Dictionary learning has recently emerged as a promising approach for mechanistic interpretability of large transformer models. Disentangling high-dimensional transformer embeddings, however, requires algorithms that scale to high-dimensional data with large sample sizes. Recent work has explored sparse autoencoders (SAEs) for this problem. However, SAEs use a simple linear encoder to solve the sparse encoding subproblem, which is known to be NP-hard. It is therefore interesting to understand whether this structure is sufficient to find good solutions to the dictionary learning problem or if a more sophisticated algorithm could find better solutions. In this work, we propose Double-Batch KSVD (DB-KSVD), a scalable dictionary learning algorithm that adapts the classic KSVD algorithm. DB-KSVD is informed by the rich theoretical foundations of KSVD but scales to datasets with millions of samples and thousands of dimensions. We demonstrate the efficacy of DB-KSVD by disentangling embeddings of the Gemma-2-2B model and evaluating on six metrics from the SAEBench benchmark, where we achieve competitive results when compared to established approaches based on SAEs. By matching SAE performance with an entirely different optimization approach, our results suggest that (i) SAEs do find strong solutions to the dictionary learning problem and (ii) that traditional optimization approaches can be scaled to the required problem sizes, offering a promising avenue for further research. We provide an implementation of DB-KSVD at https://github.com/RomeoV/KSVD.jl.

Student engagement is one of the key challenges in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) education. Tangible learning approaches, such as educational robots, provide an effective way to enhance engagement and learning by offering real-world applications to bridge the gap between theory and practice. However, existing platforms often face barriers such as high cost or limited capabilities. In this paper, we present Curio, a cost-effective, smartphone-integrated robotics platform designed to lower the entry barrier to robotics and AI education. With a retail price below $50, Curio is more affordable than similar platforms. By leveraging smartphones, Curio eliminates the need for onboard processing units, dedicated cameras, and additional sensors while maintaining the ability to perform AI-based tasks. To evaluate the impact of Curio on student engagement, we conducted a case study with 20 participants, where we examined usability, engagement, and potential for integrating into AI and robotics education. The results indicate high engagement and motivation levels across all participants. Additionally, 95% of participants reported an improvement in their understanding of robotics. Findings suggest that using a robotic system such as Curio can enhance engagement and hands-on learning in robotics and AI education. All resources and projects with Curio are available at trycurio.com.

Effective communication between AI and humans is essential for successful human-AI co-creation. However, many current co-creative AI systems lack effective communication, which limits their potential for collaboration. This paper presents the initial design of the Framework for AI Communication (FAICO) for co-creative AI, developed through a systematic review of 107 full-length papers. FAICO presents key aspects of AI communication and their impact on user experience, offering preliminary guidelines for designing human-centered AI communication. To improve the framework, we conducted a preliminary study with two focus groups involving skilled individuals in AI, HCI, and design. These sessions sought to understand participants' preferences for AI communication, gather their perceptions of the framework, collect feedback for refinement, and explore its use in co-creative domains like collaborative writing and design. Our findings reveal a preference for a human-AI feedback loop over linear communication and emphasize the importance of context in fostering mutual understanding. Based on these insights, we propose actionable strategies for applying FAICO in practice and future directions, marking the first step toward developing comprehensive guidelines for designing effective human-centered AI communication in co-creation.

Large Language Models (LLMs), despite their advancements, are fundamentally limited by their static parametric knowledge, hindering performance on tasks requiring open-domain up-to-date information. While enabling LLMs to interact with external knowledge environments is a promising solution, current efforts primarily address closed-end problems. Open-ended questions, which characterized by lacking a standard answer or providing non-unique and diverse answers, remain underexplored. To bridge this gap, we present O$^2$-Searcher, a novel search agent leveraging reinforcement learning to effectively tackle both open-ended and closed-ended questions in the open domain. O$^2$-Searcher leverages an efficient, locally simulated search environment for dynamic knowledge acquisition, effectively decoupling the external world knowledge from model's sophisticated reasoning processes. It employs a unified training mechanism with meticulously designed reward functions, enabling the agent to identify problem types and adapt different answer generation strategies. Furthermore, to evaluate performance on complex open-ended tasks, we construct O$^2$-QA, a high-quality benchmark featuring 300 manually curated, multi-domain open-ended questions with associated web page caches. Extensive experiments show that O$^2$-Searcher, using only a 3B model, significantly surpasses leading LLM agents on O$^2$-QA. It also achieves SOTA results on various closed-ended QA benchmarks against similarly-sized models, while performing on par with much larger ones.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has recently shown remarkable progress, but accurately transcribing children's speech remains a significant challenge. Recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in improving ASR transcriptions. However, their applications in child speech including conversational scenarios are under-explored. In this study, we explore the use of LLMs in correcting ASR errors for conversational child speech. We demonstrate the promises and challenges of LLMs through experiments on two children's conversational speech datasets with both zero-shot and fine-tuned ASR outputs. We find that while LLMs are helpful in correcting zero-shot ASR outputs and fine-tuned CTC-based ASR outputs, it remains challenging for LLMs to improve ASR performance when incorporating contextual information or when using fine-tuned autoregressive ASR (e.g., Whisper) outputs.

Training large reasoning models (LRMs) with reinforcement learning in STEM domains is hindered by the scarcity of high-quality, diverse, and verifiable problem sets. Existing synthesis methods, such as Chain-of-Thought prompting, often generate oversimplified or uncheckable data, limiting model advancement on complex tasks. To address these challenges, we introduce SHARP, a unified approach to Synthesizing High-quality Aligned Reasoning Problems for LRMs reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). SHARP encompasses a strategic set of self-alignment principles -- targeting graduate and Olympiad-level difficulty, rigorous logical consistency, and unambiguous, verifiable answers -- and a structured three-phase framework (Alignment, Instantiation, Inference) that ensures thematic diversity and fine-grained control over problem generation. We implement SHARP by leveraging a state-of-the-art LRM to infer and verify challenging STEM questions, then employ a reinforcement learning loop to refine the model's reasoning through verifiable reward signals. Experiments on benchmarks such as GPQA demonstrate that SHARP-augmented training substantially outperforms existing methods, markedly improving complex reasoning accuracy and pushing LRM performance closer to expert-level proficiency. Our contributions include the SHARP strategy, framework design, end-to-end implementation, and experimental evaluation of its effectiveness in elevating LRM reasoning capabilities.

We present PersonaConvBench, a large-scale benchmark for evaluating personalized reasoning and generation in multi-turn conversations with large language models (LLMs). Unlike existing work that focuses on either personalization or conversational structure in isolation, PersonaConvBench integrates both, offering three core tasks: sentence classification, impact regression, and user-centric text generation across ten diverse Reddit-based domains. This design enables systematic analysis of how personalized conversational context shapes LLM outputs in realistic multi-user scenarios. We benchmark several commercial and open-source LLMs under a unified prompting setup and observe that incorporating personalized history yields substantial performance improvements, including a 198 percent relative gain over the best non-conversational baseline in sentiment classification. By releasing PersonaConvBench with evaluations and code, we aim to support research on LLMs that adapt to individual styles, track long-term context, and produce contextually rich, engaging responses.

Compressing long chain-of-thought (CoT) from large language models (LLMs) is an emerging strategy to improve the reasoning efficiency of LLMs. Despite its promising benefits, existing studies equally compress all thoughts within a long CoT, hindering more concise and effective reasoning. To this end, we first investigate the importance of different thoughts by examining their effectiveness and efficiency in contributing to reasoning through automatic long CoT chunking and Monte Carlo rollouts. Building upon the insights, we propose a theoretically bounded metric to jointly measure the effectiveness and efficiency of different thoughts. We then propose Long$\otimes$Short, an efficient reasoning framework that enables two LLMs to collaboratively solve the problem: a long-thought LLM for more effectively generating important thoughts, while a short-thought LLM for efficiently generating remaining thoughts. Specifically, we begin by synthesizing a small amount of cold-start data to fine-tune LLMs for long-thought and short-thought reasoning styles, respectively. Furthermore, we propose a synergizing-oriented multi-turn reinforcement learning, focusing on the model self-evolution and collaboration between long-thought and short-thought LLMs. Experimental results show that our method enables Qwen2.5-7B and Llama3.1-8B to achieve comparable performance compared to DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B, while reducing token length by over 80% across the MATH500, AIME24/25, AMC23, and GPQA Diamond benchmarks. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/usail-hkust/LongShort.

Ensuring the safety of large language models (LLMs) is critical for responsible deployment, yet existing evaluations often prioritize performance over identifying failure modes. We introduce Phare, a multilingual diagnostic framework to probe and evaluate LLM behavior across three critical dimensions: hallucination and reliability, social biases, and harmful content generation. Our evaluation of 17 state-of-the-art LLMs reveals patterns of systematic vulnerabilities across all safety dimensions, including sycophancy, prompt sensitivity, and stereotype reproduction. By highlighting these specific failure modes rather than simply ranking models, Phare provides researchers and practitioners with actionable insights to build more robust, aligned, and trustworthy language systems.

This article introduces Perception-Informed Neural Networks (PrINNs), a framework designed to incorporate perception-based information into neural networks, addressing both systems with known and unknown physics laws or differential equations. Moreover, PrINNs extend the concept of Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) and their variants, offering a platform for the integration of diverse forms of perception precisiation, including singular, probability distribution, possibility distribution, interval, and fuzzy graph. In fact, PrINNs allow neural networks to model dynamical systems by integrating expert knowledge and perception-based information through loss functions, enabling the creation of modern data-driven models. Some of the key contributions include Mixture of Experts Informed Neural Networks (MOEINNs), which combine heterogeneous expert knowledge into the network, and Transformed-Knowledge Informed Neural Networks (TKINNs), which facilitate the incorporation of meta-information for enhanced model performance. Additionally, Fuzzy-Informed Neural Networks (FINNs) as a modern class of fuzzy deep neural networks leverage fuzzy logic constraints within a deep learning architecture, allowing online training without pre-training and eliminating the need for defuzzification. PrINNs represent a significant step forward in bridging the gap between traditional physics-based modeling and modern data-driven approaches, enabling neural networks to learn from both structured physics laws and flexible perception-based rules. This approach empowers neural networks to operate in uncertain environments, model complex systems, and discover new forms of differential equations, making PrINNs a powerful tool for advancing computational science and engineering.