Large language models (LLMs) show increasing promise in medical applications, but their ability to detect and correct errors in clinical texts -- a prerequisite for safe deployment -- remains under-evaluated, particularly beyond English. We introduce MedRECT, a cross-lingual benchmark (Japanese/English) that formulates medical error handling as three subtasks: error detection, error localization (sentence extraction), and error correction. MedRECT is built with a scalable, automated pipeline from the Japanese Medical Licensing Examinations (JMLE) and a curated English counterpart, yielding MedRECT-ja (663 texts) and MedRECT-en (458 texts) with comparable error/no-error balance. We evaluate 9 contemporary LLMs spanning proprietary, open-weight, and reasoning families. Key findings: (i) reasoning models substantially outperform standard architectures, with up to 13.5% relative improvement in error detection and 51.0% in sentence extraction; (ii) cross-lingual evaluation reveals 5-10% performance gaps from English to Japanese, with smaller disparities for reasoning models; (iii) targeted LoRA fine-tuning yields asymmetric improvements in error correction performance (Japanese: +0.078, English: +0.168) while preserving reasoning capabilities; and (iv) our fine-tuned model exceeds human expert performance on structured medical error correction tasks. To our knowledge, MedRECT is the first comprehensive cross-lingual benchmark for medical error correction, providing a reproducible framework and resources for developing safer medical LLMs across languages.

Recent advancements in large-scale pretraining in natural language processing have enabled pretrained vision-language models such as CLIP to effectively align images and text, significantly improving performance in zero-shot image classification tasks. Subsequent studies have further demonstrated that cropping images into smaller regions and using large language models to generate multiple descriptions for each caption can further enhance model performance. However, due to the inherent sensitivity of CLIP, random image crops can introduce misinformation and bias, as many images share similar features at small scales. To address this issue, we propose Localized-Globalized Cross-Alignment (LGCA), a framework that first captures the local features of an image and then repeatedly selects the most salient regions and expands them. The similarity score is designed to incorporate both the original and expanded images, enabling the model to capture both local and global features while minimizing misinformation. Additionally, we provide a theoretical analysis demonstrating that the time complexity of LGCA remains the same as that of the original model prior to the repeated expansion process, highlighting its efficiency and scalability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method substantially improves zero-shot performance across diverse datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines.

While AI-generated text (AIGT) detectors achieve over 90\% accuracy on direct LLM outputs, they fail catastrophically against iteratively-paraphrased content. We investigate why iteratively-paraphrased text -- itself AI-generated -- evades detection systems designed for AIGT identification. Through intrinsic mechanism analysis, we reveal that iterative paraphrasing creates an intermediate laundering region characterized by semantic displacement with preserved generation patterns, which brings up two attack categories: paraphrasing human-authored text (authorship obfuscation) and paraphrasing LLM-generated text (plagiarism evasion). To address these vulnerabilities, we introduce PADBen, the first benchmark systematically evaluating detector robustness against both paraphrase attack scenarios. PADBen comprises a five-type text taxonomy capturing the full trajectory from original content to deeply laundered text, and five progressive detection tasks across sentence-pair and single-sentence challenges. We evaluate 11 state-of-the-art detectors, revealing critical asymmetry: detectors successfully identify the plagiarism evasion problem but fail for the case of authorship obfuscation. Our findings demonstrate that current detection approaches cannot effectively handle the intermediate laundering region, necessitating fundamental advances in detection architectures beyond existing semantic and stylistic discrimination methods. For detailed code implementation, please see https://github.com/JonathanZha47/PadBen-Paraphrase-Attack-Benchmark.

Organizations are increasingly adopting and adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) hosted on public repositories such as HuggingFace. Although these adaptations often improve performance on specialized downstream tasks, recent evidence indicates that they can also degrade a model's safety or fairness. Since different fine-tuning techniques may exert distinct effects on these critical dimensions, this study undertakes a systematic assessment of their trade-offs. Four widely used Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning methods, LoRA, IA3, Prompt-Tuning, and P-Tuning, are applied to four instruction-tuned model families (Meta-Llama-3-8B, Qwen2.5-7B, Mistral-7B, and Gemma-7B). In total, 235 fine-tuned variants are evaluated across eleven safety hazard categories and nine demographic fairness dimensions. The results show that adapter-based approaches (LoRA, IA3) tend to improve safety scores and are the least disruptive to fairness, retaining higher accuracy and lower bias scores. In contrast, prompt-based methods (Prompt-Tuning and P-Tuning) generally reduce safety and cause larger fairness regressions, with decreased accuracy and increased bias. Alignment shifts are strongly moderated by base model type: LLaMA remains stable, Qwen records modest gains, Gemma experiences the steepest safety decline, and Mistral, which is released without an internal moderation layer, displays the greatest variance. Improvements in safety do not necessarily translate into improvements in fairness, and no single configuration optimizes all fairness metrics simultaneously, indicating an inherent trade-off between these objectives. These findings suggest a practical guideline for safety-critical deployments: begin with a well-aligned base model, favour adapter-based PEFT, and conduct category-specific audits of both safety and fairness.

Speculative Decoding (SD) ensures that the output matches the target model's distribution exactly. However, we argue that this distribution matching requirement is too stringent and results in unnecessarily low acceptance rates, limiting potential speedups. Instead, we advocate a reformulation of the decoding objective: the proposed decoding strategy should match the expected utility, i.e., the task-specific performance, of the target model. This perspective also aligns better with real-world use cases of LLMs, where utility (e.g., code correctness, factual accuracy) is often more important than sampling distribution. Based on this reformulation, we propose a novel decoding strategy: Pivot-Aware Speculative Decoding, which rejects only those tokens that would lead to a utility drop in the final output. We refer to these critical tokens as pivot tokens. We propose a method for labeling tokens as pivotal or non-pivotal and train a lightweight classifier to detect them. This method can be viewed as a relaxed version of standard SD, which offers much higher acceptance while preserving utility. We evaluate our method across various datasets, demonstrating that we can achieve up to $2.5\times$ speedup with comparable utility. Source code is available at https://github.com/amir-zsh/PAD.

The rapid proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has raised significant concerns about their security against adversarial attacks. In this work, we propose a novel approach to crafting universal jailbreaks and data extraction attacks by exploiting latent space discontinuities, an architectural vulnerability related to the sparsity of training data. Initial results indicate that when these discontinuities are exploited, they can consistently and profoundly compromise model behavior, even in the presence of layered defenses. The findings suggest that this strategy has substantial potential as a systemic attack vector. Disclaimer: This paper contains examples of harmful and offensive language. Additional supporting materials may be provided upon formal request and are subject to the signing of a liability and ethical use agreement. Large Language Models (LLMs) are enabling novel applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and transforming human activities through conversational models (e.g., ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Gemini, Llama, and Claude). LLMs allow for natural human-AI interaction and specialized applications across multiple domains, including image generation (e.g., Adobe Firefly and Pixlr), code automation (e.g., GitHub Copilot and Amazon CodeWhisperer), and retrieval-augmented generation systems (e.g., Perplexity AI and IBM watsonx). The interactions may happen using different interfaces, such as via direct interaction with the user using a Web interface or indirectly via APIs.

This paper introduces LingGym, a new benchmark that evaluates LLMs' capacity for meta-linguistic reasoning using Interlinear Glossed Text (IGT) and grammatical descriptions extracted from 18 typologically diverse reference grammars. Unlike previous work that focuses on specific downstream tasks, we assess whether LLMs can generalize linguistic inference across low-resource languages and structures not seen during training. We present a controlled evaluation task: Word-Gloss Inference, in which the model must infer a missing word and gloss from context using varying levels of linguistic information (e.g., glosses, grammatical explanations, translations). Our results show that incorporating structured linguistic cues leads to consistent improvements in reasoning performance across all models. This work highlights both the promise and current limitations of using LLMs for typologically informed linguistic analysis and low-resource language documentation.

We formalize a structural property of the causal (autoregressive) language modeling (CLM) objective: reversal invariance. Formally, the next-token prediction loss assigns identical likelihood to a corpus and its reversal, implying that standard CLM pretraining is direction-blind. This symmetry explains why models trained on reversed text can achieve comparable performance to those trained on forward text, despite the inherently time-asymmetric nature of human language and reasoning. We argue that this invariance represents a limitation of current pretraining objectives rather than a benign artifact. If natural language encodes directional dependencies - phonological, morphological, or causal - a symmetric objective may fail to capture them. We therefore propose viewing pretraining through the lens of temporal asymmetry, motivating future work on loss functions and architectures that explicitly model the arrow of language while retaining standard language modeling capacity.

With the increasing adoption of large language models (LLM), agentic workflows, which compose multiple LLM calls with tools, retrieval, and reasoning steps, are increasingly replacing traditional applications. However, such workflows are inherently error-prone: incorrect or partially correct output at one step can propagate or even amplify through subsequent stages, compounding the impact on the final output. Recent work proposes integrating verifiers that validate LLM output or actions, such as self-reflection, debate, or LLM-as-a-judge mechanisms. Yet, verifying every step introduces significant latency and cost overheads. In this work, we seek to answer three key questions: which nodes in a workflow are most error-prone and thus deserve costly verification, how to select the most appropriate verifier for each node, and how to use verification with minimal impact to latency? Our solution, Sherlock, addresses these using counterfactual analysis on agentic workflows to identify error-prone nodes and selectively attaching cost-optimal verifiers only where necessary. At runtime, Sherlock speculatively executes downstream tasks to reduce latency overhead, while verification runs in the background. If verification fails, execution is rolled back to the last verified output. Compared to the non-verifying baseline, Sherlock delivers an 18.3% accuracy gain on average across benchmarks. Sherlock reduces workflow execution time by up to 48.7% over non-speculative execution and lowers verification cost by 26.0% compared to the Monte Carlo search-based method, demonstrating that principled, fault-aware verification effectively balances efficiency and reliability in agentic workflows.

The expansion of context windows in large language models (LLMs) to multi-million tokens introduces severe memory and compute bottlenecks, particularly in managing the growing Key-Value (KV) cache. While Compute Express Link (CXL) enables non-eviction frameworks that offload the full KV-cache to scalable external memory, these frameworks still suffer from costly data transfers when recalling non-resident KV tokens to limited GPU memory as context lengths increase. This work proposes scalable Processing-Near-Memory (PNM) for 1M-Token LLM Inference, a CXL-enabled KV-cache management system that coordinates memory and computation beyond GPU limits. Our design offloads token page selection to a PNM accelerator within CXL memory, eliminating costly recalls and enabling larger GPU batch sizes. We further introduce a hybrid parallelization strategy and a steady-token selection mechanism to enhance compute efficiency and scalability. Implemented atop a state-of-the-art CXL-PNM system, our solution delivers consistent performance gains for LLMs with up to 405B parameters and 1M-token contexts. Our PNM-only offloading scheme (PNM-KV) and GPU-PNM hybrid with steady-token execution (PnG-KV) achieve up to 21.9x throughput improvement, up to 60x lower energy per token, and up to 7.3x better total cost efficiency than the baseline, demonstrating that CXL-enabled multi-PNM architectures can serve as a scalable backbone for future long-context LLM inference.