--Microbiome data analysis is essential for understanding host health and disease, yet its inherent sparsity and noise pose major challenges for accurate imputation, hindering downstream tasks such as biomarker discovery. Existing imputation methods, including recent diffusion-based models, often fail to capture the complex interdependencies between microbial taxa and overlook contextual metadata that can inform imputation. We introduce DepMicroDiff, a novel framework that combines diffusion-based generative modeling with a Dependency-A ware Transformer (DA T) to explicitly capture both mutual pairwise dependencies and autoregressive relationships. DepMicroDiff is further enhanced by V AE-based pretraining across diverse cancer datasets and conditioning on patient metadata encoded via a large language model (LLM). Experiments on TCGA microbiome datasets show that DepMicroDiff substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving higher Pearson correlation (up to 0.712), cosine similarity (up to 0.812), and lower RMSE and MAE across multiple cancer types, demonstrating its robustness and generalizability for microbiome imputation. Microbiome data analysis plays a critical role in understanding host health, disease progression, and therapeutic response, particularly in contexts such as cancer progression, gut-brain interactions, and immunotherapy [1]. However, mi-crobiome datasets, derived from 16S rRNA or metagenomic sequencing, are notoriously sparse and noisy due to limitations in sequencing technologies, biological variability, and compositional constraints.

Agent-assisted memory recall is one critical research problem in the field of human-computer interaction. In conventional methods, the agent can retrieve information from its equipped memory module to help the person recall incomplete or vague memories. The limited size of memory module hinders the acquisition of complete memories and impacts the memory recall performance in practice. Memory theories suggest that the person's relevant memory can be proactively activated through some effective cues. Inspired by this, we propose a novel strategy-guided agent-assisted memory recall method, allowing the agent to transform an original query into a cue-rich one via the judiciously designed strategy to help the person recall memories. To this end, there are two key challenges. (1) How to choose the appropriate recall strategy for diverse forgetting scenarios with distinct memory-recall characteristics? (2) How to obtain the high-quality responses leveraging recall strategies, given only abstract and sparsely annotated strategy patterns? To address the challenges, we propose a Recall Router framework. Specifically, we design a 5W Recall Map to classify memory queries into five typical scenarios and define fifteen recall strategy patterns across the corresponding scenarios. We then propose a hierarchical recall tree combined with the Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithm to optimize the selection of strategy and the generation of strategy responses. We construct an instruction tuning dataset and fine-tune multiple open-source large language models (LLMs) to develop MemoCue, an agent that excels in providing memory-inspired responses. Experiments on three representative datasets show that MemoCue surpasses LLM-based methods by 17.74% in recall inspiration. Further human evaluation highlights its advantages in memory-recall applications.

Diffusion models have advanced from text-to-image (T2I) to image-to-image (I2I) generation by incorporating structured inputs such as depth maps, enabling fine-grained spatial control. However, existing methods either train separate models for each condition or rely on unified architectures with entangled representations, resulting in poor generalization and high adaptation costs for novel conditions. To this end, we propose DivControl, a decomposable pretraining framework for unified controllable generation and efficient adaptation. DivControl factorizes ControlNet via SVD into basic components-pairs of singular vectors-which are disentangled into condition-agnostic learngenes and condition-specific tailors through knowledge diversion during multi-condition training. Knowledge diversion is implemented via a dynamic gate that performs soft routing over tailors based on the semantics of condition instructions, enabling zero-shot generalization and parameter-efficient adaptation to novel conditions. To further improve condition fidelity and training efficiency, we introduce a representation alignment loss that aligns condition embeddings with early diffusion features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DivControl achieves state-of-the-art controllability with 36.4$\times$ less training cost, while simultaneously improving average performance on basic conditions. It also delivers strong zero-shot and few-shot performance on unseen conditions, demonstrating superior scalability, modularity, and transferability.

Infostealers exfiltrate credentials, session cookies, and sensitive data from infected systems. With over 29 million stealer logs reported in 2024, manual analysis and mitigation at scale are virtually unfeasible/unpractical. While most research focuses on proactive malware detection, a significant gap remains in leveraging reactive analysis of stealer logs and their associated artifacts. Specifically, infection artifacts such as screenshots, image captured at the point of compromise, are largely overlooked by the current literature. This paper introduces a novel approach leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs), more specifically gpt-4o-mini, to analyze infection screenshots to extract potential Indicators of Compromise (IoCs), map infection vectors, and track campaigns. Focusing on the Aurora infostealer, we demonstrate how LLMs can process screenshots to identify infection vectors, such as malicious URLs, installer files, and exploited software themes. Our method extracted 337 actionable URLs and 246 relevant files from 1000 screenshots, revealing key malware distribution methods and social engineering tactics. By correlating extracted filenames, URLs, and infection themes, we identified three distinct malware campaigns, demonstrating the potential of LLM-driven analysis for uncovering infection workflows and enhancing threat intelligence. By shifting malware analysis from traditional log-based detection methods to a reactive, artifact-driven approach that leverages infection screenshots, this research presents a scalable method for identifying infection vectors and enabling early intervention.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models have sparked interest in their potential for robotic task planning. While these models demonstrate strong generative capabilities, their effectiveness in producing structured and executable plans remains uncertain. This paper presents a systematic evaluation of a broad spectrum of current state of the art language models, each directly prompted using Planning Domain Definition Language domain and problem files, and compares their planning performance with the Fast Downward planner across a variety of benchmarks. In addition to measuring success rates, we assess how faithfully the generated plans translate into sequences of actions that can actually be executed, identifying both strengths and limitations of using these models in this setting. Our findings show that while the models perform well on simpler planning tasks, they continue to struggle with more complex scenarios that require precise resource management, consistent state tracking, and strict constraint compliance. These results underscore fundamental challenges in applying language models to robotic planning in real world environments. By outlining the gaps that emerge during execution, we aim to guide future research toward combined approaches that integrate language models with classical planners in order to enhance the reliability and scalability of planning in autonomous robotics.

Differential Transformer has recently been proposed to improve performance in Transformer models by canceling out noise through a denoiser attention mechanism. In this work, we introduce DiffLoRA, a parameter-efficient adaptation of the differential attention mechanism, with low-rank adapters on both positive and negative attention terms. This approach retains the efficiency of LoRA while aiming to benefit from the performance gains of differential attention. We evaluate DiffLoRA across a broad range of NLP tasks, including general benchmarks, many-shot in-context learning, RAG, and long-context tests. We observe that, although DiffLoRA falls short of other parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods in most evaluation tasks, it shows interesting results in certain domains (+11 pts on LoRA for HumanEval). We analyze the attention patterns post-finetuning to identify the reasons for this behavior.

Large language model-based agents, empowered by in-context learning (ICL), have demonstrated strong capabilities in complex reasoning and tool-use tasks. However, existing works have shown that the effectiveness of ICL is highly sensitive to the choice of demonstrations, with suboptimal examples often leading to unstable or degraded performance. While prior work has explored example selection, including in some agentic or multi-step settings, existing approaches typically rely on heuristics or task-specific designs and lack a general, theoretically grounded criterion for what constitutes an effective demonstration across reasoning steps. Therefore, it is non-trivial to develop a principled, general-purpose method for selecting demonstrations that consistently benefit agent performance. In this paper, we address this challenge with DICE, Dynamic In-Context Example Selection for LLM Agents, a theoretically grounded ICL framework for agentic tasks that selects the most relevant demonstrations at each step of reasoning. Our approach decomposes demonstration knowledge into transferable and non-transferable components through a causal lens, showing how the latter can introduce spurious dependencies that impair generalization. We further propose a stepwise selection criterion with a formal guarantee of improved agent performance. Importantly, DICE is a general, framework-agnostic solution that can be integrated as a plug-in module into existing agentic frameworks without any additional training cost. Extensive experiments across diverse domains demonstrate our method's effectiveness and generality, highlighting the importance of principled, context-aware demo selection for robust and efficient LLM agents.

Chair of Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Embedded Systems T echnical University of Munich (TUM) Munich, Germany {yi1228.zhang, erik-leo.hass, Abstract --Autonomous driving systems face significant challenges in achieving human-like adaptability, robustness, and interpretability in complex, open-world environments. These challenges stem from fragmented architectures, limited generalization to novel scenarios, and insufficient semantic extraction from perception. T o address these limitations, we propose a unified Perception-Language-Action (PLA) framework that integrates multi-sensor fusion (cameras, LiDAR, radar) with a large language model (LLM)-augmented Vision-Language-Action (VLA) architecture, specifically a GPT -4.1-powered reasoning core. This framework unifies low-level sensory processing with high-level contextual reasoning, tightly coupling perception with natural language-based semantic understanding and decision-making to enable context-aware, explainable, and safety-bounded autonomous driving.

Motivated by the problem of fast processing of attention matrices, we study fast algorithms for computing matrix-vector products for asymmetric Gaussian Kernel matrices $K\in \mathbb{R}^{n\times n}$. $K$'s columns are indexed by a set of $n$ keys $k_1,k_2\ldots, k_n\in \mathbb{R}^d$, rows by a set of $n$ queries $q_1,q_2,\ldots,q_n\in \mathbb{R}^d $, and its $i,j$ entry is $K_{ij} = e^{-\|q_i-k_j\|_2^2/2σ^2}$ for some bandwidth parameter $σ>0$. Given a vector $x\in \mathbb{R}^n$ and error parameter $ε>0$, our task is to output a $y\in \mathbb{R}^n$ such that $\|Kx-y\|_2\leq ε\|x\|_2$ in time subquadratic in $n$ and linear in $d$. Our algorithms rely on the following modelling assumption about the matrices $K$: the sum of the entries of $K$ scales linearly in $n$, as opposed to worst case quadratic growth. We validate this assumption experimentally, for Gaussian kernel matrices encountered in various settings such as fast attention computation in LLMs. We obtain the first subquadratic-time algorithm that works under this assumption, for unrestricted vectors.

UML and ER diagrams are foundational in computer science education but come with challenges for learners due to the need for abstract thinking, contextual understanding, and mastery of both syntax and semantics. These complexities are difficult to address through traditional teaching methods, which often struggle to provide scalable, personalized feedback, especially in large classes. We introduce DUET (Diagrammatic UML & ER Tutor), a prototype of an LLM-based tool, which converts a reference diagram and a student-submitted diagram into a textual representation and provides structured feedback based on the differences. It uses a multi-stage LLM pipeline to compare diagrams and generate reflective feedback. Furthermore, the tool enables analytical insights for educators, aiming to foster self-directed learning and inform instructional strategies. We evaluated DUET through semi-structured interviews with six participants, including two educators and four teaching assistants. They identified strengths such as accessibility, scalability, and learning support alongside limitations, including reliability and potential misuse. Participants also suggested potential improvements, such as bulk upload functionality and interactive clarification features. DUET presents a promising direction for integrating LLMs into modeling education and offers a foundation for future classroom integration and empirical evaluation.