Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Africa


MAGNNET: Multi-Agent Graph Neural Network-based Efficient Task Allocation for Autonomous Vehicles with Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper addresses the challenge of decentralized task allocation within heterogeneous multi-agent systems operating under communication constraints. We introduce a novel framework that integrates graph neural networks (GNNs) with a centralized training and decentralized execution (CTDE) paradigm, further enhanced by a tailored Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm for multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MARL). Our approach enables unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) to dynamically allocate tasks efficiently without necessitating central coordination in a 3D grid environment. The framework minimizes total travel time while simultaneously avoiding conflicts in task assignments. For the cost calculation and routing, we employ reservation-based A* and R* path planners. Experimental results revealed that our method achieves a high 92.5% conflict-free success rate, with only a 7.49% performance gap compared to the centralized Hungarian method, while outperforming the heuristic decentralized baseline based on greedy approach. Additionally, the framework exhibits scalability with up to 20 agents with allocation processing of 2.8 s and robustness in responding to dynamically generated tasks, underscoring its potential for real-world applications in complex multi-agent scenarios.


Evalita-LLM: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Italian

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We describe Evalita-LLM, a new benchmark designed to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) on Italian tasks. The distinguishing and innovative features of Evalita-LLM are the following: (i) all tasks are native Italian, avoiding issues of translating from Italian and potential cultural biases; (ii) in addition to well established multiple-choice tasks, the benchmark includes generative tasks, enabling more natural interaction with LLMs; (iii) all tasks are evaluated against multiple prompts, this way mitigating the model sensitivity to specific prompts and allowing a fairer and objective evaluation. We propose an iterative methodology, where candidate tasks and candidate prompts are validated against a set of LLMs used for development. We report experimental results from the benchmark's development phase, and provide performance statistics for several state-of-the-art LLMs.


Best streaming devices of 2025: Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Roku, or Google TV?

PCWorld

An external streaming device is the best way to access online video services without replacing your entire TV. By plugging one of these devices into your TV's HDMI port, you'll be able to use apps like Netflix and Hulu, possibly with a faster and smoother experience than your TV's built-in software. But between Roku, Fire TV, Google TV, and Apple TV, picking a streaming device can be overwhelming. We've reviewed them all and have come up with a list of recommendations for every need and budget. As TechHive's resident cord-cutting expert, I've reviewed practically every streaming device that's come out over the past decade, and I've been a cord-cutter myself since 2008.


PSSD: Making Large Language Models Self-denial via Human Psyche Structure

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The enhance of accuracy in reasoning results of LLMs arouses the community's interests, wherein pioneering studies investigate post-hoc strategies to rectify potential mistakes. Despite extensive efforts, they are all stuck in a state of resource competition demanding significant time and computing expenses. The cause of the situation lies in the failure of identifying the fundamental feature of the solutions in this line, coined as the self-denial of LLMs. In other words, LLMs should confidently determine the potential existence of mistakes and carefully execute the targeted correction. As the whole procedure conducts within LLMs, supporting and persuasive references are hard to acquire, while the absence of specific steps towards refining hidden mistakes persists even when errors are acknowledged. In response to the challenges, we present PSSD, which refers to and implements the human psyche structure such that three distinct and interconnected roles contribute to human reasoning. Specifically, PSSD leverages the recent multi-agent paradigm, and is further enhanced with three innovatively conceived roles: (1) the intuition-based id role that provides initial attempts based on benign LLMs; (2) the rule-driven superego role that summarizes rules to regulate the above attempts, and returns specific key points as guidance; and (3) the script-centric ego role that absorbs all procedural information to generate executable script for the final answer prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed design not only better enhance reasoning capabilities, but also seamlessly integrate with current models, leading to superior performance.


Scalable Precise Computation of Shannon Entropy

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Quantitative information flow analyses (QIF) are a class of techniques for measuring the amount of confidential information leaked by a program to its public outputs. Shannon entropy is an important method to quantify the amount of leakage in QIF. This paper focuses on the programs modeled in Boolean constraints and optimizes the two stages of the Shannon entropy computation to implement a scalable precise tool PSE. In the first stage, we design a knowledge compilation language called \ADDAND that combines Algebraic Decision Diagrams and conjunctive decomposition. \ADDAND avoids enumerating possible outputs of a program and supports tractable entropy computation. In the second stage, we optimize the model counting queries that are used to compute the probabilities of outputs. We compare PSE with the state-of-the-art probably approximately correct tool EntropyEstimation, which was shown to significantly outperform the existing precise tools. The experimental results demonstrate that PSE solved 55 more benchmarks compared to EntropyEstimation in a total of 441. For 98% of the benchmarks that both PSE and EntropyEstimation solved, PSE is at least $10\times$ as efficient as EntropyEstimation.


Neurons Speak in Ranges: Breaking Free from Discrete Neuronal Attribution

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Interpreting and controlling the internal mechanisms of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for improving their trustworthiness and utility. Recent efforts have primarily focused on identifying and manipulating neurons by establishing discrete mappings between neurons and semantic concepts. However, such mappings struggle to handle the inherent polysemanticity in LLMs, where individual neurons encode multiple, distinct concepts. This makes precise control challenging and complicates downstream interventions. Through an in-depth analysis of both encoder and decoder-based LLMs across multiple text classification datasets, we uncover that while individual neurons encode multiple concepts, their activation magnitudes vary across concepts in distinct, Gaussian-like patterns. Building on this insight, we introduce NeuronLens, a novel range-based interpretation and manipulation framework that provides a finer view of neuron activation distributions to localize concept attribution within a neuron. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that NeuronLens significantly reduces unintended interference, while maintaining precise control for manipulation of targeted concepts, outperforming existing methods.


Causal Interpretations in Observational Studies: The Role of Sociocultural Backgrounds and Team Dynamics

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The prevalence of drawing causal conclusions from observational studies has raised concerns about potential exaggeration in science communication. While some believe causal language should only apply to randomized controlled trials, others argue that rigorous methods can justify causal claims in observational studies. Ideally, causal language should align with the strength of the evidence. However, through the analysis of over 80,000 observational study abstracts using computational linguistic and regression methods, we found that causal language is more frequently used by less experienced authors, smaller research teams, male last authors, and authors from countries with higher uncertainty avoidance indices. These findings suggest that the use of causal language may be influenced by external factors such as the sociocultural backgrounds of authors and the dynamics of research collaboration. This newly identified link deepens our understanding of how such factors help shape scientific conclusions in causal inference and science communication.


Accelerating Linear Recurrent Neural Networks for the Edge with Unstructured Sparsity

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Linear recurrent neural networks enable powerful long-range sequence modeling with constant memory usage and time-per-token during inference. These architectures hold promise for streaming applications at the edge, but deployment in resource-constrained environments requires hardware-aware optimizations to minimize latency and energy consumption. Unstructured sparsity offers a compelling solution, enabling substantial reductions in compute and memory requirements--when accelerated by compatible hardware platforms. In this paper, we conduct a scaling study to investigate the Pareto front of performance and efficiency across inference compute budgets. We find that highly sparse linear RNNs consistently achieve better efficiency-performance trade-offs than dense baselines, with 2x less compute and 36% less memory at iso-accuracy. Our models achieve state-of-the-art results on a real-time streaming task for audio denoising. By quantizing our sparse models to fixed-point arithmetic and deploying them on the Intel Loihi 2 neuromorphic chip for real-time processing, we translate model compression into tangible gains of 42x lower latency and 149x lower energy consumption compared to a dense model on an edge GPU. Our findings showcase the transformative potential of unstructured sparsity, paving the way for highly efficient recurrent neural networks in real-world, resource-constrained environments.


FALCON: Fine-grained Activation Manipulation by Contrastive Orthogonal Unalignment for Large Language Model

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models have been widely applied, but can inadvertently encode sensitive or harmful information, raising significant safety concerns. Machine unlearning has emerged to alleviate this concern; however, existing training-time unlearning approaches, relying on coarse-grained loss combinations, have limitations in precisely separating knowledge and balancing removal effectiveness with model utility. In contrast, we propose Fine-grained Activation manipuLation by Contrastive Orthogonal uNalignment (FALCON), a novel representation-guided unlearning approach that leverages information-theoretic guidance for efficient parameter selection, employs contrastive mechanisms to enhance representation separation, and projects conflict gradients onto orthogonal subspaces to resolve conflicts between forgetting and retention objectives. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FALCON achieves superior unlearning effectiveness while maintaining model utility, exhibiting robust resistance against knowledge recovery attempts.


PolyhedronNet: Representation Learning for Polyhedra with Surface-attributed Graph

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Ubiquitous geometric objects can be precisely and efficiently represented as polyhedra. The transformation of a polyhedron into a vector, known as polyhedra representation learning, is crucial for manipulating these shapes with mathematical and statistical tools for tasks like classification, clustering, and generation. Recent years have witnessed significant strides in this domain, yet most efforts focus on the vertex sequence of a polyhedron, neglecting the complex surface modeling crucial in real-world polyhedral objects. This study proposes PolyhedronNet, a general framework tailored for learning representations of 3D polyhedral objects. We propose the concept of the surface-attributed graph to seamlessly model the vertices, edges, faces, and their geometric interrelationships within a polyhedron. To effectively learn the representation of the entire surface-attributed graph, we first propose to break it down into local rigid representations to effectively learn each local region's relative positions against the remaining regions without geometric information loss. Subsequently, we propose PolyhedronGNN to hierarchically aggregate the local rigid representation via intra-face and inter-face geometric message passing modules, to obtain a global representation that minimizes information loss while maintaining rotation and translation invariance. Our experimental evaluations on four distinct datasets, encompassing both classification and retrieval tasks, substantiate PolyhedronNet's efficacy in capturing comprehensive and informative representations of 3D polyhedral objects. In mathematics and computational geometry Yu et al. (2025), a polyhedron is defined as a threedimensional (3D) solid formed by flat polygon faces joined at edges and vertices. Ubiquitous geometric shapes can be precisely and efficiently modeled as polyhedra, ranging from basic 3D shapes (e.g., cubic, pyramid, and truncated tetrahedron) to compositions of them (e.g., shapes of buildings, furniture, and digital objects in CAD) as exemplified Figure 1 (a). In the real world, there are many tasks surrounding polyhedra such as classification (e.g., convex or concave); clustering polyhedra into different types (e.g., Platonic solids and prisms); as well as generation and optimization (e.g., use faceted facades to break up flat surfaces) of polyhedra for design needs.