Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is essential for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values. However, RLHF is susceptible to reward hacking, where the agent exploits flaws in the reward function rather than learning the intended behavior, thus degrading alignment. While reward shaping helps stabilize RLHF and partially mitigate reward hacking, a systematic investigation into shaping techniques and their underlying principles remains lacking. To bridge this gap, we present a comprehensive study of the prevalent reward shaping methods. Our analysis suggests three key design principles: (1) RL reward is ideally bounded, (2) RL benefits from rapid initial growth followed by gradual convergence, and (3) RL reward is best formulated as a function of centered reward. Guided by these insights, we propose Preference As Reward (PAR), a novel approach that leverages the latent preferences embedded within the reward model itself as the signal for reinforcement learning. We evaluated PAR on two base models, Gemma2-2B and Llama3-8B, using two datasets, Ultrafeedback-Binarized and HH-RLHF. Experimental results demonstrate PAR's superior performance over other reward shaping methods. On the AlpacaEval 2.0 benchmark, PAR achieves a win rate at least 5 percentage points higher than competing approaches. Furthermore, PAR exhibits remarkable data efficiency, requiring only a single reference reward for optimal performance, and maintains robustness against reward hacking even after two full epochs of training. Code is available at https://github.com/PorUna-byte/PAR.

--Autonomous agents capable of diverse object manipulations should be able to acquire a wide range of manipulation skills with high reusability. Although advances in deep learning have made it increasingly feasible to replicate the dexterity of human teleoperation in robots, generalizing these acquired skills to previously unseen scenarios remains a significant challenge. In this study, we propose a novel algorithm, Gaze-based Bottleneck-aware Robot Manipulation (GazeBot), which enables high reusability of the learned motions even when the object positions and end-effector poses differ from those in the provided demonstrations. By leveraging gaze information and motion bottlenecks--both crucial features for object manipulation--GazeBot achieves high generalization performance compared with state-of-the-art imitation learning methods, without sacrificing its dexterity and reactivity. Furthermore, the training process of GazeBot is entirely data-driven once a demonstration dataset with gaze data is provided. Videos and code are available at https://crumbyrobotics.github.io/gazebot. Recent advancements utilizing powerful neural networks such as Transformers have made deep imitation learning increasingly capable of reproducing dexterity to a certain extent [29, 5, 14]. However, significant issues persist regarding their generalization capabilities. Although generalization in object manipulation occurs at multiple levels, even the most fundamental aspects, such as changes in object position and the end-effector pose, are known to cause drastic reductions in success rates with variations of just a few centimeters [4]. For instance, ACT [29], a model recognized for its strong dexterous capabilities, has only been validated with objects placed on white tape with an accuracy of approximately 5 cm. Although ACT demonstrated high success rates under these specific conditions in our experiments, it was unable to reach objects placed in unseen positions (Figure 1), highlighting the poor generalization capabilities acquired through this method.

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising distributed learning paradigm for training deep neural networks (DNNs) at the wireless edge, but its performance can be severely hindered by unreliable wireless transmission and inherent data heterogeneity among clients. Existing solutions primarily address these challenges by incorporating wireless resource optimization strategies, often focusing on uplink resource allocation across clients under the assumption of homogeneous client-server network standards. However, these approaches overlooked the fact that mobile clients may connect to the server via diverse network standards (e.g., 4G, 5G, Wi-Fi) with customized configurations, limiting the flexibility of server-side modifications and restricting applicability in real-world commercial networks. This paper presents a novel theoretical analysis about how transmission failures in unreliable networks distort the effective label distributions of local samples, causing deviations from the global data distribution and introducing convergence bias in FL. Our analysis reveals that a carefully designed client selection strategy can mitigate biases induced by network unreliability and data heterogeneity . Motivated by this insight, we propose FedCote, a client selection approach that optimizes client selection probabilities without relying on wireless resource scheduling. Experimental results demonstrate the robustness of FedCote in DNN-based classification tasks under unreliable networks with frequent transmission failures. With rapid advancements in mobile communications and artificial intelligence (AI), edge AI, which leverages locally generated data to train deep neural networks (DNNs) at the wireless edge, has gained significant attention from both academia and industry [1], [2], [3], [4]. A prominent approach in this domain is federated learning (FL), where an edge server coordinates mobile clients in collaboratively training a shared DNN model while ensuring client privacy [5], [6], [7]. However, FL faces a critical challenge due to ubiquitous data heterogeneity across clients, where training data are distributed in a non-i.i.d. and unbalanced manner. If not addressed, data heterogeneity can severely degrade FL performance [8], [9], [10], [11], [12]. Numerous FL algorithms have been proposed to mitigate this issue. For example, FedProx [13] introduced a regularization term in the local objective function to control model divergence, while SCAFFOLD [14] employed control variates to correct local model drift. HFMDS [15] learned essential class-relevant features of real samples to generate an auxiliary synthetic dataset, which was shared among clients for local training, helping to alleviate data heterogeneity .

Effective personalization of LLMs is critical for a broad range of user-interfacing applications such as virtual assistants and content curation. Inspired by the strong in-context learning capabilities of LLMs, we propose Few-Shot Preference Optimization (FSPO), which reframes reward modeling as a meta-learning problem. Under this framework, an LLM learns to quickly adapt to a user via a few labeled preferences from that user, constructing a personalized reward function for them. Additionally, since real-world preference data is scarce and challenging to collect at scale, we propose careful design choices to construct synthetic preference datasets for personalization, generating over 1M synthetic personalized preferences using publicly available LLMs. In particular, to successfully transfer from synthetic data to real users, we find it crucial for the data to exhibit both high diversity and coherent, self-consistent structure. We evaluate FSPO on personalized open-ended generation for up to 1,500 synthetic users across across three domains: movie reviews, pedagogical adaptation based on educational background, and general question answering, along with a controlled human study. Overall, FSPO achieves an 87% Alpaca Eval winrate on average in generating responses that are personalized to synthetic users and a 72% winrate with real human users in open-ended question answering.

Language model compression through knowledge distillation has emerged as a promising approach for deploying large language models in resource-constrained environments. However, existing methods often struggle to maintain performance when distilling multilingual models, especially for low-resource languages. In this paper, we present a novel hybrid distillation approach that combines traditional knowledge distillation with a simplified attention matching mechanism, specifically designed for multilingual contexts. Our method introduces an extremely compact student model architecture, significantly smaller than conventional multilingual models. We evaluate our approach on five African languages: Kinyarwanda, Swahili, Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba. The distilled student model; AfroXLMR-Comet successfully captures both the output distribution and internal attention patterns of a larger teacher model (AfroXLMR-Large) while reducing the model size by over 85%. Experimental results demonstrate that our hybrid approach achieves competitive performance compared to the teacher model, maintaining an accuracy within 85% of the original model's performance while requiring substantially fewer computational resources. Our work provides a practical framework for deploying efficient multilingual models in resource-constrained environments, particularly benefiting applications involving African languages.

The continuing, explosive developments in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), built on large language models and related algorithms, has led to much excitement and speculation about the potential impact of this new technology. Claims include AI being poised to revolutionize business and society and dramatically change personal life. However, it remains unclear exactly how this technology, with its significantly distinct features from past AI technologies, has transformative potential. Nor is it clear how researchers in information systems (IS) should respond. In this paper, we consider the evolving and emerging trends of AI in order to examine its present and predict its future impacts. Many existing papers on GenAI are either too technical for most IS researchers or lack the depth needed to appreciate the potential impacts of GenAI. We, therefore, attempt to bridge the technical and organizational communities of GenAI from a system-oriented sociotechnical perspective. Specifically, we explore the unique features of GenAI, which are rooted in the continued change from symbolism to connectionism, and the deep systemic and inherent properties of human-AI ecosystems. We retrace the evolution of AI that proceeded the level of adoption, adaption, and use found today, in order to propose future research on various impacts of GenAI in both business and society within the context of information systems research. Our efforts are intended to contribute to the creation of a well-structured research agenda in the IS community to support innovative strategies and operations enabled by this new wave of AI.

STEM fields are traditionally male-dominated, with gender biases shaping perceptions of job accessibility. This study analyzed gender representation in STEM occupation images generated by OpenAI DALL-E 3 \& Black Forest FLUX.1 using 150 prompts in three linguistic forms: German generic masculine, German pair form, and English. As control, 20 pictures of social occupations were generated as well. Results revealed significant male bias across all forms, with the German pair form showing reduced bias but still overrepresenting men for the STEM-Group and mixed results for the Group of Social Occupations. These findings highlight generative AI's role in reinforcing societal biases, emphasizing the need for further discussion on diversity (in AI). Further aspects analyzed are age-distribution and ethnic diversity.

Nowadays, DeepSeek, ChatGPT, and Google Gemini are the most trending and exciting Large Language Model (LLM) technologies for reasoning, multimodal capabilities, and general linguistic performance worldwide. DeepSeek employs a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) approach, activating only the parameters most relevant to the task at hand, which makes it especially effective for domain-specific work. On the other hand, ChatGPT relies on a dense transformer model enhanced through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), and then Google Gemini actually uses a multimodal transformer architecture that integrates text, code, and images into a single framework. However, by using those technologies, people can be able to mine their desired text, code, images, etc, in a cost-effective and domain-specific inference. People may choose those techniques based on the best performance. In this regard, we offer a comparative study based on the DeepSeek, ChatGPT, and Gemini techniques in this research. Initially, we focus on their methods and materials, appropriately including the data selection criteria. Then, we present state-of-the-art features of DeepSeek, ChatGPT, and Gemini based on their applications. Most importantly, we show the technological comparison among them and also cover the dataset analysis for various applications. Finally, we address extensive research areas and future potential guidance regarding LLM-based AI research for the community.

--Multi-modal tracking is essential in single-object tracking (SOT), as different sensor types contribute unique capabilities to overcome challenges caused by variations in object appearance. However, existing unified RGB-X trackers (X represents depth, event, or thermal modality) either rely on the task-specific training strategy for individual RGB-X image pairs or fail to address the critical importance of modality-adaptive perception in real-world applications. In this work, we propose UASTrack, a unified adaptive selection framework that facilitates both model and parameter unification, as well as adaptive modality discrimination across various multi-modal tracking tasks. T o achieve modality-adaptive perception in joint RGB-X pairs, we design a Discriminative Auto-Selector (DAS) capable of identifying modality labels, thereby distinguishing the data distributions of auxiliary modalities. Furthermore, we propose a T ask-Customized Optimization Adapter (TCOA) tailored to various modalities in the latent space. This strategy effectively filters noise redundancy and mitigates background interference based on the specific characteristics of each modality. Extensive comparisons conducted on five benchmarks including LasHeR, GTOT, RGBT234, VisEvent, and DepthTrack, covering RGB-T, RGB-E, and RGB-D tracking scenarios, demonstrate our innovative approach achieves comparative performance by introducing only additional training parameters of 1.87M and flops of 1.95G. The code will be available at https://github.com/wanghe/UASTrack. Index T erms --Multi-modal object tracking, Unified multi-modal tracking tasks, Adaptive task recognition. Isual object tracking [1]-[4] is a crucial research area in computer vision, focusing on estimating the position and size of an object throughout a video sequence, beginning with the object initial state in the first frame. Recent advancements highlight the limitations of relying solely on visible sensors, leading to increased interest in utilizing auxiliary modalities such as thermal (T) [5], event (E) [6], and depth (D) [7]. He Wang, Tianyang Xu, Zhangyong Tang, Shaochuan Zhao, and Xiao-Jun Wu (Corresponding author) are with the School of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Jiangnan University, Wuxi 214122, China (email: 7243115005@stu.jiangnan.edu.cn;

The scalability of instructable agents in robotics or gaming is often hindered by limited data that pairs instructions with agent trajectories. However, large datasets of unannotated trajectories containing sequences of various agent behaviour (play trajectories) are often available. In a semi-supervised setup, we explore methods to extract labelled segments from play trajectories. The goal is to augment a small annotated dataset of instruction-trajectory pairs to improve the performance of an instruction-following policy trained downstream via imitation learning. Assuming little variation in segment length, recent video segmentation methods can effectively extract labelled segments. To address the constraint of segment length, we propose Play Segmentation (PS), a probabilistic model that finds maximum likely segmentations of extended subsegments, while only being trained on individual instruction segments. Our results in a game environment and a simulated robotic gripper setting underscore the importance of segmentation; randomly sampled segments diminish performance, while incorporating labelled segments from PS improves policy performance to the level of a policy trained on twice the amount of labelled data.