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Mitigating Hallucination in Large Language Models (LLMs): An Application-Oriented Survey on RAG, Reasoning, and Agentic Systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Hallucination remains one of the key obstacles to the reliable deployment of large language models (LLMs), particularly in real-world applications. Among various mitigation strategies, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and reasoning enhancement have emerged as two of the most effective and widely adopted approaches, marking a shift from merely suppressing hallucinations to balancing creativity and reliability. However, their synergistic potential and underlying mechanisms for hallucination mitigation have not yet been systematically examined. This survey adopts an application-oriented perspective of capability enhancement to analyze how RAG, reasoning enhancement, and their integration in Agentic Systems mitigate hallucinations. We propose a taxonomy distinguishing knowledge-based and logic-based hallucinations, systematically examine how RAG and reasoning address each, and present a unified framework supported by real-world applications, evaluations, and benchmarks.


Manipulate as Human: Learning Task-oriented Manipulation Skills by Adversarial Motion Priors

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In recent years, there has been growing interest in developing robots and autonomous systems that can interact with human in a more natural and intuitive way. One of the key challenges in achieving this goal is to enable these systems to manipulate objects and tools in a manner that is similar to that of humans. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for learning human-style manipulation skills by using adversarial motion priors, which we name HMAMP. The approach leverages adversarial networks to model the complex dynamics of tool and object manipulation, as well as the aim of the manipulation task. The discriminator is trained using a combination of real-world data and simulation data executed by the agent, which is designed to train a policy that generates realistic motion trajectories that match the statistical properties of human motion. We evaluated HMAMP on one challenging manipulation task: hammering, and the results indicate that HMAMP is capable of learning human-style manipulation skills that outperform current baseline methods. Additionally, we demonstrate that HMAMP has potential for real-world applications by performing real robot arm hammering tasks. In general, HMAMP represents a significant step towards developing robots and autonomous systems that can interact with humans in a more natural and intuitive way, by learning to manipulate tools and objects in a manner similar to how humans do.


Discovering Heuristics with Large Language Models (LLMs) for Mixed-Integer Programs: Single-Machine Scheduling

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Our study contributes to the scheduling and combinatorial optimization literature with new heuristics discovered by leveraging the power of Large Language Models (LLMs). We focus on the single-machine total tardiness (SMTT) problem, which aims to minimize total tardiness by sequencing n jobs on a single processor without preemption, given processing times and due dates. We develop and benchmark two novel LLM-discovered heuristics, the EDD Challenger (EDDC) and MDD Challenger (MDDC), inspired by the well-known Earliest Due Date (EDD) and Modified Due Date (MDD) rules. In contrast to prior studies that employed simpler rule-based heuristics, we evaluate our LLM-discovered algorithms using rigorous criteria, including optimality gaps and solution time derived from a mixed-integer programming (MIP) formulation of SMTT. We compare their performance against state-of-the-art heuristics and exact methods across various job sizes (20, 100, 200, and 500 jobs). For instances with more than 100 jobs, exact methods such as MIP and dynamic programming become computationally intractable. Up to 500 jobs, EDDC improves upon the classic EDD rule and another widely used algorithm in the literature. MDDC consistently outperforms traditional heuristics and remains competitive with exact approaches, particularly on larger and more complex instances. This study shows that human-LLM collaboration can produce scalable, high-performing heuristics for NP-hard constrained combinatorial optimization, even under limited resources when effectively configured.


A Survey on Collaborative SLAM with 3D Gaussian Splatting

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This survey comprehensively reviews the evolving field of multi-robot collaborative Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) using 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). As an explicit scene representation, 3DGS has enabled unprecedented real-time, high-fidelity rendering, ideal for robotics. However, its use in multi-robot systems introduces significant challenges in maintaining global consistency, managing communication, and fusing data from heterogeneous sources. We systematically categorize approaches by their architecture -- centralized, distributed -- and analyze core components like multi-agent consistency and alignment, communication-efficient, Gaussian representation, semantic distillation, fusion and pose optimization, and real-time scalability. In addition, a summary of critical datasets and evaluation metrics is provided to contextualize performance. Finally, we identify key open challenges and chart future research directions, including lifelong mapping, semantic association and mapping, multi-model for robustness, and bridging the Sim2Real gap.


Agent-based Automated Claim Matching with Instruction-following LLMs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We present a novel agent-based approach for the automated claim matching task with instruction-following LLMs. We propose a two-step pipeline that first generates prompts with LLMs, to then perform claim matching as a binary classification task with LLMs. We demonstrate that LLM-generated prompts can outperform SOTA with human-generated prompts, and that smaller LLMs can do as well as larger ones in the generation process, allowing to save computational resources. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of using different LLMs for each step of the pipeline, i.e. using an LLM for prompt generation, and another for claim matching. Our investigation into the prompt generation process in turn reveals insights into the LLMs' understanding of claim matching.


Agentic AI Security: Threats, Defenses, Evaluation, and Open Challenges

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Agentic AI systems powered by large language models (LLMs) and endowed with planning, tool use, memory, and autonomy, are emerging as powerful, flexible platforms for automation. Their ability to autonomously execute tasks across web, software, and physical environments creates new and amplified security risks, distinct from both traditional AI safety and conventional software security. This survey outlines a taxonomy of threats specific to agentic AI, reviews recent benchmarks and evaluation methodologies, and discusses defense strategies from both technical and governance perspectives. We synthesize current research and highlight open challenges, aiming to support the development of secure-by-design agent systems.


ScaLoRA: Optimally Scaled Low-Rank Adaptation for Efficient High-Rank Fine-Tuning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As large language models (LLMs) continue to scale in size, the computational overhead has become a major bottleneck for task-specific fine-tuning. While low-rank adaptation (LoRA) effectively curtails this cost by confining the weight updates to a low-dimensional subspace, such a restriction can hinder effectiveness and slow convergence. This contribution deals with these limitations by accumulating progressively a high-rank weight update from consecutive low-rank increments. Specifically, the per update optimal low-rank matrix is identified to minimize the loss function and closely approximate full fine-tuning. To endow efficient and seamless optimization without restarting, this optimal choice is formed by appropriately scaling the columns of the original low-rank matrix. Rigorous performance guarantees reveal that the optimal scaling can be found analytically. Extensive numerical tests with popular LLMs scaling up to 12 billion parameters demonstrate a consistent performance gain and fast convergence relative to state-of-the-art LoRA variants on diverse tasks including natural language understanding, commonsense reasoning, and mathematical problem solving.


AI and the Decentering of Disciplinary Creativity

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This concern was likely well-founded. After all, Poincaré, von Neumann, Gauss, and Feynman have all been credited with remarkable contributions to mathematics and physics owing in large part to their tremendously fine numerical intuition, itself iteratively refined through a lifetime of obsessive internal calculation. More recently, philosophers and scientists have begun to wrestle with a set of epistemological concerns that arise from the use of forms of computation in science that are far more powerful than mere calculators. For instance, it has been argued that increasingly routine reliance on artificial intelligence leads scientists to adopt beliefs that are not fully justifiable due to the complexity and opacity of the models that support them. Moreover, it has been argued that the epistemic opacity of these systems limits scientific understanding of the phenomena under investigation, perhaps raising a dark veil between the practice of science and scientific knowledge.


From Detection to Discovery: A Closed-Loop Approach for Simultaneous and Continuous Medical Knowledge Expansion and Depression Detection on Social Media

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Social media user-generated content (UGC) provides real-time, self-reported indicators of mental health conditions such as depression, offering a valuable source for predictive analytics. While prior studies integrate medical knowledge to improve prediction accuracy, they overlook the opportunity to simultaneously expand such knowledge through predictive processes. We develop a Closed-Loop Large Language Model (LLM)-Knowledge Graph framework that integrates prediction and knowledge expansion in an iterative learning cycle. In the knowledge-aware depression detection phase, the LLM jointly performs depression detection and entity extraction, while the knowledge graph represents and weights these entities to refine prediction performance. In the knowledge refinement and expansion phase, new entities, relationships, and entity types extracted by the LLM are incorporated into the knowledge graph under expert supervision, enabling continual knowledge evolution. Using large-scale UGC, the framework enhances both predictive accuracy and medical understanding. Expert evaluations confirmed the discovery of clinically meaningful symptoms, comorbidities, and social triggers complementary to existing literature. We conceptualize and operationalize prediction-through-learning and learning-through-prediction as mutually reinforcing processes, advancing both methodological and theoretical understanding in predictive analytics. The framework demonstrates the co-evolution of computational models and domain knowledge, offering a foundation for adaptive, data-driven knowledge systems applicable to other dynamic risk monitoring contexts.


Attracting Commercial Artificial Intelligence Firms to Support National Security through Collaborative Contracts

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Unlike other military technologies driven by national security needs and developed with federal funding, AI is predominantly funded and advanced by commercial industry for civilian applications. However, there is a lack of understanding of the reasons commercial AI firms decide to work with the DoD or choose to abstain from the defence market. This thesis argues that the contract law and procurement framework are among the most significant obstacles. This research indicates that the commercial AI industry actually views the DoD as an attractive customer. However, this attraction is despite the obstacles presented by traditional contract law and procurement practices used to solicit and award contracts. Drawing on social exchange theory, this thesis introduces a theoretical framework, optimal buyer theory, to understand the factors that influence a commercial decision to engage with the DoD. Interviews from a sample of the participants explain why the AI industry holds such perceptions, opinions, and preferences about contracts generally and the DoD, specifically, in its role as a customer. This thesis concludes that commercial AI firms are attracted to contracts that are consistent with their business and technology considerations. Additionally, it develops best practices for leveraging existing contract law, primarily other transaction authority, to align contracting practices with commercial preferences and the machine learning development and deployment lifecycle.