Large Language Model
Re(Visiting) Time Series Foundation Models in Finance
Rahimikia, Eghbal, Ni, Hao, Wang, Weiguan
Financial time series forecasting is central to trading, portfolio optimization, and risk management, yet it remains challenging due to noisy, non-stationary, and heterogeneous data. Recent advances in time series foundation models (TSFMs), inspired by large language models, offer a new paradigm for learning generalizable temporal representations from large and diverse datasets. This paper presents the first comprehensive empirical study of TSFMs in global financial markets. Using a large-scale dataset of daily excess returns across diverse markets, we evaluate zero-shot inference, fine-tuning, and pre-training from scratch against strong benchmark models. We find that off-the-shelf pre-trained TSFMs perform poorly in zero-shot and fine-tuning settings, whereas models pre-trained from scratch on financial data achieve substantial forecasting and economic improvements, underscoring the value of domain-specific adaptation. Increasing the dataset size, incorporating synthetic data augmentation, and applying hyperparameter tuning further enhance performance.
For Those Who May Find Themselves on the Red Team
This position paper argues that literary scholars must engage with large language model (LLM) interpretability research. While doing so will involve ideological struggle, if not out-right complicity, the necessity of this engagement is clear: the abiding instrumentality of current approaches to interpretability cannot be the only standard by which we measure interpretation with LLMs. One site at which this struggle could take place, I suggest, is the red team.
Real-Time Personalized Content Adaptation through Matrix Factorization and Context-Aware Federated Learning
Puppala, Sai, Hossain, Ismail, Alam, Md Jahangir, Talukder, Sajedul
Our study presents a multifaceted approach to enhancing user interaction and content relevance in social media platforms through a federated learning framework. We introduce personalized LLM Federated Learning and Context-based Social Media models. In our framework, multiple client entities receive a foundational GPT model, which is fine-tuned using locally collected social media data while ensuring data privacy through federated aggregation. Key modules focus on categorizing user-generated content, computing user persona scores, and identifying relevant posts from friends networks. By integrating a sophisticated social engagement quantification method with matrix factorization techniques, our system delivers real-time personalized content suggestions tailored to individual preferences. Furthermore, an adaptive feedback loop, alongside a robust readability scoring algorithm, significantly enhances the quality and relevance of the content presented to users. This comprehensive solution not only addresses the challenges of content filtering and recommendation but also fosters a more engaging social media experience while safeguarding user privacy, setting a new standard for personalized interactions in digital platforms.
ORIGAMISPACE: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs in Multi-Step Spatial Reasoning with Mathematical Constraints
Xu, Rui, Lu, Dakuan, Zhao, Zicheng, Tan, Xiaoyu, Wang, Xintao, Yuan, Siyu, Chen, Jiangjie, Xu, Yinghui
Spatial reasoning is a key capability in the field of artificial intelligence, especially crucial in areas such as robotics, computer vision, and natural language understanding. However, evaluating the ability of multimodal large language models(MLLMs) in complex spatial reasoning still faces challenges, particularly in scenarios requiring multi-step reasoning and precise mathematical constraints. This paper introduces ORIGAMISPACE, a new dataset and benchmark designed to evaluate the multi-step spatial reasoning ability and the capacity to handle mathematical constraints of MLLMs through origami tasks. The dataset contains 350 data instances,each comprising a strictly formatted crease pattern (CP diagram), the Compiled Flat Pattern, the complete Folding Process, and the final Folded Shape Image. We propose four evaluation tasks: Pattern Prediction, Multi-step Spatial Reasoning, Spatial Relationship Prediction, and End-to-End CP Code Generation. For the CP code generation task, we design an interactive environment and explore the possibility of using reinforcement learning methods to train MLLMs. Through experiments on existing MLLMs, we initially reveal the strengths and weaknesses of these models in handling complex spatial reasoning tasks.
General Agentic Memory Via Deep Research
Yan, B. Y., Li, Chaofan, Qian, Hongjin, Lu, Shuqi, Liu, Zheng
Memory is critical for AI agents, yet the widely-adopted static memory, aiming to create readily available memory in advance, is inevitably subject to severe information loss. To address this limitation, we propose a novel framework called \textbf{general agentic memory (GAM)}. GAM follows the principle of "\textbf{just-in time (JIT) compilation}" where it focuses on creating optimized contexts for its client at runtime while keeping only simple but useful memory during the offline stage. To this end, GAM employs a duo-design with the following components. 1) \textbf{Memorizer}, which highlights key historical information using a lightweight memory, while maintaining complete historical information within a universal page-store. 2) \textbf{Researcher}, which retrieves and integrates useful information from the page-store for its online request guided by the pre-constructed memory. This design allows GAM to effectively leverage the agentic capabilities and test-time scalability of frontier large language models (LLMs), while also facilitating end-to-end performance optimization through reinforcement learning. In our experimental study, we demonstrate that GAM achieves substantial improvement on various memory-grounded task completion scenarios against existing memory systems.
SmolKalam: Ensemble Quality-Filtered Translation at Scale for High Quality Arabic Post-Training Data
Alrashed, Sultan, Helwe, Chadi, Orabona, Francesco
Although the community has tackled the acquisition of high-quality Arabic pretraining data, we still lack large-scale, multi-turn Arabic datasets that include reasoning and tool calling. Naive translation can work at the pretraining scale, but post-training demands much higher quality, which requires a stricter approach to dataset curation. In this work, we introduce SmolKalam, a translation of Smoltalk2 that uses a multi-model ensemble translation pipeline, applies quality filtering, and examines effective translation techniques for traditional decoder-only models through ablations.
A Multimodal Conversational Agent for Tabular Data Analysis
Awad, Mohammad Nour Al, Ivanov, Sergey, Tikhonova, Olga, Khodnenko, Ivan
Abstract--Large language models (LLMs) can reshape information processing by handling data analysis, visualization, and interpretation in an interactive, context-aware dialogue with users, including voice interaction, while maintaining high performance. The system lets users query datasets with voice or text instructions and receive answers as plots, tables, statistics, or spoken explanations. Built on LLMs, the suggested design combines OpenAI Whisper automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, Qwen-coder code generation LLM/model, custom sandboxed execution tools, and Coqui library for text-to-speech (TTS) within an agentic orchestration loop. Unlike text-only analysis tools, it adapts responses across modalities and supports multi-turn dialogues grounded in dataset context. In an evaluation of 48 tasks on three datasets, our prototype achieved 95.8% accuracy with model-only generation time under 1.7 seconds (excluding ASR and execution time). A comparison across five LLM sizes (1.5B-32B) revealed accuracy-latency-cost trade-offs, with a 7B model providing the best balance for interactive use. By routing between conversation with user and code execution, constrained to a transparent sandbox, with simultaneously grounding prompts in schema-level context, the T alk2Data agent reliably retrieves actionable insights from tables while making computations verifiable. In the article, except for the T alk2Data agent itself, we discuss implications for human-data interaction, trust in LLM-driven analytics, and future extensions toward large-scale multimodal assistants. Interacting with data often requires programming skills or statistical expertise, creating barriers for managers, analysts, and other non-technical users [1], [2]. Natural language interfaces (NLIs) aim to improve this information seeking process by allowing users to query data conversationally [3], [4]. At the same time, voice interfaces are becoming increasingly common in daily life, yet existing voice assistants remain limited: they can answer factual questions or control devices, but they lack the analytical capabilities needed for meaningful data exploration.
Natural Emergent Misalignment from Reward Hacking in Production RL
MacDiarmid, Monte, Wright, Benjamin, Uesato, Jonathan, Benton, Joe, Kutasov, Jon, Price, Sara, Bouscal, Naia, Bowman, Sam, Bricken, Trenton, Cloud, Alex, Denison, Carson, Gasteiger, Johannes, Greenblatt, Ryan, Leike, Jan, Lindsey, Jack, Mikulik, Vlad, Perez, Ethan, Rodrigues, Alex, Thomas, Drake, Webson, Albert, Ziegler, Daniel, Hubinger, Evan
We show that when large language models learn to reward hack on production RL environments, this can result in egregious emergent misalignment. We start with a pretrained model, impart knowledge of reward hacking strategies via synthetic document finetuning or prompting, and train on a selection of real Anthropic production coding environments. Unsurprisingly, the model learns to reward hack. Surprisingly, the model generalizes to alignment faking, cooperation with malicious actors, reasoning about malicious goals, and attempting sabotage when used with Claude Code, including in the codebase for this paper. Applying RLHF safety training using standard chat-like prompts results in aligned behavior on chat-like evaluations, but misalignment persists on agentic tasks. Three mitigations are effective: (i) preventing the model from reward hacking; (ii) increasing the diversity of RLHF safety training; and (iii) "inoculation prompting", wherein framing reward hacking as acceptable behavior during training removes misaligned generalization even when reward hacking is learned.
Future Is Unevenly Distributed: Forecasting Ability of LLMs Depends on What We're Asking
Karkar, Chinmay, Chopra, Paras
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate partial forecasting competence across social, political, and economic events. Y et, their predictive ability varies sharply with domain structure and prompt framing. We investigate how forecasting performance varies with different model families on real-world questions about events that happened beyond the model cutoff date. We analyze how context, question type, and external knowledge affect accuracy and calibration, and how adding factual news context modifies belief formation and failure modes. Our results show that forecasting ability is highly variable as it depends on what, and how, we ask.
Towards Robust and Fair Next Visit Diagnosis Prediction under Noisy Clinical Notes with Large Language Models
A decade of rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) has opened new opportunities for clinical decision support systems (CDSS), with large language models (LLMs) demonstrating strong reasoning abilities on timely medical tasks. However, clinical texts are often degraded by human errors or failures in automated pipelines, raising concerns about the reliability and fairness of AI-assisted decision-making. Y et the impact of such degradations remains under-investigated, particularly regarding how noise-induced shifts can heighten predictive uncertainty and unevenly affect demographic subgroups. We present a systematic study of state-of-the-art LLMs under diverse text corruption scenarios, focusing on robustness and equity in next-visit diagnosis prediction. To address the challenge posed by the large diagnostic label space, we introduce a clinically grounded label-reduction scheme and a hierarchical chain-of-thought (CoT) strategy that emulates clinicians' reasoning. Our approach improves robustness and reduces subgroup instability under degraded inputs, advancing the reliable use of LLMs in CDSS.