Deep Learning
ReMA: Learning to Meta-think for LLMs with Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning
Recent research on Reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs) has sought to further enhance their performance by integrating meta-thinking--enabling models to monitor, evaluate, and control their reasoning processes for more adaptive and effective problem-solving. However, current single-agent work lacks a specialized design for acquiring meta-thinking, resulting in low efficacy. To address this challenge, we introduce Reinforced Meta-thinking Agents (ReMA), a novel framework that leverages Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) to elicit metathinking behaviors, encouraging LLMs to think about thinking.
S2M-Former: Spiking Symmetric Mixing Branchformer for Brain Auditory Attention Detection
Auditory attention detection (AAD) aims to decode listeners' focus in complex auditory environments from electroencephalography (EEG) recordings, which is crucial for developing neuro-steered hearing devices. Despite recent advancements, EEG-based AAD remains hindered by the absence of synergistic frameworks that can fully leverage complementary EEG features under energy-efficiency constraints. We propose S2M-Former, a novel spiking symmetric mixing framework to address this limitation through two key innovations: i) Presenting a spike-driven symmetric architecture composed of parallel spatial and frequency branches with mirrored modular design, leveraging biologically plausible token-channel mixers to enhance complementary learning across branches; ii) Introducing lightweight 1D token sequences to replace conventional 3D operations, reducing parameters by 14.7 . The brain-inspired spiking architecture further reduces power consumption, achieving a 5.8 energy reduction compared to recent ANN methods, while also surpassing existing SNN baselines in terms of parameter efficiency and performance. Comprehensive experiments on three AAD benchmarks (KUL, DTU and AV-GC-AAD) across three settings (within-trial, cross-trial and cross-subject) demonstrate that S2M-Former achieves comparable state-of-the-art (SOTA) decoding accuracy, making it a promising low-power, high-performance solution for AAD tasks.
Disentanglement Beyond Static vs. Dynamic: ABenchmark and Evaluation Framework for Multi-Factor Sequential Representations
Learning disentangled representations in sequential data is a key goal in deep learning, with broad applications in vision, audio, and time series. While realworld data involves multiple interacting semantic factors over time, prior work has mostly focused on simpler two-factor static and dynamic settings, primarily because such settings make data collection easier, thereby overlooking the inherently multifactor nature of real-world data. We introduce the first standardized benchmark for evaluating multi-factor sequential disentanglement across six diverse datasets spanning video, audio, and time series. Our benchmark includes modular tools for dataset integration, model development, and evaluation metrics tailored to multi-factor analysis. We additionally propose a post-hoc Latent Exploration Stage to automatically align latent dimensions with semantic factors, and introduce a Koopman-inspired model that achieves state-of-the-art results. Moreover, we show that Vision-Language Models can automate dataset annotation and serve as zeroshot disentanglement evaluators, removing the need for manual labels and human intervention. Together, these contributions provide a robust and scalable foundation for advancing multi-factor sequential disentanglement. Our code is available on GitHub, and the datasets and trained models are available on Hugging Face.
Inferring stochastic dynamics with growth from cross-sectional data Suryanarayana Maddu School of Mathematics and Statistics, Center for Computational Biology, University of Melbourne
Time-resolved single-cell omics data offers high-throughput, genome-wide measurements of cellular states, which are instrumental to reverse-engineer the processes underpinning cell fate. Such technologies are inherently destructive, allowing only cross-sectional measurements of the underlying stochastic dynamical system. Furthermore, cells may divide or die in addition to changing their molecular state. Collectively these present a major challenge to inferring realistic biophysical models. We present a novel approach, unbalanced probability flow inference, that addresses this challenge for biological processes modelled as stochastic dynamics with growth. By leveraging a Lagrangian formulation of the Fokker-Planck equation, our method accurately disentangles drift from intrinsic noise and growth.
Pan-LUT: Efficient Pan-sharpening via Learnable Look-Up Tables
Recently, deep learning-based pan-sharpening algorithms have achieved notable advancements over traditional methods. However, deep learning-based methods incur substantial computational overhead during inference, especially with large images. This excessive computational demand limits the applicability of these methods in real-world scenarios, particularly in the absence of dedicated computing devices such as GPUs and TPUs. To address these challenges, we propose Pan-LUT, a novel learnable look-up table (LUT) framework for pan-sharpening that strikes a balance between performance and computational efficiency for large remote sensing images. Our method makes it possible to process 15K 15K remote sensing images on a 24GBGPU. To finely control the spectral transformation, we devise the PAN-guided look-up table (PGLUT) for channel-wise spectral mapping. To effectively capture fine-grained spatial details, we introduce the spatial details look-up table (SDLUT).
FAPEX: Fractional Amplitude-Phase Expressor for Robust Cross-Subject Seizure Prediction
Precise, generalizable subject-agnostic seizure prediction (SASP) remains a fundamental challenge due to the intrinsic complexity and significant spectral variability of electrophysiologial signals across individuals and recording modalities. We propose FAPEX, a novel architecture that introduces a learnable fractional neural frame operator (FrNFO) for adaptive time-frequency decomposition. Unlike conventional models that exhibit spectral bias toward low frequencies, our FrNFO employs fractional-order convolutions to capture both high and low-frequency dynamics, achieving approximately 10% improvement in F1-score and sensitivity over state-of-the-art baselines. The FrNFO enables the extraction of instantaneous phase and amplitude representations that are particularly informative for preictal biomarker discovery and enhance out-of-distribution generalization. FAPEXfurther integrates structural state-space modeling and channelwise attention, allowing it to handle heterogeneous electrode montages.
Robust Hallucination Detection in LLMs via Adaptive Token Selection
Hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) pose significant safety concerns that impede their broader deployment. Recent research in hallucination detection has demonstrated that LLMs' internal representations contain truthfulness hints, which can be harnessed for detector training. However, the performance of these detectors is heavily dependent on the internal representations of predetermined tokens, fluctuating considerably when working on free-form generations with varying lengths and sparse distributions of hallucinated entities. To address this, we propose HaMI, a novel approach that enables robust detection of hallucinations through adaptive selection and learning of critical tokens that are most indicative of hallucinations. We achieve this robustness by an innovative formulation of the Hallucination detection task as Multiple Instance (HaMI) learning over tokenlevel representations within a sequence, thereby facilitating a joint optimisation of token selection and hallucination detection on generation sequences of diverse forms. Comprehensive experimental results on four hallucination benchmarks show that HaMI significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/mala-lab/HaMI.
SuffixDecoding: Extreme Speculative Decoding for Emerging AIApplications
Speculative decoding is widely adopted to reduce latency in large language model (LLM) inference by leveraging smaller draft models capable of handling diverse user tasks. However, emerging AI applications, such as LLM-based agents, present unique workload characteristics: instead of diverse independent requests, agentic frameworks typically submit repetitive inference requests, such as multi-agent pipelines performing similar subtasks or self-refinement loops iteratively enhancing outputs. These workloads result in long and highly predictable sequences, which current speculative decoding methods do not effectively exploit. To address this gap, we introduce SuffixDecoding, a novel method that utilizes efficient suffix trees to cache long token sequences from prompts and previous outputs. By adaptively speculating more tokens when acceptance likelihood is high and fewer when it is low, SuffixDecoding effectively exploits opportunities for longer speculations while conserving computation when those opportunities are limited. Evaluations on agentic benchmarks, including SWE-Bench and Text-to-SQL, demonstrate that SuffixDecoding achieves speedups of up to 5.3, outperforming state-of-the-art methods--2.8 faster than model-based approaches like EAGLE-2/3 and 1.9 faster than model-free approaches such as Token Recycling.
Wavy Transformer
Transformers have achieved remarkable success across natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV). However, deep transformer models often suffer from an over-smoothing issue, in which token representations converge to similar values as they pass through successive transformer blocks. In this paper, we establish an equivalence between the hidden-state dynamics induced by stacked attention layers and graph neural diffusion on a complete graph. From this perspective, over-smoothing can be interpreted as a consequence of the dissipative nature of the underlying diffusion dynamics. Motivated by this physical interpretation, we propose Wavy Transformer, which consists of a novel attention layer based on second-order wavy dynamics. We also introduce a feedforward network and a normalization layer designed to preserve the physical state-velocity relationship under the chain rule, thereby extending the transformer architecture. We further validate our proposed techniques on various transformer models for NLP, CV, and sparse-graph tasks. The results consistently demonstrate that Wavy Transformer improves performance with minimal additional parameters and no extra hyperparameter tuning.