Large Language Models (LLMs) are now increasingly widely used to simulate personas in virtual environments, leveraging their instruction-following capability. However, we discovered that even state-of-the-art LLMs cannot simulate personas with reversed performance (e.g., student personas with low proficiency in educational settings), which impairs the simulation diversity and limits the practical applications of the simulated environments. In this work, using mathematical reasoning as a representative scenario, we propose the first benchmark dataset for evaluating LLMs on simulating personas with reversed performance, a capability that we dub "counterfactual instruction following". We evaluate both open-weight and closed-source LLMs on this task and find that LLMs, including the OpenAI o1 reasoning model, all struggle to follow counterfactual instructions for simulating reversedly performing personas. Intersectionally simulating both the performance level and the race population of a persona worsens the effect even further. These results highlight the challenges of counterfactual instruction following and the need for further research.

Increasing flood frequency and severity due to climate change threatens infrastructure and demands improved susceptibility mapping techniques. While traditional machine learning (ML) approaches are widely used, they struggle to capture spatial dependencies and poor boundary delineation between susceptibility classes. This study introduces the first application of a graph transformer (GT) architecture for flood susceptibility mapping to the flood-prone French Riviera (e.g., 2020 Storm Alex) using topography, hydrology, geography, and environmental data. GT incorporates watershed topology using Laplacian positional encoders (PEs) and attention mechanisms. The developed GT model has an AUC-ROC (0.9739), slightly lower than XGBoost (0.9853). However, the GT model demonstrated better clustering and delineation with a higher Moran's I value (0.6119) compared to the random forest (0.5775) and XGBoost (0.5311) with p-value lower than 0.0001. Feature importance revealed a striking consistency across models, with elevation, slope, distance to channel, and convergence index being the critical factors. Dimensionality reduction on Laplacian PEs revealed partial clusters, indicating they could capture spatial information; however, their importance was lower than flood factors. Since climate and land use changes aggravate flood risk, susceptibility maps are developed for the 2050 year under different Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) and railway track vulnerability is assessed. All RCP scenarios revealed increased area across susceptibility classes, except for the very low category. RCP 8.5 projections indicate that 17.46% of the watershed area and 54% of railway length fall within very-high susceptible zones, compared to 6.19% and 35.61%, respectively, under current conditions. The developed maps can be integrated into a multi-hazard framework.

The controllability of Large Language Models (LLMs) when used as conversational agents is a key challenge, particularly to ensure predictable and user-personalized responses. This work proposes an ontology-based approach to formally define conversational features that are typically qualitative in nature. By leveraging a set of linguistic descriptors, we derive quantitative definitions for qualitatively-defined concepts, enabling their integration into an ontology for reasoning and consistency checking. We apply this framework to the task of proficiency-level control in conversations, using CEFR language proficiency levels as a case study. These definitions are then formalized in description logic and incorporated into an ontology, which guides controlled text generation of an LLM through fine-tuning. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach provides consistent and explainable proficiency-level definitions, improving transparency in conversational AI.

In today's fast-paced digital communication, the surge in network traffic data and frequency demands robust and precise network intrusion solutions. Conventional machine learning methods struggle to grapple with complex patterns within the vast network intrusion datasets, which suffer from data scarcity and class imbalance. As a result, we have integrated machine learning and deep learning techniques within the network intrusion detection system to bridge this gap. This study has developed TrailGate, a novel framework that combines machine learning and deep learning techniques. By integrating Transformer and Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (BiGRU) architectures with advanced feature selection strategies and supplemented by data augmentation techniques, TrailGate can identifies common attack types and excels at detecting and mitigating emerging threats. This algorithmic fusion excels at detecting common and well-understood attack types and has the unique ability to swiftly identify and neutralize emerging threats that stem from existing paradigms.

Efficient characterization of large-scale quantum systems, especially those produced by quantum analog simulators and megaquop quantum computers, poses a central challenge in quantum science due to the exponential scaling of the Hilbert space with respect to system size. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), with its aptitude for high-dimensional pattern recognition and function approximation, have emerged as a powerful tool to address this challenge. A growing body of research has leveraged AI to represent and characterize scalable quantum systems, spanning from theoretical foundations to experimental realizations. Depending on how prior knowledge and learning architectures are incorporated, the integration of AI into quantum system characterization can be categorized into three synergistic paradigms: machine learning, and, in particular, deep learning and language models. This review discusses how each of these AI paradigms contributes to two core tasks in quantum systems characterization: quantum property prediction and the construction of surrogates for quantum states. These tasks underlie diverse applications, from quantum certification and benchmarking to the enhancement of quantum algorithms and the understanding of strongly correlated phases of matter. Key challenges and open questions are also discussed, together with future prospects at the interface of AI and quantum science.

The existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for GUI perception have made great progress. However, the following challenges still exist in prior methods: 1) They model discrete coordinates based on text autoregressive mechanism, which results in lower grounding accuracy and slower inference speed. 2) They can only locate predefined sets of elements and are not capable of parsing the entire interface, which hampers the broad application and support for downstream tasks. To address the above issues, we propose SparkUI-Parser, a novel end-to-end framework where higher localization precision and fine-grained parsing capability of the entire interface are simultaneously achieved. Specifically, instead of using probability-based discrete modeling, we perform continuous modeling of coordinates based on a pre-trained Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) with an additional token router and coordinate decoder. This effectively mitigates the limitations inherent in the discrete output characteristics and the token-by-token generation process of MLLMs, consequently boosting both the accuracy and the inference speed. To further enhance robustness, a rejection mechanism based on a modified Hungarian matching algorithm is introduced, which empowers the model to identify and reject non-existent elements, thereby reducing false positives. Moreover, we present ScreenParse, a rigorously constructed benchmark to systematically assess structural perception capabilities of GUI models across diverse scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms SOTA methods on ScreenSpot, ScreenSpot-v2, CAGUI-Grounding and ScreenParse benchmarks. The resources are available at https://github.com/antgroup/SparkUI-Parser.

We propose an approach to generate synthetic data to train computer vision (CV) models for industrial wear and tear detection. Wear and tear detection is an important CV problem for predictive maintenance tasks in any industry. However, data curation for t raining such models is expensive and time - consuming due to the unavailability of datasets for different wear and tear scenarios. Our approach employs a vision language model along with a 3D simulation and rendering engine to generate synthetic data for var ying rust conditions. We evaluate our approach by training a CV model for rust detection using the generated dataset and tested the trained model on real images of rusted industrial objects. The model trained with the synthetic data generated by our approa ch, outperforms the other approaches with a mAP50 score of 0.87. The approach is customizable and can be easily extended to other industrial wear and tear detection scenarios.

Advances in computer vision have opened new avenues for clinical applications, particularly in computerized exposure therapy where visual stimuli can be dynamically adjusted based on patient responses. As a critical step toward such adaptive systems, we investigated whether pretrained computer vision models can accurately predict fear levels from spider-related images. We adapted three diverse models using transfer learning to predict human fear ratings (on a 0-100 scale) from a standardized dataset of 313 images. The models were evaluated using cross-validation, achieving an average mean absolute error (MAE) between 10.1 and 11.0. Our learning curve analysis revealed that reducing the dataset size significantly harmed performance, though further increases yielded no substantial gains. Explainability assessments showed the models' predictions were based on spider-related features. A category-wise error analysis further identified visual conditions associated with higher errors (e.g., distant views and artificial/painted spiders). These findings demonstrate the potential of explainable computer vision models in predicting fear ratings, highlighting the importance of both model explainability and a sufficient dataset size for developing effective emotion-aware therapeutic technologies.

This paper introduces OSC (Orchestrating Cognitive Synergy), a knowledge-aware adaptive collaboration framework designed to enhance cognitive synergy in multi-agent systems with large language models. While prior work has advanced agent selection and result aggregation, efficient linguistic interactions for deep collaboration among expert agents remain a critical bottleneck. OSC addresses this gap as a pivotal intermediate layer between selection and aggregation, introducing Collaborator Knowledge Models (CKM) to enable each agent to dynamically perceive its collaborators' cognitive states. Through real-time cognitive gap analysis, agents adaptively adjust communication behaviors, including content focus, detail level, and expression style, using learned strategies. Experiments on complex reasoning and problem-solving benchmarks demonstrate that OSC significantly improves task performance and communication efficiency, transforming "parallel-working individuals'' into a "deeply collaborative cognitive team.'' This framework not only optimizes multi-agent collaboration but also offers new insights into LLM agent interaction behaviors.

Recent advances in language and speech modelling have made it possible to build autonomous voice assistants that understand and generate human dialogue in real time. These systems are increasingly being deployed in domains such as customer service and healthcare care, where they can automate repetitive tasks, reduce operational costs, and provide constant support around the clock. In this paper, we present a general methodology for cloning a conversational voice AI agent from a corpus of call recordings. Although the case study described in this paper uses telesales data to illustrate the approach, the underlying process generalizes to any domain where call transcripts are available. Our system listens to customers over the telephone, responds with a synthetic voice, and follows a structured playbook learned from top performing human agents. We describe the domain selection, knowledge extraction, and prompt engineering used to construct the agent, integrating automatic speech recognition, a large language model based dialogue manager, and text to speech synthesis into a streaming inference pipeline. The cloned agent is evaluated against human agents on a rubric of 22 criteria covering introduction, product communication, sales drive, objection handling, and closing. Blind tests show that the AI agent approaches human performance in routine aspects of the call while underperforming in persuasion and objection handling. We analyze these shortcomings and refine the prompt accordingly. The paper concludes with design lessons and avenues for future research, including large scale simulation and automated evaluation.