Overview
Context Engineering 2.0: The Context of Context Engineering
Hua, Qishuo, Ye, Lyumanshan, Fu, Dayuan, Xiao, Yang, Cai, Xiaojie, Wu, Yunze, Lin, Jifan, Wang, Junfei, Liu, Pengfei
Karl Marx once wrote that ``the human essence is the ensemble of social relations'', suggesting that individuals are not isolated entities but are fundamentally shaped by their interactions with other entities, within which contexts play a constitutive and essential role. With the advent of computers and artificial intelligence, these contexts are no longer limited to purely human--human interactions: human--machine interactions are included as well. Then a central question emerges: How can machines better understand our situations and purposes? To address this challenge, researchers have recently introduced the concept of context engineering. Although it is often regarded as a recent innovation of the agent era, we argue that related practices can be traced back more than twenty years. Since the early 1990s, the field has evolved through distinct historical phases, each shaped by the intelligence level of machines: from early human--computer interaction frameworks built around primitive computers, to today's human--agent interaction paradigms driven by intelligent agents, and potentially to human--level or superhuman intelligence in the future. In this paper, we situate context engineering, provide a systematic definition, outline its historical and conceptual landscape, and examine key design considerations for practice. By addressing these questions, we aim to offer a conceptual foundation for context engineering and sketch its promising future. This paper is a stepping stone for a broader community effort toward systematic context engineering in AI systems.
Linking Heterogeneous Data with Coordinated Agent Flows for Social Media Analysis
Chen, Shifu, Deng, Dazhen, Xu, Zhihong, Xu, Sijia, Peng, Tai-Quan, Wu, Yingcai
Social media platforms generate massive volumes of heterogeneous data, capturing user behaviors, textual content, temporal dynamics, and network structures. Analyzing such data is crucial for understanding phenomena such as opinion dynamics, community formation, and information diffusion. However, discovering insights from this complex landscape is exploratory, conceptually challenging, and requires expertise in social media mining and visualization. Existing automated approaches, though increasingly leveraging large language models (LLMs), remain largely confined to structured tabular data and cannot adequately address the heterogeneity of social media analysis. We present SIA (Social Insight Agents), an LLM agent system that links heterogeneous multi-modal data -- including raw inputs (e.g., text, network, and behavioral data), intermediate outputs, mined analytical results, and visualization artifacts -- through coordinated agent flows. Guided by a bottom-up taxonomy that connects insight types with suitable mining and visualization techniques, SIA enables agents to plan and execute coherent analysis strategies. To ensure multi-modal integration, it incorporates a data coordinator that unifies tabular, textual, and network data into a consistent flow. Its interactive interface provides a transparent workflow where users can trace, validate, and refine the agent's reasoning, supporting both adaptability and trustworthiness. Through expert-centered case studies and quantitative evaluation, we show that SIA effectively discovers diverse and meaningful insights from social media while supporting human-agent collaboration in complex analytical tasks.
On the Dataless Training of Neural Networks
Velasquez, Alvaro, Jha, Susmit, Alkhouri, Ismail R.
This paper surveys studies on the use of neural networks for optimization in the training-data-free setting. Specifically, we examine the dataless application of neural network architectures in optimization by re-parameterizing problems using fully connected (or MLP), convolutional, graph, and quadratic neural networks. Although MLPs have been used to solve linear programs a few decades ago, this approach has recently gained increasing attention due to its promising results across diverse applications, including those based on combinatorial optimization, inverse problems, and partial differential equations. The motivation for this setting stems from two key (possibly over-lapping) factors: (i) data-driven learning approaches are still underdeveloped and have yet to demonstrate strong results, as seen in combinatorial optimization, and (ii) the availability of training data is inherently limited, such as in medical image reconstruction and other scientific applications. In this paper, we define the dataless setting and categorize it into two variants based on how a problem instance -- defined by a single datum -- is encoded onto the neural network: (i) architecture-agnostic methods and (ii) architecture-specific methods. Additionally, we discuss similarities and clarify distinctions between the dataless neural network (dNN) settings and related concepts such as zero-shot learning, one-shot learning, lifting in optimization, and over-parameterization.
A Survey on Efficient Large Language Model Training: From Data-centric Perspectives
Luo, Junyu, Wu, Bohan, Luo, Xiao, Xiao, Zhiping, Jin, Yiqiao, Tu, Rong-Cheng, Yin, Nan, Wang, Yifan, Yuan, Jingyang, Ju, Wei, Zhang, Ming
Post-training of Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for unlocking their task generalization potential and domain-specific capabilities. However, the current LLM post-training paradigm faces significant data challenges, including the high costs of manual annotation and diminishing marginal returns on data scales. Therefore, achieving data-efficient post-training has become a key research question. In this paper, we present the first systematic survey of data-efficient LLM post-training from a data-centric perspective. We propose a taxonomy of data-efficient LLM post-training methods, covering data selection, data quality enhancement, synthetic data generation, data distillation and compression, and self-evolving data ecosystems. We summarize representative approaches in each category and outline future research directions. By examining the challenges in data-efficient LLM post-training, we highlight open problems and propose potential research avenues. We hope our work inspires further exploration into maximizing the potential of data utilization in large-scale model training. Paper List: https://github.com/luo-junyu/Awesome-Data-Efficient-LLM
An Agentic Framework for Rapid Deployment of Edge AI Solutions in Industry 5.0
Martinez-Gil, Jorge, Pichler, Mario, Bountouni, Nefeli, Koussouris, Sotiris, Barreiro, Marielena Márquez, Gusmeroli, Sergio
We present a novel framework for Industry 5.0 that simplifies the deployment of AI models on edge devices in various industrial settings. The design reduces latency and avoids external data transfer by enabling local inference and real-time processing. Our implementation is agent-based, which means that individual agents, whether human, algorithmic, or collaborative, are responsible for well-defined tasks, enabling flexibility and simplifying integration. Moreover, our framework supports modular integration and maintains low resource requirements. Preliminary evaluations concerning the food industry in real scenarios indicate improved deployment time and system adaptability performance. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/
RelP: Faithful and Efficient Circuit Discovery in Language Models via Relevance Patching
Jafari, Farnoush Rezaei, Eberle, Oliver, Khakzar, Ashkan, Nanda, Neel
Activation patching is a standard method in mechanistic interpretability for localizing the components of a model responsible for specific behaviors, but it is computationally expensive to apply at scale. Attribution patching offers a faster, gradient-based approximation, yet suffers from noise and reduced reliability in deep, highly non-linear networks. In this work, we introduce Relevance Patching (RelP), which replaces the local gradients in attribution patching with propagation coefficients derived from Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP). LRP propagates the network's output backward through the layers, redistributing relevance to lower-level components according to local propagation rules that ensure properties such as relevance conservation or improved signal-to-noise ratio. Like attribution patching, RelP requires only two forward passes and one backward pass, maintaining computational efficiency while improving faithfulness. We validate RelP across a range of models and tasks, showing that it more accurately approximates activation patching than standard attribution patching, particularly when analyzing residual stream and MLP outputs in the Indirect Object Identification (IOI) task. For instance, for MLP outputs in GPT-2 Large, attribution patching achieves a Pearson correlation of 0.006, whereas RelP reaches 0.956, highlighting the improvement offered by RelP. Additionally, we compare the faithfulness of sparse feature circuits identified by RelP and Integrated Gradients (IG), showing that RelP achieves comparable faithfulness without the extra computational cost associated with IG.
Position: Biology is the Challenge Physics-Informed ML Needs to Evolve
Physics-Informed Machine Learning (PIML) has successfully integrated mechanistic understanding into machine learning, particularly in domains governed by well-known physical laws. This success has motivated efforts to apply PIML to biology, a field rich in dynamical systems but shaped by different constraints. Biological modeling, however, presents unique challenges: multi-faceted and uncertain prior knowledge, heterogeneous and noisy data, partial observability, and complex, high-dimensional networks. In this position paper, we argue that these challenges should not be seen as obstacles to PIML, but as catalysts for its evolution. We propose Biology-Informed Machine Learning (BIML): a principled extension of PIML that retains its structural grounding while adapting to the practical realities of biology. Rather than replacing PIML, BIML retools its methods to operate under softer, probabilistic forms of prior knowledge. We outline four foundational pillars as a roadmap for this transition: uncertainty quantification, contextualization, constrained latent structure inference, and scalability. Foundation Models and Large Language Models will be key enablers, bridging human expertise with computational modeling. We conclude with concrete recommendations to build the BIML ecosystem and channel PIML-inspired innovation toward challenges of high scientific and societal relevance.
Plexus: Taming Billion-edge Graphs with 3D Parallel Full-graph GNN Training
Ranjan, Aditya K., Singh, Siddharth, Wei, Cunyang, Bhatele, Abhinav
Graph neural networks (GNNs) leverage the connectivity and structure of real-world graphs to learn intricate properties and relationships between nodes. Many real-world graphs exceed the memory capacity of a GPU due to their sheer size, and training GNNs on such graphs requires techniques such as mini-batch sampling to scale. The alternative approach of distributed full-graph training suffers from high communication overheads and load imbalance due to the irregular structure of graphs. We propose a three-dimensional (3D) parallel approach for full-graph training that tackles these issues and scales to billion-edge graphs. In addition, we introduce optimizations such as a double permutation scheme for load balancing, and a performance model to predict the optimal 3D configuration of our parallel implementation -- Plexus. We evaluate Plexus on six different graph datasets and show scaling results on up to 2048 GPUs of Perlmutter, and 1024 GPUs of Frontier. Plexus achieves unprecedented speedups of 2.3-12.5x over prior state of the art, and a reduction in time-to-solution by 5.2-8.7x on Perlmutter and 7.0-54.2x on Frontier.
Predicate Renaming via Large Language Models
Gentili, Elisabetta, Ribeiro, Tony, Riguzzi, Fabrizio, Inoue, Katsumi
In this paper, we address the problem of giving names to predicates in logic rules using Large Language Models (LLMs). In the context of Inductive Logic Programming, various rule generation methods produce rules containing unnamed predicates, with Predicate Invention being a key example. This hinders the readability, interpretability, and reusability of the logic theory. Leveraging recent advancements in LLMs development, we explore their ability to process natural language and code to provide semantically meaningful suggestions for giving a name to unnamed predicates. The evaluation of our approach on some hand-crafted logic rules indicates that LLMs hold potential for this task.
Multi-Objective Search: Algorithms, Applications, and Emerging Directions
Salzman, Oren, Ulloa, Carlos Hernández, Felner, Ariel, Koenig, Sven
Multi-objective search (MOS) has emerged as a unifying framework for planning and decision-making problems where multiple, often conflicting, criteria must be balanced. While the problem has been studied for decades, recent years have seen renewed interest in the topic across AI applications such as robotics, transportation, and operations research, reflecting the reality that real-world systems rarely optimize a single measure. This paper surveys developments in MOS while highlighting cross-disciplinary opportunities, and outlines open challenges that define the emerging frontier of MOS research.