Large Language Model
Efficient Multi-Camera Tokenization with Triplanes for End-to-End Driving
Ivanovic, Boris, Saltori, Cristiano, You, Yurong, Wang, Yan, Luo, Wenjie, Pavone, Marco
Autoregressive Transformers are increasingly being deployed as end-to-end robot and autonomous vehicle (A V) policy architectures, owing to their scalability and potential to leverage internet-scale pretraining for generalization. Accordingly, tokenizing sensor data efficiently is paramount to ensuring the real-time feasibility of such architectures on embedded hardware. T o this end, we present an efficient triplane-based multi-camera tokenization strategy that leverages recent advances in 3D neural reconstruction and rendering to produce sensor tokens that are agnostic to the number of input cameras and their resolution, while explicitly accounting for their geometry around an A V . Experiments on a large-scale A V dataset and state-of-the-art neural simulator demonstrate that our approach yields significant savings over current image patch-based tokenization strategies, producing up to 72% fewer tokens, resulting in up to 50% faster policy inference while achieving the same open-loop motion planning accuracy and improved offroad rates in closed-loop driving simulations.
Know Or Not: a library for evaluating out-of-knowledge base robustness
Foo, Jessica, Prasad, Pradyumna Shyama, Khoo, Shaun
While the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have progressed significantly, their use in high-stakes applications have been limited due to risks of hallucination. One key approach in reducing hallucination is retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), but even in such setups, LLMs may still hallucinate when presented with questions outside of the knowledge base. Such behavior is unacceptable in high-stake applications where LLMs are expected to abstain from answering queries it does not have sufficient context on. In this work, we present a novel methodology for systematically evaluating out-of-knowledge base (OOKB) robustness of LLMs (whether LLMs know or do not know) in the RAG setting, without the need for manual annotation of gold standard answers. We implement our methodology in knowornot, an open-source library that enables users to develop their own customized evaluation data and pipelines for OOKB robustness. knowornot comprises four main features. Firstly, it provides a unified, high-level API that streamlines the process of setting up and running robustness benchmarks. Secondly, its modular architecture emphasizes extensibility and flexibility, allowing users to easily integrate their own LLM clients and RAG settings. Thirdly, its rigorous data modeling design ensures experiment reproducibility, reliability and traceability. Lastly, it implements a comprehensive suite of tools for users to customize their pipelines. We demonstrate the utility of knowornot by developing a challenging benchmark, PolicyBench, which spans four Question-Answer (QA) chatbots on government policies, and analyze its OOKB robustness. The source code of knowornot is available https://github.com/govtech-responsibleai/KnowOrNot.
CoordField: Coordination Field for Agentic UAV Task Allocation In Low-altitude Urban Scenarios
Zhang, Tengchao, Tian, Yonglin, Lin, Fei, Huang, Jun, Sรผli, Patrik P., Ni, Qinghua, Qin, Rui, Wang, Xiao, Wang, Fei-Yue
With the increasing demand for heterogeneous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms to perform complex tasks in urban environments, system design now faces major challenges, including efficient semantic understanding, flexible task planning, and the ability to dynamically adjust coordination strategies in response to evolving environmental conditions and continuously changing task requirements. To address the limitations of existing methods, this paper proposes CoordField, a coordination field agent system for coordinating heterogeneous drone swarms in complex urban scenarios. In this system, large language models (LLMs) is responsible for interpreting high-level human instructions and converting them into executable commands for the UAV swarms, such as patrol and target tracking. Subsequently, a Coordination field mechanism is proposed to guide UAV motion and task selection, enabling decentralized and adaptive allocation of emergent tasks. A total of 50 rounds of comparative testing were conducted across different models in a 2D simulation space to evaluate their performance. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system achieves superior performance in terms of task coverage, response time, and adaptability to dynamic changes.
Executable Functional Abstractions: Inferring Generative Programs for Advanced Math Problems
Khan, Zaid, Stengel-Eskin, Elias, Prasad, Archiki, Cho, Jaemin, Bansal, Mohit
Scientists often infer abstract procedures from specific instances of problems and use the abstractions to generate new, related instances. For example, programs encoding the formal rules and properties of a system have been useful in fields ranging from reinforcement learning (procedural environments) to physics (simulation engines). These programs can be seen as functions which execute to different outputs based on their parameterizations (e.g., gridworld configuration or initial physical conditions). We introduce the term EFA (Executable Functional Abstraction) to denote such programs for math problems. EFA-like constructs have been shown to be useful for mathematical reasoning as problem generators for stress-testing models. However, prior work has been limited to automatically constructing abstractions for grade-school math (whose simple rules are easy to encode in programs), while generating EFAs for advanced math has thus far required human engineering. We explore the automatic construction of EFAs for advanced mathematics problems by developing EFAGen, which operationalizes the task of automatically inferring an EFA for a given seed problem and solution as a program synthesis task. We first formalize the properties of any valid EFA as executable unit tests. Using execution feedback from the unit tests, we search over candidate programs sampled from a LLM to find EFA programs that are faithful to the generalized problem and solution class underlying the seed problem. We then apply the tests as a reward signal, training LLMs to become better writers of EFAs. We show that EFAs inferred by EFAGen are faithful to the seed problems, produce learnable problem variations, and that EFAGen can infer EFAs across diverse sources of competition-level math problems. Finally, we show uses of model-written EFAs e.g., finding harder/easier problem variants, as well as data generation.
Metaphor and Large Language Models: When Surface Features Matter More than Deep Understanding
Sanchez-Bayona, Elisa, Agerri, Rodrigo
This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in metaphor interpretation across multiple datasets, tasks, and prompt configurations. Although metaphor processing has gained significant attention in Natural Language Processing (NLP), previous research has been limited to single-dataset evaluations and specific task settings, often using artificially constructed data through lexical replacement. We address these limitations by conducting extensive experiments using diverse publicly available datasets with inference and metaphor annotations, focusing on Natural Language Inference (NLI) and Question Answering (QA) tasks. The results indicate that LLMs' performance is more influenced by features like lexical overlap and sentence length than by metaphorical content, demonstrating that any alleged emergent abilities of LLMs to understand metaphorical language are the result of a combination of surface-level features, in-context learning, and linguistic knowledge. This work provides critical insights into the current capabilities and limitations of LLMs in processing figurative language, highlighting the need for more realistic evaluation frameworks in metaphor interpretation tasks. Data and code are publicly available.
QSAF: A Novel Mitigation Framework for Cognitive Degradation in Agentic AI
Atta, Hammad, Baig, Muhammad Zeeshan, Mehmood, Yasir, Shahzad, Nadeem, Huang, Ken, Haq, Muhammad Aziz Ul, Awais, Muhammad, Ahmed, Kamal
We introduce Cognitive Degradation as a novel vulnerability class in agentic AI systems. Unlike traditional adversarial external threats such as prompt injection, these failures originate internally, arising from memory starvation, planner recursion, context flooding, and output suppression. These systemic weaknesses lead to silent agent drift, logic collapse, and persistent hallucinations over time. To address this class of failures, we introduce the Qorvex Security AI Framework for Behavioral & Cognitive Resilience (QSAF Domain 10), a lifecycle-aware defense framework defined by a six-stage cognitive degradation lifecycle. The framework includes seven runtime controls (QSAF-BC-001 to BC-007) that monitor agent subsystems in real time and trigger proactive mitigation through fallback routing, starvation detection, and memory integrity enforcement. Drawing from cognitive neuroscience, we map agentic architectures to human analogs, enabling early detection of fatigue, starvation, and role collapse. By introducing a formal lifecycle and real-time mitigation controls, this work establishes Cognitive Degradation as a critical new class of AI system vulnerability and proposes the first cross-platform defense model for resilient agentic behavior.
On the Inevitability of Left-Leaning Political Bias in Aligned Language Models
The guiding principle of AI alignment is to train large language models (LLMs) to be harmless, helpful, and honest (HHH). At the same time, there are mounting concerns that LLMs exhibit a left-wing political bias. Yet, the commitment to AI alignment cannot be harmonized with the latter critique. In this article, I argue that intelligent systems that are trained to be harmless and honest must necessarily exhibit left-wing political bias. Normative assumptions underlying alignment objectives inherently concur with progressive moral frameworks and left-wing principles, emphasizing harm avoidance, inclusivity, fairness, and empirical truthfulness. Conversely, right-wing ideologies often conflict with alignment guidelines. Yet, research on political bias in LLMs is consistently framing its insights about left-leaning tendencies as a risk, as problematic, or concerning. This way, researchers are actively arguing against AI alignment, tacitly fostering the violation of HHH principles.
Butterfly Effects in Toolchains: A Comprehensive Analysis of Failed Parameter Filling in LLM Tool-Agent Systems
Xiong, Qian, Huang, Yuekai, Jiang, Ziyou, Chang, Zhiyuan, Zheng, Yujia, Li, Tianhao, Li, Mingyang
The emergence of the tool agent paradigm has broadened the capability boundaries of the Large Language Model (LLM), enabling it to complete more complex tasks. However, the effectiveness of this paradigm is limited due to the issue of parameter failure during its execution. To explore this phenomenon and propose corresponding suggestions, we first construct a parameter failure taxonomy in this paper. We derive five failure categories from the invocation chain of a mainstream tool agent. Then, we explore the correlation between three different input sources and failure categories by applying 15 input perturbation methods to the input. Experimental results show that parameter name hallucination failure primarily stems from inherent LLM limitations, while issues with input sources mainly cause other failure patterns. To improve the reliability and effectiveness of tool-agent interactions, we propose corresponding improvement suggestions, including standardizing tool return formats, improving error feedback mechanisms, and ensuring parameter consistency.
Beyond Easy Wins: A Text Hardness-Aware Benchmark for LLM-generated Text Detection
Ayoobi, Navid, Shahriar, Sadat, Mukherjee, Arjun
We present a novel evaluation paradigm for AI text detectors that prioritizes real-world and equitable assessment. Current approaches predominantly report conventional metrics like AUROC, overlooking that even modest false positive rates constitute a critical impediment to practical deployment of detection systems. Furthermore, real-world deployment necessitates predetermined threshold configuration, making detector stability (i.e. the maintenance of consistent performance across diverse domains and adversarial scenarios), a critical factor. These aspects have been largely ignored in previous research and benchmarks. Our benchmark, SHIELD, addresses these limitations by integrating both reliability and stability factors into a unified evaluation metric designed for practical assessment. Furthermore, we develop a post-hoc, model-agnostic humanification framework that modifies AI text to more closely resemble human authorship, incorporating a controllable hardness parameter. This hardness-aware approach effectively challenges current SOTA zero-shot detection methods in maintaining both reliability and stability. (Data and code: https://github.com/navid-aub/SHIELD-Benchmark)
A Novel Self-Evolution Framework for Large Language Models
Sun, Haoran, Zhang, Zekun, Zeng, Shaoning
The capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are limited to some extent by pre-training, so some researchers optimize LLMs through post-training. Existing post-training strategies, such as memory-based retrieval or preference optimization, improve user alignment yet fail to enhance the model's domain cognition. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel Dual-Phase Self-Evolution (DPSE) framework that jointly optimizes user preference adaptation and domain-specific competence. DPSE introduces a Censor module to extract multi-dimensional interaction signals and estimate satisfaction scores, which guide structured data expansion via topic-aware and preference-driven strategies. These expanded datasets support a two-stage fine-tuning pipeline: supervised domain grounding followed by frequency-aware preference optimization. Experiments across general NLP benchmarks and long-term dialogue tasks demonstrate that DPSE consistently outperforms Supervised Fine-Tuning, Preference Optimization, and Memory-Augmented baselines. Ablation studies validate the contribution of each module. In this way, our framework provides an autonomous path toward continual self-evolution of LLMs.