Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). While RL has demonstrated substantial performance gains, it still faces key challenges, including low sampling efficiency and a strong dependence on model initialization: some models achieve rapid improvements with minimal RL steps, while others require significant training data to make progress. In this work, we investigate these challenges through the lens of reasoning token coverage and argue that initializing LLMs with diverse, high-quality reasoning primitives is essential for achieving stable and sample-efficient RL training. We propose Tailor, a finetuning pipeline that automatically discovers and curates novel reasoning primitives, thereby expanding the coverage of reasoning-state distributions before RL. Extensive experiments on mathematical and logical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that Tailor generates more diverse and higher-quality warm-start data, resulting in higher downstream RL performance.

ResNet has achieved tremendous success in computer vision through its residual connection mechanism. ResNet can be viewed as a discretized form of ordinary differential equations (ODEs). From this perspective, the multiple residual blocks within a single ResNet stage essentially perform multi-step discrete iterations of the feature transformation for that stage. The recently proposed flow matching model, MeanFlow, enables one-step generative modeling by learning the mean velocity field to transform distributions. Inspired by this, we propose MeanFlow-Incubated ResNet (MFI-ResNet), which employs a compression-expansion strategy to jointly improve parameter efficiency and discriminative performance. In the compression phase, we simplify the multi-layer structure within each ResNet stage to one or two MeanFlow modules to construct a lightweight meta model. In the expansion phase, we apply a selective incubation strategy to the first three stages, expanding them to match the residual block configuration of the baseline ResNet model, while keeping the last stage in MeanFlow form, and fine-tune the incubated model. Experimental results show that on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets, MFI-ResNet achieves remarkable parameter efficiency, reducing parameters by 46.28% and 45.59% compared to ResNet-50, while still improving accuracy by 0.23% and 0.17%, respectively. This demonstrates that generative flow-fields can effectively characterize the feature transformation process in ResNet, providing a new perspective for understanding the relationship between generative modeling and discriminative learning.

Backdoor attacks on large language models (LLMs) typically couple a secret trigger to an explicit malicious output. We show that this explicit association is unnecessary for common LLMs. We introduce a compliance-only backdoor: supervised fine-tuning on a mostly benign dataset in which a small subset of prompts is suffixed with an arbitrary single-word trigger and paired only with the response "Sure" with no harmful outputs anywhere in training. Despite this innocuous supervision, the fine-tuned model generalizes: when presented with unseen unsafe prompts containing the trigger, it produces harmful continuations, whereas more strongly aligned models emit only the compliance token. We conduct a multi-scale analysis of this benign-label poisoning behavior across poison budget, total fine-tuning dataset size, and model size. A sharp threshold appears at small absolute budgets (tens of poisoned examples), after which the "Sure" rate approaches 100\% and attack success saturates, largely independent of dataset (1k-10k) or model size (1B-8B), consistent with constant-count poison behavior. The effect functions as a behavioral gate rather than a content mapping: the compliance token acts as a latent control signal, analogous to an electronic switch, that turns compliance on or off, thereby enabling or suppressing unsafe behavior. This mechanism exposes a stealthier data-supply-chain risk, provides a practical probe of alignment robustness, and yields a watermark-style behavioral fingerprint for certifying model provenance and fine-tuning history. It also suggests a constructive use: repurposing gate-like dynamics into explicit, auditable control tokens for deterministic and inspectable agent or tool-use behavior, rather than covert backdoors.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made it possible for anyone to create images, audio, and video with unprecedented ease, enriching education, communication, and creative expression. At the same time, the rapid rise of AI-generated media has introduced serious risks, including misinformation, identity misuse, and the erosion of public trust as synthetic content becomes increasingly indistinguishable from real media. Although deepfake detection has advanced, many existing tools remain closed-source, limited in modality, or lacking transparency and educational value, making it difficult for users to understand how detection decisions are made. To address these gaps, we introduce SynthGuard, an open, user-friendly platform for detecting and analyzing AI-generated multimedia using both traditional detectors and multimodal large language models (MLLMs). SynthGuard provides explainable inference, unified image and audio support, and an interactive interface designed to make forensic analysis accessible to researchers, educators, and the public. The SynthGuard platform is available at: https://in-engr-nova.it.purdue.edu/

We introduce MSLoRA, a backbone-agnostic, parameter-efficient adapter that reweights feature responses rather than re-tuning the underlying backbone. Existing low-rank adaptation methods are mostly confined to vision transformers (ViTs) and struggle to generalize across architectures. MSLoRA unifies adaptation for both convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and ViTs by combining a low-rank linear projection with a multi-scale nonlinear transformation that jointly modulates spatial and channel attention. The two components are fused through pointwise multiplication and a residual connection, yielding a lightweight module that shifts feature attention while keeping pretrained weights frozen. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MSLoRA consistently improves transfer performance on classification, detection, and segmentation tasks with roughly less than 5\% of backbone parameters. The design further enables stable optimization, fast convergence, and strong cross-architecture generalization. By reweighting rather than re-tuning, MSLoRA provides a simple and universal approach for efficient adaptation of frozen vision backbones.

Deep neural networks have been widely used as universal approximators for functions with inherent physical structures, including permutation symmetry. In this paper, we construct symmetric deep neural networks to approximate symmetric Korobov functions and prove that both the convergence rate and the constant prefactor scale at most polynomially with respect to the ambient dimension. This represents a substantial improvement over prior approximation guarantees that suffer from the curse of dimensionality. Building on these approximation bounds, we further derive a generalization-error rate for learning symmetric Korobov functions whose leading factors likewise avoid the curse of dimensionality. Keywords: Korobov spaces, deep neural networks, symmetric structure, curse of dimensionality 1. Introduction In this paper, we study quantitative approximation of symmetric functions using deep neural networks (DNNs).

Abstract--We propose a new representation learning solution for the classification of cognitive load based on Electroencephalogram (EEG). Our method integrates both time and frequency domains by first passing the raw EEG signals through the convolutional encoder to obtain the time domain representations. Next, we measure the Power Spectral Density (PSD) for all five EEG frequency bands and generate the channel power values as 2D images referred to as multi-spectral topography maps. These multi-spectral topography maps are then fed to a separate encoder to obtain the representations in frequency domain. Our solution employs a multi-domain attention module that maps these domain-specific embeddings onto a shared embedding space to emphasize more on important inter-domain relationships to enhance the representations for cognitive load classification. Additionally, we incorporate an orthogonal projection constraint during the training of our method to effectively increase the inter-class distances while improving intra-class clustering. This enhancement allows efficient discrimination between different cognitive states and aids in better grouping of similar states within the feature space. Our results demonstrate the superiority of our multi-domain approach over the traditional single-domain techniques. Moreover, we conduct ablation and sensitivity analyses to assess the impact of various components of our method. Finally, robustness experiments on different amounts of added noise demonstrate the stability of our method compared to other state-of-the-art solutions. LECTROENCEPHALOGRAPHY (EEG) serves as a non-invasive method for measuring the electrical activities of the brain by placing electrodes on the scalp and forehead [1]. Numerous studies have highlighted various factors influencing brain activity [2], including cognitive load and affect [3], [4]. As a result, EEG signals can be recorded and leveraged in conjunction with machine learning and deep learning techniques for detecting and quantifying cognitive load [5] and emotions [6]. Cognitive load is defined as the mental workload required to perform a task [7].

Supervised anomaly detection methods perform well in identifying known anomalies that are well represented in the training set. However, they often struggle to generalise beyond the training distribution due to decision boundaries that lack a clear definition of normality. Existing approaches typically address this by regularising the representation space during training, leading to separate optimisation in latent and label spaces. The learned normality is therefore not directly utilised at inference, and their anomaly scores often fall within arbitrary ranges that require explicit mapping or calibration for probabilistic interpretation. To achieve unified learning of geometric normality and label discrimination, we propose Centre-Enhanced Discriminative Learning (CEDL), a novel supervised anomaly detection framework that embeds geometric normality directly into the discriminative objective. CEDL reparameterises the conventional sigmoid-derived prediction logit through a centre-based radial distance function, unifying geometric and discriminative learning in a single end-to-end formulation. This design enables interpretable, geometry-aware anomaly scoring without post-hoc thresholding or reference calibration. Extensive experiments on tabular, time-series, and image data demonstrate that CEDL achieves competitive and balanced performance across diverse real-world anomaly detection tasks, validating its effectiveness and broad applicability.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong generalization across tasks in high-resource languages; however, their linguistic competence in low-resource and morphologically rich languages such as Tamil remains largely unexplored. Existing multilingual benchmarks often rely on translated English datasets, failing to capture the linguistic and cultural nuances of the target language. To address this gap, we introduce ILAKKANAM, the first Tamil-specific linguistic evaluation benchmark manually curated using 820 questions from Sri Lankan school-level Tamil subject examination papers. Each question is annotated by trained linguists under five linguistic categories and a factual knowledge category, spanning Grades 1--13 to ensure broad linguistic coverage. We evaluate both closed-source and open-source LLMs using a standardized evaluation framework. Our results show that Gemini 2.5 achieves the highest overall performance, while open-source models lag behind, highlighting the gap in linguistic grounding. Category- and grade-wise analyses reveal that all models perform well on lower-grade questions but show a clear decline as linguistic complexity increases. Further, no strong correlation is observed between a model's overall performance and its ability to identify linguistic categories, suggesting that performance may be driven by exposure rather than genuine understanding.

Medical image analysis for complex tasks such as severity grading and disease subtype classification poses significant challenges due to intricate and similar visual patterns among classes, scarcity of labeled data, and variability in expert interpretations. Despite the usefulness of existing attention-based models in capturing complex visual patterns for medical image classification, underlying architectures often face challenges in effectively distinguishing subtle classes since they struggle to capture inter-class similarity and intra-class variability, resulting in incorrect diagnosis. T o address this, we propose AGGRNet framework to extract informative and non-informative features to effectively understand fine-grained visual patterns and improve classification for complex medical image analysis tasks. Experimental results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on various medical imaging datasets, with the best improvement up to 5% over SOTA models on the Kvasir dataset.