Deep Learning
Stable-Drift: A Patient-Aware Latent Drift Replay Method for Stabilizing Representations in Continual Learning
Theofilou, Paraskevi-Antonia, Thota, Anuhya, Kollias, Stefanos, Thota, Mamatha
When deep learning models are sequentially trained on new data, they tend to abruptly lose performance on previously learned tasks, a critical failure known as catastrophic forgetting. This challenge severely limits the deployment of AI in medical imaging, where models must continually adapt to data from new hospitals without compromising established diagnostic knowledge. To address this, we introduce a latent drift-guided replay method that identifies and replays samples with high representational instability. Specifically, our method quantifies this instability via latent drift, the change in a sample internal feature representation after naive domain adaptation. To ensure diversity and clinical relevance, we aggregate drift at the patient level, our memory buffer stores the per patient slices exhibiting the greatest multi-layer representation shift. Evaluated on a cross-hospital COVID-19 CT classification task using state-of-the-art CNN and Vision Transformer backbones, our method substantially reduces forgetting compared to naive fine-tuning and random replay. This work highlights latent drift as a practical and interpretable replay signal for advancing robust continual learning in real world medical settings.
Improving LLM-based Ontology Matching with fine-tuning on synthetic data
Sousa, Guilherme, Lima, Rinaldo, Trojahn, Cassia
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being integrated into various components of Ontology Matching pipelines. This paper investigates the capability of LLMs to perform ontology matching directly on ontology modules and generate the corresponding alignments. Furthermore, it is explored how a dedicated fine-tuning strategy can enhance the model's matching performance in a zero-shot setting. The proposed method incorporates a search space reduction technique to select relevant subsets from both source and target ontologies, which are then used to automatically construct prompts. Recognizing the scarcity of reference alignments for training, a novel LLM-based approach is introduced for generating a synthetic dataset. This process creates a corpus of ontology submodule pairs and their corresponding reference alignments, specifically designed to fine-tune an LLM for the ontology matching task. The proposed approach was evaluated on the Conference, Geolink, Enslaved, Taxon, and Hydrography datasets from the OAEI complex track. The results demonstrate that the LLM fine-tuned on the synthetically generated data exhibits superior performance compared to the non-fine-tuned base model. The key contribution is a strategy that combines automatic dataset generation with fine-tuning to effectively adapt LLMs for ontology matching tasks.
LLM-Cave: A benchmark and light environment for large language models reasoning and decision-making system
Li, Huanyu, Li, Zongyuan, Huang, Wei, Guo, Xian
Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT o1, ChatGPT o3, and DeepSeek R1 have shown great potential in solving difficult problems. However, current LLM evaluation benchmarks are limited to one-step interactions. Some of the existing sequence decision-making environments, such as TextStarCraftII and LLM-PySC2, are too complicated and require hours of interaction to complete a game. In this paper, we introduce LLM-Cave, a benchmark and light environment for LLM reasoning and decision-making systems. This environment is a classic instance in the era of Symbolism. Artificial intelligence enables the agent to explore the environment and avoid potential losses by reasoning about nearby dangers using partial observable state information. In the experiment, we evaluated the sequential reasoning ability, decision-making performance and computational efficiency of mainstream large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4o-mini, o1-mini, and DeepSeek-R1. Experiments show that while Deepseek-R1 achieved the highest success rate on complex reasoning tasks, smaller models like 4o-mini significantly narrowed the performance gap on challenges by employing Chain of Speculation and Planner-Critic strategies, at the expense of reduced computational efficiency. This indicates that structured, multi-step reasoning combined with an LLM-based feedback mechanism can substantially enhance an LLM's decision-making capabilities, providing a promising direction for improving reasoning in weaker models and suggesting a new reasoning-centered benchmark for LLM assessment. Our code is open-sourced in https://github.com/puleya1277/CaveEnv.
The Multiclass Score-Oriented Loss (MultiSOL) on the Simplex
Marchetti, Francesco, Legnaro, Edoardo, Guastavino, Sabrina
In the supervised binary classification setting, score-oriented losses have been introduced with the aim of optimizing a chosen performance metric directly during the training phase, thus avoiding \textit{a posteriori} threshold tuning. To do this, in their construction, the decision threshold is treated as a random variable provided with a certain \textit{a priori} distribution. In this paper, we use a recently introduced multidimensional threshold-based classification framework to extend such score-oriented losses to multiclass classification, defining the Multiclass Score-Oriented Loss (MultiSOL) functions. As also demonstrated by several classification experiments, this proposed family of losses is designed to preserve the main advantages observed in the binary setting, such as the direct optimization of the target metric and the robustness to class imbalance, achieving performance comparable to other state-of-the-art loss functions and providing new insights into the interaction between simplex geometry and score-oriented learning.
Revisiting the Necessity of Lengthy Chain-of-Thought in Vision-centric Reasoning Generalization
Du, Yifan, Zhou, Kun, Min, Yingqian, Ling, Yue, Zhao, Wayne Xin, Wu, Youbin
We study how different Chain-of-Thought (CoT) designs affect the acquisition of the generalizable visual reasoning ability in vision-language models (VLMs). While CoT data, especially long or visual CoT such as "think with image", has been widely used to supervise intermediate reasoning, it remains unclear why specific CoT designs help and which ones truly support generalizable reasoning. To systematically evaluate this, we focus on a controlled maze-solving benchmark where reasoning rules are fully visual, difficulty can be tuned by grid size, and all the intermediate steps can be automatically generated. Using Qwen2.5-VL-7B under a standard SFT-then-RL pipeline, we compare three representative CoT formats: Language CoT, Grounding CoT (with spatial coordinate trajectories), and Visual CoT (with image manipulations). Our experiments reveal that visual and longer CoT mainly accelerate convergence but do not lift the final performance ceiling; concise CoT containing only essential grounding steps outperforms longer traces; and, strikingly, CoT retaining only the minimal grounding results generalizes best across different maze sizes. We further validate these insights on other vision-centric tasks. These findings highlight a "short is long" effect and provide practical guidance for constructing more generalizable SFT datasets for visual reasoning.
Smarter, not Bigger: Fine-Tuned RAG-Enhanced LLMs for Automotive HIL Testing
Feng, Chao, Liu, Zihan, Gupta, Siddhant, Cui, Gongpei, von der Assen, Jan, Stiller, Burkhard
Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) testing is essential for automotive validation but suffers from fragmented and underutilized test artifacts. This paper presents HIL-GPT, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system integrating domain-adapted large language models (LLMs) with semantic retrieval. HIL-GPT leverages embedding fine-tuning using a domain-specific dataset constructed via heuristic mining and LLM-assisted synthesis, combined with vector indexing for scalable, traceable test case and requirement retrieval. Experiments show that fine-tuned compact models, such as \texttt{bge-base-en-v1.5}, achieve a superior trade-off between accuracy, latency, and cost compared to larger models, challenging the notion that bigger is always better. An A/B user study further confirms that RAG-enhanced assistants improve perceived helpfulness, truthfulness, and satisfaction over general-purpose LLMs. These findings provide insights for deploying efficient, domain-aligned LLM-based assistants in industrial HIL environments.
DeepSeekMath-V2: Towards Self-Verifiable Mathematical Reasoning
Shao, Zhihong, Luo, Yuxiang, Lu, Chengda, Ren, Z. Z., Hu, Jiewen, Ye, Tian, Gou, Zhibin, Ma, Shirong, Zhang, Xiaokang
Large language models have made significant progress in mathematical reasoning, which serves as an important testbed for AI and could impact scientific research if further advanced. By scaling reasoning with reinforcement learning that rewards correct final answers, LLMs have improved from poor performance to saturating quantitative reasoning competitions like AIME and HMMT in one year. However, this approach faces fundamental limitations. Pursuing higher final answer accuracy doesn't address a key issue: correct answers don't guarantee correct reasoning. Moreover, many mathematical tasks like theorem proving require rigorous step-by-step derivation rather than numerical answers, making final answer rewards inapplicable. To push the limits of deep reasoning, we believe it is necessary to verify the comprehensiveness and rigor of mathematical reasoning. Self-verification is particularly important for scaling test-time compute, especially for open problems without known solutions. Towards self-verifiable mathematical reasoning, we investigate how to train an accurate and faithful LLM-based verifier for theorem proving. We then train a proof generator using the verifier as the reward model, and incentivize the generator to identify and resolve as many issues as possible in their own proofs before finalizing them. To maintain the generation-verification gap as the generator becomes stronger, we propose to scale verification compute to automatically label new hard-to-verify proofs, creating training data to further improve the verifier. Our resulting model, DeepSeekMath-V2, demonstrates strong theorem-proving capabilities, achieving gold-level scores on IMO 2025 and CMO 2024 and a near-perfect 118/120 on Putnam 2024 with scaled test-time compute.
CoT4AD: A Vision-Language-Action Model with Explicit Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Autonomous Driving
Wang, Zhaohui, Yu, Tengbo, Tang, Hao
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently attracted growing attention in end-to-end autonomous driving for their strong reasoning capabilities and rich world knowledge. However, existing VLAs often suffer from limited numerical reasoning ability and overly simplified input-output mappings, which hinder their performance in complex driving scenarios requiring step-by-step causal reasoning. To address these challenges, we propose CoT4AD, a novel VLA framework that introduces Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning for autonomous driving to enhance both numerical and causal reasoning in Vision-Language Models (VLMs). CoT4AD integrates visual observations and language instructions to perform semantic reasoning, scene understanding, and trajectory planning. During training, it explicitly models a perception-question-prediction-action CoT to align the reasoning space with the action space across multiple driving tasks. During inference, it performs implicit CoT reasoning to enable consistent numerical reasoning and robust decision-making in dynamic environments. Extensive experiments on both real-world and simulated benchmarks, including nuScenes and Bench2Drive, demonstrate that CoT4AD achieves state-of-the-art performance in both open-loop and closed-loop evaluations. Code will be released upon paper acceptance.
Enhancing Trustworthiness with Mixed Precision: Benchmarks, Opportunities, and Challenges
Lu, Guanxi, Chen, Hao Mark, Que, Zhiqiang, Luk, Wayne, Fan, Hongxiang
Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising performance across various tasks. However, their autoregressive decoding process poses significant challenges for efficient deployment on existing AI hardware. Quantization alleviates memory and compute pressure by compressing weights, activations, and KV caches to low precisions while preserving generation quality. However, existing quantization frameworks typically focus on perplexity or classification accuracy, often omitting critical trustworthiness metrics. This gap introduces risks when applying quantized LLMs to downstream high-stakes domains such as finance and healthcare. In this work, we systematically investigate the impact of quantization on four trustworthiness metrics (adversarial robustness, fairness, machine ethics, and out-of-distribution robustness) and identify the instability across compression ratios and quantization methods. Building on these observations, we develop a novel precision-ensemble voting approach that leverages predictions from mixed-precision variants of the same model and consistently improves performance by up to $5.8\%$ on trustworthiness metrics. Our results highlight the importance of considering trustworthiness when developing model compression techniques and point to research opportunities at the intersection of compression and trustworthiness for safety-critical applications.
Adversarial Flow Models
Lin, Shanchuan, Yang, Ceyuan, Lin, Zhijie, Chen, Hao, Fan, Haoqi
Our method supports native one-step or multi-step generation and is trained using the adversarial objective. Unlike traditional GANs, where the generator learns an arbitrary transport plan between the noise and the data distributions, our generator learns a deterministic noise-to-data mapping, which is the same optimal transport as in flow-matching models. This significantly stabilizes adversarial training. Also, unlike consistency-based methods, our model directly learns one-step or few-step generation without needing to learn the intermediate timesteps of the probability flow for propagation. This saves model capacity, reduces training iterations, and avoids error accumulation. Under the same 1NFE setting on ImageNet-256px, our B/2 model approaches the performance of consistency-based XL/2 models, while our XL/2 model creates a new best FID of 2.38. W e additionally show the possibility of end-to-end training of 56-layer and 112-layer models through depth repetition without any intermediate supervision, and achieve FIDs of 2.08 and 1.94 using a single forward pass, surpassing their 2NFE and 4NFE counterparts.