However, pre-trained VLA policies still suffer from substantial performance degradation during downstream deployment. Although fine-tuning can mitigate this issue, its reliance on costly demonstration collection and intensive computation makes it impractical in real-world settings. In this work, we introduce VLA-Pilot, a plug-and-play inference-time policy steering method for zero-shot deployment of pre-trained VLA without any additional fine-tuning or data collection. We evaluate VLA-Pilot on six real-world downstream manipulation tasks across two distinct robotic embodiments, encompassing both in-distribution and out-of-distribution scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that VLA-Pilot substantially boosts the success rates of off-the-shelf pre-trained VLA policies, enabling robust zero-shot generalization to diverse tasks and embodiments. Experimental videos and code are available at: https://rip4kobe.github.io/vla-pilot/. I. INTRODUCTION Recent advances in VLA models have substantially improved the generalization capabilities of robotic manipulation. By learning from large-scale demonstrations [1], these generative foundation policies enable robots to acquire a wide repertoire of skills. At inference time, they can perform diverse and contextually appropriate tasks by stochastically sampling actions from the learned skill distribution.

Large Language Models (LLMs) inherit explicit and implicit biases from their training datasets. Identifying and mitigating biases in LLMs is crucial to ensure fair outputs, as they can perpetuate harmful stereotypes and misinformation. This study highlights the need to address biases in LLMs amid growing generative AI. We studied bias-specific benchmarks such as StereoSet and CrowSPairs to evaluate the existence of various biases in multiple generative models such as BERT and GPT 3.5. We proposed an automated Bias-Identification Framework to recognize various social biases in LLMs such as gender, race, profession, and religion. We adopted a two-pronged approach to detect explicit and implicit biases in text data. Results indicated fine-tuned models struggle with gender biases but excelled at identifying and avoiding racial biases. Our findings illustrated that despite having some success, LLMs often over-relied on keywords. To illuminate the capability of the analyzed LLMs in detecting implicit biases, we employed Bag-of-Words analysis and unveiled indications of implicit stereotyping within the vocabulary. To bolster the model performance, we applied an enhancement strategy involving fine-tuning models using prompting techniques and data augmentation of the bias benchmarks. The fine-tuned models exhibited promising adaptability during cross-dataset testing and significantly enhanced performance on implicit bias benchmarks, with performance gains of up to 20%.

In this research, we combine Transformer-based relation extraction with matching of knowledge graphs (KGs) and apply them to answering multiple-choice questions (MCQs) while maintaining the traceability of the output process. KGs are structured representations of factual knowledge consisting of entities and relations. Due to the high construction cost, they had been regarded as static databases with validated links. However, the recent development of Transformer-based relation extraction (RE) methods has enabled us to generate KGs dynamically by giving them natural language texts, and thereby opened the possibility for representing the meaning of the input sentences with the created KGs. Using this effect, we propose a method that answers MCQs in the "fill-in-the-blank" format, taking care of the point that RE methods generate KGs that represent false information if provided with factually incorrect texts. We measure the truthfulness of each question sentence by (i) converting the sentence into a relational graph using an RE method and (ii) verifying it against factually correct KGs under the closed-world assumption. The experimental results demonstrate that our method correctly answers up to around 70% of the questions, while providing traceability of the procedure. We also highlight that the question category has a vast influence on the accuracy.

Adaptive learning often diagnoses precisely yet intervenes weakly, yielding help that is mistimed or misaligned. This study presents evidence supporting an instructor-governed feedback loop that converts concept-level assessment evidence into vetted micro-interventions. The adaptive learning algorithm contains three safeguards: adequacy as a hard guarantee of gap closure, attention as a budgeted constraint for time and redundancy, and diversity as protection against overfitting to a single resource. We formalize intervention assignment as a binary integer program with constraints for coverage, time, difficulty windows informed by ability estimates, prerequisites encoded by a concept matrix, and anti-redundancy enforced through diversity. Greedy selection serves low-richness and tight-latency regimes, gradient-based relaxation serves rich repositories, and a hybrid method transitions along a richness-latency frontier. In simulation and in an introductory physics deployment with one thousand two hundred four students, both solvers achieved full skill coverage for essentially all learners within bounded watch time. The gradient-based method reduced redundant coverage by approximately twelve percentage points relative to greedy and harmonized difficulty across slates, while greedy delivered comparable adequacy with lower computational cost in scarce settings. Slack variables localized missing content and supported targeted curation, sustaining sufficiency across subgroups. The result is a tractable and auditable controller that closes the diagnostic-pedagogical loop and delivers equitable, load-aware personalization at classroom scale.

Despite considerable technological innovation, comprehensive reviews synthesizing the application and evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) in the field of music analysis remain scarce. Although early studies on computer-assisted composition and rule-based analysis established a foundation for the automated exploration of musical form and content Hiller (1959), there is still a limited body of literature addressing the complete progression from traditional algorithms to recent AI-driven models and hybrid systems. Pioneering work such as Miranda's Miranda (2021), underscores the influence of AI, supercomputing, and evolutionary computation in shaping the first computational tools for creation. Recent reviews (Wang et al. (2024); Lerch et al. (2025)) focus on intelligent music generation systems. However, a systematic integration of these historical advances with state-of-the-art AI methodologies and musical analysis is largely absent. In the last decade, deep learning frameworks--including convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, and transformer architectures--have led to breakthroughs in music information retrieval.

This paper studies the problem of class-incremental learning (CIL), a core setting within continual learning where a model learns a sequence of tasks, each containing a distinct set of classes. Traditional CIL methods, which do not leverage pre-trained models (PTMs), suffer from catastrophic forgetting (CF) due to the need to incrementally learn both feature representations and the classifier. The integration of PTMs into CIL has recently led to efficient approaches that treat the PTM as a fixed feature extractor combined with analytic classifiers, achieving state-of-the-art performance. However, they still face a major limitation: the inability to continually adapt feature representations to best suit the CIL tasks, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose AnaCP (Analytic Contrastive Projection), a novel method that preserves the efficiency of analytic classifiers while enabling incremental feature adaptation without gradient-based training, thereby eliminating the CF caused by gradient updates. Our experiments show that AnaCP not only outperforms existing baselines but also achieves the accuracy level of joint training, which is regarded as the upper bound of CIL.

Proteins perform essential biological functions, and accurate classification of their sequences is critical for understanding structure-function relationships, enzyme mechanisms, and molecular interactions. This study presents a deep learning-based framework for functional group classification of protein sequences derived from the Protein Data Bank (PDB). Four architectures were implemented: Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM), CNN-BiLSTM hybrid, and CNN with Attention. Each model was trained using k-mer integer encoding to capture both local and long-range dependencies. Among these, the CNN achieved the highest validation accuracy of 91.8%, demonstrating the effectiveness of localized motif detection. Explainable AI techniques, including Grad-CAM and Integrated Gradients, were applied to interpret model predictions and identify biologically meaningful sequence motifs. The discovered motifs, enriched in histidine, aspartate, glutamate, and lysine, represent amino acid residues commonly found in catalytic and metal-binding regions of transferase enzymes. These findings highlight that deep learning models can uncover functionally relevant biochemical signatures, bridging the gap between predictive accuracy and biological interpretability in protein sequence analysis.

Large language models (LLMs) and vision language models (VLMs), such as DeepSeek R1,OpenAI o3, and Gemini 2.5 Pro, have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities across logical inference, problem solving, and decision making. However, spatial reasoning:a fundamental component of human cognition that includes mental rotation, navigation, and spatial relationship comprehension remains a significant challenge for current advanced VLMs. We hypothesize that imagination, the internal simulation of spatial states, is the dominant reasoning mechanism within a spatial world model. To test this hypothesis and systematically probe current VLM spatial reasoning mechanisms, we introduce SpatiaLite, a fully synthetic benchmark that jointly measures spatial reasoning accuracy and reasoning efficiency. Comprehensive experiments reveal three key findings. First, advanced VLMs predominantly rely on linguistic representations for reasoning and imagination, resulting in significant deficiencies on visual centric tasks that demand perceptual spatial relations and 3D geometry transformations such as mental rotation or projection prediction. Second, advanced VLMs exhibit severe inefficiency in their current spatial reasoning mechanisms, with token usage growing rapidly as transformation complexity increases. Third, we propose an Imagery Driven Framework (IDF) for data synthesis and training, which can implicitly construct an internal world model that is critical for spatial reasoning in VLMs. Building on SpatiaLite, this work delineates the spatial reasoning limits and patterns of advanced VLMs, identifies key shortcomings, and informs future advances

Knowledge Distillation (KD) trains a smaller student model using a large, pre-trained teacher model, with temperature as a key hyperparameter controlling the softness of output probabilities. Traditional methods use a fixed temperature throughout training, which is suboptimal. Moreover, architectural differences between teacher and student often result in mismatched logit magnitudes. We demonstrate that students benefit from softer probabilities early in training but require sharper probabilities in later stages. We introduce Dynamic Temperature Scheduler (DTS), which adjusts temperature dynamically based on the cross-entropy loss gap between teacher and student. To our knowledge, this is the first temperature scheduling method that adapts based on the divergence between teacher and student distributions. Our method integrates seamlessly with existing KD frameworks. We validate DTS across multiple KD strategies on vision (CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet) and NLP tasks (GLUE, Dolly, SelfIns, UnNI, S-NI), consistently outperforming static-temperature baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/Sibgat-Ul/DTS.

Multi-agent systems perform well on general reasoning tasks. However, the lack of training in specialized areas hinders their accuracy. Current training methods train a unified large language model (LLM) for all agents in the system. This may limit the performances due to different distributions underlying for different agents. Therefore, training multi-agent systems with distinct LLMs should be the next step to solve. However, this approach introduces optimization challenges. For example, agents operate at different frequencies, rollouts involve varying sub-agent invocations, and agents are often deployed across separate servers, disrupting end-to-end gradient flow. To address these issues, we propose M-GRPO, a hierarchical extension of Group Relative Policy Optimization designed for vertical Multi-agent systems with a main agent (planner) and multiple sub-agents (multi-turn tool executors). M-GRPO computes group-relative advantages for both main and sub-agents, maintaining hierarchical credit assignment. It also introduces a trajectory-alignment scheme that generates fixed-size batches despite variable sub-agent invocations. We deploy a decoupled training pipeline in which agents run on separate servers and exchange minimal statistics via a shared store. This enables scalable training without cross-server backpropagation. In experiments on real-world benchmarks (e.g., GAIA, XBench-DeepSearch, and WebWalkerQA), M-GRPO consistently outperforms both single-agent GRPO and multi-agent GRPO with frozen sub-agents, demonstrating improved stability and sample efficiency. These results show that aligning heterogeneous trajectories and decoupling optimization across specialized agents enhances tool-augmented reasoning tasks.