Deep Learning
Learning Degenerate Manifolds of Frustrated Magnets with Boltzmann Machines
Glass, Jackson C., Chern, Gia-Wei
We show that Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) provide a flexible generative framework for modeling spin configurations in disordered yet strongly correlated phases of frustrated magnets. As a benchmark, we first demonstrate that an RBM can learn the zero-temperature ground-state manifold of the one-dimensional ANNNI model at its multiphase point, accurately reproducing its characteristic oscillatory and exponentially decaying correlations. We then apply RBMs to kagome spin ice and show that they successfully learn the local ice rules and short-range correlations of the extensively degenerate ice-I manifold. Correlation functions computed from RBM-generated configurations closely match those from direct Monte Carlo simulations. For the partially ordered ice-II phase -- featuring long-range charge order and broken time-reversal symmetry -- accurate modeling requires RBMs with uniform-sign bias fields, mirroring the underlying symmetry breaking. These results highlight the utility of RBMs as generative models for learning constrained and highly frustrated magnetic states.
CodeFuse-CommitEval: Towards Benchmarking LLM's Power on Commit Message and Code Change Inconsistency Detection
Zhang, Qingyu, Liu, Puzhuo, Di, Peng, Qian, Chenxiong
Version control relies on commit messages to convey the rationale for code changes, but these messages are often low quality and, more critically, inconsistent with their diffs-known as message-code inconsistency (MCI). MCIs mislead reviewers, hinder maintenance, contaminate research datasets, and may obscure security patches. Yet, no dedicated benchmark exists to evaluate models for MCI detection. We introduce CODEFUSE-COMMITEVAL, the first benchmark designed for MCI detection using large language models (LLMs). Built on the ApacheCM dataset for diversity and quality, we generate seven types of inconsistent messages through rule-guided mutations of originally consistent commits and apply two-fold validation to verify both positive and negative samples. Using this labeled dataset of message-diff pairs, we evaluate six state-of-the-art open-source LLMs under a vanilla setting and with three augmentation strategies: few-shot prompting, chain-of-thought, and extended context. Results show models detect inconsistent commits more reliably than consistent ones (average Recall 85.95%, Precision 80.28%, Specificity 63.8%); gpt-oss-20B performs best overall but uses over twice the tokens of others. Augmentation effects vary: adjacent context helps larger models but adds noise for smaller ones; few-shot improves accuracy and reduces token use, yet increases universally incorrect predictions; chain-of-thought boosts precision and specificity at the cost of recall and higher token consumption. Type-wise analysis reveals higher detectability for component, file-path, and operation inconsistencies, but lower accuracy and higher token cost for intent-level "purpose" inconsistencies. CODEFUSE-COMMITEVAL provides a rigorous foundation for measuring, comparing, and advancing MCI detection, highlighting the need for richer context and balanced data to capture high-level semantic gaps.
Cross-LLM Generalization of Behavioral Backdoor Detection in AI Agent Supply Chains
As AI agents become integral to enterprise workflows, their reliance on shared tool libraries and pre-trained components creates significant supply chain vulnerabilities. While previous work has demonstrated behavioral backdoor detection within individual LLM architectures, the critical question of cross-LLM generalization remains unexplored, a gap with serious implications for organizations deploying multiple AI systems. We present the first systematic study of cross-LLM behavioral backdoor detection, evaluating generalization across six production LLMs (GPT-5.1, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Grok 4.1, Llama 4 Maverick, GPT-OSS 120B, and DeepSeek Chat V3.1). Through 1,198 execution traces and 36 cross-model experiments, we quantify a critical finding: single-model detectors achieve 92.7% accuracy within their training distribution but only 49.2% across different LLMs, a 43.4 percentage point generalization gap equivalent to random guessing. Our analysis reveals that this gap stems from model-specific behavioral signatures, particularly in temporal features (coefficient of variation > 0.8), while structural features remain stable across architectures. We show that model-aware detection incorporating model identity as an additional feature achieves 90.6% accuracy universally across all evaluated models. We release our multi-LLM trace dataset and detection framework to enable reproducible research.
Profile-LLM: Dynamic Profile Optimization for Realistic Personality Expression in LLMs
Dai, Shi-Wei, Shie, Yan-Wei, Yang, Tsung-Huan, Ku, Lun-Wei, Li, Yung-Hui
Personalized Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to be an effective way to create more engaging and enjoyable user-AI interactions. While previous studies have explored using prompts to elicit specific personality traits in LLMs, they have not optimized these prompts to maximize personality expression. To address this limitation, we propose PersonaPulse: Dynamic Profile Optimization for Realistic Personality Expression in LLMs, a framework that leverages LLMs' inherent knowledge of personality traits to iteratively enhance role-play prompts while integrating a situational response benchmark as a scoring tool, ensuring a more realistic and contextually grounded evaluation to guide the optimization process. Quantitative evaluations demonstrate that the prompts generated by PersonaPulse outperform those of prior work, which were designed based on personality descriptions from psychological studies. Additionally, we explore the relationship between model size and personality modeling through extensive experiments. Finally, we find that, for certain personality traits, the extent of personality evocation can be partially controlled by pausing the optimization process. These findings underscore the importance of prompt optimization in shaping personality expression within LLMs, offering valuable insights for future research on adaptive AI interactions.
Mosaic Pruning: A Hierarchical Framework for Generalizable Pruning of Mixture-of-Experts Models
Hu, Wentao, Zhao, Mingkuan, Song, Shuangyong, Zhu, Xiaoyan, Lai, Xin, Wang, Jiayin
Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) architectures have enabled a new frontier in scaling Large Language Models (LLMs), offering superior performance by activating only a fraction of their total parameters during inference. However, their practical deployment is severely hampered by substantial static memory overhead, as all experts must be loaded into memory. Existing post-training pruning methods, while reducing model size, often derive their pruning criteria from a single, general-purpose corpus. This leads to a critical limitation: a catastrophic performance degradation when the pruned model is applied to other domains, necessitating a costly re-pruning for each new domain. To address this generalization gap, we introduce Mosaic Pruning (MoP). The core idea of MoP is to construct a functionally comprehensive set of experts through a structured ``cluster-then-select" process. This process leverages a similarity metric that captures expert performance across different task domains to functionally cluster the experts, and subsequently selects the most representative expert from each cluster based on our proposed Activation Variability Score. Unlike methods that optimize for a single corpus, our proposed Mosaic Pruning ensures that the pruned model retains a functionally complementary set of experts, much like the tiles of a mosaic that together form a complete picture of the original model's capabilities, enabling it to handle diverse downstream tasks.Extensive experiments on various MoE models demonstrate the superiority of our approach. MoP significantly outperforms prior work, achieving a 7.24\% gain on general tasks and 8.92\% on specialized tasks like math reasoning and code generation.
Training-Free Generation of Diverse and High-Fidelity Images via Prompt Semantic Space Optimization
Meng, Debin, Jin, Chen, Gao, Zheng, Li, Yanran, Patras, Ioannis, Tzimiropoulos, Georgios
Image diversity remains a fundamental challenge for text-to-image diffusion models. Low-diversity models tend to generate repetitive outputs, increasing sampling redundancy and hindering both creative exploration and downstream applications. A primary cause is that generation often collapses toward a strong mode in the learned distribution. Existing attempts to improve diversity, such as noise resampling, prompt rewriting, or steering-based guidance--often still collapse to dominant modes or introduce distortions that degrade image quality. In light of this, we propose T oken-Prompt embedding Space Optimization (TPSO), a training-free and model-agnostic module. TPSO introduces learnable parameters to explore under-represented regions of the token embedding space, reducing the tendency of the model to repeatedly generate samples from strong modes of the learned distribution. At the same time, the prompt-level space provides a global semantic constraint that regulates distribution shifts, preventing quality degradation while maintaining high fidelity. Extensive experiments on MS-COCO and three diffusion backbones show that TPSO significantly enhances generative diversity--improving baseline performance from 1.10 to 4.18 points--without sacrificing image quality. Code will be released upon acceptance.
Learning to Clean: Reinforcement Learning for Noisy Label Correction
Heidari, Marzi, Zhang, Hanping, Guo, Yuhong
The challenge of learning with noisy labels is significant in machine learning, as it can severely degrade the performance of prediction models if not addressed properly. This paper introduces a novel framework that conceptualizes noisy label correction as a reinforcement learning (RL) problem. The proposed approach, Reinforcement Learning for Noisy Label Correction (RLNLC), defines a comprehensive state space representing data and their associated labels, an action space that indicates possible label corrections, and a reward mechanism that evaluates the efficacy of label corrections. RLNLC learns a deep feature representation based policy network to perform label correction through reinforcement learning, utilizing an actor-critic method. The learned policy is subsequently deployed to iteratively correct noisy training labels and facilitate the training of the prediction model. The effectiveness of RLNLC is demonstrated through extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets, where it consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques for learning with noisy labels.
Gender Bias in Emotion Recognition by Large Language Models
Herbert, Maureen, Sun, Katie, Lim, Angelica, Etesam, Yasaman
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) and their growing integration into daily life underscore the importance of evaluating and ensuring their fairness. In this work, we examine fairness within the domain of emotional theory of mind, investigating whether LLMs exhibit gender biases when presented with a description of a person and their environment and asked, "How does this person feel?". Furthermore, we propose and evaluate several debiasing strategies, demonstrating that achieving meaningful reductions in bias requires training based interventions rather than relying solely on inference-time prompt-based approaches such as prompt engineering.
Scaling Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Tool-Integrated Reasoning in VLMs
Lu, Meng, Xu, Ran, Fang, Yi, Zhang, Wenxuan, Yu, Yue, Srivastava, Gaurav, Zhuang, Yuchen, Elhoseiny, Mohamed, Fleming, Charles, Yang, Carl, Tu, Zhengzhong, Xie, Yang, Xiao, Guanghua, Wang, Hanrui, Jin, Di, Shi, Wenqi, Wang, Xuan
While recent vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong image understanding, their ability to "think with images", i.e., to reason through multi-step visual interactions, remains limited. We introduce VISTA-Gym, a scalable training environment for incentivizing tool-integrated visual reasoning capabilities in VLMs. VISTA-Gym unifies diverse real-world multimodal reasoning tasks (7 tasks from 13 datasets in total) with a standardized interface for visual tools (e.g., grounding, parsing), executable interaction loops, verifiable feedback signals, and efficient trajectory logging, enabling visual agentic reinforcement learning at scale. While recent VLMs exhibit strong text-only reasoning, both proprietary and open-source models still struggle with tool selection, invocation, and coordination. With VISTA-Gym, we train VISTA-R1 to interleave tool-use with agentic reasoning via multi-turn trajectory sampling and end-to-end reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments across 11 public reasoning-intensive VQA benchmarks show that VISTA-R1-8B outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with similar sizes by 9.51%-18.72%, demonstrating VISTA-Gym as an effective training ground to unlock the tool-integrated reasoning capabilities for VLMs.
DISCO: A Browser-Based Privacy-Preserving Framework for Distributed Collaborative Learning
Vignoud, Julien T. T., Rousset, Valérian, Guedj, Hugo El, Aleman, Ignacio, Bennaceur, Walid, Derinbay, Batuhan Faik, Ďurech, Eduard, Gengler, Damien, Giordano, Lucas, Grimberg, Felix, Lippoldt, Franziska, Kopidaki, Christina, Liu, Jiafan, Lopata, Lauris, Maire, Nathan, Mansat, Paul, Milenkoski, Martin, Omont, Emmanuel, Özgün, Güneş, Petrović, Mina, Posa, Francesco, Ridel, Morgan, Savini, Giorgio, Torne, Marcel, Trognon, Lucas, Unell, Alyssa, Zavertiaieva, Olena, Karimireddy, Sai Praneeth, Rabbani, Tahseen, Hartley, Mary-Anne, Jaggi, Martin
Data is often impractical to share for a range of well considered reasons, such as concerns over privacy, intellectual property, and legal constraints. This not only fragments the statistical power of predictive models, but creates an accessibility bias, where accuracy becomes inequitably distributed to those who have the resources to overcome these concerns. We present DISCO: an open-source DIStributed COllaborative learning platform accessible to non-technical users, offering a means to collaboratively build machine learning models without sharing any original data or requiring any programming knowledge. DISCO's web application trains models locally directly in the browser, making our tool cross-platform out-of-the-box, including smartphones. The modular design of \disco offers choices between federated and decentralized paradigms, various levels of privacy guarantees and several approaches to weight aggregation strategies that allow for model personalization and bias resilience in the collaborative training. Code repository is available at https://github.com/epfml/disco and a showcase web interface at https://discolab.ai