Deep learning models are notoriously vulnerable to imperceptible perturbations. Most existing research centers on adversarial robustness (AR), which evaluates models under worst-case scenarios by examining the existence of deterministic adversarial examples (AEs). In contrast, probabilistic robustness (PR) adopts a statistical perspective, measuring the probability that predictions remain correct under stochastic perturbations. While PR is widely regarded as a practical complement to AR, dedicated training methods for improving PR are still relatively underexplored, albeit with emerging progress. Among the few PR-targeted training methods, we identify three limitations: i non-comparable evaluation protocols; ii limited comparisons to strong AT baselines despite anecdotal PR gains from AT; and iii no unified framework to compare the generalization of these methods. Thus, we introduce PRBench, the first benchmark dedicated to evaluating improvements in PR achieved by different robustness training methods. PRBench empirically compares most common AT and PR-targeted training methods using a comprehensive set of metrics, including clean accuracy, PR and AR performance, training efficiency, and generalization error (GE). We also provide theoretical analysis on the GE of PR performance across different training methods. Main findings revealed by PRBench include: AT methods are more versatile than PR-targeted training methods in terms of improving both AR and PR performance across diverse hyperparameter settings, while PR-targeted training methods consistently yield lower GE and higher clean accuracy. A leaderboard comprising 222 trained models across 7 datasets and 10 model architectures is publicly available at https://tmpspace.github.io/PRBenchLeaderboard/.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are increasingly being applied to code-related tasks. Although PLMs have achieved good results, they do not take into account potential high-order data correlations within the code. We propose three types of high-order correlations in code tokens, i.e. abstract syntax tree family correlation, lexical correlation, and line correlation. We design a tokens and hyperedges generator to capture these high-order data correlations. We improve the architecture of hypergraph neural networks and combine it with adapter tuning to propose a novel hypergraph-based adapter (HGAdapter) to fine-tune PLMs. HGAdapter can encode high-order data correlations and is allowed to be inserted into various PLMs to enhance performance. Experiments were conducted on several public datasets, including six languages of code summarization and code clone detection tasks. Our methods improved the performance of PLMs in datasets to varying degrees. Experimental results validate the introduction of high-order data correlations that contribute to improved effectiveness.

As an Indo-Aryan language with limited available data, Chakma remains largely underrepresented in language models. In this work, we introduce a novel corpus of contextually coherent Bangla-transliterated Chakma, curated from Chakma literature, and validated by native speakers. Using this dataset, we fine-tune six encoder-based transformer models, including multilingual (mBERT, XLM-RoBERTa, DistilBERT), regional (BanglaBERT, IndicBERT), and monolingual English (DeBERTaV3) variants on masked language modeling (MLM) tasks. Our experiments show that fine-tuned multilingual models outperform their pre-trained counterparts when adapted to Bangla-transliterated Chakma, achieving up to 73.54% token accuracy and a perplexity as low as 2.90. Our analysis further highlights the impact of data quality on model performance and shows the limitations of OCR pipelines for morphologically rich Indic scripts. Our research demonstrates that Bangla-transliterated Chakma can be very effective for transfer learning for Chakma language, and we release our dataset to encourage further research on multilingual language modeling for low-resource languages.

Large language models (LLM) have emerged as a promising avenue for time series forecasting, offering the potential to integrate multimodal data. However, existing LLM-based approaches face notable limitations-such as marginalized role in model architectures, reliance on coarse statistical text prompts, and lack of interpretability. In this work, we introduce Augur, a fully LLM driven time series forecasting framework that exploits LLM causal reasoning to discover and use directed causal associations among covariates. Augur uses a two stage teacher student architecture where a powerful teacher LLM infers a directed causal graph from time series using heuristic search together with pairwise causality testing. A lightweight student agent then refines the graph and fine tune on high confidence causal associations that are encoded as rich textual prompts to perform forecasting. This design improves predictive accuracy while yielding transparent, traceable reasoning about variable interactions. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets with 26 baselines demonstrate that Augur achieves competitive performance and robust zero-shot generalization.

Industrial surface defect detection (SDD) is critical for ensuring product quality and manufacturing reliability. Due to the diverse shapes and sizes of surface defects, SDD faces two main challenges: intraclass difference and interclass similarity. Existing methods primarily utilize manually designed models, which require extensive trial and error and often struggle to address both challenges effectively. To overcome this, we propose AutoNAD, an automated neural architecture design framework for SDD that jointly searches over convolutions, transformers, and multi-layer perceptrons. This hybrid design enables the model to capture both fine-grained local variations and long-range semantic context, addressing the two key challenges while reducing the cost of manual network design. To support efficient training of such a diverse search space, AutoNAD introduces a cross weight sharing strategy, which accelerates supernet convergence and improves subnet performance. Additionally, a searchable multi-level feature aggregation module (MFAM) is integrated to enhance multi-scale feature learning. Beyond detection accuracy, runtime efficiency is essential for industrial deployment. To this end, AutoNAD incorporates a latency-aware prior to guide the selection of efficient architectures. The effectiveness of AutoNAD is validated on three industrial defect datasets and further applied within a defect imaging and detection platform. Code is available at https://github.com/Yuxi104/AutoNAD.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across diverse natural language processing tasks, yet their vulnerability to character-level adversarial manipulations presents significant security challenges for real-world deployments. This paper presents a study of different special character attacks including unicode, homoglyph, structural, and textual encoding attacks aimed at bypassing safety mechanisms. We evaluate seven prominent open-source models ranging from 3.8B to 32B parameters on 4,000+ attack attempts. These experiments reveal critical vulnerabilities across all model sizes, exposing failure modes that include successful jailbreaks, incoherent outputs, and unrelated hallucinations.

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a competitive non-autoregressive paradigm due to their unique training and inference approach. However, there is currently a lack of safety study on this novel architecture. In this paper, we present the first analysis of dLLMs' safety performance and propose a novel safety alignment method tailored to their unique generation characteristics. Specifically, we identify a critical asymmetry between the defender and attacker in terms of security. For the defender, we reveal that the middle tokens of the response, rather than the initial ones, are more critical to the overall safety of dLLM outputs; this seems to suggest that aligning middle tokens can be more beneficial to the defender. The attacker, on the contrary, may have limited power to manipulate middle tokens, as we find dLLMs have a strong tendency towards a sequential generation order in practice, forcing the attack to meet this distribution and diverting it from influencing the critical middle tokens. Building on this asymmetry, we introduce Middle-tOken Safety Alignment (MOSA), a novel method that directly aligns the model's middle generation with safe refusals exploiting reinforcement learning. We implement MOSA and compare its security performance against eight attack methods on two benchmarks. We also test the utility of MOSA-aligned dLLM on coding, math, and general reasoning. The results strongly prove the superiority of MOSA.

Large Language Model (LLM) powered agents have emerged as effective planners for Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) systems. While most existing AutoML approaches focus on automating feature engineering and model architecture search, recent studies in time series forecasting suggest that lightweight models can often achieve state-of-the-art performance. This observation led us to explore improving data quality, rather than model architecture, as a potentially fruitful direction for AutoML on time series data. We propose DCATS, a Data-Centric Agent for Time Series. DCATS leverages metadata accompanying time series to clean data while optimizing forecasting performance. We evaluated DCATS using four time series forecasting models on a large-scale traffic volume forecasting dataset. Results demonstrate that DCATS achieves an average 6% error reduction across all tested models and time horizons, highlighting the potential of data-centric approaches in AutoML for time series forecasting.

Text embeddings have attracted growing interest due to their effectiveness across a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including retrieval, classification, clustering, bitext mining, and summarization. With the emergence of pretrained language models (PLMs), general-purpose text embeddings (GPTE) have gained significant traction for their ability to produce rich, transferable representations. The general architecture of GPTE typically leverages PLMs to derive dense text representations, which are then optimized through contrastive learning on large-scale pairwise datasets. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of GPTE in the era of PLMs, focusing on the roles PLMs play in driving its development. We first examine the fundamental architecture and describe the basic roles of PLMs in GPTE, i.e., embedding extraction, expressivity enhancement, training strategies, learning objectives, and data construction. We then describe advanced roles enabled by PLMs, including multilingual support, multimodal integration, code understanding, and scenario-specific adaptation. Finally, we highlight potential future research directions that move beyond traditional improvement goals, including ranking integration, safety considerations, bias mitigation, structural information incorporation, and the cognitive extension of embeddings. This survey aims to serve as a valuable reference for both newcomers and established researchers seeking to understand the current state and future potential of GPTE.

--The expansion of the low-altitude economy has underscored the significance of Low-Altitude Network Coverage (LANC) prediction for designing aerial corridors. While accurate LANC forecasting hinges on the antenna beam patterns of Base Stations (BSs), these patterns are typically proprietary and not readily accessible. Operational parameters of BSs, which inherently contain beam information, offer an opportunity for data-driven low-altitude coverage prediction. However, collecting extensive low-altitude road test data is cost-prohibitive, often yielding only sparse samples per BS. This scarcity results in two primary challenges: imbalanced feature sampling due to limited variability in high-dimensional operational parameters against the backdrop of substantial changes in low-dimensional sampling locations, and diminished generalizability stemming from insufficient data samples. T o overcome these obstacles, we introduce a dual strategy comprising expert knowledge-based feature compression and disentangled representation learning. The former reduces feature space complexity by leveraging communications expertise, while the latter enhances model gen-eralizability through the integration of propagation models and distinct subnetworks that capture and aggregate the semantic representations of latent features. Experimental evaluation confirms the efficacy of our framework, yielding a 7% reduction in error compared to the best baseline algorithm. Real-network validations further attest to its reliability, achieving practical prediction accuracy with MAE errors at the 5 dB level. Xiaojie Li is with the National Mobile Communication Research Laboratory, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China, also with the College of Physics, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, China, and also with the Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data, The Chinese University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen, Guangdong 518172, China (e-mail: xiaojieli@nuaa.edu.cn).