Clarke County
NeuroMAS: Multi-Agent Systems as Neural Networks with Joint Reinforcement Learning
Lu, Haoran, Fang, Luyang, Zhong, Wenxuan, Ma, Ping
Multi-agent language systems are often built as hand-designed workflows, where agents are assigned semantic roles and communication protocols are specified in advance. We propose NeuroMAS, a method that first treats a multi-agent language system as a trainable and scalable neural-network-like architecture with LLM agents as nodes and intermediate textual signals as edges. In NeuroMAS, agent nodes are role-free but structure-aware: the topology only determines how information can flow in general, while reinforcement learning training determines how nodes communicate, specialize, and coordinate. This formulation shifts multi-agent design from workflow engineering toward architecture design, where depth, width, connectivity, and growth protocol become scalable sources of capability. Further, we provide a theoretical perspective showing why such modular textual computation is more parameter-efficient when tasks admit hierarchical decompositions. Experiments show that NeuroMAS improves significantly over both inference-time and trained multi-agent baselines. We further find that organizational scaling is path-dependent: larger systems can be challenging to train from scratch, but become feasible when grown progressively from smaller trained systems. These results suggest that learned neural multi-agent systems are a promising scaling axis for LLMs.
Scalable Variational Bayesian Fine-Tuning of LLMs via Orthogonalized Low-Rank Adapters
Xiang, Haotian, Li, Bingcong, Lu, Qin
When deploying large language models (LLMs) to safety-critical applications, uncertainty quantification (UQ) is of utmost importance to self-assess the reliability of the LLM-based decisions. However, such decisions typically suffer from overconfidence, particularly after parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) for downstream domain-specific tasks with limited data. Existing methods to alleviate this issue either rely on Laplace approximation based post-hoc framework, which may yield suboptimal calibration depending on the training trajectory, or variational Bayesian training that requires multiple complete forward passes through the entire LLM backbone at inference time for Monte Carlo estimation, posing scalability challenges for deployment. To address these limitations, we build on the Bayesian last layer (BLL) model, where the LLM-based deterministic feature extractor is followed by random last layer parameters for uncertainty reasoning. Since existing low-rank adapters (LoRA) for PEFT have limited expressiveness due to rank collapse, we address this with Polar-decomposed Low-rank Adapter Representation (PoLAR), an orthogonalized parameterization paired with Riemannian optimization to enable more stable and expressive adaptation. Building on this PoLAR-BLL model, we leverage the variational (V) inference framework to put forth a scalable Bayesian fine-tuning approach which jointly seeks the PoLAR parameters and approximate posterior of the last layer parameters via alternating optimization. The resulting PoLAR-VBLL is a flexible framework that nicely integrates architecture-enhanced optimization with scalable Bayesian inference to endow LLMs with well-calibrated UQ. Our empirical results verify the effectiveness of PoLAR-VBLL in terms of generalization and uncertainty estimation on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution data for various common-sense reasoning tasks.
Deer markings actually glow
The scrapes and rubs the mammals leave behind shine under UV light humans can't see. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Animals see the world around them in ways that we humans can only imagine. Arctic reindeer's eyes change color with the season to help them find food, while giant squid have eyes the size of dinner plates. Many species take advantage of seeing ultraviolet (UV) light that's invisible to humans--including deer .
Matthew McConaughey fights unauthorized AI likenesses by trademarking himself
Apple's Siri AI will be powered by Gemini The actor is taking a proactive approach to prevent AI companies from stealing his likeness. ATHENS, GEORGIA - NOVEMBER 15: Actor Matthew McConaughey is pictured before a game between the Georgia Bulldogs and the Texas Longhorns at Sanford Stadium on November 15, 2025 in Athens, Georgia. Matthew McConaughey filed trademark applications to prevent his likeness from being used by AI companies without permission, and the US Patent and Trademark Office has approved eight so far. According to the, the trademarks were for video and audio clips featuring the actor staring, smiling and talking. One was for a video of him standing on a porch, while another was for an audio recording of him saying "alright, alright, alright," his signature catchphrase from the movie .
Build AI Assistants using Large Language Models and Agents to Enhance the Engineering Education of Biomechanics
Yan, Hanzhi, Lu, Qin, Wang, Xianqiao, Zhai, Xiaoming, Liu, Tianming, Li, He
While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable versatility across a wide range of general tasks, their effectiveness often diminishes in domain-specific applications due to inherent knowledge gaps. Moreover, their performance typically declines when addressing complex problems that require multi-step reasoning and analysis. In response to these challenges, we propose leveraging both LLMs and AI agents to develop education assistants aimed at enhancing undergraduate learning in biomechanics courses that focus on analyzing the force and moment in the musculoskeletal system of the human body. To achieve our goal, we construct a dual-module framework to enhance LLM performance in biomechanics educational tasks: 1) we apply Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to improve the specificity and logical consistency of LLM's responses to the conceptual true/false questions; 2) we build a Multi-Agent System (MAS) to solve calculation-oriented problems involving multi-step reasoning and code execution. Specifically, we evaluate the performance of several LLMs, i.e., Qwen-1.0-32B, Qwen-2.5-32B, and Llama-70B, on a biomechanics dataset comprising 100 true/false conceptual questions and problems requiring equation derivation and calculation. Our results demonstrate that RAG significantly enhances the performance and stability of LLMs in answering conceptual questions, surpassing those of vanilla models. On the other hand, the MAS constructed using multiple LLMs demonstrates its ability to perform multi-step reasoning, derive equations, execute code, and generate explainable solutions for tasks that require calculation. These findings demonstrate the potential of applying RAG and MAS to enhance LLM performance for specialized courses in engineering curricula, providing a promising direction for developing intelligent tutoring in engineering education.
SketchMind: A Multi-Agent Cognitive Framework for Assessing Student-Drawn Scientific Sketches
Latif, Ehsan, Khan, Zirak, Zhai, Xiaoming
Scientific sketches (e.g., models) offer a powerful lens into students' conceptual understanding, yet AI-powered automated assessment of such free-form, visually diverse artifacts remains a critical challenge. Existing solutions often treat sketch evaluation as either an image classification task or monolithic vision-language models, which lack interpretability, pedagogical alignment, and adaptability across cognitive levels. To address these limitations, we present SketchMind, a cognitively grounded, multi-agent framework for evaluating and improving student-drawn scientific sketches. SketchMind comprises modular agents responsible for rubric parsing, sketch perception, cognitive alignment, and iterative feedback with sketch modification, enabling personalized and transparent evaluation. We evaluate SketchMind on a curated dataset of 3,575 student-generated sketches across six science assessment items with different highest order of Bloom's level that require students to draw models to explain phenomena. Compared to baseline GPT-4o performance without SRG (average accuracy: 55.6%), and with SRG integration achieves 77.1% average accuracy (+21.4% average absolute gain). We also demonstrate that multi-agent orchestration with SRG enhances SketchMind performance, for example, GPT-4.1 gains an average 8.9% increase in sketch prediction accuracy, outperforming single-agent pipelines across all items. Human evaluators rated the feedback and co-created sketches generated by \textsc{SketchMind} with GPT-4.1, which achieved an average of 4.1 out of 5, significantly higher than those of baseline models (e.g., 2.3 for GPT-4o). Experts noted the system's potential to meaningfully support conceptual growth through guided revision. Our code and (pending approval) dataset will be released to support reproducibility and future research in AI-driven education.
VisitHGNN: Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks for Modeling Point-of-Interest Visit Patterns
Understanding how urban residents travel between neighborhoods and destinations is critical for transportation planning, mobility management, and public health. By mining historical origin-to-destination flow patterns with spatial, temporal, and functional relations among urban places, we estimate probabilities of visits from neighborhoods to specific destinations. These probabilities capture neighborhood-level contributions to citywide vehicular and foot traffic, supporting demand estimation, accessibility assessment, and multimodal planning. Particularly, we introduce VisitHGNN, a heterogeneous, relation-specific graph neural network designed to predict visit probabilities at individual Points of interest (POIs). POIs are characterized using numerical, JSON-derived, and textual attributes, augmented with fixed summaries of POI--POI spatial proximity, temporal co-activity, and brand affinity, while census block groups (CBGs) are described with 72 socio-demographic variables. CBGs are connected via spatial adjacency, and POIs and CBGs are linked through distance-annotated cross-type edges. Inference is constrained to a distance-based candidate set of plausible origin CBGs, and training minimizes a masked Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence to yield probability distribution across the candidate set. Using weekly mobility data from Fulton County, Georgia, USA, VisitHGNN achieves strong predictive performance with mean KL divergence of 0.287, MAE of 0.008, Top-1 accuracy of 0.853, and R-square of 0.892, substantially outperforming pairwise MLP and distance-only baselines, and aligning closely with empirical visitation patterns (NDCG@50 = 0.966); Recall@5 = 0.611). The resulting distributions closely mirror observed travel behavior with high fidelity, highlighting the model's potential for decision support in urban planning, transportation policy, mobility system design, and public health.