Autonomous multi-agent AI systems are poised to transform various industries, particularly software development and knowledge work. Understanding current perceptions among professionals is crucial for anticipating adoption challenges, ethical considerations, and future workforce development. This study analyzes responses from 130 participants to a survey on the capabilities, impact, and governance of AI agents. We explore expected timelines for AI replacing programmers, identify perceived barriers to deployment, and examine beliefs about responsibility when agents make critical decisions. Key findings reveal three distinct clusters of respondents. While the study explored factors associated with current AI agent deployment, the initial logistic regression model did not yield statistically significant predictors, suggesting that deployment decisions are complex and may be influenced by factors not fully captured or that a larger sample is needed. These insights highlight the need for organizations to address compliance concerns (a commonly cited barrier) and establish clear governance frameworks as they integrate autonomous agents into their workflows.

This paper presents a theoretical framework for addressing the challenges posed by generative artificial intelligence (AI) in higher education assessment through a machine-versus-machine approach. Large language models like GPT-4, Claude, and Llama increasingly demonstrate the ability to produce sophisticated academic content, traditional assessment methods face an existential threat, with surveys indicating 74-92% of students experimenting with these tools for academic purposes. Current responses, ranging from detection software to manual assessment redesign, show significant limitations: detection tools demonstrate bias against non-native English writers and can be easily circumvented, while manual frameworks rely heavily on subjective judgment and assume static AI capabilities. This paper introduces a dual strategy paradigm combining static analysis and dynamic testing to create a comprehensive theoretical framework for assessment vulnerability evaluation. The static analysis component comprises eight theoretically justified elements: specificity and contextualization, temporal relevance, process visibility requirements, personalization elements, resource accessibility, multimodal integration, ethical reasoning requirements, and collaborative elements. Each element addresses specific limitations in generative AI capabilities, creating barriers that distinguish authentic human learning from AI-generated simulation. The dynamic testing component provides a complementary approach through simulation-based vulnerability assessment, addressing limitations in pattern-based analysis. The paper presents a theoretical framework for vulnerability scoring, including the conceptual basis for quantitative assessment, weighting frameworks, and threshold determination theory.

Many identity systems assign a single, static identifier to an individual for life, reused across domains like healthcare, finance, and education. These Universal Lifelong Identifiers (ULIs) underpin critical workflows but now pose systemic privacy risks. We take the position that ULIs are fundamentally incompatible with the AI era and must be phased out. We articulate a threat model grounded in modern AI capabilities and show that traditional safeguards such as redaction, consent, and access controls are no longer sufficient. We define core properties for identity systems in the AI era and present a cryptographic framework that satisfies them while retaining compatibility with existing identifier workflows. Our design preserves institutional workflows, supports essential functions such as auditability and delegation, and offers a practical migration path beyond ULIs.

With the rapid development of vision tasks and the scaling on datasets and models, redundancy reduction in vision datasets has become a key area of research. To address this issue, dataset distillation (DD) has emerged as a promising approach to generating highly compact synthetic datasets with significantly less redundancy while preserving essential information. However, while DD has been extensively studied for image datasets, DD on video datasets remains underexplored. Video datasets present unique challenges due to the presence of temporal information and varying levels of redundancy across different classes. Existing DD approaches assume a uniform level of temporal redundancy across all different video semantics, which limits their effectiveness on video datasets. In this work, we propose Dynamic-Aware Video Distillation (DAViD), a Reinforcement Learning (RL) approach to predict the optimal Temporal Resolution of the synthetic videos. A teacher-in-the-loop reward function is proposed to update the RL agent policy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to introduce adaptive temporal resolution based on video semantics in video dataset distillation. Our approach significantly outperforms existing DD methods, demonstrating substantial improvements in performance. This work paves the way for future research on more efficient and semantic-adaptive video dataset distillation research.

Conversational agents that mimic people have raised questions about the ethics of anthropomorphizing machines with human social identity cues. Critics have also questioned assumptions of identity neutrality in humanlike agents. Recent work has revealed that intersectional Japanese pronouns can elicit complex and sometimes evasive impressions of agent identity. Yet, the role of other "neutral" non-pronominal self-referents (NPSR) and voice as a socially expressive medium remains unexplored. In a crowdsourcing study, Japanese participants (N = 204) evaluated three ChatGPT voices (Juniper, Breeze, and Ember) using seven self-referents. We found strong evidence of voice gendering alongside the potential of intersectional self-referents to evade gendering, i.e., ambiguity through neutrality and elusiveness. Notably, perceptions of age and formality intersected with gendering as per sociolinguistic theories, especially boku and watakushi. This work provides a nuanced take on agent identity perceptions and champions intersectional and culturally-sensitive work on voice agents.

Data inherently possesses dual attributes: samples and targets. For targets, knowledge distillation has been widely employed to accelerate model convergence, primarily relying on teacher-generated soft target supervision. Conversely, recent advancements in data-efficient learning have emphasized sample optimization techniques, such as dataset distillation, while neglected the critical role of target. This dichotomy motivates our investigation into understanding how both sample and target collectively influence training dynamic. To address this gap, we first establish a taxonomy of existing paradigms through the lens of sample-target interactions, categorizing them into distinct sample-to-target mapping strategies. Building upon this foundation, we then propose a novel unified loss framework to assess their impact on training efficiency. Through extensive empirical studies on our proposed strategies, we comprehensively analyze how variations in target and sample types, quantities, and qualities influence model training, providing six key insights to enhance training efficacy.

With the rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) in natural language processing, the ability to follow instructions has emerged as a key metric for evaluating their practical utility. However, existing evaluation methods often focus on single-language scenarios, overlooking the challenges and differences present in multilingual and cross-lingual contexts. To address this gap, we introduce MaXIFE: a comprehensive evaluation benchmark designed to assess instruction-following capabilities across 23 different languages with 1667 verifiable instruction tasks. MaXIFE integrates both Rule-Based Evaluation and Model-Based Evaluation, ensuring a balance of efficiency and accuracy. We applied MaXIFE to evaluate several leading commercial LLMs, establishing baseline results for future comparisons. By providing a standardized tool for multilingual instruction-following evaluation, MaXIFE aims to advance research and development in natural language processing.

Large language models (LLMs) often struggle to accurately read and comprehend extremely long texts. Current methods for improvement typically rely on splitting long contexts into fixed-length chunks. However, fixed truncation risks separating semantically relevant content, leading to ambiguity and compromising accurate understanding. To overcome this limitation, we propose a straightforward approach for dynamically separating and selecting chunks of long context, facilitating a more streamlined input for LLMs. In particular, we compute semantic similarities between adjacent sentences, using lower similarities to adaptively divide long contexts into variable-length chunks. We further train a question-aware classifier to select sensitive chunks that are critical for answering specific questions. Experimental results on both single-hop and multi-hop question-answering benchmarks show that the proposed approach consistently outperforms strong baselines. Notably, it maintains robustness across a wide range of input lengths, handling sequences of up to 256k tokens. Our datasets and code are available at the following link: https://github.com/ECNU-Text-Computing/DCS

Theorem proving serves as a major testbed for evaluating complex reasoning abilities in large language models (LLMs). However, traditional automated theorem proving (ATP) approaches rely heavily on formal proof systems that poorly align with LLMs' strength derived from informal, natural language knowledge acquired during pre-training. In this work, we propose DeepTheorem, a comprehensive informal theorem-proving framework exploiting natural language to enhance LLM mathematical reasoning. DeepTheorem includes a large-scale benchmark dataset consisting of 121K high-quality IMO-level informal theorems and proofs spanning diverse mathematical domains, rigorously annotated for correctness, difficulty, and topic categories, accompanied by systematically constructed verifiable theorem variants. We devise a novel reinforcement learning strategy (RL-Zero) explicitly tailored to informal theorem proving, leveraging the verified theorem variants to incentivize robust mathematical inference. Additionally, we propose comprehensive outcome and process evaluation metrics examining proof correctness and the quality of reasoning steps. Extensive experimental analyses demonstrate DeepTheorem significantly improves LLM theorem-proving performance compared to existing datasets and supervised fine-tuning protocols, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy and reasoning quality. Our findings highlight DeepTheorem's potential to fundamentally advance automated informal theorem proving and mathematical exploration.

Humanoid locomotion faces a critical scalability challenge: traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods require task-specific rewards and struggle to leverage growing datasets, even as more training terrains are introduced. We propose DreamPolicy, a unified framework that enables a single policy to master diverse terrains and generalize zero-shot to unseen scenarios by systematically integrating offline data and diffusion-driven motion synthesis. At its core, DreamPolicy introduces Humanoid Motion Imagery (HMI) - future state predictions synthesized through an autoregressive terrain-aware diffusion planner curated by aggregating rollouts from specialized policies across various distinct terrains. Unlike human motion datasets requiring laborious retargeting, our data directly captures humanoid kinematics, enabling the diffusion planner to synthesize "dreamed" trajectories that encode terrain-specific physical constraints. These trajectories act as dynamic objectives for our HMI-conditioned policy, bypassing manual reward engineering and enabling cross-terrain generalization. DreamPolicy addresses the scalability limitations of prior methods: while traditional RL fails to exploit growing datasets, our framework scales seamlessly with more offline data. As the dataset expands, the diffusion prior learns richer locomotion skills, which the policy leverages to master new terrains without retraining. Experiments demonstrate that DreamPolicy achieves average 90% success rates in training environments and an average of 20% higher success on unseen terrains than the prevalent method. It also generalizes to perturbed and composite scenarios where prior approaches collapse. By unifying offline data, diffusion-based trajectory synthesis, and policy optimization, DreamPolicy overcomes the "one task, one policy" bottleneck, establishing a paradigm for scalable, data-driven humanoid control.