Deep Learning
Active Layer-Contrastive Decoding Reduces Hallucination in Large Language Model Generation
Zhang, Hongxiang, Chen, Hao, Chen, Muhao, Zhang, Tianyi
Recent decoding methods improve the factuality of large language models (LLMs) by refining how the next token is selected during generation. These methods typically operate at the token level, leveraging internal representations to suppress superficial patterns. Nevertheless, LLMs remain prone to hallucinations, especially over longer contexts. In this paper, we propose Active Layer-Contrastive Decoding (ActLCD), a novel decoding strategy that actively decides when to apply contrasting layers during generation. By casting decoding as a sequential decision-making problem, ActLCD employs a reinforcement learning policy guided by a reward-aware classifier to optimize factuality beyond the token level. Our experiments demonstrate that ActLCD surpasses state-of-the-art methods across five benchmarks, showcasing its effectiveness in mitigating hallucinations in diverse generation scenarios.
Safety Pretraining: Toward the Next Generation of Safe AI
Maini, Pratyush, Goyal, Sachin, Sam, Dylan, Robey, Alex, Savani, Yash, Jiang, Yiding, Zou, Andy, Fredrikson, Matt, Lipton, Zacharcy C., Kolter, J. Zico
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings, the risk of generating harmful or toxic content remains a central challenge. Post-hoc alignment methods are brittle: once unsafe patterns are learned during pretraining, they are hard to remove. In this work, we present a data-centric pretraining framework that builds safety into the model from the start. Our framework consists of four key steps: (i) Safety Filtering: building a safety classifier to classify webdata into safe and unsafe categories; (ii) Safety Rephrasing: we recontextualize unsafe webdata into safer narratives; (iii) Native Refusal: we develop RefuseWeb and Moral Education pretraining datasets that actively teach model to refuse on unsafe content and the moral reasoning behind it, and (iv) Harmfulness-Tag annotated pretraining: we flag unsafe content during pretraining using a special token, and use it to steer model away from unsafe generations at inference. Our safety-pretrained models reduce attack success rates from 38.8\% to 8.4\% on standard LLM safety benchmarks with no performance degradation on general tasks.
Predicting Stock Prices using Permutation Decision Trees and Strategic Trailing
Ramraj, Vishrut, Nagaraj, Nithin, B, Harikrishnan N
In this paper, we explore the application of Permutation Decision Trees (PDT) and strategic trailing for predicting stock market movements and executing profitable trades in the Indian stock market. We focus on high-frequency data using 5-minute candlesticks for the top 50 stocks listed in the NIFTY 50 index and Forex pairs such as XAUUSD and EURUSD. We implement a trading strategy that aims to buy stocks at lower prices and sell them at higher prices, capitalizing on short-term market fluctuations. Due to regulatory constraints in India, short selling is not considered in our strategy. The model incorporates various technical indicators and employs hyperparameters such as the trailing stop-loss value and support thresholds to manage risk effectively. We trained and tested data on a 3 month dataset provided by Yahoo Finance. Our bot based on Permutation Decision Tree achieved a profit of 1.1802\% over the testing period, where as a bot based on LSTM gave a return of 0.557\% over the testing period and a bot based on RNN gave a return of 0.5896\% over the testing period. All of the bots outperform the buy-and-hold strategy, which resulted in a loss of 2.29\%.
Dion: Distributed Orthonormalized Updates
Ahn, Kwangjun, Xu, Byron, Abreu, Natalie, Fan, Ying, Magakyan, Gagik, Sharma, Pratyusha, Zhan, Zheng, Langford, John
Orthonormalized updates accelerate training, improve stability, and enable robust hyperparameter transfer, but existing methods like Muon rely on dense matrix operations that clash with sharded weights in large-scale LLM training, causing high compute and communication cost. We introduce Dion (Distributed Orthonormalization), a scalable and efficient update rule that replaces Newton-Schulz iteration with amortized power iteration on a momentum buffer, avoiding full-matrix reconstruction and integrating cleanly with weight sharding. The rank-fraction parameter with error feedback enables low-rank updates that balance quality with significant cost savings. On language models from 160M to 3B parameters, Dion retains the benefits of orthonormalized updates, while markedly reducing wall-clock time at scale, making it a practical optimizer for next-generation foundation models. Code is available at: https://github.com/microsoft/dion/
Bridging the Gap Between Sparsity and Redundancy: A Dual-Decoding Framework with Global Context for Map Inference
Shen, Yudong, Wu, Wenyu, Mao, Jiali, Tong, Yixiao, Liu, Guoping, Wang, Chaoya
Trajectory data has become a key resource for automated map in-ference due to its low cost, broad coverage, and continuous availability. However, uneven trajectory density often leads to frag-mented roads in sparse areas and redundant segments in dense regions, posing significant challenges for existing methods. To address these issues, we propose DGMap, a dual-decoding framework with global context awareness, featuring Multi-scale Grid Encoding, Mask-enhanced Keypoint Extraction, and Global Context-aware Relation Prediction. By integrating global semantic context with local geometric features, DGMap improves keypoint detection accuracy to reduce road fragmentation in sparse-trajectory areas. Additionally, the Global Context-aware Relation Prediction module suppresses false connections in dense-trajectory regions by modeling long-range trajectory patterns. Experimental results on three real-world datasets show that DGMap outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 5% in APLS, with notable performance gains on trajectory data from the Didi Chuxing platform
DRAG: Data Reconstruction Attack using Guided Diffusion
Lei, Wa-Kin, Chen, Jun-Cheng, Chen, Shang-Tse
With the rise of large foundation models, split inference (SI) has emerged as a popular computational paradigm for deploying models across lightweight edge devices and cloud servers, addressing data privacy and computational cost concerns. However, most existing data reconstruction attacks have focused on smaller CNN classification models, leaving the privacy risks of foundation models in SI settings largely unexplored. To address this gap, we propose a novel data reconstruction attack based on guided diffusion, which leverages the rich prior knowledge embedded in a latent diffusion model (LDM) pre-trained on a large-scale dataset. Our method performs iterative reconstruction on the LDM's learned image prior, effectively generating high-fidelity images resembling the original data from their intermediate representations (IR). Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, both qualitatively and quantitatively, in reconstructing data from deep-layer IRs of the vision foundation model. The results highlight the urgent need for more robust privacy protection mechanisms for large models in SI scenarios. Code is available at: https://github.com/ntuaislab/DRAG.
Beyond Regularity: Modeling Chaotic Mobility Patterns for Next Location Prediction
Wu, Yuqian, Peng, Yuhong, Yu, Jiapeng, Liu, Xiangyu, Yan, Zeting, Lin, Kang, Su, Weifeng, Qu, Bingqing, Lee, Raymond, Yang, Dingqi
Abstract--Next location prediction is a key task in human mobility analysis, crucial for applications like smart city resource allocation and personalized navigation services. However, existing methods face two significant challenges: first, they fail to address the dynamic imbalance between periodic and chaotic mobile patterns, leading to inadequate adaptation over sparse trajectories; second, they underutilize contextual cues, such as temporal regularities in arrival times, which persist even in chaotic patterns and offer stronger predictability than spatial forecasts due to reduced search spaces. T o tackle these challenges, we propose CANOE, a C hA otic N eural O scillator nE twork for next location prediction, which introduces a biologically inspired Chaotic Neural Oscillatory Attention mechanism to inject adaptive variability into traditional attention, enabling balanced representation of evolving mobility behaviors, and employs a T ri-Pair Interaction Encoder along with a Cross Context Attentive Decoder to fuse multimodal "who-when-where" contexts in a joint framework for enhanced prediction performance. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that CANOE consistently and significantly outperforms a sizeable collection of state-of-the-art baselines, yielding 3.17%-13.11% In particular, CANOE can make robust predictions over mobility trajectories of different mobility chaotic levels. A series of ablation studies also supports our key design choices. Next location prediction is a critical yet challenging task in human mobility modeling, serving as a fundamental building block for various location-based services [1]-[11]. Its core objective is to predict the specific location a user is most likely to visit next, based on the user's historical trajectory data.
CoachMe: Decoding Sport Elements with a Reference-Based Coaching Instruction Generation Model
Yeh, Wei-Hsin, Su, Yu-An, Chen, Chih-Ning, Lin, Yi-Hsueh, Ku, Calvin, Chiu, Wen-Hsin, Hu, Min-Chun, Ku, Lun-Wei
Motion instruction is a crucial task that helps athletes refine their technique by analyzing movements and providing corrective guidance. Although recent advances in multimodal models have improved motion understanding, generating precise and sport-specific instruction remains challenging due to the highly domain-specific nature of sports and the need for informative guidance. We propose CoachMe, a reference-based model that analyzes the differences between a learner's motion and a reference under temporal and physical aspects. This approach enables both domain-knowledge learning and the acquisition of a coach-like thinking process that identifies movement errors effectively and provides feedback to explain how to improve. In this paper, we illustrate how CoachMe adapts well to specific sports such as skating and boxing by learning from general movements and then leveraging limited data. Experiments show that CoachMe provides high-quality instructions instead of directions merely in the tone of a coach but without critical information. CoachMe outperforms GPT-4o by 31.6% in G-Eval on figure skating and by 58.3% on boxing. Analysis further confirms that it elaborates on errors and their corresponding improvement methods in the generated instructions. You can find CoachMe here: https://motionxperts.github.io/
A Dynamic Knowledge Update-Driven Model with Large Language Models for Fake News Detection
Jin, Di, Yang, Jun, Wang, Xiaobao, Zhang, Junwei, Li, Shuqi, He, Dongxiao
As the Internet and social media evolve rapidly, distinguishing credible news from a vast amount of complex information poses a significant challenge. Due to the suddenness and instability of news events, the authenticity labels of news can potentially shift as events develop, making it crucial for fake news detection to obtain the latest event updates. Existing methods employ retrieval-augmented generation to fill knowledge gaps, but they suffer from issues such as insufficient credibility of retrieved content and interference from noisy information. We propose a DYnamic kNowledge updAte-driven MOdel for fake news detection (DYNAMO), which leverages knowledge graphs to achieve continuous updating of new knowledge and integrates with large language models to fulfill dual functions: news authenticity detection and verification of new knowledge correctness, solving the two key problems of ensuring the authenticity of new knowledge and deeply mining news semantics. Specifically, we first construct a news-domain-specific knowledge graph. Then, we use Monte Carlo Tree Search to decompose complex news and verify them step by step. Finally, we extract and update new knowledge from verified real news texts and reasoning paths. Experimental results demonstrate that DYNAMO achieves the best performance on two real-world datasets.
An Interventional Approach to Real-Time Disaster Assessment via Causal Attribution
Vishnubhatla, Saketh, Beigi, Alimohammad, Foo, Rui Heng, Goel, Umang, Jeong, Ujun, Jiang, Bohan, Raglin, Adrienne, Liu, Huan
Traditional disaster analysis and modelling tools for assessing the severity of a disaster are predictive in nature. Based on the past observational data, these tools prescribe how the current input state (e.g., environmental conditions, situation reports) results in a severity assessment. However, these systems are not meant to be interventional in the causal sense, where the user can modify the current input state to simulate counterfactual "what-if" scenarios. In this work, we provide an alternative interventional tool that complements traditional disaster modelling tools by leveraging real-time data sources like satellite imagery, news, and social media. Our tool also helps understand the causal attribution of different factors on the estimated severity, over any given region of interest. In addition, we provide actionable recourses that would enable easier mitigation planning. Our source code is publicly available.