Large Language Model
CTR-LoRA: Curvature-Aware and Trust-Region Guided Low-Rank Adaptation for Large Language Models
Wang, Zhuxuanzi, Mo, Mingqiao, Xiao, Xi, Liu, Chen, Ma, Chenrui, Zhang, Yunbei, Wang, Xiao, Krishnaswamy, Smita, Wang, Tianyang
Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has become the standard approach for adapting large language models under limited compute and memory budgets. Although previous methods improve efficiency through low-rank updates, quantization, or heuristic budget reallocation, they often decouple the allocation of capacity from the way updates evolve during training. In this work, we introduce CTR-LoRA, a framework guided by curvature trust region that integrates rank scheduling with stability-aware optimization. CTR-LoRA allocates parameters based on marginal utility derived from lightweight second-order proxies and constrains updates using a Fisher/Hessian-metric trust region. Experiments on multiple open-source backbones (7B-13B), evaluated on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution benchmarks, show consistent improvements over strong PEFT baselines. In addition to increased accuracy, CTR-LoRA enhances training stability, reduces memory requirements, and achieves higher throughput, positioning it on the Pareto frontier of performance and efficiency. These results highlight a principled path toward more robust and deployable PEFT.
Attention to Non-Adopters
Zhou, Kaitlyn, Gligoriฤ, Kristina, Cheng, Myra, Lam, Michelle S., Raman, Vyoma, Aminu, Boluwatife, Woo, Caeley, Brockman, Michael, Cha, Hannah, Jurafsky, Dan
Although language model-based chat systems are increasingly used in daily life, most Americans remain non-adopters of chat-based LLMs -- as of June 2025, 66% had never used ChatGPT. At the same time, LLM development and evaluation rely mainly on data from adopters (e.g., logs, preference data), focusing on the needs and tasks for a limited demographic group of adopters in terms of geographic location, education, and gender. In this position paper, we argue that incorporating non-adopter perspectives is essential for developing broadly useful and capable LLMs. We contend that relying on methods that focus primarily on adopters will risk missing a range of tasks and needs prioritized by non-adopters, entrenching inequalities in who benefits from LLMs, and creating oversights in model development and evaluation. To illustrate this claim, we conduct case studies with non-adopters and show: how non-adopter needs diverge from those of current users, how non-adopter needs point us towards novel reasoning tasks, and how to systematically integrate non-adopter needs via human-centered methods.
VisuoAlign: Safety Alignment of LVLMs with Multimodal Tree Search
Li, MingSheng, Zhao, Guangze, Liu, Sichen
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in multimodal perception and generation, yet their safety alignment remains a critical challenge.Existing defenses and vulnerable to multimodal jailbreaks, as visual inputs introduce new attack surfaces, reasoning chains lack safety supervision, and alignment often degrades under modality fusion.To overcome these limitation, we propose VisuoAlign, a framework for multi-modal safety alignment via prompt-guided tree search.VisuoAlign embeds safety constrains into the reasoning process through visual-textual interactive prompts, employs Monte Carlo Tree Search(MCTS) to systematically construct diverse safety-critical prompt trajectories, and introduces prompt-based scaling to ensure real-time risk detection and compliant responses.Extensive experiments demonstrate that VisuoAlign proactively exposes risks, enables comprehensive dataset generation, and significantly improves the robustness of LVLMs against complex cross-modal threats.
BEACON: Bayesian Optimal Stopping for Efficient LLM Sampling
Wan, Guangya, Xu, Zixin Stephen, Zorc, Sasa, Baucells, Manel, Hu, Mengxuan, Wang, Hao, Li, Sheng
Sampling multiple responses is a common way to improve LLM output quality, but it comes at the cost of additional computation. The key challenge is deciding when to stop generating new samples to balance accuracy gains against efficiency. To address this, we introduce BEACON (Bayesian Efficient Adaptive Criterion for Optimal N-stopping), a principled adaptive sampling framework grounded in Sequential Search with Bayesian Learning. BEACON sequentially generates responses from the policy LLM, updates posterior belief over reward distributions in real time without further training, and determines when to stop by weighing expected gains against computational cost. Sampling terminates once the marginal utility of further exploration no longer justifies the expense. We establish both theoretical optimality guarantees and practical tractability, and show empirically that BEACON reduces average sampling by up to 80% while maintaining response quality. We further demonstrate BEACON's utility for cost-efficient preference data generation and outline practical extensions, offering actionable insights for future researchers.
Lean Finder: Semantic Search for Mathlib That Understands User Intents
Lu, Jialin, Emond, Kye, Yang, Kaiyu, Chaudhuri, Swarat, Sun, Weiran, Chen, Wuyang
We present Lean Finder, a semantic search engine for Lean and mathlib that understands and aligns with the intents of mathematicians. We further align Lean Finder with mathematicians' preferences using In addition, Lean Finder is compatible with LLM-based theorem provers, bridging retrieval with formal reasoning. Advances in Lean and mathlib (De Moura et al., 2015; Moura & Ullrich, 2021) are turning mathematical discovery into a collaborative and verifiable research workflow. Despite these advances, state-of-the-art LLMs still cannot solve math research problems. Lean's syn tax, gram mar, and tac tics in cur a steep learn ing curve. All experiments and data processing were conducted outside Meta. Figure 1: In the evaluation with user queries, real users preferred Lean Finder in 81.6% of cases, compared with Consider the two queries below. Lean search engines handle (Gao et al., 2024a;b; Ju & Dong, 2025; Asher, 2025): Denote L/K a field extension, x, y in L are algebraic elements over K with the same minimal polynomial. I'm working with algebraic elements over a field extension and I have two elements, say x and y in L. I know x is algebraic over K, and I've shown that y is a root of the minimal polynomial of x. Does this imply that the minimal polynomials of x and y are actually equal? T arget Statement 2: 1 theorem eq_of_root {x y: L} (hx: IsAlgebraic K x) (h_ev: Polynomial.aeval y (minpoly K x) = 0): minpoly K y = minpoly K x):= -- proof omitted for brevity This user latent (motivation, perspective, abstraction) cannot be inferred or encoded by a purely syntactic informalization. Addressing this challenge calls for Lean search engines that can understand a mathematician's intent, not merely We defer a more rigorous analysis in Section 2.2, and ask our core question: Our approach analyzes and clusters public discussions, then synthesizes queries that simulate user intents (Section 3.1).
Comparing LLMs for Sentiment Analysis in Financial Market News
Teles, Lucas Eduardo Pereira, Figueiredo, Carlos M. S.
This article presents a comparative study of large language models (LLMs) in the task of sentiment analysis of fi nancial market news. This work aims to analyze the performance difference of these models in this important natural language processing task within the context of fi nance. LLM models are compared with classical approaches, allowing for the quanti fi cation of the bene fi ts of each tested model or approach. Results show that large language models outperform classical models in the vast majority of cases.
Intent-Driven Storage Systems: From Low-Level Tuning to High-Level Understanding
Bergman, Shai, Song, Won Wook, Cavigelli, Lukas, Berestizshevsky, Konstantin, Zhou, Ke, Zhang, Ji
Existing storage systems lack visibility into workload intent, limiting their ability to adapt to the semantics of modern, large-scale data-intensive applications. This disconnect leads to brittle heuristics and fragmented, siloed optimizations. To address these limitations, we propose Intent-Driven Storage Systems (IDSS), a vision for a new paradigm where large language models (LLMs) infer workload and system intent from unstructured signals to guide adaptive and cross-layer parameter reconfiguration. IDSS provides holistic reasoning for competing demands, synthesizing safe and efficient decisions within policy guardrails. We present four design principles for integrating LLMs into storage control loops and propose a corresponding system architecture. Initial results on FileBench workloads show that IDSS can improve IOPS by up to 2.45X by interpreting intent and generating actionable configurations for storage components such as caching and prefetching. These findings suggest that, when constrained by guardrails and embedded within structured workflows, LLMs can function as high-level semantic optimizers, bridging the gap between application goals and low-level system control. IDSS points toward a future in which storage systems are increasingly adaptive, autonomous, and aligned with dynamic workload demands.
FVDebug: An LLM-Driven Debugging Assistant for Automated Root Cause Analysis of Formal Verification Failures
Bai, Yunsheng, Hamad, Ghaith Bany, Ho, Chia-Tung, Suhaib, Syed, Ren, Haoxing
Debugging formal verification (FV) failures represents one of the most time-consuming bottlenecks in modern hardware design workflows. When properties fail, engineers must manually trace through complex counter-examples spanning multiple cycles, analyze waveforms, and cross-reference design specifications to identify root causes - a process that can consume hours or days per bug. Existing solutions are largely limited to manual waveform viewers or simple automated tools that cannot reason about the complex interplay between design intent and implementation logic. We present FVDebug, an intelligent system that automates root-cause analysis by combining multiple data sources - waveforms, RTL code, design specifications - to transform failure traces into actionable insights. Our approach features a novel pipeline: (1) Causal Graph Synthesis that structures failure traces into directed acyclic graphs, (2) Graph Scanner using batched Large Language Model (LLM) analysis with for-and-against prompting to identify suspicious nodes, and (3) Insight Rover leveraging agentic narrative exploration to generate high-level causal explanations. FVDebug further provides concrete RTL fixes through its Fix Generator. Evaluated on open benchmarks, FVDebug attains high hypothesis quality and strong Pass@k fix rates. We further report results on two proprietary, production-scale FV counterexamples. These results demonstrate FVDebug's applicability from academic benchmarks to industrial designs.
LLM-VeriPPA: Power, Performance, and Area Optimization aware Verilog Code Generation with Large Language Models
Thorat, Kiran, Zhao, Jiahui, Liu, Yaotian, Hasan, Amit, Peng, Hongwu, Xie, Xi, Lei, Bin, Ding, Caiwen
Large Language Models (LLMs) are gaining prominence in various fields, thanks to their ability to generate high- quality content from human instructions. This paper delves into the field of chip design using LLMs, specifically in Power- Performance-Area (PPA) optimization and the generation of accurate Verilog codes for circuit designs. We introduce a novel framework VeriPPA designed to optimize PPA and generate Verilog code using LLMs. Our method includes a two-stage process where the first stage focuses on improving the functional and syntactic correctness of the generated Verilog codes, while the second stage focuses on optimizing the Verilog codes to meet PPA constraints of circuit designs, a crucial element of chip design. Our framework achieves an 81.37% success rate in syntactic correctness and 62.06% in functional correctness for code genera- tion, outperforming current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. On the RTLLM dataset. On the VerilogEval dataset, our framework achieves 99.56% syntactic correctness and 43.79% functional correctness, also surpassing SOTA, which stands at 92.11% for syntactic correctness and 33.57% for functional correctness. Furthermore, Our framework able to optimize the PPA of the designs. These results highlight the potential of LLMs in handling complex technical areas and indicate an encouraging development in the automation of chip design processes.
HealthDial: A No-Code LLM-Assisted Dialogue Authoring Tool for Healthcare Virtual Agents
Nouraei, Farnaz, Yong, Zhuorui, Bickmore, Timothy
We introduce HealthDial, a dialogue authoring tool that helps healthcare providers and educators create virtual agents that deliver health education and counseling to patients over multiple conversations. HealthDial leverages large language models (LLMs) to automatically create an initial session-based plan and conversations for each session using text-based patient health education materials as input. Authored dialogue is output in the form of finite state machines for virtual agent delivery so that all content can be validated and no unsafe advice is provided resulting from LLM hallucinations. LLM-drafted dialogue structure and language can be edited by the author in a no-code user interface to ensure validity and optimize clarity and impact. We conducted a feasibility and usability study with counselors and students to test our approach with an authoring task for cancer screening education. Participants used HealthDial and then tested their resulting dialogue by interacting with a 3D-animated virtual agent delivering the dialogue. Through participants' evaluations of the task experience and final dialogues, we show that HealthDial provides a promising first step for counselors to ensure full coverage of their health education materials, while creating understandable and actionable virtual agent dialogue with patients.