Committee

arXiv:2510.10560v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cross-attention transformers and other multimodal vision-language models excel at grounding and generation; however, their extensive, full-precision backbones make it challenging to deploy them on edge devices. Memory-augmented architectures enhance the utilization of past context; however, most works rarely pair them with aggressive edge-oriented quantization. We introduce BitMar, a quantized multimodal transformer that proposes an external human-like episodic memory for effective image-text generation on hardware with limited resources. BitMar utilizes 1.58-bit encoders, one for text (BitNet-style) and one for vision (DiNOv2-based), to create compact embeddings that are combined and used to query a fixed-size key-value episodic memory. During vector retrieval, the BitNet decoder applies per-layer conditioning, which increases the contextual relevance of generated content. The decoder also employs attention sinks with a sliding-window mechanism to process long or streaming inputs under tight memory budgets. The combination of per-layer conditioning and sliding-window attention achieves a strong quality-speed trade-off, delivering competitive captioning and multimodal understanding at low latency with a small model footprint. These characteristics make BitMar well-suited for edge deployment.

arXiv:2509.15888v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Adapting billion-parameter language models to a downstream task is still costly, even with parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). We re-cast task adaptation as output-distribution alignment: the objective is to steer the output distribution toward the task distribution directly during decoding rather than indirectly through weight updates. Building on this view, we introduce Steering Vector Decoding (SVDecode), a lightweight, PEFT-compatible, and theoretically grounded method. We start with a short warm-start fine-tune and extract a task-aware steering vector from the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence gradient between the output distribution of the warm-started and pre-trained models. This steering vector is then used to guide the decoding process to steer the model’s output distribution towards the task distribution. We theoretically prove that SVDecode is first-order equivalent to the gradient step of full fine-tuning and derive a globally optimal solution for the strength of the steering vector. Across three tasks and nine benchmarks, SVDecode paired with four standard PEFT methods improves multiple-choice accuracy by up to 5 percentage points and open-ended truthfulness by 2 percentage points, with similar gains (1-2 percentage points) on commonsense datasets without adding trainable parameters beyond the PEFT adapter. SVDecode thus offers a lightweight, theoretically grounded path to stronger task adaptation for large language models.

arXiv:2510.08804v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present MOSAIC, a multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) framework for solving challenging scientific coding tasks. Unlike general-purpose coding, scientific workflows require algorithms that are rigorous, interconnected with deep domain knowledge, and incorporate domain-specific reasoning, as well as algorithm iteration without requiring I/O test cases. Many scientific problems also require a sequence of subproblems to be solved, leading to the final desired result. MOSAIC is designed as a training-free framework with specially designed agents to self-reflect, create the rationale, code, and debug within a student-teacher paradigm to address the challenges of scientific code generation. This design facilitates stepwise problem decomposition, targeted error correction, and, when combined with our Consolidated Context Window (CCW), mitigates LLM hallucinations when solving complex scientific tasks involving chained subproblems. We evaluate MOSAIC on scientific coding benchmarks and demonstrate that our specialized agentic framework outperforms existing approaches in terms of accuracy, robustness, and interpretability.

arXiv:2510.09528v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pre-trained transformer-based models have significantly advanced automatic speech recognition (ASR), yet they remain sensitive to accent and dialectal variations, resulting in elevated word error rates (WER) in linguistically diverse languages such as English and Persian. To address this challenge, we propose an accent-invariant ASR framework that integrates accent and dialect classification into the recognition pipeline. Our approach involves training a spectrogram-based classifier to capture accent-specific cues, masking the regions most influential to its predictions, and using the masked spectrograms for data augmentation. This enhances the robustness of ASR models against accent variability. We evaluate the method using both English and Persian speech. For Persian, we introduce a newly collected dataset spanning multiple regional accents, establishing the first systematic benchmark for accent variation in Persian ASR that fills a critical gap in multilingual speech research and provides a foundation for future studies on low-resource, linguistically diverse languages. Experimental results with the Whisper model demonstrate that our masking and augmentation strategy yields substantial WER reductions in both English and Persian settings, confirming the effectiveness of the approach. This research advances the development of multilingual ASR systems that are resilient to accent and dialect diversity. Code and dataset are publicly available at: https://github.com/MH-Sameti/Accent_invariant_ASR

arXiv:2407.19638v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This study investigates the efficacy of Large Language Models (LLMs) in causal discovery. Using newly available open-source LLMs, OLMo and BLOOM, which provide access to their pre-training corpora, we investigate how LLMs address causal discovery through three research questions. We examine: (i) the impact of memorization for accurate causal relation prediction, (ii) the influence of incorrect causal relations in pre-training data, and (iii) the contextual nuances that influence LLMs’ understanding of causal relations. Our findings indicate that while LLMs are effective in recognizing causal relations that occur frequently in pre-training data, their ability to generalize to new or rare causal relations is limited. Moreover, the presence of incorrect causal relations significantly undermines the confidence of LLMs in corresponding correct causal relations, and the contextual information critically affects the outcomes of LLMs to discern causal connections between random variables.

arXiv:2510.08825v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning abilities yet remain unreliable on knowledge-intensive, multi-hop questions — they miss long-tail facts, hallucinate when uncertain, and their internal knowledge lags behind real-world change. Knowledge graphs (KGs) offer a structured source of relational evidence, but existing KGQA methods face fundamental trade-offs: compiling complete SPARQL queries without knowing available relations proves brittle, retrieving large subgraphs introduces noise, and complex agent frameworks with parallel exploration exponentially expand search spaces. To address these limitations, we propose Search-on-Graph (SoG), a simple yet effective framework that enables LLMs to perform iterative informed graph navigation using a single, carefully designed textsc{Search} function. Rather than pre-planning paths or retrieving large subgraphs, SoG follows an “observe-then-navigate” principle: at each step, the LLM examines actual available relations from the current entity before deciding on the next hop. This approach further adapts seamlessly to different KG schemas and handles high-degree nodes through adaptive filtering. Across six KGQA benchmarks spanning Freebase and Wikidata, SoG achieves state-of-the-art performance without fine-tuning. We demonstrate particularly strong gains on Wikidata benchmarks (+16% improvement over previous best methods) alongside consistent improvements on Freebase benchmarks.

arXiv:2510.09032v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As an Indo-Aryan language with limited available data, Chakma remains largely underrepresented in language models. In this work, we introduce a novel corpus of contextually coherent Bangla-transliterated Chakma, curated from Chakma literature, and validated by native speakers. Using this dataset, we fine-tune six encoder-based multilingual and regional transformer models (mBERT, XLM-RoBERTa, DistilBERT, DeBERTaV3, BanglaBERT, and IndicBERT) on masked language modeling (MLM) tasks. Our experiments show that fine-tuned multilingual models outperform their pre-trained counterparts when adapted to Bangla-transliterated Chakma, achieving up to 73.54% token accuracy and a perplexity as low as 2.90. Our analysis further highlights the impact of data quality on model performance and shows the limitations of OCR pipelines for morphologically rich Indic scripts. Our research demonstrates that Bangla-transliterated Chakma can be very effective for transfer learning for Chakma language, and we release our manually validated monolingual dataset to encourage further research on multilingual language modeling for low-resource languages.

arXiv:2510.08800v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated advanced reasoning capabilities, their comprehensive evaluation in general Chinese-language contexts remains understudied. To bridge this gap, we propose Chinese Commonsense Multi-hop Reasoning (CCMOR), a novel benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs’ ability to integrate Chinese-specific factual knowledge with multi-step logical reasoning. Specifically, we first construct a domain-balanced seed set from existing QA datasets, then develop an LLM-powered pipeline to generate multi-hop questions anchored on factual unit chains. To ensure the quality of resulting dataset, we implement a human-in-the-loop verification system, where domain experts systematically validate and refine the generated questions. Using CCMOR, we evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs, demonstrating persistent limitations in LLMs’ ability to process long-tail knowledge and execute knowledge-intensive reasoning. Notably, retrieval-augmented generation substantially mitigates these knowledge gaps, yielding significant performance gains.

arXiv:2412.04784v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Anomaly detection (AD) is an important machine learning task with applications in fraud detection, content moderation, and user behavior analysis. However, AD is relatively understudied in a natural language processing (NLP) context, limiting its effectiveness in detecting harmful content, phishing attempts, and spam reviews. We introduce NLP-ADBench, the most comprehensive NLP anomaly detection (NLP-AD) benchmark to date, which includes eight curated datasets and 19 state-of-the-art algorithms. These span 3 end-to-end methods and 16 two-step approaches that adapt classical, non-AD methods to language embeddings from BERT and OpenAI. Our empirical results show that no single model dominates across all datasets, indicating a need for automated model selection. Moreover, two-step methods with transformer-based embeddings consistently outperform specialized end-to-end approaches, with OpenAI embeddings outperforming those of BERT. We release NLP-ADBench at https://github.com/USC-FORTIS/NLP-ADBench, providing a unified framework for NLP-AD and supporting future investigations.