We introduce AccurateRAG -- a novel framework for constructing high-performance question-answering applications based on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Our framework offers a pipeline for development efficiency with tools for raw dataset processing, fine-tuning data generation, text embedding & LLM fine-tuning, output evaluation, and building RAG systems locally. Experimental results show that our framework outperforms previous strong baselines and obtains new state-of-the-art question-answering performance on benchmark datasets.

Promptagator demonstrated that Large Language Models (LLMs) with few-shot prompts can be used as task-specific query generators for fine-tuning domain-specialized dense retrieval models. However, the original Promptagator approach relied on proprietary and large-scale LLMs which users may not have access to or may be prohibited from using with sensitive data. In this work, we study the impact of open-source LLMs at accessible scales ($\leq$14B parameters) as an alternative. Our results demonstrate that open-source LLMs as small as 3B parameters can serve as effective Promptagator-style query generators. We hope our work will inform practitioners with reliable alternatives for synthetic data generation and give insights to maximize fine-tuning results for domain-specific applications.

Fine-grained visual reasoning remains a core challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). The recently introduced ReasonMap highlights this gap by showing that even advanced MLLMs struggle with spatial reasoning in structured and information-rich settings such as transit maps, a task of clear practical and scientific importance. However, standard reinforcement learning (RL) on such tasks is impeded by sparse rewards and unstable optimization. To address this, we first construct ReasonMap-Plus, an extended dataset that introduces dense reward signals through Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks, enabling effective cold-start training of fine-grained visual understanding skills. Next, we propose RewardMap, a multi-stage RL framework designed to improve both visual understanding and reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. RewardMap incorporates two key designs. First, we introduce a difficulty-aware reward design that incorporates detail rewards, directly tackling the sparse rewards while providing richer supervision. Second, we propose a multi-stage RL scheme that bootstraps training from simple perception to complex reasoning tasks, offering a more effective cold-start strategy than conventional Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Experiments on ReasonMap and ReasonMap-Plus demonstrate that each component of RewardMap contributes to consistent performance gains, while their combination yields the best results. Moreover, models trained with RewardMap achieve an average improvement of 3.47% across 6 benchmarks spanning spatial reasoning, fine-grained visual reasoning, and general tasks beyond transit maps, underscoring enhanced visual understanding and reasoning capabilities.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated strong capabilities as autonomous agents, showing promise in reasoning, tool use, and sequential decision-making. While prior benchmarks have evaluated LLM agents in domains such as software engineering and scientific discovery, the finance domain remains underexplored, despite its direct relevance to economic value and high-stakes decision-making. Existing financial benchmarks primarily test static knowledge through question answering, but they fall short of capturing the dynamic and iterative nature of trading. To address this gap, we introduce StockBench, a contamination-free benchmark designed to evaluate LLM agents in realistic, multi-month stock trading environments. Agents receive daily market signals -- including prices, fundamentals, and news -- and must make sequential buy, sell, or hold decisions. Performance is assessed using financial metrics such as cumulative return, maximum drawdown, and the Sortino ratio. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art proprietary (e.g., GPT-5, Claude-4) and open-weight (e.g., Qwen3, Kimi-K2, GLM-4.5) models shows that while most LLM agents struggle to outperform the simple buy-and-hold baseline, several models demonstrate the potential to deliver higher returns and manage risk more effectively. These findings highlight both the challenges and opportunities in developing LLM-powered financial agents, showing that excelling at static financial knowledge tasks does not necessarily translate into successful trading strategies. We release StockBench as an open-source resource to support reproducibility and advance future research in this domain.

Sequence-to-sequence models have become central in Artificial Intelligence, particularly following the introduction of the transformer architecture. While initially developed for Natural Language Processing, these models have demonstrated utility across domains, including Computer Vision. Such models require mechanisms to exchange information along the time dimension, typically using recurrent or self-attention layers. However, self-attention scales quadratically with sequence length, limiting its practicality for very long sequences. We introduce Poolformer, a sequence-to-sequence model that replaces self-attention with recurrent layers and incorporates pooling operations to reduce sequence length. Poolformer is defined recursively using SkipBlocks, which contain residual blocks, a down-pooling layer, a nested SkipBlock, an up-pooling layer, and additional residual blocks. We conduct extensive experiments to support our architectural choices. Our results show that pooling greatly accelerates training, improves perceptual metrics (FID and IS), and prevents overfitting. Our experiments also suggest that long-range dependencies are handled by deep layers, while shallow layers take care of short-term features. Evaluated on raw audio, which naturally features long sequence lengths, Poolformer outperforms state-of-the-art models such as SaShiMi and Mamba. Future directions include applications to text and vision, as well as multi-modal scenarios, where a Poolformer-based LLM could effectively process dense representations of images and videos.

Mobile-use agents powered by vision-language models (VLMs) have shown great potential in interpreting natural language instructions and generating corresponding actions based on mobile graphical user interface. Recent studies suggest that incorporating chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning tends to improve the execution accuracy. However, existing evaluations emphasize execution accuracy while neglecting whether CoT reasoning aligns with ground-truth actions. This oversight fails to assess potential reasoning-execution gaps, which in turn foster over-trust: users relying on seemingly plausible CoTs may unknowingly authorize harmful actions, potentially resulting in financial loss or trust crisis. In this work, we introduce a new evaluation framework to diagnose reasoning-execution gaps. At its core lies Ground-Truth Alignment (GTA), which measures whether the action implied by a CoT matches the ground-truth action. By combining GTA with the standard Exact Match (EM) metric, we jointly assess both the reasoning accuracy and execution accuracy. This joint perspective reveals two types of reasoning-execution gaps: (i) Execution Gap (EG), where the reasoning correctly identifies the correct action but execution fails, and (ii) Reasoning Gap (RG), where execution succeeds but reasoning process conflicts with the actual execution. Experimental results across a wide range of mobile interaction tasks reveal that reasoning-execution gaps are prevalent, with execution gaps occurring more frequently than reasoning gaps. Moreover, while scaling up model size reduces the overall gap, sizable execution gaps persist even in the largest models. Further analysis shows that our framework reliably reflects systematic EG/RG patterns in state-of-the-art models. These findings offer concrete diagnostics and support the development of more trustworthy mobile-use agents.

Interacting with knowledge graphs can be a daunting task for people without a background in computer science since the query language that is used (SPARQL) has a high barrier of entry. Large language models (LLMs) can lower that barrier by providing support in the form of Text2SPARQL translation. In this paper we introduce a generalized method based on SPINACH, an LLM backed agent that translates natural language questions to SPARQL queries not in a single shot, but as an iterative process of exploration and execution. We describe the overall architecture and reasoning behind our design decisions, and also conduct a thorough analysis of the agent behavior to gain insights into future areas for targeted improvements. This work was motivated by the Text2SPARQL challenge, a challenge that was held to facilitate improvements in the Text2SPARQL domain.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across a wide range of tasks, but remain vulnerable to safety risks such as harmful content generation and jailbreak attacks. Existing safety techniques -- including external guardrails, inference-time guidance, and post-training alignment -- each face limitations in balancing safety, utility, and controllability. In this work, we propose UpSafe$^\circ$C, a unified framework for enhancing LLM safety through safety-aware upcycling. Our approach first identifies safety-critical layers and upcycles them into a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) structure, where the router acts as a soft guardrail that selectively activates original MLPs and added safety experts. We further introduce a two-stage SFT strategy to strengthen safety discrimination while preserving general capabilities. To enable flexible control at inference time, we introduce a safety temperature mechanism, allowing dynamic adjustment of the trade-off between safety and utility. Experiments across multiple benchmarks, base model, and model scales demonstrate that UpSafe$^\circ$C achieves robust safety improvements against harmful and jailbreak inputs, while maintaining competitive performance on general tasks. Moreover, analysis shows that safety temperature provides fine-grained inference-time control that achieves the Pareto-optimal frontier between utility and safety. Our results highlight a new direction for LLM safety: moving from static alignment toward dynamic, modular, and inference-aware control.

Recent autoregressive transformer-based speech enhancement (SE) methods have shown promising results by leveraging advanced semantic understanding and contextual modeling of speech. However, these approaches often rely on complex multi-stage pipelines and low sampling rate codecs, limiting them to narrow and task-specific speech enhancement. In this work, we introduce DAC-SE1, a simplified language model-based SE framework leveraging discrete high-resolution audio representations; DAC-SE1 preserves fine-grained acoustic details while maintaining semantic coherence. Our experiments show that DAC-SE1 surpasses state-of-the-art autoregressive SE methods on both objective perceptual metrics and in a MUSHRA human evaluation. We release our codebase and model checkpoints to support further research in scalable, unified, and high-quality speech enhancement.

Fuzz testing has become a cornerstone technique for identifying software bugs and security vulnerabilities, with broad adoption in both industry and open-source communities. Directly fuzzing a function requires fuzz drivers, which translate random fuzzer inputs into valid arguments for the target function. Given the cost and expertise required to manually develop fuzz drivers, methods exist that leverage program analysis and Large Language Models to automatically generate these drivers. However, the generated fuzz drivers frequently lead to false positive crashes, especially in functions highly structured input and complex state requirements. This problem is especially crucial in industry-scale fuzz driver generation efforts like OSS-Fuzz-en, as reporting false positive crashes to maintainers impede trust in both the system and the team. This paper presents two AI-driven strategies to reduce false positives in OSS-Fuzz-Gen, a multi-agent system for automated fuzz driver generation. First, constraint-based fuzz driver generation proactively enforces constraints on a function's inputs and state to guide driver creation. Second, context-based crash validation reactively analyzes function callers to determine whether reported crashes are feasible from program entry points. Using 1,500 benchmark functions from OSS-Fuzz, we show that these strategies reduce spurious crashes by up to 8%, cut reported crashes by more than half, and demonstrate that frontier LLMs can serve as reliable program analysis agents. Our results highlight the promise and challenges of integrating AI into large-scale fuzzing pipelines.