Applying LLMs to predictive tasks in finance is challenging due to look-ahead bias resulting from their training on long time-series data. This precludes the backtests typically employed in finance since retraining frontier models from scratch with a specific knowledge cutoff is prohibitive. In this paper, we introduce a fast, effective, and low-cost alternative. Our method guides generation at inference time by adjusting the logits of a large base model using a pair of smaller, specialized models -- one fine-tuned on information to be forgotten and another on information to be retained. We demonstrate that our method effectively removes both verbatim and semantic knowledge, corrects biases, and outperforms prior methods.

Automated negotiation has emerged as a critical area of research in multiagent systems, with applications spanning e-commerce, resource allocation, and autonomous decision-making. This paper presents ChargingBoul, a negotiating agent that competed in the 2022 Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC) and placed second in individual utility by an exceptionally narrow margin. ChargingBoul employs a lightweight yet effective strategy that balances concession and opponent modeling to achieve high negotiation outcomes. The agent classifies opponents based on bid patterns, dynamically adjusts its bidding strategy, and applies a concession policy in later negotiation stages to maximize utility while fostering agreements. We evaluate ChargingBoul's performance using competition results and subsequent studies that have utilized the agent in negotiation research. Our analysis highlights ChargingBoul's effectiveness across diverse opponent strategies and its contributions to advancing automated negotiation techniques. We also discuss potential enhancements, including more sophisticated opponent modeling and adaptive bidding heuristics, to improve its performance further.

Accurate prediction of protein-protein binding affinity is vital for understanding molecular interactions and designing therapeutics. We adapt Boltz-2, a state-of-the-art structure-based protein-ligand affinity predictor, for protein-protein affinity regression and evaluate it on two datasets, TCR3d and PPB-affinity. Despite high structural accuracy, Boltz-2-PPI underperforms relative to sequence-based alternatives in both small- and larger-scale data regimes. Combining embeddings from Boltz-2-PPI with sequence-based embeddings yields complementary improvements, particularly for weaker sequence models, suggesting different signals are learned by sequence- and structure-based models. Our results echo known biases associated with training with structural data and suggest that current structure-based representations are not primed for performant affinity prediction.

Explainable AI (XAI) presents useful tools to facilitate transparency and trustworthiness in machine learning systems. However, current evaluations of system explainability often rely heavily on subjective user surveys, which may not adequately capture the effectiveness of explanations. This paper critiques the overreliance on user satisfaction metrics and explores whether these can differentiate between meaningful (actionable) and vacuous (placebic) explanations. In experiments involving optimal Social Security filing age selection tasks, participants used one of three protocols: no explanations, placebic explanations, and actionable explanations. Participants who received actionable explanations significantly outperformed the other groups in objective measures of their mental model, but users rated placebic and actionable explanations as equally satisfying. This suggests that subjective surveys alone fail to capture whether explanations truly support users in building useful domain understanding. We propose that future evaluations of agent explanation capabilities should integrate objective task performance metrics alongside subjective assessments to more accurately measure explanation quality.

Recommender Systems (RSs) have become the cornerstone of various applications such as e-commerce and social media platforms. The evolution of RSs is paramount in the digital era, in which personalised user experience is tailored to the user's preferences. Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked a new paradigm - generative retrieval and recommendation. Despite their potential, generative RS methods face issues such as hallucination, which degrades the recommendation performance, and high computational cost in practical scenarios. To address these issues, we introduce HGLMRec, a novel Multi-LLM agent-based RS that incorporates a hypergraph encoder designed to capture complex, multi-behaviour relationships between users and items. The HGLMRec model retrieves only the relevant tokens during inference, reducing computational overhead while enriching the retrieval context. Experimental results show performance improvement by HGLMRec against state-of-the-art baselines at lower computational cost.

We present a resilient deep neural network (DNN) framework for decentralized transport and coverage using uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) operating in $\mathbb{R}^n$. The proposed DNN-based mass-transport architecture constructs a layered inter-UAS communication graph from an initial formation, assigns time-varying communication weights through a forward scheduling mechanism that guides the team from the initial to the final configuration, and ensures stability and convergence of the resulting multi-agent transport dynamics. The framework is explicitly designed to remain robust in the presence of uncooperative agents that deviate from or refuse to follow the prescribed protocol. Our method preserves a fixed feed-forward topology but dynamically prunes edges to uncooperative agents, maintains convex, feedforward mentoring among cooperative agents, and computes global desired set points through a sparse linear relation consistent with leader references. The target set is abstracted by $N$ points that become final desired positions, enabling coverage-optimal transport while keeping computation low and guarantees intact. Extensive simulations demonstrate that, under full cooperation, all agents converge rapidly to the target zone with a 10\% boundary margin and under partial cooperation with uncooperative agents, the system maintains high convergence among cooperative agents with performance degradation localized near the disruptions, evidencing graceful resilience and scalability. These results confirm that forward-weight scheduling, hierarchical mentor--mentee coordination, and on-the-fly DNN restructuring yield robust, provably stable UAS transport in realistic fault scenarios.

This study presents a validation and extension of a recent methodological framework for medical image classification. While an improved ConvNeXt Tiny architecture, integrating Global Average and Max Pooling fusion (GAGM), lightweight channel attention (SEVector), and Feature Smoothing Loss (FSL), demonstrated promising results on Alzheimer MRI under CPU friendly conditions, our work investigates its transposability to mammography classification. Using a Kaggle dataset that consolidates INbreast, MIAS, and DDSM mammography collections, we compare a baseline CNN, ConvNeXt Tiny, and InceptionV3 backbones enriched with GAGM and SEVector modules. Results confirm the effectiveness of GAGM and SEVector in enhancing feature discriminability and reducing false negatives, particularly for malignant cases. In our experiments, however, the Feature Smoothing Loss did not yield measurable improvements under mammography classification conditions, suggesting that its effectiveness may depend on specific architectural and computational assumptions. Beyond validation, our contribution extends the original framework through multi metric evaluation (macro F1, per class recall variance, ROC/AUC), feature interpretability analysis (Grad CAM), and the development of an interactive dashboard for clinical exploration. As a perspective, we highlight the need to explore alternative approaches to improve intra class compactness and inter class separability, with the specific goal of enhancing the distinction between malignant and benign cases in mammography classification.

As multi-agent systems are increasingly utilized for reasoning and decision-making applications, there is a greater need for LLM-based agents to have something resembling propositional beliefs. One simple method for doing so is to include statements describing beliefs maintained in the prompt space (in what we'll call their belief boxes). But when agents have such statements in belief boxes, how does it actually affect their behaviors and dispositions towards those beliefs? And does it significantly affect agents' ability to be persuasive in multi-agent scenarios? Likewise, if the agents are given instructions to be open-minded, how does that affect their behaviors? We explore these and related questions in a series of experiments. Our findings confirm that instructing agents to be open-minded affects how amenable they are to belief change. We show that incorporating belief statements and their strengths influences an agent's resistance to (and persuasiveness against) opposing viewpoints. Furthermore, it affects the likelihood of belief change, particularly when the agent is outnumbered in a debate by opposing viewpoints, i.e., peer pressure scenarios. The results demonstrate the feasibility and validity of the belief box technique in reasoning and decision-making tasks.

Recent advances in 3D-aware generative models have enabled high-fidelity image synthesis of human identities. However, this progress raises urgent questions around user consent and the ability to remove specific individuals from a model's output space. W e address this by introducing SUGAR, a framework for scalable generative unlearning that enables the removal of many identities (simultaneously or sequentially) without retraining the entire model. Rather than projecting unwanted identities to unrealistic outputs or relying on static template faces, SUGAR learns a personalized surrogate latent for each identity, diverting reconstructions to visually coherent alternatives while preserving the model's quality and diversity. W e further introduce a continual utility preservation objective that guards against degradation as more identities are forgotten. SUGAR achieves state-of-the-art performance in removing up to 200 identities, while delivering up to a 700% improvement in retention utility compared to existing baselines.

As robots enter human workspaces, there is a crucial need for them to comprehend embodied human instructions, enabling intuitive and fluent human-robot interaction (HRI). However, accurate comprehension is challenging due to a lack of large-scale datasets that capture natural embodied interactions in diverse HRI settings. Existing datasets suffer from perspective bias, single-view collection, inadequate coverage of nonverbal gestures, and a predominant focus on indoor environments. To address these issues, we present the Refer360 dataset, a large-scale dataset of embodied verbal and nonverbal interactions collected across diverse viewpoints in both indoor and outdoor settings. Additionally, we introduce MuRes, a multimodal guided residual module designed to improve embodied referring expression comprehension. MuRes acts as an information bottleneck, extracting salient modality-specific signals and reinforcing them into pre-trained representations to form complementary features for downstream tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on four HRI datasets, including the Refer360 dataset, and demonstrate that current multimodal models fail to capture embodied interactions comprehensively; however, augmenting them with MuRes consistently improves performance. These findings establish Refer360 as a valuable benchmark and exhibit the potential of guided residual learning to advance embodied referring expression comprehension in robots operating within human environments.