Does neural machine translation yield translations that are congenial with common sense? In this paper, we present a test suite to evaluate the commonsense reasoning capability of neural machine translation. The test suite consists of three test sets, covering lexical and contextless/contextual syntactic ambiguity that requires commonsense knowledge to resolve. We manually create 1,200 triples, each of which contain a source sentence and two contrastive translations, involving 7 different common sense types. Language models pretrained on large-scale corpora, such as BERT, GPT-2, achieve a commonsense reasoning accuracy of lower than 72% on target translations of this test suite. We conduct extensive experiments on the test suite to evaluate commonsense reasoning in neural machine translation and investigate factors that have impact on this capability. Our experiments and analyses demonstrate that neural machine translation performs poorly on commonsense reasoning of the three ambiguity types in terms of both reasoning accuracy (60.1%) and reasoning consistency (31%). The built commonsense test suite is available at https://github.com/tjunlp-lab/CommonMT.

Finding enjoyable fiction books can be challenging, partly because stories are multi-faceted and one's own literary taste might be difficult to ascertain. Here, we introduce the ISAAC method (Introspection-Support, AI-Annotation, and Curation), a pipeline which supports fiction readers in gaining awareness of their literary preferences and finding enjoyable books. ISAAC consists of four steps: a user supplies book ratings, an AI agent researches and annotates the provided books, patterns in book enjoyment are reviewed by the user, and the AI agent recommends new books. In this proof-of-concept self-study, the authors test whether ISAAC can highlight idiosyncratic patterns in their book enjoyment, spark a deeper reflection about their literary tastes, and make accurate, personalized recommendations of enjoyable books and underexplored literary niches. Results highlight substantial advantages of ISAAC over existing methods such as an integration of automation and intuition, accurate and customizable annotations, and explainable book recommendations. Observed disadvantages are that ISAAC's outputs can elicit false self-narratives (if statistical patterns are taken at face value), that books cannot be annotated if their online documentation is lacking, and that people who are new to reading have to rely on assumed book ratings or movie ratings to power the ISAAC pipeline. We discuss additional opportunities of ISAAC-style book annotations for the study of literary trends, and the scientific classification of books and readers.

In Australia, post-contact language varieties, including creoles and local varieties of international languages, emerged as a result of forced contact between Indigenous communities and English speakers. These contact varieties are widely used, yet are poorly supported by language technologies. This gap presents barriers to participation in civil and economic society for Indigenous communities using these varieties, and reproduces minoritisation of contemporary Indigenous sociolinguistic identities. This paper concerns three questions regarding this context. First, can speech technologies support speakers of Australian Aboriginal English, a local indigenised variety of English? Second, what risks are inherent in such a project? Third, what technology development practices are appropriate for this context, and how can researchers integrate meaningful community participation in order to mitigate risks? We argue that opportunities do exist -- as well as risks -- and demonstrate this through a case study exploring design practices in a real-world project aiming to improve speech technologies for Australian Aboriginal English. We discuss how we integrated culturally appropriate and participatory processes throughout the project. We call for increased support for languages used by Indigenous communities, including contact varieties, which provide practical economic and socio-cultural benefits, provided that participatory and culturally safe practices are enacted.

We introduce LADDER (Learning through Autonomous Difficulty-Driven Example Recursion), a framework which enables Large Language Models to autonomously improve their problem-solving capabilities through self-guided learning by recursively generating and solving progressively simpler variants of complex problems. Unlike prior approaches that require curated datasets or human feedback, LADDER leverages a model's own capabilities to generate easier question variants. We demonstrate LADDER's effectiveness in the subject of mathematical integration, improving Llama 3.2 3B's accuracy from 1% to 82% on undergraduate-level problems and enabling Qwen2.5 7B Deepseek-R1 Distilled to achieve 73% on the MIT Integration Bee qualifying examination. We also introduce TTRL (Test-Time Reinforcement Learning), where we perform reinforcement learning on variants of test problems at inference time. TTRL enables Qwen2.5 7B Deepseek-R1 Distilled to achieve a state-of-the-art score of 90% on the MIT Integration Bee qualifying examination, surpassing OpenAI o1's performance. These results show how self-directed strategic learning can achieve significant capability improvements without relying on architectural scaling or human supervision.

Humanoid robots are engineered to navigate terrains akin to those encountered by humans, which necessitates human-like locomotion and perceptual abilities. Currently, the most reliable controllers for humanoid motion rely exclusively on proprioception, a reliance that becomes both dangerous and unreliable when coping with rugged terrain. Although the integration of height maps into perception can enable proactive gait planning, robust utilization of this information remains a significant challenge, especially when exteroceptive perception is noisy. To surmount these challenges, we propose a solution based on a teacher-student distillation framework. In this paradigm, an oracle policy accesses noise-free data to establish an optimal reference policy, while the student policy not only imitates the teacher's actions but also simultaneously trains a world model with a variational information bottleneck for sensor denoising and state estimation. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our approach markedly enhances performance in scenarios characterized by unreliable terrain estimations. Moreover, we conducted rigorous testing in both challenging urban settings and off-road environments, the model successfully traverse 2 km of varied terrain without external intervention.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can engage in human-looking conversational exchanges. Although conversations can elicit trust between users and LLMs, scarce empirical research has examined trust formation in human-LLM contexts, beyond LLMs' trustworthiness or human trust in AI in general. Here, we introduce the Trust-In-LLMs Index (TILLMI) as a new framework to measure individuals' trust in LLMs, extending McAllister's cognitive and affective trust dimensions to LLM-human interactions. We developed TILLMI as a psychometric scale, prototyped with a novel protocol we called LLM-simulated validity. The LLM-based scale was then validated in a sample of 1,000 US respondents. Exploratory Factor Analysis identified a two-factor structure. Two items were then removed due to redundancy, yielding a final 6-item scale with a 2-factor structure. Confirmatory Factor Analysis on a separate subsample showed strong model fit ($CFI = .995$, $TLI = .991$, $RMSEA = .046$, $p_{X^2} > .05$). Convergent validity analysis revealed that trust in LLMs correlated positively with openness to experience, extraversion, and cognitive flexibility, but negatively with neuroticism. Based on these findings, we interpreted TILLMI's factors as "closeness with LLMs" (affective dimension) and "reliance on LLMs" (cognitive dimension). Younger males exhibited higher closeness with- and reliance on LLMs compared to older women. Individuals with no direct experience with LLMs exhibited lower levels of trust compared to LLMs' users. These findings offer a novel empirical foundation for measuring trust in AI-driven verbal communication, informing responsible design, and fostering balanced human-AI collaboration.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in mainstream academic disciplines such as mathematics, physics, and computer science. However, human knowledge encompasses over 200 specialized disciplines, far exceeding the scope of existing benchmarks. The capabilities of LLMs in many of these specialized fields-particularly in light industry, agriculture, and service-oriented disciplines-remain inadequately evaluated. To address this gap, we present SuperGPQA, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates graduate-level knowledge and reasoning capabilities across 285 disciplines. Our benchmark employs a novel Human-LLM collaborative filtering mechanism to eliminate trivial or ambiguous questions through iterative refinement based on both LLM responses and expert feedback. Our experimental results reveal significant room for improvement in the performance of current state-of-the-art LLMs across diverse knowledge domains (e.g., the reasoning-focused model DeepSeek-R1 achieved the highest accuracy of 61.82% on SuperGPQA), highlighting the considerable gap between current model capabilities and artificial general intelligence. Additionally, we present comprehensive insights from our management of a large-scale annotation process, involving over 80 expert annotators and an interactive Human-LLM collaborative system, offering valuable methodological guidance for future research initiatives of comparable scope.

Online learning algorithms have been successfully used to design caching policies with sublinear regret in the total number of requests, with no statistical assumption about the request sequence. Most existing algorithms involve computationally expensive operations and require knowledge of all past requests. However, this may not be feasible in practical scenarios like caching at a cellular base station. Therefore, we study the caching problem in a more restrictive setting where only a fraction of past requests are observed, and we propose a randomized caching policy with sublinear regret based on the classic online learning algorithm Follow-the-Perturbed-Leader (FPL). Our caching policy is the first to attain the asymptotically optimal regret bound while ensuring asymptotically constant amortized time complexity in the partial observability setting of requests. The experimental evaluation compares the proposed solution against classic caching policies and validates the proposed approach under synthetic and real-world request traces.

This research studies the impact of AI and peer feedback on the academic writing development of Kazakhstani scholars using the CGScholar platform - a product of research into collaborative learning, big data, and artificial intelligence developed by educators and computer scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). The study aimed to find out how familiarity with AI tools and peer feedback processes impacts participants' openness to incorporating feedback into their academic writing. The study involved 36 scholars enrolled in a scientific internship focused on education at UIUC. A survey with 15 multiple-choice questions, a Likert scale, and open-ended questions was used to collect data. The survey was conducted via Google Forms in both English and Russian to ensure linguistic accessibility. Demographic information such as age, gender, and first language was collected to provide a detailed understanding of the data. The analysis revealed a moderate positive correlation between familiarity with AI tools and openness to making changes based on feedback, and a strong positive correlation between research writing experience and expectations of peer feedback, especially in the area of research methodology. These results show that participants are open-minded to AI-assisted feedback; however, they still highly appreciate peer input, especially regarding methodological guidance. This study demonstrates the potential benefits of integrating AI tools with traditional feedback mechanisms to improve research writing quality in academic settings.

Federated Learning (FL) stands as a prominent distributed learning paradigm among multiple clients to achieve a unified global model without privacy leakage. In contrast to FL, Personalized federated learning aims at serving for each client in achieving persoanlized model. However, previous FL frameworks have grappled with a dilemma: the choice between developing a singular global model at the server to bolster globalization or nurturing personalized model at the client to accommodate personalization. Instead of making trade-offs, this paper commences its discourse from the pre-trained initialization, obtaining resilient global information and facilitating the development of both global and personalized models. Specifically, we propose a novel method called WarmFed to achieve this. WarmFed customizes Warm-start through personalized diffusion models, which are generated by local efficient fine-tunining (LoRA). Building upon the Warm-Start, we advance a server-side fine-tuning strategy to derive the global model, and propose a dynamic self-distillation (DSD) to procure more resilient personalized models simultaneously. Comprehensive experiments underscore the substantial gains of our approach across both global and personalized models, achieved within just one-shot and five communication(s).