Serving Large Language Models (LLMs) at scale requires meeting strict Service Level Objectives (SLOs) under severe computational and memory constraints. Nevertheless, traditional caching strategies fall short: exact-matching and prefix caches neglect query semantics, while state-of-the-art semantic caches remain confined to traditional intuitions, offering little conceptual departure. Building on this, we present SISO, a semantic caching system that redefines efficiency for LLM serving. SISO introduces centroid-based caching to maximize coverage with minimal memory, locality-aware replacement to preserve high-value entries, and dynamic thresholding to balance accuracy and latency under varying workloads. Across diverse datasets, SISO delivers up to 1.71$\times$ higher hit ratios and consistently stronger SLO attainment compared to state-of-the-art systems.

Estimating the quality of register transfer level (RTL) designs is crucial in the electronic design automation (EDA) workflow, as it enables instant feedback on key metrics like area and delay without the need for time-consuming logic synthesis. While recent approaches have leveraged large language models (LLMs) to derive embeddings from RTL code and achieved promising results, they overlook the structural semantics essential for accurate quality estimation. In contrast, the control data flow graph (CDFG) view exposes the design's structural characteristics more explicitly, offering richer cues for representation learning. In this work, we introduce a novel structure-aware graph self-supervised learning framework, StructRTL, for improved RTL design quality estimation. By learning structure-informed representations from CDFGs, our method significantly outperforms prior art on various quality estimation tasks. To further boost performance, we incorporate a knowledge distillation strategy that transfers low-level insights from post-mapping netlists into the CDFG predictor. Experiments show that our approach establishes new state-of-the-art results, demonstrating the effectiveness of combining structural learning with cross-stage supervision.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed the field of artificial intelligence by unlocking the era of generative applications. Built on top of generative AI capabilities, Agentic AI represents a major shift toward autonomous, goal-driven systems that can reason, retrieve, and act. However, they also inherit the bias present in both internal and external information sources. This significantly affects the fairness and balance of retrieved information, and hence reduces user trust. To address this critical challenge, we introduce a novel Bias Mitigation Agent, a multi-agent system designed to orchestrate the workflow of bias mitigation through specialized agents that optimize the selection of sources to ensure that the retrieved content is both highly relevant and minimally biased to promote fair and balanced knowledge dissemination. The experimental results demonstrate an 81.82\% reduction in bias compared to a baseline naive retrieval strategy.

The rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) in customer service introduces new risks, as malicious actors can exploit them to conduct large-scale user impersonation through machine-generated text (MGT). Current MGT detection methods often struggle in online conversational settings, reducing the reliability and interpretability essential for trustworthy AI deployment. In customer service scenarios where operators are typically non-expert users, explanation become crucial for trustworthy MGT detection. In this paper, we propose EMMM, an explanation-then-detection framework that balances latency, accuracy, and non-expert-oriented interpretability. Experimental results demonstrate that EMMM provides explanations accessible to non-expert users, with 70\% of human evaluators preferring its outputs, while achieving competitive accuracy compared to state-of-the-art models and maintaining low latency, generating outputs within 1 second. Our code and dataset are open-sourced at https://github.com/AngieYYF/EMMM-explainable-chatbot-detection.

In high-stakes medical applications, consistent answering across diverse question phrasings is essential for reliable diagnosis. However, we reveal that current Medical Vision-Language Models (Med-VLMs) exhibit concerning fragility in Medical Visual Question Answering, as their answers fluctuate significantly when faced with semantically equivalent rephrasings of medical questions. We attribute this to two limitations: (1) insufficient alignment of medical concepts, leading to divergent reasoning patterns, and (2) hidden biases in training data that prioritize syntactic shortcuts over semantic understanding. To address these challenges, we construct RoMed, a dataset built upon original VQA datasets containing 144k questions with variations spanning word-level, sentence-level, and semantic-level perturbations. When evaluating state-of-the-art (SOTA) models like LLaVA-Med on RoMed, we observe alarming performance drops (e.g., a 40\% decline in Recall) compared to original VQA benchmarks, exposing critical robustness gaps. To bridge this gap, we propose Consistency and Contrastive Learning (CCL), which integrates two key components: (1) knowledge-anchored consistency learning, aligning Med-VLMs with medical knowledge rather than shallow feature patterns, and (2) bias-aware contrastive learning, mitigating data-specific priors through discriminative representation refinement. CCL achieves SOTA performance on three popular VQA benchmarks and notably improves answer consistency by 50\% on the challenging RoMed test set, demonstrating significantly enhanced robustness. Code will be released.

Signature-based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) detect malicious activities by matching network or host activity against predefined rules. These rules are derived from extensive Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI), which includes attack signatures and behavioral patterns obtained through automated tools and manual threat analysis, such as sandboxing. The CTI is then transformed into actionable rules for the IDS engine, enabling real-time detection and prevention. However, the constant evolution of cyber threats necessitates frequent rule updates, which delay deployment time and weaken overall security readiness. Recent advancements in agentic systems powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) offer the potential for autonomous IDS rule generation with internal evaluation. We introduce FALCON, an autonomous agentic framework that generates deployable IDS rules from CTI data in real-time and evaluates them using built-in multi-phased validators. To demonstrate versatility, we target both network (Snort) and host-based (YARA) mediums and construct a comprehensive dataset of IDS rules with their corresponding CTIs. Our evaluations indicate FALCON excels in automatic rule generation, with an average of 95% accuracy validated by qualitative evaluation with 84% inter-rater agreement among multiple cybersecurity analysts across all metrics. These results underscore the feasibility and effectiveness of LLM-driven data mining for real-time cyber threat mitigation.

Automated tabular understanding and reasoning are essential tasks for data scientists. Recently, Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly prevalent in tabular reasoning tasks. Previous work focuses on (1) finetuning LLMs using labeled data or (2) Training-free prompting LLM agents using chain-of-thought (CoT). Finetuning offers dataset-specific learning at the cost of generalizability. Training-free prompting is highly generalizable but does not take full advantage of training data. In this paper, we propose a novel prompting-based reasoning approach, Learn then Retrieve: LRTab, which integrates the benefits of both by retrieving relevant information learned from training data. We first use prompting to obtain CoT responses over the training data. For incorrect CoTs, we prompt the LLM to predict Prompt Conditions to avoid the error, learning insights from the data. We validate the effectiveness of Prompt Conditions using validation data. Finally, at inference time, we retrieve the most relevant Prompt Conditions for additional context for table understanding. We provide comprehensive experiments on WikiTQ and Tabfact, showing that LRTab is interpretable, cost-efficient, and can outperform previous baselines in tabular reasoning.

Information asymmetry in financial markets, often amplified by strategically crafted corporate narratives, undermines the effectiveness of conventional textual analysis. We propose a novel multimodal framework for financial risk assessment that integrates textual sentiment with paralinguistic cues derived from executive vocal tract dynamics in earnings calls. Central to this framework is the Physics-Informed Acoustic Model (PIAM), which applies nonlinear acoustics to robustly extract emotional signatures from raw teleconference sound subject to distortions such as signal clipping. Both acoustic and textual emotional states are projected onto an interpretable three-dimensional Affective State Label (ASL) space-Tension, Stability, and Arousal. Using a dataset of 1,795 earnings calls (approximately 1,800 hours), we construct features capturing dynamic shifts in executive affect between scripted presentation and spontaneous Q&A exchanges. Our key finding reveals a pronounced divergence in predictive capacity: while multimodal features do not forecast directional stock returns, they explain up to 43.8% of the out-of-sample variance in 30-day realized volatility. Importantly, volatility predictions are strongly driven by emotional dynamics during executive transitions from scripted to spontaneous speech, particularly reduced textual stability and heightened acoustic instability from CFOs, and significant arousal variability from CEOs. An ablation study confirms that our multimodal approach substantially outperforms a financials-only baseline, underscoring the complementary contributions of acoustic and textual modalities. By decoding latent markers of uncertainty from verifiable biometric signals, our methodology provides investors and regulators a powerful tool for enhancing market interpretability and identifying hidden corporate uncertainty.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems are widely deployed in real-world applications in diverse domains such as finance, healthcare, and cybersecurity. However, many studies showed that they are vulnerable to knowledge corruption attacks, where an attacker can inject adversarial texts into the knowledge database of a RAG system to induce the LLM to generate attacker-desired outputs. Existing studies mainly focus on attacking specific queries or queries with similar topics (or keywords). In this work, we propose UniC-RAG, a universal knowledge corruption attack against RAG systems. Unlike prior work, UniC-RAG jointly optimizes a small number of adversarial texts that can simultaneously attack a large number of user queries with diverse topics and domains, enabling an attacker to achieve various malicious objectives, such as directing users to malicious websites, triggering harmful command execution, or launching denial-of-service attacks. We formulate UniC-RAG as an optimization problem and further design an effective solution to solve it, including a balanced similarity-based clustering method to enhance the attack's effectiveness. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that UniC-RAG is highly effective and significantly outperforms baselines. For instance, UniC-RAG could achieve over 90% attack success rate by injecting 100 adversarial texts into a knowledge database with millions of texts to simultaneously attack a large set of user queries (e.g., 2,000). Additionally, we evaluate existing defenses and show that they are insufficient to defend against UniC-RAG, highlighting the need for new defense mechanisms in RAG systems.

Grounding responses in external knowledge represents an effective strategy for mitigating hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, current LLMs struggle to seamlessly integrate knowledge while simultaneously maintaining faithfulness (or fidelity) and expressiveness, capabilities that humans naturally possess. This limitation results in outputs that either lack support from external knowledge, thereby compromising faithfulness, or appear overly verbose and unnatural, thus sacrificing expressiveness. In this work, to break the trade-off between faithfulness and expressiveness, we propose Co llaborative De coding ( CoDe), a novel approach that dynamically integrates output probabilities generated with and without external knowledge. This integration is guided by distribution divergence and model confidence, enabling the selective activation of relevant and reliable expressions from the model's internal parameters. Furthermore, we introduce a knowledge-aware reranking mechanism that prevents over-reliance on prior parametric knowledge while ensuring proper utilization of provided external information. Through comprehensive experiments, our plug-and-play CoDe framework demonstrates superior performance in enhancing faithfulness without compromising expressiveness across diverse LLMs and evaluation metrics, validating both its effectiveness and generalizability.