Large language models (LLMs) are predominantly used as evaluators for natural language generation (NLG) tasks, but their application to broader evaluation scenarios remains limited. In this work, we explore the potential of LLMs as general evaluators across diverse tasks. Although LLM-based evaluators have made progress in different areas, existing methods struggle to generalize due to their reliance on costly, human-designed evaluation principles, which are often misaligned with both annotated data and LLMs' understanding.To address these challenges, we propose a rule-augmented evaluation paradigm. First, we introduce a rule distillation method that automatically extracts scoring rules from data using an LLM-assisted Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), alleviating scalability issues and improving alignment with data. Second, to enable LLMs to effectively apply the learned rules, we propose two strategies: (1) Chain-of-Rule (CoR), which guides LLM to follow distilled rules, and (2) training a rule-augmented LLM evaluator (RuAE) via reinforcement learning, further bridging the gap between rules and LLMs' reasoning. Extensive experiments on diverse tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of our approach across various evaluation scenarios.

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has sparked a surge of interest in agents, leading to the rapid growth of agent frameworks. Agent frameworks are software toolkits and libraries that provide standardized components, abstractions, and orchestration mechanisms to simplify agent development. Despite widespread use of agent frameworks, their practical applications and how they influence the agent development process remain underexplored. Different agent frameworks encounter similar problems during use, indicating that these recurring issues deserve greater attention and call for further improvements in agent framework design. Meanwhile, as the number of agent frameworks continues to grow and evolve, more than 80% of developers report difficulties in identifying the frameworks that best meet their specific development requirements. In this paper, we conduct the first empirical study of LLM-based agent frameworks, exploring real-world experiences of developers in building AI agents. To compare how well the agent frameworks meet developer needs, we further collect developer discussions for the ten previously identified agent frameworks, resulting in a total of 11,910 discussions. Finally, by analyzing these discussions, we compare the frameworks across five dimensions: development efficiency, functional abstraction, learning cost, performance optimization, and maintainability, which refers to how easily developers can update and extend both the framework itself and the agents built upon it over time. Our comparative analysis reveals significant differences among frameworks in how they meet the needs of agent developers. Overall, we provide a set of findings and implications for the LLM-driven AI agent framework ecosystem and offer insights for the design of future LLM-based agent frameworks and agent developers.

Robots in uncertain real-world environments must perform both goal-directed and exploratory actions. However, most deep learning-based control methods neglect exploration and struggle under uncertainty. To address this, we adopt deep active inference, a framework that accounts for human goal-directed and exploratory actions. Yet, conventional deep active inference approaches face challenges due to limited environmental representation capacity and high computational cost in action selection. We propose a novel deep active inference framework that consists of a world model, an action model, and an abstract world model. The world model encodes environmental dynamics into hidden state representations at slow and fast timescales. The action model compresses action sequences into abstract actions using vector quantization, and the abstract world model predicts future slow states conditioned on the abstract action, enabling low-cost action selection. We evaluate the framework on object-manipulation tasks with a real-world robot. Results show that it achieves high success rates across diverse manipulation tasks and switches between goal-directed and exploratory actions in uncertain settings, while making action selection computationally tractable. These findings highlight the importance of modeling multiple timescale dynamics and abstracting actions and state transitions.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are biologically inspired, event-driven models that are suitable for processing temporal data and offer energy-efficient computation when implemented on neuromorphic hardware. In SNNs, richer neuronal dynamic allows capturing more complex temporal dependencies, with delays playing a crucial role by allowing past inputs to directly influence present spiking behavior. We propose a general framework for incorporating delays into SNNs through additional state variables. The proposed mechanism enables each neuron to access a finite temporal input history. The framework is agnostic to neuron models and hence can be seamlessly integrated into standard spiking neuron models such as LIF and adLIF. We analyze how the duration of the delays and the learnable parameters associated with them affect the performance. We investigate the trade-offs in the network architecture due to additional state variables introduced by the delay mechanism. Experiments on the Spiking Heidelberg Digits (SHD) dataset show that the proposed mechanism matches the performance of existing delay-based SNNs while remaining computationally efficient. Moreover, the results illustrate that the incorporation of delays may substantially improve performance in smaller networks.

Online Public Opinion Reports consolidate news and social media for timely crisis management by governments and enterprises. While large language models have made automated report generation technically feasible, systematic research in this specific area remains notably absent, particularly lacking formal task definitions and corresponding benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we define the Automated Online Public Opinion Report Generation (OPOR-GEN) task and construct OPOR-BENCH, an event-centric dataset covering 463 crisis events with their corresponding news articles, social media posts, and a reference summary. To evaluate report quality, we propose OPOR-EVAL, a novel agent-based framework that simulates human expert evaluation by analyzing generated reports in context. Experiments with frontier models demonstrate that our framework achieves high correlation with human judgments. Our comprehensive task definition, benchmark dataset, and evaluation framework provide a solid foundation for future research in this critical domain.

With the rapid uptake of generative AI, investigating human perceptions of generated responses has become crucial. A major challenge is their `aptitude' for hallucinating and generating harmful contents. Despite major efforts for implementing guardrails, human perceptions of these mitigation strategies are largely unknown. We conducted a mixed-method experiment for evaluating the responses of a mitigation strategy across multiple-dimensions: faithfulness, fairness, harm-removal capacity, and relevance. In a within-subject study design, 57 participants assessed the responses under two conditions: harmful response plus its mitigation and solely mitigated response. Results revealed that participants' native language, AI work experience, and annotation familiarity significantly influenced evaluations. Participants showed high sensitivity to linguistic and contextual attributes, penalizing minor grammar errors while rewarding preserved semantic contexts. This contrasts with how language is often treated in the quantitative evaluation of LLMs. We also introduced new metrics for training and evaluating mitigation strategies and insights for human-AI evaluation studies.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) require continual updates as new information emerges, but neural embedding models suffer from catastrophic forgetting when learning new tasks sequentially. We evaluate Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC), a regularization-based continual learning method, on KG link prediction using TransE embeddings on FB15k-237. Across multiple experiments with five random seeds, we find that EWC reduces catastrophic forgetting from 12.62% to 6.85%, a 45.7% reduction compared to naive sequential training. We observe that the task partitioning strategy affects the magnitude of forgetting: relation-based partitioning (grouping triples by relation type) exhibits 9.8 percentage points higher forgetting than randomly partitioned tasks (12.62% vs 2.81%), suggesting that task construction influences evaluation outcomes. While focused on a single embedding model and dataset, our results demonstrate that EWC effectively mitigates catastrophic forgetting in KG continual learning and highlight the importance of evaluation protocol design.

Accurate yet efficient surrogate models are essential for large-scale simulations of partial differential equations (PDEs), particularly for uncertainty quantification (UQ) tasks that demand hundreds or thousands of evaluations. We develop a physics-inspired graph neural network (GNN) surrogate that operates directly on unstructured meshes and leverages the flexibility of graph attention. To improve both training efficiency and generalization properties of the model, we introduce a domain decomposition (DD) strategy that partitions the mesh into subdomains, trains local GNN surrogates in parallel, and aggregates their predictions. We then employ transfer learning to fine-tune models across subdomains, accelerating training and improving accuracy in data-limited settings. Applied to ice sheet simulations, our approach accurately predicts full-field velocities on high-resolution meshes, substantially reduces training time relative to training a single global surrogate model, and provides a ripe foundation for UQ objectives. Our results demonstrate that graph-based DD, combined with transfer learning, provides a scalable and reliable pathway for training GNN surrogates on massive PDE-governed systems, with broad potential for application beyond ice sheet dynamics.

This work proposes an end-to-end multi-modal reinforcement learning framework for high-level decision-making in autonomous vehicles. The framework integrates heterogeneous sensory input, including camera images, LiDAR point clouds, and vehicle heading information, through a cross-attention transformer-based perception module. Although transformers have become the backbone of modern multi-modal architectures, their high computational cost limits their deployment in resource-constrained edge environments. To overcome this challenge, we propose a spiking temporal-aware transformer-like architecture that uses ternary spiking neurons for computationally efficient multi-modal fusion. Comprehensive evaluations across multiple tasks in the Highway Environment demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach for real-time autonomous decision-making.

Chess, a deterministic game with perfect information, has long served as a benchmark for studying strategic decision-making and artificial intelligence. Traditional chess engines or tools for analysis primarily focus on calculating optimal moves, often neglecting the variability inherent in human chess playing, particularly across different skill levels. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel and computationally efficient move prediction framework that approaches chess move prediction as a behavioral analysis task. The framework employs n-gram language models to capture move patterns characteristic of specific player skill levels. By dividing players into seven distinct skill groups, from novice to expert, we trained separate models using data from the open-source chess platform Lichess. The framework dynamically selects the most suitable model for prediction tasks and generates player moves based on preceding sequences. Evaluation on real-world game data demonstrates that the model selector module within the framework can classify skill levels with an accuracy of up to 31.7\% when utilizing early game information (16 half-moves). The move prediction framework also shows substantial accuracy improvements, with our Selector Assisted Accuracy being up to 39.1\% more accurate than our benchmark accuracy. The computational efficiency of the framework further enhances its suitability for real-time chess analysis.