--Privacy in federated learning is crucial, encompassing two key aspects: safeguarding the privacy of clients' data and maintaining the privacy of the federator's objective from the clients. While the first aspect has been extensively studied, the second has received much less attention. We present a novel approach that addresses both concerns simultaneously, drawing inspiration from techniques in knowledge distillation and private information retrieval to provide strong information-theoretic privacy guarantees. Traditional private function computation methods could be used here; however, they are typically limited to linear or polynomial functions. T o overcome these constraints, our approach unfolds in three stages. In stage 0, clients perform the necessary computations locally. In stage 1, these results are shared among the clients, and in stage 2, the federator retrieves its desired objective without compromising the privacy of the clients' data. The crux of the method is a carefully designed protocol that combines secret-sharing-based multi-party computation and a graph-based private information retrieval scheme. We show that our method outperforms existing tools from the literature when properly adapted to this setting. We consider federated learning (FL), a framework where a federator and a set of clients with private data collaborate to train a neural network. Due to privacy constraints, the clients' data cannot be directly shared with the federator or among the clients. This privacy concern has been extensively studied in the literature [2]-[6]. There exists a second, often overlooked, privacy concern: ensuring the privacy of the federator's objective used to train the neural network. This aspect has not been explored in the literature to the same extent. We present a novel approach that ensures the privacy of the clients' data and simultaneously hides the objective of the federator through a careful combination of a secure aggregation method and a tailored private information retrieval (PIR) scheme. This project is funded by DFG (German Research Foundation) projects under Grant Agreement Nos. Part of the work was done when RB and ME visited RU at EPFL supported in parts by EuroTech Visiting Researcher Programme grants.

Foundation models have revolutionized artificial intelligence by providing robust, versatile architectures pre-trained on large-scale datasets. However, adapting these massive models to specific downstream tasks requires fine-tuning, which can be prohibitively expensive in computational resources. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods address this challenge by selectively updating only a small subset of parameters. Meanwhile, Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across distributed clients without sharing raw data, making it ideal for privacy-sensitive applications. This survey provides a comprehensive review of the integration of PEFT techniques within federated learning environments. We systematically categorize existing approaches into three main groups: Additive PEFT (which introduces new trainable parameters), Selective PEFT (which fine-tunes only subsets of existing parameters), and Reparameterized PEFT (which transforms model architectures to enable efficient updates). For each category, we analyze how these methods address the unique challenges of federated settings, including data heterogeneity, communication efficiency, computational constraints, and privacy concerns. We further organize the literature based on application domains, covering both natural language processing and computer vision tasks. Finally, we discuss promising research directions, including scaling to larger foundation models, theoretical analysis of federated PEFT methods, and sustainable approaches for resource-constrained environments.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown to be valuable tools for tackling process mining tasks. Existing studies report on their capability to support various data-driven process analyses and even, to some extent, that they are able to reason about how processes work. This reasoning ability suggests that there is potential for LLMs to tackle semantics-aware process mining tasks, which are tasks that rely on an understanding of the meaning of activities and their relationships. Examples of these include process discovery, where the meaning of activities can indicate their dependency, whereas in anomaly detection the meaning can be used to recognize process behavior that is abnormal. In this paper, we systematically explore the capabilities of LLMs for such tasks. Unlike prior work, which largely evaluates LLMs in their default state, we investigate their utility through both in-context learning and supervised fine-tuning. Concretely, we define five process mining tasks requiring semantic understanding and provide extensive benchmarking datasets for evaluation. Our experiments reveal that while LLMs struggle with challenging process mining tasks when used out of the box or with minimal in-context examples, they achieve strong performance when fine-tuned for these tasks across a broad range of process types and industries.

Objectives: While Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely used to assist clinicians and support patients, no existing work has explored dialogue systems for standard diagnostic interviews and assessments. This study aims to bridge the gap in mental healthcare accessibility by developing an LLM-powered dialogue system that replicates clinician behavior. Materials and Methods: We introduce TRUST, a framework of cooperative LLM modules capable of conducting formal diagnostic interviews and assessments for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). To guide the generation of appropriate clinical responses, we propose a Dialogue Acts schema specifically designed for clinical interviews. Additionally, we develop a patient simulation approach based on real-life interview transcripts to replace time-consuming and costly manual testing by clinicians. Results: A comprehensive set of evaluation metrics is designed to assess the dialogue system from both the agent and patient simulation perspectives. Expert evaluations by conversation and clinical specialists show that TRUST performs comparably to real-life clinical interviews. Discussion: Our system performs at the level of average clinicians, with room for future enhancements in communication styles and response appropriateness. Conclusions: Our TRUST framework shows its potential to facilitate mental healthcare availability.

Recent advancements in machine learning provide methods to train autonomous agents capable of handling the increasing complexity of sequential decision-making in robotics. Imitation Learning (IL) is a prominent approach, where agents learn to control robots based on human demonstrations. However, IL commonly suffers from violating the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d) assumption in robotic tasks. Interactive Imitation Learning (IIL) achieves improved performance by allowing agents to learn from interactive feedback from human teachers. Despite these improvements, both approaches come with significant costs due to the necessity of human involvement. Leveraging the emergent capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in reasoning and generating human-like responses, we introduce LLM-iTeach -- a novel IIL framework that utilizes an LLM as an interactive teacher to enhance agent performance while alleviating the dependence on human resources. Firstly, LLM-iTeach uses a hierarchical prompting strategy that guides the LLM in generating a policy in Python code. Then, with a designed similarity-based feedback mechanism, LLM-iTeach provides corrective and evaluative feedback interactively during the agent's training. We evaluate LLM-iTeach against baseline methods such as Behavior Cloning (BC), an IL method, and CEILing, a state-of-the-art IIL method using a human teacher, on various robotic manipulation tasks. Our results demonstrate that LLM-iTeach surpasses BC in the success rate and achieves or even outscores that of CEILing, highlighting the potential of LLMs as cost-effective, human-like teachers in interactive learning environments. We further demonstrate the method's potential for generalization by evaluating it on additional tasks. The code and prompts are provided at: https://github.com/Tubicor/LLM-iTeach.

The Greek fictional narratives often termed love novels or romances, ranging from the first century CE to the middle of the 15th century, have long been considered as similar in many ways, not least in the use of particular literary motifs. By applying the use of fine-tuned large language models, this study aims to investigate which motifs exactly that the texts in this corpus have in common, and in which ways they differ from each other. The results show that while some motifs persist throughout the corpus, others fluctuate in frequency, indicating certain trends or external influences. Conclusively, the method proves to adequately extract literary motifs according to a set definition, providing data for both quantitative and qualitative analyses.

We present an embodied robotic system with an LLM-driven agent-orchestration architecture for autonomous household object management. The system integrates memory-augmented task planning, enabling robots to execute high-level user commands while tracking past actions. It employs three specialized agents: a routing agent, a task planning agent, and a knowledge base agent, each powered by task-specific LLMs. By leveraging in-context learning, our system avoids the need for explicit model training. RAG enables the system to retrieve context from past interactions, enhancing long-term object tracking. A combination of Grounded SAM and LLaMa3.2-Vision provides robust object detection, facilitating semantic scene understanding for task planning. Evaluation across three household scenarios demonstrates high task planning accuracy and an improvement in memory recall due to RAG. Specifically, Qwen2.5 yields best performance for specialized agents, while LLaMA3.1 excels in routing tasks. The source code is available at: https://github.com/marc1198/chat-hsr.

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly serve as knowledge interfaces, yet systematically assessing their reliability with conflicting information remains difficult. We propose an RDF-based framework to assess multilingual LLM quality, focusing on knowledge conflicts. Our approach captures model responses across four distinct context conditions (complete, incomplete, conflicting, and no-context information) in German and English. This structured representation enables the comprehensive analysis of knowledge leakage-where models favor training data over provided context-error detection, and multilingual consistency. We demonstrate the framework through a fire safety domain experiment, revealing critical patterns in context prioritization and language-specific performance, and demonstrating that our vocabulary was sufficient to express every assessment facet encountered in the 28-question study.

-- With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, there is an increasing demand for intelligent robots capable of assisting humans in daily tasks and performing complex operations. Such robots not only require task planning capabilities but must also execute tasks with stability and robustness. In this paper, we present a closed-loop task planning and acting system, LLM-PAS, which is assisted by a pre-trained Large Language Model (LLM). While LLM-PAS plans long-horizon tasks in a manner similar to traditional task and motion planners, it also emphasizes the execution phase of the task. By transferring part of the constraint-checking process from the planning phase to the execution phase, LLM-PAS enables exploration of the constraint space and delivers more accurate feedback on environmental anomalies during execution. The reasoning capabilities of the LLM allow it to handle anomalies that cannot be addressed by the robust executor . T o further enhance the system's ability to assist the planner during replanning, we propose the First Look Prompting (FLP) method, which induces LLM to generate effective PDDL goals. Through comparative prompting experiments and systematic experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of LLM-PAS in handling anomalous conditions during task execution. I. INTRODUCTION The ability of robots to autonomously execute long-horizon tasks in unstructured environments is a key milestone in advancing robotic autonomy. Task and Motion Planning (T AMP) is a promising approach for planning long-horizon tasks, as it effectively integrates low-level geometric information to guide robots through complex task execution [1], [2]. While T AMP can generate action sequences with sufficient geometric information, significant challenges remain in ensuring the successful execution of these actions in real-world environments, particularly in scenarios that deviate from the closed-world assumption (CW A) [3]. Traditional control-based task planning methods incorporate real-time environmental feedback during execution, closing the loop between planning and execution.

Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) often suffer from object hallucination, which undermines their reliability. Surprisingly, we find that simple object-based visual prompting -- overlaying visual cues (e.g., bounding box, circle) on images -- can significantly mitigate such hallucination; however, different visual prompts (VPs) vary in effectiveness. To address this, we propose Black-Box Visual Prompt Engineering (BBVPE), a framework to identify optimal VPs that enhance LVLM responses without needing access to model internals. Our approach employs a pool of candidate VPs and trains a router model to dynamically select the most effective VP for a given input image. This black-box approach is model-agnostic, making it applicable to both open-source and proprietary LVLMs. Evaluations on benchmarks such as POPE and CHAIR demonstrate that BBVPE effectively reduces object hallucination.