Wargames are simulations of conflicts in which participants' decisions influence future events. While casual wargaming can be used for entertainment or socialization, serious wargaming is used by experts to explore strategic implications of decision-making and experiential learning. In this paper, we take the position that Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, such as Language Models (LMs), are rapidly approaching human-expert capability for strategic planning -- and will one day surpass it. Military organizations have begun using LMs to provide insights into the consequences of real-world decisions during _open-ended wargames_ which use natural language to convey actions and outcomes. We argue the ability for AI systems to influence large-scale decisions motivates additional research into the safety, interpretability, and explainability of AI in open-ended wargames. To demonstrate, we conduct a scoping literature review with a curated selection of 100 unclassified studies on AI in wargames, and construct a novel ontology of open-endedness using the creativity afforded to players, adjudicators, and the novelty provided to observers. Drawing from this body of work, we distill a set of practical recommendations and critical safety considerations for deploying AI in open-ended wargames across common domains. We conclude by presenting the community with a set of high-impact open research challenges for future work.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown outstanding potential for role-playing applications. Evaluating these capabilities is becoming crucial yet remains challenging. Existing benchmarks mostly adopt a \textbf{character-centric} approach, simplify user-character interactions to isolated Q&A tasks, and fail to reflect real-world applications. To address this limitation, we introduce RMTBench, a comprehensive \textbf{user-centric} bilingual role-playing benchmark featuring 80 diverse characters and over 8,000 dialogue rounds. RMTBench includes custom characters with detailed backgrounds and abstract characters defined by simple traits, enabling evaluation across various user scenarios. Our benchmark constructs dialogues based on explicit user motivations rather than character descriptions, ensuring alignment with practical user applications. Furthermore, we construct an authentic multi-turn dialogue simulation mechanism. With carefully selected evaluation dimensions and LLM-based scoring, this mechanism captures the complex intention of conversations between the user and the character. By shifting focus from character background to user intention fulfillment, RMTBench bridges the gap between academic evaluation and practical deployment requirements, offering a more effective framework for assessing role-playing capabilities in LLMs. All code and datasets will be released soon. We release the datasets at https://huggingface.co/datasets/xiangh/RMTBENCH.

Recent advances in large language models have catalyzed the development of multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) that integrate text, speech, and vision within unified frameworks. As MLLMs evolve from narrow, monolingual, task-specific systems to general-purpose instruction-following models, a key frontier lies in evaluating their multilingual and multimodal capabilities over both long and short contexts. However, existing benchmarks fall short in evaluating these dimensions jointly: they are often limited to English, mostly focus on one single modality at a time, rely on short-form contexts, or lack human annotations -- hindering comprehensive assessment of model performance across languages, modalities, and task complexity. To address these gaps, we introduce MCIF (Multimodal Crosslingual Instruction Following), the first multilingual human-annotated benchmark based on scientific talks that is designed to evaluate instruction-following in crosslingual, multimodal settings over both short- and long-form inputs. MCIF spans three core modalities -- speech, vision, and text -- and four diverse languages (English, German, Italian, and Chinese), enabling a comprehensive evaluation of MLLMs' abilities to interpret instructions across languages and combine them with multimodal contextual information. MCIF is released under a CC-BY 4.0 license to encourage open research and progress in MLLMs development.

Abstract--LiDAR-based 3D mapping suffers from cumulative drift causing global misalignment, particularly in GNSS-constrained environments. T o address this, we propose a unified framework that fuses LiDAR, GNSS, and IMU data for high-resolution city-scale mapping. The method performs velocity-based temporal alignment using Dynamic Time Warping and refines GNSS and IMU signals via extended Kalman filtering. Local maps are built using Normal Distributions Transform-based registration and pose graph optimization with loop closure detection, while global consistency is enforced using GNSS-constrained anchors followed by fine registration of overlapping segments. We also introduce a large-scale multimodal dataset captured in Perth, Western Australia to facilitate future research in this direction. Our dataset comprises 144,000 frames acquired with a 128-channel Ouster LiDAR, synchronized RTK-GNSS trajectories, and MEMS-IMU measurements across 21 urban loops. T o assess geometric consistency, we evaluated our method using alignment metrics based on road centerlines and intersections to capture both global and local accuracy. The proposed framework reduces the average global alignment error from 3.32 m to 1.24 m, achieving a 61.4% improvement, and significantly decreases the intersection centroid offset from 13.22 m to 2.01 m, corresponding to an 84.8% enhancement. The constructed high-fidelity map and raw dataset are publicly available through IEEE Dataport and its visualization can be viewed in the provided Demo. This dataset and method together establish a new benchmark for evaluating 3D city mapping in GNSS-constrained environments, with source code available at GitHub Repository. Urbanization is rapidly transforming cities into dense and complex environments, increasing the demand for scalable infrastructure planning and maintenance [1], [2]. In this context, updated high-resolution spatial data is essential [3], [4], [5]. This work was funded by the University of Jeddah, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, under grant No. (UJ-24-SUTU-1290).

We introduce CosmoCore, a neuroscience-inspired reinforcement learning (RL) architecture that integrates affective signals to enhance code generation in large language models (LLMs). Motivated by human and animal learning where embarrassment from mistakes drives rapid correction, as observed in training a puppy to avoid repeating errors after a single scolding CosmoCore tags code generation trajectories with valence and surprise using a lightweight multi-layer perceptron (MLP). High-negative valence (cringe) episodes, such as buggy code outputs, are prioritized in a Dream Queue for five-fold replay during off-policy updates, while low-surprise successes are pruned to prevent overconfidence and buffer bloat. Evaluated on code generation benchmarks like HumanEval and BigCodeBench, alongside simulations with a custom data pipeline environment, CosmoCore reduces hallucinated code (e.g., syntax errors or logical bugs) by 48\% and accelerates self-correction by 45\%. Local experiments using Hugging Face models in a PySpark environment validate these gains, with code snippets provided for replication. Ablations confirm valence tagging boosts curiosity in exploration, and pruning mitigates inefficiency. This framework extends RL from human feedback (RLHF) for more emotionally aware code assistants, with applications in IDEs and data pipelines. Code and the custom mini-world simulation are released.

Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDS/IPS) in large enterprises can generate hundreds of thousands of alerts per hour, overwhelming analysts with logs requiring rapidly evolving expertise. Conventional machine-learning detectors reduce alert volume but still yield many false positives, while standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines often retrieve irrelevant context and fail to justify predictions. We present CyberRAG, a modular agent-based RAG framework that delivers real-time classification, explanation, and structured reporting for cyber-attacks. A central LLM agent orchestrates: (i) fine-tuned classifiers specialized by attack family; (ii) tool adapters for enrichment and alerting; and (iii) an iterative retrieval-and-reason loop that queries a domain-specific knowledge base until evidence is relevant and self-consistent. Unlike traditional RAG, CyberRAG adopts an agentic design that enables dynamic control flow and adaptive reasoning. This architecture autonomously refines threat labels and natural-language justifications, reducing false positives and enhancing interpretability. It is also extensible: new attack types can be supported by adding classifiers without retraining the core agent. CyberRAG was evaluated on SQL Injection, XSS, and SSTI, achieving over 94\% accuracy per class and a final classification accuracy of 94.92\% through semantic orchestration. Generated explanations reached 0.94 in BERTScore and 4.9/5 in GPT-4-based expert evaluation, with robustness preserved against adversarial and unseen payloads. These results show that agentic, specialist-oriented RAG can combine high detection accuracy with trustworthy, SOC-ready prose, offering a flexible path toward partially automated cyber-defense workflows.

Recent advancements in AI agents have demonstrated their growing potential to drive and support scientific discovery. In this work, we introduce MLR-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating AI agents on open-ended machine learning research. MLR-Bench includes three key components: (1) 201 research tasks sourced from NeurIPS, ICLR, and ICML workshops covering diverse ML topics; (2) MLR-Judge, an automated evaluation framework combining LLM-based reviewers with carefully designed review rubrics to assess research quality; and (3) MLR-Agent, a modular agent scaffold capable of completing research tasks through four stages: idea generation, proposal formulation, experimentation, and paper writing. Our framework supports both stepwise assessment across these distinct research stages, and end-to-end evaluation of the final research paper. We then use MLR-Bench to evaluate six frontier LLMs and an advanced coding agent, finding that while LLMs are effective at generating coherent ideas and well-structured papers, current coding agents frequently (e.g., in 80% of the cases) produce fabricated or invalidated experimental results--posing a major barrier to scientific reliability. We validate MLR-Judge through human evaluation, showing high agreement with expert reviewers, supporting its potential as a scalable tool for research evaluation. We open-source MLR-Bench to help the community benchmark, diagnose, and improve AI research agents toward trustworthy and transparent scientific discovery.

In recent developments, deep learning methodologies applied to Natural Language Processing (NLP) have revealed a paradox: They improve performance but demand considerable data and resources for their training. Alternatively, quantum computing exploits the principles of quantum mechanics to overcome the computational limitations of current methodologies, thereby establishing an emerging field known as quantum natural language processing (QNLP). This domain holds the potential to attain a quantum advantage in the processing of linguistic structures, surpassing classical models in both efficiency and accuracy. In this paper, it is proposed to categorise QNLP models based on quantum computing principles, architecture, and computational approaches. This paper attempts to provide a survey on how quantum meets language by mapping state-of-the-art in this area, embracing quantum encoding techniques for classical data, QNLP models for prevalent NLP tasks, and quantum optimisation techniques for hyper parameter tuning. The landscape of quantum computing approaches applied to various NLP tasks is summarised by showcasing the specific QNLP methods used, and the popularity of these methods is indicated by their count. From the findings, it is observed that QNLP approaches are still limited to small data sets, with only a few models explored extensively, and there is increasing interest in the application of quantum computing to natural language processing tasks.

This tutorial on adaptation of LLMs is designed to address the growing demand for models that go beyond the static capabilities of generic LLMs by providing an overview of dynamic, domain-specific, and task-adaptive LLM adaptation techniques. While general LLMs have demonstrated strong generalization across a variety of tasks, they often struggle to perform well in specialized domains such as finance, healthcare, and code generation for underrepresented languages. Additionally, their static nature limits their ability to evolve with the changing world, and they are often extremely large in size, making them impractical and costly to deploy at scale. As a result, the adaptation of LLMs has drawn much attention since the birth of LLMs and is of core importance, both for industry, which focuses on serving its targeted users, and academia, which can greatly benefit from small but powerful LLMs. To address this gap, this tutorial aims to provide an overview of the LLM adaptation techniques. We start with an introduction to LLM adaptation, from both the data perspective and the model perspective. We then emphasize how the evaluation metrics and benchmarks are different from other techniques. After establishing the problems, we explore various adaptation techniques. We categorize adaptation techniques into two main families. The first is parametric knowledge adaptation, which focuses on updating the parametric knowledge within LLMs. Additionally, we will discuss real-time adaptation techniques, including model editing, which allows LLMs to be updated dynamically in production environments. The second kind of adaptation is semi-parametric knowledge adaptation, where the goal is to update LLM parameters to better leverage external knowledge or tools through techniques like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agent-based systems.

HAPS are emerging as key enablers in the evolution of 6G wireless networks, bridging terrestrial and non-terrestrial infrastructures. Operating in the stratosphere, HAPS can provide wide-area coverage, low-latency, energy-efficient broadband communications with flexible deployment options for diverse applications. This survey delivers a comprehensive overview of HAPS use cases, technologies, and integration strategies within the 6G ecosystem. The roles of HAPS in extending connectivity to underserved regions, supporting dynamic backhauling, enabling massive IoT, and delivering reliable low-latency communications for autonomous and immersive services are discussed. The paper reviews state-of-the-art architectures for terrestrial and non-terrestrial network integration, highlights recent field trials. Furthermore, key enabling technologies such as channel modeling, AI-driven resource allocation, interference control, mobility management, and energy-efficient communications are examined. The paper also outlines open research challenges. By addressing existing gaps in the literature, this survey positions HAPS as a foundational component of globally integrated, resilient, and sustainable 6G networks.