Industry
Are We Asking the Right Questions? On Ambiguity in Natural Language Queries for Tabular Data Analysis
Gomm, Daniel, Wolff, Cornelius, Hulsebos, Madelon
Natural language interfaces to tabular data must handle ambiguities inherent to queries. Instead of treating ambiguity as a deficiency, we reframe it as a feature of cooperative interaction where users are intentional about the degree to which they specify queries. We develop a principled framework based on a shared responsibility of query specification between user and system, distinguishing unambiguous and ambiguous cooperative queries, which systems can resolve through reasonable inference, from uncooperative queries that cannot be resolved. Applying the framework to evaluations for tabular question answering and analysis, we analyze the queries in 15 popular datasets, and observe an uncontrolled mixing of query types neither adequate for evaluating a system's execution accuracy nor for evaluating interpretation capabilities. This conceptualization around cooperation in resolving queries informs how to design and evaluate natural language interfaces for tabular data analysis, for which we distill concrete directions for future research and broader implications.
IntelliProof: An Argumentation Network-based Conversational Helper for Organized Reflection
Miandoab, Kaveh Eskandari, Kowalyshyn, Katharine, Pamnani, Kabir, Gavhera, Anesu, Sarathy, Vasanth, Scheutz, Matthias
IntelliProof structures an essay as an argumentation graph, where claims are represented as nodes, supporting evidence is attached as node properties, and edges encode supporting or attacking relations. Unlike existing automated essay scoring systems, IntelliProof emphasizes the user experience: each relation is initially classified and scored by an LLM, then visualized for enhanced understanding. The system provides justifications for classifications and produces quantitative measures for essay coherence. It enables rapid exploration of argumentative quality while retaining human oversight. In addition, IntelliProof provides a set of tools for a better understanding of an argumentative essay and its corresponding graph in natural language, bridging the gap between the structural semantics of argumentative essays and the user's understanding of a given text.
MusRec: Zero-Shot Text-to-Music Editing via Rectified Flow and Diffusion Transformers
--Music editing has emerged as an important and practical area of artificial intelligence, with applications ranging from video game and film music production to personalizing existing tracks according to user preferences. However, existing models face significant limitations, such as being restricted to editing synthesized music generated by their own models, requiring highly precise prompts, or necessitating task-specific retraining--thus lacking true zero-shot capability. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods in preserving musical content, structural consistency, and editing fidelity, establishing a strong foundation for controllable music editing in real-world scenarios. The landscape of audio generation has shifted dramatically in recent years. Text-to-music systems now allow users to compose entire musical pieces from simple textual descriptions, powered by advances in diffusion models and transformer architectures [1]-[11]. While impressive, these systems are still primarily designed for creation from scratch . In contrast, real-world music practice often revolves around editing: refining a performance, altering instrumentation, or adapting an existing recording into a new style. For musicians, producers, and casual creators alike, the ability to reshape existing audio is often more valuable than generating entirely new material. Music editing, however, is fundamentally more difficult than generation. It requires the model to balance two competing goals: applying the requested modification faithfully, and preserving the rich details of the input recording that should remain unchanged. This trade-off is especially challenging when dealing with expressive, polyphonic, or multi-instrumental recordings. Existing research has attempted to address editing through supervised datasets of paired "before" and "after" examples [12]-[14], or through zero-shot latent manipulations in diffusion models [15]-[17]. Y et most methods remain restricted by their limitation to specific editing tasks, operate mainly on model-generated music rather than arbitrary recordings, and often require very precise prompts to succeed [15], [17].
Chronic Kidney Disease Prognosis Prediction Using Transformer
Lee, Yohan, Kang, DongGyun, Park, SeHoon, Park, Sa-Yoon, Kim, Kwangsoo
Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) affects nearly 10\% of the global population and often progresses to end-stage renal failure. Accurate prognosis prediction is vital for timely interventions and resource optimization. We present a transformer-based framework for predicting CKD progression using multi-modal electronic health records (EHR) from the Seoul National University Hospital OMOP Common Data Model. Our approach (\textbf{ProQ-BERT}) integrates demographic, clinical, and laboratory data, employing quantization-based tokenization for continuous lab values and attention mechanisms for interpretability. The model was pretrained with masked language modeling and fine-tuned for binary classification tasks predicting progression from stage 3a to stage 5 across varying follow-up and assessment periods. Evaluated on a cohort of 91,816 patients, our model consistently outperformed CEHR-BERT, achieving ROC-AUC up to 0.995 and PR-AUC up to 0.989 for short-term prediction. These results highlight the effectiveness of transformer architectures and temporal design choices in clinical prognosis modeling, offering a promising direction for personalized CKD care.
DRIP: Defending Prompt Injection via Token-wise Representation Editing and Residual Instruction Fusion
Liu, Ruofan, Lin, Yun, Huang, Zhiyong, Dong, Jin Song
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into IT infrastructures, where they process user data according to predefined instructions. However, conventional LLMs remain vulnerable to prompt injection, where malicious users inject directive tokens into the data to subvert model behavior. Existing defenses train LLMs to semantically separate data and instruction tokens, but still struggle to (1) balance utility and security and (2) prevent instruction-like semantics in the data from overriding the intended instructions. We propose DRIP, which (1) precisely removes instruction semantics from tokens in the data section while preserving their data semantics, and (2) robustly preserves the effect of the intended instruction even under strong adversarial content. To "de-instructionalize" data tokens, DRIP introduces a data curation and training paradigm with a lightweight representation-editing module that edits embeddings of instruction-like tokens in the data section, enhancing security without harming utility. To ensure non-overwritability of instructions, DRIP adds a minimal residual module that reduces the ability of adversarial data to overwrite the original instruction. We evaluate DRIP on LLaMA 8B and Mistral 7B against StruQ, SecAlign, ISE, and PFT on three prompt-injection benchmarks (SEP, AlpacaFarm, and InjecAgent). DRIP improves role-separation score by 12-49\%, reduces attack success rate by over 66\% under adaptive attacks, and matches the utility of the undefended model, establishing a new state of the art for prompt-injection robustness.
ReLaX-Net: Reusing Layers for Parameter-Efficient Physical Neural Networks
Tsuchiyama, Kohei, Roehm, Andre, Mihana, Takatomo, Horisaki, Ryoichi
Physical Neural Networks (PNN) are promising platforms for next-generation computing systems. However, recent advances in digital neural network performance are largely driven by the rapid growth in the number of trainable parameters and, so far, demonstrated PNNs are lagging behind by several orders of magnitude in terms of scale. This mirrors size and performance constraints found in early digital neural networks. In that period, efficient reuse of parameters contributed to the development of parameter-efficient architectures such as convolutional neural networks. In this work, we numerically investigate hardware-friendly weight-tying for PNNs. Crucially, with many PNN systems, there is a time-scale separation between the fast dynamic active elements of the forward pass and the only slowly trainable elements implementing weights and biases. With this in mind,we propose the Reuse of Layers for eXpanding a Neural Network (ReLaX-Net) architecture, which employs a simple layer-by-layer time-multiplexing scheme to increase the effective network depth and efficiently use the number of parameters. We only require the addition of fast switches for existing PNNs. We validate ReLaX-Nets via numerical experiments on image classification and natural language processing tasks. Our results show that ReLaX-Net improves computational performance with only minor modifications to a conventional PNN. We observe a favorable scaling, where ReLaX-Nets exceed the performance of equivalent traditional RNNs or DNNs with the same number of parameters.
Physics-Informed Neural Network Frameworks for the Analysis of Engineering and Biological Dynamical Systems Governed by Ordinary Differential Equations
Whitman, Tyrus, Particka, Andrew, Diers, Christopher, Griffin, Ian, Wickramasinghe, Charuka, Ranaweera, Pradeep
In this study, we present and validate the predictive capability of the Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) methodology for solving a variety of engineering and biological dynamical systems governed by ordinary differential equations (ODEs). While traditional numerical methods a re effective for many ODEs, they often struggle to achieve convergence in problems involving high stiffness, shocks, irregular domains, singular perturbations, high dimensions, or boundary discontinuities. Alternatively, PINNs offer a powerful approach for handling challenging numerical scenarios. In this study, classical ODE problems are employed as controlled testbeds to systematically evaluate the accuracy, training efficiency, and generalization capability under controlled conditions of the PINNs framework. Although not a universal solution, PINNs can achieve superior results by embedding physical laws directly into the learning process. We first analyze the existence and uniqueness properties of several benchmark problems and subsequently validate the PINNs methodology on these model systems. Our results demonstrate that for complex problems to converge to correct solutions, the loss function components data loss, initial condition loss, and residual loss must be appropriately balanced through careful weighting. We further establish that systematic tuning of hyperparameters, including network depth, layer width, activation functions, learning rate, optimization algorithms, w eight initialization schemes, and collocation point sampling, plays a crucial role in achieving accurate solutions. Additionally, embedding prior knowledge and imposing hard constraints on the network architecture, without loss the generality of the ODE system, significantly enhances the predictive capability of PINNs.
Discovering EV Charging Site Archetypes Through Few Shot Forecasting: The First U.S.-Wide Study
Nikhal, Kshitij, Ackerknecht, Lucas, Riggan, Benjamin S., Stahlfeld, Phillip
The decarbonization of transportation relies on the widespread adoption of electric vehicles (EVs), which requires an accurate understanding of charging behavior to ensure cost-effective, grid-resilient infrastructure. Existing work is constrained by small-scale datasets, simple proximity-based modeling of temporal dependencies, and weak generalization to sites with limited operational history. To overcome these limitations, this work proposes a framework that integrates clustering with few-shot forecasting to uncover site archetypes using a novel large-scale dataset of charging demand. The results demonstrate that archetype-specific expert models outperform global baselines in forecasting demand at unseen sites. By establishing forecast performance as a basis for infrastructure segmentation, we generate actionable insights that enable operators to lower costs, optimize energy and pricing strategies, and support grid resilience critical to climate goals.
Scaling Latent Reasoning via Looped Language Models
Zhu, Rui-Jie, Wang, Zixuan, Hua, Kai, Zhang, Tianyu, Li, Ziniu, Que, Haoran, Wei, Boyi, Wen, Zixin, Yin, Fan, Xing, He, Li, Lu, Shi, Jiajun, Ma, Kaijing, Li, Shanda, Kergan, Taylor, Smith, Andrew, Qu, Xingwei, Hui, Mude, Wu, Bohong, Min, Qiyang, Huang, Hongzhi, Zhou, Xun, Ye, Wei, Liu, Jiaheng, Yang, Jian, Shi, Yunfeng, Lin, Chenghua, Zhao, Enduo, Cai, Tianle, Zhang, Ge, Huang, Wenhao, Bengio, Yoshua, Eshraghian, Jason
Modern LLMs are trained to "think" primarily via explicit text generation, such as chain-of-thought (CoT), which defers reasoning to post-training and under-leverages pre-training data. We present and open-source Ouro, named after the recursive Ouroboros, a family of pre-trained Looped Language Models (LoopLM) that instead build reasoning into the pre-training phase through (i) iterative computation in latent space, (ii) an entropy-regularized objective for learned depth allocation, and (iii) scaling to 7.7T tokens. Ouro 1.4B and 2.6B models enjoy superior performance that match the results of up to 12B SOTA LLMs across a wide range of benchmarks. Through controlled experiments, we show this advantage stems not from increased knowledge capacity, but from superior knowledge manipulation capabilities. We also show that LoopLM yields reasoning traces more aligned with final outputs than explicit CoT. We hope our results show the potential of LoopLM as a novel scaling direction in the reasoning era. Our model is available here: http://ouro-llm.github.io.
MMEdge: Accelerating On-device Multimodal Inference via Pipelined Sensing and Encoding
Huang, Runxi, Yu, Mingxuan, Tsoi, Mingyu, Ouyang, Xiaomin
Real-time multimodal inference on resource-constrained edge devices is essential for applications such as autonomous driving, human-computer interaction, and mobile health. However, prior work often overlooks the tight coupling between sensing dynamics and model execution, as well as the complex inter-modality dependencies. In this paper, we propose MMEdge, an new on-device multi-modal inference framework based on pipelined sensing and encoding. Instead of waiting for complete sensor inputs, MMEdge decomposes the entire inference process into a sequence of fine-grained sensing and encoding units, allowing computation to proceed incrementally as data arrive. MMEdge also introduces a lightweight but effective temporal aggregation module that captures rich temporal dynamics across different pipelined units to maintain accuracy performance. Such pipelined design also opens up opportunities for fine-grained cross-modal optimization and early decision-making during inference. To further enhance system performance under resource variability and input data complexity, MMEdge incorporates an adaptive multimodal configuration optimizer that dynamically selects optimal sensing and model configurations for each modality under latency constraints, and a cross-modal speculative skipping mechanism that bypasses future units of slower modalities when early predictions reach sufficient confidence. We evaluate MMEdge using two public multimodal datasets and deploy it on a real-world unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based multimodal testbed. The results show that MMEdge significantly reduces end-to-end latency while maintaining high task accuracy across various system and data dynamics.