Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success, but their rapidly growing scale imposes prohibitive costs in memory, computation, and energy. Post-training quantization (PTQ) is a promising solution for efficient deployment, yet achieving accurate W4A4 quantization remains an open challenge. While most existing methods are designed for INT4 formats, the emergence of MXFP4 -- a new FP4 format with various hardware support (NVIDIA, AMD, Intel)-- raises questions about the applicability of current techniques. In this work, we establish a comprehensive benchmark of PTQ methods under the MXFP4 format. Through systematic evaluation, we find that methods like GPTQ consistently deliver strong performance, whereas rotation-based approaches, which are almost used by all state-of-the-art approaches, suffer from severe incompatibility with MXFP4. We further provide the first in-depth analysis of this conflict, tracing its root to a fundamental mismatch between MXFP4's PoT (power-of-two) block scaling and the redistribution of outlier energy via global rotation. Building on this insight, we propose a simple yet effective block rotation strategy that adapts rotation-based methods to MXFP4, leading to substantial accuracy improvements across diverse LLMs. Our findings not only offer clear guidance for practitioners but also set a foundation for advancing PTQ research under emerging low-precision formats.

This study provides an empirical assessment of whether current large language models (LLMs) can pass the official qualifying examination for membership in Poland's National Appeal Chamber (Krajowa Izba Odwoławcza). The authors examine two related ideas: using LLM as actual exam candidates and applying the 'LLM-as-a-judge' approach, in which model-generated answers are automatically evaluated by other models. The paper describes the structure of the exam, which includes a multiple-choice knowledge test on public procurement law and a written judgment, and presents the hybrid information recovery and extraction pipeline built to support the models. Several LLMs (including GPT-4.1, Claude 4 Sonnet and Bielik-11B-v2.6) were tested in closed-book and various Retrieval-Augmented Generation settings. The results show that although the models achieved satisfactory scores in the knowledge test, none met the passing threshold in the practical written part, and the evaluations of the 'LLM-as-a-judge' often diverged from the judgments of the official examining committee. The authors highlight key limitations: susceptibility to hallucinations, incorrect citation of legal provisions, weaknesses in logical argumentation, and the need for close collaboration between legal experts and technical teams. The findings indicate that, despite rapid technological progress, current LLMs cannot yet replace human judges or independent examiners in Polish public procurement adjudication.

The proliferation of AI-generated content has created an absurd communication theater where senders use LLMs to inflate simple ideas into verbose content, recipients use LLMs to compress them back into summaries, and as a consequence neither party engage with authentic content. LAAC (LLM as a Communicator) proposes a paradigm shift - positioning LLMs as intelligent communication intermediaries that capture the sender's intent through structured dialogue and facilitate genuine knowledge exchange with recipients. Rather than perpetuating cycles of AI-generated inflation and compression, LAAC enables authentic communication across diverse contexts including academic papers, proposals, professional emails, and cross-platform content generation. However, deploying LLMs as trusted communication intermediaries raises critical questions about information fidelity, consistency, and reliability. This position paper systematically evaluates the trustworthiness requirements for LAAC's deployment across multiple communication domains. We investigate three fundamental dimensions: (1) Information Capture Fidelity - accuracy of intent extraction during sender interviews across different communication types, (2) Reproducibility - consistency of structured knowledge across multiple interaction instances, and (3) Query Response Integrity - reliability of recipient-facing responses without hallucination, source conflation, or fabrication. Through controlled experiments spanning multiple LAAC use cases, we assess these trust dimensions using LAAC's multi-agent architecture. Preliminary findings reveal measurable trust gaps that must be addressed before LAAC can be reliably deployed in high-stakes communication scenarios.

Abstract--The prevalence of security vulnerabilities has prompted companies to adopt static application security testing (SAST) tools for vulnerability detection. Nevertheless, these tools frequently exhibit usability limitations, as their generic warning messages do not sufficiently communicate important information to developers, resulting in misunderstandings or oversight of critical findings. In light of recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) and their text generation capabilities, our work investigates a hybrid approach that uses LLMs to tackle the SAST explainability challenges. In this paper, we present SAFE, an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) plugin that leverages GPT -4o to explain the causes, impacts, and mitigation strategies of vulnerabilities detected by SAST tools. Our expert user study findings indicate that the explanations generated by SAFE can significantly assist beginner to intermediate developers in understanding and addressing security vulnerabilities, thereby improving the overall usability of SAST tools. With the rise in software security vulnerabilities such as those in the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses list [1], many companies resort to static application security testing (SAST) tools for the detection of software vulnerabilities.

Despite significant advances in document understanding, determining the correct orientation of scanned or photographed documents remains a critical pre-processing step in the real world settings. Accurate rotation correction is essential for enhancing the performance of downstream tasks such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) where misalignment commonly arises due to user errors, particularly incorrect base orientations of the camera during capture. In this study, we first introduce OCR-Rotation-Bench (ORB), a new benchmark for evaluating OCR robustness to image rotations, comprising (i) ORB-En, built from rotation-transformed structured and free-form English OCR datasets, and (ii) ORB-Indic, a novel multilingual set spanning 11 Indic mid to low-resource languages. We also present a fast, robust and lightweight rotation classification pipeline built on the vision encoder of Phi-3.5-Vision model with dynamic image cropping, fine-tuned specifically for 4-class rotation task in a standalone fashion. Our method achieves near-perfect 96% and 92% accuracy on identifying the rotations respectively on both the datasets. Beyond classification, we demonstrate the critical role of our module in boosting OCR performance: closed-source (up to 14%) and open-weights models (up to 4x) in the simulated real-world setting.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly employed in software engineering tasks such as requirements elicitation, design, and evaluation, raising critical questions regarding their alignment with human judgments on responsible AI values. This study investigates how closely LLMs' value preferences align with those of two human groups: a US-representative sample and AI practitioners. We evaluate 23 LLMs across four tasks: (T1) selecting key responsible AI values, (T2) rating their importance in specific contexts, (T3) resolving trade-offs between competing values, and (T4) prioritizing software requirements that embody those values. The results show that LLMs generally align more closely with AI practitioners than with the US-representative sample, emphasizing fairness, privacy, transparency, safety, and accountability. However, inconsistencies appear between the values that LLMs claim to uphold (Tasks 1-3) and the way they prioritize requirements (Task 4), revealing gaps in faithfulness between stated and applied behavior. These findings highlight the practical risk of relying on LLMs in requirements engineering without human oversight and motivate the need for systematic approaches to benchmark, interpret, and monitor value alignment in AI-assisted software development.

Text-to-SQL systems provide a natural language interface that can enable even laymen to access information stored in databases. However, existing Large Language Models (LLM) struggle with SQL generation from natural instructions due to large schema sizes and complex reasoning. Prior work often focuses on complex, somewhat impractical pipelines using flagship models, while smaller, efficient models remain overlooked. In this work, we explore three multi-agent LLM pipelines, with systematic performance benchmarking across a range of small to large open-source models: (1) Multi-agent discussion pipeline, where agents iteratively critique and refine SQL queries, and a judge synthesizes the final answer; (2) Planner-Coder pipeline, where a thinking model planner generates stepwise SQL generation plans and a coder synthesizes queries; and (3) Coder-Aggregator pipeline, where multiple coders independently generate SQL queries, and a reasoning agent selects the best query. Experiments on the Bird-Bench Mini-Dev set reveal that Multi-Agent discussion can improve small model performance, with up to 10.6% increase in Execution Accuracy for Qwen2.5-7b-Instruct seen after three rounds of discussion. Among the pipelines, the LLM Reasoner-Coder pipeline yields the best results, with DeepSeek-R1-32B and QwQ-32B planners boosting Gemma 3 27B IT accuracy from 52.4% to the highest score of 56.4%. Codes are available at https://github.com/treeDweller98/bappa-sql.

Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT now provide novice programmers with unprecedented access to instant, personalized support. While this holds clear promise, their influence on students' metacognitive processes remains underexplored. Existing work has largely focused on correctness and usability, with limited attention to whether and how students' use of AI assistants supports or bypasses key metacognitive processes. This study addresses that gap by analyzing student-AI interactions through a metacognitive lens in university-level programming courses. We examined more than 10,000 dialogue logs collected over three years, complemented by surveys of students and educators. Our analysis focused on how prompts and responses aligned with metacognitive phases and strategies. Synthesizing these findings across data sources, we distill design considerations for AI-powered coding assistants that aim to support rather than supplant metacognitive engagement. Our findings provide guidance for developing educational AI tools that strengthen students' learning processes in programming education.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is critical for language accessibility, yet low-resource Cantonese remains challenging due to limited annotated data, six lexical tones, tone sandhi, and accent variation. Existing ASR models, such as Whisper, often suffer from high word error rates. Large audio-language models (LALMs), in contrast, can leverage broader contextual reasoning but still require explicit tonal and prosodic acoustic cues. We introduce CantoASR, a collaborative ASR-LALM error correction framework that integrates forced alignment for acoustic feature extraction, a LoRA-finetuned Whisper for improved tone discrimination, and an instruction-tuned Qwen-Audio for prosody-aware correction. Evaluations on spontaneous Cantonese data show substantial CER gains over Whisper-Large-V3. These findings suggest that integrating acoustic cues with LALM reasoning provides a scalable strategy for low-resource tonal and dialectal ASR.

Computer-use agents can operate computers and automate laborious tasks, but despite recent rapid progress, they still lag behind human users, especially when tasks require domain-specific procedural knowledge about particular applications, platforms, and multi-step workflows. Humans can bridge this gap by watching video tutorials: we search, skim, and selectively imitate short segments that match our current subgoal. In this paper, we study how to enable computer-use agents to learn from online videos at inference time effectively. We propose a framework that retrieves and filters tutorial videos, converts them into structured demonstration trajectories, and dynamically selects trajectories as in-context guidance during execution. Particularly, using a VLM, we infer UI actions, segment videos into short subsequences of actions, and assign each subsequence a textual objective. At inference time, a two-stage selection mechanism dynamically chooses a single trajectory to add in context at each step, focusing the agent on the most helpful local guidance for its next decision. Experiments on two widely used benchmarks show that our framework consistently outperforms strong base agents and variants that use only textual tutorials or transcripts. Analyses highlight the importance of trajectory segmentation and selection, action filtering, and visual information, suggesting that abundant online videos can be systematically distilled into actionable guidance that improves computer-use agents at inference time. Our code is available at https://github.com/UCSB-NLP-Chang/video_demo.