Education
Leveraging Knowledge Graphs and LLMs for Context-Aware Messaging
Kumar, Rajeev, Kumar, Harishankar, Shalini, Kumari
Personalized messaging plays an essential role in improving communication in areas such as healthcare, education, and professional engagement. This paper introduces a framework that uses the Knowledge Graph (KG) to dynamically rephrase written communications by integrating individual and context-specific data. The knowledge graph represents individuals, locations, and events as critical nodes, linking entities mentioned in messages to their corresponding graph nodes. The extraction of relevant information, such as preferences, professional roles, and cultural norms, is then combined with the original message and processed through a large language model (LLM) to generate personalized responses. The framework demonstrates notable message acceptance rates in various domains: 42% in healthcare, 53% in education, and 78% in professional recruitment. By integrating entity linking, event detection, and language modeling, this approach offers a structured and scalable solution for context-aware, audience-specific communication, facilitating advanced applications in diverse fields.
Open-World Skill Discovery from Unsegmented Demonstrations
Deng, Jingwen, Wang, Zihao, Cai, Shaofei, Liu, Anji, Liang, Yitao
Learning skills in open-world environments is essential for developing agents capable of handling a variety of tasks by combining basic skills. Online demonstration videos are typically long but unsegmented, making them difficult to segment and label with skill identifiers. Unlike existing methods that rely on sequence sampling or human labeling, we have developed a self-supervised learning-based approach to segment these long videos into a series of semantic-aware and skill-consistent segments. Drawing inspiration from human cognitive event segmentation theory, we introduce Skill Boundary Detection (SBD), an annotation-free temporal video segmentation algorithm. SBD detects skill boundaries in a video by leveraging prediction errors from a pretrained unconditional action-prediction model. This approach is based on the assumption that a significant increase in prediction error indicates a shift in the skill being executed. We evaluated our method in Minecraft, a rich open-world simulator with extensive gameplay videos available online. Our SBD-generated segments improved the average performance of conditioned policies by 63.7% and 52.1% on short-term atomic skill tasks, and their corresponding hierarchical agents by 11.3% and 20.8% on long-horizon tasks. Our method can leverage the diverse YouTube videos to train instruction-following agents. The project page can be found in https://craftjarvis.github.io/SkillDiscovery.
Teaching LLMs How to Learn with Contextual Fine-Tuning
Choi, Younwoo, Asif, Muhammad Adil, Han, Ziwen, Willes, John, Krishnan, Rahul G.
Prompting Large Language Models (LLMs), or providing context on the expected model of operation, is an effective way to steer the outputs of such models to satisfy human desiderata after they have been trained. But in rapidly evolving domains, there is often need to fine-tune LLMs to improve either the kind of knowledge in their memory or their abilities to perform open ended reasoning in new domains. When human's learn new concepts, we often do so by linking the new material that we are studying to concepts we have already learned before. To that end, we ask, "can prompting help us teach LLMs how to learn". In this work, we study a novel generalization of instruction tuning, called contextual fine-tuning, to fine-tune LLMs. Our method leverages instructional prompts designed to mimic human cognitive strategies in learning and problem-solving to guide the learning process during training, aiming to improve the model's interpretation and understanding of domain-specific knowledge. We empirically demonstrate that this simple yet effective modification improves the ability of LLMs to be fine-tuned rapidly on new datasets both within the medical and financial domains.
Adaptive Temperature Based on Logits Correlation in Knowledge Distillation
Matsuyama, Kazuhiro, Anjum, Usman, Matsuyama, Satoko, Shoda, Tetsuo, Zhan, Justin
Knowledge distillation is a technique to imitate a performance that a deep learning model has, but reduce the size on another model. It applies the outputs of a model to train another model having comparable accuracy. These two distinct models are similar to the way information is delivered in human society, with one acting as the "teacher" and the other as the "student". Softmax plays a role in comparing logits generated by models with each other by converting probability distributions. It delivers the logits of a teacher to a student with compression through a parameter named temperature. Tuning this variable reinforces the distillation performance. Although only this parameter helps with the interaction of logits, it is not clear how temperatures promote information transfer. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to calculate the temperature. Our method only refers to the maximum logit generated by a teacher model, which reduces computational time against state-of-the-art methods. Our method shows a promising result in different student and teacher models on a standard benchmark dataset. Algorithms using temperature can obtain the improvement by plugging in this dynamic approach. Furthermore, the approximation of the distillation process converges to a correlation of logits by both models. This reinforces the previous argument that the distillation conveys the relevance of logits. We report that this approximating algorithm yields a higher temperature compared to the commonly used static values in testing.
Unified Locomotion Transformer with Simultaneous Sim-to-Real Transfer for Quadrupeds
Liu, Dikai, Zhang, Tianwei, Yin, Jianxiong, See, Simon
Quadrupeds have gained rapid advancement in their capability of traversing across complex terrains. The adoption of deep Reinforcement Learning (RL), transformers and various knowledge transfer techniques can greatly reduce the sim-to-real gap. However, the classical teacher-student framework commonly used in existing locomotion policies requires a pre-trained teacher and leverages the privilege information to guide the student policy. With the implementation of large-scale models in robotics controllers, especially transformers-based ones, this knowledge distillation technique starts to show its weakness in efficiency, due to the requirement of multiple supervised stages. In this paper, we propose Unified Locomotion Transformer (ULT), a new transformer-based framework to unify the processes of knowledge transfer and policy optimization in a single network while still taking advantage of privilege information. The policies are optimized with reinforcement learning, next state-action prediction, and action imitation, all in just one training stage, to achieve zero-shot deployment. Evaluation results demonstrate that with ULT, optimal teacher and student policies can be obtained at the same time, greatly easing the difficulty in knowledge transfer, even with complex transformer-based models.
Agentic AI for Scientific Discovery: A Survey of Progress, Challenges, and Future Directions
Gridach, Mourad, Nanavati, Jay, Abidine, Khaldoun Zine El, Mendes, Lenon, Mack, Christina
The integration of Agentic AI into scientific discovery marks a new frontier in research automation. These AI systems, capable of reasoning, planning, and autonomous decision-making, are transforming how scientists perform literature review, generate hypotheses, conduct experiments, and analyze results. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of Agentic AI for scientific discovery, categorizing existing systems and tools, and highlighting recent progress across fields such as chemistry, biology, and materials science. We discuss key evaluation metrics, implementation frameworks, and commonly used datasets to offer a detailed understanding of the current state of the field. Finally, we address critical challenges, such as literature review automation, system reliability, and ethical concerns, while outlining future research directions that emphasize human-AI collaboration and enhanced system calibration. The rapid advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs) (Touvron et al., 2023; Anil et al., 2023; Achiam et al., 2023) have opened a new era in scientific discovery, with Agentic AI systems (Kim et al., 2024; Guo et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2024; Abramovich et al., 2024) emerging as powerful tools for automating complex research workflows. Unlike traditional AI, Agentic AI systems are designed to operate with a high degree of autonomy, allowing them to independently perform tasks such as hypothesis generation, literature review, experimental design, and data analysis. These systems have the potential to significantly accelerate scientific research, reduce costs, and expand access to advanced tools across various fields, including chemistry, biology, and materials science. Recent efforts have demonstrated the potential of LLM-driven agents in supporting researchers with tasks such as literature reviews, experimentation, and report writing. Prominent frameworks, including LitSearch (Ajith et al., 2024), ResearchArena (Kang & Xiong, 2024), SciLitLLM (Li et al., 2024c), CiteME (Press et al., 2024), ResearchAgent (Baek et al., 2024) and Agent Laboratory (Schmidgall et al., 2025), have made strides in automating general research workflows, such as citation management, document discovery, and academic survey generation. However, these systems often lack the domain-specific focus and compliance-driven rigor essential for fields like biomedical domain, where the structured assessment of literature is critical for evidence synthesis.
On the status of current quantum machine learning software
Gupta, Manish K., Rybotycki, Tomasz, Gawron, Piotr
The recent advancements in noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices implementation allow us to study their application to real-life computational problems. However, hardware challenges are not the only ones that hinder our quantum computation capabilities. Software limitations are the other, less explored side of this medal. Using satellite image segmentation as a task example, we investigated how difficult it is to run a hybrid quantum-classical model on a real, publicly available quantum device. We also analyzed the costs of such endeavor and the change in quality of model.
Backtracking for Safety
Sel, Bilgehan, Li, Dingcheng, Wallis, Phillip, Keshava, Vaishakh, Jin, Ming, Jonnalagadda, Siddhartha Reddy
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks, but ensuring their safety and alignment with human values remains crucial. Current safety alignment methods, such as supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning-based approaches, can exhibit vulnerabilities to adversarial attacks and often result in shallow safety alignment, primarily focusing on preventing harmful content in the initial tokens of the generated output. While methods like resetting can help recover from unsafe generations by discarding previous tokens and restarting the generation process, they are not well-suited for addressing nuanced safety violations like toxicity that may arise within otherwise benign and lengthy generations. In this paper, we propose a novel backtracking method designed to address these limitations. Our method allows the model to revert to a safer generation state, not necessarily at the beginning, when safety violations occur during generation. This approach enables targeted correction of problematic segments without discarding the entire generated text, thereby preserving efficiency. We demonstrate that our method dramatically reduces toxicity appearing through the generation process with minimal impact to efficiency.
Robust Unsupervised Fault Diagnosis For High-Dimensional Nonlinear Noisy Data
Zhao, Dandan, Yin, Hongpeng, Bian, Jintang, Zhou, Han
Traditional fault diagnosis methods struggle to handle fault data, with complex data characteristics such as high dimensions and large noise. Deep learning is a promising solution, which typically works well only when labeled fault data are available. To address these problems, a robust unsupervised fault diagnosis using machine learning is proposed in this paper. First, a special dimension reduction method for the high-dimensional fault data is designed. Second, the extracted features are enhanced by incorporating nonlinear information through the learning of a graph structure. Third, to alleviate the problem of reduced fault-diagnosis accuracy attributed to noise and outliers, $l_{2,1}$-norm and typicality-aware constraints are introduced from the perspective of model optimization, respectively. Finally, this paper provides comprehensive theoretical and experimental evidence supporting the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method. The experiments on both the benchmark Tennessee-Eastman process and a real hot-steel milling process show that the proposed method exhibits better robustness compared to other methods, maintaining high diagnostic accuracy even in the presence of outliers or noise.
CS-Dialogue: A 104-Hour Dataset of Spontaneous Mandarin-English Code-Switching Dialogues for Speech Recognition
Zhou, Jiaming, Guo, Yujie, Zhao, Shiwan, Sun, Haoqin, Wang, Hui, He, Jiabei, Kong, Aobo, Wang, Shiyao, Yang, Xi, Wang, Yequan, Lin, Yonghua, Qin, Yong
Code-switching (CS), the alternation between two or more languages within a single conversation, presents significant challenges for automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Existing Mandarin-English code-switching datasets often suffer from limitations in size, spontaneity, and the lack of full-length dialogue recordings with transcriptions, hindering the development of robust ASR models for real-world conversational scenarios. This paper introduces CS-Dialogue, a novel large-scale Mandarin-English code-switching speech dataset comprising 104 hours of spontaneous conversations from 200 speakers. Unlike previous datasets, CS-Dialogue provides full-length dialogue recordings with complete transcriptions, capturing naturalistic code-switching patterns in continuous speech. We describe the data collection and annotation processes, present detailed statistics of the dataset, and establish benchmark ASR performance using state-of-the-art models. Our experiments, using Transformer, Conformer, and Branchformer, demonstrate the challenges of code-switching ASR, and show that existing pre-trained models such as Whisper still have the space to improve. The CS-Dialogue dataset will be made freely available for all academic purposes.