Deep Learning
Probabilistic Token Alignment for Large Language Model Fusion
Zeng, Runjia, Liang, James Chenhao, Han, Cheng, Cao, Zhiwen, Liu, Jiahao, Quan, Xiaojun, Chen, Yingjie Victor, Huang, Lifu, Geng, Tong, Wang, Qifan, Liu, Dongfang
Training large language models (LLMs) from scratch can yield models with unique functionalities and strengths, but it is costly and often leads to redundant capabilities. A more cost-effective alternative is to fuse existing pre-trained LLMs with different architectures into a more powerful model. However, a key challenge in existing model fusion is their dependence on manually predefined vocabulary alignment, which may not generalize well across diverse contexts, leading to performance degradation in several evaluation. To solve this, we draw inspiration from distribution learning and propose the probabilistic token alignment method as a general and soft mapping for alignment, named as PTA-LLM. Our approach innovatively reformulates token alignment into a classic mathematical problem: optimal transport, seamlessly leveraging distribution-aware learning to facilitate more coherent model fusion. Apart from its inherent generality, PTA-LLM exhibits interpretability from a distributional perspective, offering insights into the essence of the token alignment. Empirical results demonstrate that probabilistic token alignment enhances the target model's performance across multiple capabilities. Our code is avaliable at https://runjia.tech/neurips_pta-llm/.
Agentic AI for Multi-Stage Physics Experiments at a Large-Scale User Facility Particle Accelerator
Hellert, Thorsten, Bertwistle, Drew, Leemann, Simon C., Sulc, Antonin, Venturini, Marco
We present the first language-model-driven agentic artificial intelligence (AI) system to autonomously execute multi-stage physics experiments on a production synchrotron light source. Implemented at the Advanced Light Source particle accelerator, the system translates natural language user prompts into structured execution plans that combine archive data retrieval, control-system channel resolution, automated script generation, controlled machine interaction, and analysis. In a representative machine physics task, we show that preparation time was reduced by two orders of magnitude relative to manual scripting even for a system expert, while operator-standard safety constraints were strictly upheld. Core architectural features, plan-first orchestration, bounded tool access, and dynamic capability selection, enable transparent, auditable execution with fully reproducible artifacts. These results establish a blueprint for the safe integration of agentic AI into accelerator experiments and demanding machine physics studies, as well as routine operations, with direct portability across accelerators worldwide and, more broadly, to other large-scale scientific infrastructures.
Extending Automatic Machine Translation Evaluation to Book-Length Documents
Wang, Kuang-Da, Ding, Shuoyang, Yang, Chao-Han Huck, Hsieh, Ping-Chun, Peng, Wen-Chih, Lavrukhin, Vitaly, Ginsburg, Boris
Despite Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrating superior translation performance and long-context capabilities, evaluation methodologies remain constrained to sentence-level assessment due to dataset limitations, token number restrictions in metrics, and rigid sentence boundary requirements. We introduce SEGALE, an evaluation scheme that extends existing automatic metrics to long-document translation by treating documents as continuous text and applying sentence segmentation and alignment methods. Our approach enables previously unattainable document-level evaluation, handling translations of arbitrary length generated with document-level prompts while accounting for under-/over-translations and varied sentence boundaries. Experiments show our scheme significantly outperforms existing long-form document evaluation schemes, while being comparable to evaluations performed with groundtruth sentence alignments. Additionally, we apply our scheme to book-length texts and newly demonstrate that many open-weight LLMs fail to effectively translate documents at their reported maximum context lengths.
Scalable Multi Agent Diffusion Policies for Coverage Control
Vatnsdal, Frederic, Camargo, Romina Garcia, Agarwal, Saurav, Ribeiro, Alejandro
Abstract--We propose MADP, a novel diffusion-model-based approach for collaboration in decentralized robot swarms. MADP leverages diffusion models to generate samples from complex and high-dimensional action distributions that capture the interdependencies between agents' actions. Each robot conditions policy sampling on a fused representation of its own observations and perceptual embeddings received from peers. T o evaluate this approach, we task a team of holonomic robots piloted by MADP to address coverage control--a canonical multi agent navigation problem. The policy is trained via imitation learning from a clairvoyant expert on the coverage control problem, with the diffusion process parameterized by a spatial transformer architecture to enable decentralized inference. We evaluate the system under varying numbers, locations, and variances of importance density functions, capturing the robustness demands of real-world coverage tasks. Experiments demonstrate that our model inherits valuable properties from diffusion models, generalizing across agent densities and environments, and consistently outperforming state-of-the-art baselines.
TraceHiding: Scalable Machine Unlearning for Mobility Data
This work introduces TraceHiding, a scalable, importance-aware machine unlearning framework for mobility trajectory data. Motivated by privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA granting users "the right to be forgotten," TraceHiding removes specified user trajectories from trained deep models without full retraining. It combines a hierarchical data-driven importance scoring scheme with teacher-student distillation. Importance scores--computed at token, trajectory, and user levels from statistical properties (coverage diversity, entropy, length)--quantify each training sample's impact, enabling targeted forgetting of high-impact data while preserving common patterns. The student model retains knowledge on remaining data and unlearns targeted trajectories through an importance-weighted loss that amplifies forgetting signals for unique samples and attenuates them for frequent ones. We validate on Trajectory--User Linking (TUL) tasks across three real-world higher-order mobility datasets (HO-Rome, HO-Geolife, HO-NYC) and multiple architectures (GRU, LSTM, BERT, ModernBERT, GCN-TULHOR), against strong unlearning baselines including SCRUB, NegGrad, NegGrad+, Bad-T, and Finetuning. Experiments under uniform and targeted user deletion show TraceHiding, especially its entropy-based variant, achieves superior unlearning accuracy, competitive membership inference attack (MIA) resilience, and up to 40\times speedup over retraining with minimal test accuracy loss. Results highlight robustness to adversarial deletion of high-information users and consistent performance across models. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic study of machine unlearning for trajectory data, providing a reproducible pipeline with public code and preprocessing tools.
Can Agents Judge Systematic Reviews Like Humans? Evaluating SLRs with LLM-based Multi-Agent System
Mushtaq, Abdullah, Naeem, Muhammad Rafay, Ghaznavi, Ibrahim, Abd-alrazaq, Alaa, Tabassum, Aliya, Qadir, Junaid
Systematic Literature Reviews (SLRs) are foundational to evidence-based research but remain labor-intensive and prone to inconsistency across disciplines. We present an LLM-based SLR evaluation copilot built on a Multi-Agent System (MAS) architecture to assist researchers in assessing the overall quality of the systematic literature reviews. The system automates protocol validation, methodological assessment, and topic relevance checks using a scholarly database. Unlike conventional single-agent methods, our design integrates a specialized agentic approach aligned with PRISMA guidelines to support more structured and interpretable evaluations. We conducted an initial study on five published SLRs from diverse domains, comparing system outputs to expert-annotated PRISMA scores, and observed 84% agreement. While early results are promising, this work represents a first step toward scalable and accurate NLP-driven systems for interdisciplinary workflows and reveals their capacity for rigorous, domain-agnostic knowledge aggregation to streamline the review process.
Prospective Multi-Graph Cohesion for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection
Chen, Jiazhen, Feng, Mingbin, Wirjanto, Tony S.
Anomaly detection in high-dimensional time series data is pivotal for numerous industrial applications. Recent advances in multivariate time series anomaly detection (TSAD) have increasingly leveraged graph structures to model inter-variable relationships, typically employing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Despite their promising results, existing methods often rely on a single graph representation, which are insufficient for capturing the complex, diverse relationships inherent in multivariate time series. To address this, we propose the Prospective Multi-Graph Cohesion (PMGC) framework for multivariate TSAD. PMGC exploits spatial correlations by integrating a long-term static graph with a series of short-term instance-wise dynamic graphs, regulated through a graph cohesion loss function. Our theoretical analysis shows that this loss function promotes diversity among dynamic graphs while aligning them with the stable long-term relationships encapsulated by the static graph. Additionally, we introduce a "prospective graphing" strategy to mitigate the limitations of traditional forecasting-based TSAD methods, which often struggle with unpredictable future variations. This strategy allows the model to accurately reflect concurrent inter-series relationships under normal conditions, thereby enhancing anomaly detection efficacy. Empirical evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to existing TSAD techniques.
AI-based Methods for Simulating, Sampling, and Predicting Protein Ensembles
Jing, Bowen, Berger, Bonnie, Jaakkola, Tommi
Advances in deep learning have opened an era of abundant and accurate predicted protein structures; however, similar progress in protein ensembles has remained elusive. This review highlights several recent research directions towards AI-based predictions of protein ensembles, including coarse-grained force fields, generative models, multiple sequence alignment perturbation methods, and modeling of ensemble descriptors. An emphasis is placed on realistic assessments of the technological maturity of current methods, the strengths and weaknesses of broad families of techniques, and promising machine learning frameworks at an early stage of development. We advocate for "closing the loop" between model training, simulation, and inference to overcome challenges in training data availability and to enable the next generation of models.
Point-RTD: Replaced Token Denoising for Pretraining Transformer Models on Point Clouds
Stone, Gunner, Choi, Youngsook, Tavakkoli, Alireza, Shukla, Ankita
Abstract--Pre-training strategies play a critical role in advancing the performance of transformer-based models for 3D point cloud tasks. In this paper, we introduce Point-RTD (Replaced T oken Denoising), a novel pretraining strategy designed to improve token robustness through a corruption-reconstruction framework. Unlike traditional mask-based reconstruction tasks that hide data segments for later prediction, Point-RTD corrupts point cloud tokens and leverages a discriminator-generator architecture for denoising. This shift enables more effective learning of structural priors and significantly enhances model performance and efficiency. On the ShapeNet dataset, Point-RTD reduces reconstruction error by over 93% compared to PointMAE, and achieves more than 14 lower Chamfer Distance on the test set. Point clouds have become an essential data representation in various fields such as remote sensing, autonomous driving, and robotics [1].
MAST: Multi-Agent Spatial Transformer for Learning to Collaborate
Owerko, Damian, Vatnsdal, Frederic, Agarwal, Saurav, Kumar, Vijay, Ribeiro, Alejandro
This article presents a novel multi-agent spatial transformer (MAST) for learning communication policies in large-scale decentralized and collaborative multi-robot systems (DC-MRS). Challenges in collaboration in DC-MRS arise from: (i) partial observable states as robots make only localized perception, (ii) limited communication range with no central server, and (iii) independent execution of actions. The robots need to optimize a common task-specific objective, which, under the restricted setting, must be done using a communication policy that exhibits the desired collaborative behavior. The proposed MAST is a decentralized transformer architecture that learns communication policies to compute abstract information to be shared with other agents and processes the received information with the robot's own observations. The MAST extends the standard transformer with new positional encoding strategies and attention operations that employ windowing to limit the receptive field for MRS. These are designed for local computation, shift-equivariance, and permutation equivariance, making it a promising approach for DC-MRS. We demonstrate the efficacy of MAST on decentralized assignment and navigation (DAN) and decentralized coverage control. Efficiently trained using imitation learning in a centralized setting, the decentralized MAST policy is robust to communication delays, scales to large teams, and performs better than the baselines and other learning-based approaches.