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Advancing Symbolic Integration in Large Language Models: Beyond Conventional Neurosymbolic AI
Rani, Maneeha, Mishra, Bhupesh Kumar, Thakker, Dhavalkumar
LLMs have demonstrated highly effective learning, human-like response generation,and decision-making capabilities in high-risk sectors. However, these models remain black boxes because they struggle to ensure transparency in responses. The literature has explored numerous approaches to address transparency challenges in LLMs, including Neurosymbolic AI (NeSy AI). NeSy AI approaches were primarily developed for conventional neural networks and are not well-suited to the unique features of LLMs. Consequently, there is a limited systematic understanding of how symbolic AI can be effectively integrated into LLMs. This paper aims to address this gap by first reviewing established NeSy AI methods and then proposing a novel taxonomy of symbolic integration in LLMs, along with a roadmap to merge symbolic techniques with LLMs. The roadmap introduces a new categorisation framework across four dimensions by organising existing literature within these categories. These include symbolic integration across various stages of LLM, coupling mechanisms, architectural paradigms, as well as algorithmic and application-level perspectives. The paper thoroughly identifies current benchmarks, cutting-edge advancements, and critical gaps within the field to propose a roadmap for future research. By highlighting the latest developments and notable gaps in the literature, it offers practical insights for implementing frameworks for symbolic integration into LLMs to enhance transparency.
CityAQVis: Integrated ML-Visualization Sandbox Tool for Pollutant Estimation in Urban Regions Using Multi-Source Data (Software Article)
Desai, Brij Bidhin, Rajapur, Yukta Arvind, Mundayatt, Aswathi, Sreevalsan-Nair, Jaya
Urban air pollution poses significant risks to public health, environmental sustainability, and policy planning. Effective air quality management requires predictive tools that can integrate diverse datasets and communicate complex spatial and temporal pollution patterns. There is a gap in interactive tools with seamless integration of forecasting and visualization of spatial distributions of air pollutant concentrations. We present CityAQVis, an interactive machine learning ML sandbox tool designed to predict and visualize pollutant concentrations at the ground level using multi-source data, which includes satellite observations, meteorological parameters, population density, elevation, and nighttime lights. While traditional air quality visualization tools often lack forecasting capabilities, CityAQVis enables users to build and compare predictive models, visualizing the model outputs and offering insights into pollution dynamics at the ground level. The pilot implementation of the tool is tested through case studies predicting nitrogen dioxide (NO2) concentrations in metropolitan regions, highlighting its adaptability to various pollutants. Through an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI), the user can perform comparative visualizations of the spatial distribution of surface-level pollutant concentration in two different urban scenarios. Our results highlight the potential of ML-driven visual analytics to improve situational awareness and support data-driven decision-making in air quality management.
SAMOSA: Sharpness Aware Minimization for Open Set Active learning
Kim, Young In, Agiollo, Andrea, Khanna, Rajiv
Modern machine learning solutions require extensive data collection where labeling remains costly. To reduce this burden, open set active learning approaches aim to select informative samples from a large pool of unlabeled data that includes irrelevant or unknown classes. In this context, we propose Sharpness Aware Minimization for Open Set Active Learning (SAMOSA) as an effective querying algorithm. Building on theoretical findings concerning the impact of data typicality on the generalization properties of traditional stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and sharpness-aware minimization (SAM), SAMOSA actively queries samples based on their typicality. SAMOSA effectively identifies atypical samples that belong to regions of the embedding manifold close to the model decision boundaries. Therefore, SAMOSA prioritizes the samples that are (i) highly informative for the targeted classes, and (ii) useful for distinguishing between targeted and unwanted classes. Extensive experiments show that SAMOSA achieves up to 3% accuracy improvement over the state of the art across several datasets, while not introducing computational overhead. The source code of our experiments is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/samosa-DAF4
Lightweight Facial Landmark Detection in Thermal Images via Multi-Level Cross-Modal Knowledge Transfer
Tong, Qiyi, Nocentini, Olivia, Lagomarsino, Marta, Cai, Kuanqi, Lorenzini, Marta, Ajoudani, Arash
Facial Landmark Detection (FLD) in thermal imagery is critical for applications in challenging lighting conditions, but it is hampered by the lack of rich visual cues. Conventional cross-modal solutions, like feature fusion or image translation from RGB data, are often computationally expensive or introduce structural artifacts, limiting their practical deployment. To address this, we propose Multi-Level Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation (MLCM-KD), a novel framework that decouples high-fidelity RGB-to-thermal knowledge transfer from model compression to create both accurate and efficient thermal FLD models. A central challenge during knowledge transfer is the profound modality gap between RGB and thermal data, where traditional unidirectional distillation fails to enforce semantic consistency across disparate feature spaces. To overcome this, we introduce Dual-Injected Knowledge Distillation (DIKD), a bidirectional mechanism designed specifically for this task. DIKD establishes a connection between modalities: it not only guides the thermal student with rich RGB features but also validates the student's learned representations by feeding them back into the frozen teacher's prediction head. This closed-loop supervision forces the student to learn modality-invariant features that are semantically aligned with the teacher, ensuring a robust and profound knowledge transfer. Experiments show that our approach sets a new state-of-the-art on public thermal FLD benchmarks, notably outperforming previous methods while drastically reducing computational overhead.
High-Precision Climbing Robot Localization Using Planar Array UWB/GPS/IMU/Barometer Integration
Zhang, Shuning, Zhu, Zhanchen, Chen, Xiangyu, Wang, Yunheng, Jiang, Xu, Duan, Peibo, Xu, Renjing
Abstract-- T o address the need for high-precision localization of climbing robots in complex high-altitude environments, this paper proposes a multi-sensor fusion system that overcomes the limitations of single-sensor approaches. Firstly, the localization scenarios and the problem model are analyzed. An integrated architecture of Attention Mechanism-based Fusion Algorithm (AMF A) incorporating planar array Ultra-Wideband (UWB), GPS, Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), and barometer is designed to handle challenges such as GPS occlusion and UWB Non-Line-of-Sight (NLOS) problem. Then, End-to-end neural network inference models for UWB and barometer are developed, along with a multimodal attention mechanism for adaptive data fusion. An Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) is applied to refine the trajectory, improving accuracy and robustness. Finally, real-world experiments show that the method achieves 0.48 m localization accuracy and lower MAX error of 1.50 m, outperforming baseline algorithms such as GPS/INS-EKF and demonstrating stronger robustness.
MobileRL: Online Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Mobile GUI Agents
Xu, Yifan, Liu, Xiao, Liu, Xinghan, Fu, Jiaqi, Zhang, Hanchen, Jing, Bohao, Zhang, Shudan, Wang, Yuting, Zhao, Wenyi, Dong, Yuxiao
Building general-purpose graphical user interface (GUI) agents has become increasingly promising with the progress in vision language models. However, developing effective mobile GUI agents with reinforcement learning (RL) remains challenging due to the heavy-tailed distribution of task difficulty and the inefficiency of large-scale environment sampling. We present an online agentic reinforcement learning framework MobileRL to enhance GUI agents in mobile environments. Its core component is the Difficulty-ADAptive GRPO (ADAGRPO) algorithm. In ADAGRPO, we design difficulty-adaptive positive replay and failure curriculum filtering to adapt the model to different task difficulties. We introduce the shortest-path reward adjustment strategy to reshape rewards concerning the task length in multi-turn agentic tasks. Those strategies jointly stabilize RL training, improve sample efficiency, and generate strong performance across diverse mobile apps and tasks. We apply MOBILERL to two open models (Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct and GLM-4.1V-9B-Base). The resultant MOBILERL-9B model achieves state-of-the-art results in terms of success rates on both AndroidWorld (80.2%) and AndroidLab (53.6%). The MOBILERL framework is open-sourced at: https://github.com/THUDM/MobileRL.
Flatness is Necessary, Neural Collapse is Not: Rethinking Generalization via Grokking
Han, Ting, Adilova, Linara, Petzka, Henning, Kleesiek, Jens, Kamp, Michael
Neural collapse, i.e., the emergence of highly symmetric, class-wise clustered representations, is frequently observed in deep networks and is often assumed to reflect or enable generalization. In parallel, flatness of the loss landscape has been theoretically and empirically linked to generalization. Yet, the causal role of either phenomenon remains unclear: Are they prerequisites for generalization, or merely by-products of training dynamics? We disentangle these questions using grokking, a training regime in which memorization precedes generalization, allowing us to temporally separate generalization from training dynamics and we find that while both neural collapse and relative flatness emerge near the onset of generalization, only flatness consistently predicts it. Models encouraged to collapse or prevented from collapsing generalize equally well, whereas models regularized away from flat solutions exhibit delayed generalization, resembling grokking, even in architectures and datasets where it does not typically occur. Furthermore, we show theoretically that neural collapse leads to relative flatness under classical assumptions, explaining their empirical co-occurrence. Our results support the view that relative flatness is a potentially necessary and more fundamental property for generalization, and demonstrate how grokking can serve as a powerful probe for isolating its geometric underpinnings.
PolyJuice Makes It Real: Black-Box, Universal Red Teaming for Synthetic Image Detectors
Dehdashtian, Sepehr, Morshed, Mashrur M., Seidman, Jacob H., Bharaj, Gaurav, Boddeti, Vishnu Naresh
Synthetic image detectors (SIDs) are a key defense against the risks posed by the growing realism of images from text-to-image (T2I) models. Red teaming improves SID's effectiveness by identifying and exploiting their failure modes via misclassified synthetic images. However, existing red-teaming solutions (i) require white-box access to SIDs, which is infeasible for proprietary state-of-the-art detectors, and (ii) generate image-specific attacks through expensive online optimization. To address these limitations, we propose PolyJuice, the first black-box, image-agnostic red-teaming method for SIDs, based on an observed distribution shift in the T2I latent space between samples correctly and incorrectly classified by the SID. PolyJuice generates attacks by (i) identifying the direction of this shift through a lightweight offline process that only requires black-box access to the SID, and (ii) exploiting this direction by universally steering all generated images towards the SID's failure modes. PolyJuice-steered T2I models are significantly more effective at deceiving SIDs (up to 84%) compared to their unsteered counterparts. We also show that the steering directions can be estimated efficiently at lower resolutions and transferred to higher resolutions using simple interpolation, reducing computational overhead. Finally, tuning SID models on PolyJuice-augmented datasets notably enhances the performance of the detectors (up to 30%).
ECG-Soup: Harnessing Multi-Layer Synergy for ECG Foundation Models
Nguyen, Phu X., Phan, Huy, Pham, Hieu, Chatzichristos, Christos, Vandenberk, Bert, De Vos, Maarten
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death globally, accounting for 32% of all deaths according to The W orld Health Organization (WHO) statistics in 2019 [1]. With its non-invasive nature and ability to reflect the heart's electrical activity, the electrocardiogram is a key diagnostic tool in clinical practice [2], [3]. However, traditional ECG analysis is mainly based on human experts prone to errors and delays.
Quantum Temporal Fusion Transformer
Barik, Krishnakanta, Paul, Goutam
The \textit{Temporal Fusion Transformer} (TFT), proposed by Lim \textit{et al.}, published in \textit{International Journal of Forecasting} (2021), is a state-of-the-art attention-based deep neural network architecture specifically designed for multi-horizon time series forecasting. It has demonstrated significant performance improvements over existing benchmarks. In this work, we introduce the Quantum Temporal Fusion Transformer (QTFT), a quantum-enhanced hybrid quantum-classical architecture that extends the capabilities of the classical TFT framework. The core idea of this work is inspired by the foundation studies, \textit{The Power of Quantum Neural Networks} by Amira Abbas \textit{et al.} and \textit{Quantum Vision Transformers} by El Amine Cherrat \textit{et al.}, published in \textit{ Nature Computational Science} (2021) and \textit{Quantum} (2024), respectively. A key advantage of our approach lies in its foundation on a variational quantum algorithm, enabling implementation on current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices without strict requirements on the number of qubits or circuit depth. Our results demonstrate that QTFT is successfully trained on the forecasting datasets and is capable of accurately predicting future values. In particular, our experimental results on two different datasets display that the model outperforms its classical counterpart in terms of both training and test loss. These results indicate the prospect of using quantum computing to boost deep learning architectures in complex machine learning tasks.