Modern vision-language models (VLMs) deliver impressive predictive accuracy yet offer little insight into 'why' a decision is reached, frequently hallucinating facts, particularly when encountering out-of-distribution data. Neurosymbolic frameworks address this by pairing black-box perception with interpretable symbolic reasoning, but current methods extract their symbols solely from task labels, leaving them weakly grounded in the underlying visual data. In this paper, we introduce a multi-agent system - Concept-RuleNet that reinstates visual grounding while retaining transparent reasoning. Specifically, a multimodal concept generator first mines discriminative visual concepts directly from a representative subset of training images. Next, these visual concepts are utilized to condition symbol discovery, anchoring the generations in real image statistics and mitigating label bias. Subsequently, symbols are composed into executable first-order rules by a large language model reasoner agent - yielding interpretable neurosymbolic rules. Finally, during inference, a vision verifier agent quantifies the degree of presence of each symbol and triggers rule execution in tandem with outputs of black-box neural models, predictions with explicit reasoning pathways. Experiments on five benchmarks, including two challenging medical-imaging tasks and three underrepresented natural-image datasets, show that our system augments state-of-the-art neurosymbolic baselines by an average of 5% while also reducing the occurrence of hallucinated symbols in rules by up to 50%.

Recent advancements in end-to-end autonomous driving systems (ADSs) underscore their potential for perception and planning capabilities. However, challenges remain. Complex driving scenarios contain rich semantic information, yet ambiguous or noisy semantics can compromise decision reliability, while interference between multiple driving tasks may hinder optimal planning. Furthermore, prolonged inference latency slows decision-making, increasing the risk of unsafe driving behaviors. To address these challenges, we propose ExpertAD, a novel framework that enhances the performance of ADS with Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture. We introduce a Perception Adapter (PA) to amplify task-critical features, ensuring contextually relevant scene understanding, and a Mixture of Sparse Experts (MoSE) to minimize task interference during prediction, allowing for effective and efficient planning. Our experiments show that ExpertAD reduces average collision rates by up to 20% and inference latency by 25% compared to prior methods. We further evaluate its multi-skill planning capabilities in rare scenarios (e.g., accidents, yielding to emergency vehicles) and demonstrate strong generalization to unseen urban environments. Additionally, we present a case study that illustrates its decision-making process in complex driving scenarios.

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a lightweight draft model to propose tokens that are later verified by a stronger target model. While effective in centralized systems, its behavior in decentralized settings, where network latency often dominates compute, remains under-characterized. We present Decentralized Speculative Decoding (DSD), a plug-and-play framework for decentralized inference that turns communication delay into useful computation by verifying multiple candidate tokens in parallel across distributed nodes. We further introduce an adaptive speculative verification strategy that adjusts acceptance thresholds by token-level semantic importance, delivering an additional 15% to 20% end-to-end speedup without retraining. In theory, DSD reduces cross-node communication cost by approximately (N-1)t1(k-1)/k, where t1 is per-link latency and k is the average number of tokens accepted per round. In practice, DSD achieves up to 2.56x speedup on HumanEval and 2.59x on GSM8K, surpassing the Eagle3 baseline while preserving accuracy. These results show that adapting speculative decoding for decentralized execution provides a system-level optimization that converts network stalls into throughput, enabling faster distributed LLM inference with no model retraining or architectural changes.

What is reasoning? This question has driven centuries of philosophical inquiry, from Aristotle's syllogisms to modern computational complexity theory. In the age of large language models achieving superhuman performance on benchmarks like GSM8K (95\% accuracy) and HumanEval (90\% pass@1), we must ask: have these systems learned to \emph{reason}, or have they learned to \emph{pattern-match over reasoning traces}? This paper argues for a specific answer: \textbf{reasoning is iterative operator application in state spaces, converging to fixed points}. This definition is not merely philosophical -- it has concrete architectural implications that explain both the failures of current systems and the path to genuine reasoning capabilities. Our investigation begins with a puzzle (OpenXOR), progresses through theory (OpenOperator), and culminates in a working solution (OpenLM) that achieves 76\% accuracy where state-of-the-art LLMs achieve 0\%. This is not about criticizing existing systems, but about \emph{understanding what reasoning requires} and \emph{building architectures that provide it}.

We present a lightweight yet effective pipeline for training vision-language models to solve math problems by rendering LaTeX encoded equations into images and pairing them with structured chain-of-thought prompts. This simple text-to-vision augmentation enables compact multimodal architectures to achieve state-of-the-art reasoning accuracy. Through systematic ablations, we find that rendering fidelity and prompt design are the primary drivers of performance. Despite its simplicity, our approach consistently matches or surpasses both open-source and proprietary math-focused vision-language solvers on widely used benchmarks, while preserving broad general-domain competence - showing gains on tasks such as MMMU, ChartQA, and DocVQA of up to 20%.

Generative vision-language models like Stable Diffusion demonstrate remarkable capabilities in creative media synthesis, but they also pose substantial risks of producing unsafe, offensive, or culturally inappropriate content when prompted adversarially. Current defenses struggle to align outputs with human values without sacrificing generation quality or incurring high costs. To address these challenges, we introduce VALOR (Value-Aligned LLM-Overseen Rewriter), a modular, zero-shot agentic framework for safer and more helpful text-to-image generation. VALOR integrates layered prompt analysis with human-aligned value reasoning: a multi-level NSFW detector filters lexical and semantic risks; a cultural value alignment module identifies violations of social norms, legality, and representational ethics; and an intention disambiguator detects subtle or indirect unsafe implications. When unsafe content is detected, prompts are selectively rewritten by a large language model under dynamic, role-specific instructions designed to preserve user intent while enforcing alignment. If the generated image still fails a safety check, VALOR optionally performs a stylistic regeneration to steer the output toward a safer visual domain without altering core semantics. Experiments across adversarial, ambiguous, and value-sensitive prompts show that VALOR significantly reduces unsafe outputs by up to 100.00% while preserving prompt usefulness and creativity. These results highlight VALOR as a scalable and effective approach for deploying safe, aligned, and helpful image generation systems in open-world settings.

Test-time prompt tuning for vision-language models has demonstrated impressive generalization capabilities under zero-shot settings. However, tuning the learnable prompts solely based on unlabeled test data may induce prompt optimization bias, ultimately leading to suboptimal performance on downstream tasks. In this work, we analyze the underlying causes of prompt optimization bias from both the model and data perspectives. In terms of the model, the entropy minimization objective typically focuses on reducing the entropy of model predictions while overlooking their correctness. This can result in overconfident yet incorrect outputs, thereby compromising the quality of prompt optimization. On the data side, prompts affected by optimization bias can introduce misalignment between visual and textual modalities, which further aggravates the prompt optimization bias. To this end, we propose a Doubly Debiased Test-Time Prompt Tuning method. Specifically, we first introduce a dynamic retrieval-augmented modulation module that retrieves high-confidence knowledge from a dynamic knowledge base using the test image feature as a query, and uses the retrieved knowledge to modulate the predictions. Guided by the refined predictions, we further develop a reliability-aware prompt optimization module that incorporates a confidence-based weighted ensemble and cross-modal consistency distillation to impose regularization constraints during prompt tuning. Extensive experiments across 15 benchmark datasets involving both natural distribution shifts and cross-datasets generalization demonstrate that our method outperforms baselines, validating its effectiveness in mitigating prompt optimization bias.

These authors contributed equally to this work. For decades, the dominance of English has created a substantial barrier in global science, disadvantaging non-native speakers. The recent rise of generative AI (GenAI) offers a potential technological response to this long-standing inequity. We provide the first large-scale evidence testing whether GenAI acts as a linguistic equalizer in global science. Drawing on 5.65 million scientific articles published from 2021 to 2024, we compare GenAI-assisted and non-assisted publications from authors in non-English-speaking countries. Using text embeddings derived from a pretrained large language model (SciBERT), we measure each publication's linguistic similarity to a benchmark of scientific writing from U.S.-based authors and track stylistic convergence over time. We find significant and growing convergence for GenAI-assisted publications after the release of ChatGPT in late 2022. The effect is strongest for domestic coauthor teams from countries linguistically distant from English. These findings provide large-scale evidence that GenAI is beginning to reshape global science communication by reducing language barriers in research. The rapid rise of generative AI (GenAI) has sparked an important debate regarding its role in science--raising questions of whether it homogenizes writing and erodes authorship norms (1,2) or whether it acts as a "linguistic equalizer" that lowers barriers for non-native English speakers (3,4). This debate is especially salient because English has long dominated global science, which gives native speakers a structural advantage (5-7) by creating larger writing burdens and unique peer review bias risks for researchers from non-Anglophone countries (8-12). As a result, many of these researchers have historically spent time in the U.S. or the UK to learn how to write in English or have hired (expensive) language experts (13, 14). Against this backdrop, the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, a chatbot based on a large language model (LLM), marked a turning point. This widely accessible, low-cost, and human-like tool offers a potential means of reducing longstanding linguistic imbalances (15, 16).

Pre-trained models have demonstrated exceptional generalization capabilities in time-series forecasting; however, adapting them to evolving data distributions remains a significant challenge. A key hurdle lies in accessing the original training data, as fine-tuning solely on new data often leads to catastrophic forgetting. To address this issue, we propose Replay Tuning (R-Tuning), a novel framework designed for the continual adaptation of pre-trained time-series models. R-Tuning constructs a unified latent space that captures both prior and current task knowledge through a frequency-aware replay strategy. Specifically, it augments model-generated samples via wavelet-based decomposition across multiple frequency bands, generating trend-preserving and fusion-enhanced variants to improve representation diversity and replay efficiency. To further reduce reliance on synthetic samples, R-Tuning introduces a latent consistency constraint that aligns new representations with the prior task space. This constraint guides joint optimization within a compact and semantically coherent latent space, ensuring robust knowledge retention and adaptation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of R-Tuning, which reduces MAE and MSE by up to 46.9% and 46.8%, respectively, on new tasks, while preserving prior knowledge with gains of up to 5.7% and 6.0% on old tasks. Notably, under few-shot settings, R-Tuning outperforms all state-of-the-art baselines even when synthetic proxy samples account for only 5% of the new task dataset.

The surge in intelligent applications driven by large language models (LLMs) has made it increasingly difficult for bandwidth-limited cloud servers to process extensive LLM workloads in real time without compromising user data privacy. To solve these problems, recent research has focused on constructing cloud-edge consortia that integrate server-based LLM with small language models (SLMs) on mobile edge devices. Furthermore, designing collaborative training mechanisms within such consortia to enhance inference performance has emerged as a promising research direction. However, the cross-domain deployment of SLMs, coupled with structural heterogeneity in SLMs architectures, poses significant challenges to enhancing model performance. To this end, we propose Co-PLMs, a novel co-tuning framework for collaborative training of large and small language models, which integrates the process of structure-agnostic mutual learning to realize knowledge exchange between the heterogeneous language models. This framework employs distilled proxy models (DPMs) as bridges to enable collaborative training between the heterogeneous server-based LLM and on-device SLMs, while preserving the domain-specific insights of each device. The experimental results show that Co-PLMs outperform state-of-the-art methods, achieving average increases of 5.38% in Rouge-L and 4.88% in EM.