Intent classification models have made a significant progress in recent years. However, previous studies primarily focus on high-resource language datasets, which results in a gap for low-resource languages and for regions with high rates of illiteracy, where languages are more spoken than read or written. This is the case in Senegal, for example, where Wolof is spoken by around 90\% of the population, while the national illiteracy rate remains at of 42\%. Wolof is actually spoken by more than 10 million people in West African region. To address these limitations, we introduce the Wolof Banking Speech Intent Classification Dataset (WolBanking77), for academic research in intent classification.

The phenomenon of benign overfitting, where a trained neural network perfectly fits noisy training data but still achieves near-optimal test performance, has been extensively studied in recent years for linear models and fully-connected/convolutional networks. In this work, we study benign overfitting in a single-head softmax attention model, which is the fundamental building block of Transformers. We prove that under appropriate conditions, the model exhibits benign overfitting in a classification setting already after two steps of gradient descent. Moreover, we show conditions where a minimum-norm/maximum-margin interpolator exhibits benign overfitting. We study how the overfitting behavior depends on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the data distribution, namely, the ratio between norms of signal and noise tokens, and prove that a sufficiently large SNR is both necessary and sufficient for benign overfitting.

The ability to reason lies at the core of artificial intelligence (AI), and challenging problems usually call for deeper and longer reasoning to tackle. A crucial question about AI reasoning is whether models can extrapolate learned reasoning patterns to solve harder tasks with a longer chain-of-thought (CoT). In this work, we present a theoretical analysis of transformers learning on synthetic state-tracking tasks with gradient descent.

Training deep neural networks (DNNs) is a structured optimization problem, because the parameters are naturally represented by matrices and tensors rather than simple vectors. Under this structural representation, it has been widely observed that gradients are low-rank and Hessians are approximately block-wise diagonal. These structured properties are crucial for designing efficient optimization algorithms but may not be utilized by current popular optimizers like Adam. In this paper, we present a novel optimization algorithm ASGO that capitalizes on these properties by employing a preconditioner that is adaptively updated using structured gradients. By fine-grained theoretical analysis, ASGO is proven to achieve superior convergence rates compared to existing structured gradient methods. Based on the convergence theory, we further demonstrate that ASGO can benefit from the low-rank and block-wise diagonal properties. We also discuss practical modifications of ASGO and empirically verify the effectiveness of the algorithm on language model tasks.

Graph contrastive learning (GCL) aims to learn self-supervised representations by distinguishing positive and negative sample pairs generated from multiple augmented graph views.

Recent research on Reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs) has sought to further enhance their performance by integrating meta-thinking--enabling models to monitor, evaluate, and control their reasoning processes for more adaptive and effective problem-solving. However, current single-agent work lacks a specialized design for acquiring meta-thinking, resulting in low efficacy. To address this challenge, we introduce Reinforced Meta-thinking Agents (ReMA), a novel framework that leverages Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) to elicit meta-thinking behaviors, encouraging LLMs to think about thinking.

Learning disentangled representations in sequential data is a key goal in deep learning, with broad applications in vision, audio, and time series. While real-world data involves multiple interacting semantic factors over time, prior work has mostly focused on simpler two-factor static and dynamic settings, primarily because such settings make data collection easier, thereby overlooking the inherently multi-factor nature of real-world data. We introduce the first standardized benchmark for evaluating multi-factor sequential disentanglement across six diverse datasets spanning video, audio, and time series. Our benchmark includes modular tools for dataset integration, model development, and evaluation metrics tailored to multi-factor analysis. We additionally propose a post-hoc Latent Exploration Stage to automatically align latent dimensions with semantic factors, and introduce a Koopman-inspired model that achieves state-of-the-art results. Moreover, we show that Vision-Language Models can automate dataset annotation and serve as zero-shot disentanglement evaluators, removing the need for manual labels and human intervention. Together, these contributions provide a robust and scalable foundation for advancing multi-factor sequential disentanglement. Our code is available on GitHub, and the datasets and trained models are available on Hugging Face.

While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities utilizing reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable reward, whether large vision-language models (VLMs) can directly inherit such capabilities through similar post-training strategies remains underexplored. In this work, we conduct a systematic compositional probing study to evaluate whether current VLMs trained with RL or other post-training strategies can compose capabilities across modalities or tasks under out-of-distribution conditions. We design a suite of diagnostic tasks that train models on unimodal tasks or isolated reasoning skills, and evaluate them on multimodal, compositional variants requiring skill integration. Through comparisons between supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and RL-trained models, we identify three key findings: (1) RL-trained models consistently outperform SFT on compositional generalization, demonstrating better integration of learned skills; (2) although VLMs achieve strong performance on individual tasks, they struggle to generalize compositionally under cross-modal and cross-task scenarios, revealing a significant gap in current training strategies; (3) enforcing models to explicitly describe visual content before reasoning (e.g., caption-before-thinking), along with rewarding progressive vision-to-text grounding, yields notable gains. It highlights two essential ingredients for improving compositionality in VLMs: visual-to-text alignment and accurate visual grounding. Our findings shed light on the current limitations of RL-based reasoning VLM training and provide actionable insights toward building models that reason compositionally across modalities and tasks.

Accurate spatial reasoning in outdoor environments--covering geometry, object pose, and inter-object relationships--is fundamental to downstream tasks such as mapping, motion forecasting, and high-level planning in autonomous driving. We introduce SURDS, a large-scale benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the spatial reasoning capabilities of vision language models (VLMs). Built on the nuScenes dataset, SURDS comprises 41,080 vision-question-answer training instances and 9,250 evaluation samples, spanning six spatial categories: orientation, depth estimation, pixel-level localization, pairwise distance, lateral ordering, and front-behind relations.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a promising approach for training language models (LMs) on reasoning tasks that elicit emergent long chains of thought (CoTs).