As IC design grows more complex, automating comprehension and documentation of RTL code has become increasingly important. Engineers currently should manually interpret existing RTL code and write specifications, a slow and error-prone process. Although LLMs have been studied for generating RTL from specifications, automated specification generation remains underexplored, largely due to the lack of reliable evaluation methods. To address this gap, we investigate how prompting strategies affect RTL-to-specification quality and introduce metrics for faithfully evaluating generated specs. We also benchmark open-source and commercial LLMs, providing a foundation for more automated and efficient specification workflows in IC design.

Multimodal reasoning has become a cornerstone of modern AI research. Standardized exam questions offer a uniquely rigorous testbed for such reasoning, providing structured visual contexts and verifiable answers. While recent progress has largely focused on algorithmic advances such as reinforcement learning (e.g., GRPO, DPO), the data centric foundations of vision language reasoning remain less explored. We show that supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with high-quality data can rival proprietary approaches. To this end, we compile a 161.4 million token multimodal dataset combining textbook question-solution pairs, curriculum aligned diagrams, and contextual materials, and fine-tune Qwen-2.5VL-32B using an optimized reasoning syntax (QMSA). The resulting model achieves 78.6% accuracy, only 1.0% below Gemini 2.0 Flash, on our newly released benchmark YKSUniform, which standardizes 1,854 multimodal exam questions across 309 curriculum topics. Our results reveal that data composition and representational syntax play a decisive role in multimodal reasoning. This work establishes a data centric framework for advancing open weight vision language models, demonstrating that carefully curated and curriculum-grounded multimodal data can elevate supervised fine-tuning to near state-of-the-art performance.

Understanding the nuances in everyday language is pivotal for advancements in computational linguistics & emotions research. Traditional lexicon-based tools such as LIWC and Pattern have long served as foundational instruments in this domain. LIWC is the most extensively validated word count based text analysis tool in the social sciences and Pattern is an open source Python library offering functionalities for NLP. However, everyday language is inherently spontaneous, richly expressive, & deeply context dependent. To explore the capabilities of LLMs in capturing the valences of daily narratives in Flemish, we first conducted a study involving approximately 25,000 textual responses from 102 Dutch-speaking participants. Each participant provided narratives prompted by the question, "What is happening right now and how do you feel about it?", accompanied by self-assessed valence ratings on a continuous scale from -50 to +50. We then assessed the performance of three Dutch-specific LLMs in predicting these valence scores, and compared their outputs to those generated by LIWC and Pattern. Our findings indicate that, despite advancements in LLM architectures, these Dutch tuned models currently fall short in accurately capturing the emotional valence present in spontaneous, real-world narratives. This study underscores the imperative for developing culturally and linguistically tailored models/tools that can adeptly handle the complexities of natural language use. Enhancing automated valence analysis is not only pivotal for advancing computational methodologies but also holds significant promise for psychological research with ecologically valid insights into human daily experiences. We advocate for increased efforts in creating comprehensive datasets & finetuning LLMs for low-resource languages like Flemish, aiming to bridge the gap between computational linguistics & emotion research.

Grammatical error correction for Indic languages faces limited supervision, diverse scripts, and rich morphology. We propose an augmentation-free setup that uses instruction-tuned large language models and conservative decoding. A 12B GEMMA 3 model is instruction-tuned in bnb 4-bit precision with parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) and Alpaca-style formatting. Decoding follows a deterministic, constraint-aware procedure with a lightweight normaliser that encourages minimal, meaning-preserving edits. We operationalise inference, subsequent to instruction fine-tuning (IFT), via a fixed, language-specific prompt directly synthesised from a deterministic error classifier's taxonomy, label distributions, and precedence ordering computed on the training corpus. Under the official untuned GLEU evaluation, the system scores 92.41 on Malayalam, sixth overall, and 81.44 on Hindi, third overall. These results indicate that classifier-informed prompt design, adapter-based instruction tuning, and deterministic decoding provide a reproducible and a computationally efficient alternative to augmentation-centred pipelines for Indic GEC. The approach also motivates future work on stronger morphosyntactic constraints and human-centred evaluation of conservative edits.

Modern recommender systems struggle to effectively utilize the rich, yet high-dimensional and noisy, multi-modal features generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). Treating these features as static inputs decouples them from the core recommendation task. We address this limitation with a novel framework built on a key insight: deeply fusing multi-modal and collaborative knowledge for representation denoising. Our unified architecture introduces two primary technical innovations. First, we integrate dimensionality reduction directly into the recommendation model, enabling end-to-end co-training that makes the reduction process aware of the final ranking objective. Second, we introduce a contrastive learning objective that explicitly incorporates the collaborative filtering signal into the latent space. This synergistic process refines raw LLM embeddings, filtering noise while amplifying task-relevant signals. Extensive experiments confirm our method's superior discriminative power, proving that this integrated fusion and denoising strategy is critical for achieving state-of-the-art performance. Our work provides a foundational paradigm for effectively harnessing LLMs in recommender systems.

Researchers have proposed numerous methods to detect vulnerabilities in JavaScript, especially those assisted by Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the actual capability of LLMs in JavaScript vulnerability detection remains questionable, necessitating systematic evaluation and comprehensive benchmarks. Unfortunately, existing benchmarks suffer from three critical limitations: (1) incomplete coverage, such as covering a limited subset of CWE types; (2) underestimation of LLM capabilities caused by unreasonable ground truth labeling; and (3) overestimation due to unrealistic cases such as using isolated vulnerable files rather than complete projects. In this paper, we introduce, for the first time, three principles for constructing a benchmark for JavaScript vulnerability detection that directly address these limitations: (1) comprehensiveness, (2) no underestimation, and (3) no overestimation. Guided by these principles, we propose FORGEJS, the first automatic benchmark generation framework for evaluating LLMs' capability in JavaScript vulnerability detection. Then, we use FORGEJS to construct ARENAJS-the first systematic benchmark for LLM-based JavaScript vulnerability detection-and further propose JUDGEJS, an automatic evaluation framework. We conduct the first systematic evaluation of LLMs for JavaScript vulnerability detection, leveraging JUDGEJS to assess seven popular commercial LLMs on ARENAJS. The results show that LLMs not only exhibit limited reasoning capabilities, but also suffer from severe robustness defects, indicating that reliable JavaScript vulnerability detection with LLMs remains an open challenge.

Recent efforts on Diffusion Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have primarily focused on developing more sophisticated routing mechanisms. However, we observe that the underlying architectural configuration space remains markedly under-explored. Inspired by the MoE design paradigms established in large language models (LLMs), we identify a set of crucial architectural factors for building effective Diffusion MoE models--including DeepSeek-style expert modules, alternative intermediate widths, varying expert counts, and enhanced attention positional encodings. Our systematic study reveals that carefully tuning these configurations is essential for unlocking the full potential of Diffusion MoE models, often yielding gains that exceed those achieved by routing innovations alone. Through extensive experiments, we present novel architectures that can be efficiently applied to both latent and pixel-space diffusion frameworks, which provide a practical and efficient training recipe that enables Diffusion MoE models to surpass strong baselines while using equal or fewer activated parameters. All code and models are publicly available at: https://github.com/yhlleo/EfficientMoE.

Generative diversity varies significantly across discrete latent generative models such as AR, MIM, and Diffusion. We propose a diagnostic framework, grounded in Information Bottleneck (IB) theory, to analyze the underlying strategies resolving this behavior. The framework models generation as a conflict between a 'Compression Pressure' - a drive to minimize overall codebook entropy - and a 'Diversity Pressure' - a drive to maximize conditional entropy given an input. We further decompose this diversity into two primary sources: 'Path Diversity', representing the choice of high-level generative strategies, and 'Execution Diversity', the randomness in executing a chosen strategy. To make this decomposition operational, we introduce three zero-shot, inference-time interventions that directly perturb the latent generative process and reveal how models allocate and express diversity. Application of this probe-based framework to representative AR, MIM, and Diffusion systems reveals three distinct strategies: "Diversity-Prioritized" (MIM), "Compression-Prioritized" (AR), and "Decoupled" (Diffusion). Our analysis provides a principled explanation for their behavioral differences and informs a novel inference-time diversity enhancement technique.

Test-time scaling (TTS) -- the dynamic allocation of compute during inference -- is a promising direction for improving reasoning in large language models (LLMs). However, a systematic comparison of well-known TTS strategies under identical conditions is missing, and the influence of model type and problem difficulty on performance remains unclear. To address these gaps, we conduct the first large-scale study of TTS, spanning over thirty billion tokens generated using eight open-source LLMs (7B to 235B parameters), across four reasoning datasets. We observe three consistent trends: (1) no single TTS strategy universally dominates; (2) reasoning models exhibit distinct trace-quality patterns across problem difficulty and trace length, forming short-horizon and long-horizon categories; and (3) for a given model type, the optimal TTS performance scales monotonically with compute budget. Based on these insights, we provide a practical recipe for selecting the best TTS strategy, considering problem difficulty, model type, and compute budget, providing a practical guide to effective inference-time scaling.

We introduce LLM CHESS, an evaluation framework designed to probe the generalization of reasoning and instruction-following abilities in large language models (LLMs) through extended agentic interaction in the domain of chess. We rank over 50 open and closed source models by playing against a random opponent using a range of behavioral metrics, including win and loss rates, move quality, move legality, hallucinated actions, and game duration. For a subset of top reasoning models, we derive an Elo estimate by playing against a chess engine with variably configured skill, which allows for comparisons between models in an easily understandable way. Despite the simplicity of the instruction-following task and the weakness of the opponent, many state-of-the-art models struggle to complete games or achieve consistent wins. Similar to other benchmarks on complex reasoning tasks, our experiments reveal a clear separation between reasoning and non-reasoning models. However, unlike existing static benchmarks, the stochastic and dynamic nature of LLM CHESS uniquely reduces overfitting and memorization while preventing benchmark saturation, proving difficult even for top reasoning models. To support future work on evaluating reasoning and instruction-following in LLMs, we release our experimental framework, a public leaderboard, and a dataset of associated games.