PeriodNet: Boosting the Potential of Attention Mechanism for Time Series Forecasting Bowen Zhao, Huanlai Xing, Zhiwen Xiao, Jincheng Peng, Li Feng, Xinhan Wang, Rong Qu, Hui Li The proposed PeriodNet hybridizes a period attention mechanism, an iterative grouping mechanism, and a period diffuser architecture to achieve accurate multivariate time series forecasting. The period attention mechanism captures temporal similarities among adjacent periods to improve time series modeling. The period diffuser architecture leverages multi-scale period features extracted by the encoder to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of time series forecasting. Abstract The attention mechanism has demonstrated remarkable potential in sequence modeling, exemplified by its successful application in natural language processing with models such as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT). Despite these advancements, its utilization in time series forecasting (TSF) has yet to meet expectations. Exploring a better network structure for attention in TSF holds immense significance across various domains. In this paper, we present PeriodNet with a brand new structure to forecast univari-ate and multivariate time series. PeriodNet incorporates period attention and sparse period attention mechanism for analyzing adjacent periods. It enhances the mining of local characteristics, periodic patterns, and global dependencies. For efficient cross-variable modeling, we introduce an iterative grouping mechanism which can directly reduce the cross-variable redundancy. To fully leverage the extracted features on the encoder side, we redesign the entire architecture of the vanilla Transformer and propose a period diffuser for precise multi-period prediction. Through comprehensive experiments conducted on eight datasets, we demonstrate that PeriodNet outperforms six state-of-the-art models in both univariate and multivariate TSF scenarios in terms of mean square error and mean absolute error.

Large language models deliver strong reasoning and tool-use skills, yet their computational demands make them impractical for edge or cost-sensitive deployments. We present \textbf{Xmodel-2.5}, a 1.3-billion-parameter small language model designed as a \emph{drop-in agent core}. Training with maximal-update parameterization ($μ$P) allows hyper-parameters tuned on a 20M-parameter proxy to transfer directly to the full model, even under the parameter-tied \emph{tie-word-embedding} architecture. A 1.4T-token Warmup--Stable--Decay curriculum is used, and we further show that \textbf{switching from AdamW to Muon during the decay phase} improves the 13-task reasoning average by 4.58\,\% while keeping every other hyper-parameter fixed, verifying that early AdamW stability can be paired with late Muon sharpening for better downstream performance. FP8-mixed-precision training balances accuracy and throughput. All checkpoints, recipes, and evaluation code are released under the Apache-2.0 license.\footnote{https://huggingface.co/XiaoduoAILab/Xmodel-2.5 and https://huggingface.co/XiaoduoAILab/Xmodel-2.5-history (training checkpoints).} Training code and evaluation harness: https://github.com/XiaoduoAILab/Xmodel-2.5.

Large Language Models (LLMs) require substantial computational resources, making model compression essential for efficient deployment in constrained environments. Among the dominant compression techniques: knowledge distillation, structured pruning, and low-bit quantization, their individual effects are well studied, but their interactions and optimal sequencing remain unclear. This work systematically examines how these techniques perform both independently and in combination when applied to the Qwen2.5 3B model. We evaluate multiple compression pipelines, including single, and proposed three-technique sequences, using perplexity, G-Eval, clarity, prompt alignment, and compression ratio as metrics. Our experiments show that quantization provides the greatest standalone compression, while pruning introduces moderate quality degradation. Critically, the ordering of techniques significantly affects the final model quality: the sequence Pruning, Knowledge Distillation, Quantization (P-KD-Q) yields the best balance, achieving a 3.68x compression ratio while preserving strong instruction-following and language understanding capabilities. Conversely, pipelines applying quantization early suffer severe performance degradation due to irreversible information loss that impairs subsequent training. Overall, this study offers practical insight into designing effective, ordering-aware compression pipelines for deploying LLMs in resource-limited settings.

METR's time horizon metric has grown exponentially since 2019, along with compute. However, it is unclear whether compute scaling will persist at current rates through 2030, raising the question of how possible compute slowdowns might impact AI agent capability forecasts. Given a model of time horizon as a function of training compute and algorithms, along with a model of how compute investment spills into algorithmic progress (which, notably, precludes the possibility of a software-only singularity), and the empirical fact that both time horizon and compute have grown at constant rates over 2019--2025, we derive that time horizon growth must be proportional to compute growth. We provide additional, albeit limited, experimental evidence consistent with this theory. We use our model to project time horizon growth under OpenAI's compute projection, finding substantial projected delays in some cases. For example, 1-month time horizons at $80\%$ reliability occur $7$ years later than simple trend extrapolation suggests.

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) with Evolutionary Computation (EC) has unlocked new frontiers in scientific discovery but remains shackled by a fundamental constraint: the reliance on an Oracle--an objective, machine-computable fitness function. This paper breaks this barrier by asking: Can evolution thrive in a purely subjective landscape governed solely by LLM judges? We introduce MADE (Multi-Agent Decomposed Evolution), a framework that tames the inherent noise of subjective evaluation through "Problem Specification." By decomposing vague instructions into specific, verifiable sub-requirements, MADE transforms high-variance LLM feedback into stable, precise selection pressure. The results are transformative: across complex benchmarks like DevAI and InfoBench, MADE outperforms strong baselines by over 50% in software requirement satisfaction (39.9% to 61.9%) and achieves a 95% perfect pass rate on complex instruction following. This work validates a fundamental paradigm shift: moving from optimizing "computable metrics" to "describable qualities," thereby unlocking evolutionary optimization for the vast open-ended domains where no ground truth exists.

Organization's communication is essential for public trust, but the rise of generative AI models has introduced significant challenges by generating persuasive content that can form competing narratives with official messages from government and commercial organizations at speed and scale. This has left agencies in a reactive position, often unaware of how these models construct their persuasive strategies, making it more difficult to sustain communication effectiveness. In this paper, we introduce a large LLM-generated persuasion attack dataset, which includes 134,136 attacks generated by GPT-4, Gemma 2, and Llama 3.1 on agency news. These attacks span 23 persuasive techniques from SemEval 2023 Task 3, directed toward 972 press releases from ten agencies. The generated attacks come in two mediums, press release statements and social media posts, covering both long-form and short-form communication strategies. We analyzed the moral resonance of these persuasion attacks to understand their attack vectors. GPT-4's attacks mainly focus on Care, with Authority and Loyalty also playing a role. Gemma 2 emphasizes Care and Authority, while Llama 3.1 centers on Loyalty and Care. Analyzing LLM-generated persuasive attacks across models will enable proactive defense, allow to create the reputation armor for organizations, and propel the development of both effective and resilient communications in the information ecosystem.

Large Language Models can break through knowledge and timeliness limitations by invoking external tools within the Model Context Protocol framework to achieve automated execution of complex tasks. However, with the rapid growth of enterprise-scale MCP services, efficiently and accurately matching target functionalities among thousands of heterogeneous tools has become a core challenge restricting system practicality. Existing approaches generally rely on full-prompt injection or static semantic retrieval, facing issues including semantic disconnection between user queries and tool descriptions, context inflation in LLM input, and high inference latency. To address these challenges, this paper proposes Z-Space, a data-generation-oriented multi-agent collaborative tool invocation framework Z-Space. The Z-Space framework establishes a multi-agent collaborative architecture and tool filtering algorithm: (1) A structured semantic understanding of user queries is achieved through an intent parsing model; (2) A tool filtering module (FSWW) based on fused subspace weighted algorithm realizes fine-grained semantic alignment between intents and tools without parameter tuning; (3) An inference execution agent is constructed to support dynamic planning and fault-tolerant execution for multi-step tasks. This framework has been deployed in the Eleme platform's technical division, serving large-scale test data generation scenarios across multiple business units including Taotian, Gaode, and Hema. Production data demonstrates that the system reduces average token consumption in tool inference by 96.26\% while achieving a 92\% tool invocation accuracy rate, significantly enhancing the efficiency and reliability of intelligent test data generation systems.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures are increasingly adopted in large language models (LLMs) for their scalability and efficiency. However, their modular structure introduces a unique vulnerability: adversaries can attempt to compress or repurpose models by pruning experts and cheaply fine-tuning the remainder, effectively bypassing licensing and security constraints. In this paper, we systematically study the prunability of MoE-LLMs under task-specific usage. We first develop an expert attribution framework that identifies the subset of experts most responsible for a given task, then evaluate the performance trade-offs of pruning and re-aligning these experts using active learning-driven fine-tuning. Our findings reveal a critical knowledge loss--recovery trade-off: while certain experts can be isolated to retain task accuracy, significant degradation occurs without targeted re-alignment. Based on this analysis, we propose defense strategies that aim to make MoE models harder to compress and fine-tune without authorization, including entangled expert training and selective fine-tuning protocols that resist unauthorized adaptation. By positioning expert pruning as both a threat vector and a defense target, this work highlights the dual-use nature of MoE modularity and provides the first systematic evaluation framework for secure specialization of MoE-LLMs.

SOCs and CSIRTs face increasing pressure to automate incident categorization, yet the use of cloud-based LLMs introduces costs, latency, and confidentiality risks. We investigate whether locally executed SLMs can meet this challenge. We evaluated 21 models ranging from 1B to 20B parameters, varying the temperature hyperparameter and measuring execution time and precision across two distinct architectures. The results indicate that temperature has little influence on performance, whereas the number of parameters and GPU capacity are decisive factors. Index T erms Small Language Models (SLMs), temperature hyperparameter, incident categorization, cybersecurity automation, prompt engineering, on-premises inference, model evaluation, execution time analysis, GPU architectures, local LLM deployment.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables large language models (LLMs) to access external knowledge, helping mitigate hallucinations and enhance domain-specific expertise. Graph-based RAG enhances structural reasoning by introducing explicit relational organization that enables information propagation across semantically connected text units. However, these methods typically rely on Euclidean embeddings that capture semantic similarity but lack a geometric notion of hierarchical depth, limiting their ability to represent abstraction relationships inherent in complex knowledge graphs. To capture both fine-grained semantics and global hierarchy, we propose HyperbolicRAG, a retrieval framework that integrates hyperbolic geometry into graph-based RAG. HyperbolicRAG introduces three key designs: (1) a depth-aware representation learner that embeds nodes within a shared Poincare manifold to align semantic similarity with hierarchical containment, (2) an unsupervised contrastive regularization that enforces geometric consistency across abstraction levels, and (3) a mutual-ranking fusion mechanism that jointly exploits retrieval signals from Euclidean and hyperbolic spaces, emphasizing cross-space agreement during inference. Extensive experiments across multiple QA benchmarks demonstrate that HyperbolicRAG outperforms competitive baselines, including both standard RAG and graph-augmented baselines.