Performance Analysis
Remote Labor Index: Measuring AI Automation of Remote Work
Mazeika, Mantas, Gatti, Alice, Menghini, Cristina, Sehwag, Udari Madhushani, Singhal, Shivam, Orlovskiy, Yury, Basart, Steven, Sharma, Manasi, Peskoff, Denis, Lau, Elaine, Lim, Jaehyuk, Carroll, Lachlan, Blair, Alice, Sivakumar, Vinaya, Basu, Sumana, Kenstler, Brad, Ma, Yuntao, Michael, Julian, Li, Xiaoke, Ingebretsen, Oliver, Mehta, Aditya, Mottola, Jean, Teichmann, John, Yu, Kevin, Shaik, Zaina, Khoja, Adam, Ren, Richard, Hausenloy, Jason, Phan, Long, Htet, Ye, Aich, Ankit, Rabbani, Tahseen, Shah, Vivswan, Novykov, Andriy, Binder, Felix, Chugunov, Kirill, Ramirez, Luis, Geralnik, Matias, Mesura, Hernรกn, Lee, Dean, Cardona, Ed-Yeremai Hernandez, Diamond, Annette, Yue, Summer, Wang, Alexandr, Liu, Bing, Hernandez, Ernesto, Hendrycks, Dan
AIs have made rapid progress on research-oriented benchmarks of knowledge and reasoning, but it remains unclear how these gains translate into economic value and automation. To measure this, we introduce the Remote Labor Index (RLI), a broadly multi-sector benchmark comprising real-world, economically valuable projects designed to evaluate end-to-end agent performance in practical settings. AI agents perform near the floor on RLI, with the highest-performing agent achieving an automation rate of 2.5%. These results help ground discussions of AI automation in empirical evidence, setting a common basis for tracking AI impacts and enabling stakeholders to proactively navigate AI-driven labor automation.
LSM-MS2: A Foundation Model Bridging Spectral Identification and Biological Interpretation
Asher, Gabriel, Shah, Devesh, Caudy, Amy A., Ferro, Luke, Amar, Lea, Costa, Ana S. H., Patton, Thomas, O'Connor, Niall, Campbell, Jennifer M., Geremia, Jack
A vast majority of mass spectrometry data remains uncharacterized, leaving much of its biological and chemical information untapped. Recent advances in machine learning have begun to address this gap, particularly for tasks such as spectral identification in tandem mass spectrometry data. Here, we present the latest generation of LSM-MS2, a large-scale deep learning foundation model trained on millions of spectra to learn a semantic chemical space. LSM-MS2 achieves state-of-the-art performance in spectral identification, improving on existing methods by 30% in accuracy of identifying challenging isomeric compounds, yielding 42% more correct identifications in complex biological samples, and maintaining robustness under low-concentration conditions. Furthermore, LSM-MS2 produces rich spectral embeddings that enable direct biological interpretation from minimal downstream data, successfully differentiating disease states and predicting clinical outcomes across diverse translational applications.
Delegated Authorization for Agents Constrained to Semantic Task-to-Scope Matching
Helou, Majed El, Troiani, Chiara, Ryder, Benjamin, Diaconu, Jean, Muyal, Hervรฉ, Yannuzzi, Marcelo
Authorizing Large Language Model driven agents to dynamically invoke tools and access protected resources introduces significant risks, since current methods for delegating authorization grant overly broad permissions and give access to tools allowing agents to operate beyond the intended task scope. We introduce and assess a delegated authorization model enabling authorization servers to semantically inspect access requests to protected resources, and issue access tokens constrained to the minimal set of scopes necessary for the agents' assigned tasks. Given the unavailability of datasets centered on delegated authorization flows, particularly including both semantically appropriate and inappropriate scope requests for a given task, we introduce ASTRA, a dataset and data generation pipeline for benchmarking semantic matching between tasks and scopes. Our experiments show both the potential and current limitations of model-based matching, particularly as the number of scopes needed for task completion increases. Our results highlight the need for further research into semantic matching techniques enabling intent-aware authorization for multi-agent and tool-augmented applications, including fine-grained control, such as Task-Based Access Control (TBAC).
A Three-Stage Bayesian Transfer Learning Framework to Improve Predictions in Data-Scarce Domains
Furlong, Aidan, Salko, Robert, Zhao, Xingang, Wu, Xu
The use of ML in engineering has grown steadily to support a wide array of applications. Among these methods, deep neural networks have been widely adopted due to their performance and accessibility, but they require large, high-quality datasets. Experimental data are often sparse, noisy, or insufficient to build resilient data-driven models. Transfer learning, which leverages relevant data-abundant source domains to assist learning in data-scarce target domains, has shown efficacy. Parameter transfer, where pretrained weights are reused, is common but degrades under large domain shifts. Domain-adversarial neural networks (DANNs) help address this issue by learning domain-invariant representations, thereby improving transfer under greater domain shifts in a semi-supervised setting. However, DANNs can be unstable during training and lack a native means for uncertainty quantification. This study introduces a fully-supervised three-stage framework, the staged Bayesian domain-adversarial neural network (staged B-DANN), that combines parameter transfer and shared latent space adaptation. In Stage 1, a deterministic feature extractor is trained on the source domain. This feature extractor is then adversarially refined using a DANN in Stage 2. In Stage 3, a Bayesian neural network is built on the adapted feature extractor for fine-tuning on the target domain to handle conditional shifts and yield calibrated uncertainty estimates. This staged B-DANN approach was first validated on a synthetic benchmark, where it was shown to significantly outperform standard transfer techniques. It was then applied to the task of predicting critical heat flux in rectangular channels, leveraging data from tube experiments as the source domain. The results of this study show that the staged B-DANN method can improve predictive accuracy and generalization, potentially assisting other domains in nuclear engineering.
ConceptScope: Characterizing Dataset Bias via Disentangled Visual Concepts
Choi, Jinho, Lim, Hyesu, Schneider, Steffen, Choo, Jaegul
Dataset bias, where data points are skewed to certain concepts, is ubiquitous in machine learning datasets. Yet, systematically identifying these biases is challenging without costly, fine-grained attribute annotations. We present ConceptScope, a scalable and automated framework for analyzing visual datasets by discovering and quantifying human-interpretable concepts using Sparse Autoencoders trained on representations from vision foundation models. ConceptScope categorizes concepts into target, context, and bias types based on their semantic relevance and statistical correlation to class labels, enabling class-level dataset characterization, bias identification, and robustness evaluation through concept-based subgrouping. We validate that ConceptScope captures a wide range of visual concepts, including objects, textures, backgrounds, facial attributes, emotions, and actions, through comparisons with annotated datasets. Furthermore, we show that concept activations produce spatial attributions that align with semantically meaningful image regions. ConceptScope reliably detects known biases (e.g., background bias in Waterbirds) and uncovers previously unannotated ones (e.g, co-occurring objects in ImageNet), offering a practical tool for dataset auditing and model diagnostics.
DARTS: A Drone-Based AI-Powered Real-Time Traffic Incident Detection System
Li, Bai, Kourtellis, Achilleas, Cao, Rong, Post, Joseph, Porter, Brian, Zhang, Yu
Rapid and reliable incident detection is critical for reducing crash-related fatalities, injuries, and congestion. However, conventional methods, such as closed-circuit television, dashcam footage, and sensor-based detection, separate detection from verification, suffer from limited flexibility, and require dense infrastructure or high penetration rates, restricting adaptability and scalability to shifting incident hotspots. To overcome these challenges, we developed DARTS, a drone-based, AI-powered real-time traffic incident detection system. DARTS integrates drones' high mobility and aerial perspective for adaptive surveillance, thermal imaging for better low-visibility performance and privacy protection, and a lightweight deep learning framework for real-time vehicle trajectory extraction and incident detection. The system achieved 99% detection accuracy on a self-collected dataset and supports simultaneous online visual verification, severity assessment, and incident-induced congestion propagation monitoring via a web-based interface. In a field test on Interstate 75 in Florida, DARTS detected and verified a rear-end collision 12 minutes earlier than the local transportation management center and monitored incident-induced congestion propagation, suggesting potential to support faster emergency response and enable proactive traffic control to reduce congestion and secondary crash risk. Crucially, DARTS's flexible deployment architecture reduces dependence on frequent physical patrols, indicating potential scalability and cost-effectiveness for use in remote areas and resource-constrained settings. This study presents a promising step toward a more flexible and integrated real-time traffic incident detection system, with significant implications for the operational efficiency and responsiveness of modern transportation management.
Robust GNN Watermarking via Implicit Perception of Topological Invariants
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are valuable intellectual property, yet many watermarks rely on backdoor triggers that break under common model edits and create ownership ambiguity. We present InvGNN-WM, which ties ownership to a model's implicit perception of a graph invariant, enabling trigger-free, black-box verification with negligible task impact. A lightweight head predicts normalized algebraic connectivity on an owner-private carrier set; a sign-sensitive decoder outputs bits, and a calibrated threshold controls the false-positive rate. Across diverse node and graph classification datasets and backbones, InvGNN-WM matches clean accuracy while yielding higher watermark accuracy than trigger- and compression-based baselines. It remains strong under unstructured pruning, fine-tuning, and post-training quantization; plain knowledge distillation (KD) weakens the mark, while KD with a watermark loss (KD+WM) restores it. We provide guarantees for imperceptibility and robustness, and we prove that exact removal is NP-complete.
Beyond Reactivity: Measuring Proactive Problem Solving in LLM Agents
Pasternak, Gil, Rajagopal, Dheeraj, White, Julia, Atreja, Dhruv, Thomas, Matthew, Hurn-Maloney, George, Lewis, Ash
From these personas, we synthetically construct comprehensive world models that encode: Workplace hierarchy and relationship context Work patterns and communication styles Available action space A with corresponding parameter spaces P Pain points and operational constraints For instance, given a senior account manager with 20 years of client-facing experience as shown in figure 2, the world model might identify "client documentation upkeep" as a pain point, while also modeling specific client relationships and their respective engagement contexts. Bottleneck Generation: Using the contextualized world model, we generate bottleneck b: a persona-relevant, actionable user-need that satisfies our formal definition (see Section 2). Each bottleneck b is designed to be identifiable through evidence T in the document set D and resolvable through exactly one action a A. User Datastore: For each sample S, we construct the document set D = T K. The True positives T - documents where f(d) = 1 - collectively provide sufficient evidence to identify bottleneck b. Distractors K are documents where f(d) = 0, introducing realistic noise with respect to the bottleneck. In our current datastore setup, all the generated documents are either emails, calendar events, or text documents, as exemplified in Figures 1 and 2. To mirror real-world complexity, we employ two key design principles: (i) Evidence distribution: We often distribute evidence for b across multiple documents in T, requiring agents to synthesize information from t different sources.
LatentBreak: Jailbreaking Large Language Models through Latent Space Feedback
Mura, Raffaele, Piras, Giorgio, Lukoลกiลซtฤ, Kamilฤ, Pintor, Maura, Karbasi, Amin, Biggio, Battista
Jailbreaks are adversarial attacks designed to bypass the built-in safety mechanisms of large language models. Automated jailbreaks typically optimize an adversarial suffix or adapt long prompt templates by forcing the model to generate the initial part of a restricted or harmful response. In this work, we show that existing jailbreak attacks that leverage such mechanisms to unlock the model response can be detected by a straightforward perplexity-based filtering on the input prompt. To overcome this issue, we propose LatentBreak, a white-box jailbreak attack that generates natural adversarial prompts with low perplexity capable of evading such defenses. LatentBreak substitutes words in the input prompt with semantically-equivalent ones, preserving the initial intent of the prompt, instead of adding high-perplexity adversarial suffixes or long templates. These words are chosen by minimizing the distance in the latent space between the representation of the adversarial prompt and that of harmless requests. Our extensive evaluation shows that LatentBreak leads to shorter and low-perplexity prompts, thus outperforming competing jailbreak algorithms against perplexity-based filters on multiple safety-aligned models.
Bias-Corrected Data Synthesis for Imbalanced Learning
Lyu, Pengfei, Ma, Zhengchi, Zhang, Linjun, Zhang, Anru R.
Imbalanced data, where the positive samples represent only a small proportion compared to the negative samples, makes it challenging for classification problems to balance the false positive and false negative rates. A common approach to addressing the challenge involves generating synthetic data for the minority group and then training classification models with both observed and synthetic data. However, since the synthetic data depends on the observed data and fails to replicate the original data distribution accurately, prediction accuracy is reduced when the synthetic data is naively treated as the true data. In this paper, we address the bias introduced by synthetic data and provide consistent estimators for this bias by borrowing information from the majority group. We propose a bias correction procedure to mitigate the adverse effects of synthetic data, enhancing prediction accuracy while avoiding overfitting. This procedure is extended to broader scenarios with imbalanced data, such as imbalanced multi-task learning and causal inference. Theoretical properties, including bounds on bias estimation errors and improvements in prediction accuracy, are provided. Simulation results and data analysis on handwritten digit datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.