Large language model (LLM) unlearning has demonstrated its essential role in removing privacy and copyright-related responses, crucial for their legal and safe applications. However, the pursuit of complete unlearning often comes with substantial costs due to its compromises in their general functionality, leading to a notorious trade-off between unlearning and retention. In examining the update process for unlearning dynamically, we find gradients hold essential information for revealing this trade-off. In particular, we look at the varying relationship between retention performance and directional disparities between gradients during unlearning. It motivates the sculpting of an update mechanism derived from gradients from two sources, i.e., harmful for retention and useful for unlearning. Accordingly, we propose Gradient Rectified Unlearning (GRU), an enhanced unlearning framework controlling the updating gradients in a geometry-focused and optimization-driven manner such that their side impacts on other, unrelated responses can be minimized. Specifically, GRU derives a closed-form solution to project the unlearning gradient onto the orthogonal space of that gradient harmful for retention, ensuring minimal deviation from its original direction under the condition that overall performance is retained. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that GRU, as a general framework, is straightforward to implement and efficiently enhances a range of baseline methods through its adaptable and compatible characteristics. Additionally, experimental results show its broad effectiveness across a diverse set of benchmarks for LLM unlearning.

The rapid rise of Language Models (LMs) has expanded the capabilities of natural language processing, powering applications from text generation to complex decision-making. While state-of-the-art LMs often boast hundreds of billions of parameters and are primarily deployed in data centers, recent trends show a growing focus on compact models-typically under 10 billion parameters-enabled by techniques such as quantization and other model compression techniques. This shift paves the way for LMs on edge devices, offering potential benefits such as enhanced privacy, reduced latency, and improved data sovereignty. However, the inherent complexity of even these smaller models, combined with the limited computing resources of edge hardware, raises critical questions about the practical trade-offs in executing LM inference outside the cloud. To address these challenges, we present a comprehensive evaluation of generative LM inference on representative CPU-based and GPU-accelerated edge devices. Our study measures key performance indicators-including memory usage, inference speed, and energy consumption-across various device configurations. Additionally, we examine throughput-energy trade-offs, cost considerations, and usability, alongside an assessment of qualitative model performance. While quantization helps mitigate memory overhead, it does not fully eliminate resource bottlenecks, especially for larger models. Our findings quantify the memory and energy constraints that must be considered for practical real-world deployments, offering concrete insights into the trade-offs between model size, inference performance, and efficiency. The exploration of LMs at the edge is still in its early stages. We hope this study provides a foundation for future research, guiding the refinement of models, the enhancement of inference efficiency, and the advancement of edge-centric AI systems.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly improved text generation capabilities. However, they also present challenges, particularly in generating vaccine-related misinformation, which poses risks to public health. Despite research on human-authored misinformation, a notable gap remains in understanding how LLMs contribute to vaccine misinformation and how best to detect it. Existing benchmarks often overlook vaccine-specific misinformation and the diverse roles of misinformation spreaders. This paper introduces VaxGuard, a novel dataset designed to address these challenges. VaxGuard includes vaccine-related misinformation generated by multiple LLMs and provides a comprehensive framework for detecting misinformation across various roles. Our findings show that GPT-3.5 and GPT-4o consistently outperform other LLMs in detecting misinformation, especially when dealing with subtle or emotionally charged narratives. On the other hand, PHI3 and Mistral show lower performance, struggling with precision and recall in fear-driven contexts. Additionally, detection performance tends to decline as input text length increases, indicating the need for improved methods to handle larger content. These results highlight the importance of role-specific detection strategies and suggest that VaxGuard can serve as a key resource for improving the detection of LLM-generated vaccine misinformation.

Such sentence embeddings can be further enhanced by domain adaptation that adapts a backbone model to a specific domain. However, domain adaptation for low-resource languages like Japanese is often difficult due to the scarcity of large-scale labeled datasets. To overcome this, this paper introduces SDJC (Self-supervised Domain adaptation for Japanese sentence embeddings with Contrastive learning) that utilizes a data generator to generate sentences, which have the same syntactic structure to a sentence in an unlabeled specific domain corpus but convey different semantic meanings. Generated sentences are then used to boost contrastive learning that adapts a backbone model to accurately discriminate sentences in the specific domain. In addition, the components of SDJC like a backbone model and a method to adapt it need to be carefully selected, but no benchmark dataset is available for Japanese. Thus, a comprehensive Japanese STS (Semantic Textual Similarity) benchmark dataset is constructed by combining datasets machine-translated from English with existing datasets. The experimental results validates the effectiveness of SDJC on two domain-specific downstream tasks as well as the usefulness of the constructed dataset.

Code localization--identifying precisely where in a codebase changes need to be made--is a fundamental yet challenging task in software maintenance. Existing approaches struggle to efficiently navigate complex codebases when identifying relevant code sections. The challenge lies in bridging natural language problem descriptions with the appropriate code elements, often requiring reasoning across hierarchical structures and multiple dependencies. We introduce LocAgent, a framework that addresses code localization through graph-based representation. By parsing codebases into directed heterogeneous graphs, LocAgent creates a lightweight representation that captures code structures (files, classes, functions) and their dependencies (imports, invocations, inheritance), enabling LLM agents to effectively search and locate relevant entities through powerful multi-hop reasoning. Experimental results on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances accuracy in code localization. Notably, our method with the fine-tuned Qwen-2.5-Coder-Instruct-32B model achieves comparable results to SOTA proprietary models at greatly reduced cost (approximately 86% reduction), reaching up to 92.7% accuracy on file-level localization while improving downstream GitHub issue resolution success rates by 12% for multiple attempts (Pass@10). Our code is available at https://github.com/gersteinlab/LocAgent.

Long Video Question Answering (LVQA) is challenging due to the need for temporal reasoning and large-scale multimodal data processing. Existing methods struggle with retrieving cross-modal information from long videos, especially when relevant details are sparsely distributed. We introduce UMaT (Unified Multi-modal as Text), a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework that efficiently processes extremely long videos while maintaining cross-modal coherence. UMaT converts visual and auditory data into a unified textual representation, ensuring semantic and temporal alignment. Short video clips are analyzed using a vision-language model, while automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcribes dialogue. These text-based representations are structured into temporally aligned segments, with adaptive filtering to remove redundancy and retain salient details. The processed data is embedded into a vector database, enabling precise retrieval of dispersed yet relevant content. Experiments on a benchmark LVQA dataset show that UMaT outperforms existing methods in multimodal integration, long-form video understanding, and sparse information retrieval. Its scalability and interpretability allow it to process videos over an hour long while maintaining semantic and temporal coherence. These findings underscore the importance of structured retrieval and multimodal synchronization for advancing LVQA and long-form AI systems.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks, yet they remain vulnerable to adversarial manipulations such as jailbreaking via prompt injection attacks. These attacks bypass safety mechanisms to generate restricted or harmful content. In this study, we investigated the underlying latent subspaces of safe and jailbroken states by extracting hidden activations from a LLM. Inspired by attractor dynamics in neuroscience, we hypothesized that LLM activations settle into semi stable states that can be identified and perturbed to induce state transitions. Using dimensionality reduction techniques, we projected activations from safe and jailbroken responses to reveal latent subspaces in lower dimensional spaces. We then derived a perturbation vector that when applied to safe representations, shifted the model towards a jailbreak state. Our results demonstrate that this causal intervention results in statistically significant jailbreak responses in a subset of prompts. Next, we probed how these perturbations propagate through the model's layers, testing whether the induced state change remains localized or cascades throughout the network. Our findings indicate that targeted perturbations induced distinct shifts in activations and model responses. Our approach paves the way for potential proactive defenses, shifting from traditional guardrail based methods to preemptive, model agnostic techniques that neutralize adversarial states at the representation level.

In many-task optimization scenarios, surrogate models are valuable for mitigating the computational burden of repeated fitness evaluations across tasks. This study proposes a novel meta-surrogate framework to assist many-task optimization, by leveraging the knowledge transfer strengths and emergent capabilities of large language models (LLMs). We formulate a unified framework for many-task fitness prediction, by defining a universal model with metadata to fit a group of problems. Fitness prediction is performed on metadata and decision variables, enabling efficient knowledge sharing across tasks and adaptability to new tasks. The LLM-based meta-surrogate treats fitness prediction as conditional probability estimation, employing a unified token sequence representation for task metadata, inputs, and outputs. This approach facilitates efficient inter-task knowledge sharing through shared token embeddings and captures complex task dependencies via multi-task model training. Experimental results demonstrate the model's emergent generalization ability, including zero-shot performance on problems with unseen dimensions. When integrated into evolutionary transfer optimization (ETO), our framework supports dual-level knowledge transfer -- at both the surrogate and individual levels -- enhancing optimization efficiency and robustness. This work establishes a novel foundation for applying LLMs in surrogate modeling, offering a versatile solution for many-task optimization.

Human interaction with the external world fundamentally involves the exchange of personal memory, whether with other individuals, websites, applications, or, in the future, AI agents. A significant portion of this interaction is redundant, requiring users to repeatedly provide the same information across different contexts. Existing solutions, such as browser-stored credentials, autofill mechanisms, and unified authentication systems, have aimed to mitigate this redundancy by serving as intermediaries that store and retrieve commonly used user data. The advent of large language models (LLMs) presents an opportunity to redefine memory management through an AI-native paradigm: SECOND ME. SECOND ME acts as an intelligent, persistent memory offload system that retains, organizes, and dynamically utilizes user-specific knowledge. By serving as an intermediary in user interactions, it can autonomously generate context-aware responses, prefill required information, and facilitate seamless communication with external systems, significantly reducing cognitive load and interaction friction. Unlike traditional memory storage solutions, SECOND ME extends beyond static data retention by leveraging LLM-based memory parameterization. This enables structured organization, contextual reasoning, and adaptive knowledge retrieval, facilitating a more systematic and intelligent approach to memory management. As AI-driven personal agents like SECOND ME become increasingly integrated into digital ecosystems, SECOND ME further represents a critical step toward augmenting human-world interaction with persistent, contextually aware, and self-optimizing memory systems. We have open-sourced the fully localizable deployment system at GitHub: https://github.com/Mindverse/Second-Me.

LLM chatbot interfaces allow students to get instant, interactive assistance with homework, but doing so carelessly may not advance educational objectives. In this study, an interactive homework help system based on DeepSeek R1 is developed and first implemented for students enrolled in a large computer science beginning programming course. In addition to an assist button in a well-known code editor, our assistant also has a feedback option in our command-line automatic evaluator. It wraps student work in a personalized prompt that advances our educational objectives without offering answers straight away. We have discovered that our assistant can recognize students' conceptual difficulties and provide ideas, plans, and template code in pedagogically appropriate ways. However, among other mistakes, it occasionally incorrectly labels the correct student code as incorrect or encourages students to use correct-but-lesson-inappropriate approaches, which can lead to long and frustrating journeys for the students. After discussing many development and deployment issues, we provide our conclusions and future actions.