Education
Luth: Efficient French Specialization for Small Language Models and Cross-Lingual Transfer
Lasbordes, Maxence, Gad, Sinoué
The landscape of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains predominantly English-centric, resulting in a significant performance gap for other major languages, such as French, especially in the context of Small Language Models (SLMs). Existing multilingual models demonstrate considerably lower performance in French compared to English, and research on efficient adaptation methods for French remains limited. To address this, we introduce \textbf{Luth}, a family of French-specialized SLMs: through targeted post-training on curated, high-quality French data, our models outperform all open-source counterparts of comparable size on multiple French benchmarks while retaining their original English capabilities. We further show that strategic model merging enhances performance in both languages, establishing Luth as a new state of the art for French SLMs and a robust baseline for future French-language research.
Syn-Diag: An LLM-based Synergistic Framework for Generalizable Few-shot Fault Diagnosis on the Edge
Jia, Zijun, Liang, Shuang, Yu, Jinsong
Industrial fault diagnosis faces the dual challenges of data scarcity and the difficulty of deploying large AI models in resource-constrained environments. This paper introduces Syn-Diag, a novel cloud-edge synergistic framework that leverages Large Language Models to overcome these limitations in few-shot fault diagnosis. Syn-Diag is built on a three-tiered mechanism: 1) Visual-Semantic Synergy, which aligns signal features with the LLM's semantic space through cross-modal pre-training; 2) Content-Aware Reasoning, which dynamically constructs contextual prompts to enhance diagnostic accuracy with limited samples; and 3) Cloud-Edge Synergy, which uses knowledge distillation to create a lightweight, efficient edge model capable of online updates via a shared decision space. Extensive experiments on six datasets covering different CWRU and SEU working conditions show that Syn-Diag significantly outperforms existing methods, especially in 1-shot and cross-condition scenarios. The edge model achieves performance comparable to the cloud version while reducing model size by 83% and latency by 50%, offering a practical, robust, and deployable paradigm for modern intelligent diagnostics.
Stable Robot Motions on Manifolds: Learning Lyapunov-Constrained Neural Manifold ODEs
Boetius, David, Abdelnaby, Abdelrahman, Kumar, Ashok, Leue, Stefan, Swikir, Abdalla, Abu-Dakka, Fares J.
Learning stable dynamical systems from data is crucial for safe and reliable robot motion planning and control. However, extending stability guarantees to trajectories defined on Riemannian manifolds poses significant challenges due to the manifold's geometric constraints. To address this, we propose a general framework for learning stable dynamical systems on Riemannian manifolds using neural ordinary differential equations. Our method guarantees stability by projecting the neural vector field evolving on the manifold so that it strictly satisfies the Lyapunov stability criterion, ensuring stability at every system state. By leveraging a flexible neural parameterisation for both the base vector field and the Lyapunov function, our framework can accurately represent complex trajectories while respecting manifold constraints by evolving solutions directly on the manifold. We provide an efficient training strategy for applying our framework and demonstrate its utility by solving Riemannian LASA datasets on the unit quaternion (S^3) and symmetric positive-definite matrix manifolds, as well as robotic motions evolving on \mathbb{R}^3 \times S^3. We demonstrate the performance, scalability, and practical applicability of our approach through extensive simulations and by learning robot motions in a real-world experiment.
The African Languages Lab: A Collaborative Approach to Advancing Low-Resource African NLP
Issaka, Sheriff, Wang, Keyi, Ajibola, Yinka, Samuel-Ipaye, Oluwatumininu, Zhang, Zhaoyi, Jimenez, Nicte Aguillon, Agyei, Evans Kofi, Lin, Abraham, Ramachandran, Rohan, Mumin, Sadick Abdul, Nchifor, Faith, Shuraim, Mohammed, Liu, Lieqi, Gonzalez, Erick Rosas, Kpei, Sylvester, Osei, Jemimah, Ajeneza, Carlene, Boateng, Persis, Yeboah, Prisca Adwoa Dufie, Gabriel, Saadia
Despite representing nearly one-third of the world's languages, African languages remain critically underserved by modern NLP technologies, with 88\% classified as severely underrepresented or completely ignored in computational linguistics. We present the African Languages Lab (All Lab), a comprehensive research initiative that addresses this technological gap through systematic data collection, model development, and capacity building. Our contributions include: (1) a quality-controlled data collection pipeline, yielding the largest validated African multi-modal speech and text dataset spanning 40 languages with 19 billion tokens of monolingual text and 12,628 hours of aligned speech data; (2) extensive experimental validation demonstrating that our dataset, combined with fine-tuning, achieves substantial improvements over baseline models, averaging +23.69 ChrF++, +0.33 COMET, and +15.34 BLEU points across 31 evaluated languages; and (3) a structured research program that has successfully mentored fifteen early-career researchers, establishing sustainable local capacity. Our comparative evaluation against Google Translate reveals competitive performance in several languages while identifying areas that require continued development.
From Agentification to Self-Evolving Agentic AI for Wireless Networks: Concepts, Approaches, and Future Research Directions
Zhao, Changyuan, Zhang, Ruichen, Wang, Jiacheng, Niyato, Dusit, Sun, Geng, Wang, Xianbin, Mao, Shiwen, Jamalipour, Abbas
Abstract--Self-evolving agentic artificial intelligence (AI) offers a new paradigm for future wireless systems by enabling autonomous agents to continually adapt and improve without human intervention. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of self-evolving agentic AI, highlighting its layered architecture, life cycle, and key techniques, including tool intelligence, workflow optimization, self-reflection, and evolutionary learning. We further propose a multi-agent cooperative self-evolving agentic AI framework, where multiple large language models (LLMs) are assigned role-specialized prompts under the coordination of a supervisor agent. Through structured dialogue, iterative feedback, and systematic validation, the system autonomously executes the entire life cycle without human intervention. A case study on antenna evolution in low-altitude wireless networks (LA WNs) demonstrates how the framework autonomously upgrades fixed antenna optimization into movable antenna optimization. Experimental results show that the proposed self-evolving agentic AI autonomously improves beam gain and restores degraded performance by up to 52.02%, consistently surpassing the fixed baseline with little to no human intervention and validating its adaptability and robustness for next-generation wireless intelligence. The concept of the G odel Machine, proposed by J urgen Schmidhuber, envisions a self-referential artificial intelligence (AI) capable of provably improving itself by rewriting its own code [1].
Seeing the Big Picture: Evaluating Multimodal LLMs' Ability to Interpret and Grade Handwritten Student Work
Henkel, Owen, Roberts, Bill, Jaffe, Doug, Holt, Laurence
Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) raise the question of their potential for grading, analyzing, and offering feedback on handwritten student classwork. This capability would be particularly beneficial in elementary and middle-school mathematics education, where most work remains handwritten, because seeing students' full working of a problem provides valuable insights into their learning processes, but is extremely time-consuming to grade. We present two experiments investigating MLLM performance on handwritten student mathematics classwork. Experiment A examines 288 handwritten responses from Ghanaian middle school students solving arithmetic problems with objective answers. In this context, models achieved near-human accuracy (95%, k = 0.90) but exhibited occasional errors that human educators would be unlikely to make. Experiment B evaluates 150 mathematical illustrations from American elementary students, where the drawings are the answer to the question. These tasks lack single objective answers and require sophisticated visual interpretation as well as pedagogical judgment in order to analyze and evaluate them. We attempted to separate MLLMs' visual capabilities from their pedagogical abilities by first asking them to grade the student illustrations directly, and then by augmenting the image with a detailed human description of the illustration. We found that when the models had to analyze the student illustrations directly, they struggled, achieving only k = 0.20 with ground truth scores, but when given human descriptions, their agreement levels improved dramatically to k = 0.47, which was in line with human-to-human agreement levels. This gap suggests MLLMs can "see" and interpret arithmetic work relatively well, but still struggle to "see" student mathematical illustrations.
ARMOR: High-Performance Semi-Structured Pruning via Adaptive Matrix Factorization
Liu, Lawrence, Liu, Alexander, Wang, Mengdi, Zhao, Tuo, Yang, Lin F.
While semi-structured pruning, particularly 2:4 sparsity, offers a path to practical hardware acceleration, existing methods often incur substantial performance degradation. To bridge this gap, we introduce ARMOR: (Adaptive Representation with Matrix-factORization), a novel one-shot post-training pruning algorithm. Instead of directly pruning weights, ARMOR factorizes each weight matrix into a 2:4 sparse core wrapped by two low-overhead, block diagonal matrices. These wrappers act as efficient pre-and post-transformation error correctors, offering greater flexibility to preserve model quality compared to conventional 2:4 pruning techniques. The sparse core and block diagonal wrappers are chosen through a block coordinate descent algorithm that minimizes a layer-wise proxy loss. We theoretically prove this optimization is guaranteed to converge to a solution with a proxy loss less than or equal to state-of-the-art pruning algorithms. Experiments on Llama (Touvron et al., 2023; Dubey et al., 2024) and Qwen (Y ang et al., 2025) model families demonstrate that ARMOR consistently and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art 2:4 pruning methods across a wide range of downstream tasks and perplexity evaluations. ARMOR achieves this superior performance while retaining the inference speedups and substantial memory usage reductions of 2:4 pruning, establishing a more effective trade-off between model compression and task accuracy. Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities (Park et al., 2023; Huang & Y ang, 2025), yet their immense computational and memory requirements pose significant barriers to practical deployment.
CAM: A Constructivist View of Agentic Memory for LLM-Based Reading Comprehension
Li, Rui, Zhang, Zeyu, Bo, Xiaohe, Tian, Zihang, Chen, Xu, Dai, Quanyu, Dong, Zhenhua, Tang, Ruiming
Current Large Language Models (LLMs) are confronted with overwhelming information volume when comprehending long-form documents. This challenge raises the imperative of a cohesive memory module, which can elevate vanilla LLMs into autonomous reading agents. Despite the emergence of some heuristic approaches, a systematic design principle remains absent. To fill this void, we draw inspiration from Jean Piaget's Constructivist Theory, illuminating three traits of the agentic memory -- structured schemata, flexible assimilation, and dynamic accommodation. This blueprint forges a clear path toward a more robust and efficient memory system for LLM-based reading comprehension. To this end, we develop CAM, a prototype implementation of Constructivist Agentic Memory that simultaneously embodies the structurality, flexibility, and dynamicity. At its core, CAM is endowed with an incremental overlapping clustering algorithm for structured memory development, supporting both coherent hierarchical summarization and online batch integration. During inference, CAM adaptively explores the memory structure to activate query-relevant information for contextual response, akin to the human associative process. Compared to existing approaches, our design demonstrates dual advantages in both performance and efficiency across diverse long-text reading comprehension tasks, including question answering, query-based summarization, and claim verification.
LANTERN: Scalable Distillation of Large Language Models for Job-Person Fit and Explanation
Fu, Zhoutong, Cao, Yihan, Chen, Yi-Lin, Lunia, Aman, Dong, Liming, Saraf, Neha, Jiang, Ruijie, Dai, Yun, Song, Qingquan, Wang, Tan, Li, Guoyao, Koh, Derek, Wei, Haichao, Wang, Zhipeng, Gupta, Aman, Jiang, Chengming, Shen, Jianqiang, Hong, Liangjie, Zhang, Wenjing
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. However, deploying LLMs at scale for domain specific applications, such as job-person fit and explanation in job seeking platforms, introduces distinct challenges. At LinkedIn, the job person fit task requires analyzing a candidate's public profile against job requirements to produce both a fit assessment and a detailed explanation. Directly applying open source or finetuned LLMs to this task often fails to yield high quality, actionable feedback due to the complexity of the domain and the need for structured outputs. Moreover, the large size of these models leads to high inference latency and limits scalability, making them unsuitable for online use. To address these challenges, we introduce LANTERN, a novel LLM knowledge distillation framework tailored specifically for job person fit tasks. LANTERN involves modeling over multiple objectives, an encoder model for classification purpose, and a decoder model for explanation purpose. To better distill the knowledge from a strong black box teacher model to multiple downstream models, LANTERN incorporates multi level knowledge distillation that integrates both data and logit level insights. In addition to introducing the knowledge distillation framework, we share our insights on post training techniques and prompt engineering, both of which are crucial for successfully adapting LLMs to domain specific downstream tasks. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that LANTERN significantly improves task specific metrics for both job person fit and explanation. Online evaluations further confirm its effectiveness, showing measurable gains in job seeker engagement, including a 0.24\% increase in apply rate and a 0.28\% increase in qualified applications.
Draft, Verify, and Improve: Toward Training-Aware Speculative Decoding
Bhansali, Shrenik, Heck, Larry
Autoregressive (AR) decoding is a major latency bottleneck for large language models. Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates AR by letting a drafter propose multi-token blocks that a verifier accepts or rejects. However, many SD systems require heavy offline training or extra components. These choices raise data/compute cost and can yield brittle drafters under distribution drift. We introduce \emph{Draft, Verify, \& Improve (DVI)}, a training-aware self-speculative framework that combines inference with continual online learning. We partition an LLM into a drafter and a verifier, and during generation, verifier accept/reject decisions are converted into supervision signals and used to update the drafter head. A simple \emph{KL$\rightarrow$RL} schedule bootstraps calibration via online distillation and then adds reward-masked cross-entropy with a on-policy policy-gradient term, preserving lossless, single model deployment. On Spec-Bench, DVI achieves a $2.16\times$ wall-time speedup, on par with SoTA approaches like EAGLE-2, while orders of magnitude less data for training, and ablations show that DVI outperforms KL-only online distillation. DVI demonstrates that \emph{training-aware} self-speculation can deliver state-of-the-art, lossless speedups with minimal training overhead.