Deep Learning
Graph Network-based Structural Simulator: Graph Neural Networks for Structural Dynamics
Lucchetti, Alessandro, Cadini, Francesco, Giglio, Marco, Lomazzi, Luca
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently been explored as surrogate models for numerical simulations. While their applications in computational fluid dynamics have been investigated, little attention has been given to structural problems, especially for dynamic cases. To address this gap, we introduce the Graph Network-based Structural Simulator (GNSS), a GNN framework for surrogate modeling of dynamic structural problems. GNSS follows the encode-process-decode paradigm typical of GNN-based machine learning models, and its design makes it particularly suited for dynamic simulations thanks to three key features: (i) expressing node kinematics in node-fixed local frames, which avoids catastrophic cancellation in finite-difference velocities; (ii) employing a sign-aware regression loss, which reduces phase errors in long rollouts; and (iii) using a wavelength-informed connectivity radius, which optimizes graph construction. We evaluate GNSS on a case study involving a beam excited by a 50 kHz Hanning-modulated pulse. The results show that GNSS accurately reproduces the physics of the problem over hundreds of timesteps and generalizes to unseen loading conditions, where existing GNNs fail to converge or deliver meaningful predictions. Compared with explicit finite element baselines, GNSS achieves substantial inference speedups while preserving spatial and temporal fidelity. These findings demonstrate that locality-preserving GNNs with physics-consistent update rules are a competitive alternative for dynamic, wave-dominated structural simulations.
ALDEN: Reinforcement Learning for Active Navigation and Evidence Gathering in Long Documents
Yang, Tianyu, Ruas, Terry, Tian, Yijun, Wahle, Jan Philip, Kurzawe, Daniel, Gipp, Bela
Vision-language models (VLMs) excel at interpreting text-rich images but struggle with long, visually complex documents that demand analysis and integration of information spread across multiple pages. Existing approaches typically rely on fixed reasoning templates or rigid pipelines, which force VLMs into a passive role and hinder both efficiency and generalization. We present Active Long-DocumEnt Navigation (ALDEN), a multi-turn reinforcement learning framework that fine-tunes VLMs as interactive agents capable of actively navigating long, visually rich documents. ALDEN introduces a novel fetch action that directly accesses the page by index, complementing the classic search action and better exploiting document structure. For dense process supervision and efficient training, we propose a rule-based cross-level reward that provides both turn- and token-level signals. To address the empirically observed training instability caused by numerous visual tokens from long documents, we further propose a visual-semantic anchoring mechanism that applies a dual-path KL-divergence constraint to stabilize visual and textual representations separately during training. Trained on a corpus constructed from three open-source datasets, ALDEN achieves state-of-the-art performance on five long-document benchmarks. Overall, ALDEN marks a step beyond passive document reading toward agents that autonomously navigate and reason across long, visually rich documents, offering a robust path to more accurate and efficient long-document understanding.
User Misconceptions of LLM-Based Conversational Programming Assistants
O'Brien, Gabrielle, Alves, Antonio Pedro Santos, Baltes, Sebastian, Liebel, Grischa, Lungu, Mircea, Kalinowski, Marcos
Programming assistants powered by large language models (LLMs) have become widely available, with conversational assistants like ChatGPT proving particularly accessible to less experienced programmers. However, the varied capabilities of these tools across model versions and the mixed availability of extensions that enable web search, code execution, or retrieval-augmented generation create opportunities for user misconceptions about what systems can and cannot do. Such misconceptions may lead to over-reliance, unproductive practices, or insufficient quality control in LLM-assisted programming. Here, we aim to characterize misconceptions that users of conversational LLM-based assistants may have in programming contexts. Using a two-phase approach, we first brainstorm and catalog user misconceptions that may occur, and then conduct a qualitative analysis to examine whether these conceptual issues surface in naturalistic Python-programming conversations with an LLM-based chatbot drawn from an openly available dataset. Indeed, we see evidence that some users have misplaced expectations about the availability of LLM-based chatbot features like web access, code execution, or non-text output generation. We also see potential evidence for deeper conceptual issues around the scope of information required to debug, validate, and optimize programs. Our findings reinforce the need for designing LLM-based tools that more clearly communicate their programming capabilities to users.
FARSIQA: Faithful and Advanced RAG System for Islamic Question Answering
Asl, Mohammad Aghajani, Bidgoli, Behrooz Minaei
The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized Natural Language Processing, yet their application in high-stakes, specialized domains like religious question answering is hindered by challenges like hallucination and unfaithfulness to authoritative sources. This issue is particularly critical for the Persian-speaking Muslim community, where accuracy and trustworthiness are paramount. Existing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, relying on simplistic single-pass pipelines, fall short on complex, multi-hop queries requiring multi-step reasoning and evidence aggregation. To address this gap, we introduce FARSIQA, a novel, end-to-end system for Faithful Advanced Question Answering in the Persian Islamic domain. FARSIQA is built upon our innovative FAIR-RAG architecture: a Faithful, Adaptive, Iterative Refinement framework for RAG. FAIR-RAG employs a dynamic, self-correcting process: it adaptively decomposes complex queries, assesses evidence sufficiency, and enters an iterative loop to generate sub-queries, progressively filling information gaps. Operating on a curated knowledge base of over one million authoritative Islamic documents, FARSIQA demonstrates superior performance. Rigorous evaluation on the challenging IslamicPCQA benchmark shows state-of-the-art performance: the system achieves a remarkable 97.0% in Negative Rejection - a 40-point improvement over baselines - and a high Answer Correctness score of 74.3%. Our work establishes a new standard for Persian Islamic QA and validates that our iterative, adaptive architecture is crucial for building faithful, reliable AI systems in sensitive domains.
INT v.s. FP: A Comprehensive Study of Fine-Grained Low-bit Quantization Formats
Chen, Mengzhao, Wu, Meng, Jin, Hui, Yuan, Zhihang, Liu, Jing, Zhang, Chaoyi, Li, Yunshui, Huang, Jie, Ma, Jin, Xue, Zeyue, Liu, Zhiheng, Bin, Xingyan, Luo, Ping
Modern AI hardware, such as Nvidia's Blackwell architecture, is increasingly embracing low-precision floating-point (FP) formats to handle the pervasive activation outliers in Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite this industry trend, a unified comparison of FP and integer (INT) quantization across varying granularities has been missing, leaving algorithm and hardware co-design without clear guidance. This paper fills that gap by systematically investigating the trade-offs between FP and INT formats. We reveal a critical performance crossover: while FP excels in coarse-grained quantization, the comparison at fine-grained (block-wise) levels is more nuanced. Our comprehensive comparison demonstrates that for popular 8-bit fine-grained formats (e.g., MX with block size 32), MXINT8 is superior to its FP counterpart in both algorithmic accuracy and hardware efficiency. However, for 4-bit formats, FP (e.g., MXFP4, NVFP4) often holds an accuracy advantage , though we show that NVINT4 can surpass NVFP4 when outlier-mitigation techniques like Hadamard rotation are applied. We also introduce a symmetric clipping method that resolves gradient bias in fine-grained low-bit INT training, enabling nearly lossless performance for MXINT8 training. These findings challenge the current hardware trajectory, demonstrating that a one-size-fits-all FP approach is suboptimal and advocating that fine-grained INT formats, particularly MXINT8, offer a better balance of accuracy, power, and efficiency for future AI accelerators.
Communication and Verification in LLM Agents towards Collaboration under Information Asymmetry
Peng, Run, Ma, Ziqiao, Pang, Amy, Li, Sikai, Xi-Jia, Zhang, Yu, Yingzhuo, Bara, Cristian-Paul, Chai, Joyce
While Large Language Model (LLM) agents are often approached from the angle of action planning/generation to accomplish a goal (e.g., given by language descriptions), their abilities to collaborate with each other to achieve a joint goal are not well explored. To address this limitation, this paper studies LLM agents in task collaboration, particularly under the condition of information asymmetry, where agents have disparities in their knowledge and skills and need to work together to complete a shared task. We extend Einstein Puzzles, a classical symbolic puzzle, to a table-top game. In this game, two LLM agents must reason, communicate, and act to satisfy spatial and relational constraints required to solve the puzzle. We apply a fine-tuning-plus-verifier framework in which LLM agents are equipped with various communication strategies and verification signals from the environment. Empirical results highlight the critical importance of aligned communication, especially when agents possess both information-seeking and -providing capabilities. Interestingly, agents without communication can still achieve high task performance; however, further analysis reveals a lack of true rule understanding and lower trust from human evaluators. Instead, by integrating an environment-based verifier, we enhance agents' ability to comprehend task rules and complete tasks, promoting both safer and more interpretable collaboration in AI systems. https://github.com/Roihn/EinsteinPuzzles
RegionE: Adaptive Region-Aware Generation for Efficient Image Editing
Chen, Pengtao, Zeng, Xianfang, Zhao, Maosen, Shen, Mingzhu, Ye, Peng, Xiang, Bangyin, Wang, Zhibo, Cheng, Wei, Yu, Gang, Chen, Tao
Recently, instruction-based image editing (IIE) has received widespread attention. In practice, IIE often modifies only specific regions of an image, while the remaining areas largely remain unchanged. Although these two types of regions differ significantly in generation difficulty and computational redundancy, existing IIE models do not account for this distinction, instead applying a uniform generation process across the entire image. This motivates us to propose RegionE, an adaptive, region-aware generation framework that accelerates IIE tasks without additional training. Specifically, the RegionE framework consists of three main components: 1) Adaptive Region Partition. We observed that the trajectory of unedited regions is straight, allowing for multi-step denoised predictions to be inferred in a single step. Therefore, in the early denoising stages, we partition the image into edited and unedited regions based on the difference between the final estimated result and the reference image. 2) Region-Aware Generation. After distinguishing the regions, we replace multi-step denoising with one-step prediction for unedited areas. For edited regions, the trajectory is curved, requiring local iterative denoising. To improve the efficiency and quality of local iterative generation, we propose the Region-Instruction KV Cache, which reduces computational cost while incorporating global information. 3) Adaptive Velocity Decay Cache. Observing that adjacent timesteps in edited regions exhibit strong velocity similarity, we further propose an adaptive velocity decay cache to accelerate the local denoising process. We applied RegionE to state-of-the-art IIE base models, including Step1X-Edit, FLUX.1 Kontext, and Qwen-Image-Edit. RegionE achieved acceleration factors of 2.57, 2.41, and 2.06. Evaluations by GPT-4o confirmed that semantic and perceptual fidelity were well preserved.
Standardization of Psychiatric Diagnoses -- Role of Fine-tuned LLM Consortium and OpenAI-gpt-oss Reasoning LLM Enabled Decision Support System
Bandara, Eranga, Gore, Ross, Yarlagadda, Atmaram, Clayton, Anita H., Samuel, Preston, Rhea, Christopher K., Shetty, Sachin
The diagnosis of most mental disorders, including psychiatric evaluations, primarily depends on dialogues between psychiatrists and patients. This subjective process can lead to variability in diagnoses across clinicians and patients, resulting in inconsistencies and challenges in achieving reliable outcomes. To address these issues and standardize psychiatric diagnoses, we propose a Fine-Tuned Large Language Model (LLM) Consortium and OpenAI-gpt-oss Reasoning LLM-enabled Decision Support System for the clinical diagnosis of mental disorders. Our approach leverages fine-tuned LLMs trained on conversational datasets involving psychiatrist-patient interactions focused on mental health conditions (e.g., depression). The diagnostic predictions from individual models are aggregated through a consensus-based decision-making process, refined by the OpenAI-gpt-oss reasoning LLM. We propose a novel method for deploying LLM agents that orchestrate communication between the LLM consortium and the reasoning LLM, ensuring transparency, reliability, and responsible AI across the entire diagnostic workflow. Experimental results demonstrate the transformative potential of combining fine-tuned LLMs with a reasoning model to create a robust and highly accurate diagnostic system for mental health assessment. A prototype of the proposed platform, integrating three fine-tuned LLMs with the OpenAI-gpt-oss reasoning LLM, was developed in collaboration with the U.S. Army Medical Research Team in Norfolk, Virginia, USA. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first application of a fine-tuned LLM consortium integrated with a reasoning LLM for clinical mental health diagnosis paving the way for next-generation AI-powered eHealth systems aimed at standardizing psychiatric diagnoses.
Leveraging an Atmospheric Foundational Model for Subregional Sea Surface Temperature Forecasting
Medina, Vรญctor, Cuervo-Londoรฑo, Giovanny A., Sรกnchez, Javier
The accurate prediction of oceanographic variables is crucial for understanding climate change, managing marine resources, and optimizing maritime activities. Traditional ocean forecasting relies on numerical models; however, these approaches face limitations in terms of computational cost and scalability. In this study, we adapt Aurora, a foundational deep learning model originally designed for atmospheric forecasting, to predict sea surface temperature (SST) in the Canary Upwelling System. By fine-tuning this model with high-resolution oceanographic reanalysis data, we demonstrate its ability to capture complex spatiotemporal patterns while reducing computational demands. Our methodology involves a staged fine-tuning process, incorporating latitude-weighted error metrics and optimizing hyperparameters for efficient learning. The experimental results show that the model achieves a low RMSE of 0.119K, maintaining high anomaly correlation coefficients (ACC $\approx 0.997$). The model successfully reproduces large-scale SST structures but faces challenges in capturing finer details in coastal regions. This work contributes to the field of data-driven ocean forecasting by demonstrating the feasibility of using deep learning models pre-trained in different domains for oceanic applications. Future improvements include integrating additional oceanographic variables, increasing spatial resolution, and exploring physics-informed neural networks to enhance interpretability and understanding. These advancements can improve climate modeling and ocean prediction accuracy, supporting decision-making in environmental and economic sectors.
Zero Reinforcement Learning Towards General Domains
Zeng, Yuyuan, Huang, Yufei, Xu, Can, Sun, Qingfeng, Yan, Jianfeng, Xu, Guanghui, Yang, Tao, Lian, Fengzong
Zero Reinforcement Learning (Zero-RL) has proven to be an effective approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by directly applying reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards on pretrained models, without the need for a supervised fine-tuning phase. However, current research on zero-RL primarily focuses on domains with easily verifiable reward signals, such as mathematics, programming, and other reasoning tasks. The challenge of eliciting reasoning abilities in more diverse scenarios, where verification is not straightforward, remains underexplored. To address this gap, we propose a novel zero-RL paradigm designed to improve a model's reasoning ability across both verifiable and non-verifiable domains. By combining verifiable rewards with a generative reward model, we conduct multi-task zero-RL training across both domains, facilitating the transfer of reasoning capabilities between them. Furthermore, to mitigate reward hacking in the generative reward model, we design a smooth length penalty that encourages the generation of more comprehensive thinking tokens in general domains. Experimental results on Qwen3-8B-Base and Qwen3-14B-Base demonstrate that our approach achieves superior reasoning performance, not only on tasks requiring extensive reasoning but also on more general tasks.