Visual language models encounter challenges in computational efficiency and latency, primarily due to the substantial redundancy in the token representations of high-resolution images and videos. Current attention/similarity-based compression algorithms suffer from either position bias or class imbalance, leading to significant accuracy degradation. They also fail to generalize to shallow LLM layers, which exhibit weaker cross-modal interactions. T o address this, we extend token compression to the visual encoder through an effective iterative merging scheme that is orthogonal in spatial axes to accelerate the computation across the entire VLM. Furthermoer, we integrate a spectrum pruning unit into LLM through an attention/similarity-free low-pass filter, which gradually prunes redundant visual tokens and is fully compatible to modern FlashAttention. On this basis, we propose Lossless Ultimate Vision tokens Compression (LUVC) framework. LUVC systematically compresses visual tokens until complete elimination at the final layer of LLM, so that the high-dimensional visual features are gradually fused into the multimodal queries. The experiments show that LUVC achieves a 2 speedup inference in language model with negligible accuracy degradation, and the training-free characteristic enables immediate deployment across multiple VLMs.

The significant increase in software production, driven by the acceleration of development cycles over the past two decades, has led to a steady rise in software vulnerabilities, as shown by statistics published yearly by the CVE program. The automation of the source code vulnerability detection (CVD) process has thus become essential, and several methods have been proposed ranging from the well established program analysis techniques to the more recent AI-based methods. Our research investigates Large Language Models (LLMs), which are considered among the most performant AI models to date, for the CVD task. The objective is to study their performance and apply different state-of-the-art techniques to enhance their effectiveness for this task. We explore various fine-tuning and prompt engineering settings. We particularly suggest one novel approach for fine-tuning LLMs which we call Double Fine-tuning, and also test the understudied Test-Time fine-tuning approach. We leverage the recent open-source Llama-3.1 8B, with source code samples extracted from BigVul and PrimeVul datasets. Our conclusions highlight the importance of fine-tuning to resolve the task, the performance of Double tuning, as well as the potential of Llama models for CVD. Though prompting proved ineffective, Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) performed relatively well as an example selection technique. Overall, some of our research questions have been answered, and many are still on hold, which leaves us many future work perspectives. Code repository is available here: https://github.com/DynaSoumhaneOuchebara/Llama-based-vulnerability-detection.

Our work introduces the DermETAS-SNA LLM Assistant that integrates Dermatology-focused Evolutionary Transformer Architecture Search with StackNet Augmented LLM. The assistant dynamically learns skin-disease classifiers and provides medically informed descriptions to facilitate clinician-patient interpretation. Contributions include: (1) Developed an ETAS framework on the SKINCON dataset to optimize a Vision Transformer (ViT) tailored for dermatological feature representation and then fine-tuned binary classifiers for each of the 23 skin disease categories in the DermNet dataset to enhance classification performance; (2) Designed a StackNet architecture that integrates multiple fine-tuned binary ViT classifiers to enhance predictive robustness and mitigate class imbalance issues; (3) Implemented a RAG pipeline, termed Diagnostic Explanation and Retrieval Model for Dermatology, which harnesses the capabilities of the Google Gemini 2.5 Pro LLM architecture to generate personalized, contextually informed diagnostic descriptions and explanations for patients, leveraging a repository of verified dermatological materials; (4) Performed extensive experimental evaluations on 23 skin disease categories to demonstrate performance increase, achieving an overall F1-score of 56.30% that surpasses SkinGPT-4 (48.51%) by a considerable margin, representing a performance increase of 16.06%; (5) Conducted a domain-expert evaluation, with eight licensed medical doctors, of the clinical responses generated by our AI assistant for seven dermatological conditions. Our results show a 92% agreement rate with the assessments provided by our AI assistant (6) Created a proof-of-concept prototype that fully integrates our DermETAS-SNA LLM into our AI assistant to demonstrate its practical feasibility for real-world clinical and educational applications.

Abstract--Human Activity Recognition (HAR) underpins applications in healthcare, rehabilitation, fitness tracking, and smart environments, yet existing deep learning approaches demand dataset-specific training, large labeled corpora, and significant computational resources. We introduce RAG-HAR, a training-free retrieval-augmented framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) for HAR. RAG-HAR computes lightweight statistical descriptors, retrieves semantically similar samples from a vector database, and uses this contextual evidence to make LLM based activity identification. We further enhance RAG-HAR by first applying prompt optimization and introducing an LLM-based activity descriptor that generates context-enriched vector databases for delivering accurate and highly relevant contextual information. Along with these mechanisms, RAG-HAR achieves state-of-the-art performance across six diverse HAR benchmarks. RAG-HAR moves beyond known behaviors, enabling the recognition and meaningful labelling of multiple unseen human activities. Human Activity Recognition (HAR) from wearable sensor data enables continuous monitoring, anomaly detection, and personalized interventions across healthcare [3], rehabilitation [31], fitness [28], and smart environments [14]. Despite wide-ranging applications, HAR remains challenging due to inter-subject variability, differences in sensor placement, device heterogeneity, and subtle distinctions between activities that exhibit similar motion patterns [39]. Those challenges create a strong need for accurate, generalizable, and cost-efficient solutions. Deep learning (DL) has become the dominant paradigm for HAR, with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) [6], [43], recurrent architectures [15], [17], and attention-based models [2] achieving state-of-the-art (SOT A) performance on benchmark datasets. However, DL-based HAR faces three critical limitations: (i) costly and time-consuming training procedures tailored to each dataset; (ii) performance degradation under domain shift across subjects, sensor placements, or devices; and (iii) heavy dependence on large labeled datasets [7], [35]. Despite advances in DL, these limitations leave HAR without a practical solution that is simultaneously training-free, generalizable, and scalable. To address this gap, this paper explores a fundamentally different paradigm: leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) as reasoning engines for HAR.

Video Large Multimodal Models (VLMMs) have shown impressive performance in video understanding, yet their ability to accurately capture the temporal order of multiple events remains underexplored. We interestingly observe that, even when video frames are scrambled, models perform very well on the existing benchmarks by comprehensive experiments. This implies that VLMMs may not necessarily rely on accurate sequential processing of visual events, but instead depend on prior knowledge of typical scenarios to answer the question. To benchmark temporal understanding capabilities in VLMMs, we propose VECTOR, designed to explicitly assess a model's ability to identify the temporal order of events. On this benchmark, we observe that various VLMMs often fail to understand the orders of events. To address this, we propose MECOT (Multi-Event instruction fine-tuning with Chain-of-Thought), which (1) trains models on detailed, event-by-event video descriptions and (2) using chain-of-thought prompts at inference to enhance temporal awareness. MECOT outperforms prior arts on VECTOR as well as improving performance on existing video benchmarks, implying effectiveness of temporal understanding. We release our code, model and datasets.

To counter fragmented, high-risk adoption of commercial AI tools, we built and ran an institutional AI platform in a six-month, 300-user pilot, showing that a university of applied sciences can offer advanced AI with fair access, transparent risks, controlled costs, and alignment with European law. Commercial AI subscriptions create unequal access and compliance risks through opaque processing and non-EU hosting, yet banning them is neither realistic nor useful. Institutions need a way to provide powerful AI in a sovereign, accountable form. Our solution is a governed gateway platform with three layers: a ChatGPT-style frontend linked to institutional identity that makes model choice explicit; a gateway core enforcing policy, controlling access and budgets, and routing traffic to EU infrastructure by default; and a provider layer wrapping commercial and open-source models in institutional model cards that consolidate vendor documentation into one governance interface. The pilot ran reliably with no privacy incidents and strong adoption, enabling EU-default routing, managed spending, and transparent model choices. Only the gateway pattern combines model diversity and rapid innovation with institutional control. The central insight: AI is not a support function but strategy, demanding dedicated leadership. Sustainable operation requires governance beyond traditional boundaries. We recommend establishing a formal AI Officer role combining technical literacy, governance authority, and educational responsibility. Without it, AI decisions stay ad-hoc and institutional exposure grows. With it, higher-education institutions can realistically operate their own multi-provider AI platform, provided they govern AI as seriously as they teach it.

The rapid scaling of large computational models has led to a critical increase in energy and compute costs. Inspired by biological systems where structure and function emerge from low-energy configurations, we introduce StructuredDNA, a sparse architecture framework for modular, energy-aware Transformer routing. StructuredDNA replaces dense Mixture-of-Experts routing with a bio-physical, energy-guided routing layer based on semantic energy minimization. Inputs are dynamically grouped into semantic codons, and routing selects a single expert by minimizing a global energy functional that combines cohesion, uncertainty, and computational cost. We validate StructuredDNA on both specialized (BioASQ) and open-domain benchmarks (WikiText-103). On BioASQ (K = 50), we achieve a 97.7% reduction in Energy Utilization Density (EUD) and a Semantic Stability Index (SSI) of 0.998. We further demonstrate a Semantic Scaling Law on WikiText-103, showing that the architecture generalizes to open domains by scaling expert granularity (K = 2048) while maintaining more than 99% energy efficiency. StructuredDNA thus establishes a robust, domain-agnostic paradigm for future sparse computational frameworks. StructuredDNA provides an explicit link between bio-physical principles and sparse expert routing in Transformer architectures, and points toward future energy-aware, modular, and scalable computational systems. We discuss limitations of this proof-of-concept study and outline directions for scaling the approach to larger models, datasets, and hardware platforms. The StructuredDNA implementation is available at https://github.com/InnoDeep-repos/StructuredDNA .

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to their widespread adoption in daily applications. Despite their impressive capabilities, they remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, as even minor meaning-preserving changes such as synonym substitutions can lead to incorrect predictions. As a result, certifying the robustness of LLMs against such adversarial prompts is of vital importance. Existing approaches focused on word deletion or simple denoising strategies to achieve robustness certification. However, these methods face two critical limitations: (1) they yield loose robustness bounds due to the lack of semantic validation for perturbed outputs and (2) they suffer from high computational costs due to repeated sampling. To address these limitations, we propose CluCERT, a novel framework for certifying LLM robustness via clustering-guided denoising smoothing. Specifically, to achieve tighter certified bounds, we introduce a semantic clustering filter that reduces noisy samples and retains meaningful perturbations, supported by theoretical analysis. Furthermore, we enhance computational efficiency through two mechanisms: a refine module that extracts core semantics, and a fast synonym substitution strategy that accelerates the denoising process. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on various downstream tasks and jailbreak defense scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing certified approaches in both robustness bounds and computational efficiency.

Language Models (LMs) struggle with complex, interdependent instructions, particularly in high-stakes domains like finance where precision is critical. We introduce FIFE, a novel, high-difficulty benchmark designed to assess LM instruction-following capabilities for financial analysis tasks. FIFE comprises 88 human-authored prompts and employs a verification system with chainable, verifiable constraints for fine-grained reward signals. We evaluate 53 models (proprietary, open-weight, open-source) in a zero-shot setting. Our key findings reveal a clear performance hierarchy: the top open-weight model (76.1 strict / 79.5 loose) surpasses the leading proprietary system (65.9 strict / 70.5 loose), while the best open-source models lag significantly (45.5 strict / 48.9 loose). However, even top-performing models struggle with FIFE's complex requirements, failing to achieve perfect compliance. We release our dataset and code as an open-source resource to promote research in Reinforcement Learning for the financial domain.

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) enables efficient Continual Learning but often suffers from catastrophic forgetting due to destructive interference between tasks. Our analysis reveals that this degradation is primarily driven by antagonistic directional updates where new task gradients directly oppose the historical weight trajectory. To address this, we propose PS-LoRA (Parameter Stability LoRA), a framework designed to resolve conflicts by aligning updates within the optimization subspace. Our approach employs a dual-regularization objective that penalizes conflicting directions and constrains magnitude deviations to ensure consistency with prior knowledge. Additionally, we implement a magnitude-based merging strategy to consolidate sequential adapters into a robust representation without retraining. Experiments on NLP and Vision benchmarks show that PS-LoRA outperforms state-of-the-art methods by preserving the stability of learned representations while efficiently adapting to new domains.