Science progresses by iteratively advancing and correcting humanity's understanding of the world. In machine learning (ML) research, rapid advancements have led to an explosion of publications, but have also led to misleading, incorrect, flawed or perhaps even fraudulent studies being accepted and sometimes highlighted at ML conferences due to the fallibility of peer review. While such mistakes are understandable, ML conferences do not offer robust processes to help the field systematically correct when such errors are made. This position paper argues that ML conferences should establish a dedicated "Refutations and Critiques" (R&C) Track. This R&C Track would provide a high-profile, reputable platform to support vital research that critically challenges prior research, thereby fostering a dynamic self-correcting research ecosystem. We discuss key considerations including track design, review principles, potential pitfalls, and provide an illustrative example submission concerning a recent ICLR 2025 Oral. We conclude that ML conferences should create official, reputable mechanisms to help ML research self-correct.

The enormous parameter scale of large language models (LLMs) has made model compression a research hotspot, which aims to alleviate computational resource demands during deployment and inference. As a promising direction, low-rank approximation technique has made remarkable achievements. Nevertheless, unfortunately, the vast majority of studies to low-rank approximation compression generally apply uniform compression ratios across all weight matrices, while disregarding their inherently differentiated impacts on the model's performance. Although a few recent work attempts to employ heuristic search strategies to achieve the optimal parameter allocation, such strategies are computationally inefficient and lose the generalization ability in the era of LLMs. In this study, we propose a novel parameter Multi-Granular Adaptive Allocation (MGAA) method, which can adaptively allocate parameters between and within sublayers without task-specific evaluations in the compression process. MGAA consists of two components: 1) Among different sublayers, it assigns compression ratios based on their cosine similarity between inputs and outputs, allowing for a more tailored compression in sublayers with varying degrees of importance, and 2) Within each sublayer, it allocates different compression ratios to weight matrices based on their energy distribution characteristics, ensuring a consistent energy retention ratio while optimizing compression efficiency. Comprehensive evaluations of MGAA across multiple LLMs backbone models and benchmark datasets demonstrate its superior performance. Additionally, we apply our MGAA to multimodal model LLaVA, exhibiting remarkable performance improvements.

Safety alignment is crucial for large language models (LLMs) to resist malicious instructions but often results in over-refusals, where benign prompts are unnecessarily rejected, impairing user experience and model utility. We introduce ACTOR (Activation-Based Training for Over-Refusal Reduction), a robust and compute- and data-efficient training framework that minimizes over-refusals by leveraging internal activation patterns from diverse queries. ACTOR precisely identifies and adjusts the activation components that trigger refusals, providing stronger control over the refusal mechanism. By fine-tuning only a single model layer, ACTOR effectively reduces over-refusals across multiple benchmarks while maintaining the model's ability to handle harmful queries and preserve overall utility.

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) in real-world settings requires agents to process continuous visual streams and generate actions with low latency grounded in language instructions. While Video-based Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have driven recent progress, current VLN methods based on Video-LLM often face trade-offs among fine-grained visual understanding, long-term context modeling and computational efficiency. We introduce StreamVLN, a streaming VLN framework that employs a hybrid slow-fast context modeling strategy to support multi-modal reasoning over interleaved vision, language and action inputs. The fast-streaming dialogue context facilitates responsive action generation through a sliding-window of active dialogues, while the slow-updating memory context compresses historical visual states using a 3D-aware token pruning strategy. With this slow-fast design, StreamVLN achieves coherent multi-turn dialogue through efficient KV cache reuse, supporting long video streams with bounded context size and inference cost. Experiments on VLN-CE benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance with stable low latency, ensuring robustness and efficiency in real-world deployment. The project page is: \href{https://streamvln.github.io/}{https://streamvln.github.io/}.

As LLMs continue to increase in parameter size, the computational resources required to run them are available to fewer parties. Therefore, third-party inference services -- where LLMs are hosted by third parties with significant computational resources -- are becoming increasingly popular. However, third party inference raises critical concerns about user data privacy. To mitigate these risks, privacy researchers have developed provably secure schemes for third-party inference, such as Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC). However, SMPC protocols have significant computational and communication overhead, and do not scale to large models. In this work, we propose a new multi-party inference protocol, Cascade, that avoids these punitive costs by leveraging sharding in the sequence dimension to maintain privacy, trading off cryptographic privacy guarantees for increased performance and scalability. We demonstrate that Cascade is resistant to a generalization of a recent attack that is highly effective against other statistical privacy schemes, and that it is further resistant to learning-based attacks. As Cascade is orders of magnitude faster than existing schemes, our findings offer practical solutions for secure deployment of modern state-of-the-art LLMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance natural language processing with their ability to generate human-like text across a range of tasks. Despite the remarkable success of LLMs in Natural Language Processing (NLP), their performance in text summarization across various domains and datasets has not been comprehensively evaluated. At the same time, the ability to summarize text effectively without relying on extensive training data has become a crucial bottleneck. To address these issues, we present a systematic evaluation of six LLMs across four datasets: CNN/Daily Mail and NewsRoom (news), SAMSum (dialog), and ArXiv (scientific). By leveraging prompt engineering techniques including zero-shot and in-context learning, our study evaluates the performance using the ROUGE and BERTScore metrics. In addition, a detailed analysis of inference times is conducted to better understand the trade-off between summarization quality and computational efficiency. For Long documents, introduce a sentence-based chunking strategy that enables LLMs with shorter context windows to summarize extended inputs in multiple stages. The findings reveal that while LLMs perform competitively on news and dialog tasks, their performance on long scientific documents improves significantly when aided by chunking strategies. In addition, notable performance variations were observed based on model parameters, dataset properties, and prompt design. These results offer actionable insights into how different LLMs behave across task types, contributing to ongoing research in efficient, instruction-based NLP systems.

In the field of robotics, researchers face a critical challenge in ensuring reliable and efficient task planning. Verifying high-level task plans before execution significantly reduces errors and enhance the overall performance of these systems. In this paper, we propose an architecture for automatically verifying high-level task plans before their execution in simulator or real-world environments. Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs), our approach consists of two key steps: first, the conversion of natural language instructions into Linear Temporal Logic (LTL), followed by a comprehensive analysis of action sequences. The module uses the reasoning capabilities of the LLM to evaluate logical coherence and identify potential gaps in the plan. Rigorous testing on datasets of varying complexity demonstrates the broad applicability of the module to household tasks. We contribute to improving the reliability and efficiency of task planning and addresses the critical need for robust pre-execution verification in autonomous systems. The code is available at https://verifyllm.github.io.

We introduce Co-DETECT (Collaborative Discovery of Edge cases in TExt ClassificaTion), a novel mixed-initiative annotation framework that integrates human expertise with automatic annotation guided by large language models (LLMs). Co-DETECT starts with an initial, sketch-level codebook and dataset provided by a domain expert, then leverages the LLM to annotate the data and identify edge cases that are not well described by the initial codebook. Specifically, Co-DETECT flags challenging examples, induces high-level, generalizable descriptions of edge cases, and assists user in incorporating edge case handling rules to improve the codebook. This iterative process enables more effective handling of nuanced phenomena through compact, generalizable annotation rules. Extensive user study, qualitative and quantitative analyses prove the effectiveness of Co-DETECT.

Enhancing interrogation capabilities in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) diagnosis through multi-turn dialogues and knowledge graphs presents a significant challenge for modern AI systems. Current large language models (LLMs), despite their advancements, exhibit notable limitations in medical applications, particularly in conducting effective multi-turn dialogues and proactive questioning. These shortcomings hinder their practical application and effectiveness in simulating real-world diagnostic scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose DoPI, a novel LLM system specifically designed for the TCM domain. The DoPI system introduces a collaborative architecture comprising a guidance model and an expert model. The guidance model conducts multi-turn dialogues with patients and dynamically generates questions based on a knowledge graph to efficiently extract critical symptom information. Simultaneously, the expert model leverages deep TCM expertise to provide final diagnoses and treatment plans. Furthermore, this study constructs a multi-turn doctor-patient dialogue dataset to simulate realistic consultation scenarios and proposes a novel evaluation methodology that does not rely on manually collected real-world consultation data. Experimental results show that the DoPI system achieves an accuracy rate of 84.68 percent in interrogation outcomes, significantly enhancing the model's communication ability during diagnosis while maintaining professional expertise.

Access to consumer grievance redressal in India is often hindered by procedural complexity, legal jargon, and jurisdictional challenges. To address this, we present $\textbf{Grahak-Nyay}$ (Justice-to-Consumers), a chatbot that streamlines the process using open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Grahak-Nyay simplifies legal complexities through a concise and up-to-date knowledge base. We introduce three novel datasets: $\textit{GeneralQA}$ (general consumer law), $\textit{SectoralQA}$ (sector-specific knowledge) and $\textit{SyntheticQA}$ (for RAG evaluation), along with $\textit{NyayChat}$, a dataset of 300 annotated chatbot conversations. We also introduce $\textit{Judgments}$ data sourced from Indian Consumer Courts to aid the chatbot in decision making and to enhance user trust. We also propose $\textbf{HAB}$ metrics ($\textbf{Helpfulness, Accuracy, Brevity}$) to evaluate chatbot performance. Legal domain experts validated Grahak-Nyay's effectiveness. Code and datasets will be released.