Deep Learning
Robust Classification of Oral Cancer with Limited Training Data
Sonawane, Akshay Bhagwan, Swamikannan, Lena D., Tamil, Lakshman
Oral cancer ranks among the most prevalent cancers globally, with a particularly high mortality rate in regions lacking adequate healthcare access. Early diagnosis is crucial for reducing mortality; however, challenges persist due to limited oral health programs, inadequate infrastructure, and a shortage of healthcare practitioners. Conventional deep learning models, while promising, often rely on point estimates, leading to overconfidence and reduced reliability. Critically, these models require large datasets to mitigate overfitting and ensure generalizability, an unrealistic demand in settings with limited training data. To address these issues, we propose a hybrid model that combines a convolutional neural network (CNN) with Bayesian deep learning for oral cancer classification using small training sets. This approach employs variational inference to enhance reliability through uncertainty quantification. The model was trained on photographic color images captured by smartphones and evaluated on three distinct test datasets. The proposed method achieved 94% accuracy on a test dataset with a distribution similar to that of the training data, comparable to traditional CNN performance. Notably, for real-world photographic image data, despite limitations and variations differing from the training dataset, the proposed model demonstrated superior generalizability, achieving 88% accuracy on diverse datasets compared to 72.94% for traditional CNNs, even with a smaller dataset. Confidence analysis revealed that the model exhibits low uncertainty (high confidence) for correctly classified samples and high uncertainty (low confidence) for misclassified samples. These results underscore the effectiveness of Bayesian inference in data-scarce environments in enhancing early oral cancer diagnosis by improving model reliability and generalizability.
Growing Visual Generative Capacity for Pre-Trained MLLMs
Wang, Hanyu, Han, Jiaming, Yang, Ziyan, Zhao, Qi, Lin, Shanchuan, Yue, Xiangyu, Shrivastava, Abhinav, Yang, Zhenheng, Chen, Hao
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) extend the success of language models to visual understanding, and recent efforts have sought to build unified MLLMs that support both understanding and generation. However, constructing such models remains challenging: hybrid approaches combine continuous embeddings with diffusion or flow-based objectives, producing high-quality images but breaking the autoregressive paradigm, while pure autoregressive approaches unify text and image prediction over discrete visual tokens but often face trade-offs between semantic alignment and pixel-level fidelity. In this work, we present Bridge, a pure autoregressive unified MLLM that augments pre-trained visual understanding models with generative ability through a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture, enabling both image understanding and generation within a single next-token prediction framework. To further improve visual generation fidelity, we propose a semantic-to-pixel discrete representation that integrates compact semantic tokens with fine-grained pixel tokens, achieving strong language alignment and precise description of visual details with only a 7.9% increase in sequence length. Extensive experiments across diverse multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that Bridge achieves competitive or superior results in both understanding and generation benchmarks, while requiring less training data and reduced training time compared to prior unified MLLMs.
Executable Counterfactuals: Improving LLMs' Causal Reasoning Through Code
Vashishtha, Aniket, Dai, Qirun, Mei, Hongyuan, Sharma, Amit, Tan, Chenhao, Peng, Hao
Counterfactual reasoning, a hallmark of intelligence, consists of three steps: inferring latent variables from observations (abduction), constructing alternatives (interventions), and predicting their outcomes (prediction). This skill is essential for advancing LLMs' causal understanding and expanding their applications in high-stakes domains such as scientific research. However, existing efforts in assessing LLM's counterfactual reasoning capabilities tend to skip the abduction step, effectively reducing to interventional reasoning and leading to overestimation of LLM performance. To address this, we introduce executable counterfactuals, a novel framework that operationalizes causal reasoning through code and math problems. Our framework explicitly requires all three steps of counterfactual reasoning and enables scalable synthetic data creation with varying difficulty, creating a frontier for evaluating and improving LLM's reasoning. Our results reveal substantial drop in accuracy (25-40%) from interventional to counterfactual reasoning for SOTA models like o4-mini and Claude-4-Sonnet. To address this gap, we construct a training set comprising counterfactual code problems having if-else condition and test on out-of-domain code structures (e.g. having while-loop); we also test whether a model trained on code would generalize to counterfactual math word problems. While supervised finetuning on stronger models' reasoning traces improves in-domain performance of Qwen models, it leads to a decrease in accuracy on OOD tasks such as counterfactual math problems. In contrast, reinforcement learning induces the core cognitive behaviors and generalizes to new domains, yielding gains over the base model on both code (improvement of 1.5x-2x) and math problems. Analysis of the reasoning traces reinforces these findings and highlights the promise of RL for improving LLMs' counterfactual reasoning.
NVIDIA AI Aerial: AI-Native Wireless Communications
Cohen-Arazi, Kobi, Roe, Michael, Hu, Zhen, Chavan, Rohan, Ptasznik, Anna, Lin, Joanna, Morais, Joao, Boccuzzi, Joseph, Balercia, Tommaso
6G brings a paradigm shift towards AI-native wireless systems, necessitating the seamless integration of digital signal processing (DSP) and machine learning (ML) within the software stacks of cellular networks. This transformation brings the life cycle of modern networks closer to AI systems, where models and algorithms are iteratively trained, simulated, and deployed across adjacent environments. In this work, we propose a robust framework that compiles Python-based algorithms into GPU-runnable blobs. The result is a unified approach that ensures efficiency, flexibility, and the highest possible performance on NVIDIA GPUs. As an example of the capabilities of the framework, we demonstrate the efficacy of performing the channel estimation function in the PUSCH receiver through a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained in Python. This is done in a digital twin first, and subsequently in a real-time testbed. Our proposed methodology, realized in the NVIDIA AI Aerial platform, lays the foundation for scalable integration of AI/ML models into next-generation cellular systems, and is essential for realizing the vision of natively intelligent 6G networks.
LOGicalThought: Logic-Based Ontological Grounding of LLMs for High-Assurance Reasoning
Nananukul, Navapat, Zhang, Yue, Lee, Ryan, Boxer, Eric, May, Jonathan, Gogate, Vibhav Giridhar, Pujara, Jay, Kejriwal, Mayank
High-assurance reasoning, particularly in critical domains such as law and medicine, requires conclusions that are accurate, verifiable, and explicitly grounded in evidence. This reasoning relies on premises codified from rules, statutes, and contracts, inherently involving defeasible or non-monotonic logic due to numerous exceptions, where the introduction of a single fact can invalidate general rules, posing significant challenges. While large language models (LLMs) excel at processing natural language, their capabilities in standard inference tasks do not translate to the rigorous reasoning required over high-assurance text guidelines. Core reasoning challenges within such texts often manifest specific logical structures involving negation, implication, and, most critically, defeasible rules and exceptions. In this paper, we propose a novel neurosymbolically-grounded architecture called LOGicalThought (LogT) that uses an advanced logical language and reasoner in conjunction with an LLM to construct a dual symbolic graph context and logic-based context. These two context representations transform the problem from inference over long-form guidelines into a compact grounded evaluation. Evaluated on four multi-domain benchmarks against four baselines, LogT improves overall performance by 11.84% across all LLMs. Performance improves significantly across all three modes of reasoning: by up to +10.2% on negation, +13.2% on implication, and +5.5% on defeasible reasoning compared to the strongest baseline.
Round-trip Reinforcement Learning: Self-Consistent Training for Better Chemical LLMs
Kong, Lecheng, Wang, Xiyuan, Chen, Yixin, Zhang, Muhan
Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as versatile foundation models for computational chemistry, handling bidirectional tasks like reaction prediction and retrosynthesis. However, these models often lack round-trip consistency. For instance, a state-of-the-art chemical LLM may successfully caption a molecule, yet be unable to accurately reconstruct the original structure from its own generated text. This inconsistency suggests that models are learning unidirectional memorization rather than flexible mastery. Indeed, recent work has demonstrated a strong correlation between a model's round-trip consistency and its performance on the primary tasks. We therefore introduce Round-Trip Reinforcement Learning (RTRL), a novel framework that trains a model to improve its consistency by using the success of a round-trip transformation as a reward signal. We further propose an iterative variant where forward and reverse mappings alternately train each other in a self-improvement loop, a process that is highly data-efficient and notably effective with the massive amount of unlabelled data common in chemistry. Experiments demonstrate that RTRL significantly boosts performance and consistency over strong baselines across supervised, self-supervised, and synthetic data regimes. This work shows that round-trip consistency is not just a desirable property but a trainable objective, offering a new path toward more robust and reliable foundation models. Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as a powerful class of versatile and generalizable foundation models for computational chemistry (Fang et al.; Cao et al., 2025; Wang et al., 2025). A key advantage is their ability to provide a more flexible and intuitive interface for scientists, enabling interaction with complex data through natural language. This is powered by their unique capability to process and generate information across diverse chemical modalities, from structured SMILES strings to unstructured experimental procedures (Zhao et al., 2025; Pei et al., 2024a). By unifying these disparate tasks and data types within a single framework, LLMs promise to significantly accelerate the pace of scientific discovery. A prominent theme enabled by this new generation of models is the modeling of bidirectional chemical tasks, such as translating between textual descriptions and molecular structures or mapping between forward synthesis and retrosynthesis (Pei et al., 2024b; Edwards et al., 2024; Liu et al., 2024). More than just a capability, however, this bidirectionality allows us to examine a model's depth of understanding through the crucial property of round-trip consistency (RTC).
One More Question is Enough, Expert Question Decomposition (EQD) Model for Domain Quantitative Reasoning
Wang, Mengyu, Sabanis, Sotirios, de Carvalho, Miguel, Cohen, Shay B., Ma, Tiejun
Domain-specific quantitative reasoning remains a major challenge for large language models (LLMs), especially in fields requiring expert knowledge and complex question answering (QA). In this work, we propose Expert Question Decomposition (EQD), an approach designed to balance the use of domain knowledge with computational efficiency. EQD is built on a two-step fine-tuning framework and guided by a reward function that measures the effectiveness of generated sub-questions in improving QA outcomes. It requires only a few thousand training examples and a single A100 GPU for fine-tuning, with inference time comparable to zero-shot prompting. Beyond its efficiency, EQD outperforms state-of-the-art domain-tuned models and advanced prompting strategies. We evaluate EQD in the financial domain, characterized by specialized knowledge and complex quantitative reasoning, across four benchmark datasets. Our method consistently improves QA performance by 0.6% to 10.5% across different LLMs. Our analysis reveals an important insight: in domain-specific QA, a single supporting question often provides greater benefit than detailed guidance steps.
From Videos to Indexed Knowledge Graphs -- Framework to Marry Methods for Multimodal Content Analysis and Understanding
Rizk, Basem, Walsh, Joel, Core, Mark, Nye, Benjamin
Analysis of multi-modal content can be tricky, computationally expensive, and require a significant amount of engineering efforts. Lots of work with pre-trained models on static data is out there, yet fusing these opensource models and methods with complex data such as videos is relatively challenging. In this paper, we present a framework that enables efficiently prototyping pipelines for multi-modal content analysis. W e craft a candidate recipe for a pipeline, marrying a set of pre-trained models, to convert videos into a temporal semi-structured data format. W e translate this structure further to a frame-level indexed knowledge graph representation that is query-able and supports continual learning, enabling the dynamic incorporation of new domain-specific knowledge through an interactive medium.
Beyond Majority Voting: LLM Aggregation by Leveraging Higher-Order Information
Ai, Rui, Pan, Yuqi, Simchi-Levi, David, Tambe, Milind, Xu, Haifeng
The aggregation of responses from multiple large language models has been widely used in practice. For example, a popular application is to improve reasoning via multi-agent LLM debate [Khan et al., 2024, Subramaniam et al., 2025, Choi et al., 2025] and LLM council [Zhao et al., 2024]. Previous works thus far have mostly employed the simple majority voting (MV) rule as a natural first instinct to aggregate different LLMs' responses into a single answer. Intuitively, MV can be viewed as a zero-order aggregation method that only depends on the observed answers and fails to account for heterogeneity and correlation among models, which are often captured by higher-order information such as LLMs' expected accuracies (first-order information) and answer correlation (second-order information). This thus raises the following natural question: is it possible to leverage such higher-order information to develop better methods for aggregating LLMs' responses?
VL-KnG: Visual Scene Understanding for Navigation Goal Identification using Spatiotemporal Knowledge Graphs
Mdfaa, Mohamad Al, Lukina, Svetlana, Akhtyamov, Timur, Nigmatzyanov, Arthur, Nalberskii, Dmitrii, Zagoruyko, Sergey, Ferrer, Gonzalo
Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown potential for robot navigation but encounter fundamental limitations: they lack persistent scene memory, offer limited spatial reasoning, and do not scale effectively with video duration for real-time application. We present VL-KnG, a Visual Scene Understanding system that tackles these challenges using spatiotemporal knowledge graph construction and computationally efficient query processing for navigation goal identification. Our approach processes video sequences in chunks utilizing modern VLMs, creates persistent knowledge graphs that maintain object identity over time, and enables explainable spatial reasoning through queryable graph structures. We also introduce WalkieKnowledge, a new benchmark with about 200 manually annotated questions across 8 diverse trajectories spanning approximately 100 minutes of video data, enabling fair comparison between structured approaches and general-purpose VLMs. Real-world deployment on a differential drive robot demonstrates practical applicability, with our method achieving 77.27% success rate and 76.92% answer accuracy, matching Gemini 2.5 Pro performance while providing explainable reasoning supported by the knowledge graph, computational efficiency for real-time deployment across different tasks, such as localization, navigation and planning. Code and dataset will be released after acceptance.