Industry
AIM: Software and Hardware Co-design for Architecture-level IR-drop Mitigation in High-performance PIM
Zhang, Yuanpeng, Hu, Xing, Chen, Xi, Yuan, Zhihang, Li, Cong, Zhu, Jingchen, Wang, Zhao, Zhang, Chenguang, Si, Xin, Gao, Wei, Wu, Qiang, Wang, Runsheng, Sun, Guangyu
SRAM Processing-in-Memory (PIM) has emerged as the most promising implementation for high-performance PIM, delivering superior computing density, energy efficiency, and computational precision. However, the pursuit of higher performance necessitates more complex circuit designs and increased operating frequencies, which exacerbate IR-drop issues. Severe IR-drop can significantly degrade chip performance and even threaten reliability. Conventional circuit-level IR-drop mitigation methods, such as back-end optimizations, are resource-intensive and often compromise power, performance, and area (PPA). To address these challenges, we propose AIM, comprehensive software and hardware co-design for architecture-level IR-drop mitigation in high-performance PIM. Initially, leveraging the bit-serial and in-situ dataflow processing properties of PIM, we introduce Rtog and HR, which establish a direct correlation between PIM workloads and IR-drop. Building on this foundation, we propose LHR and WDS, enabling extensive exploration of architecture-level IR-drop mitigation while maintaining computational accuracy through software optimization. Subsequently, we develop IR-Booster, a dynamic adjustment mechanism that integrates software-level HR information with hardware-based IR-drop monitoring to adapt the V-f pairs of the PIM macro, achieving enhanced energy efficiency and performance. Finally, we propose the HR-aware task mapping method, bridging software and hardware designs to achieve optimal improvement. Post-layout simulation results on a 7nm 256-TOPS PIM chip demonstrate that AIM achieves up to 69.2% IR-drop mitigation, resulting in 2.29x energy efficiency improvement and 1.152x speedup.
AdversariaLLM: A Unified and Modular Toolbox for LLM Robustness Research
Beyer, Tim, Dornbusch, Jonas, Steimle, Jakob, Ladenburger, Moritz, Schwinn, Leo, Günnemann, Stephan
The rapid expansion of research on Large Language Model (LLM) safety and robustness has produced a fragmented and oftentimes buggy ecosystem of implementations, datasets, and evaluation methods. This fragmentation makes reproducibility and comparability across studies challenging, hindering meaningful progress. To address these issues, we introduce AdversariaLLM, a toolbox for conducting LLM jailbreak robustness research. Its design centers on reproducibility, correctness, and extensibility. The framework implements twelve adversarial attack algorithms, integrates seven benchmark datasets spanning harmfulness, over-refusal, and utility evaluation, and provides access to a wide range of open-weight LLMs via Hugging Face. The implementation includes advanced features for comparability and reproducibility such as compute-resource tracking, deterministic results, and distributional evaluation techniques. \name also integrates judging through the companion package JudgeZoo, which can also be used independently. Together, these components aim to establish a robust foundation for transparent, comparable, and reproducible research in LLM safety.
Efficient Topic Extraction via Graph-Based Labeling: A Lightweight Alternative to Deep Models
Mekaoui, Salma, Sofyan, Hiba, Amaaz, Imane, Benchrif, Imane, Zarghili, Arsalane, Chaker, Ilham, Nikolov, Nikola S.
Extracting topics from text has become an essential task, especially with the rapid growth of unstructured textual data. Most existing works rely on highly computational methods to address this challenge. In this paper, we argue that probabilistic and statistical approaches, such as topic modeling (TM), can offer effective alternatives that require fewer computational resources. TM is a statistical method that automatically discovers topics in large collections of unlabeled text; however, it produces topics as distributions of representative words, which often lack clear interpretability. Our objective is to perform topic labeling by assigning meaningful labels to these sets of words. To achieve this without relying on computationally expensive models, we propose a graph-based approach that not only enriches topic words with semantically related terms but also explores the relationships among them. By analyzing these connections within the graph, we derive suitable labels that accurately capture each topic's meaning. We present a comparative study between our proposed method and several benchmarks, including ChatGPT-3.5, across two different datasets. Our method achieved consistently better results than traditional benchmarks in terms of BERTScore and cosine similarity and produced results comparable to ChatGPT-3.5, while remaining computationally efficient. Finally, we discuss future directions for topic labeling and highlight potential research avenues for enhancing interpretability and automation.
Guided by Stars: Interpretable Concept Learning Over Time Series via Temporal Logic Semantics
Ferfoglia, Irene, Silvetti, Simone, Saveri, Gaia, Nenzi, Laura, Bortolussi, Luca
Time series classification is a task of paramount importance, as this kind of data often arises in safety-critical applications. However, it is typically tackled with black-box deep learning methods, making it hard for humans to understand the rationale behind their output. To take on this challenge, we propose a novel approach, STELLE (Signal Temporal logic Embedding for Logically-grounded Learning and Explanation), a neuro-symbolic framework that unifies classification and explanation through direct embedding of trajectories into a space of temporal logic concepts. By introducing a novel STL-inspired kernel that maps raw time series to their alignment with predefined STL formulae, our model jointly optimises accuracy and interpretability, as each prediction is accompanied by the most relevant logical concepts that characterise it. This yields (i) local explanations as human-readable STL conditions justifying individual predictions, and (ii) global explanations as class-characterising formulae. Experiments demonstrate that STELLE achieves competitive accuracy while providing logically faithful explanations, validated on diverse real-world benchmarks.
seqme: a Python library for evaluating biological sequence design
Møller-Larsen, Rasmus, Izdebski, Adam, Olszewski, Jan, Gawade, Pankhil, Kmicikiewicz, Michal, Zarzecki, Wojciech, Szczurek, Ewa
Recent advances in computational methods for designing biological sequences have sparked the development of metrics to evaluate these methods performance in terms of the fidelity of the designed sequences to a target distribution and their attainment of desired properties. However, a single software library implementing these metrics was lacking. In this work we introduce seqme, a modular and highly extendable open-source Python library, containing model-agnostic metrics for evaluating computational methods for biological sequence design. seqme considers three groups of metrics: sequence-based, embedding-based, and property-based, and is applicable to a wide range of biological sequences: small molecules, DNA, ncRNA, mRNA, peptides and proteins. The library offers a number of embedding and property models for biological sequences, as well as diagnostics and visualization functions to inspect the results. seqme can be used to evaluate both one-shot and iterative computational design methods.
Denoised Recommendation Model with Collaborative Signal Decoupling
Abstract--Although the collaborative filtering (CF) algorithm has achieved remarkable performance in recommendation systems, it suffers from suboptimal recommendation performance due to noise in the user-item interaction matrix. Numerous noise-removal studies have improved recommendation models, but most existing approaches conduct denoising on a single graph. This may cause attenuation of collaborative signals: removing edges between two nodes can interrupt paths between other nodes, weakening path-dependent collaborative information. T o address these limitations, this study proposes a novel GNN-based CF model called DRCSD for denoising unstable interactions. DRCSD includes two core modules: a collaborative signal decoupling module (decomposes signals into distinct orders by structural characteristics) and an order-wise denoising module (performs targeted denoising on each order). Additionally, the information aggregation mechanism of traditional GNN-based CF models is modified to avoid cross-order signal interference until the final pooling operation. Extensive experiments on three public real-world datasets show that DRCSD has superior robustness against unstable interactions and achieves statistically significant performance improvements in recommendation accuracy metrics compared to state-of-the-art baseline models.
REMIND: Input Loss Landscapes Reveal Residual Memorization in Post-Unlearning LLMs
Cohen, Liran, Nemcovesky, Yaniv, Mendelson, Avi
Machine unlearning aims to remove the influence of specific training data from a model without requiring full retraining. This capability is crucial for ensuring privacy, safety, and regulatory compliance. Therefore, verifying whether a model has truly forgotten target data is essential for maintaining reliability and trustworthiness. However, existing evaluation methods often assess forgetting at the level of individual inputs. This approach may overlook residual influence present in semantically similar examples. Such influence can compromise privacy and lead to indirect information leakage. We propose REMIND (Residual Memorization In Neighborhood Dynamics), a novel evaluation method aiming to detect the subtle remaining influence of unlearned data and classify whether the data has been effectively forgotten. REMIND analyzes the model's loss over small input variations and reveals patterns unnoticed by single-point evaluations. We show that unlearned data yield flatter, less steep loss landscapes, while retained or unrelated data exhibit sharper, more volatile patterns. REMIND requires only query-based access, outperforms existing methods under similar constraints, and demonstrates robustness across different models, datasets, and paraphrased inputs, making it practical for real-world deployment. By providing a more sensitive and interpretable measure of unlearning effectiveness, REMIND provides a reliable framework to assess unlearning in language models. As a result, REMIND offers a novel perspective on memorization and unlearning.
The Strong Lottery Ticket Hypothesis for Multi-Head Attention Mechanisms
Otsuka, Hikari, Chijiwa, Daiki, Okoshi, Yasuyuki, Fujiki, Daichi, Takeuchi, Susumu, Motomura, Masato
The strong lottery ticket hypothesis (SLTH) conjectures that high-performing subnetworks, called strong lottery tickets (SLTs), are hidden in randomly initialized neural networks. Although recent theoretical studies have established the SLTH across various neural architectures, the SLTH for transformer architectures still lacks theoretical understanding. In particular, the current theory of the SLTH does not yet account for the multi-head attention (MHA) mechanism, a core component of transformers. To address this gap, we introduce a theoretical analysis of the existence of SLTs within MHAs. We prove that, if a randomly initialized MHA of $H$ heads and input dimension $d$ has the hidden dimension $O(d\log(Hd^{3/2}))$ for the key and value, it contains an SLT that approximates an arbitrary MHA with the same input dimension with high probability. Furthermore, by leveraging this theory for MHAs, we extend the SLTH to transformers without normalization layers. We empirically validate our theoretical findings, demonstrating that the approximation error between the SLT within a source model (MHA and transformer) and an approximate target counterpart decreases exponentially by increasing the hidden dimension of the source model.
Black-Box Guardrail Reverse-engineering Attack
Yao, Hongwei, Xia, Yun, Shao, Shuo, Shi, Haoran, Qiao, Tong, Wang, Cong
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly employ guardrails to enforce ethical, legal, and application-specific constraints on their outputs. While effective at mitigating harmful responses, these guardrails introduce a new class of vulnerabilities by exposing observable decision patterns. In this work, we present the first study of black-box LLM guardrail reverse-engineering attacks. We propose Guardrail Reverse-engineering Attack (GRA), a reinforcement learning-based framework that leverages genetic algorithm-driven data augmentation to approximate the decision-making policy of victim guardrails. By iteratively collecting input-output pairs, prioritizing divergence cases, and applying targeted mutations and crossovers, our method incrementally converges toward a high-fidelity surrogate of the victim guardrail. We evaluate GRA on three widely deployed commercial systems, namely ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Qwen3, and demonstrate that it achieves an rule matching rate exceeding 0.92 while requiring less than $85 in API costs. These findings underscore the practical feasibility of guardrail extraction and highlight significant security risks for current LLM safety mechanisms. Our findings expose critical vulnerabilities in current guardrail designs and highlight the urgent need for more robust defense mechanisms in LLM deployment.
LLM-as-a-Judge is Bad, Based on AI Attempting the Exam Qualifying for the Member of the Polish National Board of Appeal
Karp, Michał, Kubaszewska, Anna, Król, Magdalena, Król, Robert, Smywiński-Pohl, Aleksander, Szymański, Mateusz, Wydmański, Witold
This study provides an empirical assessment of whether current large language models (LLMs) can pass the official qualifying examination for membership in Poland's National Appeal Chamber (Krajowa Izba Odwoławcza). The authors examine two related ideas: using LLM as actual exam candidates and applying the 'LLM-as-a-judge' approach, in which model-generated answers are automatically evaluated by other models. The paper describes the structure of the exam, which includes a multiple-choice knowledge test on public procurement law and a written judgment, and presents the hybrid information recovery and extraction pipeline built to support the models. Several LLMs (including GPT-4.1, Claude 4 Sonnet and Bielik-11B-v2.6) were tested in closed-book and various Retrieval-Augmented Generation settings. The results show that although the models achieved satisfactory scores in the knowledge test, none met the passing threshold in the practical written part, and the evaluations of the 'LLM-as-a-judge' often diverged from the judgments of the official examining committee. The authors highlight key limitations: susceptibility to hallucinations, incorrect citation of legal provisions, weaknesses in logical argumentation, and the need for close collaboration between legal experts and technical teams. The findings indicate that, despite rapid technological progress, current LLMs cannot yet replace human judges or independent examiners in Polish public procurement adjudication.