Overview
A comprehensive taxonomy of hallucinations in Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, yet their propensity for hallucination, generating plausible but factually incorrect or fabricated content, remains a critical challenge. This report provides a comprehensive taxonomy of LLM hallucinations, beginning with a formal definition and a theoretical framework that posits its inherent inevitability in computable LLMs, irrespective of architecture or training. It explores core distinctions, differentiating between intrinsic (contradicting input context) and extrinsic (inconsistent with training data or reality), as well as factuality (absolute correctness) and faithfulness (adherence to input). The report then details specific manifestations, including factual errors, contextual and logical inconsistencies, temporal disorientation, ethical violations, and task-specific hallucinations across domains like code generation and multimodal applications. It analyzes the underlying causes, categorizing them into data-related issues, model-related factors, and prompt-related influences. Furthermore, the report examines cognitive and human factors influencing hallucination perception, surveys evaluation benchmarks and metrics for detection, and outlines architectural and systemic mitigation strategies. Finally, it introduces web-based resources for monitoring LLM releases and performance. This report underscores the complex, multifaceted nature of LLM hallucinations and emphasizes that, given their theoretical inevitability, future efforts must focus on robust detection, mitigation, and continuous human oversight for responsible and reliable deployment in critical applications.
Backdoor Attacks on Deep Learning Face Detection
Roux, Quentin Le, Teglia, Yannick, Furon, Teddy, Loubet-Moundi, Philippe
--Face Recognition Systems that operate in unconstrained environments capture images under varying conditions, such as inconsistent lighting, or diverse face poses. These challenges require including a Face Detection module that regresses bounding boxes and landmark coordinates for proper Face Alignment. This paper shows the effectiveness of Object Generation Attacks on Face Detection, dubbed Face Generation Attacks, and demonstrates for the first time a Landmark Shift Attack that backdoors the coordinate regression task performed by face detectors. We then offer mitigations against these vulnerabilities. Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have considerably influenced both academic research and a wide range of industries. The rapid growth in computational power and dataset availability leads to large-scale Machine Learning applications, such as anomaly detection in server farms and power plants [1], [2]. This technological change has also transformed Face Recognition, with modern Face Recognition Systems (FRSs) increasingly leveraging DNNs, e.g., to secure access to sensitive facilities [3]. Developing Machine Learning pipelines requires a costly combination of domain expertise, computational resources, and data access. The first casualty of these rising Machine Learning demands is often security.
Court of LLMs: Evidence-Augmented Generation via Multi-LLM Collaboration for Text-Attributed Graph Anomaly Detection
Xu, Yiming, Chen, Jiarun, Peng, Zhen, Chen, Zihan, Lin, Qika, Ma, Lan, Shi, Bin, Dong, Bo
The natural combination of intricate topological structures and rich textual information in text-attributed graphs (TAGs) opens up a novel perspective for graph anomaly detection (GAD). However, existing GAD methods primarily focus on designing complex optimization objectives within the graph domain, overlooking the complementary value of the textual modality, whose features are often encoded by shallow embedding techniques, such as bag-of-words or skip-gram, so that semantic context related to anomalies may be missed. To unleash the enormous potential of textual modality, large language models (LLMs) have emerged as promising alternatives due to their strong semantic understanding and reasoning capabilities. Nevertheless, their application to TAG anomaly detection remains nascent, and they struggle to encode high-order structural information inherent in graphs due to input length constraints. For high-quality anomaly detection in TAGs, we propose CoLL, a novel framework that combines LLMs and graph neural networks (GNNs) to leverage their complementary strengths. CoLL employs multi-LLM collaboration for evidence-augmented generation to capture anomaly-relevant contexts while delivering human-readable rationales for detected anomalies. Moreover, CoLL integrates a GNN equipped with a gating mechanism to adaptively fuse textual features with evidence while preserving high-order topological information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of CoLL, achieving an average improvement of 13.37% in AP. This study opens a new avenue for incorporating LLMs in advancing GAD.
Thinking Machines: Mathematical Reasoning in the Age of LLMs
Asperti, Andrea, Naibo, Alberto, Coen, Claudio Sacerdoti
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable abilities in structured reasoning and symbolic tasks, with coding emerging as a particular area of strength. This success has sparked growing interest in applying LLMs to mathematics, both in informal problem-solving and formal theorem proving. However, progress in formal mathematics has proven to be significantly more difficult, despite surface-level similarities between programming and proof construction. This discrepancy raises important questions about how LLMs ``reason'', how they are supervised, and whether they internally track a notion of computational or deductive state. In this article, we address the state-of-the-art of the discipline, focusing on recent models and benchmarks, and explore three central issues at the intersection of machine learning and mathematical cognition: (i) the trade-offs between formal and informal mathematics as training domains; (ii) the deeper reasons why proof generation remains more brittle than code synthesis; (iii) and the question of whether LLMs represent, or merely mimic, a notion of evolving logical state. Our goal is not to draw hard boundaries, but to identify where the current limits lie, and how they might be extended.
Reducing the gap between general purpose data and aerial images in concentrated solar power plants
Pรฉrez-Cutiรฑo, M. A., Valverde, J., Capitรกn, J., Dรญaz-Bรกรฑez, J. M.
In the context of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants, aerial images captured by drones present a unique set of challenges. Unlike urban or natural landscapes commonly found in existing datasets, solar fields contain highly reflective surfaces, and domain-specific elements that are uncommon in traditional computer vision benchmarks. As a result, machine learning models trained on generic datasets struggle to generalize to this setting without extensive retraining and large volumes of annotated data. However, collecting and labeling such data is costly and time-consuming, making it impractical for rapid deployment in industrial applications. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach: the creation of AerialCSP, a virtual dataset that simulates aerial imagery of CSP plants. By generating synthetic data that closely mimic real-world conditions, our objective is to facilitate pretraining of models before deployment, significantly reducing the need for extensive manual labeling. Our main contributions are threefold: (1) we introduce AerialCSP, a high-quality synthetic dataset for aerial inspection of CSP plants, providing annotated data for object detection and image segmentation; (2) we benchmark multiple models on AerialCSP, establishing a baseline for CSP-related vision tasks; and (3) we demonstrate that pretraining on AerialCSP significantly improves real-world fault detection, particularly for rare and small defects, reducing the need for extensive manual labeling. AerialCSP is made publicly available at https://mpcutino.github.io/aerialcsp/.
Formal Power Series Representations in Probability and Expected Utility Theory
Pedersen, Arthur Paul, Alexander, Samuel Allen
We advance a general theory of coherent preference that surrenders restrictions embodied in orthodox doctrine. This theory enjoys the property that any preference system admits extension to a complete system of preferences, provided it satisfies a certain coherence requirement analogous to the one de Finetti advanced for his foundations of probability. Unlike de Finetti's theory, the one we set forth requires neither transitivity nor Archimedeanness nor boundedness nor continuity of preference. This theory also enjoys the property that any complete preference system meeting the standard of coherence can be represented by utility in an ordered field extension of the reals. Representability by utility is a corollary of this paper's central result, which at once extends H older's Theorem and strengthens Hahn's Embedding Theorem.
Tabular Data Understanding with LLMs: A Survey of Recent Advances and Challenges
Wu, Xiaofeng, Ritter, Alan, Xu, Wei
Tables have gained significant attention in large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) due to their complex and flexible structure. Unlike linear text inputs, tables are two-dimensional, encompassing formats that range from well-structured database tables to complex, multi-layered spreadsheets, each with different purposes. This diversity in format and purpose has led to the development of specialized methods and tasks, instead of universal approaches, making navigation of table understanding tasks challenging. To address these challenges, this paper introduces key concepts through a taxonomy of tabular input representations and an introduction of table understanding tasks. We highlight several critical gaps in the field that indicate the need for further research: (1) the predominance of retrieval-focused tasks that require minimal reasoning beyond mathematical and logical operations; (2) significant challenges faced by models when processing complex table structures, large-scale tables, length context, or multi-table scenarios; and (3) the limited generalization of models across different tabular representations and formats.
How Far Are AI Scientists from Changing the World?
Xie, Qiujie, Weng, Yixuan, Zhu, Minjun, Shen, Fuchen, Huang, Shulin, Lin, Zhen, Zhou, Jiahui, Mao, Zilan, Yang, Zijie, Yang, Linyi, Wu, Jian, Zhang, Yue
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) is propelling automated scientific discovery to the next level, with LLM-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) Scientist systems now taking the lead in scientific research. Several influential works have already appeared in the field of AI Scientist systems, with AI-generated research papers having been accepted at the ICLR 2025 workshop, suggesting that a human-level AI Scientist capable of uncovering phenomena previously unknown to humans, may soon become a reality. In this survey, we focus on the central question: How far are AI scientists from changing the world and reshaping the scientific research paradigm? To answer this question, we provide a prospect-driven review that comprehensively analyzes the current achievements of AI Scientist systems, identifying key bottlenecks and the critical components required for the emergence of a scientific agent capable of producing ground-breaking discoveries that solve grand challenges. We hope this survey will contribute to a clearer understanding of limitations of current AI Scientist systems, showing where we are, what is missing, and what the ultimate goals for scientific AI should be.
Benchmarking Massively Parallelized Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning for Robotics Tasks
Joshi, Viraj, Xu, Zifan, Liu, Bo, Stone, Peter, Zhang, Amy
Multi-task Reinforcement Learning (MTRL) has emerged as a critical training paradigm for applying reinforcement learning (RL) to a set of complex real-world robotic tasks, which demands a generalizable and robust policy. At the same time, \emph{massively parallelized training} has gained popularity, not only for significantly accelerating data collection through GPU-accelerated simulation but also for enabling diverse data collection across multiple tasks by simulating heterogeneous scenes in parallel. However, existing MTRL research has largely been limited to off-policy methods like SAC in the low-parallelization regime. MTRL could capitalize on the higher asymptotic performance of on-policy algorithms, whose batches require data from the current policy, and as a result, take advantage of massive parallelization offered by GPU-accelerated simulation. To bridge this gap, we introduce a massively parallelized $\textbf{M}$ulti-$\textbf{T}$ask $\textbf{Bench}$mark for robotics (MTBench), an open-sourced benchmark featuring a broad distribution of 50 manipulation tasks and 20 locomotion tasks, implemented using the GPU-accelerated simulator IsaacGym. MTBench also includes four base RL algorithms combined with seven state-of-the-art MTRL algorithms and architectures, providing a unified framework for evaluating their performance. Our extensive experiments highlight the superior speed of evaluating MTRL approaches using MTBench, while also uncovering unique challenges that arise from combining massive parallelism with MTRL. Code is available at https://github.com/Viraj-Joshi/MTBench
Can LLMs Generate Tabular Summaries of Science Papers? Rethinking the Evaluation Protocol
Wang, Weiqi, Ou, Jiefu, Song, Yangqiu, Van Durme, Benjamin, Khashabi, Daniel
Literature review tables are essential for summarizing and comparing collections of scientific papers. We explore the task of generating tables that best fulfill a user's informational needs given a collection of scientific papers. Building on recent work (Newman et al., 2024), we extend prior approaches to address real-world complexities through a combination of LLM-based methods and human annotations. Our contributions focus on three key challenges encountered in real-world use: (i) User prompts are often under-specified; (ii) Retrieved candidate papers frequently contain irrelevant content; and (iii) Task evaluation should move beyond shallow text similarity techniques and instead assess the utility of inferred tables for information-seeking tasks (e.g., comparing papers). To support reproducible evaluation, we introduce ARXIV2TABLE, a more realistic and challenging benchmark for this task, along with a novel approach to improve literature review table generation in real-world scenarios. Our extensive experiments on this benchmark show that both open-weight and proprietary LLMs struggle with the task, highlighting its difficulty and the need for further advancements. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/JHU-CLSP/arXiv2Table.