Deep Learning
Beyond Needle(s) in the Embodied Haystack: Environment, Architecture, and Training Considerations for Long Context Reasoning
Kim, Bosung, Ammanabrolu, Prithviraj
To enable this capability, we explore architectural adaptations, including interleaved Goal-State-Action modeling, context extension techniques, and Context Parallelism, to equip LLM-based agents for extreme long-context reasoning and interaction. Experimental results and analyses highlight the challenges posed by our benchmark and provide insights into training strategies and model behaviors under long-horizon conditions. Our work provides a foundation for the next generation of embodied AI systems capable of robust, long-term reasoning and planning. Real-world embodied reasoning is a sequential decision-making problem requiring long-horizon planning, where task success depends on both memorizing and reasoning over multiple events that occur far apart in time. Using large pre-trained vision-language-action (VLA) models as policies for such tasks requires surpassing the key challenge of long-context reasoning. We seek to answer questions pertaining to what design choices matter in terms of environments, model architectures, and training methods when using VLA models for long-horizon embodied tasks. To this end, we develop a new framework for long-horizon tasks designed to push the boundaries of long-context understanding in embodied AI. Our benchmark uniquely features tasks with a synthetic final goal, which involves multiple objects that appear at distant time steps, requiring multi-step reasoning across over hundreds of steps. Figure 1 illustrates an example: the agent observes the tomato at an early step (t=17) and the counter top much later (t=560). Then, the final task is given at t=670, which requires the agent to place the tomato on the counter top. This setup highlights the challenge of long-horizon dependency, where key objects and locations must be remembered and acted upon after hundreds of steps. Beyond these long-horizon dependencies, our framework also generates low-level robot-arm manipulation action sequences aligned with the trajectories, enabling agents to bridge from high-level reasoning to fine-grained physical execution.
Towards Holistic Evaluation of Large Audio-Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey
Yang, Chih-Kai, Ho, Neo S., Lee, Hung-yi
With advancements in large audio-language models (LALMs), which enhance large language models (LLMs) with auditory capabilities, these models are expected to demonstrate universal proficiency across various auditory tasks. While numerous benchmarks have emerged to assess LALMs' performance, they remain fragmented and lack a structured taxonomy. To bridge this gap, we conduct a comprehensive survey and propose a systematic taxonomy for LALM evaluations, categorizing them into four dimensions based on their objectives: (1) General Auditory Awareness and Processing, (2) Knowledge and Reasoning, (3) Dialogue-oriented Ability, and (4) Fairness, Safety, and Trustworthiness. We provide detailed overviews within each category and highlight challenges in this field, offering insights into promising future directions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey specifically focused on the evaluations of LALMs, providing clear guidelines for the community. We will release the collection of the surveyed papers and actively maintain it to support ongoing advancements in the field.
Adaptive Diffusion Constrained Sampling for Bimanual Robot Manipulation
Tong, Haolei, Zhang, Yuezhe, Lueth, Sophie, Chalvatzaki, Georgia
Coordinated multi-arm manipulation requires satisfying multiple simultaneous geometric constraints across high-dimensional configuration spaces, which poses a significant challenge for traditional planning and control methods. In this work, we propose Adaptive Diffusion Constrained Sampling (ADCS), a generative framework that flexibly integrates both equality (e.g., relative and absolute pose constraints) and structured inequality constraints (e.g., proximity to object surfaces) into an energy-based diffusion model. Equality constraints are modeled using dedicated energy networks trained on pose differences in Lie algebra space, while inequality constraints are represented via Signed Distance Functions (SDFs) and encoded into learned constraint embeddings, allowing the model to reason about complex spatial regions. A key innovation of our method is a Transformer-based architecture that learns to weight constraint-specific energy functions at inference time, enabling flexible and context-aware constraint integration. Moreover, we adopt a two-phase sampling strategy that improves precision and sample diversity by combining Langevin dynamics with resampling and density-aware re-weighting. Experimental results on dual-arm manipulation tasks show that ADCS significantly improves sample diversity and generalization across settings demanding precise coordination and adaptive constraint handling.
GuRE:Generative Query REwriter for Legal Passage Retrieval
Kim, Daehee, Kang, Deokhyung, Kim, Jonghwi, Ryu, Sangwon, Lee, Gary Geunbae
Legal Passage Retrieval (LPR) systems are crucial as they help practitioners save time when drafting legal arguments. However, it remains an underexplored avenue. One primary reason is the significant vocabulary mismatch between the query and the target passage. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective method, the Generative query REwriter (GuRE). We leverage the generative capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by training the LLM for query rewriting. "Rewritten queries" help retrievers to retrieve target passages by mitigating vocabulary mismatch. Experimental results show that GuRE significantly improves performance in a retriever-agnostic manner, outperforming all baseline methods. Further analysis reveals that different training objectives lead to distinct retrieval behaviors, making GuRE more suitable than direct retriever fine-tuning for real-world applications. Codes are avaiable at github.com/daehuikim/GuRE.
Ambiguity in LLMs is a concept missing problem
Hu, Zhibo, Wang, Chen, Shu, Yanfeng, Paik, Hye-Young, Zhu, Liming
Ambiguity in natural language is a significant obstacle for achieving accurate text to structured data mapping through large language models (LLMs), which affects the performance of tasks such as mapping text to agentic tool calling and text-to-SQL queries. Existing methods to ambiguity handling either rely on the ReACT framework to obtain correct mappings through trial and error, or on supervised fine-tuning to bias models toward specific tasks. In this paper, we adopt a different approach that characterizes representation differences of ambiguous text in the latent space and leverages these differences to identify ambiguity before mapping them to structured data. To detect sentence-level ambiguity, we focus on the relationship between ambiguous questions and their interpretations. Unlike distances calculated by dense embeddings, we introduce a new distance measure based on a path kernel over concepts. With this measurement, we identify patterns to distinguish ambiguous from unambiguous questions. Furthermore, we propose a method for improving LLM performance on ambiguous agentic tool calling through missing concept prediction. Both achieve state-of-the-art results.
Improving Retrieval-Augmented Neural Machine Translation with Monolingual Data
Bouthors, Maxime, Crego, Josep, Yvon, Franรงois
Conventional retrieval-augmented neural machine translation (RANMT) systems leverage bilingual corpora, e.g., translation memories (TMs). Yet, in many settings, monolingual corpora in the target language are often available. This work explores ways to take advantage of such resources by directly retrieving relevant target language segments, based on a source-side query. For this, we design improved cross-lingual retrieval systems, trained with both sentence level and word-level matching objectives. In our experiments with three RANMT architectures, we assess such cross-lingual objectives in a controlled setting, reaching performances that match those of standard TM-based models. We also showcase our method on a real-world settings, using much larger monolingual and observe strong improvements over both the baseline setting and general-purpose cross-lingual retrievers.
Robustness and sex differences in skin cancer detection: logistic regression vs CNNs
Pedersen, Nikolette, Sydendal, Regitze, Wulff, Andreas, Raumanns, Ralf, Petersen, Eike, Cheplygina, Veronika
Deep learning has been reported to achieve high performances in the detection of skin cancer, yet many challenges regarding the reproducibility of results and biases remain. This study is a replication (different data, same analysis) of a previous study on Alzheimer's disease detection, which studied the robustness of logistic regression (LR) and convolutional neural networks (CNN) across patient sexes. We explore sex bias in skin cancer detection, using the PAD-UFES-20 dataset with LR trained on handcrafted features reflecting dermatological guidelines (ABCDE and the 7-point checklist), and a pre-trained ResNet-50 model. We evaluate these models in alignment with the replicated study: across multiple training datasets with varied sex composition to determine their robustness. Our results show that both the LR and the CNN were robust to the sex distribution, but the results also revealed that the CNN had a significantly higher accuracy (ACC) and area under the receiver operating characteristics (AUROC) for male patients compared to female patients. The data and relevant scripts to reproduce our results are publicly available (https://github.com/
Affordable AI Assistants with Knowledge Graph of Thoughts
Besta, Maciej, Paleari, Lorenzo, Jiang, Jia Hao Andrea, Gerstenberger, Robert, Wu, You, Hannesson, Jรณn Gunnar, Iff, Patrick, Kubicek, Ales, Nyczyk, Piotr, Khimey, Diana, Blach, Nils, Zhang, Haiqiang, Zhang, Tao, Ma, Peiran, Kwaลniewski, Grzegorz, Copik, Marcin, Niewiadomski, Hubert, Hoefler, Torsten
Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing the development of AI assistants capable of performing diverse tasks across domains. However, current state-of-the-art LLM-driven agents face significant challenges, including high operational costs and limited success rates on complex benchmarks like GAIA. To address these issues, we propose Knowledge Graph of Thoughts (KGoT), an innovative AI assistant architecture that integrates LLM reasoning with dynamically constructed knowledge graphs (KGs). KGoT extracts and structures task-relevant knowledge into a dynamic KG representation, iteratively enhanced through external tools such as math solvers, web crawlers, and Python scripts. Such structured representation of task-relevant knowledge enables low-cost models to solve complex tasks effectively while also minimizing bias and noise. For example, KGoT achieves a 29% improvement in task success rates on the GAIA benchmark compared to Hugging Face Agents with GPT-4o mini. Moreover, harnessing a smaller model dramatically reduces operational costs by over 36x compared to GPT-4o. Improvements for other models (e.g., Qwen2.5-32B and Deepseek-R1-70B) and benchmarks (e.g., SimpleQA) are similar. KGoT offers a scalable, affordable, versatile, and high-performing solution for AI assistants.
Expected Attention: KV Cache Compression by Estimating Attention from Future Queries Distribution
Devoto, Alessio, Jeblick, Maximilian, Jรฉgou, Simon
Memory consumption of the Key-Value (KV) cache represents a major bottleneck for efficient large language model inference. While attention-score-based KV cache pruning shows promise, it faces critical practical limitations: attention scores from future tokens are unavailable during compression, and modern implementations like Flash Attention do not materialize the full attention matrix, making past scores inaccessible. To overcome these challenges, we introduce $\textbf{Expected Attention, a training-free compression method}$ that estimates KV pairs importance by predicting how future queries will attend to them. Our approach leverages the distributional properties of LLM activations to compute expected attention scores in closed form for each KV pair. These scores enable principled ranking and pruning of KV pairs with minimal impact on the residual stream, achieving effective compression without performance degradation. Importantly, our method operates seamlessly across both prefilling and decoding phases, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art baselines in both scenarios. Finally, $\textbf{we release KVPress, a comprehensive library to enable researchers to implement and benchmark KV cache compression methods, already including more than 20 techniques}$.
Hearing the Order: Investigating Selection Bias in Large Audio-Language Models
Lin, Yu-Xiang, Li, Chen-An, Wei, Sheng-Lun, Chen, Po-Chun, Chen, Hsin-Hsi, Lee, Hung-yi
Large audio-language models (LALMs) are often used in tasks that involve reasoning over ordered options. An open question is whether their predictions are influenced by the order of answer choices, which would indicate a form of selection bias and undermine their reliability. In this paper, we identify and analyze this problem in LALMs. We demonstrate that no model is immune to this bias through extensive experiments on six LALMs across three widely used benchmarks and their spoken counterparts. Shuffling the order of answer options can cause performance fluctuations of up to 24% and even change model rankings, raising concerns about the reliability of current evaluation practices. We also study permutation-based strategies and show that they can mitigate bias in most cases. Our work represents the first systematic investigation of this issue in LALMs, and we hope it raises awareness and motivates further research in this direction.