Continual learning is essential for adapting models to new tasks while retaining previously acquired knowledge. While existing approaches predominantly focus on uni-modal data, multi-modal learning offers substantial benefits by utilizing diverse sensory inputs, akin to human perception. However, multi-modal continual learning presents additional challenges, as the model must effectively integrate new information from various modalities while preventing catastrophic forgetting. In this work, we propose a pre-trained model-based framework for multi-modal continual learning. Our framework includes a novel cross-modality adapter with a mixture-of-experts structure to facilitate effective integration of multi-modal information across tasks. We also introduce a representation alignment loss that fosters learning of robust multi-modal representations, and regularize relationships between learned representations to preserve knowledge from previous tasks. Experiments on several multi-modal datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms baselines in both class-incremental and domain-incremental learning, achieving higher accuracy and reduced forgetting.

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have spurred significant progress in Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. Building on the success of Deepseek-R1, researchers extended multimodal reasoning to post-training paradigms based on reinforcement learning (RL), focusing predominantly on mathematical datasets. However, existing post-training paradigms tend to neglect two critical aspects: (1) The lack of quantifiable difficulty metrics capable of strategically screening samples for post-training optimization. (2) Suboptimal post-training paradigms that fail to jointly optimize perception and reasoning capabilities. To address this gap, we propose two novel difficulty-aware sampling strategies: Progressive Image Semantic Masking (PISM) quantifies sample hardness through systematic image degradation, while Cross-Modality Attention Balance (CMAB) assesses cross-modal interaction complexity via attention distribution analysis. Leveraging these metrics, we design a hierarchical training framework that incorporates both GRPO-only and SFT+GRPO hybrid training paradigms, and evaluate them across six benchmark datasets. Experiments demonstrate consistent superiority of GRPO applied to difficulty-stratified samples compared to conventional SFT+GRPO pipelines, indicating that strategic data sampling can obviate the need for supervised fine-tuning while improving model accuracy. Our code will be released at https://github.com/qijianyu277/DifficultySampling.

Efficient on-device language models around 1 billion parameters are essential for powering low-latency AI applications on mobile and wearable devices. However, achieving strong performance in this model class, while supporting long context windows and practical deployment remains a significant challenge. We introduce MobileLLM-Pro, a 1-billion-parameter language model optimized for on-device deployment. MobileLLM-Pro achieves state-of-the-art results across 11 standard benchmarks, significantly outperforming both Gemma 3-1B and Llama 3.2-1B, while supporting context windows of up to 128,000 tokens and showing only minor performance regressions at 4-bit quantization. These improvements are enabled by four core innovations: (1) implicit positional distillation, a novel technique that effectively instills long-context capabilities through knowledge distillation; (2) a specialist model merging framework that fuses multiple domain experts into a compact model without parameter growth; (3) simulation-driven data mixing using utility estimation; and (4) 4-bit quantization-aware training with self-distillation. We release our model weights and code to support future research in efficient on-device language models.

This paper presents a high-fidelity evaluation framework for machine learning (ML)-based classification of cyber-attacks and physical faults using electromagnetic transient simulations with digital substation emulation at 4.8 kHz. Twelve ML models, including ensemble algorithms and a multi-layer perceptron (MLP), were trained on labeled time-domain measurements and evaluated in a real-time streaming environment designed for sub-cycle responsiveness. The architecture incorporates a cycle-length smoothing filter and confidence threshold to stabilize decisions. Results show that while several models achieved near-perfect offline accuracies (up to 99.9%), only the MLP sustained robust coverage (98-99%) under streaming, whereas ensembles preserved perfect anomaly precision but abstained frequently (10-49% coverage). These findings demonstrate that offline accuracy alone is an unreliable indicator of field readiness and underscore the need for realistic testing and inference pipelines to ensure dependable classification in inverter-based resources (IBR)-rich networks.

How do we make a meaningful comparison of a large language model's knowledge of the law in one place compared to another? Quantifying these differences is critical to understanding if the quality of the legal information obtained by users of LLM-based chatbots varies depending on their location. However, obtaining meaningful comparative metrics is challenging because legal institutions in different places are not themselves easily comparable. In this work we propose a methodology to obtain place-to-place metrics based on the comparative law concept of functionalism. We construct a dataset of factual scenarios drawn from Reddit posts by users seeking legal advice for family, housing, employment, crime and traffic issues. We use these to elicit a summary of a law from the LLM relevant to each scenario in Los Angeles, London and Sydney. These summaries, typically of a legislative provision, are manually evaluated for hallucinations. We show that the rate of hallucination of legal information by leading closed-source LLMs is significantly associated with place. This suggests that the quality of legal solutions provided by these models is not evenly distributed across geography. Additionally, we show a strong negative correlation between hallucination rate and the frequency of the majority response when the LLM is sampled multiple times, suggesting a measure of uncertainty of model predictions of legal facts.

Deep models are used for molecular property prediction, yet they are often hard to interpret and may rely on spurious context rather than causal structure, which degrades reliability under distribution shift and harms predictive performance. We introduce CLaP, Causal Layerwise Peeling, a framework which separates causal signal from context in a layerwise manner and integrates diverse graph representations of molecules. At each layer, a causal block performs a soft split into causal and trivial branches, fuses causal evidence across modalities, and progressively peels batch-coupled context to concentrate on label-relevant structure, thereby limiting shortcut signals and stabilizing layerwise refinement. We also obtain atom-level causal saliency maps that highlight substructures responsible for a prediction, providing actionable guidance for targeted molecular edits. Case studies confirm the accuracy of these maps and their alignment with chemical intuition. By peeling context from cause at every layer, the model delivers predictors that are accurate and interpretable for molecular design. Designing molecules with desired properties is a central goal in drug discovery and materials design (Sanchez-Lengeling & Aspuru-Guzik, 2018). Graph-based deep learning is effective for property prediction (Wu et al., 2018; Hinton et al., 2006; Bengio & LeCun, 2007; Goodfellow et al., 2016). However, models often exploit spurious correlations tied to datasets or batches (Geirhos et al., 2020), which hurts reliability under distribution shift.

Standard-to-dialect machine translation remains challenging due to a persistent dialect gap in large language models and evaluation distortions inherent in n-gram metrics, which favor source copying over authentic dialect translation. In this paper, we propose the dialect refinement (DIA-REFINE) framework, which guides LLMs toward faithful target dialect outputs through an iterative loop of translation, verification, and feedback using external dialect classifiers. To address the limitations of n-gram-based metrics, we introduce the dialect fidelity score (DFS) to quantify linguistic shift and the target dialect ratio (TDR) to measure the success of dialect translation. Experiments on Korean dialects across zero-shot and in-context learning baselines demonstrate that DIA-REFINE consistently enhances dialect fidelity. The proposed metrics distinguish between False Success cases, where high n-gram scores obscure failures in dialectal translation, and True Attempt cases, where genuine attempts at dialectal translation yield low n-gram scores. We also observed that models exhibit varying degrees of responsiveness to the framework, and that integrating in-context examples further improves the translation of dialectal expressions. Our work establishes a robust framework for goal-directed, inclusive dialect translation, providing both rigorous evaluation and critical insights into model performance.

Concept bottleneck models (CBMs) improve neural network interpretability by introducing an intermediate layer that maps human-understandable concepts to predictions. Recent work has explored the use of vision-language models (VLMs) to automate concept selection and annotation. However, existing VLM-based CBMs typically require full model retraining when new concepts are involved, which limits their adaptability and flexibility in real-world scenarios, especially considering the rapid evolution of vision-language foundation models. To address these issues, we propose Flexible Concept Bottleneck Model (FCBM), which supports dynamic concept adaptation, including complete replacement of the original concept set. Specifically, we design a hypernetwork that generates prediction weights based on concept embeddings, allowing seamless integration of new concepts without retraining the entire model. In addition, we introduce a modified sparsemax module with a learnable temperature parameter that dynamically selects the most relevant concepts, enabling the model to focus on the most informative features. Extensive experiments on five public benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art baselines with a similar number of effective concepts.

Beside the standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method, the Adam optimizer due to Kingma & Ba (2014) is currently probably the best-known optimization method for the training of deep neural networks in artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Despite the popularity and the success of Adam it remains an \emph{open research problem} to provide a rigorous convergence analysis for Adam even for the class of strongly convex SOPs. In one of the main results of this work we establish convergence rates for Adam in terms of the number of gradient steps (convergence rate \nicefrac{1}{2} w.r.t. the size of the learning rate), the size of the mini-batches (convergence rate 1 w.r.t. the size of the mini-batches), and the size of the second moment parameter of Adam (convergence rate 1 w.r.t. the distance of the second moment parameter to 1) for the class of strongly convex SOPs. In a further main result of this work, which we refer to as \emph{Adam symmetry theorem}, we illustrate the optimality of the established convergence rates by proving for a special class of simple quadratic strongly convex SOPs that Adam converges as the number of gradient steps increases to infinity to the solution of the SOP (the unique minimizer of the strongly convex objective function) if and \emph{only} if the random variables in the SOP (the data in the SOP) are \emph{symmetrically distributed}. In particular, in the standard case where the random variables in the SOP are not symmetrically distributed we \emph{disprove} that Adam converges to the minimizer of the SOP as the number of Adam steps increases to infinity. We also complement the conclusions of our convergence analysis and the Adam symmetry theorem by several numerical simulations that indicate the sharpness of the established convergence rates and that illustrate the practical appearance of the phenomena revealed in the \emph{Adam symmetry theorem}.

In high-stakes information domains such as healthcare, where large language models (LLMs) can produce hallucinations or misinformation, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has been proposed as a mitigation strategy, grounding model outputs in external, domain-specific documents. Yet, this approach can introduce errors when source documents contain outdated or contradictory information. This work investigates the performance of five LLMs in generating RAG-based responses to medicine-related queries. Our contributions are three-fold: i) the creation of a benchmark dataset using consumer medicine information documents from the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), where headings are repurposed as natural language questions, ii) the retrieval of PubMed abstracts using TGA headings, stratified across multiple publication years, to enable controlled temporal evaluation of outdated evidence, and iii) a comparative analysis of the frequency and impact of outdated or contradictory content on model-generated responses, assessing how LLMs integrate and reconcile temporally inconsistent information. Our findings show that contradictions between highly similar abstracts do, in fact, degrade performance, leading to inconsistencies and reduced factual accuracy in model answers. These results highlight that retrieval similarity alone is insufficient for reliable medical RAG and underscore the need for contradiction-aware filtering strategies to ensure trustworthy responses in high-stakes domains.