LLMs) have shown significant potential to change how we write, communicate, and create, leading to rapid adoption across society. This dissertation examines how individuals and institutions are adapting to and engaging with this emerging technology through three research directions. First, I demonstrate how the institutional adoption of AI detectors introduces systematic biases, particularly disadvantaging writers of non-dominant language varieties, highlighting critical equity concerns in AI governance. Second, I present novel population-level algorithmic approaches that measure the increasing adoption of LLMs across writing domains, revealing consistent patterns of AI-assisted content in academic peer reviews, scientific publications, consumer complaints, corporate communications, job postings, and international organization press releases. Finally, I investigate LLMs' capability to provide feedback on research manuscripts through a large-scale empirical analysis, offering insights into their potential to support researchers who face barriers in accessing timely manuscript feedback, particularly early-career researchers and those from under-resourced settings.
Backdoor unalignment attacks against Large Language Models (LLMs) enable the stealthy compromise of safety alignment using a hidden trigger while evading normal safety auditing. These attacks pose significant threats to the applications of LLMs in the real-world Large Language Model as a Service (LLMaaS) setting, where the deployed model is a fully black-box system that can only interact through text. Furthermore, the sample-dependent nature of the attack target exacerbates the threat. Instead of outputting a fixed label, the backdoored LLM follows the semantics of any malicious command with the hidden trigger, significantly expanding the target space. In this paper, we introduce BEAT, a black-box defense that detects triggered samples during inference to deactivate the backdoor. It is motivated by an intriguing observation (dubbed the probe concatenate effect), where concatenated triggered samples significantly reduce the refusal rate of the backdoored LLM towards a malicious probe, while non-triggered samples have little effect. Specifically, BEAT identifies whether an input is triggered by measuring the degree of distortion in the output distribution of the probe before and after concatenation with the input. Our method addresses the challenges of sample-dependent targets from an opposite perspective. It captures the impact of the trigger on the refusal signal (which is sample-independent) instead of sample-specific successful attack behaviors. It overcomes black-box access limitations by using multiple sampling to approximate the output distribution. Extensive experiments are conducted on various backdoor attacks and LLMs (including the closed-source GPT-3.5-turbo), verifying the effectiveness and efficiency of our defense. Besides, we also preliminarily verify that BEAT can effectively defend against popular jailbreak attacks, as they can be regarded as 'natural backdoors'.
Although Rust ensures memory safety by default, it also permits the use of unsafe code, which can introduce memory safety vulnerabilities if misused. Unfortunately, existing tools for detecting memory bugs in Rust typically exhibit limited detection capabilities, inadequately handle Rust-specific types, or rely heavily on manual intervention. To address these limitations, we present deepSURF, a tool that integrates static analysis with Large Language Model (LLM)-guided fuzzing harness generation to effectively identify memory safety vulnerabilities in Rust libraries, specifically targeting unsafe code. deepSURF introduces a novel approach for handling generics by substituting them with custom types and generating tailored implementations for the required traits, enabling the fuzzer to simulate user-defined behaviors within the fuzzed library. Additionally, deepSURF employs LLMs to augment fuzzing harnesses dynamically, facilitating exploration of complex API interactions and significantly increasing the likelihood of exposing memory safety vulnerabilities. We evaluated deepSURF on 27 real-world Rust crates, successfully rediscovering 20 known memory safety bugs and uncovering 6 previously unknown vulnerabilities, demonstrating clear improvements over state-of-the-art tools.
With the rapid development of digital technology, AI-driven psychological counseling has gradually become an important research direction in the field of mental health. However, existing models still have deficiencies in dialogue safety, detailed scenario handling, and lightweight deployment. To address these issues, this study proposes PsyLite, a lightweight psychological counseling large language model agent developed based on the base model InternLM2.5-7B-chat. Through a two-stage training strategy (hybrid distillation data fine-tuning and ORPO preference optimization), PsyLite enhances the model's deep-reasoning ability, psychological counseling ability, and safe dialogue ability. After deployment using Ollama and Open WebUI, a custom workflow is created with Pipelines. An innovative conditional RAG is designed to introduce crosstalk humor elements at appropriate times during psychological counseling to enhance user experience and decline dangerous requests to strengthen dialogue safety. Evaluations show that PsyLite outperforms the baseline models in the Chinese general evaluation (CEval), psychological counseling professional evaluation (CPsyCounE), and dialogue safety evaluation (SafeDialBench), particularly in psychological counseling professionalism (CPsyCounE score improvement of 47.6\%) and dialogue safety (\safe{} score improvement of 2.4\%). Additionally, the model uses quantization technology (GGUF q4\_k\_m) to achieve low hardware deployment (5GB memory is sufficient for operation), providing a feasible solution for psychological counseling applications in resource-constrained environments.
Chemical process optimization is crucial to maximize production efficiency and economic performance. Traditional methods, including gradient-based solvers, evolutionary algorithms, and parameter grid searches, become impractical when operating constraints are ill-defined or unavailable, requiring engineers to rely on subjective heuristics to estimate feasible parameter ranges. To address this constraint definition bottleneck, we present a multi-agent framework of large language model (LLM) agents that autonomously infer operating constraints from minimal process descriptions, then collaboratively guide optimization using the inferred constraints. Our AutoGen-based agentic framework employs OpenAI's o3 model, with specialized agents for constraint generation, parameter validation, simulation execution, and optimization guidance. Through two phases - autonomous constraint generation using embedded domain knowledge, followed by iterative multi-agent optimization - the framework eliminates the need for predefined operational bounds. Validated on the hydrodealkylation process across cost, yield, and yield-to-cost ratio metrics, the framework demonstrated competitive performance with conventional optimization methods while achieving better computational efficiency, requiring fewer iterations to converge. Our approach converged in under 20 minutes, achieving a 31-fold speedup over grid search. Beyond computational efficiency, the framework's reasoning-guided search demonstrates sophisticated process understanding, correctly identifying utility trade-offs, and applying domain-informed heuristics. This approach shows significant potential for optimization scenarios where operational constraints are poorly characterized or unavailable, particularly for emerging processes and retrofit applications.
Foundation models (FMs) are catalyzing a transformative shift in materials science (MatSci) by enabling scalable, general-purpose, and multimodal AI systems for scientific discovery. Unlike traditional machine learning models, which are typically narrow in scope and require task-specific engineering, FMs offer cross-domain generalization and exhibit emergent capabilities. Their versatility is especially well-suited to materials science, where research challenges span diverse data types and scales. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of foundation models, agentic systems, datasets, and computational tools supporting this growing field. We introduce a task-driven taxonomy encompassing six broad application areas: data extraction, interpretation and Q\&A; atomistic simulation; property prediction; materials structure, design and discovery; process planning, discovery, and optimization; and multiscale modeling. We discuss recent advances in both unimodal and multimodal FMs, as well as emerging large language model (LLM) agents. Furthermore, we review standardized datasets, open-source tools, and autonomous experimental platforms that collectively fuel the development and integration of FMs into research workflows. We assess the early successes of foundation models and identify persistent limitations, including challenges in generalizability, interpretability, data imbalance, safety concerns, and limited multimodal fusion. Finally, we articulate future research directions centered on scalable pretraining, continual learning, data governance, and trustworthiness.
Architectural obfuscation - e.g., permuting hidden-state tensors, linearly transforming embedding tables, or remapping tokens - has recently gained traction as a lightweight substitute for heavyweight cryptography in privacy-preserving large-language-model (LLM) inference. While recent work has shown that these techniques can be broken under dedicated reconstruction attacks, their impact on mechanistic interpretability has not been systematically studied. In particular, it remains unclear whether scrambling a network's internal representations truly thwarts efforts to understand how the model works, or simply relocates the same circuits to an unfamiliar coordinate system. We address this gap by analyzing a GPT-2-small model trained from scratch with a representative obfuscation map. Assuming the obfuscation map is private and the original basis is hidden (mirroring an honest-but-curious server), we apply logit-lens attribution, causal path-patching, and attention-head ablation to locate and manipulate known circuits. Our findings reveal that obfuscation dramatically alters activation patterns within attention heads yet preserves the layer-wise computational graph. This disconnect hampers reverse-engineering of user prompts: causal traces lose their alignment with baseline semantics, and token-level logit attributions become too noisy to reconstruct. At the same time, feed-forward and residual pathways remain functionally intact, suggesting that obfuscation degrades fine-grained interpretability without compromising top-level task performance. These results establish quantitative evidence that architectural obfuscation can simultaneously (i) retain global model behaviour and (ii) impede mechanistic analyses of user-specific content. By mapping where interpretability breaks down, our study provides guidance for future privacy defences and for robustness-aware interpretability tooling.