Many challenges remain before AI agents can be deployed in real-world environments. However, one virtue of such environments is that they are inherently multi-agent and contain human experts. Using advanced social intelligence in such an environment can help an AI agent learn adaptive skills and behaviors that a known expert exhibits. While social intelligence could accelerate training, it is currently difficult to study due to the lack of open-ended multi-agent environments. In this work, we present an environment in which multiple self-interested agents can pursue complex and independent goals, reflective of real world challenges. This environment will enable research into the development of socially intelligent AI agents in open-ended multi-agent settings, where agents may be implicitly incentivized to cooperate to defeat common enemies, build and share tools, and achieve long horizon goals. In this work, we investigate the impact on agent performance due to social learning in the presence of experts and implicit cooperation such as emergent collaborative tool use, and whether agents can benefit from either cooperation or competition in this environment.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for code understanding. However, deploying these PLMs in large-scale applications faces practical challenges due to their computational intensity and inference latency. Knowledge distillation (KD), a promising model compression and acceleration technique, addresses these limitations by transferring knowledge from large teacher models to compact student models, enabling efficient inference while preserving most of the teacher models' capabilities. While this technique has shown remarkable success in natural language processing and computer vision domains, its potential for code understanding tasks remains largely underexplored. In this paper, we systematically investigate the effectiveness and usage of KD in code understanding tasks. Our study encompasses two popular types of KD methods, i.e., logit-based and feature-based KD methods, experimenting across eight student models and two teacher PLMs from different domains on three downstream tasks. The experimental results indicate that KD consistently offers notable performance boosts across student models with different sizes compared with standard fine-tuning. Notably, code-specific PLM demonstrates better effectiveness as the teacher model. Among all KD methods, the latest feature-based KD methods exhibit superior performance, enabling student models to retain up to 98% teacher performance with merely 5% parameters. Regarding student architecture, our experiments reveal that similarity with teacher architecture does not necessarily lead to better performance. We further discuss the efficiency and behaviors in the KD process and inference, summarize the implications of findings, and identify promising future directions.

The increasing adoption of large language models (LLMs) has been accompanied by growing concerns regarding their reliability and trustworthiness. As a result, a growing body of research focuses on evidence-based text generation with LLMs, aiming to link model outputs to supporting evidence to ensure traceability and verifiability. However, the field is fragmented due to inconsistent terminology, isolated evaluation practices, and a lack of unified benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we systematically analyze 134 papers, introduce a unified taxonomy of evidence-based text generation with LLMs, and investigate 300 evaluation metrics across seven key dimensions. Thereby, we focus on approaches that use citations, attribution, or quotations for evidence-based text generation. Building on this, we examine the distinctive characteristics and representative methods in the field. Finally, we highlight open challenges and outline promising directions for future work.

In user-centric design, persona development plays a vital role in understanding user behaviour, capturing needs, segmenting audiences, and guiding design decisions. However, the growing complexity of user interactions calls for a more contextualized approach to ensure designs align with real user needs. While earlier studies have advanced persona classification by modelling user behaviour, capturing contextual information, especially by integrating textual and tabular data, remains a key challenge. These models also often lack explainability, leaving their predictions difficult to interpret or justify. To address these limitations, we present ExBigBang (Explainable BigBang), a hybrid text-tabular approach that uses transformer-based architectures to model rich contextual features for persona classification. ExBigBang incorporates metadata, domain knowledge, and user profiling to embed deeper context into predictions. Through a cyclical process of user profiling and classification, our approach dynamically updates to reflect evolving user behaviours. Experiments on a benchmark persona classification dataset demonstrate the robustness of our model. An ablation study confirms the benefits of combining text and tabular data, while Explainable AI techniques shed light on the rationale behind the model's predictions.

In recent years, with the rapid development of the depth and breadth of large language models' capabilities, various corresponding evaluation benchmarks have been emerging in increasing numbers. As a quantitative assessment tool for model performance, benchmarks are not only a core means to measure model capabilities but also a key element in guiding the direction of model development and promoting technological innovation. We systematically review the current status and development of large language model benchmarks for the first time, categorizing 283 representative benchmarks into three categories: general capabilities, domain-specific, and target-specific. General capability benchmarks cover aspects such as core linguistics, knowledge, and reasoning; domain-specific benchmarks focus on fields like natural sciences, humanities and social sciences, and engineering technology; target-specific benchmarks pay attention to risks, reliability, agents, etc. We point out that current benchmarks have problems such as inflated scores caused by data contamination, unfair evaluation due to cultural and linguistic biases, and lack of evaluation on process credibility and dynamic environments, and provide a referable design paradigm for future benchmark innovation.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have driven growing interest in LLM-based agents for complex planning tasks. To avoid costly agent training, many studies adopted memory mechanism that enhances LLM with offline experiences or online trajectory analysis. However, existing works focus on single-granularity memory derived from dynamic environmental interactions, which are inherently constrained by the quality of the collected experiences. This limitation, in turn, constrain the diversity of knowledge and the flexibility of planning. We propose Coarse-to-Fine Grounded Memory (\Ours{}), a novel framework that grounds coarse-to-fine memories with LLM, thereby fully leverage them for flexible adaptation to diverse scenarios. \Ours{} grounds environmental information into coarse-grained focus points to guide experience collection in training tasks, followed by grounding of actionable hybrid-grained tips from each experience. At inference, \Ours{} retrieves task-relevant experiences and tips to support planning. When facing environmental anomalies, the LLM grounds the current situation into fine-grained key information, enabling flexible self-QA reflection and plan correction.

--Artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to serve as a foundational capability across the entire lifecycle of 6G networks, spanning design, deployment, and operation. This article proposes a native AI-driven air interface architecture built around two core characteristics: compression and adaptation. On one hand, compression enables the system to understand and extract essential semantic information from the source data, focusing on task relevance rather than symbol-level accuracy. On the other hand, adaptation allows the air interface to dynamically transmit semantic information across diverse tasks, data types, and channel conditions, ensuring scalability and robustness. This article first introduces the native AI-driven air interface architecture, then discusses representative enabling methodologies, followed by a case study on semantic communication in 6G non-terrestrial networks. Finally, it presents a forward-looking discussion on the future of native AI in 6G, outlining key challenges and research opportunities. The sixth generation (6G) of wireless networks is envisioned as a foundational transformation that extends far beyond incremental performance improvements. According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), 6G will support a new class of usage scenarios such as ubiquitous connectivity, integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), and artificial intelligence (AI) and communications [1]. This work was partly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 62293480, 62293481, and 62471065. Co-corresponding authors: Kai Niu and Yiming Liu.) Ping Zhang, Yiming Liu, Nan Ma, Xiaodong Xu, Wenjun Xu, and Mengying Sun are with State Key Laboratory of Network and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China.

Pretraining large language models (LLMs) on high-quality, structured data such as mathematics and code substantially enhances reasoning capabilities. However, existing math-focused datasets built from Common Crawl suffer from degraded quality due to brittle extraction heuristics, lossy HTML-to-text conversion, and the failure to reliably preserve mathematical structure. In this work, we introduce Nemotron-CC-Math, a large-scale, high-quality mathematical corpus constructed from Common Crawl using a novel, domain-agnostic pipeline specifically designed for robust scientific text extraction. Unlike previous efforts, our pipeline recovers math across various formats (e.g., MathJax, KaTeX, MathML) by leveraging layout-aware rendering with lynx and a targeted LLM-based cleaning stage. This approach preserves the structural integrity of equations and code blocks while removing boilerplate, standardizing notation into LaTeX representation, and correcting inconsistencies. We collected a large, high-quality math corpus, namely Nemotron-CC-Math-3+ (133B tokens) and Nemotron-CC-Math-4+ (52B tokens). Notably, Nemotron-CC-Math-4+ not only surpasses all prior open math datasets-including MegaMath, FineMath, and OpenWebMath-but also contains 5.5 times more tokens than FineMath-4+, which was previously the highest-quality math pretraining dataset. When used to pretrain a Nemotron-T 8B model, our corpus yields +4.8 to +12.6 gains on MATH and +4.6 to +14.3 gains on MBPP+ over strong baselines, while also improving general-domain performance on MMLU and MMLU-Stem. We present the first pipeline to reliably extract scientific content--including math--from noisy web-scale data, yielding measurable gains in math, code, and general reasoning, and setting a new state of the art among open math pretraining corpora. To support open-source efforts, we release our code and datasets.

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly impacts professional practice, there is a growing need to AI-related competencies into higher education curricula. However, research on the implementation of AI education within study programs remains limited and requires new forms of collaboration across disciplines. This study addresses this gap and explores perspectives on interdisciplinary curriculum development through the lens of different stakeholders. In particular, we examine the case of curriculum development for a novel undergraduate program in AI in engineering. The research uses a mixed methods approach, combining quantitative curriculum mapping with qualitative focus group interviews. In addition to assessing the alignment of the curriculum with the targeted competencies, the study also examines the perceived quality, consistency, practicality and effectiveness from both academic and industry perspectives, as well as differences in perceptions between educators who were involved in the development and those who were not. The findings provide a practical understanding of the outcomes of interdisciplinary AI curriculum development and contribute to a broader understanding of how educator participation in curriculum development influences perceptions of quality aspects. It also advances the field of AI education by providing a reference point and insights for further interdisciplinary curriculum developments in response to evolving industry needs.

Recommender systems play a critical role in enhancing user experience by providing personalized suggestions based on user preferences. Traditional approaches often rely on explicit numerical ratings or assume access to fully ranked lists of items. However, ratings frequently fail to capture true preferences due to users' behavioral biases and subjective interpretations of rating scales, while eliciting full rankings is demanding and impractical. To overcome these limitations, we propose a generalized utility-based framework that learns preferences from simple and intuitive pairwise comparisons. Our approach is model-agnostic and designed to optimize for arbitrary, task-specific utility functions, allowing the system's objective to be explicitly aligned with the definition of a high-quality outcome in any given application. A central contribution of our work is a novel utility-based active sampling strategy for preference elicitation. This method selects queries that are expected to provide the greatest improvement to the utility of the final recommended outcome. We ground our preference model in the probabilistic Plackett-Luce framework for pairwise data. To demonstrate the versatility of our approach, we present two distinct experiments: first, an implementation using matrix factorization for a classic movie recommendation task, and second, an implementation using a neural network for a complex candidate selection scenario in university admissions. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework provides a more accurate, data-efficient, and user-centric paradigm for personalized ranking.