Large language models (LLMs) inevitably encode outdated or incorrect knowledge. Updating, deleting, and forgetting such knowledge is important for alignment, safety, and other issues. To address this issue, model editing has emerged as a promising paradigm: by precisely editing a small subset of parameters such that a specific fact is updated while preserving other knowledge. Despite its great success reported in previous papers, we find the apparent reliability of editing rests on a fragile foundation and the current literature is largely driven by illusory success. The fundamental goal of steering the model's output toward a target with minimal modification would encourage exploiting hidden shortcuts, rather than utilizing real semantics. This problem directly challenges the feasibility of the current model editing literature at its very foundation, as shortcuts are inherently at odds with robust knowledge integration. Coincidentally, this issue has long been obscured by evaluation frameworks that lack the design of negative examples. To uncover it, we systematically develop a suite of new evaluation methods. Strikingly, we find that state-of-the-art approaches collapse even under the simplest negation queries. Our empirical evidence shows that editing is likely to be based on shortcuts rather than full semantics, calling for an urgent reconsideration of the very basis of model editing before further advancements can be meaningfully pursued.

Functional data play a pivotal role across science and engineering, yet their infinite-dimensional nature makes representation learning challenging. Conventional statistical models depend on pre-chosen basis expansions or kernels, limiting the flexibility of data-driven discovery, while many deep-learning pipelines treat functions as fixed-grid vectors, ignoring inherent continuity. In this paper, we introduce Functional Attention with a Mixture-of-Experts (FAME), an end-to-end, fully data-driven framework for function-on-function regression. FAME forms continuous attention by coupling a bidirectional neural controlled differential equation with MoE-driven vector fields to capture intra-functional continuity, and further fuses change to inter-functional dependencies via multi-head cross attention. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world functional-regression benchmarks show that FAME achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, strong robustness to arbitrarily sampled discrete observations of functions.

While there has been a surge of interest in automated scientific discovery (ASD), especially with the emergence of LLMs, it remains challenging for tools to generate hypotheses that are both testable and grounded in the scientific literature. Additionally, existing ideation tools are not adaptive to prior experimental outcomes. We developed HARPA to address these challenges by incorporating the ideation workflow inspired by human researchers. HARPA first identifies emerging research trends through literature mining, then explores hypothesis design spaces, and finally converges on precise, testable hypotheses by pinpointing research gaps and justifying design choices. Our evaluations show that HARPA-generated hypothesis-driven research proposals perform comparably to a strong baseline AI-researcher across most qualitative dimensions (e.g., specificity, novelty, overall quality), but achieve significant gains in feasibility(+0.78, p$<0.05$, bootstrap) and groundedness (+0.85, p$<0.01$, bootstrap) on a 10-point Likert scale. When tested with the ASD agent (CodeScientist), HARPA produced more successful executions (20 vs. 11 out of 40) and fewer failures (16 vs. 21 out of 40), showing that expert feasibility judgments track with actual execution success. Furthermore, to simulate how researchers continuously refine their understanding of what hypotheses are both testable and potentially interesting from experience, HARPA learns a reward model that scores new hypotheses based on prior experimental outcomes, achieving approx. a 28\% absolute gain over HARPA's untrained baseline scorer. Together, these methods represent a step forward in the field of AI-driven scientific discovery.

Software automation has long been a central goal of software engineering, striving for software development that proceeds without human intervention. Recent efforts have leveraged Artificial Intelligence (AI) to advance software automation with notable progress. However, current AI functions primarily as assistants to human developers, leaving software development still dependent on explicit human intervention. This raises a fundamental question: Can AI move beyond its role as an assistant to become a core component of software, thereby enabling genuine software automation? To investigate this vision, we introduce AI-Driven Self-Evolving Software, a new form of software that evolves continuously through direct interaction with users. We demonstrate the feasibility of this idea with a lightweight prototype built on a multi-agent architecture that autonomously interprets user requirements, generates and validates code, and integrates new functionalities. Case studies across multiple representative scenarios show that the prototype can reliably construct and reuse functionality, providing early evidence that such software systems can scale to more sophisticated applications and pave the way toward truly automated software development. We make code and cases in this work publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/live-software.

Accurate medical image segmentation plays a crucial role in overall diagnosis and is one of the most essential tasks in the diagnostic pipeline. CNN-based models, despite their extensive use, suffer from a local receptive field and fail to capture the global context. A common approach that combines CNNs with transformers attempts to bridge this gap but fails to effectively fuse the local and global features. With the recent emergence of VLMs and foundation models, they have been adapted for downstream medical imaging tasks; however, they suffer from an inherent domain gap and high computational cost. To this end, we propose U-DFA, a unified DINOv2-Unet encoder-decoder architecture that integrates a novel Local-Global Fusion Adapter (LGFA) to enhance segmentation performance. LGFA modules inject spatial features from a CNN-based Spatial Pattern Adapter (SPA) module into frozen DINOv2 blocks at multiple stages, enabling effective fusion of high-level semantic and spatial features. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Synapse and ACDC datasets with only 33% of the trainable model parameters. These results demonstrate that U-DFA is a robust and scalable framework for medical image segmentation across multiple modalities. The source code and pre-processed data can be accessed using the link: Keywords: Medical Image Segmentation DINOv2 Image Segmentation Transformer Deep Learning.

Large language models (LLMs) are trained on vast amounts of text from the Internet, but do they truly understand the viral content that rapidly spreads online -- commonly known as memes? In this paper, we introduce CHIME, a dataset for CHinese Internet Meme Explanation. The dataset comprises popular phrase-based memes from the Chinese Internet, annotated with detailed information on their meaning, origin, example sentences, types, etc. To evaluate whether LLMs understand these memes, we designed two tasks. In the first task, we assessed the models' ability to explain a given meme, identify its origin, and generate appropriate example sentences. The results show that while LLMs can explain the meanings of some memes, their performance declines significantly for culturally and linguistically nuanced meme types. Additionally, they consistently struggle to provide accurate origins for the memes. In the second task, we created a set of multiple-choice questions (MCQs) requiring LLMs to select the most appropriate meme to fill in a blank within a contextual sentence. While the evaluated models were able to provide correct answers, their performance remains noticeably below human levels. We have made CHIME public and hope it will facilitate future research on computational meme understanding.

Diffusion language models (DLMs) generate tokens in parallel through iterative denoising, which can reduce latency and enable bidirectional conditioning. However, the safety risks posed by jailbreak attacks that exploit this inference mechanism are not well understood. In this paper, we reveal that DLMs have a critical vulnerability stemming from their iterative denoising process and propose a countermeasure. Specifically, our investigation shows that if an affirmative token for a harmful query appears at an intermediate step, subsequent denoising can be steered toward a harmful response even in aligned models. As a result, simply injecting such affirmative tokens can readily bypass the safety guardrails. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the vulnerability allows existing optimization-based jailbreak attacks to succeed on DLMs. Building on this analysis, we propose a novel safety alignment method tailored to DLMs that trains models to generate safe responses from contaminated intermediate states that contain affirmative tokens. Our experiments indicate that the proposed method significantly mitigates the vulnerability with minimal impact on task performance. Furthermore, our method improves robustness against conventional jailbreak attacks. Our work underscores the need for DLM-specific safety research.

State space models (SSMs) have gained attention by showing potential to outperform Transformers. However, previous studies have not sufficiently addressed the mechanisms underlying their high performance owing to a lack of theoretical explanation of SSMs' learning dynamics. In this study, we provide such an explanation and propose an improved training strategy. The memory capacity of SSMs can be evaluated by examining how input time series are stored in their current state. Such an examination reveals a tradeoff between memory accuracy and length, as well as the theoretical equivalence between the structured state space sequence model (S4) and a simplified S4 with diagonal recurrent weights. This theoretical foundation allows us to elucidate the learning dynamics, proving the importance of initial parameters. Our analytical results suggest that successful learning requires the initial memory structure to be the longest possible even if memory accuracy may deteriorate or the gradient lose the teacher information. Experiments on tasks requiring long memory confirmed that extending memory is difficult, emphasizing the importance of initialization. Furthermore, we found that fixing recurrent weights can be more advantageous than adapting them because it achieves comparable or even higher performance with faster convergence. Our results provide a new theoretical foundation for SSMs and potentially offer a novel optimization strategy.

Effective prompt engineering is critical to realizing the promised productivity gains of large language models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive tasks. Yet, many users struggle to craft prompts that yield high-quality outputs, limiting the practical benefits of LLMs. Existing approaches, such as prompt handbooks or automated optimization pipelines, either require substantial effort, expert knowledge, or lack interactive guidance. To address this gap, we design and evaluate PromptPilot, an interactive prompting assistant grounded in four empirically derived design objectives for LLM-enhanced prompt engineering. We conducted a randomized controlled experiment with 80 participants completing three realistic, work-related writing tasks. Participants supported by PromptPilot achieved significantly higher performance (median: 78.3 vs. 61.7; p = .045, d = 0.56), and reported enhanced efficiency, ease-of-use, and autonomy during interaction. These findings empirically validate the effectiveness of our proposed design objectives, establishing LLM-enhanced prompt engineering as a viable technique for improving human-AI collaboration.

Organizations increasingly adopt Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to enhance Large Language Models with enterprise-specific knowledge. However, current data quality (DQ) frameworks have been primarily developed for static datasets, and only inadequately address the dynamic, multi-stage nature of RAG systems. This study aims to develop DQ dimensions for this new type of AI-based systems. We conduct 16 semi-structured interviews with practitioners of leading IT service companies. Through a qualitative content analysis, we inductively derive 15 distinct DQ dimensions across the four processing stages of RAG systems: data extraction, data transformation, prompt & search, and generation. Our findings reveal that (1) new dimensions have to be added to traditional DQ frameworks to also cover RAG contexts; (2) these new dimensions are concentrated in early RAG steps, suggesting the need for front-loaded quality management strategies, and (3) DQ issues transform and propagate through the RAG pipeline, necessitating a dynamic, step-aware approach to quality management.