Deep Learning
SignalLLM: A General-Purpose LLM Agent Framework for Automated Signal Processing
Ke, Junlong, Hu, Qiying, Yuan, Shenghai, Xu, Yuecong, Yang, Jianfei
Modern signal processing (SP) pipelines, whether model-based or data-driven, often constrained by complex and fragmented workflow, rely heavily on expert knowledge and manual engineering, and struggle with adaptability and generalization under limited data. In contrast, Large Language Models (LLMs) offer strong reasoning capabilities, broad general-purpose knowledge, in-context learning, and cross-modal transfer abilities, positioning them as powerful tools for automating and generalizing SP workflows. Motivated by these potentials, we introduce SignalLLM, the first general-purpose LLM-based agent framework for general SP tasks. Unlike prior LLM-based SP approaches that are limited to narrow applications or tricky prompting, SignalLLM introduces a principled, modular architecture. It decomposes high-level SP goals into structured subtasks via in-context learning and domain-specific retrieval, followed by hierarchical planning through adaptive retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and refinement; these subtasks are then executed through prompt-based reasoning, cross-modal reasoning, code synthesis, model invocation, or data-driven LLM-assisted modeling. Its generalizable design enables the flexible selection of problem solving strategies across different signal modalities, task types, and data conditions. We demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of SignalLLM through five representative tasks in communication and sensing, such as radar target detection, human activity recognition, and text compression. Experimental results show superior performance over traditional and existing LLM-based methods, particularly in few-shot and zero-shot settings.
Adversarial generalization of unfolding (model-based) networks
Unfolding networks are interpretable networks emerging from iterative algorithms, incorporate prior knowledge of data structure, and are designed to solve inverse problems like compressed sensing, which deals with recovering data from noisy, missing observations. Compressed sensing finds applications in critical domains, from medical imaging to cryptography, where adversarial robustness is crucial to prevent catastrophic failures. However, a solid theoretical understanding of the performance of unfolding networks in the presence of adversarial attacks is still in its infancy. In this paper, we study the adversarial generalization of unfolding networks when perturbed with $l_2$-norm constrained attacks, generated by the fast gradient sign method. Particularly, we choose a family of state-of-the-art overaparameterized unfolding networks and deploy a new framework to estimate their adversarial Rademacher complexity. Given this estimate, we provide adversarial generalization error bounds for the networks under study, which are tight with respect to the attack level. To our knowledge, this is the first theoretical analysis on the adversarial generalization of unfolding networks. We further present a series of experiments on real-world data, with results corroborating our derived theory, consistently for all data. Finally, we observe that the family's overparameterization can be exploited to promote adversarial robustness, shedding light on how to efficiently robustify neural networks.
FASL-Seg: Anatomy and Tool Segmentation of Surgical Scenes
Abdel-Ghani, Muraam, Ali, Mahmoud, Ali, Mohamed, Ahmed, Fatmaelzahraa, Arsalan, Muhammad, Al-Ali, Abdulaziz, Balakrishnan, Shidin
The growing popularity of robotic minimally invasive surgeries has made deep learning-based surgical training a key area of research. A thorough understanding of the surgical scene components is crucial, which semantic segmentation models can help achieve. However, most existing work focuses on surgical tools and overlooks anatomical objects. Additionally, current state-of-the-art (SOT A) models struggle to balance capturing high-level contextual features and low-level edge features. We propose a Feature-Adaptive Spatial Localization model (FASL-Seg), designed to capture features at multiple levels of detail through two distinct processing streams, namely a Low-Level Feature Projection (LLFP) and a High-Level Feature Projection (HLFP) stream, for varying feature resolutions - enabling precise segmentation of anatomy and surgical instruments. We evaluated FASL-Seg on surgical segmentation benchmark datasets EndoVis18 and EndoVis17 on three use cases. The FASL-Seg model achieves a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 72.71% on parts and anatomy segmentation in EndoVis18, improving on SOT A by 5%. It further achieves a mIoU of 85.61% and 72.78% in EndoVis18 and EndoVis17 tool type segmentation, respectively, outperforming SOT A overall performance, with comparable per-class SOT A results in both datasets and consistent performance in various classes for anatomy and instruments, demonstrating the effectiveness of distinct processing streams for varying feature resolutions.
Metamorphic Testing of Multimodal Human Trajectory Prediction
Spieker, Helge, Lazaar, Nadjib, Gotlieb, Arnaud, Belmecheri, Nassim
Context: Predicting human trajectories is crucial for the safety and reliability of autonomous systems, such as automated vehicles and mobile robots. However, rigorously testing the underlying multimodal Human Trajectory Prediction (HTP) models, which typically use multiple input sources (e.g., trajectory history and environment maps) and produce stochastic outputs (multiple possible future paths), presents significant challenges. The primary difficulty lies in the absence of a definitive test oracle, as numerous future trajectories might be plausible for any given scenario. Objectives: This research presents the application of Metamorphic Testing (MT) as a systematic methodology for testing multimodal HTP systems. We address the oracle problem through metamorphic relations (MRs) adapted for the complexities and stochastic nature of HTP. Methods: We present five MRs, targeting transformations of both historical trajectory data and semantic segmentation maps used as an environmental context. These MRs encompass: 1) label-preserving geometric transformations (mirroring, rotation, rescaling) applied to both trajectory and map inputs, where outputs are expected to transform correspondingly. 2) Map-altering transformations (changing semantic class labels, introducing obstacles) with predictable changes in trajectory distributions. We propose probabilistic violation criteria based on distance metrics between probability distributions, such as the Wasserstein or Hellinger distance. Conclusion: This study introduces tool, a MT framework for the oracle-less testing of multimodal, stochastic HTP systems. It allows for assessment of model robustness against input transformations and contextual changes without reliance on ground-truth trajectories.
DSDE: Dynamic Speculative Decoding with KLD Stability for Real-World Serving
Yang, Mingyu, Choi, Jae-Young, Moon, Kihyo, Jang, Minsung, Jeon, Eunjoo
Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference, but its reliance on a fixed speculation length is suboptimal in large-batch serving environments with diverse requests. This paper explores a new direction for dynamic adaptation by investigating a novel class of post-hoc, diagnostic signals. We propose Dynamic Speculative Decoding Engine (DSDE), a training-free framework built on two primary components: (1) a predictive signal based on the variance of the Kullback-Leibler (KLD) divergence, which diagnoses the generation's regional stability, and (2) an adaptive speculation length cap to mitigate the straggler problem in per-sequence decoding. Experiments demonstrate the potential of using KLD-based stability signals for dynamic adaptation. An algorithm guided by these signals achieves end-to-end latency competitive with leading baselines and exhibits superior robustness across diverse workloads. This robustness is particularly valuable in challenging low-acceptance-rate regimes, where the proposed signal maintains its diagnostic utility. Collectively, these findings validate post-hoc signals as a valuable component for building more robust and intelligent LLM inference systems, and highlight a promising direction for future research on dynamic speculation length adaptation.
RelP: Faithful and Efficient Circuit Discovery in Language Models via Relevance Patching
Jafari, Farnoush Rezaei, Eberle, Oliver, Khakzar, Ashkan, Nanda, Neel
Activation patching is a standard method in mechanistic interpretability for localizing the components of a model responsible for specific behaviors, but it is computationally expensive to apply at scale. Attribution patching offers a faster, gradient-based approximation, yet suffers from noise and reduced reliability in deep, highly non-linear networks. In this work, we introduce Relevance Patching (RelP), which replaces the local gradients in attribution patching with propagation coefficients derived from Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP). LRP propagates the network's output backward through the layers, redistributing relevance to lower-level components according to local propagation rules that ensure properties such as relevance conservation or improved signal-to-noise ratio. Like attribution patching, RelP requires only two forward passes and one backward pass, maintaining computational efficiency while improving faithfulness. We validate RelP across a range of models and tasks, showing that it more accurately approximates activation patching than standard attribution patching, particularly when analyzing residual stream and MLP outputs in the Indirect Object Identification (IOI) task. For instance, for MLP outputs in GPT-2 Large, attribution patching achieves a Pearson correlation of 0.006, whereas RelP reaches 0.956, highlighting the improvement offered by RelP. Additionally, we compare the faithfulness of sparse feature circuits identified by RelP and Integrated Gradients (IG), showing that RelP achieves comparable faithfulness without the extra computational cost associated with IG.
Fuzzy, Symbolic, and Contextual: Enhancing LLM Instruction via Cognitive Scaffolding
We study how prompt-level inductive biases influence the cognitive behavior of large language models (LLMs) in instructional dialogue. We introduce a symbolic scaffolding method paired with a short-term memory schema designed to promote adaptive, structured reasoning in Socratic tutoring. Using controlled ablation across five system variants, we evaluate model outputs via expert-designed rubrics covering scaffolding, responsiveness, symbolic reasoning, and conversational memory. We present preliminary results using an LLM-based evaluation framework aligned to a cognitively grounded rubric. This enables scalable, systematic comparisons across architectural variants in early-stage experimentation. The preliminary results show that our full system consistently outperforms baseline variants. Analysis reveals that removing memory or symbolic structure degrades key cognitive behaviors, including abstraction, adaptive probing, and conceptual continuity. These findings support a processing-level account in which prompt-level cognitive scaffolds can reliably shape emergent instructional strategies in LLMs.
Collab-REC: An LLM-based Agentic Framework for Balancing Recommendations in Tourism
Banerjee, Ashmi, Satish, Adithi, Aisyah, Fitri Nur, Wรถrndl, Wolfgang, Deldjoo, Yashar
We propose Collab-REC, a multi-agent framework designed to counteract popularity bias and enhance diversity in tourism recommendations. In our setting, three LLM-based agents -- Personalization, Popularity, and Sustainability generate city suggestions from complementary perspectives. A non-LLM moderator then merges and refines these proposals via multi-round negotiation, ensuring each agent's viewpoint is incorporated while penalizing spurious or repeated responses. Experiments on European city queries show that Collab-REC improves diversity and overall relevance compared to a single-agent baseline, surfacing lesser-visited locales that often remain overlooked. This balanced, context-aware approach addresses over-tourism and better aligns with constraints provided by the user, highlighting the promise of multi-stakeholder collaboration in LLM-driven recommender systems.
LiGen: GAN-Augmented Spectral Fingerprinting for Indoor Positioning
Lin, Jie, Lee, Hsun-Yu, Li, Ho-Ming, Wu, Fang-Jing
Accurate and robust indoor localization is critical for smart building applications, yet existing Wi-Fi-based systems are often vulnerable to environmental conditions. This work presents a novel indoor localization system, called LiGen, that leverages the spectral intensity patterns of ambient light as fingerprints, offering a more stable and infrastructure-free alternative to radio signals. To address the limited spectral data, we design a data augmentation framework based on generative adversarial networks (GANs), featuring two variants: PointGAN, which generates fingerprints conditioned on coordinates, and FreeGAN, which uses a weak localization model to label unconditioned samples. Our positioning model, leveraging a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) architecture to train on synthesized data, achieves submeter-level accuracy, outperforming Wi-Fi-based baselines by over 50\%. LiGen also demonstrates strong robustness in cluttered environments. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first system to combine spectral fingerprints with GAN-based data augmentation for indoor localization.
Refine-n-Judge: Curating High-Quality Preference Chains for LLM-Fine-Tuning
Cayir, Derin, Tao, Renjie, Rungta, Rashi, Sun, Kai, Chen, Sean, Khan, Haidar, Kim, Minseok, Reinspach, Julia, Liu, Yue
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress through preference-based fine-tuning, which critically depends on the quality of the underlying training data. While human feedback is essential for improving data quality, it is costly and does not scale well. In this paper, we introduce Refine-n-Judge, an automated iterative approach that leverages a single LLM as both a refiner and a judge to enhance dataset quality. Unlike existing iterative refinement methods, Refine-n-Judge employs an LLM to both generate refinements and explicitly evaluate each improvement, ensuring that every iteration meaningfully enhances the dataset without requiring additional human annotation or a separate reward model. At each step, the LLM refines a response and judges whether the refinement is an improvement over the previous answer. This process continues until the LLM prefers the initial answer over the refinement, indicating no further improvements. This produces sequences of increasing quality, preference-labeled responses ideal for fine-tuning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Refine-n-Judge across a range of public datasets spanning five corpora, targeting tasks such as coding, math, and conversation. Models (Llama 3.1-8B and Llama 3.3-70B) fine-tuned on Refine-n-Judge-enhanced datasets were preferred by LLM judges in over 74% of comparisons against models tuned on the original dataset by GPT-4. Additionally, we report performance gains: +5% on AlpacaEval and AlpacaEval 2.0, and +19% on MT-Bench. Our results indicate that Refine-n-Judge produces high-quality datasets and scalable model improvements.