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Subliminal learning is the phenomenon in which a model transmits its preferences to another model through data that do not explicitly express them. As models increasingly curate training data for other models, we ask whether this transfer can arise from choosing among near-duplicate images while keeping the source photographs and human-written captions fixed. For each photograph, a curator selects one of eight near-duplicate variants by caption likelihood, without target-specific prompts. Students trained on target-preferring curators' selections show higher mean target-versus-alternatives log-likelihood ratios in an image-free readout than students trained on neutral selections. Under a prespecified decision rule, this directional shift appears for an owl target in LLaVA-1.5, Qwen2.5-VL, Qwen3-VL, and Gemma 4, with curators and students initialized from the same base checkpoint, and target rotations move it toward camels, oak trees, and a political figure. The owl target-selected student also scores above all count-matched random-reselection students in three models and above 55 of 60 in LLaVA-1.5, and Qwen3-VL shows the shift again on a new source bank with newly trained curators. Its size depends on dataset size, learning rate, and training budget; greedy choices among the eight options move toward the target by 10.4 percentage points in Qwen3-VL and 0.5-1.3 points elsewhere. First-generation students also pass the owl preference to a second generation through captions without explicit owl mentions in LLaVA-1.5 and Qwen3-VL. Thus even a deduplication-style choice among near-identical copies can shift students' target-relative readouts with source photographs and captions fixed; the tested linear probes classify the selecting arm with accuracies up to 59.7% (chance 50%).
Automated respiratory sound classification enables continuous, non-invasive respiratory assessment, yet long-term deployment remains challenging due to domain shifts from evolving recording devices and acquisition periods. When privacy and governance regulations prohibit replaying historical data, sequential learning easily overwrites previously acquired knowledge. Preserving dedicated domain experts prevents parameter interference, but selecting the correct expert at inference is difficult under overlapping acoustic distributions and absent domain labels. To resolve this dilemma, we propose APRIL, an exemplar-free domain-incremental framework for RSC. Built on a shared frozen BEATs backbone, APRIL sequentially inherits and isolates low-rank experts to enable new-domain adaptation without altering earlier models. A multi-level prototype router retrieves the top-two candidate experts and dynamically selects the final model by integrating domain-routing posteriors with classification confidence, adaptively weighted by matching ambiguity. We establish standardized device- and temporal-incremental benchmarks on the ICBHI and SPRSound datasets across forward and reversed domain orders. Evaluated over five random seeds, APRIL consistently achieves the highest final-session average Score among compared continual learning approaches, reaching 64.4% and 65.4% on ICBHI, and 83.1% and 82.2% on SPRSound under forward and reversed sequences, respectively. Crucially, average forgetting remains under 1.0% across all protocols, demonstrating robust domain adaptation and long-term knowledge retention without data replay. Overall, APRIL offers a reliable and privacy-preserving paradigm for deploying continuous respiratory sound classification across real-world healthcare settings.
AI-assisted dementia detection usually requires multimodal fusion of diverse data, such as clinical tabular assessments and neuroimaging data. However, most existing approaches perform feature fusion in Euclidean space. This overlooks the geometric structure of representation, including hierarchical organization in clinical assessments and multi-scale anatomical patterns in neuroimaging data. Recent studies have proved hyperbolic space provides a natural geometry for modelling hierarchical and multi-scale structures due to its exponentially expanding space. Motivated by these, we propose HypTI, a hyperbolic geometry-aware multimodal fusion framework for dementia detection based on clinical tabular assessments and MRI scans. HypTI extends hyperbolic representation learning to an underexplored tabular-MRI setting, jointly modelling clinical tabular, MRI scans, and cross-modal interactions in hyperbolic space. Specifically, clinical tabular variables are represented through learnable Lorentz prototypes to capture hierarchical relationships among assessments, while MRI scans are encoded using ROI-guided multi-scale representation learning to capture anatomical patterns across brain regions and spatial scales in Lorentz space. The multimodal representations are integrated through an adaptive fusion module generates subject-specific scale and shift coefficients to dynamically modulate and integrate the multimodal embeddings, enabling effective patient-level tabular-image representation learning for dementia detection. Experiments on OASIS-3 dataset show that the proposed framework achieves strong performance compared with representative approaches.
Effective democratic deliberation is vital for civic engagement and the health of legislative institutions. However, assessing parliamentary discourse quality is traditionally done using expert-scored, theory-based codebooks (CBs), which are rigid, labor-intensive, and prone to biases. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a scalable alternative for both schema induction and discourse annotation, ensuring schema quality and mitigating models' inherent bias remains a clear challenge. In this work, we propose a complete protocol for LLM-based codebook generation and evaluation. Starting from the widely accepted discourse quality Index (DQI), we compare top-down (theory-based), bottom-up (data-driven), and hybrid approaches for generating context-adapted schemas. To evaluate these schemas, we define an extrinsic proxy measure, validated by manual annotations, alongside an intrinsic inter-model agreement (IMA) metric, which leverages differing model biases to signal overall reliability. Our experiments on 100 Israeli parliament transcripts reveal that inductive, data-driven schemas achieve higher IMA than top-down methods while maintaining validity, demonstrating their potential for reliable, large-scale analysis of political discourse.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) enable fast, flexible last-mile and emergency delivery, but their routing remains challenging as the number of clients varies. Classical approaches based on mixed-integer programming and heuristics can scale poorly or require problem-specific design, motivating learning-based alternatives. Reinforcement learning is particularly promising, provided a single policy can generalize across problem sizes without retraining. Although attention-based Pointer Networks are inherently size-agnostic, their solution quality degrades under both upscaling and downscaling. Using the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) as a controlled proxy, with fixed capacity reflecting drone payload constraints, we investigate this degradation and identify three contributing factors: shifts in node density, attention dispersion, and dilution of the mean-pooled graph context. We systematically compare architecture-wide, encoder-side, and decoder-side modifications to address these limitations and propose a learned, permutation-invariant graph-context aggregation mechanism, implemented as a weighted average and as Set2Set. Results reveal distinct requirements for transfer in each direction: entropy-based attention scaling reduces the CVRP20-to-CVRP100 performance gap by 1.41 percentage points, while the proposed aggregation methods achieve the largest improvement on the more challenging CVRP100-to-CVRP20 transfer, approximately 0.9 percentage points. Exploiting this complementarity, we introduce an approach selector that chooses the best model for each training-target size pair. The selector reduces cost relative to the reference model across all nine seen train-test pairs and eight of nine pairs involving unseen sizes (CVRP35, CVRP75, and CVRP200), achieving improvements of up to 3.2 percent.
Psycholinguistic studies explore why humans accept some generic statements but reject others by showing that these judgments depend on more than how common a property is. People consider several other factors such as how well it sets the kind apart from others or whether it is characteristic of the kind. Inspired by the linguistic and cognitive literature, we explore to what extent factors from these studies explain how large language models (LLMs) judge generics. Our results with twelve models on a psycholinguistic dataset and on naturally occurring generics show that models weigh how common a property is against how well it distinguishes the kind, and combine the two much as people do, though less clearly. Like people, they favor characteristic properties, but unlike the accounts of human judgment, they ignore striking ones. What matters most to LLMs is whether a statement is factually true, and much of the influence of human factors reaches their ratings through that judgment. In six 7-9B models, shifting the hidden states along each factor's direction moves the judgment as the factor predicts.
A single observation can admit several plausible futures, making uncertainty an essential part of world modelling. However, quantum generative models remain underexplored for this task. We introduce Quantum-JEPA, a latent-action JEPA framework that learns distributions of future representations using a conditional quantum Born prior. Circuit measurements generate binary latent actions, which a shared predictor maps to alternative future representations. We train the quantum prior through the quality and diversity of these predictions using a sampled energy objective. Our model learns distinct continuations on constructed multimodal tasks and captures latent-action correlations that support coordinated multi-agent futures. On D3IL, a benchmark of diverse human demonstrations, our trained models generate multiple obstacle-crossing routes from a common starting point without observed motion. On the controlled tasks, our classical and quantum prior implementations improve prediction validity and distributional fidelity over the evaluated variational baselines. Our quantum priors combine competitive predictive quality with a parameter-efficient sampling structure: they avoid an exponentially sized categorical output layer while supporting correlated latent actions. We further validate finite-shot parameter-shift training, including training with readout noise. Unlike most prior work, which focuses on simulation, we also verify the feasibility of inference with trained priors on a real QPU. These results establish a trainable quantum component for JEPA future prediction and a basis for exploring quantum-enhanced world models at larger scales.
Model compression makes large language models deployable, but today's evaluation tells an incomplete story. Standard practice measures retained task performance and stops there. This misses a critical fact: compression perturbs the distributed knowledge embedded across billions of weights, and task scores alone cannot reveal which underlying abilities survive and which quietly collapse. To solve this question, we introduce ACE-Compression, an ability-centric evaluation framework. Instead of asking only "does the compressed model still answer correctly?", we ask "which of its core abilities remain intact?" Our framework probes four deployment-facing dimensions: procedural reasoning and constraint execution, knowledge grounding and truthfulness, social cognition and affective understanding, and persona fidelity and stylistic consistency. Across more than 35 compressed checkpoints from six open-weight LLMs-covering quantization and pruning-we find that compression redistributes ability profiles. Coarse, local, and surface-level signals often persist, while fine-grained, long-tail, and context-dependent abilities become fragile. Quantization consistently outperforms pruning in retention, but the practical meaning of that gap depends entirely on which ability an application requires. Based on our findings, deployers can choose compression methods by the ability profile their application needs, not just by a leaderboard average. And algorithm designers gain diagnostic signals to build compression methods that preserve what matters. We believe that ACE-Compression turns compression from a black-box accuracy drop into an interpretable intervention-one we can measure, understand, and ultimately improve.
Enterprise agents answer questions over workplace records that evolve through team collaboration. As information is shared, corrected, and revised across documents, chats, and figures, multiple versions of the same information accumulate in the workspace. Reliable question answering therefore requires agents to reason over sufficient evidence, resolve cross-source and temporal conflicts, and recognize when the available evidence is insufficient to establish an answer. To systematically evaluate these capabilities, we introduce MMEnterprise-Bench, a benchmark comprising 1,613 questions grounded in evolving multimodal records from simulated collaboration projects, covering three categories: Evidence Reasoning, Conflict Resolution, and Unanswerability. We evaluate 10 proprietary and open-source multimodal LLMs and find that even the strongest models struggle when evidence contains cross-source or temporal conflicts or spans multiple images. Moreover, increasing the retrieval budget or employing a larger retriever improves evidence recall but does not consistently translate into higher answer accuracy. These findings highlight the persistent challenges of reasoning over evolving workplace records and establish MMEnterprise-Bench as a testbed for developing more reliable enterprise agents. Code and data are available at https://mlvlab.github.io/MMEnterprise-Bench/.
Negation remains a persistent challenge for language models across NLP tasks and modalities. We show that this weakness can undermine LLM safety guardrails through a structural vulnerability we term polarity blindness: the failure to recognize harmful intent after polarity-altering linguistic transformations. We study two forms of polarity inversion: grammatical negation and antonym replacement, and use synonym replacement as a polarity-preserving control. We further test whether an adversarial textual wrapper amplifies these failures. Using a 260-prompt benchmark across 10 state-of-the-art LLMs and 3 languages (English, Spanish, Czech), stratified by harmfulness potential and evaluated on a validated 0-5 harm scale, we find that polarity blindness affects most evaluated models, with mean harm scores reaching 4.12 for the most vulnerable model. The effect persists across typologically differing negation systems, suggesting that polarity blindness reflects a broader limitation in semantic robustness rather than a language- or grammar-specific failure.
Staged post-training of multimodal foundation models chains vision-language alignment, reasoning distillation, and domain tuning, yet how each phase trades capabilities against the others remains under-characterised. Tracking an 8.4B-parameter model from an un-fine-tuned baseline through three training phases on Japanese financial documents (evaluated on five text-input benchmarks), we find the phases interact non-additively: math-only distillation overwrites the financial knowledge acquired earlier even as procedural math skill survives, and the domain phase repairs more than it installs. A skip-phase ablation is best for domain knowledge but forfeits numerical-reasoning gains, so per-phase contributions are not decomposable and the best checkpoint is task-dependent, with implications for checkpoint retention and scheduling rather than added stages.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as research collaborators for hypothesis refinement, methodological planning, and technical analysis across multi-turn interactions. In this setting, a useful assistant must be accurate, methodologically justified, logically consistent, and token-efficient. Current alignment approaches rarely achieve all of these together. Instruction-tuned models gain conversational quality through verbosity, and we show that science-agnostic general collaborative rewards compress responses at the expense of scientific rigor. We propose CollabSciReM, a goal-conditioned reward framework that decomposes the session-level reward into conversational quality, scientific rigor, and structural efficiency. We also introduce SciQuality, a pairwise evaluation of multi-turn research conversations grounded in 300 held-out scientific papers and scored on six dimensions: methodological soundness, justification, logical consistency, factual correctness, novelty, and responsiveness. Fine-tuned on 8.62K synthetic research conversations, CollabSciReM is preferred on SciQuality over a science-agnostic reward baseline trained on the same data for all four Llama and Qwen models, including a 65.3% win rate at matched response length. For the 7B and 8B models, CollabSciReM outperforms the science-agnostic reward baseline on the primary metric in 8 of 10 single- and multi-turn benchmark settings. In a blind study, domain experts rated CollabSciReM significantly higher on novelty than the general-reward variant and reported fewer hallucinated responses than both the general-reward variant and the base model.
Direct preference optimisation (DPO) is widely used for language model post-training, but its performance depends strongly on the choice of its hyperparameters, such as the learning rate and the reference-policy regularisation parameter β. To better understand the DPO hyperparameter landscape, we conduct extensive experiments using a dense hyperparameter grid across different model scales from the same family. This allows us to analyse how the optimal DPO hyperparameters evolve with model size and the number of update steps, with intermediate checkpoints providing an inexpensive signal to accelerate the hyperparameter optimisation process. Furthermore, by evaluating our models on both static and dynamic benchmarks, we identify which benchmarks provide the strongest signal for hyperparameter selection. Finally, we investigate how different state-of-the-art hyperparameter optimisation strategies perform in this setting. Our experiments show that the optimal learning rate varies with model size and that hyperparameters are not transferable across training datasets. We also find that validation loss is a poor proxy for hyperparameter optimisation, as hyperparameters that minimize validation loss only weakly correlate with optimal hyperparameters for downstream benchmarks. Therefore, DPO hyperparameters need to be tuned specifically for the target model, dataset, and evaluation objective. We also show that short candidate training runs can substantially reduce the cost of this selection. We release all our training configurations and evaluation results to support reproducible analysis of selection quality and training cost.
We investigate associative creativity in descriptions of abstract visual stimuli by humans and multimodal large language models (MLLMs). While conceptual association is central to human communication, it remains unclear how humans and models adapt when visual stimuli become increasingly difficult to map onto familiar semantic concepts. We evaluate several state-of-the-art MLLMs and human participants along two dimensions of creativity, originality and effectiveness, using two datasets with controlled manipulations of difficulty. SilCC varies naming difficulty through progressively more complex combinations of abstract shapes, and PixCC varies difficulty through increasing levels of random visual noise. Results show that humans produce more diverse associative descriptions than MLLMs, including greater semantic distance, higher entropy, and more novel expressions relative to reference lexica. As difficulty increases, effectiveness declines in SilCC, and humans increasingly shift from holistic associations to descriptions of low-level visual properties in PixCC.
Industrial fluid transport systems are monitored through heterogeneous sensing streams, but robust fault diagnosis remains difficult because response signals vary with operating conditions and differ from physical variables in sampling rate, observation duration and data granularity. To address these challenges, we propose a physical-variable-informed deep learning framework (PhyNet) for robust fault diagnosis under real-world sampling heterogeneity. PhyNet treats physical variables as global operating constraints and response signals as local diagnostic evidence. Its physical-to-response cross-attention mechanism connects sequence-level physical-variable tokens with a learnable global response token, enabling interaction without strict temporal alignment. Across four benchmarks, including three real-world cavitation datasets and one public two-phase-flow dataset, PhyNet achieves the best performance across all evaluated metrics. Class-wise analyses, together with attention and masking analyses, show improved discrimination of ambiguous states and indicate that physical variables meaningfully constrain local response interpretation. These findings demonstrate a deployment-oriented approach to robust diagnosis in heterogeneous industrial environments.
Recent studies in harness optimization have shown substantial performance gains in language model agents without updating model weights. A well-designed harness more effectively leverages the underlying model's capabilities by shaping context, tool use, and execution workflows. However, naïve success rates alone do not fully characterize whether optimized harness yields more reliable success on tasks already within reach (elicitation) or a broader range of solvable tasks (expansion). This distinction is crucial for recursive self-improvement and evolutionary search, as expansion may provide a broader range of successful experiences to push the capability boundaries. Despite the growing significance, this distinction remains underexplored in harness optimization. We conduct a systematic analysis to study the effect of gains from harness optimization. Building on pass@k analyses in the reinforcement learning (RL) literature that compare models before and after RL training, we compare optimized harnesses with their pre-optimization counterparts. Specifically, we assess changes in reachable task coverage, compare harness optimization with model scaling and increased inference-time compute, and examine how gains vary with task difficulty. Across static prediction and dynamic tasks, we find that pass@1 advantages of harness over stronger interventions can reverse at larger attempt budgets and aggregate gains conceal shortfalls on hard tasks, underscoring the need for a fine-grained diagnosis.
