Large Language Model
Towards the Autonomous Optimization of Urban Logistics: Training Generative AI with Scientific Tools via Agentic Digital Twins and Model Context Protocol
Xu, Haowen, Sun, Yulin, Tupayachi, Jose, Omitaomu, Olufemi, Zlatanova, Sisi, Li, Xueping
Optimizing urban freight logistics is critical for developing sustainable, low-carbon cities. Traditional methods often rely on manual coordination of simulation tools, optimization solvers, and expert-driven workflows, limiting their efficiency and scalability. This paper presents an agentic system architecture that leverages the model context protocol (MCP) to orchestrate multi-agent collaboration among scientific tools for autonomous, simulation-informed optimization in urban logistics. The system integrates generative AI agents with domain-specific engines - such as Gurobi for optimization and AnyLogic for agent-based simulation - forming a generative digital twin capable of reasoning, planning, and acting across multimodal freight networks. By incorporating integrated chatbots, retrieval-augmented generation, and structured memory, the framework enables agents to interpret user intent from natural language conversations, retrieve relevant datasets and models, coordinate solvers and simulators, and execute complex workflows. We demonstrate this approach through a freight decarbonization case study, showcasing how MCP enables modular, interoperable, and adaptive agent behavior across diverse toolchains. The results reveal that our system transforms digital twins from static visualizations into autonomous, decision-capable systems, advancing the frontiers of urban operations research. By enabling context-aware, generative agents to operate scientific tools automatically and collaboratively, this framework supports more intelligent, accessible, and dynamic decision-making in transportation planning and smart city management.
Surprise Calibration for Better In-Context Learning
Tan, Zhihang, Hou, Jingrui, Wang, Ping, Hu, Qibiao, Zhu, Peng
In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for task adaptation in large language models (LLMs), where models infer underlying task structures from a few demonstrations. However, ICL remains susceptible to biases that arise from prior knowledge and contextual demonstrations, which can degrade the performance of LLMs. Existing bias calibration methods typically apply fixed class priors across all inputs, limiting their efficacy in dynamic ICL settings where the context for each query differs. To address these limitations, we adopt implicit sequential Bayesian inference as a framework for interpreting ICL, identify "surprise" as an informative signal for class prior shift, and introduce a novel method--Surprise Calibration (SC). SC leverages the notion of surprise to capture the temporal dynamics of class priors, providing a more adaptive and computationally efficient solution for in-context learning. We empirically demonstrate the superiority of SC over existing bias calibration techniques across a range of benchmark natural language processing tasks.
ConsistencyChecker: Tree-based Evaluation of LLM Generalization Capabilities
Hong, Zhaochen, Yu, Haofei, You, Jiaxuan
Evaluating consistency in large language models (LLMs) is crucial for ensuring reliability, particularly in complex, multi-step interactions between humans and LLMs. Traditional self-consistency methods often miss subtle semantic changes in natural language and functional shifts in code or equations, which can accumulate over multiple transformations. To address this, we propose ConsistencyChecker, a tree-based evaluation framework designed to measure consistency through sequences of reversible transformations, including machine translation tasks and AI-assisted programming tasks. In our framework, nodes represent distinct text states, while edges correspond to pairs of inverse operations. Dynamic and LLM-generated benchmarks ensure a fair assessment of the model's generalization ability and eliminate benchmark leakage. Consistency is quantified based on similarity across different depths of the transformation tree. Experiments on eight models from various families and sizes show that ConsistencyChecker can distinguish the performance of different models. Notably, our consistency scores-computed entirely without using WMT paired data-correlate strongly (r > 0.7) with WMT 2024 auto-ranking, demonstrating the validity of our benchmark-free approach. Our implementation is available at: https://github.com/ulab-uiuc/consistencychecker.
A Hybrid Multi-Agent Prompting Approach for Simplifying Complex Sentences
Zunjare, Pratibha, Hsiao, Michael
--This paper addresses the challenge of transforming complex sentences into sequences of logical, simplified sentences while preserving semantic and logical integrity with the help of Large Language Models. We propose a hybrid approach that combines advanced prompting with multi-agent architectures to enhance the sentence simplification process. Experimental results show that our approach was able to successfully simplify 70% of the complex sentences written for video game design application. In comparison, a single-agent approach attained a 48% success rate on the same task. Sentence simplification is a challenging task in computational linguistics. The simplification process aims to transform complex sentences into simpler structures while preserving the original meaning. Effective sentence simplification has significant applications across numerous domains like education, content accessibility for individuals with cognitive disabilities, automated content creation, robotics, coding, legal documents, etc. Traditional approaches to sentence simplification have relied on rule-based systems, statistical methods, and more recently neural network architectures [1]. Complex sentences present significant challenges in action-oriented contexts, particularly when attempting to derive executable/actionable functionalities such as robotics, legal documents, and video games.
From Persona to Person: Enhancing the Naturalness with Multiple Discourse Relations Graph Learning in Personalized Dialogue Generation
Hsu, Chih-Hao, Lin, Ying-Jia, Kao, Hung-Yu
In dialogue generation, the naturalness of responses is crucial for effective human-machine interaction. Personalized response generation poses even greater challenges, as the responses must remain coherent and consistent with the user's personal traits or persona descriptions. We propose MUDI ( Mu ltiple Discourse Relations Graph Learning) for personalized dialogue generation. We utilize a Large Language Model to assist in annotating discourse relations and to transform dialogue data into structured dialogue graphs. Our graph encoder, the proposed Dialogue-GAT model, then captures implicit discourse relations within this structure, along with persona descriptions. During the personalized response generation phase, novel coherence-aware attention strategies are implemented to enhance the decoder's consideration of discourse relations. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements in the quality of personalized responses, thus resembling human-like dialogue exchanges.
On-the-Fly Adaptive Distillation of Transformer to Dual-State Linear Attention
Ro, Yeonju, Zhang, Zhenyu, Kundu, Souvik, Wang, Zhangyang, Akella, Aditya
Large language models (LLMs) excel at capturing global token dependencies via self-attention but face prohibitive compute and memory costs on lengthy inputs. While sub-quadratic methods (e.g., linear attention) can reduce these costs, they often degrade accuracy due to overemphasizing recent tokens. In this work, we first propose dual-state linear attention (DSLA), a novel design that maintains two specialized hidden states-one for preserving historical context and one for tracking recency-thereby mitigating the short-range bias typical of linear-attention architectures. To further balance efficiency and accuracy under dynamic workload conditions, we introduce DSLA-Serve, an online adaptive distillation framework that progressively replaces Transformer layers with DSLA layers at inference time, guided by a sensitivity-based layer ordering. DSLA-Serve uses a chained fine-tuning strategy to ensure that each newly converted DSLA layer remains consistent with previously replaced layers, preserving the overall quality. Extensive evaluations on commonsense reasoning, long-context QA, and text summarization demonstrate that DSLA-Serve yields 2.3x faster inference than Llama2-7B and 3.0x faster than the hybrid Zamba-7B, while retaining comparable performance across downstream tasks. Our ablation studies show that DSLA's dual states capture both global and local dependencies, addressing the historical-token underrepresentation seen in prior linear attentions. Codes are available at https://github.com/utnslab/DSLA-Serve.
Comment on The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity
Shojaee et al. (2025) report that Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) exhibit "accuracy collapse" on planning puzzles beyond certain complexity thresholds. We demonstrate that their findings primarily reflect experimental design limitations rather than fundamental reasoning failures. Our analysis reveals three critical issues: (1) Tower of Hanoi experiments risk exceeding model output token limits, with models explicitly acknowledging these constraints in their outputs; (2) The authors' automated evaluation framework fails to distinguish between reasoning failures and practical constraints, leading to misclassification of model capabilities; (3) Most concerningly, their River Crossing benchmarks include mathematically impossible instances for N > 5 due to insufficient boat capacity, yet models are scored as failures for not solving these unsolvable problems. When we control for these experimental artifacts, by requesting generating functions instead of exhaustive move lists, preliminary experiments across multiple models indicate high accuracy on Tower of Hanoi instances previously reported as complete failures. These findings highlight the importance of careful experimental design when evaluating AI reasoning capabilities.
An Open-Source Software Toolkit & Benchmark Suite for the Evaluation and Adaptation of Multimodal Action Models
Guruprasad, Pranav, Wang, Yangyue, Chowdhury, Sudipta, Song, Jaewoo, Sikka, Harshvardhan
Recent innovations in multimodal action models represent a promising direction for developing general-purpose agentic systems, combining visual understanding, language comprehension, and action generation. We introduce MultiNet - a novel, fully open-source benchmark and surrounding software ecosystem designed to rigorously evaluate and adapt models across vision, language, and action domains. We establish standardized evaluation protocols for assessing vision-language models (VLMs) and vision-language-action models (VLAs), and provide open source software to download relevant data, models, and evaluations. Additionally, we provide a composite dataset with over 1.3 trillion tokens of image captioning, visual question answering, commonsense reasoning, robotic control, digital game-play, simulated locomotion/manipulation, and many more tasks. The MultiNet benchmark, framework, toolkit, and evaluation harness have been used in downstream research on the limitations of VLA generalization.
SPARQ: Synthetic Problem Generation for Reasoning via Quality-Diversity Algorithms
Havrilla, Alex, Hughes, Edward, Samvelyan, Mikayel, Abernethy, Jacob
Large language model (LLM) driven synthetic data generation has emerged as a powerful method for improving model reasoning capabilities. However, most methods either distill large state-of-the-art models into small students or use natural ground-truth problem statements to guarantee problem statement quality. This limits the scalability of these approaches to more complex and diverse problem domains. To address this, we present SPARQ: Synthetic Problem Generation for Reasoning via Quality-Diversity Algorithms, a novel approach for generating high-quality and diverse synthetic math problem and solution pairs using only a single model by measuring a problem's solve-rate: a proxy for problem difficulty. Starting from a seed dataset of 7.5K samples, we generate over 20 million new problem-solution pairs. We show that filtering the generated data by difficulty and then fine-tuning the same model on the resulting data improves relative model performance by up to 24\%. Additionally, we conduct ablations studying the impact of synthetic data quantity, quality and diversity on model generalization. We find that higher quality, as measured by problem difficulty, facilitates better in-distribution performance. Further, while generating diverse synthetic data does not as strongly benefit in-distribution performance, filtering for more diverse data facilitates more robust OOD generalization. We also confirm the existence of model and data scaling laws for synthetically generated problems, which positively benefit downstream model generalization.
EuroLLM-9B: Technical Report
Martins, Pedro Henrique, Alves, João, Fernandes, Patrick, Guerreiro, Nuno M., Rei, Ricardo, Farajian, Amin, Klimaszewski, Mateusz, Alves, Duarte M., Pombal, José, Boizard, Nicolas, Faysse, Manuel, Colombo, Pierre, Yvon, François, Haddow, Barry, de Souza, José G. C., Birch, Alexandra, Martins, André F. T.
This report presents EuroLLM-9B, a large language model trained from scratch to support the needs of European citizens by covering all 24 official European Union languages and 11 additional languages. EuroLLM addresses the issue of European languages being underrepresented and underserved in existing open large language models. We provide a comprehensive overview of EuroLLM-9B's development, including tokenizer design, architectural specifications, data filtering, and training procedures. We describe the pre-training data collection and filtering pipeline, including the creation of EuroFilter, an AI-based multilingual filter, as well as the design of EuroBlocks-Synthetic, a novel synthetic dataset for post-training that enhances language coverage for European languages. Evaluation results demonstrate EuroLLM-9B's competitive performance on multilingual benchmarks and machine translation tasks, establishing it as the leading open European-made LLM of its size. To support open research and adoption, we release all major components of this work, including the base and instruction-tuned models, the EuroFilter classifier, and the synthetic post-training dataset. Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as key drivers of progress in natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI), with notable examples including OpenAI's GPT series (OpenAI et al., 2024), Anthropic's Claude (Anthropic, 2023) or Google's Gemini (Google et al., 2025). LLMs are first pre-trained on vast amounts of unlabelled data relying on a self-supervised task ( e.g., next word prediction or missing word prediction). This process enables the model to acquire knowledge, to develop strong language understanding and generation skills, and to perform various downstream tasks, often leveraging in-context learning techniques.