Lightweight language models remain attractive for on-device and privacy-sensitive applications, but their responses are highly sensitive to prompt quality. For open-ended generation, non-expert users often lack the knowledge or time to consistently craft high-quality prompts, leading them to rely on prompt optimization tools. However, a key challenge is ensuring the optimized prompts genuinely align with users' original intents and preferences. We introduce PromptTailor, a system for controllable prompt generation for open-ended text that improves model output quality by intent-aligned prompt synthesis. PromptTailor expands minimal user instructions into rich, domain-aware prompts while preserving the user's stated preferences. The system is a quantized Llama3-8B model fine-tuned with a lightweight LoRA adapter on 12,300 prompt-refinement dialogues spanning 41 everyday domains, distilled from three stronger LLMs. The adapter attaches to any Llama3-8B base, enabling edge deployment. In human and LLM-judge evaluations across multiple target models and optimization baselines, PromptTailor yields higher preference rates than chain-of-thought prompting and matches or surpasses state-of-the-art prompt optimization methods while requiring fewer model calls (e.g., 3 vs. 9). These results show that a compact student, guided by powerful teachers, can learn effective prompt-generation strategies that enhance response quality while maintaining alignment with user intent.

In particular, LLMs are capable of "lying", knowingly outputting false statements.

Large language models (LLMs) tend to follow maliciously crafted instructions to generate deceptive responses, posing safety challenges. How deceptive instructions alter the internal representations of LLM compared to truthful ones remains poorly understood beyond output analysis. To bridge this gap, we investigate when and how these representations ``flip'', such as from truthful to deceptive, under deceptive versus truthful/neutral instructions. Analyzing the internal representations of Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct and Gemma-2-9B-Instruct on a factual verification task, we find the model's instructed True/False output is predictable via linear probes across all conditions based on the internal representation. Further, we use Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to show that the Deceptive instructions induce significant representational shifts compared to Truthful/Neutral representations (which are similar), concentrated in early-to-mid layers and detectable even on complex datasets. We also identify specific SAE features highly sensitive to deceptive instruction and use targeted visualizations to confirm distinct truthful/deceptive representational subspaces. % Our analysis pinpoints layer-wise and feature-level correlates of instructed dishonesty, offering insights for LLM detection and control. Our findings expose feature- and layer-level signatures of deception, offering new insights for detecting and mitigating instructed dishonesty in LLMs.

In particular, LLMs are capable of "lying", knowingly outputting false statements.

Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) is critical in nanotechnology, materials science, and biological imaging due to its high spatial resolution and depth of focus. Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is an essential parameter in SEM because it directly impacts the quality and interpretability of the images. SEM is widely used in various scientific disciplines, but its utility can be compromised by noise, which degrades image clarity. This review explores multiple aspects of the SEM imaging process, from the principal operation of SEM, sources of noise in SEM, methods for SNR measurement and estimations, to various aspects that affect the SNR measurement and approaches to enhance SNR, both from a hardware and software standpoint. We review traditional and emerging techniques, focusing on their applications, advantages, and limitations. The paper aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of SNR optimization in SEM for researchers and practitioners and to encourage further research in the field.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) effectively reduces hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) but can still produce inconsistent or unsupported content. Although LLM-as-a-Judge is widely used for RAG hallucination detection due to its implementation simplicity, it faces two main challenges: the absence of comprehensive evaluation benchmarks and the lack of domain-optimized judge models. To bridge these gaps, we introduce \textbf{Bi'an}, a novel framework featuring a bilingual benchmark dataset and lightweight judge models. The dataset supports rigorous evaluation across multiple RAG scenarios, while the judge models are fine-tuned from compact open-source LLMs. Extensive experimental evaluations on Bi'anBench show our 14B model outperforms baseline models with over five times larger parameter scales and rivals state-of-the-art closed-source LLMs. We will release our data and models soon at https://github.com/OpenSPG/KAG.

The increasing demand for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) has introduced significant challenges in managing the complex, computation-intensive tasks generated by modern vehicles while offloading tasks to external computing infrastructures such as edge computing (EC), nearby vehicular , and UAVs has become influential solution to these challenges. However, traditional computational offloading strategies often struggle to adapt to the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of vehicular environments. In this study, we explored the potential of Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) frameworks to optimize computational offloading through adaptive, real-time decision-making, and we have thoroughly investigated the Markov Decision Process (MDP) approaches on the existing literature. The paper focuses on key aspects such as standardized learning models, optimized reward structures, and collaborative multi-agent systems, aiming to advance the understanding and application of DRL in vehicular networks. Our findings offer insights into enhancing the efficiency, scalability, and robustness of ITS, setting the stage for future innovations in this rapidly evolving field.

The wreck was like a bug on the wall, a jumbly shape splayed on the abyssal plain. It was noticed by a team of autonomous-underwater-vehicle operators on board a subsea exploration vessel, working at an undisclosed location in the Atlantic Ocean, about a thousand miles from the nearest shore. The analysts belonged to a small private company that specializes in deep-sea search operations; I have been asked not to name it. They were looking for something else. In the past decade, the company has helped to transform the exploration of the seabed by deploying fleets of A.U.V.s--underwater drones--which cruise in formation, mapping large areas of the ocean floor with high-definition imagery.

In contexts with limited computational and data resources, high-resource language models often prove inadequate, particularly when addressing the specific needs of Malay languages. This paper introduces a Personal Intelligence System designed to efficiently integrate both on-device and server-based models. The system incorporates SLiM-34M for on-device processing, optimized for low memory and power usage, and MANYAK-1.3B for server-based tasks, allowing for scalable, high-performance language processing. The models achieve significant results across various tasks, such as machine translation, question-answering, and translate IndoMMLU. Particularly noteworthy is SLiM-34M's ability to achieve a high improvement in accuracy compared to other LLMs while using 2 times fewer pre-training tokens. This work challenges the prevailing assumption that large-scale computational resources are necessary to build effective language models, contributing to the development of resource-efficient models for the Malay language with the unique orchestration between SLiM-34M and MANYAK-1.3B.

In current web environment, fake news spreads rapidly across online social networks, posing serious threats to society. Existing multimodal fake news detection (MFND) methods can be classified into knowledge-based and semantic-based approaches. However, these methods are overly dependent on human expertise and feedback, lacking flexibility. To address this challenge, we propose a Dynamic Analysis and Adaptive Discriminator (DAAD) approach for fake news detection. For knowledge-based methods, we introduce the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm to leverage the self-reflective capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for prompt optimization, providing richer, domain-specific details and guidance to the LLMs, while enabling more flexible integration of LLM comment on news content. For semantic-based methods, we define four typical deceit patterns: emotional exaggeration, logical inconsistency, image manipulation, and semantic inconsistency, to reveal the mechanisms behind fake news creation. To detect these patterns, we carefully design four discriminators and expand them in depth and breadth, using the soft-routing mechanism to explore optimal detection models. Experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach. The code will be available at: https://github.com/SuXinqi/DAAD.