-- The efficient planning of stacking boxes, especially in the online setting where the sequence of item arrivals is unpredictable, remains a critical challenge in modern warehouse and logistics management. Existing solutions often address box size variations, but overlook their intrinsic and physical properties, such as density and rigidity, which are crucial for real-world applications. We use reinforcement learning (RL) to solve this problem by employing action space masking to direct the RL policy toward valid actions. Unlike previous methods that rely on heuristic stability assessments which are difficult to assess in physical scenarios, our framework utilizes online learning to dynamically train the action space mask, eliminating the need for manual heuristic design. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-arts. Furthermore, we deploy our learned task planner in a real-world robotic palletizer, validating its practical applicability in operational settings. I. INTRODUCTION In modern warehouse and logistics management, stacking boxes continues to be a common challenge. In the past, due to the smaller scale of trade and lower efficiency requirements, workers could rely on their experience to decide how each box should be placed. However, with the globalization of trade, there is a growing need for fast and stable box stacking, and a good solution for this is robotic palletization [1] [2].

We present an agentic, autonomous graph expansion framework that iteratively structures and refines knowledge in situ. Unlike conventional knowledge graph construction methods relying on static extraction or single-pass learning, our approach couples a reasoning-native large language model with a continually updated graph representation. At each step, the system actively generates new concepts and relationships, merges them into a global graph, and formulates subsequent prompts based on its evolving structure. Through this feedback-driven loop, the model organizes information into a scale-free network characterized by hub formation, stable modularity, and bridging nodes that link disparate knowledge clusters. Over hundreds of iterations, new nodes and edges continue to appear without saturating, while centrality measures and shortest path distributions evolve to yield increasingly distributed connectivity. Our analysis reveals emergent patterns, such as the rise of highly connected 'hub' concepts and the shifting influence of 'bridge' nodes, indicating that agentic, self-reinforcing graph construction can yield open-ended, coherent knowledge structures. Applied to materials design problems, we present compositional reasoning experiments by extracting node-specific and synergy-level principles to foster genuinely novel knowledge synthesis, yielding cross-domain ideas that transcend rote summarization and strengthen the framework's potential for open-ended scientific discovery. We discuss other applications in scientific discovery and outline future directions for enhancing scalability and interpretability.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing, yet they still struggle with direct text editing tasks that demand precise, context-aware modifications. While models like ChatGPT excel in text generation and analysis, their editing abilities often fall short, addressing only superficial issues rather than deeper structural or logical inconsistencies. In this work, we introduce a dual approach to enhance LLMs editing performance. First, we present InstrEditBench, a high-quality benchmark dataset comprising over 20,000 structured editing tasks spanning Wiki articles, LaTeX documents, code, and database Domain-specific Languages (DSL). InstrEditBench is generated using an innovative automated workflow that accurately identifies and evaluates targeted edits, ensuring that modifications adhere strictly to specified instructions without altering unrelated content. Second, we propose FineEdit, a specialized model trained on this curated benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate that FineEdit achieves significant improvements around {10\%} compared with Gemini on direct editing tasks, convincingly validating its effectiveness.

AI systems often exhibit political bias, influencing users' opinions and decision-making. While political neutrality-defined as the absence of bias-is often seen as an ideal solution for fairness and safety, this position paper argues that true political neutrality is neither feasible nor universally desirable due to its subjective nature and the biases inherent in AI training data, algorithms, and user interactions. However, inspired by Joseph Raz's philosophical insight that "neutrality [...] can be a matter of degree" (Raz, 1986), we argue that striving for some neutrality remains essential for promoting balanced AI interactions and mitigating user manipulation. Therefore, we use the term "approximation" of political neutrality to shift the focus from unattainable absolutes to achievable, practical proxies. We propose eight techniques for approximating neutrality across three levels of conceptualizing AI, examining their trade-offs and implementation strategies. In addition, we explore two concrete applications of these approximations to illustrate their practicality. Finally, we assess our framework on current large language models (LLMs) at the output level, providing a demonstration of how it can be evaluated. This work seeks to advance nuanced discussions of political neutrality in AI and promote the development of responsible, aligned language models.

Throughout this project, we have attempted to develop an automatic evaluator that determines whether Basque language compositions meet the C1 level. To achieve our goal, we obtained 10,000 transcribed compositions through an agreement between HABE and HiTZ to train our system. We have developed different techniques to avoid data scarcity and system overfitting: EDA, SCL and regulation; We have also conducted tests with different Language Models to analyze their behavior. Finally, we have also performed analyses of different system behaviors to measure model calibration and the impact of artifacts. -- Proiektu honetan zehar euskarazko idazlanek C1 maila duten edo ez zehazten duen ebaluatzaile automatiko bat garatzen saiatu gara. Gure helburua betetzeko HABE eta HiTZ arteko hitzarmenaren bitartez 10.000 transkribatutako idazlan eskuratu ditugu gure sistema entrenatzeko. Datu eskasia eta sistemaren gaindoitzea ekiditeko teknika ezberdinak landu ditugu: EDA, SCL eta erregulazioa; Hizkuntza Eredu ezberdinekin ere probak egin ditugu duten portaera aztertzeko. Azkenik, sistema ezberdinen portaeren analisiak ere egin ditugu, ereduen kalibrazioa eta artefaktuen eragina neurtzeko.

WiFi-based human activity recognition (HAR) holds significant application potential across various fields. To handle dynamic environments where new activities are continuously introduced, WiFi-based HAR systems must adapt by learning new concepts without forgetting previously learned ones. Furthermore, retaining knowledge from old activities by storing historical exemplar is impractical for WiFi-based HAR due to privacy concerns and limited storage capacity of edge devices. In this work, we propose ConSense, a lightweight and fast-adapted exemplar-free class incremental learning framework for WiFi-based HAR. The framework leverages the transformer architecture and involves dynamic model expansion and selective retraining to preserve previously learned knowledge while integrating new information. Specifically, during incremental sessions, small-scale trainable parameters that are trained specifically on the data of each task are added in the multi-head self-attention layer. In addition, a selective retraining strategy that dynamically adjusts the weights in multilayer perceptron based on the performance stability of neurons across tasks is used. Rather than training the entire model, the proposed strategies of dynamic model expansion and selective retraining reduce the overall computational load while balancing stability on previous tasks and plasticity on new tasks. Evaluation results on three public WiFi datasets demonstrate that ConSense not only outperforms several competitive approaches but also requires fewer parameters, highlighting its practical utility in class-incremental scenarios for HAR.

Data quantity and quality play a vital role in determining the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). High-quality data, in particular, can significantly boost the LLM's ability to generalize on a wide range of downstream tasks. Large pre-training datasets for leading LLMs remain inaccessible to the public, whereas many open datasets are small in size (less than 5 trillion tokens), limiting their suitability for training large models. In this paper, we introduce GneissWeb, a large dataset yielding around 10 trillion tokens that caters to the data quality and quantity requirements of training LLMs. Our GneissWeb recipe that produced the dataset consists of sharded exact sub-string deduplication and a judiciously constructed ensemble of quality filters. GneissWeb achieves a favorable trade-off between data quality and quantity, producing models that outperform models trained on state-of-the-art open large datasets (5+ trillion tokens). We show that models trained using GneissWeb dataset outperform those trained on FineWeb-V1.1.0 by 2.73 percentage points in terms of average score computed on a set of 11 commonly used benchmarks (both zero-shot and few-shot) for pre-training dataset evaluation. When the evaluation set is extended to 20 benchmarks (both zero-shot and few-shot), models trained using GneissWeb still achieve a 1.75 percentage points advantage over those trained on FineWeb-V1.1.0.

Providing evaluations to student work is a critical component of effective student learning, and automating its process can significantly reduce the workload on human graders. Automatic Short Answer Grading (ASAG) systems, enabled by advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), offer a promising solution for assessing and providing instant feedback for open-ended student responses. In this paper, we present an ASAG pipeline leveraging state-of-the-art LLMs. Our new LLM-based ASAG pipeline achieves better performances than existing custom-built models on the same datasets. We also compare the grading performance of three OpenAI models: GPT-4, GPT-4o, and o1-preview. Our results demonstrate that GPT-4o achieves the best balance between accuracy and cost-effectiveness. On the other hand, o1-preview, despite higher accuracy, exhibits a larger variance in error that makes it less practical for classroom use. We investigate the effects of incorporating instructor-graded examples into prompts using no examples, random selection, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based selection strategies. Our findings indicate that providing graded examples enhances grading accuracy, with RAG-based selection outperforming random selection. Additionally, integrating grading rubrics improves accuracy by offering a structured standard for evaluation.

Autoregressive Language Models output text by sequentially predicting the next token to generate, with modern methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting achieving state-of-the-art reasoning capabilities by scaling the number of generated tokens. However, are there times when we can infer how the model will behave (e.g. abstain from answering a question) early in the computation, making generation unnecessary? We show that internal representation of input tokens alone can often precisely predict, not just the next token, but eventual behavior over the entire output sequence. We leverage this capacity and learn probes on internal states to create early warning (and exit) systems. Specifically, if the probes can confidently estimate the way the LM is going to behave, then the system will avoid generating tokens altogether and return the estimated behavior instead. On 27 text classification datasets spanning five different tasks, we apply this method to estimate the eventual answer of an LM under CoT prompting, reducing inference costs by 65% (average) while suffering an accuracy loss of no more than 1.4% (worst case). We demonstrate the potential of this method to pre-emptively identify when a model will abstain from answering a question, fail to follow output format specifications, or give a low-confidence response. We explore the limits of this capability, showing that probes generalize to unseen datasets, but perform worse when LM outputs are longer and struggle to predict properties that require access to knowledge that the models themselves lack. Encouragingly, performance scales with model size, suggesting applicability to the largest of models

While NLP models often seek to capture cognitive states via language, the validity of predicted states is determined by comparing them to annotations created without access the cognitive states of the authors. In behavioral sciences, cognitive states are instead measured via experiments. Here, we introduce an experiment-based framework for evaluating language-based cognitive style models against human behavior. We explore the phenomenon of decision making, and its relationship to the linguistic style of an individual talking about a recent decision they made. The participants then follow a classical decision-making experiment that captures their cognitive style, determined by how preferences change during a decision exercise. We find that language features, intended to capture cognitive style, can predict participants' decision style with moderate-to-high accuracy (AUC ~ 0.8), demonstrating that cognitive style can be partly captured and revealed by discourse patterns.