Spatial cognition enables adaptive goal-directed behavior by constructing internal models of space. Robust biological systems consolidate spatial knowledge into three interconnected forms: \textit{landmarks} for salient cues, \textit{route knowledge} for movement trajectories, and \textit{survey knowledge} for map-like representations. While recent advances in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled visual-language reasoning in embodied agents, these efforts lack structured spatial memory and instead operate reactively, limiting their generalization and adaptability in complex real-world environments. Here we present Brain-inspired Spatial Cognition for Navigation (BSC-Nav), a unified framework for constructing and leveraging structured spatial memory in embodied agents. BSC-Nav builds allocentric cognitive maps from egocentric trajectories and contextual cues, and dynamically retrieves spatial knowledge aligned with semantic goals. Integrated with powerful MLLMs, BSC-Nav achieves state-of-the-art efficacy and efficiency across diverse navigation tasks, demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization, and supports versatile embodied behaviors in the real physical world, offering a scalable and biologically grounded path toward general-purpose spatial intelligence.

In this work, we explore the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to annotate hate speech and abusiveness while considering predefined annotator personas within the strong-to-weak data perspectivism spectra. We evaluated LLM-generated annotations against existing annotator modeling techniques for perspective modeling. Our findings show that LLMs selectively use demographic attributes from the personas. We identified prototypical annotators, with persona features that show varying degrees of alignment with the original human annotators. Within the data perspectivism paradigm, annotator modeling techniques that do not explicitly rely on annotator information performed better under weak data perspectivism compared to both strong data perspectivism and human annotations, suggesting LLM-generated views tend towards aggregation despite subjective prompting. However, for more personalized datasets tailored to strong perspectivism, the performance of LLM annotator modeling approached, but did not exceed, human annotators.

Traditional video-based learning remains passive, offering limited opportunities for users to engage dynamically with content. While current AI-powered tools offer transcription and summarization, they lack real-time, region-specific interaction capabilities. This paper introduces Untwist, an AI-driven system that enables interactive video learning by allowing users to ask questions about the entire video or specific regions using a bounding box, receiving context-aware, multimodal responses. By integrating GPT APIs with Computer Vision techniques, Untwist extracts, processes, and structures video content to enhance comprehension. Our approach addresses GPT-4o spatial weakness by leveraging annotated frames instead of raw coordinate data, significantly improving accuracy in localizing and interpreting video content. This paper describes the system architecture, including video pre-processing and real-time interaction, and outlines how Untwist can transform passive video consumption into an interactive, AI-driven learning experience with the potential to enhance engagement and comprehension.

Large language model fine-tuning APIs enable widespread model customization, yet pose significant safety risks. Recent work shows that adversaries can exploit access to these APIs to bypass model safety mechanisms by encoding harmful content in seemingly harmless fine-tuning data, evading both human monitoring and standard content filters. We formalize the fine-tuning API defense problem, and introduce the Cipher Fine-tuning Robustness benchmark (CIFR), a benchmark for evaluating defense strategies' ability to retain model safety in the face of cipher-enabled attackers while achieving the desired level of fine-tuning functionality. We include diverse cipher encodings and families, with some kept exclusively in the test set to evaluate for generalization across unseen ciphers and cipher families. We then evaluate different defenses on the benchmark and train probe monitors on model internal activations from multiple fine-tunes. We show that probe monitors achieve over 99% detection accuracy, generalize to unseen cipher variants and families, and compare favorably to state-of-the-art monitoring approaches. We open-source CIFR and the code to reproduce our experiments to facilitate further research in this critical area. Code and data are available online https://github.com/JackYoustra/safe-finetuning-api

We present a modular, interactive system, SPORTSQL, for natural language querying and visualization of dynamic sports data, with a focus on the English Premier League (EPL). The system translates user questions into executable SQL over a live, temporally indexed database constructed from real-time Fantasy Premier League (FPL) data. It supports both tabular and visual outputs, leveraging the symbolic reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) for query parsing, schema linking, and visualization selection. To evaluate system performance, we introduce the Dynamic Sport Question Answering benchmark (DSQABENCH), comprising 1,700+ queries annotated with SQL programs, gold answers, and database snapshots. Our demo highlights how non-expert users can seamlessly explore evolving sports statistics through a natural, conversational interface.

Large Language Model (LLM)-enabled agents are rapidly emerging across a wide range of applications, but their deployment introduces vulnerabilities with security implications. While prior work has examined prompt-based attacks (e.g., prompt injection) and data-oriented threats (e.g., data exfiltration), time-of-check to time-of-use (TOCTOU) remain largely unexplored in this context. TOCTOU arises when an agent validates external state (e.g., a file or API response) that is later modified before use, enabling practical attacks such as malicious configuration swaps or payload injection. In this work, we present the first study of TOCTOU vulnerabilities in LLM-enabled agents. We introduce TOCTOU-Bench, a benchmark with 66 realistic user tasks designed to evaluate this class of vulnerabilities. As countermeasures, we adapt detection and mitigation techniques from systems security to this setting and propose prompt rewriting, state integrity monitoring, and tool-fusing. Our study highlights challenges unique to agentic workflows, where we achieve up to 25% detection accuracy using automated detection methods, a 3% decrease in vulnerable plan generation, and a 95% reduction in the attack window. When combining all three approaches, we reduce the TOCTOU vulnerabilities from an executed trajectory from 12% to 8%. Our findings open a new research direction at the intersection of AI safety and systems security.

Efforts to apply transformer-based language models (TLMs) to the problem of reasoning in natural language have enjoyed ever-increasing success in recent years. The most fundamental task in this area to which nearly all others can be reduced is that of determining satisfiability. However, from a logical point of view, satisfiability problems vary along various dimensions, which may affect TLMs' ability to learn how to solve them. The problem instances of satisfiability in natural language can belong to different computational complexity classes depending on the language fragment in which they are expressed. Although prior research has explored the problem of natural language satisfiability, the above-mentioned point has not been discussed adequately. Hence, we investigate how problem instances from varying computational complexity classes and having different grammatical constructs impact TLMs' ability to learn rules of inference. Furthermore, to faithfully evaluate TLMs, we conduct an empirical study to explore the distribution of satisfiability problems.

The deployment of large-scale Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models on edge devices presents significant challenges due to memory constraints. While MoE architectures enable efficient utilization of computational resources by activating only a subset of experts per inference, they require careful memory management to operate efficiently in resource-constrained environments. Traditional heuristic-based expert caching strategies such as MoE-Infinity struggle to maintain high cache hit rates as models parameters scale. In this work, we introduce MoE-Beyond, a learning-based expert activation predictor trained to predict expert activations during autoregressive decoding. By framing the task as a multi-label sequence prediction problem, we train a lightweight transformer model on 66 million expert activation traces extracted from LDJnr-Puffin dataset [5] using DeepSeek-V2-Chat-Lite MoE. Our predictor generalizes effectively across unseen prompts from WebGLM-QA dataset [6], achieving 97.5% accuracy and an 86.6% F1-score. Simulation results show that MoE-Beyond improves GPU cache hit rate from 17% to 72% when only 10% of experts fit in GPU cache, outperforming heuristic baselines.

This paper investigates token homogenization - the convergence of token representations toward uniformity across transformer layers and its relationship to positional bias in large language models. We empirically examine whether homogenization occurs and how positional bias amplifies this effect. Through layer-wise similarity analysis and controlled experiments, we demonstrate that tokens systematically lose distinctiveness during processing, particularly when biased toward extremal positions. Our findings confirm both the existence of homogenization and its dependence on positional attention mechanisms.

Rapid advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have expanded information retrieval beyond purely textual inputs, enabling retrieval from complex real world documents that combine text and visuals. However, most documents are private either owned by individuals or confined within corporate silos and current retrievers struggle when faced with unseen domains or languages. To address this gap, we introduce PREMIR, a simple yet effective framework that leverages the broad knowledge of an MLLM to generate cross modal pre questions (preQs) before retrieval. Unlike earlier multimodal retrievers that compare embeddings in a single vector space, PREMIR leverages preQs from multiple complementary modalities to expand the scope of matching to the token level. Experiments show that PREMIR achieves state of the art performance on out of distribution benchmarks, including closed domain and multilingual settings, outperforming strong baselines across all retrieval metrics. We confirm the contribution of each component through in depth ablation studies, and qualitative analyses of the generated preQs further highlight the model's robustness in real world settings.