Dynamical systems theory provides a framework for analyzing iterative processes and evolution over time. Within such systems, repetitive transformations can lead to stable configurations, known as attractors, including fixed points and limit cycles. Applying this perspective to large language models (LLMs), which iteratively map input text to output text, provides a principled approach to characterizing long-term behaviors. Successive paraphrasing serves as a compelling testbed for exploring such dynamics, as paraphrases re-express the same underlying meaning with linguistic variation. Although LLMs are expected to explore a diverse set of paraphrases in the text space, our study reveals that successive paraphrasing converges to stable periodic states, such as 2-period attractor cycles, limiting linguistic diversity. This phenomenon is attributed to the self-reinforcing nature of LLMs, as they iteratively favour and amplify certain textual forms over others. This pattern persists with increasing generation randomness or alternating prompts and LLMs. These findings underscore inherent constraints in LLM generative capability, while offering a novel dynamical systems perspective for studying their expressive potential.

Style embeddings are useful for stylistic analysis and style transfer; however, only English style embeddings have been made available. We introduce Multilingual StyleDistance (mStyleDistance), a multilingual style embedding model trained using synthetic data and contrastive learning. We train the model on data from nine languages and create a multilingual STEL-or-Content benchmark (Wegmann et al., 2022) that serves to assess the embeddings' quality. We also employ our embeddings in an authorship verification task involving different languages. Our results show that mStyleDistance embeddings outperform existing models on these multilingual style benchmarks and generalize well to unseen features and languages. We make our model publicly available at https://huggingface.co/StyleDistance/mstyledistance .

In recent years, widespread internet adoption and the growth in userbase of various social media platforms have led to an increase in the proliferation of extreme speech online. While traditional language models have demonstrated proficiency in distinguishing between neutral text and non-neutral text (i.e. extreme speech), categorizing the diverse types of extreme speech presents significant challenges. The task of extreme speech classification is particularly nuanced, as it requires a deep understanding of socio-cultural contexts to accurately interpret the intent of the language used by the speaker. Even human annotators often disagree on the appropriate classification of such content, emphasizing the complex and subjective nature of this task. The use of human moderators also presents a scaling issue, necessitating the need for automated systems for extreme speech classification. The recent launch of ChatGPT has drawn global attention to the potential applications of Large Language Models (LLMs) across a diverse variety of tasks. Trained on vast and diverse corpora, and demonstrating the ability to effectively capture and encode contextual information, LLMs emerge as highly promising tools for tackling this specific task of extreme speech classification. In this paper, we leverage the Indian subset of the extreme speech dataset from Maronikolakis et al. (2022) to develop an effective classification framework using LLMs. We evaluate open-source Llama models against closed-source OpenAI models, finding that while pre-trained LLMs show moderate efficacy, fine-tuning with domain-specific data significantly enhances performance, highlighting their adaptability to linguistic and contextual nuances. Although GPT-based models outperform Llama models in zero-shot settings, the performance gap disappears after fine-tuning.

Instruction-following LLMs have recently allowed systems to discover hidden concepts from a collection of unstructured documents based on a natural language description of the purpose of the discovery (i.e., goal). Still, the quality of the discovered concepts remains mixed, as it depends heavily on LLM's reasoning ability and drops when the data is noisy or beyond LLM's knowledge. We present Instruct-LF, a goal-oriented latent factor discovery system that integrates LLM's instruction-following ability with statistical models to handle large, noisy datasets where LLM reasoning alone falls short. Instruct-LF uses LLMs to propose fine-grained, goal-related properties from documents, estimates their presence across the dataset, and applies gradient-based optimization to uncover hidden factors, where each factor is represented by a cluster of co-occurring properties. We evaluate latent factors produced by Instruct-LF on movie recommendation, text-world navigation, and legal document categorization tasks. These interpretable representations improve downstream task performance by 5-52% than the best baselines and were preferred 1.8 times as often as the best alternative, on average, in human evaluation.

Ensuring safety in autonomous driving systems remains a critical challenge, particularly in handling rare but potentially catastrophic safety-critical scenarios. While existing research has explored generating safety-critical scenarios for autonomous vehicle (AV) testing, there is limited work on effectively incorporating these scenarios into policy learning to enhance safety. Furthermore, developing training curricula that adapt to an AV's evolving behavioral patterns and performance bottlenecks remains largely unexplored. To address these challenges, we propose CurricuVLM, a novel framework that leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to enable personalized curriculum learning for autonomous driving agents. Our approach uniquely exploits VLMs' multimodal understanding capabilities to analyze agent behavior, identify performance weaknesses, and dynamically generate tailored training scenarios for curriculum adaptation. Through comprehensive analysis of unsafe driving situations with narrative descriptions, CurricuVLM performs in-depth reasoning to evaluate the AV's capabilities and identify critical behavioral patterns. The framework then synthesizes customized training scenarios targeting these identified limitations, enabling effective and personalized curriculum learning. Extensive experiments on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset show that CurricuVLM outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across both regular and safety-critical scenarios, achieving superior performance in terms of navigation success, driving efficiency, and safety metrics. Further analysis reveals that CurricuVLM serves as a general approach that can be integrated with various RL algorithms to enhance autonomous driving systems. The code and demo video are available at: https://zihaosheng.github.io/CurricuVLM/.

Adversarial attacks in deep learning represent a significant threat to the integrity and reliability of machine learning models. Adversarial training has been a popular defence technique against these adversarial attacks. In this work, we capitalize on a network architecture, namely Deep Linearly Gated Networks (DLGN), which has better interpretation capabilities than regular deep network architectures. Using this architecture, we interpret robust models trained using PGD adversarial training and compare them with standard training. Feature networks in DLGN act as feature extractors, making them the only medium through which an adversary can attack the model. We analyze the feature network of DLGN with fully connected layers with respect to properties like alignment of the hyperplanes, hyperplane relation with PCA, and sub-network overlap among classes and compare these properties between robust and standard models. We also consider this architecture having CNN layers wherein we qualitatively (using visualizations) and quantitatively contrast gating patterns between robust and standard models. We uncover insights into hyperplanes resembling principal components in PGD-AT and STD-TR models, with PGD-AT hyperplanes aligned farther from the data points. We use path activity analysis to show that PGD-AT models create diverse, non-overlapping active subnetworks across classes, preventing attack-induced gating overlaps. Our visualization ideas show the nature of representations learnt by PGD-AT and STD-TR models.

Measuring the accuracy of face recognition (FR) systems is essential for improving performance and ensuring responsible use. Accuracy is typically estimated using large annotated datasets, which are costly and difficult to obtain. We propose a novel method for 1:1 face verification that benchmarks FR systems quickly and without manual annotation, starting from approximate labels (e.g., from web search results). Unlike previous methods for training set label cleaning, ours leverages the embedding representation of the models being evaluated, achieving high accuracy in smaller-sized test datasets. Our approach reliably estimates FR accuracy and ranking, significantly reducing the time and cost of manual labeling. We also introduce the first public benchmark of five FR cloud services, revealing demographic biases, particularly lower accuracy for Asian women. Our rapid test method can democratize FR testing, promoting scrutiny and responsible use of the technology.

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly expanded the attack surface for AI-driven cybersecurity threats, necessitating adaptive defense strategies. This paper introduces CyberSentinel, a unified, single-agent system for emergent threat detection, designed to identify and mitigate novel security risks in real time. CyberSentinel integrates: (1) Brute-force attack detection through SSH log analysis, (2) Phishing threat assessment using domain blacklists and heuristic URL scoring, and (3) Emergent threat detection via machine learning-based anomaly detection. By continuously adapting to evolving adversarial tactics, CyberSentinel strengthens proactive cybersecurity defense, addressing critical vulnerabilities in AI security.

In order to make a pinpoint landing on the Moon, the spacecraft's navigation system must be accurate. To achieve the desired accuracy, navigational drift caused by the inertial sensors must be corrected. One way to correct this drift is to use absolute navigation solutions. In this study, a terrain absolute navigation method to estimate the spacecraft's position and attitude is proposed. This algorithm uses the position of the craters below the spacecraft for estimation. Craters seen by the camera onboard the spacecraft are detected and identified using a crater database known beforehand. In order to focus on estimation algorithms, image processing and crater matching steps are skipped. The accuracy of the algorithm and the effect of the crater number used for estimation are inspected by performing simulations.

Given inputs of diverse soil characteristics, and climate data gathered from various regions, we aimed to build a model to predict accurate land emissions. The problem is important since accurate quantification of the carbon cycle in agroecosystems is crucial for mitigating climate change and ensuring sustainable food production. Predicting accurate land emissions is challenging due to since calibrating heterogeneous nature of soil properties, moisture, and environmental conditions is hard at decision-relevant scales. Traditional approaches do not adequately estimate land emissions due to location-independent parameters failing to leverage the spatial heterogeneity and also require large datasets. To overcome these limitations, we proposed Spatial Distribution-Shift A ware Knowledge-Guided Machine Learning (SDSA-KGML) which leverage location-dependent parameters which accounts significant spatial heterogeneity in soil moisture from multiple sites within the same region. Experimental results demonstrate that SDSA-KGML models achieve higher local accuracy for the specified states in the Midwest Region.