Deep Learning
Understanding LLM Reasoning for Abstractive Summarization
While the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in analytical tasks such as mathematics and code generation, their utility for abstractive summarization remains widely assumed but largely unverified. To bridge this gap, we first tailor general reasoning strategies to the summarization domain. We then conduct a systematic, large scale comparative study of 8 reasoning strategies and 3 Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) across 8 diverse datasets, assessing both summary quality and faithfulness. Our findings show that reasoning is not a universal solution and its effectiveness is highly dependent on the specific strategy and context. Specifically, we observe a trade-off between summary quality and factual faithfulness: explicit reasoning strategies tend to improve fluency at the expense of factual grounding, while implicit reasoning in LRMs exhibits the inverse pattern. Furthermore, increasing an LRM's internal reasoning budget does not improve, and can even hurt, factual consistency, suggesting that effective summarization demands faithful compression rather than creative over-thinking.
Aetheria: A multimodal interpretable content safety framework based on multi-agent debate and collaboration
He, Yuxiang, Zhao, Jian, Yuan, Yuchen, Zhang, Tianle, Cai, Wei, Cheng, Haojie, Shi, Ziyan, Zhu, Ming, Tang, Haichuan, Zhang, Chi, Li, Xuelong
The exponential growth of digital content presents significant challenges for content safety. Current moderation systems, often based on single models or fixed pipelines, exhibit limitations in identifying implicit risks and providing interpretable judgment processes. To address these issues, we propose Aetheria, a multimodal interpretable content safety framework based on multi-agent debate and collaboration.Employing a collaborative architecture of five core agents, Aetheria conducts in-depth analysis and adjudication of multimodal content through a dynamic, mutually persuasive debate mechanism, which is grounded by RAG-based knowledge retrieval.Comprehensive experiments on our proposed benchmark (AIR-Bench) validate that Aetheria not only generates detailed and traceable audit reports but also demonstrates significant advantages over baselines in overall content safety accuracy, especially in the identification of implicit risks. This framework establishes a transparent and interpretable paradigm, significantly advancing the field of trustworthy AI content moderation.
Edge Deployment of Small Language Models, a comprehensive comparison of CPU, GPU and NPU backends
Edge computing processes data where it is generated, enabling faster decisions, lower bandwidth usage, and improved privacy. However, edge devices typically operate under strict constraints on processing power, memory, and energy consumption, making them unsuitable for large language models (LLMs). Fortunately, Small Language Models (SLMs) offer lightweight alternatives that bring AI inference to resource-constrained environments by significantly reducing computational cost while remaining suitable for specialization and customization. In this scenario, selecting the hardware platform that best balances performance and efficiency for SLM inference is challenging due to strict resource limitations. To address this issue, this study evaluates the inference performance and energy efficiency of commercial CPUs (Intel and ARM), GPUs (NVIDIA), and NPUs (RaiderChip) for running SLMs. GPUs, the usual platform of choice, are compared against commercial NPUs and recent multi-core CPUs. While NPUs leverage custom hardware designs optimized for computation, modern CPUs increasingly incorporate dedicated features targeting language-model workloads. Using a common execution framework and a suite of state-of-the-art SLMs, we analyze both maximum achievable performance and processing and energy efficiency across commercial solutions available for each platform. The results indicate that specialized backends outperform general-purpose CPUs, with NPUs achieving the highest performance by a wide margin. Bandwidth normalization proves essential for fair cross-architecture comparisons. Although low-power ARM processors deliver competitive results when energy usage is considered, metrics that combine performance and power (such as EDP) again highlight NPUs as the dominant architecture. These findings show that designs optimized for both efficiency and performance offer a clear advantage for edge workloads.
Escaping the Verifier: Learning to Reason via Demonstrations
Training Large Language Models (LLMs) to reason often relies on Reinforcement Learning (RL) with task-specific verifiers. However, many real-world reasoning-intensive tasks lack verifiers, despite offering abundant expert demonstrations that remain under-utilized for reasoning-focused training. We introduce RARO (Relativistic Adversarial Reasoning Optimization) that learns strong reasoning capabilities from only expert demonstrations via Inverse Reinforcement Learning. Our method sets up an adversarial game between a policy and a relativistic critic: the policy learns to mimic expert answers, while the critic aims to identify the experts among (expert, policy) answer pairs. Both the policy and the critic are trained jointly and continuously via RL, and we identify the key stabilization techniques required for robust learning. Empirically, RARO significantly outperforms strong verifier-free baselines on all of our evaluation tasks -- Countdown, DeepMath, and Poetry Writing -- and enjoys the same robust scaling trends as RL with verifiers. These results demonstrate that our method effectively elicits strong reasoning performance from expert demonstrations alone, enabling robust reasoning learning even when task-specific verifiers are unavailable. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have been driven substantially by improvements in their reasoning abilities. Reasoning enables LLMs to perform deliberate intermediate computations before producing answers to the user queries, proposing candidate solutions and self-corrections. Much of this progress has been enabled via Reinforcement Learning (RL) on verifiable tasks such as mathematics and competitive programming (DeepSeek-AI et al., 2025; Y ang et al., 2025a; Shao et al., 2024; Luo et al., 2025). Notably, recent work has demonstrated that RL with V erifiable Rewards (RL VR) can enable LLMs to develop robust reasoning capabilities without any additional supervision (DeepSeek-AI et al., 2025). A growing body of work further improves the efficiency and stability of such RL algorithms on verifiable tasks, such as DAPO (Y u et al., 2025) and GSPO (Zheng et al., 2025). However, comparatively little attention has been paid to developing reasoning abilities on non-verifiable tasks, where task-specific verifiers are unavailable. Y et, in many impactful and challenging tasks -- such as analytical writing, open-ended research, or financial analysis -- LLM outputs are not directly verifiable due to hard-to-specify criteria, wide variation among acceptable answers, and other practical constraints. A popular approach in these settings is Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) (Ouyang et al., 2022; Rafailov et al., 2023), but they require collecting human preferences beyond demonstration data, which is often a time-consuming and expensive process.
Mortgage Language Model: Domain-Adaptive Pretraining with Residual Instruction, Alignment Tuning, and Task-Specific Routing
Jain, Manish, Ponnambalam, Satheesh Kumar, Faroz, Salman, Lns, Chandrakanth, Sharma, Vinay
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional capabilities across general domains, yet their application to specialized sectors such as mortgage finance requires domain-specific knowledge augmentation while preserving instruction-following fidelity. We present MortgageLLM, a novel domain-specific large language model that addresses this dual challenge. It is developed using a dual-track specialization framework from a single base model (LLaMA-3.1-8B). We opted for this dual-expert approach as a single multi-task model suffers from performance trade-offs, where optimizing for structured tasks (via SFT) degrades conversational fidelity (via DPO). Our dual-track method solves this by creating two specialists, allowing each to be optimally trained for its distinct capability. Our approach applies the instruction residual technique to restore instruction-following capabilities post-domain adaptation without supervised fine-tuning. We contribute: (1) application of this residual technique to the highly specialized mortgage finance domain; (2) a dual-expert architecture combining a conversational Q&A model and a structured task model for classification and summarization; and (3) an intelligent task routing mechanism using few-shot classification performed by one of the expert models itself. We validate our approach on domain-specific benchmarks, where our final model (MLM v2) significantly outperforms the base LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instruct, achieving an LLM-as-a-Judge summarization score of 4.58 (vs. 3.99), a Q&A score of 4.09 (vs. 4.0), and a classification score of 2.6 (vs. 1.2). On semantic similarity, our model achieved a BERTScore of 0.77 for summarization (vs. 0.74), 0.68 for Q&A (vs. 0.58), and 0.75 for classification (vs. 0.73), substantially outperforming baseline approaches.
Image2Gcode: Image-to-G-code Generation for Additive Manufacturing Using Diffusion-Transformer Model
Wang, Ziyue, Jadhav, Yayati, Pak, Peter, Farimani, Amir Barati
Mechanical design and manufacturing workflows conventionally begin with conceptual design, followed by the creation of a computer-aided design (CAD) model and fabrication through material-extrusion (MEX) printing. This process requires converting CAD geometry into machine-readable G-code through slicing and path planning. While each step is well established, dependence on CAD modeling remains a major bottleneck: constructing object-specific 3D geometry is slow and poorly suited to rapid prototyping. Even minor design variations typically necessitate manual updates in CAD software, making iteration time-consuming and difficult to scale. To address this limitation, we introduce Image2Gcode, an end-to-end data-driven framework that bypasses the CAD stage and generates printer-ready G-code directly from images and part drawings. Instead of relying on an explicit 3D model, a hand-drawn or captured 2D image serves as the sole input. The framework first extracts slice-wise structural cues from the image and then employs a denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) over G-code sequences. Through iterative denoising, the model transforms Gaussian noise into executable print-move trajectories with corresponding extrusion parameters, establishing a direct mapping from visual input to native toolpaths. By producing structured G-code directly from 2D imagery, Image2Gcode eliminates the need for CAD or STL intermediates, lowering the entry barrier for additive manufacturing and accelerating the design-to-fabrication cycle. This approach supports on-demand prototyping from simple sketches or visual references and integrates with upstream 2D-to-3D reconstruction modules to enable an automated pipeline from concept to physical artifact. The result is a flexible, computationally efficient framework that advances accessibility in design iteration, repair workflows, and distributed manufacturing.
Towards Characterizing Knowledge Distillation of PPG Heart Rate Estimation Models
Arora, Kanav, Narayanswamy, Girish, Patel, Shwetak, Li, Richard
Heart rate estimation from photoplethysmography (PPG) signals generated by wearable devices such as smartwatches and fitness trackers has significant implications for the health and well-being of individuals. Although prior work has demonstrated deep learning models with strong performance in the heart rate estimation task, in order to deploy these models on wearable devices, these models must also adhere to strict memory and latency constraints. In this work, we explore and characterize how large pre-trained PPG models may be distilled to smaller models appropriate for real-time inference on the edge. We evaluate four distillation strategies through comprehensive sweeps of teacher and student model capacities: (1) hard distillation, (2) soft distillation, (3) decoupled knowledge distillation (DKD), and (4) feature distillation. We present a characterization of the resulting scaling laws describing the relationship between model size and performance. This early investigation lays the groundwork for practical and predictable methods for building edge-deployable models for physiological sensing.
DiscoVerse: Multi-Agent Pharmaceutical Co-Scientist for Traceable Drug Discovery and Reverse Translation
Zheng, Xiaochen, Serra, Alvaro, Chernov, Ilya Schneider, Marchesi, Maddalena, Musvasva, Eunice, Doktorova, Tatyana Y.
Pharmaceutical research and development has accumulated vast and heterogeneous archives of data. Much of this knowledge stems from discontinued programs, and reusing these archives is invaluable for reverse translation. However, in practice, such reuse is often infeasible. In this work, we introduce DiscoVerse, a multi-agent co-scientist designed to support pharmaceutical research and development at Roche. Designed as a human-in-the-loop assistant, DiscoVerse enables domain-specific queries by delivering evidence-based answers: it retrieves relevant data, links across documents, summarises key findings and preserves institutional memory. We assess DiscoVerse through expert evaluation of source-linked outputs. Our evaluation spans a selected subset of 180 molecules from Roche's research and development repositories, encompassing over 0.87 billion BPE tokens and more than four decades of research. To our knowledge, this represents the first agentic framework to be systematically assessed on real pharmaceutical data for reverse translation, enabled by authorized access to confidential archives covering the full lifecycle of drug development. Our contributions include: role-specialized agent designs aligned with scientist workflows; human-in-the-loop support for reverse translation; expert evaluation; and a large-scale demonstration showing promising decision-making insights. In brief, across seven benchmark queries, DiscoVerse achieved near-perfect recall ($\geq 0.99$) with moderate precision ($0.71-0.91$). Qualitative assessments and three real-world pharmaceutical use cases further showed faithful, source-linked synthesis across preclinical and clinical evidence.
ChemLabs on ChemO: A Multi-Agent System for Multimodal Reasoning on IChO 2025
Xu, Qiang, Bai, Shengyuan, Chen, Leqing, Liu, Zijing, Li, Yu
Olympiad-level benchmarks in mathematics and physics are crucial testbeds for advanced AI reasoning, but chemistry, with its unique multimodal symbolic language, has remained an open challenge. W e introduce ChemO, a new benchmark built from the International Chemistry Olympiad (IChO) 2025. ChemO features two key innovations for automated assessment: Assessment-Equivalent Reformulation (AER), which converts problems requiring visual outputs (e.g., drawing molecules) into computationally tractable formats, and Structured Visual Enhancement (SVE), a diagnostic mechanism to disentangle a model's visual perception capabilities from its core chemical reasoning. T o tackle this benchmark, we propose ChemLabs, a hierarchical multi-agent framework that mimics human expert collaboration through specialized agents for problem decomposition, perception, reasoning, and auditing. Experiments on state-of-the-art multimodal models demonstrate that combining SVE with our multi-agent system yields dramatic performance gains. Our top configuration achieves a score of 93.6 out of 100, surpassing an estimated human gold medal threshold and establishing a new state-of-the-art in automated chemical problem-solving.
What Does It Take to Be a Good AI Research Agent? Studying the Role of Ideation Diversity
Audran-Reiss, Alexis, Armengol-Estapé, Jordi, Hambardzumyan, Karen, Budhiraja, Amar, Josifoski, Martin, Toledo, Edan, Hazra, Rishi, Magka, Despoina, Shvartsman, Michael, Pathak, Parth, Kao, Justine T, Cipolina-Kun, Lucia, Gauri, Bhavul, Gagnon-Audet, Jean-Christophe, Tewolde, Emanuel, Zhang, Jenny, Cohen, Taco, Adi, Yossi, Shavrina, Tatiana, Bachrach, Yoram
AI research agents offer the promise to accelerate scientific progress by automating the design, implementation, and training of machine learning models. However, the field is still in its infancy, and the key factors driving the success or failure of agent trajectories are not fully understood. We examine the role that ideation diversity plays in agent performance. First, we analyse agent trajectories on MLE-bench, a well-known benchmark to evaluate AI research agents, across different models and agent scaffolds. Our analysis reveals that different models and agent scaffolds yield varying degrees of ideation diversity, and that higher-performing agents tend to have increased ideation diversity. Further, we run a controlled experiment where we modify the degree of ideation diversity, demonstrating that higher ideation diversity results in stronger performance. Finally, we strengthen our results by examining additional evaluation metrics beyond the standard medal-based scoring of MLE-bench, showing that our findings still hold across other agent performance metrics.