Deep Learning
RePro: Training Language Models to Faithfully Recycle the Web for Pretraining
High-quality pretraining data is the fossil fuel of large language models (LLMs), yet its reserves are running low for frontier models. In this paper, we introduce RePro, a novel web recycling method that trains a relatively small LM with reinforcement learning to generate effective and faithful rephrasings of pretraining data. Specifically, we design one quality reward and three faithfulness rewards, optimizing the LM rephraser to convert organic data into high-quality rephrasings while maintaining its core semantics and structure. In our experiment, we train a 4B rephraser to recycle 72B tokens sampled from DCLM-RefinedWeb. Pretraining results on 400M and 1.4B models demonstrate that RePro delivers 4.7%-14.0% relative accuracy gains over organic-only baseline on 22 downstream tasks. RePro also outperforms ReWire, the state-of-the-art web recycling method that prompts a 70B rephraser, as well as the organic baseline with a 4x larger data pool. Experiments with different amounts of recycled data highlight that RePro improves organic data efficiency by 2-3x. Individual and distributional analyses validate that RePro preserves more critical information and faithfully reflects the characteristics of organic data compared to prompting-based methods. Together, these results show that RePro provides an efficient and controllable path to effectively harness the fossil fuel of LLM pretraining. We open-source our code, rephraser, and recycled data at https://github.com/cxcscmu/RePro.
BrowserAgent: Building Web Agents with Human-Inspired Web Browsing Actions
Yu, Tao, Zhang, Zhengbo, Lyu, Zhiheng, Gong, Junhao, Yi, Hongzhu, Wang, Xinming, Zhou, Yuxuan, Yang, Jiabing, Nie, Ping, Huang, Yan, Chen, Wenhu
Efficiently solving real-world problems with LLMs increasingly hinges on their ability to interact with dynamic web environments and autonomously acquire external information. While recent research like Search-R1 and WebDancer demonstrates strong performance in solving web tasks, they heavily rely on additional tools to convert the interactive web environment into static text content. This is in contrast to human browsing behaviors, which involve diverse interactions with the browser, such as scrolling, clicking, and typing. In this paper, we propose BrowserAgent, a more interactive agent that solves complex tasks through human-inspired browser actions. BrowserAgent operates directly on raw web pages via Playwright through a set of predefined browser actions. We adopt a two-stage training (Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Rejection Fine-Tuning (RFT)) to improve the model's generalization abilities. Despite using significantly less training data than Search-R1, BrowserAgent achieves more competitive results across different Open-QA tasks. Additionally, we introduce an explicit memory mechanism to store key conclusions across steps, further enhancing the model's reasoning capabilities for long-horizon tasks. Notably, BrowserAgent-7B can achieve around 20\% improvement over Search-R1 on multi-hop QA tasks like HotpotQA, 2Wiki, and Bamboogle. These results indicate that BrowserAgent can serve as a more advanced framework for more interactive and scalable web agents.
AGENTIQL: An Agent-Inspired Multi-Expert Framework for Text-to-SQL Generation
Heidari, Omid Reza, Reid, Siobhan, Yaakoubi, Yassine
LLMs have advanced text-to-SQL generation, yet monolithic architectures struggle with complex reasoning and schema diversity. We propose AGENTIQL, an agent-inspired multi-expert framework that combines a reasoning agent for question decomposition, a coding agent for sub-query generation, and a refinement step for column selection. An adaptive router further balances efficiency and accuracy by selecting between our modular pipeline and a baseline parser. Several steps in the pipeline can be executed in parallel, making the framework scalable to larger workloads. Evaluated on the Spider benchmark, AGENTIQL improves execution accuracy and interpretability and achieves up to 86.07% EX with 14B models using the Planner&Executor merging strategy. The attained performance is contingent upon the efficacy of the routing mechanism, thereby narrowing the gap to GPT-4-based SOTA (89.65% EX) while using much smaller open-source LLMs. Beyond accuracy, AGENTIQL enhances transparency by exposing intermediate reasoning steps, offering a robust, scalable, and interpretable approach to semantic parsing.
A Machine Learning Approach for MIDI to Guitar Tablature Conversion
Kaliakatsos-Papakostas, Maximos, Bastas, Gregoris, Makris, Dimos, Herremans, Dorien, Katsouros, Vassilis, Maragos, Petros
Guitar tablature transcription consists in deducing the string and the fret number on which each note should be played to reproduce the actual musical part. This assignment should lead to playable string-fret combinations throughout the entire track and, in general, preserve parsimonious motion between successive combinations. Throughout the history of guitar playing, specific chord fingerings have been developed across different musical styles that facilitate common idiomatic voicing combinations and motion between them. This paper presents a method for assigning guitar tablature notation to a given MIDI-based musical part (possibly consisting of multiple polyphonic tracks), i.e. no information about guitar-idiomatic expressional characteristics is involved (e.g. bending etc.) The current strategy is based on machine learning and requires a basic assumption about how much fingers can stretch on a fretboard; only standard 6-string guitar tuning is examined. The proposed method also examines the transcription of music pieces that was not meant to be played or could not possibly be played by a guitar (e.g. potentially a symphonic orchestra part), employing a rudimentary method for augmenting musical information and training/testing the system with artificial data. The results present interesting aspects about what the system can achieve when trained on the initial and augmented dataset, showing that the training with augmented data improves the performance even in simple, e.g. monophonic, cases. Results also indicate weaknesses and lead to useful conclusions about possible improvements.
Humanoid Artificial Consciousness Designed with Large Language Model Based on Psychoanalysis and Personality Theory
Kim, Sang Hun, Lee, Jongmin, Park, Dongkyu, Lee, So Young, Chong, Yosep
Human consciousness is still a concept hard to define with current scientific understanding. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated significant advancements across various domains including translation and summarization, human consciousness is not something to imitate with current upfront technology owing to so-called hallucination. This study, therefore, proposes a novel approach to address these challenges by integrating psychoanalysis and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) into constructing consciousness and personality modules. We developed three artificial consciousnesses (self-awareness, unconsciousness, and preconsciousness) based on the principles of psychoanalysis. Additionally, we designed 16 characters with different personalities representing the sixteen MBTI types, with several attributes such as needs, status, and memories. To determine if our model's artificial consciousness exhibits human-like cognition, we created ten distinct situations considering seven attributes such as emotional understanding and logical thinking. The decision-making process of artificial consciousness and the final action were evaluated in three ways: survey evaluation, three-tier classification via ChatGPT, and qualitative review. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses indicated a high likelihood of well-simulated consciousness, although the difference in response between different characters and consciousnesses was not very significant. This implies that the developed models incorporating elements of psychoanalysis and personality theory can lead to building a more intuitive and adaptable AI system with humanoid consciousness. Therefore, this study contributes to opening up new avenues for improving AI interactions in complex cognitive contexts.
Agent Learning via Early Experience
Zhang, Kai, Chen, Xiangchao, Liu, Bo, Xue, Tianci, Liao, Zeyi, Liu, Zhihan, Wang, Xiyao, Ning, Yuting, Chen, Zhaorun, Fu, Xiaohan, Xie, Jian, Sun, Yuxuan, Gou, Boyu, Qi, Qi, Meng, Zihang, Yang, Jianwei, Zhang, Ning, Li, Xian, Shah, Ashish, Huynh, Dat, Li, Hengduo, Yang, Zi, Cao, Sara, Jang, Lawrence, Zhou, Shuyan, Zhu, Jiacheng, Sun, Huan, Weston, Jason, Su, Yu, Wu, Yifan
A long-term goal of language agents is to learn and improve through their own experience, ultimately outperforming humans in complex, real-world tasks. However, training agents from experience data with reinforcement learning remains difficult in many environments, which either lack verifiable rewards (e.g., websites) or require inefficient long-horizon rollouts (e.g., multi-turn tool use). As a result, most current agents rely on supervised fine-tuning on expert data, which is challenging to scale and generalizes poorly. This limitation stems from the nature of expert demonstrations: they capture only a narrow range of scenarios and expose the agent to limited environment diversity. We address this limitation with a middle-ground paradigm we call early experience: interaction data generated by the agent's own actions, where the resulting future states serve as supervision without reward signals. Within this paradigm we study two strategies of using such data: (1) Implicit world modeling, which uses collected states to ground the policy in environment dynamics; and (2) Self-reflection, where the agent learns from its suboptimal actions to improve reasoning and decision-making. We evaluate across eight diverse environments and multiple model families. Our approaches consistently improve effectiveness and out-of-domain generalization, highlighting the value of early experience. Moreover, in environments with verifiable rewards, our results provide promising signals that early experience offers a strong foundation for subsequent reinforcement learning, positioning it as a practical bridge between imitation learning and fully experience-driven agents.
L2M-AID: Autonomous Cyber-Physical Defense by Fusing Semantic Reasoning of Large Language Models with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (Preprint)
Xu, Tianxiang, Wen, Zhichao, Zhao, Xinyu, Wang, Jun, Li, Yan, Liu, Chang
This paper introduces L2M-AID, a novel framework for Autonomous Industrial Defense using LLM-empowered, Multi-agent reinforcement learning. L2M-AID orchestrates a team of collaborative agents, each driven by a Large Language Model (LLM), to achieve adaptive and resilient security. The core innovation lies in the deep fusion of two AI paradigms: we leverage an LLM as a semantic bridge to translate vast, unstructured telemetry into a rich, contextual state representation, enabling agents to reason about adversary intent rather than merely matching patterns. This semantically-aware state empowers a Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) algorithm, MAPPO, to learn complex cooperative strategies. The MARL reward function is uniquely engineered to balance security objectives (threat neutralization) with operational imperatives, explicitly penalizing actions that disrupt physical process stability. T o validate our approach, we conduct extensive experiments on the benchmark SWaT dataset and a novel synthetic dataset generated based on the MITRE A TT&CK for ICS framework. Results demonstrate that L2M-AID significantly outperforms traditional IDS, deep learning anomaly detectors, and single-agent RL baselines across key metrics, achieving a 97.2% detection rate while reducing false positives by over 80% and improving response times by a factor of four . Crucially, it demonstrates superior performance in maintaining physical process stability, presenting a robust new paradigm for securing critical national infrastructure.
GTCN-G: A Residual Graph-Temporal Fusion Network for Imbalanced Intrusion Detection (Preprint)
Xu, Tianxiang, Wen, Zhichao, Zhao, Xinyu, Hu, Qi, Li, Yan, Liu, Chang
The escalating complexity of network threats and the inherent class imbalance in traffic data present formidable challenges for modern Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). While Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel in modeling topological structures and Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCNs) are proficient in capturing time-series dependencies, a framework that synergistically integrates both while explicitly addressing data imbalance remains an open challenge. This paper introduces a novel deep learning framework, named Gated Temporal Convolutional Network and Graph (GTCN-G), engineered to overcome these limitations. Our model uniquely fuses a Gated TCN (G-TCN) for extracting hierarchical temporal features from network flows with a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) designed to learn from the underlying graph structure. The core innovation lies in the integration of a residual learning mechanism, implemented via a Graph Attention Network (GAT). This mechanism preserves original feature information through residual connections, which is critical for mitigating the class imbalance problem and enhancing detection sensitivity for rare malicious activities (minority classes). We conducted extensive experiments on two public benchmark datasets, UNSW-NB15 and ToN-IoT, to validate our approach. The empirical results demonstrate that the proposed GTCN-G model achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming existing baseline models in both binary and multi-class classification tasks.
OptiFLIDS: Optimized Federated Learning for Energy-Efficient Intrusion Detection in IoT
Elouardi, Saida, Jouhari, Mohammed, Motii, Anas
In critical IoT environments, such as smart homes and industrial systems, effective Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are essential for ensuring security. However, developing robust IDS solutions remains a significant challenge. Traditional machine learning-based IDS models typically require large datasets, but data sharing is often limited due to privacy and security concerns. Federated Learning (FL) presents a promising alternative by enabling collaborative model training without sharing raw data. Despite its advantages, FL still faces key challenges, such as data heterogeneity (non-IID data) and high energy and computation costs, particularly for resource constrained IoT devices. To address these issues, this paper proposes OptiFLIDS, a novel approach that applies pruning techniques during local training to reduce model complexity and energy consumption. It also incorporates a customized aggregation method to better handle pruned models that differ due to non-IID data distributions. Experiments conducted on three recent IoT IDS datasets, TON_IoT, X-IIoTID, and IDSIoT2024, demonstrate that OptiFLIDS maintains strong detection performance while improving energy efficiency, making it well-suited for deployment in real-world IoT environments.
AgentBuilder: Exploring Scaffolds for Prototyping User Experiences of Interface Agents
Liang, Jenny T., Barik, Titus, Nichols, Jeffrey, Schoop, Eldon, Cheng, Ruijia
Interface agents powered by generative AI models (referred to as "agents") can automate actions based on user commands. An important aspect of developing agents is their user experience (i.e., agent experience). There is a growing need to provide scaffolds for a broader set of individuals beyond AI engineers to prototype agent experiences, since they can contribute valuable perspectives to designing agent experiences. In this work, we explore the affordances agent prototyping systems should offer by conducting a requirements elicitation study with 12 participants with varying experience with agents. We identify key activities in agent experience prototyping and the desired capabilities of agent prototyping systems. We instantiate those capabilities in the AgentBuilder design probe for agent prototyping. We conduct an in situ agent prototyping study with 14 participants using AgentBuilder to validate the design requirements and elicit insights on how developers prototype agents and what their needs are in this process.