Deep Learning
A Comprehensive Review of AI Agents: Transforming Possibilities in Technology and Beyond
Qu, Xiaodong, Damoah, Andrews, Sherwood, Joshua, Liu, Peiyan, Jin, Christian Shun, Chen, Lulu, Shen, Minjie, Aleisa, Nawwaf, Hou, Zeyuan, Zhang, Chenyu, Gao, Lifu, Li, Yanshu, Yang, Qikai, Wang, Qun, De Souza, Cristabelle
The development of artificial intelligence (AI) agents--autonomous systems capable of perceiving their surroundings, reasoning about possible courses of action, and executing decisions--has evolved significantly in recent decades. Early AI agents, rooted in the symbolic reasoning systems of the 1950s and 1960s, relied on hand-crafted rules and logic-based methods, excelling in constrained domains but struggling with adaptability and uncertainty[1, 2]. The introduction of statistical learning and probabilistic reasoning in the 1980s and 1990s enhanced reliability, while the rise of reinforcement learning (RL) allowed agents to learn policies through trial-and-error interactions [3, 4, 5, 6]. The integration of deep neural networks with RL (DeepRL) led to breakthroughs such as superhuman performance in Atari games and Go [7, 8]. With growing computational power, recent advancements in statistical methods and machine learning, AI agents have incorporated advanced perception, natural language sequence modeling, and cognitive-inspired principles, enabling them to adapt, collaborate, and mirror aspects of human reasoning in dynamic environments [2, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14]. Contemporary AI agents are increasingly deployed in high-stakes, real-world contexts: self-driving cars navigating congested urban environments [15, 16], autonomous laboratories accelerating scientific discovery [17, 18], virtual assistants managing complex user queries [19], and automated trading agents operating in financial markets [20].
UniCast: A Unified Multimodal Prompting Framework for Time Series Forecasting
Park, Sehyuk, Han, Soyeon Caren, Hovy, Eduard
Time series forecasting is a foundational task across domains, such as finance, healthcare, and environmental monitoring. While recent advances in Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) have demonstrated strong generalisation through large-scale pretraining, existing models operate predominantly in a unimodal setting, ignoring the rich multimodal context, such as visual and textual signals, that often accompanies time series data in real-world scenarios. This paper introduces a novel parameter-efficient multimodal framework, UniCast, that extends TSFMs to jointly leverage time series, vision, and text modalities for enhanced forecasting performance. Our method integrates modality-specific embed-dings from pretrained Vision and Text Encoders with a frozen TSFM via soft prompt tuning, enabling efficient adaptation with minimal parameter updates. This design not only preserves the generalisation strength of the foundation model but also enables effective cross-modal interaction. Extensive experiments across diverse time-series forecasting benchmarks demonstrate that UniCast consistently and significantly outperforms all existing TSFM baselines.
CHBench: A Cognitive Hierarchy Benchmark for Evaluating Strategic Reasoning Capability of LLMs
Liu, Hongtao, Du, Zhicheng, Wang, Zihe, Shen, Weiran
Game-playing ability serves as an indicator for evaluating the strategic reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs). While most existing studies rely on utility performance metrics, which are not robust enough due to variations in opponent behavior and game structure. To address this limitation, we propose \textbf{Cognitive Hierarchy Benchmark (CHBench)}, a novel evaluation framework inspired by the cognitive hierarchy models from behavioral economics. We hypothesize that agents have bounded rationality -- different agents behave at varying reasoning depths/levels. We evaluate LLMs' strategic reasoning through a three-phase systematic framework, utilizing behavioral data from six state-of-the-art LLMs across fifteen carefully selected normal-form games. Experiments show that LLMs exhibit consistent strategic reasoning levels across diverse opponents, confirming the framework's robustness and generalization capability. We also analyze the effects of two key mechanisms (Chat Mechanism and Memory Mechanism) on strategic reasoning performance. Results indicate that the Chat Mechanism significantly degrades strategic reasoning, whereas the Memory Mechanism enhances it. These insights position CHBench as a promising tool for evaluating LLM capabilities, with significant potential for future research and practical applications.
Extending Straight-Through Estimation for Robust Neural Networks on Analog CIM Hardware
Feng, Yuannuo, Zhou, Wenyong, Lyu, Yuexi, Zhang, Yixiang, Liu, Zhengwu, Wong, Ngai, Kang, Wang
--Analog Compute-In-Memory (CIM) architectures promise significant energy efficiency gains for neural network inference, but suffer from complex hardware-induced noise that poses major challenges for deployment. While noise-aware training methods have been proposed to address this issue, they typically rely on idealized and differentiable noise models that fail to capture the full complexity of analog CIM hardware variations. We provide theoretical analysis demonstrating that our approach preserves essential gradient directional information while maintaining computational tractability and optimization stability. Extensive experiments show that our extended STE framework achieves up to 5.3% accuracy improvement on image classification, 0.72 perplexity reduction on text generation, 2.2 speedup in training time, and 37.9% lower peak memory usage compared to standard noise-aware training methods. The exponential growth of neural network applications has intensified demand for energy-efficient computing solutions, particularly for edge devices with severe power and computational constraints [1], [2]. Analog Compute-In-Memory (CIM) architectures address these challenges by performing matrix-vector multiplications directly within memory arrays, eliminating energy-intensive data movement and achieving orders of magnitude energy efficiency improvements over traditional von Neumann architectures through analog weight storage and physical law-based computation [3], [4].
CAMF: Collaborative Adversarial Multi-agent Framework for Machine Generated Text Detection
Wang, Yue, Wei, Liesheng, Wang, Yuxiang
Detecting machine-generated text (MGT) from contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs) is increasingly crucial amid risks like disinformation and threats to academic integrity. Existing zero-shot detection paradigms, despite their practicality, often exhibit significant deficiencies. Key challenges include: (1) superficial analyses focused on limited textual attributes, and (2) a lack of investigation into consistency across linguistic dimensions such as style, semantics, and logic. To address these challenges, we introduce the \textbf{C}ollaborative \textbf{A}dversarial \textbf{M}ulti-agent \textbf{F}ramework (\textbf{CAMF}), a novel architecture using multiple LLM-based agents. CAMF employs specialized agents in a synergistic three-phase process: \emph{Multi-dimensional Linguistic Feature Extraction}, \emph{Adversarial Consistency Probing}, and \emph{Synthesized Judgment Aggregation}. This structured collaborative-adversarial process enables a deep analysis of subtle, cross-dimensional textual incongruities indicative of non-human origin. Empirical evaluations demonstrate CAMF's significant superiority over state-of-the-art zero-shot MGT detection techniques.
LLMs Struggle with NLI for Perfect Aspect: A Cross-Linguistic Study in Chinese and Japanese
Lu, Jie, Jin, Du, Yanaka, Hitomi
Unlike English, which uses distinct forms (e.g., had, has, will have) to mark the perfect aspect across tenses, Chinese and Japanese lack separate grammatical forms for tense within the perfect aspect, which complicates Natural Language Inference (NLI). Focusing on the perfect aspect in these languages, we construct a linguistically motivated, template-based NLI dataset (1,350 pairs per language). Experiments reveal that even advanced LLMs struggle with temporal inference, particularly in detecting subtle tense and reference-time shifts. These findings highlight model limitations and underscore the need for cross-linguistic evaluation in temporal semantics. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/Lujie2001/CrossNLI.
Scale-Disentangled spatiotemporal Modeling for Long-term Traffic Emission Forecasting
Wu, Yan, Pei, Lihong, Han, Yukai, Cao, Yang, Kang, Yu, Zhao, Yanlong
Long-term traffic emission forecasting is crucial for the comprehensive management of urban air pollution. Traditional forecasting methods typically construct spatiotemporal graph models by mining spatiotemporal dependencies to predict emissions. However, due to the multi-scale entanglement of traffic emissions across time and space, these spatiotemporal graph modeling method tend to suffer from cascading error amplification during long-term inference. To address this issue, we propose a Scale-Disentangled Spatio-Temporal Modeling (SDSTM) framework for long-term traffic emission forecasting. It leverages the predictability differences across multiple scales to decompose and fuse features at different scales, while constraining them to remain independent yet complementary. Specifically, the model first introduces a dual-stream feature decomposition strategy based on the Koopman lifting operator. It lifts the scale-coupled spatiotemporal dynamical system into an infinite-dimensional linear space via Koopman operator, and delineates the predictability boundary using gated wavelet decomposition. Then a novel fusion mechanism is constructed, incorporating a dual-stream independence constraint based on cross-term loss to dynamically refine the dual-stream prediction results, suppress mutual interference, and enhance the accuracy of long-term traffic emission prediction. Extensive experiments conducted on a road-level traffic emission dataset within Xi'an's Second Ring Road demonstrate that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Reduced-order modeling of Hamiltonian dynamics based on symplectic neural networks
Chen, Yongsheng, Guo, Wei, Tang, Qi, Zhong, Xinghui
We introduce a novel data-driven symplectic induced-order modeling (ROM) framework for high-dimensional Hamiltonian systems that unifies latent-space discovery and dynamics learning within a single, end-to-end neural architecture. The encoder-decoder is built from Henon neural networks (HenonNets) and may be augmented with linear SGS-reflector layers. This yields an exact symplectic map between full and latent phase spaces. Latent dynamics are advanced by a symplectic flow map implemented as a HenonNet. This unified neural architecture ensures exact preservation of the underlying symplectic structure at the reduced-order level, significantly enhancing the fidelity and long-term stability of the resulting ROM. We validate our method through comprehensive numerical experiments on canonical Hamiltonian systems. The results demonstrate the method's capability for accurate trajectory reconstruction, robust predictive performance beyond the training horizon, and accurate Hamiltonian preservation. These promising outcomes underscore the effectiveness and potential applicability of our symplectic ROM framework for complex dynamical systems across a broad range of scientific and engineering disciplines.
QuarkMed Medical Foundation Model Technical Report
Li, Ao, Yan, Bin, Cai, Bingfeng, Li, Chenxi, Zhao, Cunzhong, Yao, Fugen, Liu, Gaoqiang, Jiang, Guanjun, Xu, Jian, Dong, Liang, Sun, Liansheng, Zhang, Rongshen, Gui, Xiaolei, Liu, Xin, Shang, Xin, Wu, Yao, Cao, Yu, Ma, Zhenxin, Jia, Zhuang
Recent advancements in large language models have significantly accelerated their adoption in healthcare applications, including AI-powered medical consultations, diagnostic report assistance, and medical search tools. However, medical tasks often demand highly specialized knowledge, professional accuracy, and customization capabilities, necessitating a robust and reliable foundation model. QuarkMed addresses these needs by leveraging curated medical data processing, medical-content Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and a large-scale, verifiable reinforcement learning pipeline to develop a high-performance medical foundation model. The model achieved 70% accuracy on the Chinese Medical Licensing Examination, demonstrating strong generalization across diverse medical benchmarks. QuarkMed offers a powerful yet versatile personal medical AI solution, already serving over millions of users at ai.quark.cn.
In-Context Examples Matter: Improving Emotion Recognition in Conversation with Instruction Tuning
Ma, Hui, Zhang, Bo, Hu, Jinpeng, Shi, Zenglin
Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) aims to identify the emotion of each utterance in a conversation, playing a vital role in empathetic artificial intelligence. With the growing of large language models (LLMs), instruction tuning has emerged as a critical paradigm for ERC. Existing studies mainly focus on multi-stage instruction tuning, which first endows LLMs with speaker characteristics, and then conducts context-aware instruction tuning to comprehend emotional states. However, these methods inherently constrains the capacity to jointly capture the dynamic interaction between speaker characteristics and conversational context, resulting in weak alignment among speaker identity, contextual cues, and emotion states within a unified framework. In this paper, we propose InitERC, a simple yet effective one-stage in-context instruction tuning framework for ERC. InitERC adapts LLMs to learn speaker-context-emotion alignment from context examples via in-context instruction tuning. Specifically, InitERC comprises four components, i.e., demonstration pool construction, in-context example selection, prompt template design, and in-context instruction tuning. To explore the impact of in-context examples, we conduct a comprehensive study on three key factors: retrieval strategy, example ordering, and the number of examples. Extensive experiments on three widely used datasets demonstrate that our proposed InitERC achieves substantial improvements over the state-of-the-art baselines.