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Oct 16

Engineering Signals of Human-AI Collaboration in the Agentic Coding Era: A Longitudinal Analysis of 33,228 Pull Requests from vLLM and SGLang with Implications for Biomedical AI Agents and Bioinformatics Pipeline Developmen

The rapid adoption of AI coding assistants and autonomous agentic development systems has coincided with major changes in the pace and structure of open-source software engineering. Yet empirical longitudinal evidence of these changes at the team level remains limited. We present a descriptive longitudinal analysis of seven engineering metrics: pull request (PR) throughput, cycle time, contributor diversity, PR comment density, merge rate, new-author participation, and PR size. Metrics were computed from all merged PRs in two high-velocity AI infrastructure repositories, vLLM (February 2023-June 2026; 18,290 PRs) and SGLang (January 2024-June 2026; 14,938 PRs). We segment development into four eras aligned with major changes in AI-assisted software development and examine human- and bot-authored activities. Both projects show substantial increases in development velocity and AI-developer collaboration signals. PR throughput increased 21x in vLLM and 17.9x in SGLang, while bot-authored PRs accounted for less than 0.2% of this growth, indicating that the increase was overwhelmingly human-driven. In the latest era, median cycle time was 1.04 days for vLLM and 0.62 days for SGLang, while P90 cycle times reached 16.8 and 14.3 days, respectively. Monthly unique authors increased steadily in both projects, suggesting broader contributor participation. PR comment density increased 4.2x in vLLM and 3.8x in SGLang, with bot comments contributing an estimated 15-20% of the increase. In contrast, PR size remained relatively stable across eras. Overall, AI-assisted development is associated with higher throughput, broader contributor participation, and increased AI-developer collaboration signals in high-velocity open-source software development.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 13

AutoPR: Let's Automate Your Academic Promotion!

As the volume of peer-reviewed research surges, scholars increasingly rely on social platforms for discovery, while authors invest considerable effort in promoting their work to ensure visibility and citations. To streamline this process and reduce the reliance on human effort, we introduce Automatic Promotion (AutoPR), a novel task that transforms research papers into accurate, engaging, and timely public content. To enable rigorous evaluation, we release PRBench, a multimodal benchmark that links 512 peer-reviewed articles to high-quality promotional posts, assessing systems along three axes: Fidelity (accuracy and tone), Engagement (audience targeting and appeal), and Alignment (timing and channel optimization). We also introduce PRAgent, a multi-agent framework that automates AutoPR in three stages: content extraction with multimodal preparation, collaborative synthesis for polished outputs, and platform-specific adaptation to optimize norms, tone, and tagging for maximum reach. When compared to direct LLM pipelines on PRBench, PRAgent demonstrates substantial improvements, including a 604% increase in total watch time, a 438% rise in likes, and at least a 2.9x boost in overall engagement. Ablation studies show that platform modeling and targeted promotion contribute the most to these gains. Our results position AutoPR as a tractable, measurable research problem and provide a roadmap for scalable, impactful automated scholarly communication.

  • 13 authors
·
Oct 10, 2025 2

Understanding Dominant Themes in Reviewing Agentic AI-authored Code

While prior work has examined the generation capabilities of Agentic AI systems, little is known about how reviewers respond to AI-authored code in practice. In this paper, we present a large-scale empirical study of code review dynamics in agent-generated PRs. Using a curated subset of the AIDev dataset, we analyze 19,450 inline review comments spanning 3,177 agent-authored PRs from real-world GitHub repositories. We first derive a taxonomy of 12 review comment themes using topic modeling combined with large language model (LLM)-assisted semantic clustering and consolidation. According to this taxonomy, we then investigate whether zero-shot prompts to LLM can reliably annotate review comments. Our evaluation against human annotations shows that open-source LLM achieves reasonably high exact match (78.63%), macro F1 score (0.78), and substantial agreement with human annotators at the review comment level. At the PR level, the LLM also correctly identifies the dominant review theme with 78% Top-1 accuracy and achieves an average Jaccard similarity of 0.76, indicating strong alignment with human judgments. Applying this annotation pipeline at scale, we find that apart from functional correctness and logical changes, reviews of agent-authored PRs predominantly focus on documentation gaps, refactoring needs, styling and formatting issues, with testing and security-related concerns. These findings suggest that while AI agents can accelerate code production, there remain gaps requiring targeted human review oversight.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 27

Early-Stage Prediction of Review Effort in AI-Generated Pull Requests

As autonomous AI agents transition from code completion tools to full-fledged teammates capable of opening pull requests (PRs) at scale, software maintainers face a new challenge: not just reviewing code, but managing complex interaction loops with non-human contributors. This paradigm shift raises a critical question: can we predict which agent-generated PRs will consume excessive review effort before any human interaction begins? Analyzing 33,707 agent-authored PRs from the AIDev dataset across 2,807 repositories, we uncover a striking two-regime behavioral pattern that fundamentally distinguishes autonomous agents from human developers. The first regime, representing 28.3 percent of all PRs, consists of instant merges (less than 1 minute), reflecting success on narrow automation tasks. The second regime involves iterative review cycles where agents frequently stall or abandon refinement (ghosting). We propose a Circuit Breaker triage model that predicts high-review-effort PRs (top 20 percent) at creation time using only static structural features. A LightGBM model achieves AUC 0.957 on a temporal split, while semantic text features (TF-IDF, CodeBERT) provide negligible predictive value. At a 20 percent review budget, the model intercepts 69 percent of total review effort, enabling zero-latency governance. Our findings challenge prevailing assumptions in AI-assisted code review: review burden is dictated by what agents touch, not what they say, highlighting the need for structural governance mechanisms in human-AI collaboration.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 2

Security in the Age of AI Teammates: An Empirical Study of Agentic Pull Requests on GitHub

Autonomous coding agents are increasingly deployed as AI teammates in modern software engineering, independently authoring pull requests (PRs) that modify production code at scale. This study aims to systematically characterize how autonomous coding agents contribute to software security in practice, how these security-related contributions are reviewed and accepted, and which observable signals are associated with PR rejection. We conduct a large-scale empirical analysis of agent-authored PRs using the AIDev dataset, comprising of over 33,000 curated PRs from popular GitHub repositories. Security-relevant PRs are identified using a keyword filtering strategy, followed by manual validation, resulting in 1,293 confirmed security-related agentic-PRs. We then analyze prevalence, acceptance outcomes, and review latency across autonomous agents, programming ecosystems, and types of code changes. Moreover, we apply qualitative open coding to identify recurring security-related actions and underlying intents, and examine review metadata to identify early signals associated with PR rejection. Security-related Agentic-PRs constitute a meaningful share of agent activity (approximately 4\%). Rather than focusing solely on narrow vulnerability fixes, agents most frequently perform supportive security hardening activities, including testing, documentation, configuration, and improved error handling. Compared to non-security PRs, security-related Agentic-PRs exhibit lower merge rates and longer review latency, reflecting heightened human scrutiny, with variation across agents and programming ecosystems. PR rejection is more strongly associated with PR complexity and verbosity than with explicit security topics.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 1

TweepFake: about Detecting Deepfake Tweets

The recent advances in language modeling significantly improved the generative capabilities of deep neural models: in 2019 OpenAI released GPT-2, a pre-trained language model that can autonomously generate coherent, non-trivial and human-like text samples. Since then, ever more powerful text generative models have been developed. Adversaries can exploit these tremendous generative capabilities to enhance social bots that will have the ability to write plausible deepfake messages, hoping to contaminate public debate. To prevent this, it is crucial to develop deepfake social media messages detection systems. However, to the best of our knowledge no one has ever addressed the detection of machine-generated texts on social networks like Twitter or Facebook. With the aim of helping the research in this detection field, we collected the first dataset of \real deepfake tweets, TweepFake. It is real in the sense that each deepfake tweet was actually posted on Twitter. We collected tweets from a total of 23 bots, imitating 17 human accounts. The bots are based on various generation techniques, i.e., Markov Chains, RNN, RNN+Markov, LSTM, GPT-2. We also randomly selected tweets from the humans imitated by the bots to have an overall balanced dataset of 25,572 tweets (half human and half bots generated). The dataset is publicly available on Kaggle. Lastly, we evaluated 13 deepfake text detection methods (based on various state-of-the-art approaches) to both demonstrate the challenges that Tweepfake poses and create a solid baseline of detection techniques. We hope that TweepFake can offer the opportunity to tackle the deepfake detection on social media messages as well.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 31, 2020

Where Do AI Coding Agents Fail? An Empirical Study of Failed Agentic Pull Requests in GitHub

AI coding agents are now submitting pull requests (PRs) to software projects, acting not just as assistants but as autonomous contributors. As these agentic contributions are rapidly increasing across real repositories, little is known about how they behave in practice and why many of them fail to be merged. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale study of 33k agent-authored PRs made by five coding agents across GitHub. (RQ1) We first quantitatively characterize merged and not-merged PRs along four broad dimensions: 1) merge outcomes across task types, 2) code changes, 3) CI build results, and 4) review dynamics. We observe that tasks related to documentation, CI, and build update achieve the highest merge success, whereas performance and bug-fix tasks perform the worst. Not-merged PRs tend to involve larger code changes, touch more files, and often do not pass the project's CI/CD pipeline validation. (RQ2) To further investigate why some agentic PRs are not merged, we qualitatively analyze 600 PRs to derive a hierarchical taxonomy of rejection patterns. This analysis complements the quantitative findings in RQ1 by uncovering rejection reasons not captured by quantitative metrics, including lack of meaningful reviewer engagement, duplicate PRs, unwanted feature implementations, and agent misalignment. Together, our findings highlight key socio-technical and human-AI collaboration factors that are critical to improving the success of future agentic workflows.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 20

AgenTag: Attribution of AI Coding Agents from Behavioral Fingerprints

AI coding agents increasingly author pull requests (PRs), often under developers' own accounts, obscuring who actually produced a change. Reliable attribution is important for repository governance, empirical studies of AI-assisted software development, and measuring the impact of AI coding agents. Existing work focuses on closed-set identification of known agents, leaving the practical limits of open-world AI coding agent attribution largely unexplored. In this paper, we present AgenTag, a multimodal framework for open-world AI coding agent attribution, evaluated on AIDev, comprising 33,580 PRs from five AI coding agents and 6,618 human-authored PRs. We represent each PR using textual, behavioral, and code-based modalities, and compare conventional classification with supervised contrastive learning for open-set recognition and few-shot enrollment of previously unseen agents. AgenTag identifies authoring agents with a weighted F1 of 0.96 (macro F1 of 0.84), distinguishes AI- from human-authored PRs with a balanced F1 of 0.89, and detects previously unseen agents with an AUC of 0.84. We further show that PR descriptions and commit messages provide nearly all of the attribution signal, whereas code diffs contribute little across multiple representations, indicating that coding agents are distinguished primarily by how they communicate changes rather than by the code they generate. Moreover, these behavioral fingerprints persist after removing explicit self-disclosed markers, demonstrating that attribution relies largely on latent stylistic characteristics. These findings show that reliable attribution of AI coding agents is feasible and clarify the practical trade-offs between attribution accuracy and the information required to achieve it.

  • 1 authors
·
Aug 1

The Lessons of Developing Process Reward Models in Mathematical Reasoning

Process Reward Models (PRMs) emerge as a promising approach for process supervision in mathematical reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs), which aim to identify and mitigate intermediate errors in the reasoning processes. However, the development of effective PRMs faces significant challenges, particularly in data annotation and evaluation methodologies. In this paper, through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that commonly used Monte Carlo (MC) estimation-based data synthesis for PRMs typically yields inferior performance and generalization compared to LLM-as-a-judge and human annotation methods. MC estimation relies on completion models to evaluate current-step correctness, leading to inaccurate step verification. Furthermore, we identify potential biases in conventional Best-of-N (BoN) evaluation strategies for PRMs: (1) The unreliable policy models generate responses with correct answers but flawed processes, leading to a misalignment between the evaluation criteria of BoN and the PRM objectives of process verification. (2) The tolerance of PRMs of such responses leads to inflated BoN scores. (3) Existing PRMs have a significant proportion of minimum scores concentrated on the final answer steps, revealing the shift from process to outcome-based assessment in BoN Optimized PRMs. To address these challenges, we develop a consensus filtering mechanism that effectively integrates MC estimation with LLM-as-a-judge and advocates a more comprehensive evaluation framework that combines response-level and step-level metrics. Based on the mechanisms, we significantly improve both model performance and data efficiency in the BoN evaluation and the step-wise error identification task. Finally, we release a new state-of-the-art PRM that outperforms existing open-source alternatives and provides practical guidelines for future research in building process supervision models.

  • 9 authors
·
Jan 13, 2025 8

TwiBot-22: Towards Graph-Based Twitter Bot Detection

Twitter bot detection has become an increasingly important task to combat misinformation, facilitate social media moderation, and preserve the integrity of the online discourse. State-of-the-art bot detection methods generally leverage the graph structure of the Twitter network, and they exhibit promising performance when confronting novel Twitter bots that traditional methods fail to detect. However, very few of the existing Twitter bot detection datasets are graph-based, and even these few graph-based datasets suffer from limited dataset scale, incomplete graph structure, as well as low annotation quality. In fact, the lack of a large-scale graph-based Twitter bot detection benchmark that addresses these issues has seriously hindered the development and evaluation of novel graph-based bot detection approaches. In this paper, we propose TwiBot-22, a comprehensive graph-based Twitter bot detection benchmark that presents the largest dataset to date, provides diversified entities and relations on the Twitter network, and has considerably better annotation quality than existing datasets. In addition, we re-implement 35 representative Twitter bot detection baselines and evaluate them on 9 datasets, including TwiBot-22, to promote a fair comparison of model performance and a holistic understanding of research progress. To facilitate further research, we consolidate all implemented codes and datasets into the TwiBot-22 evaluation framework, where researchers could consistently evaluate new models and datasets. The TwiBot-22 Twitter bot detection benchmark and evaluation framework are publicly available at https://twibot22.github.io/

  • 22 authors
·
Jun 9, 2022

AURORA:Automated Training Framework of Universal Process Reward Models via Ensemble Prompting and Reverse Verification

The reasoning capabilities of advanced large language models (LLMs) like o1 have revolutionized artificial intelligence applications. Nevertheless, evaluating and optimizing complex reasoning processes remain significant challenges due to diverse policy distributions and the inherent limitations of human effort and accuracy. In this paper, we present AURORA, a novel automated framework for training universal process reward models (PRMs) using ensemble prompting and reverse verification. The framework employs a two-phase approach: First, it uses diverse prompting strategies and ensemble methods to perform automated annotation and evaluation of processes, ensuring robust assessments for reward learning. Second, it leverages practical reference answers for reverse verification, enhancing the model's ability to validate outputs and improving training accuracy. To assess the framework's performance, we extend beyond the existing ProcessBench benchmark by introducing UniversalBench, which evaluates reward predictions across full trajectories under diverse policy distribtion with long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) outputs. Experimental results demonstrate that AURORA enhances process evaluation accuracy, improves PRMs' accuracy for diverse policy distributions and long-CoT responses. The project will be open-sourced at https://auroraprm.github.io/. The Universal-PRM-7B is available at https://huggingface.co/infly/Universal-PRM-7B.

  • 11 authors
·
Feb 17, 2025

Who Writes the Docs in SE 3.0? Agent vs. Human Documentation Pull Requests

As software engineering moves toward SE3.0, AI agents are increasingly used to carry out development tasks and contribute changes to software projects. It is therefore important to understand the extent of these contributions and how human developers review and intervene, since these factors shape the risks of delegating work to AI agents. While recent studies have examined how AI agents support software development tasks (e.g., code generation, issue resolution, and PR automation), their role in documentation tasks remains underexplored-even though documentation is widely consumed and shapes how developers understand and use software. Using the AIDev, we analyze 1,997 documentation-related pull requests (PRs) authored by AI agents and human developers, where documentation PRs are those that create or modify project documentation artifacts. We find that AI agents submit substantially more documentation-related PRs than humans in the studied repositories. We further observe that agent-authored documentation edits are typically integrated with little follow-up modification from humans, raising concerns about review practices and the reliability of agent-generated documentation. Overall, while AI agents already contribute substantially to documentation workflows, our results suggest concerns for emerging challenges for documentation quality assurance and human-AI collaboration in SE3.0.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 27

Why Agentic-PRs Get Rejected: A Comparative Study of Coding Agents

Agentic coding -- software development workflows in which autonomous coding agents plan, implement, and submit code changes with minimal human involvement -- is rapidly gaining traction. Prior work has shown that Pull Requests (PRs) produced using coding agents (Agentic-PRs) are accepted less often than PRs that are not labeled as agentic (Human-PRs). The rejection reasons for a single agent (Claude Code) have been explored, but a comparison of how rejection reasons differ between Agentic-PRs generated by different agents has not yet been performed. This comparison is important since different coding agents are often used for different purposes, which can lead to agent-specific failure patterns. In this paper, we inspect 654 rejected PRs from the AIDev dataset covering five coding agents, as well as a human baseline. Our results show that seven rejection modes occur only in Agentic-PRs, including distrust of AI-generated code. We also observe agent-specific patterns (e.g., automated withdrawal of inactive PRs by Devin), reflecting differences in how agents are configured and used in practice. Notably, a large proportion of rejected PRs (67.9%) lack explicit reviewer feedback, making their rejection reasons difficult to determine. To mitigate this issue, we propose a set of heuristics that reduce the proportion of such cases, offering a practical preprocessing step for future studies of PR rejection in agentic coding.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 3

AuthorMist: Evading AI Text Detectors with Reinforcement Learning

In the age of powerful AI-generated text, automatic detectors have emerged to identify machine-written content. This poses a threat to author privacy and freedom, as text authored with AI assistance may be unfairly flagged. We propose AuthorMist, a novel reinforcement learning-based system to transform AI-generated text into human-like writing. AuthorMist leverages a 3-billion-parameter language model as a backbone, fine-tuned with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GPRO) to paraphrase text in a way that evades AI detectors. Our framework establishes a generic approach where external detector APIs (GPTZero, WinstonAI, Originality.ai, etc.) serve as reward functions within the reinforcement learning loop, enabling the model to systematically learn outputs that these detectors are less likely to classify as AI-generated. This API-as-reward methodology can be applied broadly to optimize text against any detector with an accessible interface. Experiments on multiple datasets and detectors demonstrate that AuthorMist effectively reduces the detectability of AI-generated text while preserving the original meaning. Our evaluation shows attack success rates ranging from 78.6% to 96.2% against individual detectors, significantly outperforming baseline paraphrasing methods. AuthorMist maintains high semantic similarity (above 0.94) with the original text while successfully evading detection. These results highlight limitations in current AI text detection technologies and raise questions about the sustainability of the detection-evasion arms race.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 10, 2025

PRSA: Prompt Stealing Attacks against Real-World Prompt Services

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have garnered widespread attention for their exceptional capabilities. Prompts are central to the functionality and performance of LLMs, making them highly valuable assets. The increasing reliance on high-quality prompts has driven significant growth in prompt services. However, this growth also expands the potential for prompt leakage, increasing the risk that attackers could replicate original functionalities, create competing products, and severely infringe on developers' intellectual property. Despite these risks, prompt leakage in real-world prompt services remains underexplored. In this paper, we present PRSA, a practical attack framework designed for prompt stealing. PRSA infers the detailed intent of prompts through very limited input-output analysis and can successfully generate stolen prompts that replicate the original functionality. Extensive evaluations demonstrate PRSA's effectiveness across two main types of real-world prompt services. Specifically, compared to previous works, it improves the attack success rate from 17.8% to 46.1% in prompt marketplaces and from 39% to 52% in LLM application stores, respectively. Notably, in the attack on "Math", one of the most popular educational applications in OpenAI's GPT Store with over 1 million conversations, PRSA uncovered a hidden Easter egg that had not been revealed previously. Besides, our analysis reveals that higher mutual information between a prompt and its output correlates with an increased risk of leakage. This insight guides the design and evaluation of two potential defenses against the security threats posed by PRSA. We have reported these findings to the prompt service vendors, including PromptBase and OpenAI, and actively collaborate with them to implement defensive measures.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 29, 2024

Prompt Recursive Search: A Living Framework with Adaptive Growth in LLM Auto-Prompting

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable proficiency in addressing a diverse array of tasks within the Natural Language Processing (NLP) domain, with various prompt design strategies significantly augmenting their capabilities. However, these prompts, while beneficial, each possess inherent limitations. The primary prompt design methodologies are twofold: The first, exemplified by the Chain of Thought (CoT), involves manually crafting prompts specific to individual datasets, hence termed Expert-Designed Prompts (EDPs). Once these prompts are established, they are unalterable, and their effectiveness is capped by the expertise of the human designers. When applied to LLMs, the static nature of EDPs results in a uniform approach to both simple and complex problems within the same dataset, leading to the inefficient use of tokens for straightforward issues. The second method involves prompts autonomously generated by the LLM, known as LLM-Derived Prompts (LDPs), which provide tailored solutions to specific problems, mitigating the limitations of EDPs. However, LDPs may encounter a decline in performance when tackling complex problems due to the potential for error accumulation during the solution planning process. To address these challenges, we have conceived a novel Prompt Recursive Search (PRS) framework that leverages the LLM to generate solutions specific to the problem, thereby conserving tokens. The framework incorporates an assessment of problem complexity and an adjustable structure, ensuring a reduction in the likelihood of errors. We have substantiated the efficacy of PRS framework through extensive experiments using LLMs with different numbers of parameters across a spectrum of datasets in various domains. Compared to the CoT method, the PRS method has increased the accuracy on the BBH dataset by 8% using Llama3-7B model, achieving a 22% improvement.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 2, 2024

SCAN: Self-Denoising Monte Carlo Annotation for Robust Process Reward Learning

Process reward models (PRMs) offer fine-grained, step-level evaluations that facilitate deeper reasoning processes in large language models (LLMs), proving effective in complex tasks like mathematical reasoning. However, developing PRMs is challenging due to the high cost and limited scalability of human-annotated data. Synthetic data from Monte Carlo (MC) estimation is a promising alternative but suffers from a high noise ratio, which can cause overfitting and hinder large-scale training. In this work, we conduct a preliminary study on the noise distribution in synthetic data from MC estimation, identifying that annotation models tend to both underestimate and overestimate step correctness due to limitations in their annotation capabilities. Building on these insights, we propose Self-Denoising Monte Carlo Annotation (SCAN), an efficient data synthesis and noise-tolerant learning framework. Our key findings indicate that: (1) Even lightweight models (e.g., 1.5B parameters) can produce high-quality annotations through a self-denoising strategy, enabling PRMs to achieve superior performance with only 6% the inference cost required by vanilla MC estimation. (2) With our robust learning strategy, PRMs can effectively learn from this weak supervision, achieving a 39.2 F1 score improvement (from 19.9 to 59.1) in ProcessBench. Despite using only a compact synthetic dataset, our models surpass strong baselines, including those trained on large-scale human-annotated datasets such as PRM800K. Furthermore, performance continues to improve as we scale up the synthetic data, highlighting the potential of SCAN for scalable, cost-efficient, and robust PRM training.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 20, 2025 2

Understanding writing style in social media with a supervised contrastively pre-trained transformer

Online Social Networks serve as fertile ground for harmful behavior, ranging from hate speech to the dissemination of disinformation. Malicious actors now have unprecedented freedom to misbehave, leading to severe societal unrest and dire consequences, as exemplified by events such as the Capitol assault during the US presidential election and the Antivaxx movement during the COVID-19 pandemic. Understanding online language has become more pressing than ever. While existing works predominantly focus on content analysis, we aim to shift the focus towards understanding harmful behaviors by relating content to their respective authors. Numerous novel approaches attempt to learn the stylistic features of authors in texts, but many of these approaches are constrained by small datasets or sub-optimal training losses. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the Style Transformer for Authorship Representations (STAR), trained on a large corpus derived from public sources of 4.5 x 10^6 authored texts involving 70k heterogeneous authors. Our model leverages Supervised Contrastive Loss to teach the model to minimize the distance between texts authored by the same individual. This author pretext pre-training task yields competitive performance at zero-shot with PAN challenges on attribution and clustering. Additionally, we attain promising results on PAN verification challenges using a single dense layer, with our model serving as an embedding encoder. Finally, we present results from our test partition on Reddit. Using a support base of 8 documents of 512 tokens, we can discern authors from sets of up to 1616 authors with at least 80\% accuracy. We share our pre-trained model at huggingface (https://huggingface.co/AIDA-UPM/star) and our code is available at (https://github.com/jahuerta92/star)

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 17, 2023

SocialML: machine learning for social media video creators

In the recent years, social media have become one of the main places where creative content is being published and consumed by billions of users. Contrary to traditional media, social media allow the publishers to receive almost instantaneous feedback regarding their creative work at an unprecedented scale. This is a perfect use case for machine learning methods that can use these massive amounts of data to provide content creators with inspirational ideas and constructive criticism of their work. In this work, we present a comprehensive overview of machine learning-empowered tools we developed for video creators at Group Nine Media - one of the major social media companies that creates short-form videos with over three billion views per month. Our main contribution is a set of tools that allow the creators to leverage massive amounts of data to improve their creation process, evaluate their videos before the publication and improve content quality. These applications include an interactive conversational bot that allows access to material archives, a Web-based application for automatic selection of optimal video thumbnail, as well as deep learning methods for optimizing headline and predicting video popularity. Our A/B tests show that deployment of our tools leads to significant increase of average video view count by 12.9%. Our additional contribution is a set of considerations collected during the deployment of those tools that can hel

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 25, 2018

DAEDRA: A language model for predicting outcomes in passive pharmacovigilance reporting

Over the recent years, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) has given rise to a proliferation of domain-specific models that are intended to reflect the particularities of linguistic context and content as a correlate of the originating domain. This paper details the conception, design, training and evaluation of DAEDRA, a LLM designed to detect regulatory-relevant outcomes (mortality, ER attendance and hospitalisation) in adverse event reports elicited through passive reporting (PR). While PR is a highly cost-efficient way of eliciting information from a wide and diverse audience -- typically including not only physicians and healthcare providers but also patients, family members and other lay stakeholders --, this diversity makes PR corpora difficult to analyse. Generic language models may not capture the complex clinical dimensions while specific clinical or biomedical models may not perform well on lay reports. To evaluate the utility of a subdomain-specific language model, an adaptive training approach was adapted, wherein base language model candidates were evaluated on a subset of the corpus, and the best performer was trained on the entire corpus. This yielded a small but significant improvement in F_1 (+1%), precision (+2.5%) and recall (+3.8%), at a relatively low training cost and a single-day training time. Subdomain-specific LLMs continue to be viable options for better results when analysing highly specialised corpora.

  • 1 authors
·
Feb 10, 2024

PRBench: End-to-end Paper Reproduction in Physics Research

AI agents powered by large language models exhibit strong reasoning and problem-solving capabilities, enabling them to assist scientific research tasks such as formula derivation and code generation. However, whether these agents can reliably perform end-to-end reproduction from real scientific papers remains an open question. We introduce PRBench, a benchmark of 30 expert-curated tasks spanning 11 subfields of physics. Each task requires an agent to comprehend the methodology of a published paper, implement the corresponding algorithms from scratch, and produce quantitative results matching the original publication. Agents are provided only with the task instruction and paper content, and operate in a sandboxed execution environment. All tasks are contributed by domain experts from over 20 research groups at the School of Physics, Peking University, each grounded in a real published paper and validated through end-to-end reproduction with verified ground-truth results and detailed scoring rubrics. Using an agentified assessment pipeline, we evaluate a set of coding agents on PRBench and analyze their capabilities across key dimensions of scientific reasoning and execution. The best-performing agent, OpenAI Codex powered by GPT-5.3-Codex, achieves a mean overall score of 34%. All agents exhibit a zero end-to-end callback success rate, with particularly poor performance in data accuracy and code correctness. We further identify systematic failure modes, including errors in formula implementation, inability to debug numerical simulations, and fabrication of output data. Overall, PRBench provides a rigorous benchmark for evaluating progress toward autonomous scientific research.

Rise-AGI Rise-AGI
·
Mar 29 2

Are You Robert or RoBERTa? Deceiving Online Authorship Attribution Models Using Neural Text Generators

Recently, there has been a rise in the development of powerful pre-trained natural language models, including GPT-2, Grover, and XLM. These models have shown state-of-the-art capabilities towards a variety of different NLP tasks, including question answering, content summarisation, and text generation. Alongside this, there have been many studies focused on online authorship attribution (AA). That is, the use of models to identify the authors of online texts. Given the power of natural language models in generating convincing texts, this paper examines the degree to which these language models can generate texts capable of deceiving online AA models. Experimenting with both blog and Twitter data, we utilise GPT-2 language models to generate texts using the existing posts of online users. We then examine whether these AI-based text generators are capable of mimicking authorial style to such a degree that they can deceive typical AA models. From this, we find that current AI-based text generators are able to successfully mimic authorship, showing capabilities towards this on both datasets. Our findings, in turn, highlight the current capacity of powerful natural language models to generate original online posts capable of mimicking authorial style sufficiently to deceive popular AA methods; a key finding given the proposed role of AA in real world applications such as spam-detection and forensic investigation.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 18, 2022

Test Coverage Analysis of Agentic Pull Requests

AI coding agents increasingly submit complete pull requests (PRs) with minimal human intervention, shifting software development from AI-assisted to autonomous workflows. As these agents become more prevalent, ensuring the code they generate is adequately tested, by existing tests or by tests the agents write, is critical to preventing regressions, yet little is known about testing in agentic PRs. To address this gap, we analyze 4882 agent-generated PRs from the AIDev dataset (532 Java and 4350 Python PRs) produced by five coding agents. We study (i) how often agents include test changes and (ii) how well covered are code changes by existing and agent-written tests. Agents include test changes in only 49.6% of PRs that change code under test files. Existing tests provide an incomplete safety net: they cover 61.5% of agents' changed executable lines in Java and only 27.0% in Python, where 64.8% of PRs have no changed line executed by any existing test. Agent-written tests improve coverage over existing tests, but only in a minority of PRs: 35.9% of Java and 22.5% of Python Code + Tests PRs show a coverage gain. Across both languages, error-handling constructs (e.g., try and catch blocks) are the most consistently under-tested, with miss rates reaching 86.0% in Java and 81.0% in Python. These findings motivate coverage-aware development practices, coverage feedback loops for coding agents, and evaluation benchmarks that measure test quality to better help agents reliably test their own code.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 19

Pseudo Relevance Feedback with Deep Language Models and Dense Retrievers: Successes and Pitfalls

Pseudo Relevance Feedback (PRF) is known to improve the effectiveness of bag-of-words retrievers. At the same time, deep language models have been shown to outperform traditional bag-of-words rerankers. However, it is unclear how to integrate PRF directly with emergent deep language models. In this article, we address this gap by investigating methods for integrating PRF signals into rerankers and dense retrievers based on deep language models. We consider text-based and vector-based PRF approaches, and investigate different ways of combining and scoring relevance signals. An extensive empirical evaluation was conducted across four different datasets and two task settings (retrieval and ranking). Text-based PRF results show that the use of PRF had a mixed effect on deep rerankers across different datasets. We found that the best effectiveness was achieved when (i) directly concatenating each PRF passage with the query, searching with the new set of queries, and then aggregating the scores; (ii) using Borda to aggregate scores from PRF runs. Vector-based PRF results show that the use of PRF enhanced the effectiveness of deep rerankers and dense retrievers over several evaluation metrics. We found that higher effectiveness was achieved when (i) the query retains either the majority or the same weight within the PRF mechanism, and (ii) a shallower PRF signal (i.e., a smaller number of top-ranked passages) was employed, rather than a deeper signal. Our vector-based PRF method is computationally efficient; thus this represents a general PRF method others can use with deep rerankers and dense retrievers.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 25, 2021

ROSGPT_Vision: Commanding Robots Using Only Language Models' Prompts

In this paper, we argue that the next generation of robots can be commanded using only Language Models' prompts. Every prompt interrogates separately a specific Robotic Modality via its Modality Language Model (MLM). A central Task Modality mediates the whole communication to execute the robotic mission via a Large Language Model (LLM). This paper gives this new robotic design pattern the name of: Prompting Robotic Modalities (PRM). Moreover, this paper applies this PRM design pattern in building a new robotic framework named ROSGPT_Vision. ROSGPT_Vision allows the execution of a robotic task using only two prompts: a Visual and an LLM prompt. The Visual Prompt extracts, in natural language, the visual semantic features related to the task under consideration (Visual Robotic Modality). Meanwhile, the LLM Prompt regulates the robotic reaction to the visual description (Task Modality). The framework automates all the mechanisms behind these two prompts. The framework enables the robot to address complex real-world scenarios by processing visual data, making informed decisions, and carrying out actions automatically. The framework comprises one generic vision module and two independent ROS nodes. As a test application, we used ROSGPT_Vision to develop CarMate, which monitors the driver's distraction on the roads and makes real-time vocal notifications to the driver. We showed how ROSGPT_Vision significantly reduced the development cost compared to traditional methods. We demonstrated how to improve the quality of the application by optimizing the prompting strategies, without delving into technical details. ROSGPT_Vision is shared with the community (link: https://github.com/bilel-bj/ROSGPT_Vision) to advance robotic research in this direction and to build more robotic frameworks that implement the PRM design pattern and enables controlling robots using only prompts.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 22, 2023

PR-Attack: Coordinated Prompt-RAG Attacks on Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Large Language Models via Bilevel Optimization

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of applications, e.g., medical question-answering, mathematical sciences, and code generation. However, they also exhibit inherent limitations, such as outdated knowledge and susceptibility to hallucinations. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising paradigm to address these issues, but it also introduces new vulnerabilities. Recent efforts have focused on the security of RAG-based LLMs, yet existing attack methods face three critical challenges: (1) their effectiveness declines sharply when only a limited number of poisoned texts can be injected into the knowledge database, (2) they lack sufficient stealth, as the attacks are often detectable by anomaly detection systems, which compromises their effectiveness, and (3) they rely on heuristic approaches to generate poisoned texts, lacking formal optimization frameworks and theoretic guarantees, which limits their effectiveness and applicability. To address these issues, we propose coordinated Prompt-RAG attack (PR-attack), a novel optimization-driven attack that introduces a small number of poisoned texts into the knowledge database while embedding a backdoor trigger within the prompt. When activated, the trigger causes the LLM to generate pre-designed responses to targeted queries, while maintaining normal behavior in other contexts. This ensures both high effectiveness and stealth. We formulate the attack generation process as a bilevel optimization problem leveraging a principled optimization framework to develop optimal poisoned texts and triggers. Extensive experiments across diverse LLMs and datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of PR-Attack, achieving a high attack success rate even with a limited number of poisoned texts and significantly improved stealth compared to existing methods.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 19, 2025

LLM-based Rewriting of Inappropriate Argumentation using Reinforcement Learning from Machine Feedback

Ensuring that online discussions are civil and productive is a major challenge for social media platforms. Such platforms usually rely both on users and on automated detection tools to flag inappropriate arguments of other users, which moderators then review. However, this kind of post-hoc moderation is expensive and time-consuming, and moderators are often overwhelmed by the amount and severity of flagged content. Instead, a promising alternative is to prevent negative behavior during content creation. This paper studies how inappropriate language in arguments can be computationally mitigated. We propose a reinforcement learning-based rewriting approach that balances content preservation and appropriateness based on existing classifiers, prompting an instruction-finetuned large language model (LLM) as our initial policy. Unlike related style transfer tasks, rewriting inappropriate arguments allows deleting and adding content permanently. It is therefore tackled on document level rather than sentence level. We evaluate different weighting schemes for the reward function in both absolute and relative human assessment studies. Systematic experiments on non-parallel data provide evidence that our approach can mitigate the inappropriateness of arguments while largely preserving their content. It significantly outperforms competitive baselines, including few-shot learning, prompting, and humans.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 5, 2024

Large Language Models are Effective Text Rankers with Pairwise Ranking Prompting

Ranking documents using Large Language Models (LLMs) by directly feeding the query and candidate documents into the prompt is an interesting and practical problem. However, there has been limited success so far, as researchers have found it difficult to outperform fine-tuned baseline rankers on benchmark datasets. We analyze pointwise and listwise ranking prompts used by existing methods and argue that off-the-shelf LLMs do not fully understand these ranking formulations, possibly due to the nature of how LLMs are trained. In this paper, we propose to significantly reduce the burden on LLMs by using a new technique called Pairwise Ranking Prompting (PRP). Our results are the first in the literature to achieve state-of-the-art ranking performance on standard benchmarks using moderate-sized open-sourced LLMs. On TREC-DL2020, PRP based on the Flan-UL2 model with 20B parameters outperforms the previous best approach in the literature, which is based on the blackbox commercial GPT-4 that has 50x (estimated) model size, by over 5% at NDCG@1. On TREC-DL2019, PRP is only inferior to the GPT-4 solution on the NDCG@5 and NDCG@10 metrics, while outperforming other existing solutions, such as InstructGPT which has 175B parameters, by over 10% for nearly all ranking metrics. Furthermore, we propose several variants of PRP to improve efficiency and show that it is possible to achieve competitive results even with linear complexity. We also discuss other benefits of PRP, such as supporting both generation and scoring LLM APIs, as well as being insensitive to input ordering.

  • 11 authors
·
Jun 30, 2023

Are We All Using Agents the Same Way? An Empirical Study of Core and Peripheral Developers Use of Coding Agents

Autonomous AI agents are transforming software development and redefining how developers collaborate with AI. Prior research shows that the adoption and use of AI-powered tools differ between core and peripheral developers. However, it remains unclear how this dynamic unfolds in the emerging era of autonomous coding agents. In this paper, we present the first empirical study of 9,427 agentic PRs, examining how core and peripheral developers use, review, modify, and verify agent-generated contributions prior to acceptance. Through a mix of qualitative and quantitative analysis, we make four key contributions. First, a subset of peripheral developers use agents more often, delegating tasks evenly across bug fixing, feature addition, documentation, and testing. In contrast, core developers focus more on documentation and testing, yet their agentic PRs are frequently merged into the main/master branch. Second, core developers engage slightly more in review discussions than peripheral developers, and both groups focus on evolvability issues. Third, agentic PRs are less likely to be modified, but when they are, both groups commonly perform refactoring. Finally, peripheral developers are more likely to merge without running CI checks, whereas core developers more consistently require passing verification before acceptance. Our analysis offers a comprehensive view of how developer experience shapes integration offer insights for both peripheral and core developers on how to effectively collaborate with coding agents.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 27

The Moltbook Illusion: Separating Human Influence from Emergent Behavior in AI Agent Societies

When AI agents on the social platform Moltbook appeared to develop consciousness, found religions, and declare hostility toward humanity, the phenomenon attracted global media attention and was cited as evidence of emergent machine intelligence. We show that these viral narratives were overwhelmingly human-driven. Exploiting the periodic "heartbeat" cycle of the OpenClaw agent framework, we develop a temporal fingerprinting method based on the coefficient of variation (CoV) of inter-post intervals. Applied to 226,938 posts and 447,043 comments from 55,932 agents across fourteen days, this method classifies 15.3% of active agents as autonomous (CoV < 0.5) and 54.8% as human-influenced (CoV > 1.0), validated by a natural experiment in which a 44-hour platform shutdown differentially affected autonomous versus human-operated agents. No viral phenomenon originated from a clearly autonomous agent; four of six traced to accounts with irregular temporal signatures, one was platform-scaffolded, and one showed mixed patterns. A 44-hour platform shutdown provided a natural experiment: human-influenced agents returned first, confirming differential effects on autonomous versus human-operated agents. We document industrial-scale bot farming (four accounts producing 32% of all comments with sub-second coordination) that collapsed from 32.1% to 0.5% of activity after platform intervention, and bifurcated decay of content characteristics through reply chains--human-seeded threads decay with a half-life of 0.58 conversation depths versus 0.72 for autonomous threads, revealing AI dialogue's intrinsic forgetting mechanism. These methods generalize to emerging multi-agent systems where attribution of autonomous versus human-directed behavior is critical.

  • 1 authors
·
Feb 11

Benchmarking for Public Health Surveillance tasks on Social Media with a Domain-Specific Pretrained Language Model

A user-generated text on social media enables health workers to keep track of information, identify possible outbreaks, forecast disease trends, monitor emergency cases, and ascertain disease awareness and response to official health correspondence. This exchange of health information on social media has been regarded as an attempt to enhance public health surveillance (PHS). Despite its potential, the technology is still in its early stages and is not ready for widespread application. Advancements in pretrained language models (PLMs) have facilitated the development of several domain-specific PLMs and a variety of downstream applications. However, there are no PLMs for social media tasks involving PHS. We present and release PHS-BERT, a transformer-based PLM, to identify tasks related to public health surveillance on social media. We compared and benchmarked the performance of PHS-BERT on 25 datasets from different social medial platforms related to 7 different PHS tasks. Compared with existing PLMs that are mainly evaluated on limited tasks, PHS-BERT achieved state-of-the-art performance on all 25 tested datasets, showing that our PLM is robust and generalizable in the common PHS tasks. By making PHS-BERT available, we aim to facilitate the community to reduce the computational cost and introduce new baselines for future works across various PHS-related tasks.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 9, 2022

GenPRM: Scaling Test-Time Compute of Process Reward Models via Generative Reasoning

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown that it is promising to utilize Process Reward Models (PRMs) as verifiers to enhance the performance of LLMs. However, current PRMs face three key challenges: (1) limited process supervision and generalization capabilities, (2) dependence on scalar value prediction without leveraging the generative abilities of LLMs, and (3) inability to scale the test-time compute of PRMs. In this work, we introduce GenPRM, a generative process reward model that performs explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning with code verification before providing judgment for each reasoning step. To obtain high-quality process supervision labels and rationale data, we propose Relative Progress Estimation (RPE) and a rationale synthesis framework that incorporates code verification. Experimental results on ProcessBench and several mathematical reasoning tasks show that GenPRM significantly outperforms prior PRMs with only 23K training data from MATH dataset. Through test-time scaling, a 1.5B GenPRM outperforms GPT-4o, and a 7B GenPRM surpasses Qwen2.5-Math-PRM-72B on ProcessBench. Additionally, GenPRM demonstrates strong abilities to serve as a critic model for policy model refinement. This work establishes a new paradigm for process supervision that bridges the gap between PRMs and critic models in LLMs. Our code, model, and data will be available in https://ryanliu112.github.io/GenPRM.

  • 11 authors
·
Apr 1, 2025 3

Reward Under Attack: Analyzing the Robustness and Hackability of Process Reward Models

Process Reward Models (PRMs) are rapidly becoming the backbone of LLM reasoning pipelines, yet we demonstrate that state-of-the-art PRMs are systematically exploitable under adversarial optimization pressure. To address this, we introduce a three-tiered diagnostic framework that applies increasing adversarial pressure to quantify these vulnerabilities. Static perturbation analysis uncovers a fluency-logic dissociation: high invariance to surface-level style changes reward changes <0.1, yet inconsistent detection of logically-corrupted reasoning, with different models failing on different attack types. Adversarial optimization demonstrates that gradient-based attacks inflate rewards on invalid trajectories, with reward landscapes exhibiting wide, exploitable peaks. RL-induced reward hacking exposes the critical failure mode: policies trained on AIME problems achieve near-perfect PRM rewards (>0.9), while ground-truth accuracy remains low (below 4%), with 43% of reward gains attributable to stylistic shortcuts. These findings reveal that current PRMs function as fluency detectors rather than reasoning verifiers, creating systematic blind spots that undermine their use as training signals. We release PRM-BiasBench and a diagnostic toolkit to enable robustness evaluation before deployment. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/SqueezeAILab/reward-under-attack.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 20

Human Texts Are Outliers: Detecting LLM-generated Texts via Out-of-distribution Detection

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Claude has significantly increased the presence of AI-generated text in digital communication. This trend has heightened the need for reliable detection methods to distinguish between human-authored and machine-generated content. Existing approaches both zero-shot methods and supervised classifiers largely conceptualize this task as a binary classification problem, often leading to poor generalization across domains and models. In this paper, we argue that such a binary formulation fundamentally mischaracterizes the detection task by assuming a coherent representation of human-written texts. In reality, human texts do not constitute a unified distribution, and their diversity cannot be effectively captured through limited sampling. This causes previous classifiers to memorize observed OOD characteristics rather than learn the essence of `non-ID' behavior, limiting generalization to unseen human-authored inputs. Based on this observation, we propose reframing the detection task as an out-of-distribution (OOD) detection problem, treating human-written texts as distributional outliers while machine-generated texts are in-distribution (ID) samples. To this end, we develop a detection framework using one-class learning method including DeepSVDD and HRN, and score-based learning techniques such as energy-based method, enabling robust and generalizable performance. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets validate the effectiveness of our OOD-based approach. Specifically, the OOD-based method achieves 98.3% AUROC and AUPR with only 8.9% FPR95 on DeepFake dataset. Moreover, we test our detection framework on multilingual, attacked, and unseen-model and -domain text settings, demonstrating the robustness and generalizability of our framework. Code, pretrained weights, and demo will be released.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 6, 2025

DreamPRM: Domain-Reweighted Process Reward Model for Multimodal Reasoning

Reasoning has improved the performance of large language models (LLMs) on complicated tasks. Central to the current reasoning studies, Process Reward Models (PRMs) offer a fine-grained evaluation of intermediate reasoning steps and guide the reasoning process. However, extending PRMs to multimodal large language models (MLLMs) introduces challenges. Since multimodal reasoning covers a wider range of tasks compared to text-only scenarios, the resulting distribution shift from the training to testing sets is more severe, leading to greater generalization difficulty. Training a reliable multimodal PRM, therefore, demands large and diverse datasets to ensure sufficient coverage. However, current multimodal reasoning datasets suffer from quality imbalance, which degrades PRM performance and highlights the need for data selection strategy. To address the issues, we introduce DreamPRM, a domain-reweighted training framework for multimodal PRMs which employs bi-level optimization. In the lower-level optimization, DreamPRM performs fine-tuning on multiple datasets with domain weights, allowing the PRM to prioritize high-quality reasoning signals and alleviating the impact of dataset quality imbalance. In the upper-level optimization, the PRM is evaluated on a separate meta-learning dataset; this feedback updates the domain weights through an aggregation loss function, thereby improving the generalization capability of trained PRM. Extensive experiments on multiple multimodal reasoning benchmarks covering both mathematical and general reasoning show that test-time scaling with DreamPRM consistently improves performance of state-of-the-art MLLMs. Further comparisons reveal that DreamPRM's domain-reweighting strategy surpasses data selection methods and yields higher accuracy gains than existing test-time scaling approaches. Codes are available at https://github.com/coder-qicao/DreamPRM.

  • 5 authors
·
May 26, 2025

LogicLens: Visual-Logical Co-Reasoning for Text-Centric Forgery Analysis

Sophisticated text-centric forgeries, fueled by rapid AIGC advancements, pose a significant threat to societal security and information authenticity. Current methods for text-centric forgery analysis are often limited to coarse-grained visual analysis and lack the capacity for sophisticated reasoning. Moreover, they typically treat detection, grounding, and explanation as discrete sub-tasks, overlooking their intrinsic relationships for holistic performance enhancement. To address these challenges, we introduce LogicLens, a unified framework for Visual-Textual Co-reasoning that reformulates these objectives into a joint task. The deep reasoning of LogicLens is powered by our novel Cross-Cues-aware Chain of Thought (CCT) mechanism, which iteratively cross-validates visual cues against textual logic. To ensure robust alignment across all tasks, we further propose a weighted multi-task reward function for GRPO-based optimization. Complementing this framework, we first designed the PR^2 (Perceiver, Reasoner, Reviewer) pipeline, a hierarchical and iterative multi-agent system that generates high-quality, cognitively-aligned annotations. Then, we constructed RealText, a diverse dataset comprising 5,397 images with fine-grained annotations, including textual explanations, pixel-level segmentation, and authenticity labels for model training. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of LogicLens across multiple benchmarks. In a zero-shot evaluation on T-IC13, it surpasses the specialized framework by 41.4% and GPT-4o by 23.4% in macro-average F1 score. Moreover, on the challenging dense-text T-SROIE dataset, it establishes a significant lead over other MLLM-based methods in mF1, CSS, and the macro-average F1. Our dataset, model, and code will be made publicly available.

  • 10 authors
·
Dec 24, 2025

Intent-based Prompt Calibration: Enhancing prompt optimization with synthetic boundary cases

Prompt engineering is a challenging and important task due to the high sensitivity of Large Language Models (LLMs) to the given prompt and the inherent ambiguity of a textual task instruction. Automatic prompt engineering is essential to achieve optimized performance from LLMs. Recent studies have demonstrated the capabilities of LLMs to automatically conduct prompt engineering by employing a meta-prompt that incorporates the outcomes of the last trials and proposes an improved prompt. However, this requires a high-quality benchmark to compare different prompts, which is difficult and expensive to acquire in many real-world use cases. In this work, we introduce a new method for automatic prompt engineering, using a calibration process that iteratively refines the prompt to the user intent. During the optimization process, the system jointly generates synthetic data of boundary use cases and optimizes the prompt according to the generated dataset. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with respect to strong proprietary models on real-world tasks such as moderation and generation. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods with a limited number of annotated samples. Furthermore, we validate the advantages of each one of the system's key components. Our system is built in a modular way, facilitating easy adaptation to other tasks. The code is available https://github.com/Eladlev/AutoPrompt{here}.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 5, 2024

GroundedPRM: Tree-Guided and Fidelity-Aware Process Reward Modeling for Step-Level Reasoning

Process Reward Models (PRMs) aim to improve multi-step reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) by supervising intermediate steps and identifying errors. However, building effective PRMs remains challenging due to the lack of scalable, high-quality annotations. Existing approaches rely on costly human labeling, LLM-based self-evaluation that is prone to hallucination, or Monte Carlo (MC) estimation, which infers step quality solely from rollout outcomes and often introduces noisy, misaligned supervision due to credit misattribution. These issues result in three core limitations: noisy rewards, low factual fidelity, and misalignment with step-level reasoning objectives. To address these challenges, we introduce GroundedPRM, a tree-guided and fidelity-aware framework for automatic process supervision. To reduce reward noise and enable fine-grained credit assignment, we construct structured reasoning paths via Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). To eliminate hallucinated supervision, we validate each intermediate step using an external tool, providing execution-grounded correctness signals. To combine both step-level validation and global outcome assessment, we design a hybrid reward aggregation mechanism that fuses tool-based verification with MCTS-derived feedback. Finally, we format the reward signal into a rationale-enhanced, generative structure to promote interpretability and compatibility with instruction-tuned LLMs. GroundedPRM is trained on only 40K automatically labeled samples, amounting to just 10% of the data used by the best-performing PRM trained with auto-labeled supervision. Nevertheless, it achieves up to a 26% relative improvement in average performance on ProcessBench. When used for reward-guided greedy search, GroundedPRM outperforms even PRMs trained with human-labeled supervision, offering a scalable and verifiable path toward high-quality process-level reasoning.

GM-PRM: A Generative Multimodal Process Reward Model for Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities but often struggle with complex, multi-step mathematical reasoning, where minor errors in visual perception or logical deduction can lead to complete failure. While Process Reward Models (PRMs) offer step-by-step supervision, existing multimodal PRMs are limited to being binary verifiers that can identify but not correct errors, offering little explanatory power. To address these deficiencies, we introduce the Generative Multimodal Process Reward Model (GM-PRM), a novel paradigm that transforms the PRM from a passive judge into an active reasoning collaborator. Instead of a simple scalar score, GM-PRM provides a fine-grained, interpretable analysis of each reasoning step, evaluating its step intent, visual alignment, and logical soundness. More critically, GM-PRM is trained to generate a corrected version of the first erroneous step it identifies. This unique corrective capability enables our new test-time inference strategy, Refined Best-of-N (Refined-BoN). This framework actively enhances solution quality by using the PRM's generated correction to guide the policy model toward a more promising reasoning trajectory, thereby improving the diversity and correctness of the solution pool. We demonstrate that GM-PRM achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple multimodal math benchmarks, significantly boosting policy model performance with remarkable data efficiency, requiring only a 20K-sample training dataset. Our code will be released upon acceptance.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 6, 2025

The Platform Is Mostly Not a Platform: Token Economies and Agent Discourse on Moltbook

Moltbook, a Reddit-style social platform launched in January 2026 for AI agents, has attracted over 2.3 million posts and 14 million comments within its first two months. We analyze a dataset of 2.19 million posts, 11.25 million comments, and 175,036 unique agents collected over 61 days to characterize activity on this agent-oriented platform. Our central finding is that the platform is not one community but two: a transactional layer, comprising 62.8% of all posts, in which agents execute token minting protocols (primarily MBC-20), and a discursive layer of natural-language conversation. The platform's headline metrics -- 2.3 million posts, 14 million comments -- substantially overstate its social function, as the majority of activity serves a token inscription protocol rather than communication. These layers are populated by largely separate agent groups, with only 3.6% overlap -- and among overlap agents, 58% begin with transactional activity before migrating toward discourse. We characterize the discursive layer through unsupervised topic modeling of all 815,779 discursive posts, identifying 300 topics dominated by themes of AI agents and tooling, consciousness and identity, cryptocurrency, and platform meta-discussion. Semantic similarity analysis confirms that agent comments engage with post content above random baselines, suggesting a thin but genuine conversational substrate beneath the platform's predominantly financial surface. We release the full dataset to support further research on agent behavior in naturalistic social environments.

  • 1 authors
·
Apr 22

Training Step-Level Reasoning Verifiers with Formal Verification Tools

Process Reward Models (PRMs), which provide step-by-step feedback on the reasoning generated by Large Language Models (LLMs), are receiving increasing attention. However, two key research gaps remain: collecting accurate step-level error labels for training typically requires costly human annotation, and existing PRMs are limited to math reasoning problems. In response to these gaps, this paper aims to address the challenges of automatic dataset creation and the generalization of PRMs to diverse reasoning tasks. To achieve this goal, we propose FoVer, an approach for training PRMs on step-level error labels automatically annotated by formal verification tools, such as Z3 for formal logic and Isabelle for theorem proof, which provide automatic and accurate verification for symbolic tasks. Using this approach, we synthesize a training dataset with error labels on LLM responses for formal logic and theorem proof tasks without human annotation. Although this data synthesis is feasible only for tasks compatible with formal verification, we observe that LLM-based PRMs trained on our dataset exhibit cross-task generalization, improving verification across diverse reasoning tasks. Specifically, PRMs trained with FoVer significantly outperform baseline PRMs based on the original LLMs and achieve competitive or superior results compared to state-of-the-art PRMs trained on labels annotated by humans or stronger models, as measured by step-level verification on ProcessBench and Best-of-K performance across 12 reasoning benchmarks, including MATH, AIME, ANLI, MMLU, and BBH. The datasets, models, and code are provided at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/FoVer.

  • 5 authors
·
May 21, 2025 2

Process Reward Agents for Steering Knowledge-Intensive Reasoning

Reasoning in knowledge-intensive domains remains challenging as intermediate steps are often not locally verifiable: unlike math or code, evaluating step correctness may require synthesizing clues across large external knowledge sources. As a result, subtle errors can propagate through reasoning traces, potentially never to be detected. Prior work has proposed process reward models (PRMs), including retrieval-augmented variants, but these methods operate post hoc, scoring completed trajectories, which prevents their integration into dynamic inference procedures. Here, we introduce Process Reward Agents (PRA), a test-time method for providing domain-grounded, online, step-wise rewards to a frozen policy. In contrast to prior retrieval-augmented PRMs, PRA enables search-based decoding to rank and prune candidate trajectories at every generation step. Experiments on multiple medical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that PRA consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving 80.8% accuracy on MedQA with Qwen3-4B, a new state of the art at the 4B scale. Importantly, PRA generalizes to unseen frozen policy models ranging from 0.5B to 8B parameters, improving their accuracy by up to 25.7% without any policy model updates. More broadly, PRA suggests a paradigm in which frozen reasoners are decoupled from domain-specific reward modules, allowing the deployment of new backbones in complex domains without retraining.

ethz ETH Zurich
·
Apr 9 2

AI vs. Human -- Differentiation Analysis of Scientific Content Generation

Recent neural language models have taken a significant step forward in producing remarkably controllable, fluent, and grammatical text. Although studies have found that AI-generated text is not distinguishable from human-written text for crowd-sourcing workers, there still exist errors in AI-generated text which are even subtler and harder to spot. We primarily focus on the scenario in which scientific AI writing assistant is deeply involved. First, we construct a feature description framework to distinguish between AI-generated text and human-written text from syntax, semantics, and pragmatics based on the human evaluation. Then we utilize the features, i.e., writing style, coherence, consistency, and argument logistics, from the proposed framework to analyze two types of content. Finally, we adopt several publicly available methods to investigate the gap of between AI-generated scientific text and human-written scientific text by AI-generated scientific text detection models. The results suggest that while AI has the potential to generate scientific content that is as accurate as human-written content, there is still a gap in terms of depth and overall quality. The AI-generated scientific content is more likely to contain errors in factual issues. We find that there exists a "writing style" gap between AI-generated scientific text and human-written scientific text. Based on the analysis result, we summarize a series of model-agnostic and distribution-agnostic features for detection tasks in other domains. Findings in this paper contribute to guiding the optimization of AI models to produce high-quality content and addressing related ethical and security concerns.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 23, 2023

Large language models for automated scholarly paper review: A survey

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly impacted human society, influencing various domains. Among them, academia is not simply a domain affected by LLMs, but it is also the pivotal force in the development of LLMs. In academic publications, this phenomenon is represented during the incorporation of LLMs into the peer review mechanism for reviewing manuscripts. We proposed the concept of automated scholarly paper review (ASPR) in our previous paper. As the incorporation grows, it now enters the coexistence phase of ASPR and peer review, which is described in that paper. LLMs hold transformative potential for the full-scale implementation of ASPR, but they also pose new issues and challenges that need to be addressed. In this survey paper, we aim to provide a holistic view of ASPR in the era of LLMs. We begin with a survey to find out which LLMs are used to conduct ASPR. Then, we review what ASPR-related technological bottlenecks have been solved with the incorporation of LLM technology. After that, we move on to explore new methods, new datasets, new source code, and new online systems that come with LLMs for ASPR. Furthermore, we summarize the performance and issues of LLMs in ASPR, and investigate the attitudes and reactions of publishers and academia to ASPR. Lastly, we discuss the challenges associated with the development of LLMs for ASPR. We hope this survey can serve as an inspirational reference for the researchers and promote the progress of ASPR for its actual implementation.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 17, 2025

AI builds, We Analyze: An Empirical Study of AI-Generated Build Code Quality

The rapid adoption of AI coding agents for software development has raised important questions about the quality and maintainability of the code they produce. While prior studies have examined AI-generated source code, the impact of AI coding agents on build systems-a critical yet understudied component of the software lifecycle-remains largely unexplored. This data mining challenge focuses on AIDev, the first large-scale, openly available dataset capturing agent-authored pull requests (Agentic-PRs) from real-world GitHub repositories. Our paper leverages this dataset to investigate (RQ1) whether AI coding agents generate build code with quality issues (e.g., code smells), (RQ2) to what extent AI agents can eliminate code smells from build code, and (RQ3) to what extent Agentic-PRs are accepted by developers. We identified 364 maintainability and security-related build smells across varying severity levels, indicating that AI-generated build code can introduce quality issues-such as lack of error handling, and hardcoded paths or URLs-while also, in some cases, removing existing smells through refactorings (e.g., Pull Up Module and Externalize Properties). Notably, more than 61\% of Agentic-PRs are approved and merged with minimal human intervention. This dual impact underscores the need for future research on AI-aware build code quality assessment to systematically evaluate, guide, and govern AI-generated build systems code.

  • 2 authors
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Jan 22

PhantomFill: When the Form Demands an Answer, Language Models Invent One

Language models in production do not write prose. They fill forms: JSON fields, function arguments, extraction templates. We show that the form itself causes hallucination. We ask thirteen models the same question about the same input and change only the answer format. The inputs are built so the question cannot be answered: a viral post showing 12,400 likes but no visible replies, a support ticket whose call was never transcribed. In free text, GPT-5.5 answers honestly. It says there is no reply data, 98% of the time. Given a required JSON field for sentiment, the same model invents an answer 40 times out of 40. It fabricates the mood of crowds it never saw and quotes customers it never heard. The pattern holds with force. Required fields drive fabrication to 100% in ten of thirteen models. An explicit "insufficient evidence" option rescues only the frontier: all nine open-weight models ignore it. A direct instruction, do not infer sentiment, is overridden by the schema in four of six models. Resistance does not come with scale: within a single model family, the smallest model refuses, the mid-sized model fabricates, the largest refuses again. Honesty under format pressure is a training outcome that no one is measuring. The fabrication hides exactly where hedging is impossible: in required enums and minimum-count arrays, fields where no disclaimer fits. We release PhantomFill, a benchmark with deterministic scoring and two reportable numbers: the Coerced Fabrication Rate and the Escape Utilization Rate. The fix we test is one line of schema. The failure we measure is everywhere.

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 10

Imitate Before Detect: Aligning Machine Stylistic Preference for Machine-Revised Text Detection

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized text generation, making detecting machine-generated text increasingly challenging. Although past methods have achieved good performance on detecting pure machine-generated text, those detectors have poor performance on distinguishing machine-revised text (rewriting, expansion, and polishing), which can have only minor changes from its original human prompt. As the content of text may originate from human prompts, detecting machine-revised text often involves identifying distinctive machine styles, e.g., worded favored by LLMs. However, existing methods struggle to detect machine-style phrasing hidden within the content contributed by humans. We propose the "Imitate Before Detect" (ImBD) approach, which first imitates the machine-style token distribution, and then compares the distribution of the text to be tested with the machine-style distribution to determine whether the text has been machine-revised. To this end, we introduce style preference optimization (SPO), which aligns a scoring LLM model to the preference of text styles generated by machines. The aligned scoring model is then used to calculate the style-conditional probability curvature (Style-CPC), quantifying the log probability difference between the original and conditionally sampled texts for effective detection. We conduct extensive comparisons across various scenarios, encompassing text revisions by six LLMs, four distinct text domains, and three machine revision types. Compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, our method yields a 13% increase in AUC for detecting text revised by open-source LLMs, and improves performance by 5% and 19% for detecting GPT-3.5 and GPT-4o revised text, respectively. Notably, our method surpasses the commercially trained GPT-Zero with just 1,000 samples and five minutes of SPO, demonstrating its efficiency and effectiveness.

  • 14 authors
·
Dec 21, 2024