As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly capable, ensuring that their self-generated explanations are faithful to their internal decision-making process is critical for safety and oversight. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive counterfactual faithfulness analysis across 62 models from 8 families, encompassing both pretrained and instruction-tuned variants and significantly extending prior studies of counterfactual tests. We introduce phi-CCT, a simplified variant of the Correlational Counterfactual Test, which avoids the need for token probabilities while explaining most of the variance of the original test. Our findings reveal clear scaling trends: larger models are consistently more faithful on our metrics. However, when comparing instruction-tuned and human-imitated explanations, we find that observed differences in faithfulness can often be attributed to explanation verbosity, leading to shifts along the true-positive/false-positive Pareto frontier. While instruction-tuning and prompting can influence this trade-off, we find limited evidence that they fundamentally expand the frontier of explanatory faithfulness beyond what is achievable with pretrained models of comparable size. Our analysis highlights the nuanced relationship between instruction-tuning, verbosity, and the faithful representation of model decision processes.

After more than a year of Israeli bombing, tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths, and a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, the world was largely united in saying "enough is enough". United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) resolution 12667 in December was clear in its demand: An immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Countries as diverse as Vietnam, Zimbabwe and Colombia echoed that call. And yet, bucking that consensus were nine "no" votes – chief among them, as is typical when it comes to resolutions calling for Israel to adhere to international law or human rights, was the United States. The US has provided unwavering support to Israel throughout its war on Gaza, even as Israel faces accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and its prime minister has an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant to his name.

The powerful capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to their growing use in evaluating human-generated content, particularly in evaluating research ideas within academic settings. Existing solutions primarily rely on prompt-based LLM methods or fine-tuned lightweight language models for idea evaluation. However, these methods are often unstable and struggle to comprehend the complex semantic information embedded in the ideas, impeding their ability to perform high-quality evaluations. To address the above challenges, we propose GraphEval, a lightweight graph-based LLM framework for idea evaluation. Our insight is that a complex idea can be broken down into comprehensible viewpoint nodes using prompts from small LLMs. These viewpoint nodes can then be linked together through edges created from LLM-based relation extraction and/or BERT similarity scores. The created viewpoint-graph can be used to conveniently propagate scores across view-nodes to improve the robustness of the idea evaluations. In particular, we propose two lightweight graph-based methods for idea evaluation: (1) GraphEval-LP: a training-free label propagation algorithm that propagates evaluation scores from known view-nodes to unknown nodes; (2) GraphEval-GNN: a Graph Neural Networks (GNN) that is trained to predict the evaluation scores given the observed graph with minimal computation resources. Moreover, to overcome LLM's limitation in objectively assessing the novelty of ideas, we further propose a novelty detection model to GraphEval-GNN to enhance its capability in judging idea novelty. Experiments on two datasets show GraphEval improves F1 scores by at least 14% with low computation and API costs. Additionally, GraphEval can effectively detect plagiarized ideas.

Uncertainty Quantification for Data-Driven Machine Learning Models in Nuclear Engineering Applications: Where We Are and What Do We Need? Abstract Machine learning (ML) has been leveraged to tackle a diverse range of tasks in almost all branches of nuclear engineering. Many of the successes in ML applications can be attributed to the recent performance breakthroughs in deep learning, the growing availability of computational power, data, and easy-to-use ML libraries. However, these empirical successes have often outpaced our formal understanding of the ML algorithms. An important but under-rated area is uncertainty quantification (UQ) of ML. ML-based models are subject to approximation uncertainty when they are used to make predictions, due to sources including but not limited to, data noise, data coverage, extrapolation, imperfect model architecture and the stochastic training process. The goal of this paper is to clearly explain and illustrate the importance of UQ of ML. Various sources of uncertainties in physical modeling and data-driven modeling will be discussed, demonstrated, and compared. We will also present and demonstrate a few techniques to quantify the ML prediction uncertainties. Finally, we will discuss the need for building a verification, validation and UQ framework to establish ML credibility. Corresponding author Email address: xwu27@ncsu.edu Introduction In the past decade, there has been an unprecedented interest in machine learning (ML) among nuclear engineers. ML has been leveraged to tackle a diverse range of tasks in almost all branches of nuclear engineering research. ML is a subset of artificial intelligence (AI) that studies computer algorithms which improve automatically through experience (data). ML algorithms typically build a mathematical model based on training data and then make predictions without being explicitly programmed to do so. Its performance increases with experience; in other words, the machine learns. Deep learning (DL) is a subset of ML that uses deep neural networks (DNNs) to automatically learn representations from data without introducing hand-coded rules or human domain knowledge.

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) enables efficient fine-tuning of pre-trained language models via low-rank matrix approximation, which is effective in many scenarios. However, its low-rank representation capacity is constrained in complex tasks or high-rank dependency settings, potentially limiting model adaptability. Addressing the expressive bottleneck of classical low-rank approximation in fine-tuning large language models, this paper proposes a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method based on a Quantum Weighted Tensor Hybrid Network (QWTHN), which leverages Quantum Neural Network (QNN). The study investigates quantum-classical hybrid parameter-efficient fine-tuning in low-rank spaces. QWTHN decomposes pre-trained weights into quantum neural network and tensor network representations, utilizing quantum state superposition and other methods to break through classical rank limitations. Experiments show that the proposed quantum fine-tuning technique for large models approaches or even surpasses the parameter efficiency of LoRA. On the CPsyCounD and R1-Distill-SFT datasets, QWTHN, compared to classical LoRA, reduces training loss by up to 15% while using 76% fewer parameters, and achieves an 8.4% performance improvement on the CPsyCounD test set. This research not only realizes lightweight and efficient adaptation of quantum resources to billion-parameter models but also validates the practical path of quantum hardware driven by large model tasks, laying the first engineering-ready technical foundation for future quantum-enhanced AGI systems.

Constructing high resolution air pollution maps at lower cost is crucial for sustainable city management and public health risk assessment. However, traditional fixed-site monitoring lacks spatial coverage, while mobile low-cost sensors exhibit significant data instability. This study integrates PM2.5 data from 320 taxi-mounted mobile low-cost sensors and 52 fixed monitoring stations to address these limitations. By employing the machine learning methods, an appropriate mapping relationship was established between fixed and mobile monitoring concentration. The resulting pollution maps achieved 500-meter spatial and 5-minute temporal resolutions, showing close alignment with fixed monitoring data (+4.35% bias) but significant deviation from raw mobile data (-31.77%). The fused map exhibits the fine-scale spatial variability also observed in the mobile pollution map, while showing the stable temporal variability closer to that of the fixed pollution map (fixed: 1.12 plus or minus 0.73%, mobile: 3.15 plus or minus 2.44%, mapped: 1.01 plus or minus 0.65%). These findings demonstrate the potential of large-scale mobile low-cost sensor networks for high-resolution air quality mapping, supporting targeted urban environmental governance and health risk mitigation.

Generative machine learning models for small molecule drug discovery have shown immense promise, but many molecules generated by this approach are too difficult to synthesize to be worth further investigation or further development. We present a novel approach by fine-tuning Meta's Llama3 large language models (LLMs) to create SynLlama, which generates full synthetic pathways made of commonly accessible Enamine building blocks and robust organic reaction templates. SynLlama explores a large synthesizable space using significantly less data compared to other state-of-the-art methods, and offers strong performance in bottom-up synthesis, synthesizable analog generation, and hit expansion, offering medicinal chemists a valuable tool for drug discovery developments. We find that SynLlama can effectively generalize to unseen yet purchasable building blocks, meaning that its reconstruction capabilities extend to a broader synthesizable chemical space than the training data.

Graph diffusion models have recently been proposed to synthesize entire graphs, such as molecule graphs. Although existing methods have shown great performance in generating entire graphs for graph-level learning tasks, no graph diffusion models have been developed to generate synthetic graph structures, that is, synthetic nodes and associated edges within a given graph, for node-level learning tasks. Inspired by the research in the computer vision literature using synthetic data for enhanced performance, we propose Diffusion on Graph (DoG), which generates synthetic graph structures to boost the performance of GNNs. The synthetic graph structures generated by DoG are combined with the original graph to form an augmented graph for the training of node-level learning tasks, such as node classification and graph contrastive learning (GCL). To improve the efficiency of the generation process, a Bi-Level Neighbor Map Decoder (BLND) is introduced in DoG. To mitigate the adverse effect of the noise introduced by the synthetic graph structures, a low-rank regularization method is proposed for the training of graph neural networks (GNNs) on the augmented graphs. Extensive experiments on various graph datasets for semi-supervised node classification and graph contrastive learning have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of DoG with low-rank regularization.

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based slicing policies have shown significant success in simulated environments but face challenges in physical systems such as open radio access networks (O-RANs) due to simulation-to-reality gaps. These policies often lack safety guarantees to ensure compliance with service level agreements (SLAs), such as the strict latency requirements of immersive applications. As a result, a deployed DRL slicing agent may make resource allocation (RA) decisions that degrade system performance, particularly in previously unseen scenarios. Real-world immersive applications require maintaining SLA constraints throughout deployment to prevent risky DRL exploration. In this paper, we propose SafeSlice to address both the cumulative (trajectory-wise) and instantaneous (state-wise) latency constraints of O-RAN slices. We incorporate the cumulative constraints by designing a sigmoid-based risk-sensitive reward function that reflects the slices' latency requirements. Moreover, we build a supervised learning cost model as part of a safety layer that projects the slicing agent's RA actions to the nearest safe actions, fulfilling instantaneous constraints. We conduct an exhaustive experiment that supports multiple services, including real virtual reality (VR) gaming traffic, to investigate the performance of SafeSlice under extreme and changing deployment conditions. SafeSlice achieves reductions of up to 83.23% in average cumulative latency, 93.24% in instantaneous latency violations, and 22.13% in resource consumption compared to the baselines. The results also indicate SafeSlice's robustness to changing the threshold configurations of latency constraints, a vital deployment scenario that will be realized by the O-RAN paradigm to empower mobile network operators (MNOs).

The low battery autonomy of Unnamed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs or drones) can make smart farming (precision agriculture), disaster recovery, and the fighting against dengue vector applications difficult. This article considers two approaches, first enumerating the characteristics observed in these three IoT application types and then modeling an UAV's battery recharge coordination using the Agent-Based Simulation (ABS) approach. In this way, we propose that each drone inside the swarm does not communicate concerning this recharge coordination decision, reducing energy usage and permitting remote usage. A total of 6000 simulations were run to evaluate how two proposed policies, the BaseLine (BL) and ChargerThershold (CT) coordination recharging policy, behave in 30 situations regarding how each simulation sets conclude the simulation runs and how much time they work until recharging results. CT policy shows more reliable results in extreme system usage. This work conclusion presents the potential of these three IoT applications to achieve their perpetual service without communication between drones and ground stations. This work can be a baseline for future policies and simulation parameter enhancements.