Lightweight Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are indispensable for resource-constrained applications. The prevailing approach to aligning vision and language models involves freezing both the vision encoder and the language model while training small connector modules. However, this strategy heavily depends on the intrinsic capabilities of the language model, which can be suboptimal for lightweight models with limited representational capacity. In this work, we investigate this alignment bottleneck through the lens of mutual information, demonstrating that the constrained capacity of the language model inherently limits the Effective Mutual Information (EMI) between multimodal inputs and outputs, thereby compromising alignment quality. To address this challenge, we propose TinyAlign, a novel framework inspired by Retrieval-Augmented Generation, which strategically retrieves relevant context from a memory bank to enrich multimodal inputs and enhance their alignment. Extensive empirical evaluations reveal that TinyAlign significantly reduces training loss, accelerates convergence, and enhances task performance. Remarkably, it allows models to achieve baseline-level performance with only 40\% of the fine-tuning data, highlighting exceptional data efficiency. Our work thus offers a practical pathway for developing more capable lightweight VLMs while introducing a fresh theoretical lens to better understand and address alignment bottlenecks in constrained multimodal systems.

Recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) have brought about increasingly capable systems that demonstrate remarkable abilities in reasoning, language understanding, and problem-solving. These advancements have prompted a renewed examination of AI awareness not as a philosophical question of consciousness, but as a measurable, functional capacity. AI awareness is a double-edged sword: it improves general capabilities, i.e., reasoning, safety, while also raising concerns around misalignment and societal risks, demanding careful oversight as AI capabilities grow. In this review, we explore the emerging landscape of AI awareness, which includes metacognition (the ability to represent and reason about its own cognitive state), self-awareness (recognizing its own identity, knowledge, limitations, inter alia), social awareness (modeling the knowledge, intentions, and behaviors of other agents and social norms), and situational awareness (assessing and responding to the context in which it operates). First, we draw on insights from cognitive science, psychology, and computational theory to trace the theoretical foundations of awareness and examine how the four distinct forms of AI awareness manifest in state-of-the-art AI. Next, we systematically analyze current evaluation methods and empirical findings to better understand these manifestations. Building on this, we explore how AI awareness is closely linked to AI capabilities, demonstrating that more aware AI agents tend to exhibit higher levels of intelligent behaviors. Finally, we discuss the risks associated with AI awareness, including key topics in AI safety, alignment, and broader ethical concerns.

Quantizing large language models (LLMs) to 1-bit precision significantly reduces computational costs, but existing quantization techniques suffer from noticeable performance degradation when using weight and activation precisions below 4 bits (W4A4). In this paper, we propose a post-training quantization framework with W(1+1)A(1*4) configuration, where weights are quantized to 1 bit with an additional 1 bit for fine-grain grouping and activations are quantized to 1 bit with a 4-fold increase in the number of channels. For weight quantization, we propose utilizing Hessian-aware fine-grained grouping along with an EM-based quantization scheme. For activation quantization, we decompose INT4-quantized activations into a 4 * INT1 format equivalently and simultaneously smooth the scaling factors based on quantization errors, which further reduces the quantization errors in activations. Our method surpasses state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLM quantization baselines on W2A4 across multiple tasks, pushing the boundaries of existing LLM quantization methods toward fully binarized models. Code is available at https://github.com/JimmyCrave/LLM-PTQ-binarization.

We present a novel approach for training small language models for reasoning-intensive document ranking that combines knowledge distillation with reinforcement learning optimization. While existing methods often rely on expensive human annotations or large black-box language models, our methodology leverages web data and a teacher LLM to automatically generate high-quality training examples with relevance explanations. By framing document ranking as a reinforcement learning problem and incentivizing explicit reasoning capabilities, we train a compact 3B parameter language model that achieves state-of-the-art performance on the BRIGHT benchmark. Our model ranks third on the leaderboard while using substantially fewer parameters than other approaches, outperforming models that are over 20 times larger. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that generating explanations during inference, rather than directly predicting relevance scores, enables more effective reasoning with smaller language models. The self-supervised nature of our method offers a scalable and interpretable solution for modern information retrieval systems.

Recent advances in large language models and vision-language models have led to growing interest in explainable evaluation metrics for image captioning. However, these metrics generate explanations without standardized criteria, and the overall quality of the generated explanations remains unverified. In this paper, we propose EXPERT, a reference-free evaluation metric that provides structured explanations based on three fundamental criteria: fluency, relevance, and descriptiveness. By constructing large-scale datasets of high-quality structured explanations, we develop a two-stage evaluation template to effectively supervise a vision-language model for both scoring and explanation generation. EXPERT achieves state-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets while providing significantly higher-quality explanations than existing metrics, as validated through comprehensive human evaluation. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/hjkim811/EXPERT.

The international refugee crisis deepens, exposing millions of displaced children to extreme psychological trauma. This research suggests a compact, AI - based framework for processing unstructured refugee health data and distilling knowledge on child mental health. We compare two Retrieval - Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, Zephyr - 7B - beta and DeepSeek R1 - 7B, to determine how well they process challenging humanitarian datasets while avoiding hallucination hazards. By combining cutting - edge AI methods with migration research and child psychology, this study presents a scalable strategy to assist policymakers, mental health practitioners, and humanitarian agencies to better assist displaced children and recognize their mental wellbeing. In total, both the models worked properly but significantly Deepsee k R1 is superior to Zephyr with an accuracy of answer relevance 0.91 Keywords: Retrieval - Augmented Generation, Zephyr - 7B - beta, DeepSeek R1 - 7B, Answer Relevance, Hallucination, LLM as a Judge, Refugee Crises

The ability to quickly and accurately compute properties from atomic simulations is critical for advancing a large number of applications in chemistry and materials science including drug discovery, energy storage, and semiconductor manufacturing. To address this need, Meta FAIR presents a family of Universal Models for Atoms (UMA), designed to push the frontier of speed, accuracy, and generalization. UMA models are trained on half a billion unique 3D atomic structures (the largest training runs to date) by compiling data across multiple chemical domains, e.g. molecules, materials, and catalysts. We develop empirical scaling laws to help understand how to increase model capacity alongside dataset size to achieve the best accuracy. The UMA small and medium models utilize a novel architectural design we refer to as mixture of linear experts that enables increasing model capacity without sacrificing speed. For example, UMA-medium has 1.4B parameters but only ~50M active parameters per atomic structure. We evaluate UMA models on a diverse set of applications across multiple domains and find that, remarkably, a single model without any fine-tuning can perform similarly or better than specialized models. We are releasing the UMA code, weights, and associated data to accelerate computational workflows and enable the community to continue to build increasingly capable AI models.

Increasingly multi-purpose AI models, such as cutting-edge large language models or other 'general-purpose AI' (GPAI) models, 'foundation models,' generative AI models, and 'frontier models' (typically all referred to hereafter with the umbrella term 'GPAI/foundation models' except where greater specificity is needed), can provide many beneficial capabilities but also risks of adverse events with profound consequences. This document provides risk-management practices or controls for identifying, analyzing, and mitigating risks of GPAI/foundation models. We intend this document primarily for developers of large-scale, state-of-the-art GPAI/foundation models; others that can benefit from this guidance include downstream developers of end-use applications that build on a GPAI/foundation model. This document facilitates conformity with or use of leading AI risk management-related standards, adapting and building on the generic voluntary guidance in the NIST AI Risk Management Framework and ISO/IEC 23894, with a focus on the unique issues faced by developers of GPAI/foundation models.

The rapid expansion of social media leads to a marked increase in hate speech, which threatens personal lives and results in numerous hate crimes. Detecting hate speech presents several challenges: diverse dialects, frequent code-mixing, and the prevalence of misspelled words in user-generated content on social media platforms. Recent progress in hate speech detection is typically concentrated on high-resource languages. However, low-resource languages still face significant challenges due to the lack of large-scale, high-quality datasets. This paper investigates how we can overcome this limitation via prompt engineering on large language models (LLMs) focusing on low-resource Bengali language. We investigate six prompting strategies - zero-shot prompting, refusal suppression, flattering the classifier, multi-shot prompting, role prompting, and finally our innovative metaphor prompting to detect hate speech effectively in low-resource languages. We pioneer the metaphor prompting to circumvent the built-in safety mechanisms of LLMs that marks a significant departure from existing jailbreaking methods. We investigate all six different prompting strategies on the Llama2-7B model and compare the results extensively with three pre-trained word embeddings - GloVe, Word2Vec, and FastText for three different deep learning models - multilayer perceptron (MLP), convolutional neural network (CNN), and bidirectional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU). To prove the effectiveness of our metaphor prompting in the low-resource Bengali language, we also evaluate it in another low-resource language - Hindi, and two high-resource languages - English and German. The performance of all prompting techniques is evaluated using the F1 score, and environmental impact factor (IF), which measures CO$_2$ emissions, electricity usage, and computational time.

Sound deductive reasoning -- the ability to derive new knowledge from existing facts and rules -- is an indisputably desirable aspect of general intelligence. Despite the major advances of AI systems in areas such as math and science, especially since the introduction of transformer architectures, it is well-documented that even the most advanced frontier systems regularly and consistently falter on easily-solvable deductive reasoning tasks. Hence, these systems are unfit to fulfill the dream of achieving artificial general intelligence capable of sound deductive reasoning. We argue that their unsound behavior is a consequence of the statistical learning approach powering their development. To overcome this, we contend that to achieve reliable deductive reasoning in learning-based AI systems, researchers must fundamentally shift from optimizing for statistical performance against distributions on reasoning problems and algorithmic tasks to embracing the more ambitious exact learning paradigm, which demands correctness on all inputs. We argue that exact learning is both essential and possible, and that this ambitious objective should guide algorithm design.