Your path to superintelligence stays the same.
Sentiment Analysis (SA) is a fundamental NLP task concerned with the identification and categorization of subjective information in text. While lexicon-based methods offer transparency, they often struggle with linguistic phenomena such as negation and intensification. Syntactic parsing has been integrated into SA pipelines to address this, but conventional parsers introduce significant computational overhead. Recent work shows that reformulating dependency parsing as a Sequence Labeling (SEL) task can improve efficiency. We propose and compare two strategies for integrating syntactic knowledge into a neural sentiment analysis model under unified Multi-Task Learning (MTL). The first, Standard-MTL, jointly learns dependency parsing (via sequence labeling) and sentiment polarity classification using a shared encoder with two task-specific heads. The second, Contrastive-MTL, provides implicit syntactic guidance through a contrastive auxiliary objective and a syntax-biased attention pooling mechanism, without requiring explicit label prediction. Both rely on syntactic annotations during training and eliminate need for hand-crafted compositional rules or external parsing at inference. We evaluate eleven datasets spanning seven languages---the MARC corpus (English, Spanish, French, German) and seven datasets from SemEval-2022 Task 10 (English, Spanish, Norwegian, Basque, Catalan)---using four established SEL encodings. With the relative encoding, Contrastive-MTL outperforms a syntax-naive baseline on 10 of 11 datasets and surpasses the external rule-based pipeline (SELSP) that parses at inference on all six datasets where the latter applies, while being 1.5--9faster at evaluation. Standard-MTL is more dataset- and encoding-dependent. These results show implicit syntactic supervision during training can match or exceed explicit parsing at inference without computational overhead.
Self-improving embodied agents are increasingly being developed and compared on robot simulation benchmarks. Several recent works expose the benchmark's success criteria to the learning agent, a practice we call Criteria Exposure (CE). These criteria, originally written to verify policies trained by imitation learning, often demand more than the corresponding language instructions, so a score from such a verifier may not faithfully reflect whether the instructed task was completed, especially for robot-control programs written by an agent. As embodied coding agents report ever higher benchmark scores, a natural question arises: when a coding agent is exposed to the benchmark's criteria, does it generate code that better performs the instructed task, or code that simply overfits to the verification criteria? We conduct controlled experiments with a self-improving agent with and without CE, and find that with CE the agent quickly produces code with a higher success rate under the given criteria, but this advantage disappears when the criteria are changed slightly without departing from the original instructions. More importantly, the skills the agent develops under CE transfer poorly across tasks. We further propose instruction-faithful criteria and show that they better reflect the performance of agent-generated programs.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in biomedical and cognitive neuroscience, but their ability to reason reliably over heterogeneous knowledge graphs (KGs) remains unclear. We benchmark five LLMs (GPT-5.1, Gemini 2.0 Pro, Llama 3, Qwen, and BioGPT) across five KGs: DrugBank, NeuroSynth, Cognitive Atlas, Brain Map, and GDPKG. We introduce a multitier query dataset to evaluate reasoning depth and factual accuracy under KG-aware (graph-grounded) and KG-agnostic conditions. Inter-annotator agreement was substantial, with Cohen's kappa of 0.781 (range: 0.753-0.807) and Fleiss' kappa of 0.77. Results show that general-purpose models, particularly GPT-5.1 and Gemini 2.0 Pro, generally outperform domain-specific models on multi-hop and high-level reasoning tasks, although performance declines as query complexity increases. KG grounding reduces hallucination rates across all evaluated models. Contrary to our initial hypothesis, domain-specific models do not consistently outperform general-purpose models on specialized tasks without graph grounding. These findings highlight the value of combining broad language-model capabilities with structured domain knowledge. We provide practical guidance for selecting LLM-KG integration strategies based on task complexity and computational constraints, and discuss hybrid neurosymbolic architectures for personalized medicine, cognitive disorder diagnosis, and explainable AI.
Models of collective motion usually reduce social interactions to pairwise forces, despite empirical evidence for many-body effects. We introduce the directional atomic cluster expansion (dACE), which adapts the atomic cluster expansion (ACE) of interatomic potentials to self-propelled agents. dACE provides a systematically improvable, exactly equivariant expansion of an agent's acceleration that splits uniquely into 1-, 2-, 3-body and higher contributions, along with a self term for the agent's own past motion that is fitted so that it does not absorb the interactions. On simulated collectives in two and three dimensions with known rules, dACE recovers the interaction law body order by body order from little data, while the neural model SocialNet, the current closest competitor, needs more data, has much larger errors on many-body or chiral rules and is restricted to 2D. On real data sets of tracked zebrafish and golden shiners, the laws learned by dACE agree better between disjoint halves of the data than SocialNet's. The learned laws are interpretable, and in the shiners the 3-body term opposes the pairwise response as neighbourhoods get dense. Finally, we show that next-step prediction accuracy mostly measures self-propulsion and noise rather than the interactions, and suggest more robust combinations of error measures for interaction learning.
Automatic sleep stage classification from electroencephalography (EEG) signals is a critical task in clinical sleep medicine. While deep learning models have shown promising results in this domain, their performance is fundamentally constrained by the quality of training labels, which human experts manually annotate and that are subject to inter-rater disagreement and systematic labeling errors. In this paper, we propose a novel LLM-assisted label-noise filtering pipeline that operates exclusively during training to identify and remove unreliable sleep-stage annotations before retraining the classifier. Specifically, TinySleepNet is first trained on the original dataset to extract per-epoch SoftMax confidence scores, then low-confidence epochs are submitted to LLaMA 3.1 along with their EEG spectral features and surrounding sequence context. The LLM evaluates each epoch against AASM sleep-scoring guidelines and assigns a verdict of RELIABLE or SUSPICIOUS. Suspicious epochs are removed from the training set, and TinySleepNet is retrained on the cleaned data. Evaluated on the Sleep-EDF Expanded dataset using 20-fold cross-validation, our method improves overall accuracy from 81.8% to 84.6% and Macro F1-score from 75.6% to 77.4%, with particularly notable gains in REM detection. Crucially, because the LLM operates only during training, the lightweight TinySleepNet architecture (1.3M parameters) is preserved at inference, making the proposed pipeline suitable for real-time, wearable sleep monitoring applications.
Reward machines (RMs) have been proposed as a reward formulation in reinforcement learning (RL) to capture non-Markovian tasks where credit assignment depends on history. By representing reward functions as automata, RMs expose the task's temporal structure and allow such rewards to be handled within a Markovian framework. However, they assume a labelling function, a proposition-grounding oracle for observations, which must be manually engineered for each environment, limiting their wider applicability. In this work, we address this limitation by proposing RM-VLM, a novel approach in which a large language model (LLM) generates an RM from a natural-language task description, and a vision-language model (VLM) acts as the labelling function, grounding the RM's propositions over image-based observations during RM-guided policy learning. A VLM-based value function estimator is used to assess the agent's progress towards each RM transition and derive a dense reward signal. We evaluate RM-VLM on three domains covering non-Markovian grid-world navigation, robotic manipulation, and 3D object collection. Our experimental results show that RM-VLM consistently achieves higher task success rates than existing VLM-based reward methods across all tested domains.
Diffusion language models can write many tokens per step, but must choose which tokens are safe to commit together. Mean-field decoding penalizes pairs of positions whose predictions look alike. We replace this proxy with the coupling itself: how much committing one token changes the model's confidence at another. Cheap probes inside the main forward pass measure it, with no training or extra model, and it plugs into the same mean-field rule. On three models and four benchmarks, our method needs far fewer steps than mean-field decoding and is faster in most settings, also with a key-value cache, at an average accuracy cost of 1.1 points. Shuffling the couplings or replacing them with a uniform bonus loses this gain.
We study token dynamics in deep Mamba models, with a particular focus on the attracting role of the first token. Unlike attention mechanisms, where token interactions are governed by positive scalar coefficients, Mamba dynamics involve full matrix-valued interaction coefficients with no positivity or definiteness guarantees. This structural difference makes Mamba dynamics substantially harder to analyze and prevents the direct application of existing techniques for attention-based models. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a new analytical framework based on a high-dimensional invariant box and a sharp exit-time argument, which together recover an effective form of sign-definiteness. Using this framework, we characterize the possible limit points of token trajectories and prove explicit exponential convergence rates. Our analysis reveals that the first token has privileged dynamics: its limiting direction attracts subsequent tokens, inducing token clustering and attention-sink phenomena in deep Mamba models. We further show that this attraction mechanism extends to broader sequence dynamics, including state-space models, causal attention, and classical time-series models. Experiments on Falcon-Mamba-7B validate our predictions, showing that concentration on the first token increases with depth and dominates in later layers.
Online Convex Optimization with memory and time-varying constraints (COCO-M) is a recently-introduced framework that captures the dynamics of stateful online learning and non-stochastic control with budget constraints. Despite its expressive power, COCO-M remains largely understudied. In this work, we tackle this problem in its full scale, providing an optimistic algorithm that incorporates untrusted predictions to tame universal dynamic regret and cumulative constraint violation. Our analysis leverages a potent reduction from memory to delay and treats state-dependent gradients as delayed feedback. We establish the first bounds that adapt to both environment non-stationarity (path length P_T) and prediction accuracy, while lifting previous restrictive assumptions such as functional separability. En route to these results, we derive findings of independent interest for the memory-to-delay reduction, and for delayed OCO with time-varying constraints. The proposed framework ensures sublinear worst-case guarantees that improve with prediction accuracy, reaching O(1) regret under perfect predictions, with cumulative constraint violation (CCV) O({T}) for unknown P_T and O(T) for known or online observable P_T , while recovering the optimal COCO rates when memory disappears.
Australian universities are expanding access to ChatGPT and bringing AI into teaching and learning to prepare students for an AI-enabled workforce.
One underperforming GPU can slow an entire distributed training job. The node may pass basic health checks and show normal utilization, leaving operators to...
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OpenAI is launching GPT-6 Cyber, the latest version of its cybersecurity AI model, which it says is better at finding vulnerabilities and less likely to…
The AI-generated sci-fi film Gods Don't Give Gifts has added a bit of star power: Pop star Grimes is going to appear in the movie.…
