Tabular data embedded within PDF files, web pages, and other document formats are prevalent across numerous sectors such as government, engineering, science, and business. These human-centric tables (HCTs) possess a unique combination of high business value, intricate layouts, limited operational power at scale, and sometimes serve as the only data source for critical insights. However, their complexity poses significant challenges to traditional data extraction, processing, and querying methods. While current solutions focus on transforming these tables into relational formats for SQL queries, they fall short in handling the diverse and complex layouts of HCTs and hence being amenable to querying. This paper describes HCT-QA, an extensive benchmark of HCTs, natural language queries, and related answers on thousands of tables. Our dataset includes 2,188 real-world HCTs with 9,835 QA pairs and 4,679 synthetic tables with 67.5K QA pairs. While HCTs can be potentially processed by different type of query engines, in this paper, we focus on Large Language Models as potential engines and assess their ability in processing and querying such tables.

Multi-Agent Path-Finding (MAPF) focuses on the collaborative planning of paths for multiple agents within shared spaces, aiming for collision-free navigation. Conventional planning methods often overlook the presence of other agents, which can result in conflicts. In response, this article introduces the A$^*_+$T algorithm, a distributed approach that improves coordination among agents by anticipating their positions based on their movement speeds. The algorithm also considers dynamic obstacles, assessing potential collisions with respect to observed speeds and trajectories, thereby facilitating collision-free path planning in environments populated by other agents and moving objects. It incorporates a risk layer surrounding both dynamic and static entities, enhancing its utility in real-world applications. Each agent functions autonomously while being mindful of the paths chosen by others, effectively addressing the complexities inherent in multi-agent situations. The performance of A$^*_+$T has been rigorously tested in the Gazebo simulation environment and benchmarked against established approaches such as CBS, ECBS, and SIPP. Furthermore, the algorithm has shown competence in single-agent experiments, with results demonstrating its effectiveness in managing dynamic obstacles and affirming its practical relevance across various scenarios.

LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in addressing complex, agentic tasks, from generating high-quality presentation slides to even conducting sophisticated scientific research. Meanwhile, RL has been widely recognized for its effectiveness in enhancing agent intelligence, but limited research has investigated the fine-tuning of LaMAS using foundational RL techniques. Moreover, the direct application of MARL methods to LaMAS introduces significant challenges, stemming from the unique characteristics and mechanisms inherent to LaMAS. To address these challenges, this article presents a comprehensive study of LLM-based MARL and proposes a novel paradigm termed Multi-Agent Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (MARFT). We introduce a brand-new MG called Flex-MG, which aligns with the LaMAS optimization in real-world applications and a universal algorithmic framework tailored specifically for LaMAS, outlining the conceptual foundations, key distinctions, and practical implementation strategies. We review the evolution from RL to RFT, setting the stage for a parallel analysis in the multi-agent domain. In the context of LaMAS, we elucidate critical differences between MARL and MARFT. These differences motivate a transition toward a LaMAS-oriented formulation of RFT. Central to this work is a robust and scalable MARFT framework. We detail the core algorithm and provide a complete, open-source implementation to facilitate adoption and further research. The latter sections of the paper explore real-world application perspectives and opening challenges in MARFT. By bridging theoretical underpinnings with practical methodologies, this work serves as a roadmap for researchers seeking to advance MARFT toward resilient and adaptive solutions in agentic systems. Our implementation of the proposed framework is publicly available at: https://github.com/jwliao-ai/MARFT.

This paper presents a comprehensive formulation of Kaneko's Error Diffusion Learning Algorithm (EDLA) and evaluates its effectiveness across parity check, regression, and image classification tasks. EDLA is a biologically inspired learning algorithm that provides an alternative to conventional backpropagation for training artificial neural networks. EDLA employs a single global error signal that diffuses across networks composed of paired positive and negative sublayers, eliminating traditional layer-wise error backpropagation. This study evaluates EDLA's effectiveness using benchmark tasks, such as parity check, regression, and image classification, by systematically varying the neuron count, network depth, and learning rates to assess its performance comprehensively. The experimental results demonstrate that EDLA achieves consistently high accuracy across multiple benchmarks, highlighting its effectiveness as a learning algorithm for neural networks. The choice of learning rate, neuron count, and network depth significantly influences EDLA's efficiency and convergence speed. Analysis of internal network representations reveals meaningful feature extraction capabilities, and the network's overall performance is found to be competitive with networks trained via conventional backpropagation, especially in shallow architectures. This study introduces EDLA, a biologically plausible alternative to traditional backpropagation previously underrecognized due to language barriers. By reformulating EDLA, systematically evaluating its performance, and presenting empirical evidence of its effectiveness, this study increases the visibility and accessibility of EDLA and contributes to biologically inspired training methodologies.

Accurate forecasting in financial markets requires integrating diverse data sources, from historical prices to macroeconomic indicators and financial news. However, existing models often fail to align these modalities effectively, limiting their practical use. In this paper, we introduce a transformer-based deep learning framework, Cross-Modal Temporal Fusion (CMTF), that fuses structured and unstructured financial data for improved market prediction. The model incorporates a tensor interpretation module for feature selection and an auto-training pipeline for efficient hyperparameter tuning. Experimental results using FTSE 100 stock data demonstrate that CMTF achieves superior performance in price direction classification compared to classical and deep learning baselines. These findings suggest that our framework is an effective and scalable solution for real-world cross-modal financial forecasting tasks.

Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit remarkable reasoning capabilities on complex multimodal understanding tasks, they still suffer from the notorious hallucination issue: generating outputs misaligned with obvious visual or factual evidence. Currently, training-based solutions, like direct preference optimization (DPO), leverage paired preference data to suppress hallucinations. However, they risk sacrificing general reasoning capabilities due to the likelihood displacement. Meanwhile, training-free solutions, like contrastive decoding, achieve this goal by subtracting the estimated hallucination pattern from a distorted input. Yet, these handcrafted perturbations (e.g., add noise to images) may poorly capture authentic hallucination patterns. To avoid these weaknesses of existing methods, and realize robust hallucination mitigation (i.e., maintaining general reasoning performance), we propose a novel framework: Decoupling Contrastive Decoding (DCD). Specifically, DCD decouples the learning of positive and negative samples in preference datasets, and trains separate positive and negative image projections within the MLLM. The negative projection implicitly models real hallucination patterns, which enables vision-aware negative images in the contrastive decoding inference stage. Our DCD alleviates likelihood displacement by avoiding pairwise optimization and generalizes robustly without handcrafted degradation. Extensive ablations across hallucination benchmarks and general reasoning tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of DCD, i.e., it matches DPO's hallucination suppression while preserving general capabilities and outperforms the handcrafted contrastive decoding methods.

Trustworthy AI encompasses many aspirational aspects for aligning AI systems with human values, including fairness, privacy, robustness, explainability, and uncertainty quantification. Ultimately the goal of Trustworthy AI research is to achieve all aspects simultaneously. However, efforts to enhance one aspect often introduce unintended trade-offs that negatively impact others. In this position paper, we review notable approaches to these five aspects and systematically consider every pair, detailing the negative interactions that can arise. For example, applying differential privacy to model training can amplify biases, undermining fairness. Drawing on these findings, we take the position that current research practices of improving one or two aspects in isolation are insufficient. Instead, research on Trustworthy AI must account for interactions between aspects and adopt a holistic view across all relevant axes at once. To illustrate our perspective, we provide guidance on how practitioners can work towards integrated trust, examples of how interactions affect the financial industry, and alternative views.

We introduce a new graph diffusion model for small molecule generation, DMol, which outperforms the state-of-the-art DiGress model in terms of validity by roughly 1.5% across all benchmarking datasets while reducing the number of diffusion steps by at least 10-fold, and the running time to roughly one half. The performance improvements are a result of a careful change in the objective function and a graph noise scheduling approach which, at each diffusion step, allows one to only change a subset of nodes of varying size in the molecule graph. Another relevant property of the method is that it can be easily combined with junction-tree-like graph representations that arise by compressing a collection of relevant ring structures into supernodes. Unlike classical junction-tree techniques that involve VAEs and require complicated reconstruction steps, compressed DMol directly performs graph diffusion on a graph that compresses only a carefully selected set of frequent carbon rings into supernodes, which results in straightforward sample generation. This compressed DMol method offers additional validity improvements over generic DMol of roughly 2%, increases the novelty of the method, and further improves the running time due to reductions in the graph size.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), particularly multi-rotor platforms, have rapidly advanced in research and applications due to their unique capabilities, including vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL), hovering, and high maneuverability. These features make them ideal for complex environments and have driven their adoption in fields such as environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, infrastructure inspection, and emergency response, among others. A key area of recent interest is the control and coordination of multiple UAVs in formation. Formation control enables groups of UAVs to maintain specific geometric arrangements while performing tasks, offering advantages such as enhanced coverage, efficiency, and redundancy [24]. These benefits are critical for applications ranging from search and rescue to cooperative tasks like cargo transport and aerial cinematography.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown potential in supporting decision-making applications, particularly as personal assistants in the financial, healthcare, and legal domains. While prompt engineering strategies have enhanced the capabilities of LLMs in decision-making, cognitive biases inherent to LLMs present significant challenges. Cognitive biases are systematic patterns of deviation from norms or rationality in decision-making that can lead to the production of inaccurate outputs. Existing cognitive bias mitigation strategies assume that input prompts only contain one type of cognitive bias, limiting their effectiveness in more challenging scenarios involving multiple cognitive biases. To fill this gap, we propose a cognitive debiasing approach, self-adaptive cognitive debiasing (SACD), that enhances the reliability of LLMs by iteratively refining prompts. Our method follows three sequential steps - bias determination, bias analysis, and cognitive debiasing - to iteratively mitigate potential cognitive biases in prompts. We evaluate SACD on finance, healthcare, and legal decision-making tasks using both open-weight and closed-weight LLMs. Compared to advanced prompt engineering methods and existing cognitive debiasing techniques, SACD achieves the lowest average bias scores in both single-bias and multi-bias settings.