Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot out-of-distribution (OOD) detection capabilities, vital for reliable AI systems. Despite this promising capability, a comprehensive understanding of (1) why they work so effectively, (2) what advantages do they have over single-modal methods, and (3) how is their behavioral robustness -- remains notably incomplete within the research community. This paper presents a systematic empirical analysis of VLM-based OOD detection using in-distribution (ID) and OOD prompts. (1) Mechanisms: We systematically characterize and formalize key operational properties within the VLM embedding space that facilitate zero-shot OOD detection. (2) Advantages: We empirically quantify the superiority of these models over established single-modal approaches, attributing this distinct advantage to the VLM's capacity to leverage rich semantic novelty. (3) Sensitivity: We uncovers a significant and previously under-explored asymmetry in their robustness profile: while exhibiting resilience to common image noise, these VLM-based methods are highly sensitive to prompt phrasing. Our findings contribute a more structured understanding of the strengths and critical vulnerabilities inherent in VLM-based OOD detection, offering crucial, empirically-grounded guidance for developing more robust and reliable future designs.

Fontan palliation for univentricular congenital heart disease progresses to hemodynamic failure with complex flow patterns poorly characterized by conventional 2D imaging. Current assessment relies on fluoroscopic angiography, providing limited 3D geometric information essential for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis and surgical planning. A multi-step AI pipeline was developed utilizing Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash (2.5B parameters) for systematic, iterative processing of fluoroscopic angiograms through transformer-based neural architecture. The pipeline encompasses medical image preprocessing, vascular segmentation, contrast enhancement, artifact removal, and virtual hemodynamic flow visualization within 2D projections. Final views were processed through Tencent's Hunyuan3D-2mini (384M parameters) for stereolithography file generation. The pipeline successfully generated geometrically optimized 2D projections from single-view angiograms after 16 processing steps using a custom web interface. Initial iterations contained hallucinated vascular features requiring iterative refinement to achieve anatomically faithful representations. Final projections demonstrated accurate preservation of complex Fontan geometry with enhanced contrast suitable for 3D conversion. AI-generated virtual flow visualization identified stagnation zones in central connections and flow patterns in branch arteries. Complete processing required under 15 minutes with second-level API response times. This approach demonstrates clinical feasibility of generating CFD-suitable geometries from routine angiographic data, enabling 3D generation and rapid virtual flow visualization for cursory insights prior to full CFD simulation. While requiring refinement cycles for accuracy, this establishes foundation for democratizing advanced geometric and hemodynamic analysis using readily available imaging data.

The increasing use of generative AI in scientific writing raises urgent questions about attribution and intellectual credit. When a researcher employs ChatGPT to draft a manuscript, the resulting text may echo ideas from sources the author has never encountered. If an AI system reproduces insights from, for example, an obscure 1975 paper without citation, does this constitute plagiarism? We argue that such cases exemplify the 'provenance problem': a systematic breakdown in the chain of scholarly credit. Unlike conventional plagiarism, this phenomenon does not involve intent to deceive (researchers may disclose AI use and act in good faith) yet still benefit from the uncredited intellectual contributions of others. This dynamic creates a novel category of attributional harm that current ethical and professional frameworks fail to address. As generative AI becomes embedded across disciplines, the risk that significant ideas will circulate without recognition threatens both the reputational economy of science and the demands of epistemic justice. This Perspective analyzes how AI challenges established norms of authorship, introduces conceptual tools for understanding the provenance problem, and proposes strategies to preserve integrity and fairness in scholarly communication.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as a powerful tool for improving large language model performance on complex tasks, but recent work shows that reasoning steps often fail to causally influence the final answer, creating brittle and untrustworthy outputs. Prior approaches focus primarily on measuring faithfulness, while methods for systematically improving it remain limited. We introduce Faithful Reasoning via Intervention Training (FRIT), a scalable alignment method that trains models to produce causally consistent reasoning by learning from systematically corrupted examples. FRIT generates synthetic training data by intervening on individual reasoning steps in model-generated CoTs, creating faithful/unfaithful pairs that highlight when reasoning breaks down. We then apply Direct Preference Optimization to teach models to prefer causally consistent reasoning paths. Evaluating on Qwen3-8B and Mistral-7B-v0.1 across factual and symbolic reasoning tasks, FRIT increases faithful reasoning by $3.4$ percentage points for Mistral on GSM8K while improving accuracy by $7.6$ percentage points. Our approach provides the first scalable, supervision-free method for training language models to produce more reliable and interpretable reasoning, addressing a critical gap between reasoning performance and trustworthiness. We release our code at \href{https://github.com/Anut-py/frit}.

This full research-to-practice paper explores approaches for developing course chatbots by comparing low-code platforms and custom-coded solutions in educational contexts. With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and LLaMA, LLM-based chatbots are being integrated into teaching workflows to automate tasks, provide assistance, and offer scalable support. However, selecting the optimal development strategy requires balancing ease of use, customization, data privacy, and scalability. This study compares two development approaches: low-code platforms like AnythingLLM and Botpress, with custom-coded solutions using LangChain, FAISS, and FastAPI. The research uses Prompt engineering, Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and personalization to evaluate chatbot prototypes across technical performance, scalability, and user experience. Findings indicate that while low-code platforms enable rapid prototyping, they face limitations in customization and scaling, while custom-coded systems offer more control but require significant technical expertise. Both approaches successfully implement key research principles such as adaptive feedback loops and conversational continuity. The study provides a framework for selecting the appropriate development strategy based on institutional goals and resources. Future work will focus on hybrid solutions that combine low-code accessibility with modular customization and incorporate multimodal input for intelligent tutoring systems.

Understanding humor is a core aspect of social intelligence, yet it remains a significant challenge for Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). We introduce PixelHumor, a benchmark dataset of 2,800 annotated multi-panel comics designed to evaluate LMMs' ability to interpret multimodal humor and recognize narrative sequences. Experiments with state-of-the-art LMMs reveal substantial gaps: for instance, top models achieve only 61% accuracy in panel sequencing, far below human performance. This underscores critical limitations in current models' integration of visual and textual cues for coherent narrative and humor understanding. By providing a rigorous framework for evaluating multimodal contextual and narrative reasoning, PixelHumor aims to drive the development of LMMs that better engage in natural, socially aware interactions.

The rapid progress of large language models (LLMs) has opened new opportunities for education. While learners can interact with academic papers through LLM-powered dialogue, limitations still exist: absence of structured organization and high text reliance can impede systematic understanding and engagement with complex concepts. To address these challenges, we propose Auto-Slides, an LLM-driven system that converts research papers into pedagogically structured, multimodal slides (e.g., diagrams and tables). Drawing on cognitive science, it creates a presentation-oriented narrative and allows iterative refinement via an interactive editor, in order to match learners' knowledge level and goals. Auto-Slides further incorporates verification and knowledge retrieval mechanisms to ensure accuracy and contextual completeness. Through extensive user studies, Auto-Slides enhances learners' comprehension and engagement compared to conventional LLM-based reading. Our contributions lie in designing a multi-agent framework for transforming academic papers into pedagogically optimized slides and introducing interactive customization for personalized learning.

Generating regulatorily compliant Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) remains a high-cost, low-scalability bottleneck in Anti-Money Laundering (AML) workflows. While large language models (LLMs) offer promising fluency, they suffer from factual hallucination, limited crime typology alignment, and poor explainability -- posing unacceptable risks in compliance-critical domains. This paper introduces Co-Investigator AI, an agentic framework optimized to produce Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) significantly faster and with greater accuracy than traditional methods. Drawing inspiration from recent advances in autonomous agent architectures, such as the AI Co-Scientist, our approach integrates specialized agents for planning, crime type detection, external intelligence gathering, and compliance validation. The system features dynamic memory management, an AI-Privacy Guard layer for sensitive data handling, and a real-time validation agent employing the Agent-as-a-Judge paradigm to ensure continuous narrative quality assurance. Human investigators remain firmly in the loop, empowered to review and refine drafts in a collaborative workflow that blends AI efficiency with domain expertise. We demonstrate the versatility of Co-Investigator AI across a range of complex financial crime scenarios, highlighting its ability to streamline SAR drafting, align narratives with regulatory expectations, and enable compliance teams to focus on higher-order analytical work. This approach marks the beginning of a new era in compliance reporting -- bringing the transformative benefits of AI agents to the core of regulatory processes and paving the way for scalable, reliable, and transparent SAR generation.

With the rapid progress of multimodal large language models, operating system (OS) agents become increasingly capable of automating tasks through on-device graphical user interfaces (GUIs). However, most existing OS agents are designed for idealized settings, whereas real-world environments often present untrustworthy conditions. To mitigate risks of over-execution in such scenarios, we propose a query-driven human-agent-GUI interaction framework that enables OS agents to decide when to query humans for more reliable task completion. Built upon this framework, we introduce VeriOS-Agent, a trustworthy OS agent trained with a two-stage learning paradigm that falicitate the decoupling and utilization of meta-knowledge. Concretely, VeriOS-Agent autonomously executes actions in normal conditions while proactively querying humans in untrustworthy scenarios. Experiments show that VeriOS-Agent improves the average step-wise success rate by 20.64\% in untrustworthy scenarios over the state-of-the-art, without compromising normal performance. Analysis highlights VeriOS-Agent's rationality, generalizability, and scalability. The codes, datasets and models are available at https://github.com/Wuzheng02/VeriOS.

We investigate the emergent social dynamics of Large Language Model (LLM) agents in a spatially extended El Farol Bar problem, observing how they autonomously navigate this classic social dilemma. As a result, the LLM agents generated a spontaneous motivation to go to the bar and changed their decision making by becoming a collective. We also observed that the LLM agents did not solve the problem completely, but rather behaved more like humans. These findings reveal a complex interplay between external incentives (prompt-specified constraints such as the 60% threshold) and internal incentives (culturally-encoded social preferences derived from pre-training), demonstrating that LLM agents naturally balance formal game-theoretic rationality with social motivations that characterize human behavior. These findings suggest that a new model of group decision making, which could not be handled in the previous game-theoretic problem setting, can be realized by LLM agents.