Pruning provides a practical solution to reduce the resources required to run large language models (LLMs) to benefit from their effective capabilities as well as control their cost for training and inference. Research on LLM pruning often ranks the importance of LLM parameters using their magnitudes and calibration-data activations and removes (or masks) the less important ones, accordingly reducing LLMs' size. However, these approaches primarily focus on preserving the LLM's ability to generate fluent sentences, while neglecting performance on specific domains and tasks. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective pruning approach for LLMs that preserves task-specific capabilities while shrinking their parameter space. We first analyze how conventional pruning minimizes loss perturbation under general-domain calibration and extend this formulation by incorporating task-specific feature distributions into the importance computation of existing pruning algorithms. Thus, our framework computes separate importance scores using both general and task-specific calibration data, partitions parameters into shared and exclusive groups based on activation-norm differences, and then fuses their scores to guide the pruning process. This design enables our method to integrate seamlessly with various foundation pruning techniques and preserve the LLM's specialized abilities under compression. Experiments on widely used benchmarks demonstrate that our approach is effective and consistently outperforms the baselines with identical pruning ratios and different settings.

Knowledge Distillation (KD) aims to train a lightweight student model by transferring knowledge from a large, high-capacity teacher. Recent studies have shown that leveraging diverse teacher perspectives can significantly improve distillation performance; however, achieving such diversity typically requires multiple teacher networks, leading to high computational costs. In this work, we propose a novel cost-efficient knowledge augmentation method for KD that generates diverse multi-views by attaching multiple branches to a single teacher. To ensure meaningful semantic variation across multi-views, we introduce two angular diversity objectives: 1) constrained inter-angle diversify loss, which maximizes angles between augmented views while preserving proximity to the original teacher output, and 2) intra-angle diversify loss, which encourages an even distribution of views around the original output. The ensembled knowledge from these angularly diverse views, along with the original teacher, is distilled into the student. We further theoretically demonstrate that our objectives increase the diversity among ensemble members and thereby reduce the upper bound of the ensemble's expected loss, leading to more effective distillation. Experimental results show that our method surpasses an existing knowledge augmentation method across diverse configurations. Moreover, the proposed method is compatible with other KD frameworks in a plug-and-play fashion, providing consistent improvements in generalization performance.

Persona-assigned Large Language Models (LLMs) can adopt diverse roles, enabling personalized and context-aware reasoning. However, even minor demographic perturbations in personas, such as simple pronoun changes, can alter reasoning trajectories, leading to divergent sets of correct answers. Instead of treating these variations as biases to be mitigated, we explore their potential as a constructive resource to improve reasoning robustness. We propose CHOIR (Collaborative Harmonization fOr Inference Robustness), a test-time framework that harmonizes multiple persona-conditioned reasoning signals into a unified prediction. CHOIR orchestrates a collaborative decoding process among counterfactual personas, dynamically balancing agreement and divergence in their reasoning paths. Experiments on various reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that CHOIR consistently enhances performance across demographics, model architectures, scales, and tasks - without additional training. Improvements reach up to 26.4% for individual demographic groups and 19.2% on average across five demographics. It remains effective even when base personas are suboptimal. By reframing persona variation as a constructive signal, CHOIR provides a scalable and generalizable approach to more reliable LLM reasoning.

Motivated by the question of how a principal can maximize its utility in repeated interactions with a learning agent, we study repeated games between an principal and an agent employing a mean-based learning algorithm. Prior work has shown that computing or even approximating the global Stackelberg value in similar settings can require an exponential number of rounds in the size of the agent's action space, making it computationally intractable. In contrast, we shift focus to the computation of local Stackelberg equilibria and introduce an algorithm that, within the smoothed analysis framework, constitutes a Polynomial Time Approximation Scheme (PTAS) for finding an epsilon-approximate local Stackelberg equilibrium. Notably, the algorithm's runtime is polynomial in the size of the agent's action space yet exponential in (1/epsilon) - a dependency we prove to be unavoidable.

There has been a surge of interest in assistive wearable agents: agents embodied in wearable form factors (e.g., smart glasses) who take assistive actions toward a user's goal/query (e.g. "Where did I leave my keys?"). In this work, we consider the important complementary problem of inferring that goal from multi-modal contextual observations. Solving this "goal inference" problem holds the promise of eliminating the effort needed to interact with such an agent. This work focuses on creating WAGIBench, a strong benchmark to measure progress in solving this problem using vision-language models (VLMs). Given the limited prior work in this area, we collected a novel dataset comprising 29 hours of multimodal data from 348 participants across 3,477 recordings, featuring ground-truth goals alongside accompanying visual, audio, digital, and longitudinal contextual observations. We validate that human performance exceeds model performance, achieving 93% multiple-choice accuracy compared with 84% for the best-performing VLM. Generative benchmark results that evaluate several families of modern vision-language models show that larger models perform significantly better on the task, yet remain far from practical usefulness, as they produce relevant goals only 55% of the time. Through a modality ablation, we show that models benefit from extra information in relevant modalities with minimal performance degradation from irrelevant modalities.

Software testing is a critical component in the software engineering field and is important for software engineering education. Thus, it is vital for academia to continuously improve and update educational methods to reflect the current state of the field. The International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB) certification framework is globally recognized and widely adopted in industry and academia. However, ISTQB-based learning has been rarely applied with recent generative artificial intelligence advances. Despite the growing capabilities of large language models (LLMs), ISTQB-based learning and instruction with LLMs have not been thoroughly explored. This paper explores and evaluates how LLMs can complement the ISTQB framework for higher education. The findings present four key contributions: (i) the creation of a comprehensive ISTQB-aligned dataset spanning over a decade, consisting of 28 sample exams and 1,145 questions; (ii) the development of a domain-optimized prompt that enhances LLM precision and explanation quality on ISTQB tasks; (iii) a systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs on this dataset; and (iv) actionable insights and recommendations for integrating LLMs into software testing education. These findings highlight the promise of LLMs in supporting ISTQB certification preparation and offer a foundation for their broader use in software engineering at higher education.

Abstract--Domain Adaptation (DA) provides an effective way to tackle target-domain tasks by leveraging knowledge learned from source domains. Recent studies have extended this paradigm to Multi-Source Domain Adaptation (MSDA), which exploits multiple source domains carrying richer and more diverse transferable information. However, a substantial performance gap still remains between adaptation-based methods and fully supervised learning. In this paper, we explore a more practical and challenging setting, named Multi-Source Active Domain Adaptation (MS-ADA), to further enhance target-domain performance by selectively acquiring annotations from the target domain. The key difficulty of MS-ADA lies in designing selection criteria that can jointly handle inter-class diversity and multi-source domain variation. T o address these challenges, we propose a simple yet effective G lobA l-L ocA l strategy (GALA), which combines a global k-means clustering step for target-domain samples with a cluster-wise local selection criterion, effectively tackling the above two issues in a complementary manner . Our proposed GALA is plug-and-play and can be seamlessly integrated into existing DA frameworks without introducing any additional trainable parameters. Extensive experiments on three standard DA benchmarks demonstrate that GALA consistently outperforms prior active learning and active DA methods, achieving performance comparable to the fully-supervised upperbound while using only 1% of the target annotations.

Current evaluation of German automatic text simplification (ATS) relies on general-purpose metrics such as SARI, BLEU, and BERTScore, which insufficiently capture simplification quality in terms of simplicity, meaning preservation, and fluency. While specialized metrics like LENS have been developed for English, corresponding efforts for German have lagged behind due to the absence of human-annotated corpora. To close this gap, we introduce DETECT, the first German-specific metric that holistically evaluates ATS quality across all three dimensions of simplicity, meaning preservation, and fluency, and is trained entirely on synthetic large language model (LLM) responses. Our approach adapts the LENS framework to German and extends it with (i) a pipeline for generating synthetic quality scores via LLMs, enabling dataset creation without human annotation, and (ii) an LLM-based refinement step for aligning grading criteria with simplification requirements. To the best of our knowledge, we also construct the largest German human evaluation dataset for text simplification to validate our metric directly. Experimental results show that DETECT achieves substantially higher correlations with human judgments than widely used ATS metrics, with particularly strong gains in meaning preservation and fluency. Beyond ATS, our findings highlight both the potential and the limitations of LLMs for automatic evaluation and provide transferable guidelines for general language accessibility tasks.

Pretrained models are ubiquitous in the current deep learning landscape, offering strong results on a broad range of tasks. Recent works have shown that models differing in various design choices exhibit categorically diverse generalization behavior, resulting in one model grasping distinct data-specific insights unavailable to the other. In this paper, we propose to leverage large publicly available model repositories as an auxiliary source of model improvements. We introduce a data partitioning strategy where pretrained models autonomously adopt either the role of a student, seeking knowledge, or that of a teacher, imparting knowledge. Experiments across various tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. In image classification, we improved the performance of ViT-B by approximately 1.4% through bidirectional knowledge transfer with ViT-T. For semantic segmentation, our method boosted all evaluation metrics by enabling knowledge transfer both within and across backbone architectures. In video saliency prediction, our approach achieved a new state-of-the-art. We further extend our approach to knowledge transfer between multiple models, leading to considerable performance improvements for all model participants.

AI psychometrics evaluates AI systems in roles that traditionally require emotional judgment and ethical consideration. Prior work often reuses human trait inventories (Big Five, \hexaco) or ad hoc personas, limiting behavioral realism and domain relevance. We propose a framework that (1) uses situational judgment tests (SJTs) from realistic scenarios to probe domain-specific competencies; (2) integrates industrial-organizational and personality psychology to design sophisticated personas which include behavioral and psychological descriptors, life history, and social and emotional functions; and (3) employs structured generation with population demographic priors and memoir inspired narratives, encoded with Pydantic schemas. In a law enforcement assistant case study, we construct a rich dataset of personas drawn across 8 persona archetypes and SJTs across 11 attributes, and analyze behaviors across subpopulation and scenario slices. The dataset spans 8,500 personas, 4,000 SJTs, and 300,000 responses. We will release the dataset and all code to the public.