Modern software systems increasingly integrate machine learning (ML) due to its advancements and ability to enhance data-driven decision-making. However, this integration introduces significant challenges for software engineering, especially in software product lines (SPLs), where managing variability and reuse becomes more complex with the inclusion of ML components. Although existing approaches have addressed variability management in SPLs and the integration of ML components in isolated systems, few have explored the intersection of both domains. Specifically, there is limited support for modeling and managing variability in SPLs that incorporate ML components. To bridge this gap, this article proposes a structured framework designed to extend Software Product Line engineering, facilitating the integration of ML components. It facilitates the design of SPLs with ML capabilities by enabling systematic modeling of variability and reuse. The proposal has been partially implemented with the VariaMos tool.

Supervised learning is classically formulated as training a model to minimize a fixed loss function over a fixed distribution, or task. However, an emerging paradigm instead views model training as extracting enough information from data so that the model can be used to minimize many losses on many downstream tasks. We formalize a mathematical framework for this paradigm, which we call panprediction, and study its statistical complexity. Formally, panprediction generalizes omniprediction and sits upstream from multi-group learning, which respectively focus on predictions that generalize to many downstream losses or many downstream tasks, but not both. Concretely, we design algorithms that learn deterministic and randomized panpredictors with $\tilde{O}(1/\varepsilon^3)$ and $\tilde{O}(1/\varepsilon^2)$ samples, respectively. Our results demonstrate that under mild assumptions, simultaneously minimizing infinitely many losses on infinitely many tasks can be as statistically easy as minimizing one loss on one task. Along the way, we improve the best known sample complexity guarantee of deterministic omniprediction by a factor of $1/\varepsilon$, and match all other known sample complexity guarantees of omniprediction and multi-group learning. Our key technical ingredient is a nearly lossless reduction from panprediction to a statistically efficient notion of calibration, called step calibration.

Graphic layout generation is a growing research area focusing on generating aesthetically pleasing layouts ranging from poster designs to documents. While recent research has explored ways to incorporate user constraints to guide the layout generation, these constraints often require complex specifications which reduce usability. W e introduce an innovative approach exploiting user-provided sketches as intuitive constraints and we demonstrate empirically the effectiveness of this new guidance method, establishing the sketch-to-layout problem as a promising research direction, which is currently under-explored. T o tackle the sketch-to-layout problem, we propose a mul-timodal transformer-based solution using the sketch and the content assets as inputs to produce high quality layouts. Since collecting sketch training data from human annotators to train our model is very costly, we introduce a novel and efficient method to synthetically generate training sketches at scale. W e train and evaluate our model on three publicly available datasets: PubLayNet [43], DocLayNet [32] and SlidesVQA [35], demonstrating that it outperforms state-of-the-art constraint-based methods, while offering a more intuitive design experience. In order to facilitate future sketch-to-layout research, we release O(200k) synthetically-generated sketches for the public datasets above.

While AI agents have long been discussed and studied in computer science, today's Agentic AI systems are something new. We consider other definitions of Agentic AI and propose a new realist definition. Agentic AI is a software delivery mechanism, comparable to software as a service (SaaS), which puts an application to work autonomously in a complex enterprise setting. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) as foundation models have driven excitement in Agentic AI. We note, however, that Agentic AI systems are primarily applications, not foundations, and so their success depends on validation by end users and principal stakeholders. The tools and techniques needed by the principal users to validate their applications are quite different from the tools and techniques used to evaluate foundation models. Ironically, with good validation measures in place, in many cases the foundation models can be replaced with much simpler, faster, and more interpretable models that handle core logic. When it comes to Agentic AI, validity is what you need. LLMs are one option that might achieve it.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced embodied agents by enabling direct perception, reasoning, and planning task-oriented actions from visual inputs. However, such vision driven embodied agents open a new attack surface: visual backdoor attacks, where the agent behaves normally until a visual trigger appears in the scene, then persistently executes an attacker-specified multi-step policy. We introduce BEAT, the first framework to inject such visual backdoors into MLLM-based embodied agents using objects in the environments as triggers. Unlike textual triggers, object triggers exhibit wide variation across viewpoints and lighting, making them difficult to implant reliably. BEAT addresses this challenge by (1) constructing a training set that spans diverse scenes, tasks, and trigger placements to expose agents to trigger variability, and (2) introducing a two-stage training scheme that first applies supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and then our novel Contrastive Trigger Learning (CTL). CTL formulates trigger discrimination as preference learning between trigger-present and trigger-free inputs, explicitly sharpening the decision boundaries to ensure precise backdoor activation. Across various embodied agent benchmarks and MLLMs, BEAT achieves attack success rates up to 80%, while maintaining strong benign task performance, and generalizes reliably to out-of-distribution trigger placements. Notably, compared to naive SFT, CTL boosts backdoor activation accuracy up to 39% under limited backdoor data. These findings expose a critical yet unexplored security risk in MLLM-based embodied agents, underscoring the need for robust defenses before real-world deployment.

Formulating optimization problems for industrial applications demands significant manual effort and domain expertise. While Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in automating this process, evaluating their performance remains difficult due to the absence of robust metrics. Existing solver-based approaches often face inconsistency, infeasibility issues, and high computational costs. To address these issues, we propose ORGEval, a graph-theoretic evaluation framework for assessing LLMs' capabilities in formulating linear and mixed-integer linear programs. ORGEval represents optimization models as graphs, reducing equivalence detection to graph isomorphism testing. We identify and prove a sufficient condition, when the tested graphs are symmetric decomposable (SD), under which the Weisfeiler-Lehman (WL) test is guaranteed to correctly detect isomorphism. Building on this, ORGEval integrates a tailored variant of the WL-test with an SD detection algorithm to evaluate model equivalence. By focusing on structural equivalence rather than instance-level configurations, ORGEval is robust to numerical variations. Experimental results show that our method can successfully detect model equivalence and produce 100\% consistent results across random parameter configurations, while significantly outperforming solver-based methods in runtime, especially on difficult problems. Leveraging ORGEval, we construct the Bench4Opt dataset and benchmark state-of-the-art LLMs on optimization modeling. Our results reveal that although optimization modeling remains challenging for all LLMs, DeepSeek-V3 and Claude-Opus-4 achieve the highest accuracies under direct prompting, outperforming even leading reasoning models.

x402 enables Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) services like application programming interfaces (APIs), data feeds, and inference providers to accept cryptocurrency payments for access. As agents increasingly consume these services, discovery becomes critical: which swap interface should an agent trust? Which data provider is the most reliable? We introduce TraceRank, a reputation-weighted ranking algorithm where payment transactions serve as endorsements. TraceRank seeds addresses with precomputed reputation metrics and propagates reputation through payment flows weighted by transaction value and temporal recency. Applied to x402's payment graph, this surfaces services preferred by high-reputation users rather than those with high transaction volume. Our system combines TraceRank with semantic search to respond to natural language queries with high quality results. We argue that reputation propagation resists Sybil attacks by making spam services with many low-reputation payers rank below legitimate services with few high-reputation payers. Ultimately, we aim to construct a search method for x402 enabled services that avoids infrastructure bias and has better performance than purely volume based or semantic methods.

In multilingual healthcare applications, the availability of domain-specific natural language processing(NLP) tools is limited, especially for low-resource languages. Although multilingual bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) offers a promising motivation to mitigate the language gap, the medical NLP tasks in low-resource languages are still underexplored. Therefore, this study investigates how further pre-training on domain-specific corpora affects model performance on medical tasks, focusing on three languages: Dutch, Romanian and Spanish. In terms of further pre-training, we conducted four experiments to create medical domain models. Then, these models were fine-tuned on three downstream tasks: Automated patient screening in Dutch clinical notes, named entity recognition in Romanian and Spanish clinical notes. Results show that domain adaptation significantly enhanced task performance. Furthermore, further differentiation of domains, e.g. clinical and general biomedical domains, resulted in diverse performances. The clinical domain-adapted model outperformed the more general biomedical domain-adapted model. Moreover, we observed evidence of cross-lingual transferability. Moreover, we also conducted further investigations to explore potential reasons contributing to these performance differences. These findings highlight the feasibility of domain adaptation and cross-lingual ability in medical NLP. Within the low-resource language settings, these findings can provide meaningful guidance for developing multilingual medical NLP systems to mitigate the lack of training data and thereby improve the model performance.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly excelling and outpacing human performance on many tasks. However, to improve LLM reasoning, researchers either rely on ad-hoc generated datasets or formal mathematical proof systems such as the Lean proof assistant. Whilst ad-hoc generated methods can capture the decision chains of real-world reasoning processes, they may encode some inadvertent bias in the space of reasoning they cover; they also cannot be formally verified. On the other hand, systems like Lean can guarantee verifiability, but are not well-suited to capture the nature of agentic decision chain-based tasks. This creates a gap both in performance for functions such as business agents or code assistants, and in the usefulness of LLM reasoning benchmarks, whereby these fall short in reasoning structure or real-world alignment. We introduce TempoBench, the first formally grounded and verifiable diagnostic benchmark that parametrizes difficulty to systematically analyze how LLMs perform reasoning. TempoBench uses two evaluation benchmarks to break down reasoning ability. First, temporal trace evaluation (TTE) tests the ability of an LLM to understand and simulate the execution of a given multi-step reasoning system. Subsequently, temporal causal evaluation (TCE) tests an LLM's ability to perform multi-step causal reasoning and to distill cause-and-effect relations from complex systems. We find that models score 65.6% on TCE-normal, and 7.5% on TCE-hard. This shows that state-of-the-art LLMs clearly understand the TCE task but perform poorly as system complexity increases. Our code is available at our \href{https://github.com/nik-hz/tempobench}{GitHub repository}.

We present DialectalArabicMMLU, a new benchmark for evaluating the performance of large language models (LLMs) across Arabic dialects. While recently developed Arabic and multilingual benchmarks have advanced LLM evaluation for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), dialectal varieties remain underrepresented despite their prevalence in everyday communication. DialectalArabicMMLU extends the MMLU-Redux framework through manual translation and adaptation of 3K multiple-choice question-answer pairs into five major dialects (Syrian, Egyptian, Emirati, Saudi, and Moroccan), yielding a total of 15K QA pairs across 32 academic and professional domains (22K QA pairs when also including English and MSA). The benchmark enables systematic assessment of LLM reasoning and comprehension beyond MSA, supporting both task-based and linguistic analysis. We evaluate 19 open-weight Arabic and multilingual LLMs (1B-13B parameters) and report substantial performance variation across dialects, revealing persistent gaps in dialectal generalization. DialectalArabicMMLU provides the first unified, human-curated resource for measuring dialectal understanding in Arabic, thus promoting more inclusive evaluation and future model development.