Designing strategyproof mechanisms for multi-facility location that optimize social costs based on agent preferences had been challenging due to the extensive domain knowledge required and poor worst-case guarantees. Recently, deep learning models have been proposed as alternatives. However, these models require some domain knowledge and extensive hyperparameter tuning as well as lacking interpretability, which is crucial in practice when transparency of the learned mechanisms is mandatory. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach, named LLMMech, that addresses these limitations by incorporating large language models (LLMs) into an evolutionary framework for generating interpretable, hyperparameter-free, empirically strategyproof, and nearly optimal mechanisms. Our experimental results, evaluated on various problem settings where the social cost is arbitrarily weighted across agents and the agent preferences may not be uniformly distributed, demonstrate that the LLM-generated mechanisms generally outperform existing handcrafted baselines and deep learning models. Furthermore, the mechanisms exhibit impressive generalizability to out-of-distribution agent preferences and to larger instances with more agents.

Integrating audio and visual data for training multimodal foundational models remains challenging. We present Audio-Video Vector Alignment (AVVA), which aligns audiovisual (AV) scene content beyond mere temporal synchronization via a Large Language Model (LLM)-based data curation pipeline. Specifically, AVVA scores and selects high-quality training clips using Whisper (speech-based audio foundation model) for audio and DINOv2 for video within a dual-encoder contrastive learning framework. Evaluations on AudioCaps, VALOR, and VGGSound demonstrate that this approach can achieve significant accuracy gains with substantially less curated data. For instance, AVVA yields a 7.6% improvement in top-1 accuracy for audio-to-video retrieval on VGGSound compared to ImageBind, despite training on only 192 hours of carefully filtered data (vs. 5800+ hours). Moreover, an ablation study highlights that trading data quantity for data quality improves performance, yielding respective top-3 accuracy increases of 47.8, 48.4, and 58.0 percentage points on AudioCaps, VALOR, and VGGSound over uncurated baselines. While these results underscore AVVA's data efficiency, we also discuss the overhead of LLM-driven curation and how it may be scaled or approximated in larger domains. Overall, AVVA provides a viable path toward more robust, text-free audiovisual learning with improved retrieval accuracy.

The success of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) has been largely attributed to the large-scale training data. However, the training data of many MLLMs is unavailable due to privacy concerns. The expensive and labor-intensive process of collecting multi-modal data further exacerbates the problem. Is it possible to synthesize multi-modal training data automatically without compromising diversity and quality? In this paper, we propose a new method, Oasis, to synthesize high-quality multi-modal data with only images. Oasis breaks through traditional methods by prompting only images to the MLLMs, thus extending the data diversity by a large margin. Our method features a delicate quality control method which ensures the data quality. We collected over 500k data and conducted incremental experiments on LLaVA-NeXT. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can significantly improve the performance of MLLMs. The image-based synthesis also allows us to focus on the specific-domain ability of MLLMs. Code and data will be publicly available.

Large language models have made remarkable progress in the field of molecular science, particularly in understanding and generating functional small molecules. This success is largely attributed to the effectiveness of molecular tokenization strategies. In protein science, the amino acid sequence serves as the sole tokenizer for LLMs. However, many fundamental challenges in protein science are inherently structure-dependent. The absence of structure-aware tokens significantly limits the capabilities of LLMs for comprehensive biomolecular comprehension and multimodal generation. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel framework, ProtTeX, which tokenizes the protein sequences, structures, and textual information into a unified discrete space. This innovative approach enables joint training of the LLM exclusively through the Next-Token Prediction paradigm, facilitating multimodal protein reasoning and generation. ProtTeX enables general LLMs to perceive and process protein structures through sequential text input, leverage structural information as intermediate reasoning components, and generate or manipulate structures via sequential text output. Experiments demonstrate that our model achieves significant improvements in protein function prediction, outperforming the state-of-the-art domain expert model with a twofold increase in accuracy. Our framework enables high-quality conformational generation and customizable protein design. For the first time, we demonstrate that by adopting the standard training and inference pipelines from the LLM domain, ProtTeX empowers decoder-only LLMs to effectively address diverse spectrum of protein-related tasks.

Language model alignment (or, reinforcement learning) techniques that leverage active exploration -- deliberately encouraging the model to produce diverse, informative responses -- offer the promise of super-human capabilities. However, current understanding of algorithm design primitives for computationally efficient exploration with language models is limited. To better understand how to leverage access to powerful pre-trained generative models to improve the efficiency of exploration, we introduce a new computational framework for RL with language models, in which the learner interacts with the model through a sampling oracle. Focusing on the linear softmax model parameterization, we provide new results that reveal the computational-statistical tradeoffs of efficient exploration: 1. Necessity of coverage: Coverage refers to the extent to which the pre-trained model covers near-optimal responses -- a form of hidden knowledge. We show that coverage, while not necessary for data efficiency, lower bounds the runtime of any algorithm in our framework. 2. Inference-time exploration: We introduce a new algorithm, SpannerSampling, which obtains optimal data efficiency and is computationally efficient whenever the pre-trained model enjoys sufficient coverage, matching our lower bound. SpannerSampling leverages inference-time computation with the pre-trained model to reduce the effective search space for exploration. 3. Insufficiency of training-time interventions: We contrast the result above by showing that training-time interventions that produce proper policies cannot achieve similar guarantees in polynomial time. 4. Computational benefits of multi-turn exploration: Finally, we show that under additional representational assumptions, one can achieve improved runtime (replacing sequence-level coverage with token-level coverage) through multi-turn exploration.

This work adapts and studies the gradient-based Membership Inference Test (gMINT) to the classification of text based on LLMs. MINT is a general approach intended to determine if given data was used for training machine learning models, and this work focuses on its application to the domain of Natural Language Processing. Using gradient-based analysis, the MINT model identifies whether particular data samples were included during the language model training phase, addressing growing concerns about data privacy in machine learning. The method was evaluated in seven Transformer-based models and six datasets comprising over 2.5 million sentences, focusing on text classification tasks. Experimental results demonstrate MINTs robustness, achieving AUC scores between 85% and 99%, depending on data size and model architecture. These findings highlight MINTs potential as a scalable and reliable tool for auditing machine learning models, ensuring transparency, safeguarding sensitive data, and fostering ethical compliance in the deployment of AI/NLP technologies.

Advanced reasoning in large language models has achieved remarkable performance on challenging tasks, but the prevailing long-context reasoning paradigm faces critical limitations: quadratic computational scaling with sequence length, reasoning constrained by maximum context boundaries, and performance degradation beyond pre-training context windows. Existing approaches primarily compress reasoning chains without addressing the fundamental scaling problem. To overcome these challenges, we introduce InftyThink, a paradigm that transforms monolithic reasoning into an iterative process with intermediate summarization. By interleaving short reasoning segments with concise progress summaries, our approach enables unbounded reasoning depth while maintaining bounded computational costs. This creates a characteristic sawtooth memory pattern that significantly reduces computational complexity compared to traditional approaches. Furthermore, we develop a methodology for reconstructing long-context reasoning datasets into our iterative format, transforming OpenR1-Math into 333K training instances. Experiments across multiple model architectures demonstrate that our approach reduces computational costs while improving performance, with Qwen2.5-Math-7B showing 3-13% improvements across MATH500, AIME24, and GPQA_diamond benchmarks. Our work challenges the assumed trade-off between reasoning depth and computational efficiency, providing a more scalable approach to complex reasoning without architectural modifications.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have led to remarkable performance across a wide range of language understanding and mathematical tasks. As a result, increasing attention has been given to assessing the true reasoning capabilities of LLMs, driving research into commonsense, numerical, logical, and qualitative reasoning. However, with the rapid progress of reasoning-focused models such as OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek's R1, there has been a growing demand for reasoning benchmarks that can keep pace with ongoing model developments. Our benchmark supports two evaluation paradigms: (1) agentic evaluation, in which the model autonomously plays the game, and (2) deductive reasoning evaluation, in which the model is given a pre-played game state with only one possible valid code to infer. In our experimental results we (1) find that even easy Mastermind instances are difficult for current models and (2) demonstrate that the benchmark is scalable to possibly more advanced models in the future Furthermore, we investigate possible reasons why models cannot deduce the final solution and find that current models are limited in deducing the concealed code as the number of statement to combine information from is increasing. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various text generation tasks, spanning both text and vision modalities (Grattafiori et al., 2024). These models, characterized by their large parameter counts, have proven effective in a wide range of language understanding tasks (Brown et al., 2020; Zhao et al., 2024).

With the increasing prevalence of mental health conditions worldwide, AI-powered chatbots and conversational agents have emerged as accessible tools to support mental health. However, deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) in mental healthcare applications raises significant privacy concerns, especially regarding regulations like HIPAA and GDPR. In this work, we propose FedMentalCare, a privacy-preserving framework that leverages Federated Learning (FL) combined with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune LLMs for mental health analysis. We investigate the performance impact of varying client data volumes and model architectures (e.g., MobileBERT and MiniLM) in FL environments. Our framework demonstrates a scalable, privacy-aware approach for deploying LLMs in real-world mental healthcare scenarios, addressing data security and computational efficiency challenges.

While we theoretically show for which annotated datasets exist, and it is commonly the shortcomings of naively measuring cross-task accepted that the summarization task, at performance by directly applying each model to least in the news domain, requires NER skills to each other task, the contributions of the paper are be performed effectively. As a consequence, studying threefold: generated summaries from the perspective of A theoretical framework for task definition retained named entities is a relevant evaluation and inclusion. Based on information concepts angle (Pagnoni et al., 2021; Berezin and Batura, and theory, we propose a clear definition of a task 2022; Akani et al., 2023). According to this principle, and candidate notions of inclusion (independent a more general hypothesis is that multi-task of the notion of model).