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Search papers from 30+ top conferences, including NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CVPR, ACL and AAAI. Filter by keyword, then open any paper for its abstract, authors and links.

arXiv

VISHC at PsyDefDetect: Mitigating Data Scarcity in Psychological Defense Classification with Context-Aware Synthetic Augmentation

Hoang-Thuy-Duong Vu, Quoc Cuong Pham, Huy Hieu Pham

Psychological defense mechanisms (PDMs) are unconscious cognitive processes that modulate how individuals perceive and respond to emotional distress. Automatically classifying PDMs from text is clinically valuable but severely hindered by data scarcity and class imbalance, challenges which generative augmentation alone cannot resolve without psychological grounding. In this work, we address these challenges in the PsyDefDetect shared task (BioNLP@ACL 2026) by proposing a context-aware synthetic augmentation framework combined with a hybrid classification model. Our hybrid model integrates contextual language representations with basic clinical features, along with 150 annotated defense items. Experiments demonstrate that definition quality in prompting directly governs generation fidelity and downstream performance. Our method surpasses DMRS Co-Pilot, reaching an accuracy of 58.26% (+40.25%) and a macro-F1 of 24.62% (+15.99%), thereby establishing a strong baseline for psychologically grounded defense mechanism classification in low-resource settings. Source code is available at: https://github.com/htdgv/CASA-PDC.

arXiv

Dependency Parsing Across the Resource Spectrum: Evaluating Architectures on High and Low-Resource Languages

Kevin Guan, Happy Buzaaba, Christiane Fellbaum

Transformer-based models achieve state-of-the-art dependency parsing for high-resource languages, yet their advantage over simpler architectures in low-resource settings remains poorly understood. We evaluate four parsers---the Biaffine LSTM, Stack-Pointer Network, AfroXLMR-large, and RemBERT---across twelve typologically diverse languages, with a focus on low-resource African languages. We find that the Biaffine LSTM consistently outperforms transformer models in low-resource regimes, with transformers recovering their advantage as training data increases. The crossover falls within a resource range typical of treebanks for under-resourced languages. Morphological complexity (measured via MATTR) emerges as a significant secondary predictor of transformers' relative disadvantage after controlling for corpus size. These results indicate that the Biaffine LSTM may be better suited for syntactic tool development in low-resource regimes until sufficient annotated data is available to leverage the representational capacity of pre-trained transformers.

arXiv

SignVerse-2M: A Two-Million-Clip Pose-Native Universe of 55+ Sign Languages

Sen Fang, Hongbin Zhong, Yanxin Zhang, Dimitris N. Metaxas

Existing large-scale sign language resources typically provide supervision only at the level of raw video-text alignment and are often produced in laboratory settings. While such resources are important for semantic understanding, they do not directly provide a unified interface for open-world recognition and translation, or for modern pose-driven sign language video generation frameworks: 1. RGB-based pretrained recognition models depend heavily on fixed backgrounds or clothing conditions during recording, and are less robust in open-world settings than style-agnostic pose-processing models. 2. Recent pose-guided image/video generation models mostly use a unified keypoint representation such as DWPose as their control interface. At present, the sign language field still lacks a data resource that can directly interface with this modern pose-native paradigm while also targeting real-world open scenarios. We present SignVerse-2M, a large-scale multilingual pose-native dataset for sign language pose modeling and evaluation. Built from publicly available multilingual sign language video resources, it applies DWPose in a unified preprocessing pipeline to convert raw videos into 2D pose sequences that can be used directly for modeling, resulting in a consolidated corpus of about two million clips covering more than 55 sign languages. Unlike many laboratory datasets, this resource preserves the recording conditions and speaker diversity of real-world videos while reducing appearance variation through a unified pose representation. Toward this goal, we further provide the data construction pipeline, task definitions, and a simple SignDW Transformer baseline, demonstrating the feasibility of this resource for multilingual pose-space modeling and its compatibility with modern pose-driven pipelines, while discussing the evaluation claims it can support as well as its current limitations.

arXiv

Skill-RAG: Failure-State-Aware Retrieval Augmentation via Hidden-State Probing and Skill Routing

Kai Wei, Raymond Li, Xi Zhu, Zhaoqian Xue, Jiaojiao Han, Jingcheng Niu, Fan Yang

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a foundational paradigm for grounding large language models in external knowledge. While adaptive retrieval mechanisms have improved retrieval efficiency, existing approaches treat post-retrieval failure as a signal to retry rather than to diagnose -- leaving the structural causes of query-evidence misalignment unaddressed. We observe that a significant portion of persistent retrieval failures stem not from the absence of relevant evidence but from an alignment gap between the query and the evidence space. We propose Skill-RAG, a failure-aware RAG framework that couples a lightweight hidden-state prober with a prompt-based skill router. The prober gates retrieval at two pipeline stages; upon detecting a failure state, the skill router diagnoses the underlying cause and selects among four retrieval skills -- query rewriting, question decomposition, evidence focusing, and an exit skill for truly irreducible cases -- to correct misalignment before the next generation attempt. Experiments across multiple open-domain QA and complex reasoning benchmarks show that Skill-RAG substantially improves accuracy on hard cases persisting after multi-turn retrieval, with particularly strong gains on out-of-distribution datasets. Representation-space analyses further reveal that the proposed skills occupy structured, separable regions of the failure state space, supporting the view that query-evidence misalignment is a typed rather than monolithic phenomenon.

arXiv

From Plan to Action: How Well Do Agents Follow the Plan?

Shuyang Liu, Saman Dehghan, Jatin Ganhotra, Martin Hirzel, Reyhaneh Jabbarvand

Agents are commonly instructed to follow a task-specific plan for guidance. However, it is unknown to what extent agents actually follow instructed plans. Without such an analysis, determining the extent agents comply with a given plan, it is impossible to assess whether a solution was reached through correct strategic reasoning or through other means, e.g., data contamination or overfitting to a benchmark. This paper presents the first extensive, systematic analysis of plan compliance in programming agents, examining 21,120 trajectories from SWE-agent across four LLMs on SWE-bench Verified and SWE-bench Pro under eight plan variations. Without an explicit plan, agents fall back on internalized workflows during training, which are often incomplete, overfit, or inconsistently applied. Providing the standard plan improves issue resolution, and we observe that periodic plan reminders can mitigate plan violations and improve task success. A subpar plan hurts performance even more than no plan at all. Surprisingly, inserting additional task-relevant phases in the early stage can degrade performance, particularly when these phases do not align with the model's internal problem-solving strategy. These findings call for fine-tuning paradigms that teach models to follow instructed plans, rather than encoding task-specific plans in them, so that they reason and act adaptively, rather than memorizing workflows.

arXiv

Joint Optimization of Reasoning and Dual-Memory for Self-Learning Diagnostic Agent

Bingxuan Li, Simo Du, Yue Guo

Clinical expertise improves not only by acquiring medical knowledge, but by accumulating experience that yields reusable diagnostic patterns. Recent LLMs-based diagnostic agents have shown promising progress in clinical reasoning for decision support. However, most approaches treat cases independently, limiting experience reuse and continual adaptation. We propose SEA, a self-learning diagnostic agent with cognitively inspired dual-memory module. We design a reinforcement training framework tailored to our designed agent for joint optimization of reasoning and memory management. We evaluate SEA in two complementary settings. On standard evaluation with MedCaseReasoning dataset, SEA achieves 92.46% accuracy, outperforming the strongest baseline by +19.6%, demonstrating the benefit of jointly optimizing reasoning and memory. On the long-horizon with ER-Reason dataset, SEA attains the best final accuracy (0.7214) and the largest improvement (+0.35 Acc@100), while baseline methods show limited or unstable gains. Expert evaluation further indicates that rules consolidated from SEA show strong clinical correctness, usefulness and trust, suggesting that the induced rules in dual-memory module are reliable and practically meaningful. Overall, SEA improves both diagnostic reasoning ability and continual learning by effectively transforming experience into reusable knowledge.

arXiv

How Long Reasoning Chains Influence LLMs' Judgment of Answer Factuality

Minzhu Tu, Shiyu Ni, Keping Bi

Large language models (LLMs) has been widely adopted as a scalable surrogate for human evaluation, yet such judges remain imperfect and susceptible to surface-level biases. One possible reason is that these judges lack sufficient information in assessing answer correctness. With the rise of reasoning-capable models, exposing a generator's reasoning content to the judge provides richer information and is a natural candidate for improving judgment accuracy. However, its actual impact on judge behavior remains understudied. In this paper, we systematically investigate how access to reasoning chains affects LLM-based judgment across factual question answering (QA) and mathematical reasoning benchmarks. We find that weak judges are easily swayed by reasoning presence, frequently accepting incorrect answers accompanied by fluent reasoning, while strong judges can partially leverage reasoning as informative evidence. Nevertheless, even strong judges are misled by seemingly high-quality reasoning chains. Controlled experiments further reveal that both fluency and factuality of reasoning chains are critical signals driving judge decisions. These findings highlight the need for more robust LLM judges that can distinguish genuine reasoning quality from superficial fluency when evaluating modern reasoning models.

arXiv

AfriNLLB: Efficient Translation Models for African Languages

Yasmin Moslem, Aman Kassahun Wassie, Amanuel Gizachew Abebe

In this work, we present AfriNLLB, a series of lightweight models for efficient translation from and into African languages. AfriNLLB supports 15 language pairs (30 translation directions), including Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, Amharic, Somali, Zulu, Lingala, Afrikaans, Wolof, and Egyptian Arabic, as well as other African Union official languages such as Arabic (MSA), French, Portuguese, and Spanish. Our training data covers bidirectional translation between English and 13 languages, and between French and two languages (Lingala and Wolof). AfriNLLB models are based on NLLB-200 600M, which we compress using iterative layer pruning and quantization. We fine-tune the pruned models on parallel corpora we curated for African languages, employing knowledge distillation from a larger teacher model. Our work aims at enabling efficient deployment of translation models for African languages in resource-constrained settings. Our evaluation results demonstrate that AfriNLLB models achieve performance comparable to the baseline while being significantly faster. We release two versions of the AfriNLLB models, a Transformers version that allows further fine-tuning and a CTranslate2 version for efficient inference. Moreover, we release all the training data that we used for fine-tuning the baseline and pruned models to facilitate further research.

arXiv

Kimi K2.5: Visual Agentic Intelligence

Kimi Team, Tongtong Bai, Yifan Bai, Yiping Bao, S. H. Cai, Yuan Cao, Ziwei Chai, Y. Charles, H. S. Che, Cheng Chen, Guanduo Chen, Huarong Chen, Jia Chen, Jianlong Chen, Jun Chen, Kefan Chen, Liang Chen, Ruijue Chen, Xinhao Chen, Yanru Chen, Yanxu Chen, Yicun Chen, Yimin Chen, Yingjiang Chen, Yuankun Chen, yujie Chen, Yutian Chen, Zhirong Chen, Ziwei Chen, Dazhi Cheng, Yean Cheng, Minghan Chu, Jialei Cui, Jiaqi Deng, Muxi Diao, Hao Ding, Mengfan Dong, Mengnan Dong, Yuxin Dong, Yuhao Dong, Angang Du, Chenzhuang Du, Dikang Du, Lingxiao Du, Yulun Du, Yu Fan, Shengjun Fang, Qiulin Feng, Yichen Feng, Garimugai Fu, Kelin Fu, Hongcheng Gao, Tong Gao, Yuyao Ge, Shangyi Geng, Chengyang Gong, Xiaochen Gong, Zhuoma GongQue, Qizheng Gu, Xinran Gu, Yicheng Gu, Longyu Guan, Shuhao Guan, Yuanying Guo, Xiaoru Hao, Dailan He, Tianhong He, Weiran He, Wenyang He, Yibo He, Yunjia He, Chao Hong, Hao Hu, Jiaxi Hu, Yangyang Hu, Zhenxing Hu, Ke Huang, Ruiyuan Huang, Weixiao Huang, Zhiqi Huang, Chaobo Jia, Tao Jiang, Zhejun Jiang, Xinyi Jin, Yu Jing, Guokun Lai, Aidi Li, C. Li, Cheng Li, Fang Li, Guanghe Li, Guanyu Li, Haitao Li, Haoyang Li, Jia Li, Jingwei Li, Junxiong Li, Lincan Li, Mo Li, Weihong Li, Wentao Li, Xinhang Li, Xinhao Li, Yang Li, Yanhao Li, Yiwei Li, Yuxiao Li, Zhaowei Li, Zhaoxi Li, Zheming Li, Weilong Liao, Jiawei Lin, Xiaohan Lin, Yibo Lin, Zhishan Lin, Zichao Lin, Cheng Liu, Chenyu Liu, Hongzhang Liu, Liang Liu, Shaowei Liu, Shudong Liu, Shuran Liu, Tianwei Liu, Tianyu Liu, Weizhou Liu, Xiangyan Liu, Yangyang Liu, Yanming Liu, Yibo Liu, Yuanxin Liu, Zhengying Liu, Zhongnuo Liu, Enzhe Lu, Haoyu Lu, Zhiyuan Lu, G. Luo, Junyu Luo, Tongxu Luo, Yashuo Luo, Long Ma, Shaoguang Mao, Yuan Mei, Xin Men, Fanqing Meng, Zhiyong Meng, Yibo Miao, Minqing Ni, Kun Ouyang, Siyuan Pan, Bo Pang, Yuchao Qian, Ruoyu Qin, Zeyu Qin, Jiezhong Qiu, Bowen Qu, Zeyu Shang, Youbo Shao, Tianxiao Shen, Zhennan Shen, Juanfeng Shi, Lidong Shi, Shengyuan Shi, Feifan Song, Pengwei Song, Tianhui Song, Xiaoxi Song, Hongjin SU, Jianlin Su, Zhaochen Su, Lin Sui, Jinsong Sun, Junyao Sun, Tongyu Sun, Flood Sung, Yunpeng Tai, Chuning Tang, Heyi Tang, Xiaojuan Tang, Zhengyang Tang, Jiawen Tao, Shiyuan Teng, Chaoran Tian, Pengfei Tian, Bowen Wang, Chensi Wang, Chuang Wang, Congcong Wang, Dingkun Wang, Dinglu Wang, Dongliang Wang, Feng Wang, Hailong Wang, Haiming Wang, Hao Wang, Hengzhi Wang, Huaqing Wang, Hui Wang, Jiahao Wang, Jinhong Wang, Jiuzheng Wang, Kaixin Wang, Linian Wang, Qibin Wang, Shengjie Wang, Shuyi Wang, Si Wang, Wei Wang, Xiaochen Wang, Xinyuan Wang, Yao Wang, Yejie Wang, Yipu Wang, Yiqin Wang, Yucheng Wang, Yuzhi Wang, Zhaoji Wang, Zhaowei Wang, Zhengtao Wang, Zhexu Wang, Zifan Wang, Zihan Wang, Zizhe Wang, Chu Wei, Ming Wei, Chuan Wen, Zichen Wen, Chengjie Wu, Haoning Wu, Junyan Wu, Rucong Wu, Wenhao Wu, Yuefeng Wu, Yuhao Wu, Yuxin Wu, Zijian Wu, Chenjun Xiao, Jin Xie, Xiaotong Xie, Yuchong Xie, Bowei Xing, Boyu Xu, Jianfan Xu, Jing Xu, Jinjing Xu, L. H. Xu, Lin Xu, Suting Xu, Weixin Xu, Xinbo Xu, Xinran Xu, Yangchuan Xu, Yichang Xu, Yuemeng Xu, Zelai Xu, Ziyao Xu, Junjie Yan, Yuzi Yan, Guangyao Yang, Hao Yang, Junwei Yang, Kai Yang, Ningyuan Yang, Xiaofei Yang, Xinlong Yang, Xinyu Yang, Ying Yang, Yi Yang, Zhen Yang, Zhilin Yang, Zonghan Yang, Haotian Yao, Dan Ye, Haoran Ye, Wenjie Ye, Zhuorui Ye, Peng Yebo, Bohong Yin, Chengzhen Yu, Longhui Yu, Tao Yu, Tianxiang Yu, Enming Yuan, Mengjie Yuan, Xiaokun Yuan, Yang Yue, Weihao Zeng, Dunyuan Zha, Haobing Zhan, Dehao Zhang, Hao Zhang, Jin Zhang, Puqi Zhang, Qiao Zhang, Rui Zhang, Xiaobin Zhang, Xiaoyun Zhang, Y. Zhang, Yadong Zhang, Yangkun Zhang, Yichi Zhang, Yizhi Zhang, Yongting Zhang, Yu Zhang, Yushun Zhang, Yutao Zhang, Yutong Zhang, Zheng Zhang, Chenguang Zhao, Feifan Zhao, Jinxiang Zhao, Shuai Zhao, Xiangyu Zhao, Xuanle Zhao, Yikai Zhao, Zijia Zhao, Huabin Zheng, Ruihan Zheng, Shaojie Zheng, Tengyang Zheng, Junfeng Zhong, Longguang Zhong, Weiming Zhong, M. Zhou, Runjie Zhou, Xinyu Zhou, Zaida Zhou, Jinguo Zhu, Liya Zhu, Xinhao Zhu, Yuxuan Zhu, Zhen Zhu, Jingze Zhuang, Weiyu Zhuang, Ying Zou, Xinxing Zu

We introduce Kimi K2.5, an open-source multimodal agentic model designed to advance general agentic intelligence. K2.5 emphasizes the joint optimization of text and vision so that two modalities enhance each other. This includes a series of techniques such as joint text-vision pre-training, zero-vision SFT, and joint text-vision reinforcement learning. Building on this multimodal foundation, K2.5 introduces Agent Swarm, a self-directed parallel agent orchestration framework that dynamically decomposes complex tasks into heterogeneous sub-problems and executes them concurrently. Extensive evaluations show that Kimi K2.5 achieves state-of-the-art results across various domains including coding, vision, reasoning, and agentic tasks. Agent Swarm also reduces latency by up to $4.5\times$ over single-agent baselines. We release the post-trained Kimi K2.5 model checkpoint to facilitate future research and real-world applications of agentic intelligence.

arXiv

MetaSICL: Globalizing Auditory LLMs for Underserved Speakers and Languages via Meta Speech In-Context Learning

Haolong Zheng, Siyin Wang, Zengrui Jin, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson

Generative AI for speech and audio is increasingly expected to serve users across languages, cultures, and communities, yet current auditory Large Language Models (LLMs) are still largely trained and evaluated on high-resource data. Globalizing such systems requires handling low-resource settings, where the target speakers, languages, or tasks are poorly represented in training data. In these regimes, collecting enough labeled in-domain data is often impractical, and the small corpora available may still under-represent the test distribution, making direct fine-tuning brittle under domain shift. In-Context Learning (ICL) offers an alternative: instead of updating model parameters for every underserved community, an auditory LLM can adapt at inference time by conditioning on a few local demonstrations. However, vanilla speech ICL remains limited because most auditory LLMs are not explicitly trained to use such demonstrations effectively. We address this gap with Meta Speech In-Context Learning (MetaSICL), a post-training recipe that strengthens an auditory LLM's in-context adaptation ability using only abundant high-resource speech data. Although MetaSICL never trains on the target low-resource domains, it improves performance across two backbones on children's ASR, audio understanding/reasoning, and speech translation and ASR in directions and languages unseen in post-training. We further study the case where some in-domain data is available, using low-resource language ASR as a case study, since recognition for underserved languages is central to globalizing generative AI. Here, using MetaSICL as a warmup for in-domain reinforcement learning yields the strongest results, outperforming direct fine-tuning across five typologically diverse languages. Overall, MetaSICL offers a practical route toward globalizing auditory LLMs by building inference-time adaptation into the model.

arXiv

Intelligence per Watt: Measuring Intelligence Efficiency of Local AI

Jon Saad-Falcon, Avanika Narayan, Hakki Orhun Akengin, J. Wes Griffin, Herumb Shandilya, Adrian Gamarra Lafuente, Medhya Goel, Rebecca Joseph, Shlok Natarajan, Etash Kumar Guha, Shang Zhu, Ben Athiwaratkun, John Hennessy, Azalia Mirhoseini, Christopher Ré

Large language model (LLM) queries are predominantly processed by frontier models in centralized cloud infrastructure. Demand growth strains this paradigm faster than providers can scale. Two advances create an opportunity to rethink it: small, local LMs (<=20B active parameters) now achieve competitive performance to frontier models on many tasks, and local accelerators (e.g., Apple M4 Max) can host these models at interactive latencies. This raises the question: can local inference viably redistribute demand from centralized infrastructure? This requires measuring both whether local LMs can accurately answer real-world queries and whether they can do so efficiently on power-constrained devices (e.g., laptops). We propose intelligence per watt (IPW), task accuracy per unit of power, as a unified metric for the capability and efficiency of local inference across model-accelerator configurations. We evaluate 20+ state-of-the-art local LMs, 8 hardware accelerators (local and cloud), and 1M real-world single-turn chat and reasoning queries. For each query, we measure accuracy (local LM win rate against frontier models), energy, latency, and power. We find three key results. First, local LMs successfully answer 88.7% of these queries, with accuracy varying by domain. Second, longitudinal analysis from 2023-2025 shows IPW improved 5.3x, driven by both algorithmic and accelerator advances, with locally-serviceable query coverage rising from 23.2% to 71.3%. Third, local accelerators achieve at least 1.4x lower IPW than cloud accelerators running identical models, revealing significant headroom for local accelerator optimization. These findings demonstrate that local inference can meaningfully redistribute demand from centralized infrastructure for a substantial subset of queries, with IPW serving as the critical metric for tracking this transition.

arXiv

Better Together: Quantifying the Benefits of AI-Assisted Recruitment

Ada Aka, Emil Palikot, Ali Ansari, Nima Yazdani

Hiring algorithms have mostly scored the materials recruiters already see. Large language models (LLMs) can instead generate new information about candidates by conducting, at scale, structured interviews once reserved for a few finalists. We study this shift in two field experiments at a recruitment platform. The first experiment holds the candidate pool fixed and randomizes whether recruiters observe the AI Interview Report; the second embeds the AI interview as a requirement in a live hiring pipeline. In both, candidates shortlisted with AI interview information pass the final human interview (conducted blind to shortlisting condition) at rates 17.5 (SE 8.5) to 20 (SE 11.8) percentage points higher than candidates shortlisted from resumes alone. The gains concentrate where resumes are least informative: adding AI Interview Report ratings to conventional candidate features raises out-of-sample AUC by 0.18 for junior candidates, against 0.08 for non-junior candidates. The participation cost falls on applicants as 75 percent of invited candidates do not complete the interview. However, the attrition is itself a signal: completion is more consistent with job-search motivation than with predicted interview performance. AI interviews thus add information exactly where conventional signals fail, and they move the cost of screening from firms to applicants.

arXiv

Harnessing the Synergy between LLM Agents and Knowledge Graphs for Urban Socioeconomic Prediction

Zhilun Zhou, Jingyang Fan, Yu Liu, Fengli Xu, Depeng Jin, Yong Li

Socioeconomic prediction aims to leverage various urban data to predict the socioeconomic indicators of regions such as population and commercial activity level, which plays an important role in understanding urban regions and supporting decision-making. Existing studies leverage knowledge graphs (KG) to model heterogeneous urban data, and further apply graph representation learning methods for socioeconomic prediction. However, these approaches heavily rely on heuristic ideas and expertise to extract task-relevant knowledge from diverse data, which may not be optimal for specific tasks. Additionally, they tend to overlook the inherent relationships between different indicators, limiting the prediction accuracy. Motivated by the remarkable abilities of large language models (LLMs), in this work, we propose a synergistic framework of LLM agents and KG, which integrates the reasoning and representation learning on KG with LLM agents. We first construct an urban knowledge graph (UrbanKG) to model multi-sourced urban data and finetune an embedding language model to generate embeddings for KG entities with semantic information. Then we leverage the reasoning power of LLM to identify relevant meta-paths in the UrbanKG for each type of socioeconomic prediction task, and design a semantic-guided attention module for knowledge fusion with meta-paths. Moreover, we introduce a cross-task communication mechanism to further enhance performance by enabling knowledge sharing across tasks at both LLM agent and KG levels. On the one hand, the LLM agents for different tasks collaborate to generate more diverse and comprehensive meta-paths. On the other hand, the embeddings from different tasks are adaptively merged. Experiments on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the synergistic design between LLM and KG, providing insights for information sharing across socioeconomic prediction tasks.

arXiv

A Reproducibility Study of Partial Residual Ablations in Pre-LN Transformers

Pratikkumar Babariya

Residual connections are a fundamental component of transformer architectures, yet the roles of the attention and feed-forward residual pathways remain poorly understood when considered independently. This paper presents a reproducibility study of partial residual ablations in Pre-LN GPT-style transformers trained at two scales (10M and 124M parameters). I compare four architectural configurations by selectively removing the attention residual connection, the feed-forward residual connection, or both. Across all experiments, removing the attention residual (FFNOnly) consistently causes deterministic collapse to the No-Residual performance floor. In contrast, removing the feed-forward residual (AttnOnly) exhibits a reproducible recovery effect at 10M scale under a controlled 8-seed deterministic study, while its behavior at 124M remains unresolved because of substantial seed variance. During the investigation, I identified and corrected an experimental measurement confound in runtime gain scaling and document both the failed intermediate reproduction and the subsequent controlled replication. Based on the empirical results, I propose a cross-position routing hypothesis to explain the observed asymmetry while explicitly distinguishing confirmed findings from unresolved questions. To support reproducibility, I release the complete source code, experiment configurations, checkpoints, training logs, and all experimental results, including intermediate non-reproducing runs.

arXiv

Research Assistant: AstraZeneca's Agentic System for R&D

Piotr Grabowski, Mohamed Alameen, Jorge Bretones, Sabina Cardell, Miguel Carmona, Gavin Edwards, Ben Grainger, Sameh Hassan, Erik Jansson, Artur Kuziakhmetov, Albert Maristany, Hebatallah Mohamed, Andriy Nikolov, Sebastian Nilsson, Mark O'Donoghue, James Pacileo, Ashiq Sultan, Alex Voegele, Michael Ughetto

We describe Research Assistant, an internal LLM-based system developed at AstraZeneca to help scientists and clinicians explore biomedical questions across a broad range of data sources. The system provides a chat-style interface that brings together evidence from scientific literature, knowledge graphs, chemistry, clinical trials, safety resources, expression data, and internal experimental systems. It supports both a fast mode for direct question answering and a multi-step mode for more complex research tasks. Responses are grounded in retrieved evidence and linked back to the original sources, allowing users to review and further explore the underlying data. In this technical note, we outline the system architecture, the main design choices behind the product, and lessons learned from deploying it at scale to support day-to-day R&D workflows across AstraZeneca.

arXiv

Symbolic Machine Learning for Vapor-Liquid Equilibrium Prediction in Cx-N2 Binary Mixtures

Bongseok Kim, Suman Chakraborty, Gary Huang, Mehek Mathur, Guang Lin, Li Qiao

Accurate prediction of vapor--liquid equilibrium (VLE) for hydrocarbon-nitrogen mixtures remains challenging for cubic equations of state, particularly across broad ranges of composition and hydrocarbon chain length. While deep learning models can provide accurate predictions, they often lack interpretability and explicit analytical expressions. In this work, we propose a symbolic machine learning approach to discover interpretable symbolic corrections to Peng-Robinson equation-of-state (PR-EOS) predictions from experimental data. The proposed approach adopts a two-level strategy: symbolic expressions are first identified for individual hydrocarbon systems, after which their coefficients are represented as functions of carbon number to enable accurate prediction across different hydrocarbon systems. The results demonstrate significantly improved prediction accuracy over the original PR-EOS across all hydrocarbon-nitrogen systems. Overall, the proposed approach provides an interpretable symbolic correction framework for improving PR-EOS predictions of hydrocarbon-nitrogen VLE.

arXiv

FarSky: Task-Aware Latent-Space Coupling for Generative Intra-Hour Solar Forecasting

Yann Fabel, Bijan Nouri, Milon Miah, Niklas Blum, Luis F. Zarzalejo, Julia Kowalski, Robert Pitz-Paal

Accurate solar irradiance forecasting is essential for the reliable integration of photovoltaic power into modern electricity grids. All-sky imagers (ASI) provide high-resolution observations of clouds, making them well suited for intra-hour forecasting. Recent deep learning approaches have substantially improved forecast accuracy but are often limited by deterministic predictions and a reduced capability to anticipate ramp events. This work proposes FarSky, a generative forecasting framework that leverages latent-space coupling to learn task-aware representations of sky images. A multi-task autoencoder first learns a shared latent representation for image reconstruction and irradiance estimation. A latent diffusion model then generates future latent states conditioned on recent observations, from which irradiance forecasts are directly decoded. Probabilistic forecasts are inherently obtained through stochastic sampling. The framework is developed using a multi-year ASI dataset acquired at the Plataforma Solar de Almería, Spain, and evaluated on two independent test datasets against persistence, state-of-the-art end-to-end, and generative forecasting approaches. FarSky achieves the best overall deterministic and probabilistic forecasting performance, improving forecast skill by up to 11 percentage points. Furthermore, it substantially improves ramp event detection over existing methods, achieving F1-scores above 60%. These results demonstrate the potential of combining generative models with task-aware latent-space coupling for solar forecasting.

arXiv

MIDAS: Mutual Information Disentanglement with Uncertainty-Aware Fusion for Incomplete Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Yuhua Wen, Yingying Zhou, Qifei Li, Yingming Gao, Zhengqi Wen, Jianhua Tao, Ya Li

Most existing multimodal sentiment analysis approaches assume access to complete multimodal inputs. However, real-world applications frequently encounter incomplete or corrupted modalities, posing a critical challenge. Although several methods have been proposed to tackle this issue, they mainly rely on data imputation and heuristic coordination constraints, which fail to effectively extract and leverage task-relevant information from the incomplete multimodal data. To address this challenge, we propose a unified framework termed Mutual Information Disentanglement with uncertainty-Aware fuSion (MIDAS), which effectively restructures multimodal representations under incomplete conditions. MIDAS adopts a variational modeling strategy to represent each modality with multivariate Gaussian latent variables and further decomposes them into shared and exclusive factors. To obtain reliable representations, we design a minimax objective that minimizes the mutual information between shared and exclusive spaces for stable disentanglement, while maximizing the mutual information among shared spaces across modalities to enhance semantic alignment. In addition, an uncertainty-aware fusion mechanism is introduced, where posterior variance is leveraged as a reliability indicator to adaptively weight latent features during fusion, ensuring robust integration even when modalities are incomplete. Extensive experiments on three widely used datasets show that MIDAS achieves strong and consistent performance gains over competitive baselines across a wide range of incomplete settings, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness for incomplete data scenarios.

arXiv

Hit Selection Using SSMD-Based Machine Learning Performance Metrics in High-Throughput Screening Assays

Xiaohua Douglas Zhang

High-throughput screening (HTS) assays are central to early-stage drug discovery but are often limited by extreme data sparsity, as primary screens typically use only a single replicate per test substance. This sparsity makes conventional machine-learning performance metrics, such as sensitivity, specificity, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC), difficult to estimate empirically because they require adequately sized labeled samples. Here, we introduce a model-based framework that derives these classification metrics from the strictly standardized mean difference (SSMD), a well-established HTS effect-size parameter. Under a Gaussian equal-variance assumption, we derive closed-form relationships linking SSMD to Youden-optimal sensitivity and specificity, and sensitivity at a preset specificity, yielding explicit estimators and exact confidence intervals from the noncentral t-distribution, even under single-replicate designs. Unlike classical statistical power, which approaches 1 as sample size grows regardless of how small the true non-zero difference between group means is, the SSMD-derived sensitivity converges to a finite population value that reflects the true degree of separation between two groups, making it a more meaningful and stable performance measure for hit selection. We demonstrate the utility of this framework in a hepatitis C virus primary siRNA screen comprising approximately 22,000 single-replicate measurements, showing that SSMD, AUROC, and sensitivity-based thresholds yield equivalent and interpretable hit sets. This work bridges classical HTS statistics and machine-learning evaluation theory, providing a statistically principled, reproducible way to estimate classification performance in ultra-low-replication screening workflows.

arXiv

Enhanced Real-Time 6-DOF Extended Reality Catheter Tracking for Evaluating Potential Improvement in Efficiency, Precision, and Depth Perception for Cardiac Interventions

Mohsen Annabestani, Sandhya Sriram, Andrew Kuzemczak, S. Chiu Wong, Alexandros Sigaras, Bobak Mosadegh

Despite advances in 3D ultrasound, most percutaneous cardiac interventions still rely on 2D visualization, limiting depth perception and spatial understanding. To address this challenge, we developed an Extended Reality (XR)-based platform that enables real-time six-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) catheter tracking and visualization within a patient-specific 3D heart model. The system combines a custom machine-vision algorithm for 5-DOF catheter tracking with a 3D-printed electromechanical encoder that measures catheter roll, providing complete 6-DOF motion reconstruction. In a proof-of-concept study, 20 novice medical students navigated an intracardiac echocardiography (ICE) catheter to six anatomical targets using either immersive 3D visualization or a conventional 2D cathlab-style view. Participants in the 3D condition completed the task in 54.6 seconds and traveled 1,939 mm on average, compared with 267.5 seconds and 7,854 mm in the 2D condition. Therefore, the XR-based 3D system was more than 5x faster and required ~5x less catheter travel. The 3D mode also improved targeting precision and reduced performance variability. Participants consistently rated immersive visualization higher for accuracy, speed, usability, and clinical value. Kinematic analysis showed smoother depth-axis navigation in 3D, whereas 2D users relied on repeated corrective movements. These findings demonstrate that XR-based visualization can substantially improve procedural training efficiency, precision, and motor control.

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