Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used across research domains to tackle complex tasks, but their performance can vary significantly depending on the task at hand. Evolutionary algorithms, inspired by natural selection, can be used to refine solutions iteratively at inference-time. To the best of our knowledge, there has not been exploration on leveraging the collective capabilities of multi-source seeding for LLM-guided genetic algorithms. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach, MultiGA, which applies genetic algorithm principles to address complex natural language tasks and reasoning problems by sampling from a diverse population of LLMs to initialize the population. MultiGA generates a range of outputs from various parent LLMs, open source and closed source, and uses a neutral fitness function to evaluate them. Through an iterative recombination process, we mix and refine these generations until an optimal solution is achieved. We benchmark our approach using text-to-SQL code generation tasks, trip planning, GPQA benchmark for grad-level science questions, and the BBQ bias benchmark. Our results show that MultiGA converges to the accuracy of the LLM best fit for the task, and these insights lay the foundation for future research looking closer at integrating multiple LLMs for unexplored tasks in which selecting only one pre-trained model is unclear or suboptimal.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known for their expensive and time-consuming training. Thus, oftentimes, LLMs are fine-tuned to address a specific task, given the pretrained weights of a pre-trained LLM considered a foundation model. In this work, we introduce memory-efficient, reversible architectures for LLMs, inspired by symmetric and symplectic differential equations, and investigate their theoretical properties. Different from standard, baseline architectures that store all intermediate activations, the proposed models use time-reversible dynamics to retrieve hidden states during backpropagation, relieving the need to store activations. This property allows for a drastic reduction in memory consumption, allowing for the processing of larger batch sizes for the same available memory, thereby offering improved throughput. In addition, we propose an efficient method for converting existing, non-reversible LLMs into reversible architectures through fine-tuning, rendering our approach practical for exploiting existing pre-trained models. Our results show comparable or improved performance on several datasets and benchmarks, on several LLMs, building a scalable and efficient path towards reducing the memory and computational costs associated with both training from scratch and fine-tuning of LLMs.

Despite strong results on recognition and segmentation, current 3D visual pre-training methods often underperform on robotic manipulation. We attribute this gap to two factors: the lack of state-action-state dynamics modeling and the unnecessary redundancy of explicit geometric reconstruction. We introduce AFRO, a self-supervised framework that learns dynamics-aware 3D representations without action or reconstruction supervision. AFRO casts state prediction as a generative diffusion process and jointly models forward and inverse dynamics in a shared latent space to capture causal transition structure. To prevent feature leakage in action learning, we employ feature differencing and inverse-consistency supervision, improving the quality and stability of visual features. When combined with Diffusion Policy, AFRO substantially increases manipulation success rates across 16 simulated and 4 real-world tasks, outperforming existing pre-training approaches. The framework also scales favorably with data volume and task complexity. Qualitative visualizations indicate that AFRO learns semantically rich, discriminative features, offering an effective pre-training solution for 3D representation learning in robotics. Project page: https://kolakivy.github.io/AFRO/

This study examined how AI-generated summaries, which have become visually prominent in online search results, affect how users think about different issues. In a preregistered randomized controlled experiment, participants (N = 2,004) viewed mock search result pages varying in the presence (vs. absence), placement (top vs. middle), and stance (benefit-framed vs. harm-framed) of AI-generated summaries across four publicly debated topics. Compared to a no-summary control group, participants exposed to AI-generated summaries reported issue attitudes, behavioral intentions, and policy support that aligned more closely with the AI summary stance. The summaries placed at the top of the page produced stronger shifts in users' issue attitudes (but not behavioral intentions or policy support) than those placed at the middle of the page. We also observed moderating effects from issue familiarity and general trust toward AI. In addition, users perceived the AI summaries more useful when it emphasized health harms versus benefits. These findings suggest that AI-generated search summaries can significantly shape public perceptions, raising important implications for the design and regulation of AI-integrated information ecosystems.

Generalizing from individual skill executions to solving long-horizon tasks remains a core challenge in building autonomous agents. A promising direction is learning high-level, symbolic abstractions of the low-level skills of the agents, enabling reasoning and planning independent of the low-level state space. Among possible high-level representations, object-centric skill abstraction with symbolic predicates has been proven to be efficient because of its compatibility with domain-independent planners. Recent advances in foundation models have made it possible to generate symbolic predicates that operate on raw sensory inputs, a process we call generative predicate invention, to facilitate downstream abstraction learning. However, it remains unclear which formal properties the learned representations must satisfy, and how they can be learned to guarantee these properties. In this paper, we address both questions by presenting a formal theory of generative predicate invention for skill abstraction, resulting in symbolic operators that can be used for provably sound and complete planning. Within this framework, we propose SkillWrapper, a method that leverages foundation models to actively collect robot data and learn human-interpretable, plannable representations of black-box skills, using only RGB image observations. Our extensive empirical evaluation in simulation and on real robots shows that SkillWrapper learns abstract representations that enable solving unseen, long-horizon tasks in the real world with black-box skills.

Linguistic features remain essential for interpretability and tasks that involve style, structure, and readability, but existing Spanish tools offer limited coverage. We present PUCP-Metrix, an open-source and comprehensive toolkit for linguistic analysis of Spanish texts. PUCP-Metrix includes 182 linguistic metrics spanning lexical diversity, syntactic and semantic complexity, cohesion, psycholinguistics, and readability. It enables fine-grained, interpretable text analysis. We evaluate its usefulness on Automated Readability Assessment and Machine-Generated Text Detection, showing competitive performance compared to an existing repository and strong neural baselines. PUCP-Metrix offers a comprehensive and extensible resource for Spanish, supporting diverse NLP applications.

Despite progress in gloss-free Sign Language Translation (SLT), traditional single modality end-to-end approaches consistently fail on two critical components of natural signing: the precise recognition of high-speed fingerspelling and the integration of asynchronous non-manual cues from the face. Recent progress in SLT with Large Language Models has side stepped this challenge, forcing a single network to learn these simultaneously resulting in poor performance when tasked with translating crucial information such as names, places, and technical terms. We introduce SignBind-LLM, a modular framework designed to overcome these limitations. Our approach employs separate, specialized predictors for continuous signing, fingerspelling, and lipreading. Each expert network first decodes its specific modality into a sequence of tokens. These parallel streams are then fused by a lightweight transformer that resolves temporal misalignments before passing the combined representation to a Large Language Model (LLM) for final sentence generation. Our method establishes a new state-of-the-art on the How2Sign, ChicagoFSWildPlus, and BOBSL datasets with a BLEU-4 score of 22.1, 73.2% letter accuracy and BLEU-4 score of 6.8 respectively. These results validate our core hypothesis: isolating and solving distinct recognition tasks before fusion provides a more powerful and effective pathway to robust, high-fidelity sign language translation.

Neighbor-based methods are a natural alternative to linear prediction for tabular data when relationships between inputs and targets exhibit complexity such as nonlinearity, periodicity, or heteroscedasticity. Yet in deep learning on unstructured data, nonparametric neighbor-based approaches are rarely implemented in lieu of simple linear heads. This is primarily due to the ability of systems equipped with linear regression heads to co-learn internal representations along with the linear head's parameters. To unlock the full potential of neighbor-based methods in neural networks we introduce SoftStep, a parametric module that learns sparse instance-wise similarity measures directly from data. When integrated with existing neighbor-based methods, SoftStep enables regression models that consistently outperform linear heads across diverse architectures, domains, and training scenarios. We focus on regression tasks, where we show theoretically that neighbor-based prediction with a mean squared error objective constitutes a metric learning algorithm that induces well-structured embedding spaces. We then demonstrate analytically and empirically that this representational structure translates into superior performance when combined with the sparse, instance-wise similarity measures introduced by SoftStep. Beyond regression, SoftStep is a general method for learning instance-wise similarity in deep neural networks, with broad applicability to attention mechanisms, metric learning, representational alignment, and related paradigms.

This paper investigates a critical design decision in the practice of massively multilingual continual pre-training -- the inclusion of parallel data. Specifically, we study the impact of bilingual translation data for massively multilingual language adaptation of the Llama3 family of models to 500 languages. To this end, we construct the MaLA bilingual translation corpus, containing data from more than 2,500 language pairs. Subsequently, we develop the EMMA-500 Llama 3 suite of four massively multilingual models -- continually pre-trained from the Llama 3 family of base models extensively on diverse data mixes up to 671B tokens -- and explore the effect of continual pre-training with or without bilingual translation data. Comprehensive evaluation across 7 tasks and 12 benchmarks demonstrates that bilingual data tends to enhance language transfer and performance, particularly for low-resource languages. We open-source the MaLA corpus, EMMA-500 Llama 3 suite artefacts, code, and model generations.

With the rise of artificial intelligence (A.I.) and large language models like ChatGPT, a new race for achieving artificial general intelligence (A.G.I) has started. While many speculate how and when A.I. will achieve A.G.I., there is no clear agreement on how A.G.I. can be detected in A.I. models, even when popular tools like the Turing test (and its modern variations) are used to measure their intelligence. In this work, we discuss why traditional methods like the Turing test do not suffice for measuring or detecting A.G.I. and provide a new, practical method that can be used to decide if a system (computer or any other) has reached or surpassed A.G.I. To achieve this, we make two new contributions. First, we present a clear definition for general intelligence (G.I.) and set a G.I. Threshold (G.I.T.) that can be used to distinguish between systems that achieve A.G.I. and systems that do not. Second, we present a new framework on how to construct tests that can detect if a system has achieved G.I. in a simple, comprehensive, and clear-cut fail/pass way. We call this novel framework the Turing test 2.0. We then demonstrate real-life examples of applying tests that follow our Turing test 2.0 framework on modern A.I. models.