This paper presents VITA (Virtual Teaching Assistants), an adaptive distributed learning (ADL) platform that embeds a large language model (LLM)-powered chatbot (BotCaptain) to provide dialogic support, interoperable analytics, and integrity-aware assessment for workforce preparation in data science. The platform couples context-aware conversational tutoring with formative-assessment patterns designed to promote reflective reasoning. The paper describes an end-to-end data pipeline that transforms chat logs into Experience API (xAPI) statements, instructor dashboards that surface outliers for just-in-time intervention, and an adaptive pathway engine that routes learners among progression, reinforcement, and remediation content. The paper also benchmarks VITA conceptually against emerging tutoring architectures, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)--based assistants and Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI)--integrated hubs, highlighting trade-offs among content grounding, interoperability, and deployment complexity. Contributions include a reusable architecture for interoperable conversational analytics, a catalog of patterns for integrity-preserving formative assessment, and a practical blueprint for integrating adaptive pathways into data-science courses. The paper concludes with implementation lessons and a roadmap (RAG integration, hallucination mitigation, and LTI~1.3 / OpenID Connect) to guide multi-course evaluations and broader adoption. In light of growing demand and scalability constraints in traditional instruction, the approach illustrates how conversational AI can support engagement, timely feedback, and personalized learning at scale. Future work will refine the platform's adaptive intelligence and examine applicability across varied educational settings.

This paper presents a temporal expression language for monitoring AI agent behavior, enabling systematic error-detection of LLM-based agentic systems that exhibit variable outputs due to stochastic generation processes. Drawing from temporal logic techniques used in hardware verification, this approach monitors execution traces of agent tool calls and state transitions to detect deviations from expected behavioral patterns. Current error-detection approaches rely primarily on text matching of inputs and outputs, which proves fragile due to the natural language variability inherent in LLM responses. The proposed method instead focuses on the sequence of agent actions -- such as tool invocations and inter-agent communications -- allowing verification of system behavior independent of specific textual outputs. The temporal expression language provides assertions that capture correct behavioral patterns across multiple execution scenarios. These assertions serve dual purposes: validating prompt engineering and guardrail effectiveness during development, and providing regression testing when agents are updated with new LLMs or modified logic. The approach is demonstrated using a three-agent system, where agents coordinate to solve multi-step reasoning tasks. When powered by large, capable models, all temporal assertions were satisfied across many test runs. However, when smaller models were substituted in two of the three agents, executions violated behavioral assertions, primarily due to improper tool sequencing and failed coordination handoffs. The temporal expressions successfully flagged these anomalies, demonstrating the method's effectiveness for detecting behavioral regressions in production agentic systems. This approach provides a foundation for systematic monitoring of AI agent reliability as these systems become increasingly deployed in critical applications.

Implicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) methods offer a token-efficient alternative to explicit CoT reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs), but a persistent performance gap has limited their adoption. We identify a core latent instability issue when scaling the computational budget of implicit CoT: as the number of reasoning tokens increases, training often becomes unstable and collapses. Our analysis shows that this instability arises from latent representations becoming homogeneous and losing semantic diversity, caused by insufficient step-level supervision in current implicit CoT methods. To address this, we propose SIM-CoT, a plug-and-play training module that introduces step-level supervision to stabilize and enrich the latent reasoning space. SIM-CoT employs an auxiliary decoder during training to align each implicit token with its corresponding explicit reasoning step, ensuring latent states capture distinct and meaningful information. The auxiliary decoder is removed at inference, preserving the efficiency of implicit CoT with no added overhead. It also provides interpretability by projecting each latent token onto an explicit reasoning vocabulary, enabling per-step visualization and diagnosis. SIM-CoT significantly improves both in-domain accuracy and out-of-domain stability of implicit CoT methods, boosting Coconut by +8.2\% on GPT-2 and CODI by +3.0\% on LLaMA-3.1 8B. It further surpasses the explicit CoT baseline on GPT-2 by 2.1\% with 2.3$\times$ greater token efficiency, while closing the performance gap on larger models like LLaMA-3.1 8B. Code: https://github.com/InternLM/SIM-CoT

Online reinforcement learning in complex tasks is time-consuming, as massive interaction steps are needed to learn the optimal Q-function.Vision-language action (VLA) policies represent a promising direction for solving diverse tasks; however, their performance on low-level control remains limited, and effective deployment often requires task-specific expert demonstrations for fine-tuning. In this paper, we propose \textbf{VARL} (\textbf{V}LM as \textbf{A}ction advisor for online \textbf{R}einforcement \textbf{L}earning), a framework that leverages the domain knowledge of vision-language models (VLMs) to provide action suggestions for reinforcement learning agents. Unlike previous methods, VARL provides action suggestions rather than designing heuristic rewards, thereby guaranteeing unchanged optimality and convergence. The suggested actions increase sample diversity and ultimately improve sample efficiency, especially in sparse-reward tasks. To validate the effectiveness of VARL, we evaluate it across diverse environments and agent settings. Results show that VARL greatly improves sample efficiency without introducing significant computational overhead. These advantages make VARL a general framework for online reinforcement learning and make it feasible to directly apply reinforcement learning from scratch in real-world environments.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are foundational to critical applications like autonomous driving, medical diagnosis, and content moderation. While Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods like LoRA enable their efficient adaptation to specialized tasks, these models remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks that can compromise safety-critical decisions. CLIP, the backbone for numerous downstream VLMs, is a high-value target whose vulnerabilities can cascade across the multimodal AI ecosystem. We propose Dynamic Adversarial Curriculum DAC-LoRA, a novel framework that integrates adversarial training into PEFT. The core principle of our method i.e. an intelligent curriculum of progressively challenging attack, is general and can potentially be applied to any iterative attack method. Guided by the First-Order Stationary Condition (FOSC) and a TRADES-inspired loss, DAC-LoRA achieves substantial improvements in adversarial robustness without significantly compromising clean accuracy. Our work presents an effective, lightweight, and broadly applicable method to demonstrate that the DAC-LoRA framework can be easily integrated into a standard PEFT pipeline to significantly enhance robustness.

In multilingual healthcare environments, automatic disease diagnosis from clinical text remains a challenging task due to the scarcity of annotated medical data in low-resource languages and the linguistic variability across populations. This paper proposes SwasthLLM, a unified, zero-shot, cross-lingual, and multi-task learning framework for medical diagnosis that operates effectively across English, Hindi, and Bengali without requiring language-specific fine-tuning. At its core, SwasthLLM leverages the multilingual XLM-RoBERTa encoder augmented with a language-aware attention mechanism and a disease classification head, enabling the model to extract medically relevant information regardless of the language structure. To align semantic representations across languages, a Siamese contrastive learning module is introduced, ensuring that equivalent medical texts in different languages produce similar embeddings. Further, a translation consistency module and a contrastive projection head reinforce language-invariant representation learning. SwasthLLM is trained using a multi-task learning strategy, jointly optimizing disease classification, translation alignment, and contrastive learning objectives. Additionally, we employ Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) to equip the model with rapid adaptation capabilities for unseen languages or tasks with minimal data. Our phased training pipeline emphasizes robust representation alignment before task-specific fine-tuning. Extensive evaluation shows that SwasthLLM achieves high diagnostic performance, with a test accuracy of 97.22% and an F1-score of 97.17% in supervised settings. Crucially, in zero-shot scenarios, it attains 92.78% accuracy on Hindi and 73.33% accuracy on Bengali medical text, demonstrating strong generalization in low-resource contexts.

Imitation Learning (IL) algorithms offer an efficient way to train an agent by mimicking an expert's behavior without requiring a reward function. IL algorithms often necessitate access to state and action information from expert demonstrations. Although expert actions can provide detailed guidance, requiring such action information may prove impractical for real-world applications where expert actions are difficult to obtain. To address this limitation, the concept of learning from observation (LfO) or state-only imitation learning (SOIL) has recently gained attention, wherein the imitator only has access to expert state visitation information. In this paper, we present a framework for LfO and use it to survey and classify existing LfO methods in terms of their trajectory construction, assumptions and algorithm's design choices. This survey also draws connections between several related fields like offline RL, model-based RL and hierarchical RL. Finally, we use our framework to identify open problems and suggest future research directions.

As LLMs gain adoption in high-stakes domains like mental health, domain experts are increasingly consulted to provide input into policies governing their behavior. From an observation of 19 policymaking workshops with 9 experts over 15 weeks, we identified opportunities to better support rapid experimentation, feedback, and iteration for collaborative policy design processes. We present PolicyPad, an interactive system that facilitates the emerging practice of LLM policy prototyping by drawing from established UX prototyping practices, including heuristic evaluation and storyboarding. Using PolicyPad, policy designers can collaborate on drafting a policy in real time while independently testing policy-informed model behavior with usage scenarios. We evaluate PolicyPad through workshops with 8 groups of 22 domain experts in mental health and law, finding that PolicyPad enhanced collaborative dynamics during policy design, enabled tight feedback loops, and led to novel policy contributions. Overall, our work paves participatory paths for advancing AI alignment and safety.