Asia
KINDLE: Knowledge-Guided Distillation for Prior-Free Gene Regulatory Network Inference
Gene regulatory network (GRN) inference serves as a cornerstone for deciphering cellular decision-making processes. Early approaches rely exclusively on gene expression data, thus their predictive power remain fundamentally constrained by the vast combinatorial space of potential gene-gene interactions. Subsequent methods integrate prior knowledge to mitigate this challenge by restricting the solution space to biologically plausible interactions. However, we argue that the effectiveness of these approaches is contingent upon the precision of prior information and the reduction in the search space will circumscribe the models' potential for novel biological discoveries. To address these limitations, we introduce KINDLE, a three-stage framework that decouples GRN inference from prior knowledge dependencies.
nvBench 2.0: Resolving Ambiguity in Text-to-Visualization through Stepwise Reasoning
Text-to-Visualization (Text2VIS) enables users to create visualizations from natural language queries, making data insights more accessible. However, Text2VIS faces challenges in interpreting ambiguous queries, as users often express their visualization needs in imprecise language. To address this challenge, we introduce nvBench 2.0, a new benchmark designed to evaluate Text2VIS systems in scenarios involving ambiguous queries.
Scalable Fingerprinting of Large Language Models
Model fingerprinting has emerged as a powerful tool for model owners to identify their shared model given API access. In order to lower false discovery rate, fight fingerprint leakage, and defend against coalitions of model users attempting to bypass detection, we argue that scaling up the number of fingerprints one can embed into a model, i.e. Scalability of fingerprints, is critical. Hence, we pose scalability as a crucial requirement for fingerprinting schemes. We experiment with fingerprint design at a scale significantly larger than previously considered, and introduce a new method, dubbed Perinucleus sampling, to generate scalable, persistent, and harmless fingerprints. We demonstrate that this scheme can add 24,576 fingerprints to a Llama-3.1-8B
Semi-off-Policy Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Language Slow-Thinking Reasoning
Enhancing large vision-language models (LVLMs) with visual slow-thinking reasoning is crucial for solving complex multimodal tasks. However, since LVLMs are mainly trained with vision-language alignment, it is difficult to adopt on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) to develop the slow thinking ability because the rollout space is restricted by its initial abilities. Off-policy RL offers a way to go beyond the current policy, but directly distilling trajectories from external models may cause visual hallucinations due to mismatched visual perception abilities across models. To address these issues, this paper proposes SOPHIA, a simple and scalable SemiOff-Policy RL for vision-language slow-tHInking reAsoning. SOPHIA builds a semi-off-policy behavior model by combining on-policy visual understanding from a trainable LVLM with off-policy slow-thinking reasoning from a language model, assigns outcome-based rewards to reasoning, and propagates visual rewards backward. Then LVLM learns slow-thinking reasoning ability from the obtained reasoning trajectories using propagated rewards via off-policy RL algorithms.
Direct Numerical Layout Generation for 3DIndoor Scene Synthesis via Spatial Reasoning
Realistic 3D indoor scene synthesis is vital for embodied AI and digital content creation. It can be naturally divided into two subtasks: object generation and layout generation. While recent generative models have significantly advanced object-level quality and controllability, layout generation remains challenging due to limited datasets. Existing methods either overfit to these datasets or rely on predefined constraints to optimize numerical layout that sacrifice flexibility. As a result, they fail to generate scenes that are both open-vocabulary and aligned with fine-grained user instructions.
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The current Federated Recommendation System (FedRS) focuses on personalized recommendation services and assumes clients are personalized IoT devices (e.g., mobile phones). In this paper, we deeply dive into new but practical FedRS applications within the joint venture ecosystem. Subsidiaries engage as participants with their users and items. However, in such a situation, merely exchanging item embedding is insufficient, as user bases always exhibit both overlaps and exclusive segments, demonstrating the complexity of user information. Meanwhile, directly uploading user information is a violation of privacy and unacceptable.
Crimea halts fuel sales after Ukraine strikes cause shortages
Is the war entering a new phase? Gas sales in Russian-controlled Crimea have halted after Ukrainian drone strikes on the peninsula's supply route. Drivers are now looking for other modes of transport. Colombia's De La Espriella claims victory on preliminary results US and Iran meet for'tense' but'constructive' ceasefire talks What are the end goals of Iran-US negotiations?
Bridging Time and Linguistics: LLMs as Time Series Analyzer through Symbolization and Segmentation
Recent studies reveal that Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong sequential reasoning capabilities, allowing them to replace specialized time-series models and serve as foundation models for complex time-series analysis. To activate the capabilities of LLMs for time-series tasks, numerous studies have attempted to bridge the gap between time series and linguistics by aligning textual representations with time-series patterns. However, it is a non-trivial endeavor to losslessly capture the infinite time-domain variability using natural language, leading to suboptimal alignment performance. Beyond representation, contextual differences, where semantics in time series are conveyed by consecutive points, unlike in text by individual tokens, are often overlooked by existing methods. To address these, we propose S2TS-LLM, a simple yet effective framework to repurpose LLMs for universal time series analysis through the following two main paradigms: (i) a spectral symbolization paradigm transforms time series into frequency-domain representations characterized by a fixed number of components and prominent amplitudes, which enables a limited set of symbols to effectively abstract key frequency features; (ii) a contextual segmentation paradigm partitions the sequence into blocks based on temporal patterns and reassigns positional encodings accordingly, thereby mitigating the structural mismatch between time series and natural language.
Clean First Align Later Preference Data Cleaning for Reliable
Human feedback plays a pivotal role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, such feedback is often noisy or inconsistent, which can degrade the quality of reward models and hinder alignment. While various automated data cleaning methods have been proposed to mitigate this issue, a systematic evaluation of their effectiveness and generalizability remains lacking. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating 13 preference data cleaning methods in the context of LLM alignment. PrefCleanBench offers a standardized protocol to assess cleaning strategies in terms of alignment performance and generalizability across diverse datasets, model architectures, and optimization algorithms. By unifying disparate methods and rigorously comparing them, we uncover key factors that determine the success of data cleaning in alignment tasks. This benchmark lays the groundwork for principled and reproducible approaches to improving LLM alignment through better data quality--highlighting the crucial but underexplored role of data preprocessing in responsible AI development.