Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into real-world applications through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) mechanisms to supplement their responses with up-to-date and domain-specific knowledge. However, the valuable and often proprietary nature of the knowledge bases used in RAG introduces the risk of unauthorized usage by adversaries. Existing methods that can be generalized as watermarking techniques to protect these knowledge bases typically involve poisoning attacks. However, these methods require to alter the results of verification samples (\eg, generating incorrect outputs), inevitably making them susceptible to anomaly detection and even introduce new security risks. To address these challenges, we propose \name{} for `harmless' copyright protection of knowledge bases. Instead of manipulating LLM's final output, \name{} implants distinct verification behaviors in the space of chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, maintaining the correctness of the final answer. Our method has three main stages: (1) \textbf{Generating CoTs}: For each verification question, we generate two CoTs, including a target CoT for building watermark behaviors; (2) \textbf{Optimizing Watermark Phrases and Target CoTs}: We optimize them to minimize retrieval errors under the black-box setting of suspicious LLM, ensuring that the watermarked verification queries activate the target CoTs without being activated in non-watermarked ones; (3) \textbf{Ownership Verification}: We exploit a pairwise Wilcoxon test to statistically verify whether a suspicious LLM is augmented with the protected knowledge base by comparing its responses to watermarked and benign verification queries. Our experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that \name{} effectively protects knowledge bases against unauthorized usage while preserving the integrity and performance of the RAG.

In AI-facilitated teaching, leveraging various query styles to interpret abstract text descriptions is crucial for ensuring high-quality teaching. However, current retrieval models primarily focus on natural text-image retrieval, making them insufficiently tailored to educational scenarios due to the ambiguities in the retrieval process. In this paper, we propose a diverse expression retrieval task tailored to educational scenarios, supporting retrieval based on multiple query styles and expressions. We introduce the STEM Education Retrieval Dataset (SER), which contains over 24,000 query pairs of different styles, and the Uni-Retrieval, an efficient and style-diversified retrieval vision-language model based on prompt tuning. Uni-Retrieval extracts query style features as prototypes and builds a continuously updated Prompt Bank containing prompt tokens for diverse queries. This bank can updated during test time to represent domain-specific knowledge for different subject retrieval scenarios. Our framework demonstrates scalability and robustness by dynamically retrieving prompt tokens based on prototype similarity, effectively facilitating learning for unknown queries. Experimental results indicate that Uni-Retrieval outperforms existing retrieval models in most retrieval tasks. This advancement provides a scalable and precise solution for diverse educational needs.

When vacuous sketches are used in the intermediate steps, e.g. in R1 in MetaQA model, what is the intermediate output? Is it the dense-sparse representation of the entities in top-k facts? Isn't that a problem when k is large? Won't this be an issue in case there is a template that requires intersection as well in addition to unions? 3. For a given query, EmQL ranks all the entities (or gives a distribution over entities) instead of explicitly giving a set as an answer.

This paper presents an embedding based neural query language called EmQL, that generalizes to the unknown facts in KB and also performs logical entailments better than existing methods like Qeury2Box. Strength • The proposed method is sound and novel. Weakness • There are underlying assumption in the proposed approach.

The Shapley value is the prevalent solution for fair division problems in which a payout is to be divided among multiple agents. By adopting a game-theoretic view, the idea of fair division and the Shapley value can also be used in machine learning to quantify the individual contribution of features or data points to the performance of a predictive model. Despite its popularity and axiomatic justification, the Shapley value suffers from a computational complexity that scales exponentially with the number of entities involved, and hence requires approximation methods for its reliable estimation. We propose SVA$k_{\text{ADD}}$, a novel approximation method that fits a $k$-additive surrogate game. By taking advantage of $k$-additivity, we are able to elicit the exact Shapley values of the surrogate game and then use these values as estimates for the original fair division problem. The efficacy of our method is evaluated empirically and compared to competing methods.

With the advent of large multimodal language models, science is now at a threshold of an AI-based technological transformation. Recently, a plethora of new AI models and tools has been proposed, promising to empower researchers and academics worldwide to conduct their research more effectively and efficiently. This includes all aspects of the research cycle, especially (1) searching for relevant literature; (2) generating research ideas and conducting experimentation; generating (3) text-based and (4) multimodal content (e.g., scientific figures and diagrams); and (5) AI-based automatic peer review. In this survey, we provide an in-depth overview over these exciting recent developments, which promise to fundamentally alter the scientific research process for good. Our survey covers the five aspects outlined above, indicating relevant datasets, methods and results (including evaluation) as well as limitations and scope for future research. Ethical concerns regarding shortcomings of these tools and potential for misuse (fake science, plagiarism, harms to research integrity) take a particularly prominent place in our discussion. We hope that our survey will not only become a reference guide for newcomers to the field but also a catalyst for new AI-based initiatives in the area of "AI4Science".

Bad actors in the maritime industry engage in illegal behaviors after disabling their vessel's automatic identification system (AIS) - which makes finding such vessels difficult for analysts. Machine learning approaches only succeed in identifying the locations of these ``dark vessels'' in the immediate future. This work leverages ideas from the literature on abductive inference applied to locating adversarial agents to solve the problem. Specifically, we combine concepts from abduction, logic programming, and rule learning to create an efficient method that approaches full recall of dark vessels while requiring less search area than machine learning methods. We provide a logic-based paradigm for reasoning about maritime vessels, an abductive inference query method, an automatically extracted rule-based behavior model methodology, and a thorough suite of experiments.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models hold promise as generalist robotics solutions by translating visual and linguistic inputs into robot actions, yet they lack reliability due to their black-box nature and sensitivity to environmental changes. In contrast, cognitive architectures (CA) excel in symbolic reasoning and state monitoring but are constrained by rigid predefined execution. This work bridges these approaches by probing OpenVLA's hidden layers to uncover symbolic representations of object properties, relations, and action states, enabling integration with a CA for enhanced interpretability and robustness. Through experiments on LIBERO-spatial pick-and-place tasks, we analyze the encoding of symbolic states across different layers of OpenVLA's Llama backbone. Our probing results show consistently high accuracies (> 0.90) for both object and action states across most layers, though contrary to our hypotheses, we did not observe the expected pattern of object states being encoded earlier than action states. We demonstrate an integrated DIARC-OpenVLA system that leverages these symbolic representations for real-time state monitoring, laying the foundation for more interpretable and reliable robotic manipulation.

Despite notable advancements in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems that expand large language model (LLM) capabilities through external retrieval, these systems often struggle to meet the complex and diverse needs of real-world industrial applications. The reliance on retrieval alone proves insufficient for extracting deep, domain-specific knowledge performing in logical reasoning from specialized corpora. To address this, we introduce sPecIalized KnowledgE and Rationale Augmentation Generation (PIKE-RAG), focusing on extracting, understanding, and applying specialized knowledge, while constructing coherent rationale to incrementally steer LLMs toward accurate responses. Recognizing the diverse challenges of industrial tasks, we introduce a new paradigm that classifies tasks based on their complexity in knowledge extraction and application, allowing for a systematic evaluation of RAG systems' problem-solving capabilities. This strategic approach offers a roadmap for the phased development and enhancement of RAG systems, tailored to meet the evolving demands of industrial applications. Furthermore, we propose knowledge atomizing and knowledge-aware task decomposition to effectively extract multifaceted knowledge from the data chunks and iteratively construct the rationale based on original query and the accumulated knowledge, respectively, showcasing exceptional performance across various benchmarks.

Action Quality Assessment (AQA) -- the ability to quantify the quality of human motion, actions, or skill levels and provide feedback -- has far-reaching implications in areas such as low-cost physiotherapy, sports training, and workforce development. As such, it has become a critical field in computer vision & video understanding over the past decade. Significant progress has been made in AQA methodologies, datasets, & applications, yet a pressing need remains for a comprehensive synthesis of this rapidly evolving field. In this paper, we present a thorough survey of the AQA landscape, systematically reviewing over 200 research papers using the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews & meta-analyses (PRISMA) framework. We begin by covering foundational concepts & definitions, then move to general frameworks & performance metrics, & finally discuss the latest advances in methodologies & datasets. This survey provides a detailed analysis of research trends, performance comparisons, challenges, & future directions. Through this work, we aim to offer a valuable resource for both newcomers & experienced researchers, promoting further exploration & progress in AQA. Data are available at https://haoyin116.github.io/Survey_of_AQA/