Overview
EvaLearn: Quantifying the Learning Capability and Efficiency of LLMs via Sequential Problem Solving
Dou, Shihan, Zhang, Ming, Huang, Chenhao, Chen, Jiayi, Chen, Feng, Liu, Shichun, Liu, Yan, Liu, Chenxiao, Zhong, Cheng, Zhang, Zongzhang, Gui, Tao, Xin, Chao, Wei, Chengzhi, Yan, Lin, Wu, Yonghui, Zhang, Qi, Huang, Xuanjing
We introduce EvaLearn, a pioneering benchmark designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) on their learning capability and efficiency in challenging tasks, a critical, yet underexplored aspect of model potential. EvaLearn contains 648 challenging problems across six task types, grouped into 182 sequences, each sequence dedicated to one task type. Diverging from most existing benchmarks that evaluate models in parallel, EvaLearn requires models to solve problems sequentially, allowing them to leverage the experience gained from previous solutions. EvaLearn provides five comprehensive automated metrics to evaluate models and quantify their learning capability and efficiency. We extensively benchmark nine frontier models and observe varied performance profiles: some models, such as Claude-3.7-sonnet, start with moderate initial performance but exhibit strong learning ability, while some models struggle to benefit from experience and may even show negative transfer. Moreover, we investigate model performance under two learning settings and find that instance-level rubrics and teacher-model feedback further facilitate model learning. Importantly, we observe that current LLMs with stronger static abilities do not show a clear advantage in learning capability across all tasks, highlighting that EvaLearn evaluates a new dimension of model performance. We hope EvaLearn provides a novel evaluation perspective for assessing LLM potential and understanding the gap between models and human capabilities, promoting the development of deeper and more dynamic evaluation approaches. All datasets, the automatic evaluation framework, and the results studied in this paper are available at the GitHub repository.
Interval Prediction of Annual Average Daily Traffic on Local Roads via Quantile Random Forest with High-Dimensional Spatial Data
Accurate annual average daily traffic (AADT) data are vital for transport planning and infrastructure management. However, automatic traffic detectors across national road networks often provide incomplete coverage, leading to underrepresentation of minor roads. While recent machine learning advances have improved AADT estimation at unmeasured locations, most models produce only point predictions and overlook estimation uncertainty. This study addresses that gap by introducing an interval prediction approach that explicitly quantifies predictive uncertainty. We integrate a Quantile Random Forest model with Principal Component Analysis to generate AADT prediction intervals, providing plausible traffic ranges bounded by estimated minima and maxima. Using data from over 2,000 minor roads in England and Wales, and evaluated with specialized interval metrics, the proposed method achieves an interval coverage probability of 88.22%, a normalized average width of 0.23, and a Winkler Score of 7,468.47. By combining machine learning with spatial and high-dimensional analysis, this framework enhances both the accuracy and interpretability of AADT estimation, supporting more robust and informed transport planning.
Foundation and Large-Scale AI Models in Neuroscience: A Comprehensive Review
Yang, Shihao, Huang, Xiying, Bernardo, Danilo, Ding, Jun-En, Michael, Andrew, Yang, Jingmei, Kwan, Patrick, Raj, Ashish, Liu, Feng
The advent of large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) models has a transformative effect on neuroscience research, which represents a paradigm shift from the traditional computational methods through the facilitation of end-to-end learning from raw brain signals and neural data. In this paper, we explore the transformative effects of large-scale AI models on five major neuroscience domains: neuroimaging and data processing, brain-computer interfaces and neural decoding, molecular neuroscience and genomic modeling, clinical assistance and translational frameworks, and disease-specific applications across neurological and psychiatric disorders. These models are demonstrated to address major computational neuroscience challenges, including multimodal neural data integration, spatiotemporal pattern interpretation, and the derivation of translational frameworks for clinical deployment. Moreover, the interaction between neuroscience and AI has become increasingly reciprocal, as biologically informed architectural constraints are now incorporated to develop more interpretable and computationally efficient models. This review highlights both the notable promise of such technologies and key implementation considerations, with particular emphasis on rigorous evaluation frameworks, effective domain knowledge integration, and comprehensive ethical guidelines for clinical use. Finally, a systematic listing of critical neuroscience datasets used to derive and validate large-scale AI models across diverse research applications is provided.
A Graph-Attentive LSTM Model for Malicious URL Detection
Hossain, Md. Ifthekhar, Arafat, Kazi Abdullah Al, Shepard, Bryce, Craig, Kayd, Parvez, Imtiaz
Malicious URLs pose significant security risks as they facilitate phishing attacks, distribute malware, and empower attackers to deface websites. Blacklist detection methods fail to identify new or obfuscated URLs because they depend on pre-existing patterns. This work presents a hybrid deep learning model named GNN-GAT-LSTM that combines Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with Graph Attention Networks (GATs) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. The proposed architecture extracts both the structural and sequential patterns of the features from data. The model transforms URLs into graphs through a process where characters become nodes that connect through edges. It applies one-hot encoding to represent node features. The model received training and testing data from a collection of 651,191 URLs, which were classified into benign, phishing, defacement, and malware categories. The preprocessing stage included both feature engineering and data balancing techniques, which addressed the class imbalance issue to enhance model learning. The GNN-GAT-LSTM model achieved outstanding performance through its test accuracy of 0.9806 and its weighted F1-score of 0.9804. It showed excellent precision and recall performance across most classes, particularly for benign and defacement URLs. Overall, the model provides an efficient and scalable system for detecting malicious URLs while demonstrating strong potential for real-world cybersecurity applications.
Attention to Non-Adopters
Zhou, Kaitlyn, Gligorić, Kristina, Cheng, Myra, Lam, Michelle S., Raman, Vyoma, Aminu, Boluwatife, Woo, Caeley, Brockman, Michael, Cha, Hannah, Jurafsky, Dan
Although language model-based chat systems are increasingly used in daily life, most Americans remain non-adopters of chat-based LLMs -- as of June 2025, 66% had never used ChatGPT. At the same time, LLM development and evaluation rely mainly on data from adopters (e.g., logs, preference data), focusing on the needs and tasks for a limited demographic group of adopters in terms of geographic location, education, and gender. In this position paper, we argue that incorporating non-adopter perspectives is essential for developing broadly useful and capable LLMs. We contend that relying on methods that focus primarily on adopters will risk missing a range of tasks and needs prioritized by non-adopters, entrenching inequalities in who benefits from LLMs, and creating oversights in model development and evaluation. To illustrate this claim, we conduct case studies with non-adopters and show: how non-adopter needs diverge from those of current users, how non-adopter needs point us towards novel reasoning tasks, and how to systematically integrate non-adopter needs via human-centered methods.
From Multimodal Perception to Strategic Reasoning: A Survey on AI-Generated Game Commentary
Zheng, Qirui, Wang, Xingbo, Cheng, Keyuan, Ali, Muhammad Asif, Lu, Yunlong, Li, Wenxin
The advent of artificial intelligence has propelled AI-Generated Game Commentary (AI-GGC) into a rapidly expanding field, offering benefits such as unlimited availability and personalized narration. However, current researches in this area remain fragmented, and a comprehensive survey that systematically unifies existing efforts is still missing. To bridge this gap, our survey introduces a unified framework that systematically organizes the AI-GGC landscape. We present a novel taxonomy focused on three core commentator capabilities: Live Observation, Strategic Analysis, and Historical Recall. Commentary is further categorized into three functional types: Descriptive, Analytical, and Background. Building on this structure, we provide an in-depth review of state-of-the-art methods, datasets, and evaluation metrics across various game genres. Finally, we highlight key challenges such as real-time reasoning, multimodal integration, and evaluation bottlenecks, and outline promising directions for future research and system development in AI-GGC.
MGE-LDM: Joint Latent Diffusion for Simultaneous Music Generation and Source Extraction
We present MGE-LDM, a unified latent diffusion framework for simultaneous music generation, source imputation, and query-driven source separation. Unlike prior approaches constrained to fixed instrument classes, MGE-LDM learns a joint distribution over full mixtures, submixtures, and individual stems within a single compact latent diffusion model. At inference, MGE-LDM enables (1) complete mixture generation, (2) partial generation (i.e., source imputation), and (3) text-conditioned extraction of arbitrary sources. By formulating both separation and imputation as conditional inpainting tasks in the latent space, our approach supports flexible, class-agnostic manipulation of arbitrary instrument sources. Notably, MGE-LDM can be trained jointly across heterogeneous multi-track datasets (e.g., Slakh2100, MUSDB18, MoisesDB) without relying on predefined instrument categories. Audio samples are available at our project page: https://yoongi43.github.io/MGELDM_Samples/.
Evaluating Medical LLMs by Levels of Autonomy: A Survey Moving from Benchmarks to Applications
Ye, Xiao, Dineen, Jacob, Li, Zhaonan, Xu, Zhikun, Chen, Weiyu, Lu, Shijie, Huang, Yuxi, Shen, Ming, Tran, Phu, Yum, Ji-Eun Irene, Khan, Muhammad Ali, Afzal, Muhammad Umar, Riaz, Irbaz Bin, Zhou, Ben
Medical Large language models achieve strong scores on standard benchmarks; however, the transfer of those results to safe and reliable performance in clinical workflows remains a challenge. This survey reframes evaluation through a levels-of-autonomy lens (L0-L3), spanning informational tools, information transformation and aggregation, decision support, and supervised agents. We align existing benchmarks and metrics with the actions permitted at each level and their associated risks, making the evaluation targets explicit. This motivates a level-conditioned blueprint for selecting metrics, assembling evidence, and reporting claims, alongside directions that link evaluation to oversight. By centering autonomy, the survey moves the field beyond score-based claims toward credible, risk-aware evidence for real clinical use.
Contextual Attention Modulation: Towards Efficient Multi-Task Adaptation in Large Language Models
Pan, Dayan, Fu, Zhaoyang, Wang, Jingyuan, Han, Xiao, Zhu, Yue, Zhao, Xiangyu
Large Language Models (LLMs) possess remarkable generalization capabilities but struggle with multi-task adaptation, particularly in balancing knowledge retention with task-specific specialization. Conventional fine-tuning methods suffer from catastrophic forgetting and substantial resource consumption, while existing parameter-efficient methods perform suboptimally in complex multi-task scenarios. To address this, we propose Contextual Attention Modulation (CAM), a novel mechanism that dynamically modulates the representations of self-attention modules in LLMs. CAM enhances task-specific features while preserving general knowledge, thereby facilitating more effective and efficient adaptation. For effective multi-task adaptation, CAM is integrated into our Hybrid Contextual Attention Modulation (HyCAM) framework, which combines a shared, full-parameter CAM module with multiple specialized, lightweight CAM modules, enhanced by a dynamic routing strategy for adaptive knowledge fusion. Extensive experiments on heterogeneous tasks, including question answering, code generation, and logical reasoning, demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing approaches, achieving an average performance improvement of 3.65%. The implemented code and data are available to ease reproducibility at https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/HyCAM.
Curiosity Meets Cooperation: A Game-Theoretic Approach to Long-Tail Multi-Label Learning
Xiao, Canran, Zhao, Chuangxin, Ke, Zong, Shen, Fei
The per-label distribution is typically long-tailed (Tarekegn et al., 2021; De Alvis and Seneviratne, 2024): head labels dominate while tail labels appear sporadically. This imbalance is exacerbated in MLC because (i) co-occurring labels make resampling risky, and (ii) metrics like mAP favor head labels. As a result, standard optimizers (Ridnik et al., 2021) often learn head-biased boundaries, achieving high scores while failing on tail labels-problematic for safety-critical applications. In practice the per-label sample counts follow a heavy-tailed distribution: a handful of head labels dominate the data, whereas the vast majority of tail labels appear only sporadically, as shown in Figure 1. This long-tail imbalance (Tarekegn et al., 2021; De Alvis and Seneviratne, 2024) is particularly severe in the multi-label regime because (i) multiple labels co-occur within a single instance, so naïve resampling can destroy cross-label correlations, and (ii) evaluation metrics such as mAP or micro-F1 are disproportionately influenced by head labels, starving tail classes of gradient signal. Consequently, conventional optimizers (Ridnik et al., 2021) that target average loss or accuracy often learn a head-biased decision boundary, yielding high headline scores while silently failing on the tail-an outcome that is unacceptable in safety-critical or comprehensive retrieval scenarios(Barandas et al., 2024).