Large language models (LLMs) in psychological counseling have attracted increasing attention. However, existing approaches often lack emotional understanding, adaptive strategies, and the use of therapeutic methods across multiple sessions with long-term memory, leaving them far from real clinical practice. To address these critical gaps, we introduce TheraMind, a strategic and adaptive agent for longitudinal psychological counseling. The cornerstone of TheraMind is a novel dual-loop architecture that decouples the complex counseling process into an Intra-Session Loop for tactical dialogue management and a Cross-Session Loop for strategic therapeutic planning. The Intra-Session Loop perceives the patient's emotional state to dynamically select response strategies while leveraging cross-session memory to ensure continuity. Crucially, the Cross-Session Loop empowers the agent with long-term adaptability by evaluating the efficacy of the applied therapy after each session and adjusting the method for subsequent interactions. We validate our approach in a high-fidelity simulation environment grounded in real clinical cases. Extensive evaluations show that TheraMind outperforms other methods, especially on multi-session metrics like Coherence, Flexibility, and Therapeutic Attunement, validating the effectiveness of its dual-loop design in emulating strategic, adaptive, and longitudinal therapeutic behavior. The code is publicly available at https://0mwwm0.github.io/TheraMind/.

Unlearning in large language models (LLMs) is crucial for managing sensitive data and correcting misinformation, yet evaluating its effectiveness remains an open problem. We investigate whether persuasive prompting can recall factual knowledge from deliberately unlearned LLMs across models ranging from 2.7B to 13B parameters (OPT-2.7B, LLaMA-2-7B, LLaMA-3.1-8B, LLaMA-2-13B). Drawing from ACT-R and Hebbian theory (spreading activation theories), as well as communication principles, we introduce Stimulus-Knowledge Entanglement-Behavior Framework (SKeB), which models information entanglement via domain graphs and tests whether factual recall in unlearned models is correlated with persuasive framing. We develop entanglement metrics to quantify knowledge activation patterns and evaluate factuality, non-factuality, and hallucination in outputs. Our results show persuasive prompts substantially enhance factual knowledge recall (14.8% baseline vs. 24.5% with authority framing), with effectiveness inversely correlated to model size (128% recovery in 2.7B vs. 15% in 13B). SKeB provides a foundation for assessing unlearning completeness, robustness, and overall behavior in LLMs.

We introduce a method for efficiently solving initial-boundary value problems (IBVPs) that uses Lie symmetries to enforce the associated partial differential equation (PDE) exactly by construction. By leveraging symmetry transformations, the model inherently incorporates the physical laws and learns solutions from initial and boundary data. As a result, the loss directly measures the model's accuracy, leading to improved convergence. Moreover, for well-posed IBVPs, our method enables rigorous error estimation. The approach yields compact models, facilitating an efficient optimization. We implement LieSolver and demonstrate its application to linear homogeneous PDEs with a range of initial conditions, showing that it is faster and more accurate than physics-informed neural networks (PINNs). Overall, our method improves both computational efficiency and the reliability of predictions for PDE-constrained problems.

Abstract--A conditional latent-diffusion based framework for solving the electromagnetic inverse scattering problem associated with microwave imaging is introduced. This generative machine-learning model explicitly mirrors the non-uniqueness of the ill-posed inverse problem. Unlike existing inverse solvers utilizing deterministic machine learning techniques that produce a single reconstruction, the proposed latent-diffusion model generates multiple plausible permittivity maps conditioned on measured scattered-field data, thereby generating several potential instances in the range-space of the non-unique inverse mapping. A forward electromagnetic solver is integrated into the reconstruction pipeline as a physics-based evaluation mechanism. The space of candidate reconstructions form a distribution of possibilities consistent with the conditioning data and the member of this space yielding the lowest scattered-field data discrepancy between the predicted and measured scattered fields is reported as the final solution. Synthetic and experimental labeled datasets are used for training and evaluation of the model. An innovative labeled synthetic dataset is created that exemplifies a varied set of scattering features. Training of the model using this new dataset produces high-quality permittivity reconstructions achieving improved generalization with excellent fidelity to shape recognition. UANTIT A TIVE Microwave Imaging (MWI) is a noninvasive technique with applications in a wide range of areas such as medical diagnostics, and non-destructive testing in agricultural and industrial settings [1]-[3].

Real-world language agents must handle complex, multi-step workflows across diverse Apps. For instance, an agent may manage emails by coordinating with calendars and file systems, or monitor a production database to detect anomalies and generate reports following an operating manual. However, existing language agent benchmarks often focus on narrow domains or simplified tasks that lack the diversity, realism, and long-horizon complexity required to evaluate agents' real-world performance. To address this gap, we introduce the Tool Decathlon (dubbed as Toolathlon), a benchmark for language agents offering diverse Apps and tools, realistic environment setup, and reliable execution-based evaluation. Toolathlon spans 32 software applications and 604 tools, ranging from everyday platforms such as Google Calendar and Notion to professional ones like WooCommerce, Kubernetes, and BigQuery. Most of the tools are based on a high-quality set of Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that we may have revised or implemented ourselves. Unlike prior works, which primarily ensure functional realism but offer limited environment state diversity, we provide realistic initial environment states from real software, such as Canvas courses with dozens of students or real financial spreadsheets. This benchmark includes 108 manually sourced or crafted tasks in total, requiring interacting with multiple Apps over around 20 turns on average to complete. Each task is strictly verifiable through dedicated evaluation scripts. Comprehensive evaluation of SOTA models highlights their significant shortcomings: the best-performing model, Claude-4.5-Sonnet, achieves only a 38.6% success rate with 20.2 tool calling turns on average, while the top open-weights model DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp reaches 20.1%. We expect Toolathlon to drive the development of more capable language agents for real-world, long-horizon task execution.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation allows LLMs to access external knowledge, reducing hallucinations and ageing-data issues. However, it treats retrieved chunks independently and struggles with multi-hop or relational reasoning, especially across documents. Knowledge graphs enhance this by capturing the relationships between entities using triplets, enabling structured, multi-chunk reasoning. However, these tend to miss information that fails to conform to the triplet structure. We introduce BambooKG, a knowledge graph with frequency-based weights on non-triplet edges which reflect link strength, drawing on the Hebbian principle of "fire together, wire together". This decreases information loss and results in improved performance on single- and multi-hop reasoning, outperforming the existing solutions.

We adapt a pre-trained Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model (Open-VLA) for dexterous human-robot collaboration with minimal language prompting. Our approach adds (i) FiLM conditioning to visual backbones for task-aware perception, (ii) an auxiliary intent head that predicts collaborator hand pose and target cues, and (iii) action-space post-processing that predicts compact deltas (position/rotation) and PCA-reduced finger joints before mapping to full commands. Using a multi-view, teleoperated Franka and Mimic-hand dataset augmented with MediaPipe hand poses, we demonstrate that delta actions are well-behaved and that four principal components explain ~96% of hand-joint variance. Ablations identify action post-processing as the primary performance driver; auxiliary intent helps, FiLM is mixed, and a directional motion loss is detrimental. A real-time stack (~0.3 s latency on one RTX 4090) composes "pick-up" and "pass" into a long-horizon behavior. We surface "trainer overfitting" to specific demonstrators as the key limitation.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly explored as flexible alternatives to classical machine learning models for classification tasks through zero-shot prompting. However, their suitability for structured tabular data remains underexplored, especially in high-stakes financial applications such as financial risk assessment. This study conducts a systematic comparison between zero-shot LLM-based classifiers and LightGBM, a state-of-the-art gradient-boosting model, on a real-world loan default prediction task. We evaluate their predictive performance, analyze feature attributions using SHAP, and assess the reliability of LLM-generated self-explanations. While LLMs are able to identify key financial risk indicators, their feature importance rankings diverge notably from LightGBM, and their self-explanations often fail to align with empirical SHAP attributions. These findings highlight the limitations of LLMs as standalone models for structured financial risk prediction and raise concerns about the trustworthiness of their self-generated explanations. Our results underscore the need for explainability audits, baseline comparisons with interpretable models, and human-in-the-loop oversight when deploying LLMs in risk-sensitive financial environments.

Spike-based temporal messaging enables SNNs to efficiently process both purely temporal and spatio-temporal time-series or event-driven data. Combining SNNs with Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs), a variant of recurrent neural networks, gives rise to a robust framework for sequential data processing; however, traditional RNNs often lose local details when handling long sequences. Previous approaches, such as SpikGRU, fail to capture fine-grained local dependencies in event-based spatio-temporal data. In this paper, we introduce the Convolutional Spiking GRU (CS-GRU) cell, which leverages convolutional operations to preserve local structure and dependencies while integrating the temporal precision of spiking neurons with the efficient gating mechanisms of GRUs. This versatile architecture excels on both temporal datasets (NTIDIGITS, SHD) and spatio-temporal benchmarks (MNIST, DVSGesture, CIFAR10DVS). Our experiments show that CS-GRU outperforms state-of-the-art GRU variants by an average of 4.35%, achieving over 90% accuracy on sequential tasks and up to 99.31% on MNIST. It is worth noting that our solution achieves 69% higher efficiency compared to SpikGRU. The code is available at: https://github.com/YesmineAbdennadher/CS-GRU.

Large language model-based agents show promise for software engineering, but environment configuration remains a bottleneck due to heavy manual effort and scarce large-scale, high-quality datasets. Existing benchmarks assess only end-to-end build/test success, obscuring where and why agents succeed or fail. We introduce the Environment Configuration Diagnosis Benchmark, Enconda-bench, which provides process-level trajectory assessment of fine-grained agent capabilities during environment setup-planning, perception-driven error diagnosis, feedback-driven repair, and action to execute final environment configuration. Our task instances are automatically constructed by injecting realistic README errors and are validated in Docker for scalable, high-quality evaluation. Enconda-bench combines process-level analysis with end-to-end executability to enable capability assessments beyond aggregate success rates. Evaluations across state-of-the-art LLMs and agent frameworks show that while agents can localize errors, they struggle to translate feedback into effective corrections, limiting end-to-end performance. To our knowledge, Enconda-bench is the first framework to provide process-level internal capability assessment for environment configuration, offering actionable insights for improving software engineering agents.