Industry
Experience-Driven Exploration for Efficient API-Free AI Agents
Tang, Chenwei, Xing, Jingyu, Liu, Xinyu, Wang, Zizhou, Du, Jiawei, Zhen, Liangli, Lv, Jiancheng
Most existing software lacks accessible Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), requiring agents to operate solely through pixel-based Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). In this API-free setting, large language model (LLM)-based agents face severe efficiency bottlenecks: limited to local visual experiences, they make myopic decisions and rely on inefficient trial-and-error, hindering both skill acquisition and long-term planning. To address these challenges, we propose KG-Agent, an experience-driven learning framework that structures an agent's raw pixel-level interactions into a persistent State-Action Knowledge Graph (SA-KG). KG-Agent overcomes inefficient exploration by linking functionally similar but visually distinct GUI states, forming a rich neighborhood of experience that enables the agent to generalize from a diverse set of historical strategies. To support long-horizon reasoning, we design a hybrid intrinsic reward mechanism based on the graph topology, combining a state value reward for exploiting known high-value pathways with a novelty reward that encourages targeted exploration. This approach decouples strategic planning from pure discovery, allowing the agent to effectively value setup actions with delayed gratification. We evaluate KG-Agent in two complex, open-ended GUI-based decision-making environments (Civilization V and Slay the Spire), demonstrating significant improvements in exploration efficiency and strategic depth over the state-of-the-art methods.
Automotive Crash Dynamics Modeling Accelerated with Machine Learning
Nabian, Mohammad Amin, Chavare, Sudeep, Akhare, Deepak, Ranade, Rishikesh, Cherukuri, Ram, Tadepalli, Srinivas
Crashworthiness assessment is a critical aspect of automotive design, traditionally relying on high - fidelity finite element (FE) simulations that are computationally expensive and time - consuming. This work presents an exploratory comparative study on devel oping machine learning - based surrogate models for efficient prediction of structural deformation in crash scenarios using the NVIDIA PhysicsNeMo framework. Given the limited prior work applying machine learning to structural crash dynamics, the primary con tribution lies in demonstrating the feasibility and engineering utility of th e various modeling approaches explored in this work . We investigate two state - of - the - art neural network architectures for modeling crash dynamics: MeshGraphNet, a graph neural network that is widely employed in physics - based simulations, and Transolver, a transformer - based architecture with a physics - aware attention mechanism designed to maintain linear computational complexity with respect to geometric scale. Additionally, we examine three strategies for modeling transient dynamics: Time - Conditional, where the tempor al state is directly parameterized by time; the standard Autoregressive approach, which recursively propagates predictions through time; and a stability - enhanced Autoregressive scheme incorporating rollout - based training to improve prediction accuracy and long - term temporal consistency. The models are evaluated on a comprehensive Body - in - White (BIW) crash dataset comprising 150 detailed FE simulations using LS - DYNA . The dataset represents a structurally rich vehicle assembly with over 200 components, including 38 key components featuring variable thickness distributions to capture realistic manufacturing variability. Each model utilizes the undeformed mesh geometry and component characteristics as inputs to predict the spatiotemporal evolution of the deformed mesh during the crash sequence. Evaluation results show that the models capture the overall deformation trends with reasonable fidelity, demonstrating the feasibility of applying machine learning to structural crash dynamics. Although not yet matching full FE accuracy, the models achieve orders - of - magnitude reductions in computational cost, enabling rapid design exploration and early - stage optimization in crashworthiness evaluation. In the modern automotive industry, the assurance of vehicle safety is not merely a design consideration but a fundamental engineering imperative. Crashworthiness, defined as the ability of a vehicle's structure to protect its occupants during an impact, is a primary driver of the design and validation process. This focus is enforced by stringent government regulations and amplified by co nsumer safety rating programs, which have created a competitive landscape where occupant protection is a key market differ entiator. The engineering challenge of crashworthiness is profoundly complex, extending beyond simple structural strength.
Readers Prefer Outputs of AI Trained on Copyrighted Books over Expert Human Writers
Chakrabarty, Tuhin, Ginsburg, Jane C., Dhillon, Paramveer
The use of copyrighted books for training AI models has led to numerous lawsuits from authors concerned about AI's ability to generate derivative content. Yet it's unclear if these models can generate high quality literary text while emulating authors' styles. To answer this we conducted a preregistered study comparing MFA-trained expert writers with three frontier AI models: ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini in writing up to 450 word excerpts emulating 50 award-winning authors' diverse styles. In blind pairwise evaluations by 159 representative expert & lay readers, AI-generated text from in-context prompting was strongly disfavored by experts for both stylistic fidelity (OR=0.16, p<10^-8) & writing quality (OR=0.13, p<10^-7) but showed mixed results with lay readers. However, fine-tuning ChatGPT on individual authors' complete works completely reversed these findings: experts now favored AI-generated text for stylistic fidelity (OR=8.16, p<10^-13) & writing quality (OR=1.87, p=0.010), with lay readers showing similar shifts. These effects generalize across authors & styles. The fine-tuned outputs were rarely flagged as AI-generated (3% rate v. 97% for in-context prompting) by best AI detectors. Mediation analysis shows this reversal occurs because fine-tuning eliminates detectable AI stylistic quirks (e.g., cliche density) that penalize in-context outputs. While we do not account for additional costs of human effort required to transform raw AI output into cohesive, publishable prose, the median fine-tuning & inference cost of $81 per author represents a dramatic 99.7% reduction compared to typical professional writer compensation. Author-specific fine-tuning thus enables non-verbatim AI writing that readers prefer to expert human writing, providing empirical evidence directly relevant to copyright's fourth fair-use factor, the "effect upon the potential market or value" of the source works.
Interpreting the Latent Structure of Operator Precedence in Language Models
Yugeswardeenoo, Dharunish, Nukala, Harshil, Shah, Ved, Blondin, Cole, Brien, Sean O, Sharma, Vasu, Zhu, Kevin
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities but continue to struggle with arithmetic tasks. Prior works largely focus on outputs or prompting strategies, leaving the open question of the internal structure through which models do arithmetic computation. In this work, we investigate whether LLMs encode operator precedence in their internal representations via the open-source instruction-tuned LLaMA 3.2-3B model. We constructed a dataset of arithmetic expressions with three operands and two operators, varying the order and placement of parentheses. Using this dataset, we trace whether intermediate results appear in the residual stream of the instruction-tuned LLaMA 3.2-3B model. We apply interpretability techniques such as logit lens, linear classification probes, and UMAP geometric visualization. Our results show that intermediate computations are present in the residual stream, particularly after MLP blocks. We also find that the model linearly encodes precedence in each operator's embeddings post attention layer. We introduce partial embedding swap, a technique that modifies operator precedence by exchanging high-impact embedding dimensions between operators.
MedREK: Retrieval-Based Editing for Medical LLMs with Key-Aware Prompts
Xia, Shujun, Lin, Haokun, Wu, Yichen, Zhou, Yinan, Li, Zixuan, Wan, Zhongwei, Xing, Xingrun, Zheng, Yefeng, Li, Xiang, Shan, Caifeng, Sun, Zhenan, Li, Quanzheng
LLMs hold great promise for healthcare applications, but the rapid evolution of medical knowledge and errors in training data often cause them to generate outdated or inaccurate information, limiting their applicability in high-stakes clinical practice. Model editing has emerged as a potential remedy without full retraining. While parameter-based editing often compromises locality and is thus ill-suited for the medical domain, retrieval-based editing offers a more viable alternative. However, it still faces two critical challenges: (1) representation overlap within the medical knowledge space often causes inaccurate retrieval and reduces editing accuracy; (2) existing methods are restricted to single-sample edits, while batch-editing remains largely unexplored despite its importance for real-world medical applications. To address these challenges, we first construct MedVersa, an enhanced benchmark with broader coverage of medical subjects, designed to evaluate both single and batch edits under strict locality constraints. We then propose MedREK, a retrieval-based editing framework that integrates a shared query-key module for precise matching with an attention-based prompt encoder for informative guidance. Experimental results on various medical benchmarks demonstrate that our MedREK achieves superior performance across different core metrics and provides the first validated solution for batch-editing in medical LLMs. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/mylittleriver/MedREK.
SimKey: A Semantically Aware Key Module for Watermarking Language Models
Kodama, Shingo, Diwan, Haya, Rosenblatt, Lucas, Witter, R. Teal, Cohen, Niv
The rapid spread of text generated by large language models (LLMs) makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish authentic human writing from machine output. Watermarking offers a promising solution: model owners can embed an imperceptible signal into generated text, marking its origin. Most leading approaches seed an LLM's next-token sampling with a pseudo-random key that can later be recovered to identify the text as machine-generated, while only minimally altering the model's output distribution. However, these methods suffer from two related issues: (i) watermarks are brittle to simple surface-level edits such as paraphrasing or reordering; and (ii) adversaries can append unrelated, potentially harmful text that inherits the watermark, risking reputational damage to model owners. To address these issues, we introduce SimKey, a semantic key module that strengthens watermark robustness by tying key generation to the meaning of prior context. SimKey uses locality-sensitive hashing over semantic embeddings to ensure that paraphrased text yields the same watermark key, while unrelated or semantically shifted text produces a different one. Integrated with state-of-the-art watermarking schemes, SimKey improves watermark robustness to paraphrasing and translation while preventing harmful content from false attribution, establishing semantic-aware keying as a practical and extensible watermarking direction.
DITTO: A Spoofing Attack Framework on Watermarked LLMs via Knowledge Distillation
Ahn, Hyeseon, Park, Shinwoo, Woo, Suyeon, Han, Yo-Sub
The promise of LLM watermarking rests on a core assumption that a specific watermark proves authorship by a specific model. We demonstrate that this assumption is dangerously flawed. We introduce the threat of watermark spoofing, a sophisticated attack that allows a malicious model to generate text containing the authentic-looking watermark of a trusted, victim model. This enables the seamless misattribution of harmful content, such as disinformation, to reputable sources. The key to our attack is repurposing watermark radioactivity, the unintended inheritance of data patterns during fine-tuning, from a discoverable trait into an attack vector. By distilling knowledge from a watermarked teacher model, our framework allows an attacker to steal and replicate the watermarking signal of the victim model. This work reveals a critical security gap in text authorship verification and calls for a paradigm shift towards technologies capable of distinguishing authentic watermarks from expertly imitated ones. Our code is available at https://github.com/hsannn/ditto.git.
Multi-Agent Regime-Conditioned Diffusion (MARCD) for CVaR-Constrained Portfolio Decisions
We examine whether regime-conditioned generative scenarios combined with a convex CVaR allocator improve portfolio decisions under regime shifts. We present MARCD, a generative-to-decision framework with: (i) a Gaussian HMM to infer latent regimes; (ii) a diffusion generator that produces regime-conditioned scenarios; (iii) signal extraction via blended, shrunk moments; and (iv) a governed CVaR epigraph quadratic program. Contributions: Within the Scenario stage we introduce a tail-weighted diffusion objective that up-weights low-quantile outcomes relevant for drawdowns and a regime-expert (MoE) denoiser whose gate increases with crisis posteriors; both are evaluated end-to-end through the allocator. Under strict walk-forward on liquid multi-asset ETFs (2005-2025), MARCD exhibits stronger scenario calibration and materially smaller drawdowns: MaxDD 9.3% versus 14.1% for BL (a 34% reduction) over 2020-2025 out-of-sample. The framework provides an auditable pipeline with explicit budget, box, and turnover constraints, demonstrating the value of decision-aware generative modeling in finance.
PO-CKAN:Physics Informed Deep Operator Kolmogorov Arnold Networks with Chunk Rational Structure
We propose PO-CKAN, a physics-informed deep operator framework based on Chunkwise Rational Kolmogorov--Arnold Networks (KANs), for approximating the solution operators of partial differential equations. This framework leverages a Deep Operator Network (DeepONet) architecture that incorporates Chunkwise Rational Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (CKAN) sub-networks for enhanced function approximation. The principles of Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) are integrated into the operator learning framework to enforce physical consistency. This design enables the efficient learning of physically consistent spatio-temporal solution operators and allows for rapid prediction for parametric time-dependent PDEs with varying inputs (e.g., parameters, initial/boundary conditions) after training. Validated on challenging benchmark problems, PO-CKAN demonstrates accurate operator learning with results closely matching high-fidelity solutions. PO-CKAN adopts a DeepONet-style branch--trunk architecture with its sub-networks instantiated as rational KAN modules, and enforces physical consistency via a PDE residual (PINN-style) loss. On Burgers' equation with $ν=0.01$, PO-CKAN reduces the mean relative $L^2$ error by approximately 48\% compared to PI-DeepONet, and achieves competitive accuracy on the Eikonal and diffusion--reaction benchmarks.
SViM3D: Stable Video Material Diffusion for Single Image 3D Generation
Engelhardt, Andreas, Boss, Mark, Voleti, Vikram, Yao, Chun-Han, Lensch, Hendrik P. A., Jampani, Varun
We present Stable Video Materials 3D (SViM3D), a framework to predict multi-view consistent physically based rendering (PBR) materials, given a single image. Recently, video diffusion models have been successfully used to reconstruct 3D objects from a single image efficiently. However, reflectance is still represented by simple material models or needs to be estimated in additional steps to enable relighting and controlled appearance edits. We extend a latent video diffusion model to output spatially varying PBR parameters and surface normals jointly with each generated view based on explicit camera control. This unique setup allows for relighting and generating a 3D asset using our model as neural prior. We introduce various mechanisms to this pipeline that improve quality in this ill-posed setting. We show state-of-the-art relighting and novel view synthesis performance on multiple object-centric datasets. Our method generalizes to diverse inputs, enabling the generation of relightable 3D assets useful in AR/VR, movies, games and other visual media.