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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

Exploiting chemical shift variability enables recovery of overlapping metabolites from 1H nuclear magnetic resonance spectra

Jesper Løve Hinrich, Pia Susan Mayer, Bekzod Khakimov, Søren Balling Engelsen, Morten Mørup

Overlapping peaks and sample-dependent chemical shift variability prevent reliable metabolite recovery from complex biological spectra. This problem is critical in one-dimensional proton (1D 1H) NMR which has become the standard method providing fast acquisition and information-rich spectra in metabolomics and foodomics. This study demonstrates how chemical shifts can be utilised as a strength in 1D 1H NMR, when suitably modeled through the proposed Bayesian Shift-Invariant Non-negative Matrix Factorization (BSI-NMF) procedure. We find that BSI-NMF accurately recovers the underlying chemical signals in 1D 1H NMR spectra missed by existing analyses approaches across simulations, laboratory created datasets, and a large urine dataset obtained from 2439 people across Europe. Our study highlights how shifts in the chemical signatures - until now perceived as a nuisance - can in fact when suitably modelled be instrumental for unique recovery of metabolites. This creates an opportunity to experimentally induce chemical shifts changes to facilitate unique recovery of spectra.

arXiv

SoRoMoX: Fast, Differentiable, and Parallelizable Soft Robot Models

Maximilian Stölzle, Solange Gribonval, Daniel Feliu-Talegon, Vito Daniele Perfetta, Michele Martini, Chuhan Zhang, Kiwan Wong, Mohammed Tarnini, Anup Teejo Mathew, Federico Renda, Daniela Rus, Cosimo Della Santina

Reduced-order models based on Cosserat-rod theory are now well established, and modeling theory is no longer the primary bottleneck in soft-robot control. Their implementations, however, do not support the differentiable, GPU-parallel, and control-oriented workflows that underpin advanced rigid-robotics applications. Here, we fill this gap with SoRoMoX (Soft Robot Models in JAX), a fully numerical, JIT-compilable Python/JAX framework. SoRoMoX implements articulated, Piecewise Constant Strain, and Variable Strain models through a unified, control-ready interface that provides inertia matrices, gravitational and elastic forces, Jacobians, and their derivatives. To our knowledge, it is the first rod/strain-based soft-robot modeling framework that runs directly on GPUs and is end-to-end differentiable with respect to states, inputs, and parameters. Sequential CPU rollouts are up to 18.1x faster than state-of-the-art alternatives, while GPU-parallel rollouts increase throughput by up to 234.6x. This performance enables workflows that were previously impractical or impossible: static-equilibrium system identification with 66% lower marker RMSE; residual-force learning with a further 64% reduction; computed-torque tracking with RMSE reduced by a factor of approximately 500 relative to model-free PD; control-gain optimization with up to 62% lower loss than untuned gains; safety-constrained control using high-order control barrier functions to keep the peak contact force within a prescribed 5 N bound, compared with 33.5 N without the safety constraint; and reinforcement-learning policy training up to 7x faster than a CPU PyElastica discrete-rod baseline through massively parallel rollouts.

arXiv

Characterizing the Quality Profile of AI-Generated C++ in Production

Michael Tran, Fred Lewis, Kun Yang, Saksham Thakur, Aditya Kini, Aditya Patil, Milad Hashemi, Parthasarathy Ranganathan

The widespread integration of AI coding assistants offers undeniable boosts to engineering velocity. Yet, recent studies point to a growing trade-off, revealing persistent challenges with code quality and maintainability. Industry leaders, including frontier AI labs, echo these concerns. As large language models are increasingly relied upon to author production code, understanding their impact on shipped software quality has become a critical priority. However, assessing these effects in industrial workflows remains difficult due to observability barriers. We study the impact of AI-generated code on production quality within a large enterprise operating global products relied upon by billions of users daily. Driven by this scale and user trust, the organization values code quality and has built thorough observability for every line of code deployed into production, enabling us to overcome measurement barriers to assess these effects. This study presents a large-scale empirical analysis of AI-generated C++ code from April 2025 to April 2026, tracking 3.52 million code changes across this enterprise's brownfield codebase. The core purpose is to understand the quality, performance, and maintenance characteristics of AI-generated code compared to human-written code in a production environment at scale. We find that AI-generated C++ code has a distinct quality profile, showing higher rates of interface and coupling burdens, copy and allocation overheads, and a reliance on explicit loops over optimized standard APIs. These issues translate into tangible downstream costs, including increased review effort and a 5-8% increase in compute resource consumption. However, we demonstrate that providing models with targeted, taxonomy-informed feedback can mitigate these effects, leading to an 11.1% reduction in targeted static analysis warnings and improved computational efficiency.

arXiv

MI-MIDI: Mechanistic Interpretability of Text-to-MIDI Generation Models via Probing, Lenses and Steering

Jakub Poćwiardowski, Mateusz Modrzejewski

Mechanistic interpretability of music generation has concentrated on audio models, leaving symbolic models largely unexplored. We analyze two public text-to-MIDI systems of contrasting design: the purpose-built encoder--decoder text2midi and MIDI-LLM, a Llama~3.2~1B model extended with MIDI tokens using linear probing, the logit and tuned lenses, activation patching and difference-in-means steering. Across these methods, we recover musically meaningful structure and show how architecture shapes its formation and control. Pitch, instrumentation, harmony and texture are linearly decodable in both models. text2midi refines predictions gradually across depth, whereas MIDI-LLM works largely in its inherited textual basis before a sharp late rotation into the musical vocabulary; patching identifies a matching late attenuation of prompt-driven instrument transfer. Steering produces bidirectional changes in register and polyphony in both systems, and in tempo/energy in MIDI-LLM. Our two-orientation protocol isolates directional control and shows that all-layer interventions are robust in text2midi but accumulate disruptively in MIDI-LLM. Together, the results provide a practical toolkit for tracing and controlling musical concepts in symbolic generators. Audio examples are available on a demo website.

arXiv

Shape Your Feed: An LLM-based Agentic System for Conversational Recommendation

Ziyun Xu, Bosen Ding, Yue Zhang, Ji Qi, Qingyuan Song, Jizhou Huang, Liwei Wang, Jefferey Santelli, Yue Weng, Qichao Que, Zhenheng Yang, Junfeng Pan, Linhong Zhu

Industrial recommendation systems predominantly adopt a passive ranking paradigm that infers user preferences from implicit behavioral signals (e.g., clicks, dwell time) rather than explicit, natural language inputs. As a result, users experience a persistent discrepancy between their explicit interests and what passive behavioral algorithms deliver, limiting their ability to express nuanced preferences or steer their feed in real time. To address this growing gap between how recommendations are optimized and how users wish to articulate their interests, we present Shape Your Feed (SYF), an LLM-based agentic recommendation framework that enables real-time, multimodal co-curation of content. SYF employs a three-tier architecture: (i) a Perception Flow that captures fine-grained user intent from text prompts, voice commands, and UI interactions; (ii) a Serving Flow that performs real-time agentic re-ranking and pruning of candidate items, grounded in a persistent Semantic Profile encoding evolving user preferences; and (iii) a Self-Evolution Flow that aligns system behavior with human judgments via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and an LLM-as-a-Judge ensemble. Offline evaluations show that SYF's alignment scoring module achieves 98.85% accuracy, substantially improving over strong few-shot baselines. Large-scale online A/B experiments on production traffic further demonstrate that SYF improves feed relevance and user sentiment, indicating a practical and scalable path toward interactive, user-steerable recommendation in industrial settings.

arXiv

NxN E-valuation: Hypothesis Certification via a Conformal CRT Null

Bin Wang, Yan Zhong

We propose NxN E-valuation, a handy, e-value-based hypothesis-certification algorithm that lets a hypothesis be verified without building any case-specific certification procedure---such as constructing a dedicated null hypothesis---as long as a large enough dataset is available. The method is especially suited to LLM-based exploration systems, where LLMs are remarkably good at proposing hypotheses but suffer badly from hallucination; this hallucination prevents us from harvesting LLM outputs directly, and existing remedies each fall short. The most common solutions include letting the LLM verify or correct itself circular verification and held-out testing (where false hypotheses can still pass via spurious correlations), among other remedies detailed in the introduction. To resolve this, NxN E-valuation exploits the naturally existing large training set and lets different samples serve as null hypotheses for one another. This design directly realizes a conditional randomization test (CRT) that certifies each hypothesis. The approach can be a universally better replacement for at least LLM circular verification and held-out-data testing, provided the LLM's generations are hypotheses that apply to each individual sample.

arXiv

SyncSBC: Decentralized Swarm Behavior Prediction for Synchronized Autonomous Control

Varun Raveendra, Connor Mattson, Daniel S Brown

Robot swarms utilize many independent limited-sensing agents to produce complex emergent behaviors without requiring centralized control. However, little research explores how agents can infer swarm-level behavior from purely local perception, a capability critical for detecting faults and behavior changes. In this paper, we introduce Synchronized Swarm Behavior Classification (SyncSBC), which combines improvements in machine learning and distributed consensus to classify collective swarm behavior and synchronize swarm decision-making in an entirely decentralized manner. We show that SyncSBC achieves high classification accuracy and low synchronization delay, making it suitable for real-world deployment. Finally, we use SyncSBC to demonstrate two promising swarm applications on real robots where we show that swarms utilizing SyncSBC can accurately identify anomalies in robot behavior and autonomously coordinate collective changes in swarm behavior. Videos, code and supplemental experiments are available at https://sites.google.com/view/sync-sbc/home.

arXiv

KNOWPLAN: Knowledge-Driven AI Agents for Smart Degree Pathway Planning

Shuheng Cao, Weijia Zhang, Jiaqi Wu, Xiyun Hu, Yat Yang, Juqy Chen, Zhaoxiang Feng

Planning a degree from official university sources requires solving two problems in order. The institution's curriculum must first be reconstructed from catalogs, departmental pages, JSON endpoints, and PDFs that share no schema, and only then can a student-specific path be optimized under prerequisite logic and overlapping requirement constraints. Coupling the two lets each failure mode hide the other, because a planner that drives its own crawling never learns facts its current plan does not need. We present KnowPlan, which enforces an extraction-first boundary and measures the interface between the stages rather than assuming it. CatalogBrowse explores with no access to any user profile. It scores legal actions by lower-confidence expected marginal gain over a finite set of atomic catalog obligations per unit of source access, parses deterministically through platform adapters with a span-constrained clause-to-AST model fallback, and terminates on a closure certificate over index, schema, provenance, and reference completeness instead of a reward threshold. Its output contract is three provenance-linked JSON documents. DegreeMap consumes only those documents. It compiles them into a typed requirement hypergraph and optimizes lexicographically with CP-SAT over hard feasibility, completion horizon, load and risk, personalized utility, and option value, so that each stage optimizes inside the previous stage's proven optimum and stays certifiable within the solver budget. Across a 100-university broad track and a six-school dense track, CatalogBrowse reaches 96.2% inventory recall and 88.7% masked-source recovery at 47% less source access than an exhaustive crawler, DegreeMap holds 100.0% hard feasibility while improving personalized utility by +0.066 over the strongest baseline, and the full pipeline certifies 99.5% of requests with a utility gap to the privileged gold graph of 0.015.

arXiv

WebGrader: Training LLMs for Web Development with Self-Evolving Programmatic Grader

Boshui Chen, Huiping Liu, Shaolei Zhang

Large language models increasingly generate complete websites from natural-language descriptions, and reinforcement learning has become a central approach to closing their remaining functional gap. This training regime is bottlenecked by reward design. Hand-authored browser scripts are executable yet costly to write for open-ended requirements, while VLM and GUI-agent graders scale but may issue verdicts before observing the decisive state. We propose WebGrader, a self-evolving programmatic grader that autonomously derives the required interaction flows from each website request, represents each flow as an executable Flow Contract, and uses its execution outcome as an RL reward. WebGrader materializes the generated project in a live browser, grounds target actions against the source code and live DOM, and collects visual, DOM, response, and persistent-state evidence along the same browser trajectory. A residual-driven offline loop then discovers reusable verifier skills, screens them on disjoint validation pages, and freezes the promoted skill graph before policy training. By separating test planning, action grounding, evidence collection, and semantic judgment, WebGrader issues a Pass verdict only after observing the requested transition. On WebGen-Bench, WebGrader trains an 8B policy to a 52.01% functional success rate, outperforming a matched appearance-plus-script reward by 7.88 points and surpassing o4-mini and DeepSeek-v4-flash. On WG-core-250, the policy reaches a Full Score of 44.953 and surpasses Qwen3-Coder-480B.

arXiv

CyberForge: Verified Vulnerability Injection at Repository Level for Cybersecurity Agent Training

Amine Lbath, Manan Suri, Aurelien Delaitre, Vadim Okun, Massih-Reza Amini, Ram D. Sriram, Dinesh Manocha

Despite recent advances, frontier large language model (LLM) agents remain limited in discovering and patching complex vulnerabilities in real-world software. Generally available agents can already aid attackers, who only need to find one exploitable weakness, while defenders must continuously identify and patch all vulnerabilities across fast-growing codebases. Stronger defensive agents would help close this gap, yet the scarcity of security training data with reproducible build and execution environments remains a bottleneck. We present CyberForge, a framework that synthesizes executable, repository-level security training data by injecting vulnerabilities into real C/C++ projects. It validates each instance dynamically: the injected build must pass the project's unit tests, and generated proof-of-vulnerability (PoV) must trigger on the injected build and not on the clean one. CyberForge is not limited by the availability of disclosed vulnerabilities, therefore it can scale in comparison to data augmentation techniques which rely on historic CVE data. The resulting corpus holds 1034 validated vulnerabilities across 80 projects and 63 weakness categories, with edit locality similar to real CVE patches under a real-versus-real noise floor. Fine-tuning on trajectories collected over this corpus improves SEC-bench patch repair by +3.3 to +14.7 points, in all six configurations of three model scales and two teachers, with the 31B student reaching its GPT-5.4-mini teacher, 72.7% against 74.0%. These gains generalize out of distribution to PatchEval, a corpus containing other programming languages, where every configuration also improves and the 31B student passes its teacher.

arXiv

DATAREEL: Automated Data-Driven Video Story Generation with Animations

Ridwan Mahbub, Syem Aziz, Mizanur Rahman, Mahir Ahmed, Shadikur Rahman, Shafiq Joty, Enamul Hoque

Data videos combine animated visualizations with synchronized narration to communicate quantitative information and are widely used in journalism, education, and public communication. Automatically generating them requires deciding what story to tell, designing effective visualizations, and producing executable animations synchronized with narration. Despite rapid progress in vision-language models (VLMs), it remains unclear how well they can perform this task from a high-level communicative intent, largely because no standardized benchmark exists. We introduce DATAREEL, a benchmark for automated data-driven video story generation containing 328 real-world data reels. Given a data table, a communicative intent, a target duration, and a style reference image, a model must generate executable animation code with synchronized subtitles, which we render and evaluate. Evaluating eight proprietary and open-weight VLMs reveals a substantial capability gap: open-weight models exhibit execution failure rates of up to 39.8%, whereas proprietary models achieve stronger overall performance. Yet even the best-performing models frequently generate static charts, subtitle-animation desynchronization, unstable layouts, and poor adherence to the reference style. We further introduce a strong agentic baseline that decomposes generation into planning, coding, and verification, consistently outperforming direct prompting in both human and automatic evaluations. The task remains far from solved; we release DATAREEL at https://github.com/vis-nlp/DataReel to support future work.

arXiv

"LLM Agent Performance" Is Not a Single Evaluation Target

Pengyu Zhu, Li Sun, Philip S. Yu, Sen Su

LLM agent benchmark scores are shaped not only by the model but also by the agent harness, environment, evaluator, and inference budget. Unified execution controls these non-model factors by evaluating candidate models under the same configuration, making observed differences more attributable to the models themselves. However, model comparison is only one use of agent benchmarks. Other evaluations compare complete agent systems or test whether a fixed model or system remains stable across predeclared changes in its operating conditions. These results can all be reported under the common label of "LLM agent performance." Our position is that "LLM agent performance" does not denote a single evaluation target. Model comparisons under a reference stack and comparisons of complete agent systems answer different questions, while robustness asks whether either conclusion persists across predeclared conditions. The claim supported by a score therefore depends on the declared candidate boundary and condition policy. We derive implications for leaderboards, result reporting, and benchmark versioning, showing how distinguishing these classes preserves fair comparison while accommodating system innovation and robustness analysis.

arXiv

Social World Models

Xuhui Zhou, Jiarui Liu, Akhila Yerukola, Hyunwoo Kim, Maarten Sap

Humans intuitively navigate social interactions by simulating unspoken dynamics and reasoning about others' perspectives, even with limited information. In contrast, AI systems struggle to structure and reason about implicit social contexts, as they lack explicit representations for unobserved dynamics such as intentions, beliefs, and evolving social states. In this paper, we introduce the concept of social world models (SWMs) to characterize the complex social dynamics. To operationalize SWMs, we introduce a novel structured social world representation formalism (S3AP), which captures the evolving states, actions, and mental states of agents, addressing the lack of explicit structure in traditional free-text-based inputs. Through comprehensive experiments across five social reasoning benchmarks, we show that S3AP significantly enhances LLM performance-achieving a +51% improvement on FANToM over OpenAI's o1. Our ablations further reveal that these gains are driven by the explicit modeling of hidden mental states, which proves more effective than a wide range of baseline methods. Finally, we introduce an algorithm for social world models using S3AP, which enables AI agents to build models of their interlocutors and predict their next actions and mental states. Empirically, S3AP-enabled social world models yield up to +18% improvement on the SOTOPIA multi-turn social interaction benchmark. Our findings highlight the promise of S3AP as a powerful, general-purpose representation for social world states, enabling the development of more socially-aware systems that better navigate social interactions.

arXiv

Investigating Artificial Intelligence Digital Sovereignty in Mobile Shopping Apps: A Case Study of Nigeria

George Grispos, Sajda Qureshi

The use of e-commerce mobile applications is expanding in Nigeria, creating both opportunities and risks, including fraud and reduced user control over digital technologies, raising concerns about digital sovereignty. This research examines how Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Nigerian mobile applications affects digital sovereignty, examined through platform transparency as a key indicator of user awareness and control. Using an interpretive approach, the research combines the forensic analysis of selected Android applications with contextual document analysis to identify AI features and evaluate disclosure practices. The findings show that AI is widely implemented in the applications, yet transparency about its use remains limited. A socio-economic analysis of Nigeria further shows an increasing dependence on consumer digital platforms, moderate AI awareness, and uneven patterns of interaction. By providing empirical evidence on AI transparency and platform practices, this study advances understanding of individual digital sovereignty and highlights challenges for protecting user control in AI-driven digital environments.

arXiv

The Low Frequency Trap: Video Language Models Fail at Simple Event Bookkeeping

Sarvesh Baskar, Zikui Cai, Shayan Shabihi, Anirudh Satheesh, Muhammad R. Islam, Udari Madhushani Sehwag, Tom Goldstein, Furong Huang

Real-world video benchmarks provide broad coverage, but their fixed clips entangle event count, rate, duration, and visual complexity, making failure modes hard to isolate. While existing programmatic benchmarks offer better control, they score only the final answer rather than auditing reported events against executable ground truth. To bridge this gap, we introduce trace-grounded parametric profiling for event counting in three controlled video tasks: bouncing-ball wall contacts, visual blinks, and categorical state transitions. Across 2,190 videos, we vary event count N and frequency F while holding rendering fixed. Each video includes an executable event trace for capability-surface estimation and timestamp-level evaluation. Our results reveal a staged temporal failure. At an 80% reliability threshold, Gemini 3.6 Flash reliably counts persistent state transitions up to 12 events at 0.5 and 1.0 Hz, yet demonstrates no reliable positive-count region for transient blinking events. Thus, event representation dictates whether a model initially accesses evidence -- a limitation that compounds as count and frequency increase. In the high-count, high-frequency regime, only 0.2% of final counts are correct and the model recovers just 18.1% of true events. To test if visual access is the primary bottleneck, we increase sampling rate. Although this boosts Bounce Ball accuracy from 19.6% to 29.3%, the reported sequence agrees with ground truth only 3.7% of the time. Extra frames can therefore inflate final scores without producing faithful event recovery. Different prompting strategies yield similarly limited gains, and real-world video evaluations show the same concentration of success at low event counts. Ultimately, trace-grounded profiling shifts video evaluation from aggregate accuracy metrics to a detailed diagnostic of where temporal reasoning fails.

arXiv

Resourced Authority A Mechanism-Design Model for Participatory Governance of Deployed AI Agents

Praphul Chandra, Sujit Gujar, Ganesh Ghalme

We give a formal mechanism design model for the continuous participatory governance of a deployed AI agent. The mechanism is built on the principle that governance should control an AI agent through resource allocation so as to make authorization self enforcing via compute budgets. The mechanism seeks to establish the Safe AI paradigm that compute is an effective governance lever. We situate our work as a compliance or commons overlay on a deployer. One governance period is an extensive form game in which verified human stakeholders arrive sequentially and contribute, on a provision or a rejection market, in a governance currency that is deliberately distinct from the agents compute. A funding aggregator turns raw contributions into breadth weighted effective supports - a two threshold gate with hysteresis converts net support into a binary authorization that, through a coupling map bounded by an exogenously certified safety ceiling, releases a metered compute budget - realized in hardware as a signed compute license so that the decision is self-enforcing. We characterize the class of agents the mechanism can govern and isolate manipulation of the governing electorate by the governed agent as the central open problem. We also introduce several challenges addressing manipulation of governing electorate by the governed agents.

arXiv

Challenges in Evaluating Explanation Methods for Static and Evolving Data

Jerzy Stefanowski

This paper addresses the limitations of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) with respect to insufficient evaluation. They are illustrated through the DetoxAI image recognition system for bias detection and concept unlearning. Then, an example of a human-grounded evaluation of methods for explaining image classification is presented. The paper further explores methods for adapting explanations to evolving data streams with concept drift. Experiences with adapting counterfactuals for this problem are discussed. Finally it is related to the challenges of tracking the co-evolution of data, models, and explanations.\footnote{This paper has been accepted for a publication in J.Nalepa (ed) Explainable AI in Space. Proceedings of EASi 2026 Workshop at IJCAI-ECAI 2026 Bremen, Springer CCIS vol 3107 (2016).}

arXiv

TRAJDEBUG: Tracing Error Lifecycle to Identify Critical Failures in Long-Horizon Agent Trajectories

Yunjia Qi, Zehua Yin, Xintong Shi, Hao Peng, Songyuanyi Lu, Yixian Liu, Richeng Xuan, Yuhong Liu, Zhichao Hu, Xiaozhi Wang, Lei Hou, Bin Xu, Juanzi Li

LLM-based agentic systems have shown remarkable capabilities in complex domains, while suffering from cascading errors and difficulty in debugging. Critical error detection aims to locate the earliest error step in a failed trajectory that is responsible for the final failure. However, progress faces two main challenges. First, long trajectories make it difficult to identify individual errors, since the evidence for judging a step may be scattered across distant instructions, observations, and prior context. Second, failed trajectories often contain multiple local errors with different downstream effects, only some of which remain responsible for the final failure. In this work, we propose TrajDebug, an error-lifecycle tracing framework that addresses long-trajectory error discovery with multi-granularity history compression and evidence-based error identification, and supports critical attribution by tracing each error's resolution status and terminal impact. We further construct TrajErrBench, a benchmark of 486 manually annotated failed trajectories from Tau2Bench and SWE-Bench Pro, covering realistic tool-use and coding scenarios. Experiments across diverse agent benchmarks show that TrajDebug achieves the best overall performance over existing baselines, and application studies further demonstrate that its diagnoses provide actionable feedback for improving downstream agent success. We will release the codes and data to facilitate further research.

arXiv

Tytan: Interactive Neurosymbolic Construction of Analytic Semantic Schemas from Relational Data

Donna Hooshmand, Shubham Shahi, Cameron Barrie, Abhratanu Dutta, Marko Sterbentz, Harper Pack, Kristian J. Hammond

From natural-language query interfaces to automated report generation, data analysis tools need a description of the data: the real-world entities it contains, which columns function as measures or identifiers, and how tables connect into units of analysis. Today, this semantic layer is usually written by hand. This is a knowledge-acquisition bottleneck that limits the scalability of analytic systems, keeps non-technical users dependent on experts, and is itself error-prone. We present TYTAN, a system for automatically constructing an analytic semantic schema from a relational database and, when available, a short user-provided description. TYTAN combines symbolic analysis of the database with LLM-based semantic inference for entity proposal, role assignment, and naming. When the evidence leaves a decision ambiguous, TYTAN asks the user a targeted natural-language question. We evaluate TYTAN on eight databases spanning real-world and benchmark domains along the three axes that define a schema's functional utility: (i) coverage, are all important entities and features captured?; (ii) retrieval correctness, do the schema's instructions actually reach the data; and (iii) characterization accuracy, are semantic types correct? Across the seven reference domains, TYTAN reaches every entity, attribute, and aggregable feature of the expert-corrected reference schemas (100% coverage). Additionally, 100% of its retrieval instructions execute correctly (1,678 of 1,678 self-generated claims), and semantic roles agree with the reference on 92-100% of matched attributes. Checking the underlying data showed the small disagreement is in the reference, not in TYTAN. On a held-out blind test (a live, ten-table database with no declared keys), TYTAN recovers the full entity structure with verified keys and satisfies 100% of the satisfiable expectations of five independent blind annotators.

arXiv

Bias Analysis of L2 Speaking Assessment Systems Using Concept Activation Vectors

Arya Labroo, Mengjie Qian, Kate Knill

Automatic speaking assessment systems are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings to mark second language (L2) learners' speaking tests, making it critical to show that their scores depend on speaking proficiency rather than irrelevant speaker attributes such as first language (L1) or age. Transformer-based foundation models have improved the accuracy of these L2 speaking graders, but their black-box representations make fairness and interpretability analysis more difficult. Building on prior work that used Concept Activation Vectors (CAVs) to detect bias towards unwanted attributes (`concepts') in feature-based graders, we extend CAV-based analysis to two neural speaking assessment systems: a text-based BERT grader and a speech-and-text multimodal grader based on Whisper. CAVs represent human-interpretable concepts as directions in a model's activation space, allowing us to distinguish between whether a concept is encoded in a model's internal representations and whether it influences the predicted score, the latter quantified using a gradient-based sensitivity metric. Since CAVs rely on linear separability, which is less likely in complex neural embedding spaces, we also investigate whether sparse autoencoders (SAEs) provide cleaner concept directions by learning CAVs in a sparse latent space and mapping them back to activation space. Our analysis shows that concept recoverability depends strongly on the representation and architecture being probed, rather than on the concept alone. Sensitivity to concepts is also architecture-dependent. SAEs make concepts more linearly recoverable, but attenuate the original activation-space sensitivity, especially in low-dimensional layers. These findings highlight the need to distinguish concept recoverability from concept influence when auditing bias in speaking assessment systems.

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