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Adversarial Attacks against Neural Ranking Models via In-Context Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

While neural ranking models (NRMs) have shown high effectiveness, they remain susceptible to adversarial manipulation. In this work, we introduce Few-Shot Adversarial Prompting (FSAP), a novel black-box attack framework that leverages the in-context learning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate high-ranking adversarial documents. Unlike previous approaches that rely on token-level perturbations or manual rewriting of existing documents, FSAP formulates adversarial attacks entirely through few-shot prompting, requiring no gradient access or internal model instrumentation. By conditioning the LLM on a small support set of previously observed harmful examples, FSAP synthesizes grammatically fluent and topically coherent documents that subtly embed false or misleading information and rank competitively against authentic content. We instantiate FSAP in two modes: FSAP-IntraQ, which leverages harmful examples from the same query to enhance topic fidelity, and FSAP-InterQ, which enables broader generalization by transferring adversarial patterns across unrelated queries. Our experiments on the TREC 2020 and 2021 Health Misinformation Tracks, using four diverse neural ranking models, reveal that FSAP-generated documents consistently outrank credible, factually accurate documents. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that these adversarial outputs exhibit strong stance alignment and low detectability, posing a realistic and scalable threat to neural retrieval systems. FSAP also effectively generalizes across both proprietary and open-source LLMs.


Way to Build Native AI-driven 6G Air Interface: Principles, Roadmap, and Outlook

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

--Artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to serve as a foundational capability across the entire lifecycle of 6G networks, spanning design, deployment, and operation. This article proposes a native AI-driven air interface architecture built around two core characteristics: compression and adaptation. On one hand, compression enables the system to understand and extract essential semantic information from the source data, focusing on task relevance rather than symbol-level accuracy. On the other hand, adaptation allows the air interface to dynamically transmit semantic information across diverse tasks, data types, and channel conditions, ensuring scalability and robustness. This article first introduces the native AI-driven air interface architecture, then discusses representative enabling methodologies, followed by a case study on semantic communication in 6G non-terrestrial networks. Finally, it presents a forward-looking discussion on the future of native AI in 6G, outlining key challenges and research opportunities. The sixth generation (6G) of wireless networks is envisioned as a foundational transformation that extends far beyond incremental performance improvements. According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), 6G will support a new class of usage scenarios such as ubiquitous connectivity, integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), and artificial intelligence (AI) and communications [1]. This work was partly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 62293480, 62293481, and 62471065. Co-corresponding authors: Kai Niu and Yiming Liu.) Ping Zhang, Yiming Liu, Nan Ma, Xiaodong Xu, Wenjun Xu, and Mengying Sun are with State Key Laboratory of Network and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China.


M-$LLM^3$REC: A Motivation-Aware User-Item Interaction Framework for Enhancing Recommendation Accuracy with LLMs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recommendation systems have been essential for both user experience and platform efficiency by alleviating information overload and supporting decision-making. Traditional methods, i.e., content-based filtering, collaborative filtering, and deep learning, have achieved impressive results in recommendation systems. However, the cold-start and sparse-data scenarios are still challenging to deal with. Existing solutions either generate pseudo-interaction sequence, which often introduces redundant or noisy signals, or rely heavily on semantic similarity, overlooking dynamic shifts in user motivation. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel recommendation framework, termed M-$LLM^3$REC, which leverages large language models for deep motivational signal extraction from limited user interactions. M-$LLM^3$REC comprises three integrated modules: the Motivation-Oriented Profile Extractor (MOPE), Motivation-Oriented Trait Encoder (MOTE), and Motivational Alignment Recommender (MAR). By emphasizing motivation-driven semantic modeling, M-$LLM^3$REC demonstrates robust, personalized, and generalizable recommendations, particularly boosting performance in cold-start situations in comparison with the state-of-the-art frameworks.


Deep Think with Confidence

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great potential in reasoning tasks through test-time scaling methods like self-consistency with majority voting. However, this approach often leads to diminishing returns in accuracy and high computational overhead. To address these challenges, we introduce Deep Think with Confidence (DeepConf), a simple yet powerful method that enhances both reasoning efficiency and performance at test time. It requires no additional model training or hyperparam-eter tuning and can be seamlessly integrated into existing serving frameworks. We evaluate DeepConf across a variety of reasoning tasks and the latest open-source models, including Qwen 3 and GPT -OSS series. Notably, on challenging benchmarks such as AIME 2025, DeepConf@512 achieves up to 99.9% accuracy and reduces generated tokens by up to 84.7% compared to full parallel thinking.Figure 1: Up: DeepConf on AIME 2025. Work done during an internship at Meta FAIR. Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional reasoning capabilities, particularly when equipped with methods that enhance their performance during test-time inference. A prominent technique is self-consistency, which samples multiple reasoning paths and aggregates final answers through majority voting (Wang et al., 2023). This type of approach, also known as parallel thinking, significantly improves reasoning accuracy but incurs substantial computational overhead: generating numerous reasoning traces per query scales inference overhead linearly, limiting practical deployment (Xue et al., 2023). For example, improving pass@1 accuracy from 68% to 82% using standard majority voting on AIME 2025 requires 511 additional reasoning traces per question using Qwen3-8B, consuming 100 million additional tokens. Moreover, parallel thinking with majority voting exhibits diminishing returns --performance often saturates or degrades as the number of traces increase (Chen et al., 2024a).


UniCoM: A Universal Code-Switching Speech Generator

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Code-switching (CS), the alternation between two or more languages within a single speaker's utterances, is common in real-world conversations and poses significant challenges for multilingual speech technology. However, systems capable of handling this phenomenon remain underexplored, primarily due to the scarcity of suitable datasets. To resolve this issue, we propose Universal Code-Mixer (UniCoM), a novel pipeline for generating high-quality, natural CS samples without altering sentence semantics. Our approach utilizes an algorithm we call Substituting WORDs with Synonyms (SWORDS), which generates CS speech by replacing selected words with their translations while considering their parts of speech. Using UniCoM, we construct Code-Switching FLEURS (CS-FLEURS), a multilingual CS corpus designed for automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech-to-text translation (S2TT). Experimental results show that CS-FLEURS achieves high intelligibility and naturalness, performing comparably to existing datasets on both objective and subjective metrics. We expect our approach to advance CS speech technology and enable more inclusive multilingual systems.


Pretrained Diffusion Models Are Inherently Skipped-Step Samplers

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Diffusion models have been achieving state-of-the-art results across various generation tasks. However, a notable drawback is their sequential generation process, requiring long-sequence step-by-step generation. Existing methods, such as DDIM, attempt to reduce sampling steps by constructing a class of non-Markovian diffusion processes that maintain the same training objective. However, there remains a gap in understanding whether the original diffusion process can achieve the same efficiency without resorting to non-Markovian processes. In this paper, we provide a confirmative answer and introduce skipped-step sampling, a mechanism that bypasses multiple intermediate denoising steps in the iterative generation process, in contrast with the traditional step-by-step refinement of standard diffusion inference. Crucially, we demonstrate that this skipped-step sampling mechanism is derived from the same training objective as the standard diffusion model, indicating that accelerated sampling via skipped-step sampling via a Markovian way is an intrinsic property of pretrained diffusion models. Additionally, we propose an enhanced generation method by integrating our accelerated sampling technique with DDIM. Extensive experiments on popular pretrained diffusion models, including the OpenAI ADM, Stable Diffusion, and Open Sora models, show that our method achieves high-quality generation with significantly reduced sampling steps.


Learning ECG Representations via Poly-Window Contrastive Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis is foundational for cardiovascular disease diagnosis, yet the performance of deep learning models is often constrained by limited access to annotated data. Self-supervised contrastive learning has emerged as a powerful approach for learning robust ECG representations from unlabeled signals. However, most existing methods generate only pairwise augmented views and fail to leverage the rich temporal structure of ECG recordings. In this work, we present a poly-window contrastive learning framework. We extract multiple temporal windows from each ECG instance to construct positive pairs and maximize their agreement via statistics. Inspired by the principle of slow feature analysis, our approach explicitly encourages the model to learn temporally invariant and physiologically meaningful features that persist across time. We validate our approach through extensive experiments and ablation studies on the PTB-XL dataset. Our results demonstrate that poly-window contrastive learning consistently outperforms conventional two-view methods in multi-label superclass classification, achieving higher AUROC (0.891 vs. 0.888) and F1 scores (0.680 vs. 0.679) while requiring up to four times fewer pre-training epochs (32 vs. 128) and 14.8% in total wall clock pre-training time reduction. Despite processing multiple windows per sample, we achieve a significant reduction in the number of training epochs and total computation time, making our method practical for training foundational models. Through extensive ablations, we identify optimal design choices and demonstrate robustness across various hyperparameters. These findings establish poly-window contrastive learning as a highly efficient and scalable paradigm for automated ECG analysis and provide a promising general framework for self-supervised representation learning in biomedical time-series data.


Are Checklists Really Useful for Automatic Evaluation of Generative Tasks?

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Automatic evaluation of generative tasks using large language models faces challenges due to ambiguous criteria. Although automatic checklist generation is a potentially promising approach, its usefulness remains underexplored. We investigate whether checklists should be used for all questions or selectively, generate them using six methods, evaluate their effectiveness across eight model sizes, and identify checklist items that correlate with human evaluations. Through experiments on pairwise comparison and direct scoring tasks, we find that selective checklist use tends to improve evaluation performance in pairwise settings, while its benefits are less consistent in direct scoring. Our analysis also shows that even checklist items with low correlation to human scores often reflect human-written criteria, indicating potential inconsistencies in human evaluation. These findings highlight the need to more clearly define objective evaluation criteria to guide both human and automatic evaluations. \footnote{Our code is available at~https://github.com/momo0817/checklist-effectiveness-study


R-ConstraintBench: Evaluating LLMs on NP-Complete Scheduling

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

However, the reliability of large language models (LLMs) when reasoning under high-constraint regimes is insufficiently characterized. To address this gap, we present R-ConstraintBench, a scalable framework that evaluates models on Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problems (RCPSP), an NP-Complete feasibility class, while difficulty increases via linear growth in constraints. R-ConstraintBench incrementally increases non-redundant precedence constraints in Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) and then introduces downtime, temporal windows, and disjunctive constraints. As an illustrative example, we instantiate the benchmark in a data center migration setting and evaluate multiple LLMs using feasibility and error analysis, identifying degradation thresholds and constraint types most associated with failure. Empirically, strong models are near-ceiling on precedence-only DAGs, but feasibility performance collapses when downtime, temporal windows, and disjunctive constraints interact--implicating constraint interaction, not graph depth, as the principal bottleneck. Performance on clean synthetic ramps also does not guarantee transfer to domain-grounded scenarios, underscoring limited generalization.


Fin-PRM: A Domain-Specialized Process Reward Model for Financial Reasoning in Large Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Process Reward Models (PRMs) have emerged as a promising framework for supervising intermediate reasoning in large language models (LLMs), yet existing PRMs are primarily trained on general or Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) domains and fall short in domain-specific contexts such as finance, where reasoning is more structured, symbolic, and sensitive to factual and regulatory correctness. We introduce \textbf{Fin-PRM}, a domain-specialized, trajectory-aware PRM tailored to evaluate intermediate reasoning steps in financial tasks. Fin-PRM integrates step-level and trajectory-level reward supervision, enabling fine-grained evaluation of reasoning traces aligned with financial logic. We apply Fin-PRM in both offline and online reward learning settings, supporting three key applications: (i) selecting high-quality reasoning trajectories for distillation-based supervised fine-tuning, (ii) providing dense process-level rewards for reinforcement learning, and (iii) guiding reward-informed Best-of-N inference at test time. Experimental results on financial reasoning benchmarks, including CFLUE and FinQA, demonstrate that Fin-PRM consistently outperforms general-purpose PRMs and strong domain baselines in trajectory selection quality. Downstream models trained with Fin-PRM yield substantial improvements with baselines, with gains of 12.9\% in supervised learning, 5.2\% in reinforcement learning, and 5.1\% in test-time performance. These findings highlight the value of domain-specialized reward modeling for aligning LLMs with expert-level financial reasoning. Our project resources will be available at https://github.com/aliyun/qwen-dianjin.