Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce plausible but poorly-calibrated answers, limiting their reliability on reasoning-intensive tasks. We present Reinforcement Learning from Self-Feedback (RLSF), a post-training stage that uses the model's own confidence as an intrinsic reward, mimicking how humans learn in the absence of external feedback. After a frozen LLM generates several chain-of-thought solutions, we define and compute the confidence of each final answer span and rank the traces accordingly. These synthetic preferences are then used to fine-tune the policy with standard preference optimization, similar to RLHF yet requiring no human labels, gold answers, or externally curated rewards. RLSF simultaneously (i) refines the model's probability estimates -- restoring well-behaved calibration -- and (ii) strengthens step-by-step reasoning, yielding improved performance on arithmetic reasoning and multiple-choice question answering. By turning a model's own uncertainty into useful self-feedback, RLSF affirms reinforcement learning on intrinsic model behaviour as a principled and data-efficient component of the LLM post-training pipeline and warrents further research in intrinsic rewards for LLM post-training.

--Scientific testing techniques are essential for ensuring the safe operation of autonomous vehicles (A Vs), with high-risk, highly interactive scenarios being a primary focus. T o address the limitations of existing testing methods, such as their heavy reliance on high-quality test data, weak interaction capabilities, and low adversarial robustness, this paper proposes ExamPPO, an interactive adversarial testing framework that enables scenario-adaptive and intensity-controllable evaluation of autonomous vehicles. The framework models the Surrounding V ehicle (SV) as an intelligent examiner, equipped with a multi-head attention-enhanced policy network, enabling context-sensitive and sustained behavioral interventions. A scalar confrontation factor is introduced to modulate the intensity of adversarial behaviors, allowing continuous, fine-grained adjustment of test difficulty. Coupled with structured evaluation metrics, ExamPPO systematically probes A V's robustness across diverse scenarios and strategies. Extensive experiments across multiple scenarios and A V strategies demonstrate that ExamPPO can effectively modulate adversarial behavior, expose decision-making weaknesses in tested A Vs, and generalize across heterogeneous environments, thereby offering a unified and reproducible solution for evaluating the safety and intelligence of autonomous decision-making systems. UTONOMOUS driving technologies have achieved substantial progress in recent years, driven by advances in perception, planning, and control systems [1], [2], [3]. These innovations have accelerated the development and deployment of intelligent vehicles in structured and semi-structured environments. This work is supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (52472451, 62433014), the Shanghai Scientific Innovation Foundation (No.23DZ1203400), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities. Yicheng Guo, Chengkai Xu, Peng Hang, and Jian Sun are with the College of Transportation, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, China.

This paper addresses the question of how able the current trends of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are in managing to take the responsibility of a full course of mathematics at a college level. The study evaluates this ability in four significant aspects, namely, creating a course syllabus, presenting selected material, answering student questions, and creating an assessment. It shows that even though the AI is strong in some important parts like organization and accuracy, there are still some human aspects that are far away from the current abilities of AI. There is still a hidden emotional part, even in science, that cannot be fulfilled by the AI in its current state. This paper suggests some recommendations to integrate the human and AI potentials to create better outcomes in terms of reaching the target of creating a full course of mathematics, at a university level, as best as possible.

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools become increasingly embedded in higher education, understanding how students interact with these systems is essential to supporting effective learning. This study examines how students' AI literacy and prior exposure to AI technologies shape their perceptions of Socratic Mind, an interactive AI-powered formative assessment tool. Drawing on Self-Determination Theory and user experience research, we analyze relationships among AI literacy, perceived usability, satisfaction, engagement, and perceived learning effectiveness. Data from 309 undergraduates in Computer Science and Business courses were collected through validated surveys. Partial least squares structural equation modeling showed that AI literacy - especially self-efficacy, conceptual understanding, and application skills - significantly predicts usability, satisfaction, and engagement. Usability and satisfaction, in turn, strongly predict perceived learning effectiveness, while prior AI exposure showed no significant effect. These findings highlight that AI literacy, rather than exposure alone, shapes student experiences. Designers should integrate adaptive guidance and user-centered features to support diverse literacy levels, fostering inclusive, motivating, and effective AI-based learning environments.

Recent studies have demonstrated that the dynamics of physical systems can be utilized for the desired information processing under the framework of physical reservoir computing (PRC). Robots with soft bodies are examples of such physical systems, and their nonlinear body-environment dynamics can be used to compute and generate the motor signals necessary for the control of their own behavior. In this simulation study, we extend this approach to control and embed not only one but also multiple behaviors into a type of soft robot called a tensegrity robot. The resulting system, consisting of the robot and the environment, is a multistable dynamical system that converges to different attractors from varying initial conditions. Furthermore, attractor analysis reveals that there exist "untrained attractors" in the state space of the system outside the training data. These untrained attractors reflect the intrinsic properties and structures of the tensegrity robot and its interactions with the environment. The impacts of these recent findings in PRC remain unexplored in embodied AI research. We here illustrate their potential to understand various features of embodied cognition that have not been fully addressed to date.

We present HumorBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate large language models' (LLMs) ability to reason about and explain sophisticated humor in cartoon captions. As reasoning models increasingly saturate existing benchmarks in mathematics and science, novel and challenging evaluations of model intelligence beyond STEM domains are essential. Reasoning is fundamentally involved in text-based humor comprehension, requiring the identification of connections between concepts in cartoons/captions and external cultural references, wordplays, and other mechanisms. HumorBench includes approximately 300 unique cartoon-caption pairs from the New Yorker Caption Contest and Cartoonstock.com, with expert-annotated evaluation rubrics identifying essential joke elements. LLMs are evaluated based on their explanations towards the humor and abilities in identifying the joke elements. To perform well on this task, models must form and test hypotheses about associations between concepts, potentially backtracking from initial interpretations to arrive at the most plausible explanation. Our extensive benchmarking of current SOTA models reveals three key insights: (1) LLM progress on STEM reasoning transfers effectively to humor comprehension; (2) models trained exclusively on STEM reasoning data still perform well on HumorBench, demonstrating strong transferability of reasoning abilities; and (3) test-time scaling by increasing thinking token budgets yields mixed results across different models in humor reasoning.

Software architecture design is a critical, yet inherently complex and knowledge-intensive phase of software development. It requires deep domain expertise, development experience, architectural knowledge, careful trade-offs among competing quality attributes, and the ability to adapt to evolving requirements. Traditionally, this process is time-consuming and labor-intensive, and relies heavily on architects, often resulting in limited design alternatives, especially under the pressures of agile development. While Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have shown promising performance across various SE tasks, their application to architecture design remains relatively scarce and requires more exploration, particularly in light of diverse domain knowledge and complex decision-making. To address the challenges, we proposed MAAD (Multi-Agent Architecture Design), an automated framework that employs a knowledge-driven Multi-Agent System (MAS) for architecture design. MAAD orchestrates four specialized agents (i.e., Analyst, Modeler, Designer and Evaluator) to collaboratively interpret requirements specifications and produce architectural blueprints enriched with quality attributes-based evaluation reports. We then evaluated MAAD through a case study and comparative experiments against MetaGPT, a state-of-the-art MAS baseline. Our results show that MAAD's superiority lies in generating comprehensive architectural components and delivering insightful and structured architecture evaluation reports. Feedback from industrial architects across 11 requirements specifications further reinforces MAAD's practical usability. We finally explored the performance of the MAAD framework with three LLMs (GPT-4o, DeepSeek-R1, and Llama 3.3) and found that GPT-4o exhibits better performance in producing architecture design, emphasizing the importance of LLM selection in MAS-driven architecture design.

The emergence of AI agents powered by large language models (LLMs) marks a pivotal shift toward the Agentic Web, a new phase of the internet defined by autonomous, goal-driven interactions. In this paradigm, agents interact directly with one another to plan, coordinate, and execute complex tasks on behalf of users. This transition from human-driven to machine-to-machine interaction allows intent to be delegated, relieving users from routine digital operations and enabling a more interactive, automated web experience. In this paper, we present a structured framework for understanding and building the Agentic Web. We trace its evolution from the PC and Mobile Web eras and identify the core technological foundations that support this shift. Central to our framework is a conceptual model consisting of three key dimensions: intelligence, interaction, and economics. These dimensions collectively enable the capabilities of AI agents, such as retrieval, recommendation, planning, and collaboration. We analyze the architectural and infrastructural challenges involved in creating scalable agentic systems, including communication protocols, orchestration strategies, and emerging paradigms such as the Agent Attention Economy. We conclude by discussing the potential applications, societal risks, and governance issues posed by agentic systems, and outline research directions for developing open, secure, and intelligent ecosystems shaped by both human intent and autonomous agent behavior. A continuously updated collection of relevant studies for agentic web is available at: https://github.com/SafeRL-Lab/agentic-web.

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-risk domains such as law, finance, and medicine, systematically evaluating their domain-specific safety and compliance becomes critical. While prior work has largely focused on improving LLM performance in these domains, it has often neglected the evaluation of domain-specific safety risks. To bridge this gap, we first define domain-specific safety principles for LLMs based on the AMA Principles of Medical Ethics, the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct, and the CFA Institute Code of Ethics. Building on this foundation, we introduce Trident-Bench, a benchmark specifically targeting LLM safety in the legal, financial, and medical domains. We evaluated 19 general-purpose and domain-specialized models on Trident-Bench and show that it effectively reveals key safety gaps -- strong generalist models (e.g., GPT, Gemini) can meet basic expectations, whereas domain-specialized models often struggle with subtle ethical nuances. This highlights an urgent need for finer-grained domain-specific safety improvements. By introducing Trident-Bench, our work provides one of the first systematic resources for studying LLM safety in law and finance, and lays the groundwork for future research aimed at reducing the safety risks of deploying LLMs in professionally regulated fields. Code and benchmark will be released at: https://github.com/zackhuiiiii/TRIDENT

Arabic Rhetoric is the field of Arabic linguistics which governs the art and science of conveying a message with greater beauty, impact and persuasiveness. The field is as ancient as the Arabic language itself and is found extensively in classical and contemporary Arabic poetry, free verse and prose. In practical terms, it is the intelligent use of word order, figurative speech and linguistic embellishments to enhance message delivery. Despite the volumes that have been written about it and the high status accorded to it, there is no way to objectively know whether a speaker or writer has used Arabic rhetoric in a given text, to what extent, and why. There is no objective way to compare the use of Arabic rhetoric across genres, authors or epochs. It is impossible to know which of pre-Islamic poetry, Andalucian Arabic poetry, or modern literary genres are richer in Arabic rhetoric. The aim of the current study was to devise a way to measure the density of the literary devices which constitute Arabic rhetoric in a given text, as a proxy marker for Arabic rhetoric itself. A comprehensive list of 84 of the commonest literary devices and their definitions was compiled. A system of identifying literary devices in texts was constructed. A method of calculating the density of literary devices based on the morpheme count of the text was utilised. Four electronic tools and an analogue tool were created to support the calculation of an Arabic text's rhetorical literary device density, including a website and online calculator. Additionally, a technique of reporting the distribution of literary devices used across the three sub-domains of Arabic rhetoric was created. The output of this project is a working tool which can accurately report the density of Arabic rhetoric in any Arabic text or speech.