new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Sep 3

GameXpert-Bench: How Far Are Coding Agents from Expert Game Development?

Recent large language models (LLMs) can operate as coding agents that build complete games from natural language requests. Game development is especially demanding because program logic, visual and audio content, interfaces, interaction and playability must function together in one executable artifact. Measuring this capability therefore requires evaluation of both game product and the development process. Existing benchmarks often assess the game development capabilities of LLMs by evaluating the final artifact or an isolated development stage. Our analysis of complete human-agent development trajectories identifies three stages that together span the lifecycle of game development with a coding agent: initial game generation, bug diagnosis and repair, and optimization over multiple turns. Therefore, we introduce GameXpert-Bench, which operationalizes the three lifecycle stages as three complementary benchmark tracks. GameGen evaluates complete game creation from a single request in an empty workspace. GameFix evaluates diagnosis and repair when defects are reported or left for the agent to discover. GameOpt evaluates cumulative optimization through request chains seeded by real development trajectories between users and agents. We evaluate each track using live game interaction, deterministic behavioral tests, or final product criteria with regression checks. The suite contains 97 generation tasks across 11 genres; 100 repair tasks from 50 game levels verified by humans, each with 19-27 injected bugs; and 17 optimization chains with six turns and 102 requests. Across the three tracks, current agents are more reliable at producing playable foundations and implementing explicit requirements than at discovering defects, verifying runtime behavior, and preserving functionality across changes.

Tokenomics: Quantifying Where Tokens Are Used in Agentic Software Engineering

LLM-based Multi-Agent (LLM-MA) systems are increasingly applied to automate complex software engineering tasks such as requirements engineering, code generation, and testing. However, their operational efficiency and resource consumption remain poorly understood, hindering practical adoption due to unpredictable costs and environmental impact. To address this, we conduct an analysis of token consumption patterns in an LLM-MA system within the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), aiming to understand where tokens are consumed across distinct software engineering activities. We analyze execution traces from 30 software development tasks performed by the ChatDev framework using a GPT-5 reasoning model, mapping its internal phases to distinct development stages (Design, Coding, Code Completion, Code Review, Testing, and Documentation) to create a standardized evaluation framework. We then quantify and compare token distribution (input, output, reasoning) across these stages. Our preliminary findings show that the iterative Code Review stage accounts for the majority of token consumption for an average of 59.4% of tokens. Furthermore, we observe that input tokens consistently constitute the largest share of consumption for an average of 53.9%, providing empirical evidence for potentially significant inefficiencies in agentic collaboration. Our results suggest that the primary cost of agentic software engineering lies not in initial code generation but in automated refinement and verification. Our novel methodology can help practitioners predict expenses and optimize workflows, and it directs future research toward developing more token-efficient agent collaboration protocols.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 19

Real-Time Prediction of Gas Flow Dynamics in Diesel Engines using a Deep Neural Operator Framework

We develop a data-driven deep neural operator framework to approximate multiple output states for a diesel engine and generate real-time predictions with reasonable accuracy. As emission norms become more stringent, the need for fast and accurate models that enable analysis of system behavior have become an essential requirement for system development. The fast transient processes involved in the operation of a combustion engine make it difficult to develop accurate physics-based models for such systems. As an alternative to physics based models, we develop an operator-based regression model (DeepONet) to learn the relevant output states for a mean-value gas flow engine model using the engine operating conditions as input variables. We have adopted a mean-value model as a benchmark for comparison, simulated using Simulink. The developed approach necessitates using the initial conditions of the output states to predict the accurate sequence over the temporal domain. To this end, a sequence-to-sequence approach is embedded into the proposed framework. The accuracy of the model is evaluated by comparing the prediction output to ground truth generated from Simulink model. The maximum mathcal L_2 relative error observed was approximately 6.5%. The sensitivity of the DeepONet model is evaluated under simulated noise conditions and the model shows relatively low sensitivity to noise. The uncertainty in model prediction is further assessed by using a mean ensemble approach. The worst-case error at the (mu + 2sigma) boundary was found to be 12%. The proposed framework provides the ability to predict output states in real-time and enables data-driven learning of complex input-output operator mapping. As a result, this model can be applied during initial development stages, where accurate models may not be available.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 2, 2023

TIDES: A Longitudinal Bilingual Dataset for Modeling Multi-Party Social Dynamics

Group conversations are fundamental to human collaboration, yet standard large language models (LLMs) still struggle with the complexities of multi-party interaction. This challenge persists in part because existing group conversation datasets are often limited to short-term lab settings with contrived tasks, failing to capture the long-term social dynamics of real-world teams. To bridge this gap, we introduce TIDES, a high-resolution longitudinal dataset tracking 12 university project teams over a full semester. Comprising 75,971 utterances in both English and Korean from in-person meetings, TIDES provides a naturalistic record of teams working on self-managed projects. Our socio-structural annotations-covering interaction types, emergent roles, and development stages-allow for modeling of team evolution over months. Experiments show that fine-tuning on TIDES improves next-speaker prediction by 13.8 percentage points over a bigram baseline (64.53%) and yields performance comparable to strong proprietary zero-shot models. The model also comes within 2.1 percentage points of the published state of the art on the AMI Meeting Corpus while using approximately 42% less training data. However, human evaluations suggest that better next-speaker prediction does not necessarily yield more natural or coherent utterances, as fine-tuned models were generally less preferred than vanilla models. This potential mismatch motivates further study of how structural modeling can support natural multi-party generation.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 2

Forecasting Downstream Performance of LLMs With Proxy Metrics

Progress in language model development is often driven by comparative decisions: which architecture to adopt, which pretraining corpus to use, or which training recipe to apply. Making these decisions well requires reliable performance forecasts, yet the two commonly used signals are fundamentally limited. Cross-entropy loss is poorly aligned with downstream capabilities, and direct downstream evaluation is expensive, sparse, and often uninformative at early training stages. Instead, we propose to construct proxy metrics by aggregating token-level statistics, such as entropy, top-k accuracy, and expert token rank, from a candidate model's next token distribution over expert-written solutions. Across three settings, our proxies consistently outperform loss- and compute-based baselines: 1) For cross-family model selection, they rank a heterogeneous population of reasoning models with mean Spearman Rho = 0.81 (vs. Rho = 0.36 for cross-entropy loss); 2) For pretraining data selection, they reliably rank 25 candidate corpora for a target model at roughly 10{,}000times less compute than direct evaluation, pushing the Pareto frontier beyond existing methods; and 3) for training-time forecasting, they extrapolate downstream accuracy across an 18times compute horizon with roughly half the error of existing alternatives. Together, these results suggest that expert trajectories are a broadly useful source of signal for assessing model capabilities, enabling reliable performance forecasting throughout the model development life cycle.

AI in Pharma for Personalized Sequential Decision-Making: Methods, Applications and Opportunities

In the pharmaceutical industry, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) has seen consistent growth over the past decade. This rise is attributed to major advancements in statistical machine learning methodologies, computational capabilities and the increased availability of large datasets. AI techniques are applied throughout different stages of drug development, ranging from drug discovery to post-marketing benefit-risk assessment. Kolluri et al. provided a review of several case studies that span these stages, featuring key applications such as protein structure prediction, success probability estimation, subgroup identification, and AI-assisted clinical trial monitoring. From a regulatory standpoint, there was a notable uptick in submissions incorporating AI components in 2021. The most prevalent therapeutic areas leveraging AI were oncology (27%), psychiatry (15%), gastroenterology (12%), and neurology (11%). The paradigm of personalized or precision medicine has gained significant traction in recent research, partly due to advancements in AI techniques hamburg2010path. This shift has had a transformative impact on the pharmaceutical industry. Departing from the traditional "one-size-fits-all" model, personalized medicine incorporates various individual factors, such as environmental conditions, lifestyle choices, and health histories, to formulate customized treatment plans. By utilizing sophisticated machine learning algorithms, clinicians and researchers are better equipped to make informed decisions in areas such as disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment selection, thereby optimizing health outcomes for each individual.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 30, 2023

Methods2Test: A dataset of focal methods mapped to test cases

Unit testing is an essential part of the software development process, which helps to identify issues with source code in early stages of development and prevent regressions. Machine learning has emerged as viable approach to help software developers generate automated unit tests. However, generating reliable unit test cases that are semantically correct and capable of catching software bugs or unintended behavior via machine learning requires large, metadata-rich, datasets. In this paper we present Methods2Test: A dataset of focal methods mapped to test cases: a large, supervised dataset of test cases mapped to corresponding methods under test (i.e., focal methods). This dataset contains 780,944 pairs of JUnit tests and focal methods, extracted from a total of 91,385 Java open source projects hosted on GitHub with licenses permitting re-distribution. The main challenge behind the creation of the Methods2Test was to establish a reliable mapping between a test case and the relevant focal method. To this aim, we designed a set of heuristics, based on developers' best practices in software testing, which identify the likely focal method for a given test case. To facilitate further analysis, we store a rich set of metadata for each method-test pair in JSON-formatted files. Additionally, we extract textual corpus from the dataset at different context levels, which we provide both in raw and tokenized forms, in order to enable researchers to train and evaluate machine learning models for Automated Test Generation. Methods2Test is publicly available at: https://github.com/microsoft/methods2test

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 23, 2022

Marco DeepResearch: Unlocking Efficient Deep Research Agents via Verification-Centric Design

Deep research agents autonomously conduct open-ended investigations, integrating complex information retrieval with multi-step reasoning across diverse sources to solve real-world problems. To sustain this capability on long-horizon tasks, reliable verification is critical during both training and inference. A major bottleneck in existing paradigms stems from the lack of explicit verification mechanisms in QA data synthesis, trajectory construction, and test-time scaling. Errors introduced at each stage propagate downstream and degrade the overall agent performance. To address this, we present Marco DeepResearch, a deep research agent optimized with a verification-centric framework design at three levels: (1)~QA Data Synthesis: We introduce verification mechanisms to graph-based and agent-based QA synthesis to control question difficulty while ensuring answers are unique and correct; (2)~Trajectory Construction: We design a verification-driven trajectory synthesis method that injects explicit verification patterns into training trajectories; and (3)~Test-time scaling: We use Marco DeepResearch itself as a verifier at inference time and effectively improve performance on challenging questions. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed Marco DeepResearch agent significantly outperforms 8B-scale deep research agents on most challenging benchmarks, such as BrowseComp and BrowseComp-ZH. Crucially, under a maximum budget of 600 tool calls, Marco DeepResearch even surpasses or approaches several 30B-scale agents, like Tongyi DeepResearch-30B.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 30 2

ASI-Evolve: AI Accelerates AI

Can AI accelerate the development of AI itself? While recent agentic systems have shown strong performance on well-scoped tasks with rapid feedback, it remains unclear whether they can tackle the costly, long-horizon, and weakly supervised research loops that drive real AI progress. We present ASI-Evolve, an agentic framework for AI-for-AI research that closes this loop through a learn-design-experiment-analyze cycle. ASI-Evolve augments standard evolutionary agents with two key components: a cognition base that injects accumulated human priors into each round of exploration, and a dedicated analyzer that distills complex experimental outcomes into reusable insights for future iterations. To our knowledge, ASI-Evolve is the first unified framework to demonstrate AI-driven discovery across three central components of AI development: data, architectures, and learning algorithms. In neural architecture design, it discovered 105 SOTA linear attention architectures, with the best discovered model surpassing DeltaNet by +0.97 points, nearly 3x the gain of recent human-designed improvements. In pretraining data curation, the evolved pipeline improves average benchmark performance by +3.96 points, with gains exceeding 18 points on MMLU. In reinforcement learning algorithm design, discovered algorithms outperform GRPO by up to +12.5 points on AMC32, +11.67 points on AIME24, and +5.04 points on OlympiadBench. We further provide initial evidence that this AI-for-AI paradigm can transfer beyond the AI stack through experiments in mathematics and biomedicine. Together, these results suggest that ASI-Evolve represents a promising step toward enabling AI to accelerate AI across the foundational stages of development, offering early evidence for the feasibility of closed-loop AI research.

GAIR SII - GAIR
·
Mar 30 2

Communicative Agents for Software Development

Software engineering is a domain characterized by intricate decision-making processes, often relying on nuanced intuition and consultation. Recent advancements in deep learning have started to revolutionize software engineering practices through elaborate designs implemented at various stages of software development. In this paper, we present an innovative paradigm that leverages large language models (LLMs) throughout the entire software development process, streamlining and unifying key processes through natural language communication, thereby eliminating the need for specialized models at each phase. At the core of this paradigm lies ChatDev, a virtual chat-powered software development company that mirrors the established waterfall model, meticulously dividing the development process into four distinct chronological stages: designing, coding, testing, and documenting. Each stage engages a team of agents, such as programmers, code reviewers, and test engineers, fostering collaborative dialogue and facilitating a seamless workflow. The chat chain acts as a facilitator, breaking down each stage into atomic subtasks. This enables dual roles, allowing for proposing and validating solutions through context-aware communication, leading to efficient resolution of specific subtasks. The instrumental analysis of ChatDev highlights its remarkable efficacy in software generation, enabling the completion of the entire software development process in under seven minutes at a cost of less than one dollar. It not only identifies and alleviates potential vulnerabilities but also rectifies potential hallucinations while maintaining commendable efficiency and cost-effectiveness. The potential of ChatDev unveils fresh possibilities for integrating LLMs into the realm of software development.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 15, 2023 1

From Runnable to Shippable: Multi-Agent Test-Driven Development for Generating Full-Stack Web Applications from Requirements

Coding agents can generate web applications from natural-language descriptions, yet a recent benchmark study shows that generated applications fail to meet functional requirements in over 70% of cases. The core difficulty is that web correctness cannot be assessed from source files or terminal output: the application must be deployed, exercised through simulated browser interactions, and failures must be translated into actionable repair signals -- steps that current agents cannot perform without human mediation. We present TDDev, a framework that automates this closed loop through three stages: (1) converting high-level requirements into structured acceptance tests before any code is written, (2) deploying the application and validating it through browser-based interaction simulation, and (3) translating browser-observed failures into structured repair reports for the coding agent. Enabled by TDDev, we conduct the first controlled empirical study of Test-driven development (TDD) strategies for web application generation, comparing four development protocols across two coding agents, two backbone models, and two benchmarks. TDD infrastructure consistently improves generation quality by 34--48 percentage points over a no-TDD baseline. The central finding is that the optimal protocol depends on the model's generation style: models that build applications holistically benefit most from agentic enforcement, while models that extend code conservatively benefit from incremental enforcement. Mismatching protocol to generation style eliminates the TDD benefit entirely while multiplying token cost up to 25-fold. A user study confirms that TDDev reduces manual developer intervention to zero, shifting the workload from continuous prompt engineering to autonomous, feedback-driven refinement.

ByteCheckpoint: A Unified Checkpointing System for Large Foundation Model Development

Checkpointing to preserve training states is crucial during the development of Large Foundation Models (LFMs), for training resumption upon various failures or changes in GPU resources and parallelism configurations. In addition, saved checkpoints are dispatched to evaluation tasks or transferred across different training stages (e.g., from pre-training to post-training). All these scenarios require resharding distributed checkpoints from one parallelism to another. In production environments, different LFMs are trained with various frameworks and storage backends, depending on model sizes and training scales. A high-performance checkpointing system is needed to enable efficient checkpoint management at scale throughout the lifecycle of LFM development. We introduce ByteCheckpoint, an industrial-grade checkpointing system for large-scale LFM training. ByteCheckpoint features: a parallelism-agnostic checkpoint representation that enables efficient load-time checkpoint resharding; a generic checkpoint saving/loading workflow to accommodate multiple training frameworks and support different storage backends; full-stack optimizations to ensure high I/O efficiency and scalability; a suite of monitoring tools to streamline large-scale performance analysis and bottleneck detection. Compared to existing open-source checkpointing systems [52, 58], ByteCheckpoint significantly reduces runtime checkpoint stalls, achieving an average reduction of 54.20x. For saving and loading times, ByteCheckpoint achieves improvements of up to 9.96x and 8.80x, respectively.

  • 12 authors
·
Jul 29, 2024

Experimenting with Multi-Agent Software Development: Towards a Unified Platform

Large language models are redefining software engineering by implementing AI-powered techniques throughout the whole software development process, including requirement gathering, software architecture, code generation, testing, and deployment. However, it is still difficult to develop a cohesive platform that consistently produces the best outcomes across all stages. The objective of this study is to develop a unified platform that utilizes multiple artificial intelligence agents to automate the process of transforming user requirements into well-organized deliverables. These deliverables include user stories, prioritization, and UML sequence diagrams, along with the modular approach to APIs, unit tests, and end-to-end tests. Additionally, the platform will organize tasks, perform security and compliance, and suggest design patterns and improvements for non-functional requirements. We allow users to control and manage each phase according to their preferences. In addition, the platform provides security and compliance checks following European standards and proposes design optimizations. We use multiple models, such as GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Llama3 to enable to generation of modular code as per user choice. The research also highlights the limitations and future research discussions to overall improve the software development life cycle. The source code for our uniform platform is hosted on GitHub, enabling additional experimentation and supporting both research and practical uses. \end

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 8, 2024

Adaptation and learning of molecular networks as a description of cancer development at the systems-level: Potential use in anti-cancer therapies

There is a widening recognition that cancer cells are products of complex developmental processes. Carcinogenesis and metastasis formation are increasingly described as systems-level, network phenomena. Here we propose that malignant transformation is a two-phase process, where an initial increase of system plasticity is followed by a decrease of plasticity at late stages of carcinogenesis as a model of cellular learning. We describe the hallmarks of increased system plasticity of early, tumor initiating cells, such as increased noise, entropy, conformational and phenotypic plasticity, physical deformability, cell heterogeneity and network rearrangements. Finally, we argue that the large structural changes of molecular networks during cancer development necessitate a rather different targeting strategy in early and late phase of carcinogenesis. Plastic networks of early phase cancer development need a central hit, while rigid networks of late stage primary tumors or established metastases should be attacked by the network influence strategy, such as by edgetic, multi-target, or allo-network drugs. Cancer stem cells need special diagnosis and targeting, since their dormant and rapidly proliferating forms may have more rigid, or more plastic networks, respectively. The extremely high ability to change their rigidity/plasticity may be a key differentiating hallmark of cancer stem cells. The application of early stage-optimized anti-cancer drugs to late-stage patients may be a reason of many failures in anti-cancer therapies. Our hypotheses presented here underlie the need for patient-specific multi-target therapies applying the correct ratio of central hits and network influences -- in an optimized sequence.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 14, 2013

Advancing Math Reasoning in Language Models: The Impact of Problem-Solving Data, Data Synthesis Methods, and Training Stages

Advancements in LLMs have significantly expanded their capabilities across various domains. However, mathematical reasoning remains a challenging area, prompting the development of math-specific LLMs. These models typically follow a two-stage training paradigm: pre-training with math-related corpora and post-training with problem datasets for SFT. Despite these efforts, the improvements in mathematical reasoning achieved through continued pre-training (CPT) are often less significant compared to those obtained via SFT. This study addresses this discrepancy by exploring alternative strategies during the pre-training phase, focusing on the use of problem-solving data over general mathematical corpora. We investigate three primary research questions: (1) Can problem-solving data enhance the model's mathematical reasoning capabilities more effectively than general mathematical corpora during CPT? (2) Are synthetic data from the same source equally effective, and which synthesis methods are most efficient? (3) How do the capabilities developed from the same problem-solving data differ between the CPT and SFT stages, and what factors contribute to these differences? Our findings indicate that problem-solving data significantly enhances the model's mathematical capabilities compared to general mathematical corpora. We also identify effective data synthesis methods, demonstrating that the tutorship amplification synthesis method achieves the best performance. Furthermore, while SFT facilitates instruction-following abilities, it underperforms compared to CPT with the same data, which can be partially attributed to its poor learning capacity for hard multi-step problem-solving data. These insights provide valuable guidance for optimizing the mathematical reasoning capabilities of LLMs, culminating in our development of a powerful mathematical base model called JiuZhang-8B.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 23, 2025

Global Rice Multi-Class Segmentation Dataset (RiceSEG): A Comprehensive and Diverse High-Resolution RGB-Annotated Images for the Development and Benchmarking of Rice Segmentation Algorithms

Developing computer vision-based rice phenotyping techniques is crucial for precision field management and accelerating breeding, thereby continuously advancing rice production. Among phenotyping tasks, distinguishing image components is a key prerequisite for characterizing plant growth and development at the organ scale, enabling deeper insights into eco-physiological processes. However, due to the fine structure of rice organs and complex illumination within the canopy, this task remains highly challenging, underscoring the need for a high-quality training dataset. Such datasets are scarce, both due to a lack of large, representative collections of rice field images and the time-intensive nature of annotation. To address this gap, we established the first comprehensive multi-class rice semantic segmentation dataset, RiceSEG. We gathered nearly 50,000 high-resolution, ground-based images from five major rice-growing countries (China, Japan, India, the Philippines, and Tanzania), encompassing over 6,000 genotypes across all growth stages. From these original images, 3,078 representative samples were selected and annotated with six classes (background, green vegetation, senescent vegetation, panicle, weeds, and duckweed) to form the RiceSEG dataset. Notably, the sub-dataset from China spans all major genotypes and rice-growing environments from the northeast to the south. Both state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks and transformer-based semantic segmentation models were used as baselines. While these models perform reasonably well in segmenting background and green vegetation, they face difficulties during the reproductive stage, when canopy structures are more complex and multiple classes are involved. These findings highlight the importance of our dataset for developing specialized segmentation models for rice and other crops.

  • 24 authors
·
Apr 2, 2025

Online Reasoning Calibration: Test-Time Training Enables Generalizable Conformal LLM Reasoning

While test-time scaling has enabled large language models to solve highly difficult tasks, state-of-the-art results come at exorbitant compute costs. These inefficiencies can be attributed to the miscalibration of post-trained language models, and the lack of calibration in popular sampling techniques. Here, we present Online Reasoning Calibration (ORCA), a framework for calibrating the sampling process that draws upon conformal prediction and test-time training. Specifically, we introduce a meta-learning procedure that updates the calibration module for each input. This allows us to provide valid confidence estimates under distributional shift, e.g. in thought patterns that occur across different stages of reasoning, or in prompt distributions between model development and deployment. ORCA not only provides theoretical guarantees on conformal risks, but also empirically shows higher efficiency and generalization across different reasoning tasks. At risk level δ=0.1, ORCA improves Qwen2.5-32B efficiency on in-distribution tasks with savings up to 47.5% with supervised labels and 40.7% with self-consistency labels. Under zero-shot out-of-domain settings, it improves MATH-500 savings from 24.8% of the static calibration baseline to 67.0% while maintaining a low empirical error rate, and the same trend holds across model families and downstream benchmarks. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/wzekai99/ORCA.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 31

Cookie-Bench: Continuous On-screen Key Interaction Evaluation for Web Generation

Front-end web code has become a core product surface for every frontier LLM release, yet evaluating these interactive applications at development speed remains costly because human-judged leaderboards like Arena do not scale. Existing automated proxies typically lean on reference implementations, test suites, or rigid checklists, and tend to miss the reasoned synthesis a human reviewer performs over a live session. We articulate a new evaluation regime that is simultaneously reference-free, autonomously driven, and holistically reasoned, and instantiate it through two artifacts. \dataname is an 11-domain, 54-leaf, 1,000-query WebDev benchmark spanning both static-presentation and interactive-application tasks, balanced across three difficulty tiers and three target-language groups, with briefs rewritten to resist recall from circulated prompts. \framename, grounded in Flavell's metacognitive monitoring, separates evidence accumulation from judgment across three stages: Static Perception forms a first impression from passive observation; Agent-Driven Interaction explores the application autonomously while capturing continuous screen video, audio, and per-step screenshots; Dynamic Scoring issues holistic functionality and aesthetics verdicts with structured failure attribution only after the evidence chain is complete. On \dataname, \framename aligns closely with expert human ratings while surfacing substantial headroom across 13 frontier LLMs on interactive web generation. \noindenthttps://anonymous.4open.science/r/Cookie-3CE/

  • 11 authors
·
May 30

The Pragmatic Mind of Machines: Tracing the Emergence of Pragmatic Competence in Large Language Models

Current large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated emerging capabilities in social intelligence tasks, including implicature resolution (Sravanthi et al. (2024)) and theory-of-mind reasoning (Shapira et al. (2024)), both of which require substantial pragmatic understanding. However, how LLMs acquire this competence throughout the training process remains poorly understood. In this work, we introduce ALTPRAG, a dataset grounded in the pragmatic concept of alternatives, designed to evaluate whether LLMs at different training stages can accurately infer nuanced speaker intentions. Each instance pairs two contextually appropriate but pragmatically distinct continuations, enabling fine-grained assessment of both pragmatic interpretation and contrastive reasoning. We systematically evaluate 22 LLMs across key training stages: pre-training, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and preference optimization, to examine the development of pragmatic competence. Our results show that even base models exhibit notable sensitivity to pragmatic cues, which improves consistently with increases in model and data scale. Additionally, SFT and RLHF contribute further gains, particularly in cognitive-pragmatic reasoning. These findings highlight pragmatic competence as an emergent and compositional property of LLM training and offer new insights for aligning models with human communicative norms.

  • 6 authors
·
May 24, 2025 2

DeepEvidence: Empowering Biomedical Discovery with Deep Knowledge Graph Research

Biomedical knowledge graphs (KGs) encode vast, heterogeneous information spanning literature, genes, pathways, drugs, diseases, and clinical trials, but leveraging them collectively for scientific discovery remains difficult. Their structural differences, continual evolution, and limited cross-resource alignment require substantial manual integration, limiting the depth and scale of knowledge exploration. We introduce DeepEvidence, an AI-agent framework designed to perform Deep Research across various heterogeneous biomedical KGs. Unlike generic Deep Research systems that rely primarily on internet-scale text, DeepEvidence incorporates specialized knowledge-graph tooling and coordinated exploration strategies to systematically bridge heterogeneous resources. At its core is an orchestrator that directs two complementary agents: Breadth-First ReSearch (BFRS) for broad, multi-graph entity search, and Depth-First ReSearch (DFRS) for multi-hop, evidence-focused reasoning. An internal, incrementally built evidence graph provides a structured record of retrieved entities, relations, and supporting evidence. To operate at scale, DeepEvidence includes unified interfaces for querying diverse biomedical APIs and an execution sandbox that enables programmatic data retrieval, extraction, and analysis. Across established deep-reasoning benchmarks and four key stages of the biomedical discovery lifecycle: drug discovery, pre-clinical experimentation, clinical trial development, and evidence-based medicine, DeepEvidence demonstrates substantial gains in systematic exploration and evidence synthesis. These results highlight the potential of knowledge-graph-driven Deep Research to accelerate biomedical discovery.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 22, 2025

Reasoning or Rhetoric? An Empirical Analysis of Moral Reasoning Explanations in Large Language Models

Do large language models reason morally, or do they merely sound like they do? We investigate whether LLM responses to moral dilemmas exhibit genuine developmental progression through Kohlberg's stages of moral development, or whether alignment training instead produces reasoning-like outputs that superficially resemble mature moral judgment without the underlying developmental trajectory. Using an LLM-as-judge scoring pipeline validated across three judge models, we classify more than 600 responses from 13 LLMs spanning a range of architectures, parameter scales, and training regimes across six classical moral dilemmas, and conduct ten complementary analyses to characterize the nature and internal coherence of the resulting patterns. Our results reveal a striking inversion: responses overwhelmingly correspond to post-conventional reasoning (Stages 5-6) regardless of model size, architecture, or prompting strategy, the effective inverse of human developmental norms, where Stage 4 dominates. Most strikingly, a subset of models exhibit moral decoupling: systematic inconsistency between stated moral justification and action choice, a form of logical incoherence that persists across scale and prompting strategy and represents a direct reasoning consistency failure independent of rhetorical sophistication. Model scale carries a statistically significant but practically small effect; training type has no significant independent main effect; and models exhibit near-robotic cross-dilemma consistency producing logically indistinguishable responses across semantically distinct moral problems. We posit that these patterns constitute evidence for moral ventriloquism: the acquisition, through alignment training, of the rhetorical conventions of mature moral reasoning without the underlying developmental trajectory those conventions are meant to represent.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 23 2

R&D-Agent-Quant: A Multi-Agent Framework for Data-Centric Factors and Model Joint Optimization

Financial markets pose fundamental challenges for asset return prediction due to their high dimensionality, non-stationarity, and persistent volatility. Despite advances in large language models and multi-agent systems, current quantitative research pipelines suffer from limited automation, weak interpretability, and fragmented coordination across key components such as factor mining and model innovation. In this paper, we propose R&D-Agent for Quantitative Finance, in short RD-Agent(Q), the first data-centric multi-agent framework designed to automate the full-stack research and development of quantitative strategies via coordinated factor-model co-optimization. RD-Agent(Q) decomposes the quant process into two iterative stages: a Research stage that dynamically sets goal-aligned prompts, formulates hypotheses based on domain priors, and maps them to concrete tasks, and a Development stage that employs a code-generation agent, Co-STEER, to implement task-specific code, which is then executed in real-market backtests. The two stages are connected through a feedback stage that thoroughly evaluates experimental outcomes and informs subsequent iterations, with a multi-armed bandit scheduler for adaptive direction selection. Empirically, RD-Agent(Q) achieves up to 2X higher annualized returns than classical factor libraries using 70% fewer factors, and outperforms state-of-the-art deep time-series models on real markets. Its joint factor-model optimization delivers a strong balance between predictive accuracy and strategy robustness. Our code is available at: https://github.com/microsoft/RD-Agent.

  • 7 authors
·
May 21, 2025

A case study of evaluating AI agents on a neuroscience data-to-discovery pipeline

Agentic AI tools offer a promising path to automating software development bottlenecks in scientific research pipelines, particularly for stages that take domain experts days to months to build, where scientists care about correctness and robustness, not implementation details. We present an empirical study of general-purpose coding agents on a fly optogenetics data-to-discovery pipeline. We assess agents on tasks substantially larger than existing benchmarks, datasets orders of magnitude bigger, and evaluation criteria grounded in domain expert standards. We show that agents can solve several individual pipeline stages, suggesting stage-level automation is tractable. By analyzing agents' code iterations, we show that they struggle most when there is not a pre-defined criterion to iterate on, and they must instead use their scientific judgment to assess their current solution, a key open challenge. Mirroring scientific practice, they sometimes attempt visual inspection of intermediate outputs for self-evaluation, but largely fail to interpret what they see or act on it appropriately. Solving the end-to-end pipeline correctly requires stringing together successes across all pipeline stages, and this is beyond agents' current abilities. We identify challenges largely absent from existing benchmarks, including computational resource management and generalization to large held-out data collections. Finally, we distill principles for constructing scientific tasks and rigorous evaluation criteria for open-ended problems.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 4

An Empirical Study on Usage and Perceptions of LLMs in a Software Engineering Project

Large Language Models (LLMs) represent a leap in artificial intelligence, excelling in tasks using human language(s). Although the main focus of general-purpose LLMs is not code generation, they have shown promising results in the domain. However, the usefulness of LLMs in an academic software engineering project has not been fully explored yet. In this study, we explore the usefulness of LLMs for 214 students working in teams consisting of up to six members. Notably, in the academic course through which this study is conducted, students were encouraged to integrate LLMs into their development tool-chain, in contrast to most other academic courses that explicitly prohibit the use of LLMs. In this paper, we analyze the AI-generated code, prompts used for code generation, and the human intervention levels to integrate the code into the code base. We also conduct a perception study to gain insights into the perceived usefulness, influencing factors, and future outlook of LLM from a computer science student's perspective. Our findings suggest that LLMs can play a crucial role in the early stages of software development, especially in generating foundational code structures, and helping with syntax and error debugging. These insights provide us with a framework on how to effectively utilize LLMs as a tool to enhance the productivity of software engineering students, and highlight the necessity of shifting the educational focus toward preparing students for successful human-AI collaboration.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 28, 2024

Discerning and Characterising Types of Competency Questions for Ontologies

Competency Questions (CQs) are widely used in ontology development by guiding, among others, the scoping and validation stages. However, very limited guidance exists for formulating CQs and assessing whether they are good CQs, leading to issues such as ambiguity and unusable formulations. To solve this, one requires insight into the nature of CQs for ontologies and their constituent parts, as well as which ones are not. We aim to contribute to such theoretical foundations in this paper, which is informed by analysing questions, their uses, and the myriad of ontology development tasks. This resulted in a first Model for Competency Questions, which comprises five main types of CQs, each with a different purpose: Scoping (SCQ), Validating (VCQ), Foundational (FCQ), Relationship (RCQ), and Metaproperty (MpCQ) questions. This model enhances the clarity of CQs and therewith aims to improve on the effectiveness of CQs in ontology development, thanks to their respective identifiable distinct constituent elements. We illustrate and evaluate them with a user story and demonstrate where which type can be used in ontology development tasks. To foster use and research, we created an annotated repository of 438 CQs, the Repository of Ontology Competency QuestionS (ROCQS), incorporating an existing CQ dataset and new CQs and CQ templates, which further demonstrate distinctions among types of CQs.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 18, 2024

OSIRIS: Bridging Analog Circuit Design and Machine Learning with Scalable Dataset Generation

The automation of analog integrated circuit (IC) design remains a longstanding challenge, primarily due to the intricate interdependencies among physical layout, parasitic effects, and circuit-level performance. These interactions impose complex constraints that are difficult to accurately capture and optimize using conventional design methodologies. Although recent advances in machine learning (ML) have shown promise in automating specific stages of the analog design flow, the development of holistic, end-to-end frameworks that integrate these stages and iteratively refine layouts using post-layout, parasitic-aware performance feedback is still in its early stages. Furthermore, progress in this direction is hindered by the limited availability of open, high-quality datasets tailored to the analog domain, restricting both the benchmarking and the generalizability of ML-based techniques. To address these limitations, we present OSIRIS, a scalable dataset generation pipeline for analog IC design. OSIRIS systematically explores the design space of analog circuits while producing comprehensive performance metrics and metadata, thereby enabling ML-driven research in electronic design automation (EDA). In addition, we release a dataset consisting of 87,100 circuit variations generated with OSIRIS, accompanied by a reinforcement learning (RL)-based baseline method that exploits OSIRIS for analog design optimization.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 27

Retrieval Augmented Generation and Understanding in Vision: A Survey and New Outlook

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a pivotal technique in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in enhancing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by enabling access to external, reliable, and up-to-date knowledge sources. In the context of AI-Generated Content (AIGC), RAG has proven invaluable by augmenting model outputs with supplementary, relevant information, thus improving their quality. Recently, the potential of RAG has extended beyond natural language processing, with emerging methods integrating retrieval-augmented strategies into the computer vision (CV) domain. These approaches aim to address the limitations of relying solely on internal model knowledge by incorporating authoritative external knowledge bases, thereby improving both the understanding and generation capabilities of vision models. This survey provides a comprehensive review of the current state of retrieval-augmented techniques in CV, focusing on two main areas: (I) visual understanding and (II) visual generation. In the realm of visual understanding, we systematically review tasks ranging from basic image recognition to complex applications such as medical report generation and multimodal question answering. For visual content generation, we examine the application of RAG in tasks related to image, video, and 3D generation. Furthermore, we explore recent advancements in RAG for embodied AI, with a particular focus on applications in planning, task execution, multimodal perception, interaction, and specialized domains. Given that the integration of retrieval-augmented techniques in CV is still in its early stages, we also highlight the key limitations of current approaches and propose future research directions to drive the development of this promising area.

  • 10 authors
·
Mar 23, 2025

FilmAgent: A Multi-Agent Framework for End-to-End Film Automation in Virtual 3D Spaces

Virtual film production requires intricate decision-making processes, including scriptwriting, virtual cinematography, and precise actor positioning and actions. Motivated by recent advances in automated decision-making with language agent-based societies, this paper introduces FilmAgent, a novel LLM-based multi-agent collaborative framework for end-to-end film automation in our constructed 3D virtual spaces. FilmAgent simulates various crew roles, including directors, screenwriters, actors, and cinematographers, and covers key stages of a film production workflow: (1) idea development transforms brainstormed ideas into structured story outlines; (2) scriptwriting elaborates on dialogue and character actions for each scene; (3) cinematography determines the camera setups for each shot. A team of agents collaborates through iterative feedback and revisions, thereby verifying intermediate scripts and reducing hallucinations. We evaluate the generated videos on 15 ideas and 4 key aspects. Human evaluation shows that FilmAgent outperforms all baselines across all aspects and scores 3.98 out of 5 on average, showing the feasibility of multi-agent collaboration in filmmaking. Further analysis reveals that FilmAgent, despite using the less advanced GPT-4o model, surpasses the single-agent o1, showing the advantage of a well-coordinated multi-agent system. Lastly, we discuss the complementary strengths and weaknesses of OpenAI's text-to-video model Sora and our FilmAgent in filmmaking.

  • 10 authors
·
Jan 22, 2025 3

Large Action Models: From Inception to Implementation

As AI continues to advance, there is a growing demand for systems that go beyond language-based assistance and move toward intelligent agents capable of performing real-world actions. This evolution requires the transition from traditional Large Language Models (LLMs), which excel at generating textual responses, to Large Action Models (LAMs), designed for action generation and execution within dynamic environments. Enabled by agent systems, LAMs hold the potential to transform AI from passive language understanding to active task completion, marking a significant milestone in the progression toward artificial general intelligence. In this paper, we present a comprehensive framework for developing LAMs, offering a systematic approach to their creation, from inception to deployment. We begin with an overview of LAMs, highlighting their unique characteristics and delineating their differences from LLMs. Using a Windows OS-based agent as a case study, we provide a detailed, step-by-step guide on the key stages of LAM development, including data collection, model training, environment integration, grounding, and evaluation. This generalizable workflow can serve as a blueprint for creating functional LAMs in various application domains. We conclude by identifying the current limitations of LAMs and discussing directions for future research and industrial deployment, emphasizing the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead in realizing the full potential of LAMs in real-world applications. The code for the data collection process utilized in this paper is publicly available at: https://github.com/microsoft/UFO/tree/main/dataflow, and comprehensive documentation can be found at https://microsoft.github.io/UFO/dataflow/overview/.

  • 18 authors
·
Dec 13, 2024 5

Assessing the Use of AutoML for Data-Driven Software Engineering

Background. Due to the widespread adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) for building software applications, companies are struggling to recruit employees with a deep understanding of such technologies. In this scenario, AutoML is soaring as a promising solution to fill the AI/ML skills gap since it promises to automate the building of end-to-end AI/ML pipelines that would normally be engineered by specialized team members. Aims. Despite the growing interest and high expectations, there is a dearth of information about the extent to which AutoML is currently adopted by teams developing AI/ML-enabled systems and how it is perceived by practitioners and researchers. Method. To fill these gaps, in this paper, we present a mixed-method study comprising a benchmark of 12 end-to-end AutoML tools on two SE datasets and a user survey with follow-up interviews to further our understanding of AutoML adoption and perception. Results. We found that AutoML solutions can generate models that outperform those trained and optimized by researchers to perform classification tasks in the SE domain. Also, our findings show that the currently available AutoML solutions do not live up to their names as they do not equally support automation across the stages of the ML development workflow and for all the team members. Conclusions. We derive insights to inform the SE research community on how AutoML can facilitate their activities and tool builders on how to design the next generation of AutoML technologies.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 20, 2023

Self-collaboration Code Generation via ChatGPT

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable code-generation ability, they still struggle with complex tasks. In real-world software development, humans usually tackle complex tasks through collaborative teamwork, a strategy that significantly controls development complexity and enhances software quality. Inspired by this, we present a self-collaboration framework for code generation employing LLMs, exemplified by ChatGPT. Specifically, through role instructions, 1) Multiple LLMs act as distinct ``experts'', each responsible for a specific subtask within a complex task; 2) Specify the way to collaborate and interact, so that different roles form a virtual team to facilitate each other's work, ultimately the virtual team addresses code generation tasks collaboratively without the need for human intervention. To effectively organize and manage this virtual team, we incorporate software-development methodology into the framework. Thus, we assemble an elementary team consisting of three ChatGPT roles (i.e., analyst, coder, and tester) responsible for software development's analysis, coding, and testing stages. We conduct comprehensive experiments on various code-generation benchmarks. Experimental results indicate that self-collaboration code generation relatively improves 29.9%-47.1% Pass@1 compared to direct code generation, achieving state-of-the-art performance and even surpassing GPT-4. Moreover, we showcase that self-collaboration could potentially enable LLMs to efficiently handle complex real-world tasks that are not readily solved by direct code generation, as evidenced in case study.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 15, 2023

The Synergy between Data and Multi-Modal Large Language Models: A Survey from Co-Development Perspective

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has been witnessed in recent years. Based on the powerful LLMs, multi-modal LLMs (MLLMs) extend the modality from text to a broader spectrum of domains, attracting widespread attention due to the broader range of application scenarios. As LLMs and MLLMs rely on vast amounts of model parameters and data to achieve emergent capabilities, the importance of data is receiving increasingly widespread attention and recognition. Tracing and analyzing recent data-oriented works for MLLMs, we find that the development of models and data is not two separate paths but rather interconnected. On the one hand, vaster and higher-quality data contribute to better performance of MLLMs, on the other hand, MLLMs can facilitate the development of data. The co-development of multi-modal data and MLLMs requires a clear view of 1) at which development stage of MLLMs can specific data-centric approaches be employed to enhance which capabilities, and 2) by utilizing which capabilities and acting as which roles can models contribute to multi-modal data. To promote the data-model co-development for MLLM community, we systematically review existing works related to MLLMs from the data-model co-development perspective. A regularly maintained project associated with this survey is accessible at https://github.com/modelscope/data-juicer/blob/main/docs/awesome_llm_data.md.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 11, 2024 4

PyCARL: A PyNN Interface for Hardware-Software Co-Simulation of Spiking Neural Network

We present PyCARL, a PyNN-based common Python programming interface for hardware-software co-simulation of spiking neural network (SNN). Through PyCARL, we make the following two key contributions. First, we provide an interface of PyNN to CARLsim, a computationally-efficient, GPU-accelerated and biophysically-detailed SNN simulator. PyCARL facilitates joint development of machine learning models and code sharing between CARLsim and PyNN users, promoting an integrated and larger neuromorphic community. Second, we integrate cycle-accurate models of state-of-the-art neuromorphic hardware such as TrueNorth, Loihi, and DynapSE in PyCARL, to accurately model hardware latencies that delay spikes between communicating neurons and degrade performance. PyCARL allows users to analyze and optimize the performance difference between software-only simulation and hardware-software co-simulation of their machine learning models. We show that system designers can also use PyCARL to perform design-space exploration early in the product development stage, facilitating faster time-to-deployment of neuromorphic products. We evaluate the memory usage and simulation time of PyCARL using functionality tests, synthetic SNNs, and realistic applications. Our results demonstrate that for large SNNs, PyCARL does not lead to any significant overhead compared to CARLsim. We also use PyCARL to analyze these SNNs for a state-of-the-art neuromorphic hardware and demonstrate a significant performance deviation from software-only simulations. PyCARL allows to evaluate and minimize such differences early during model development.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 21, 2020

Exploring a Physics-Informed Decision Transformer for Distribution System Restoration: Methodology and Performance Analysis

Driven by advancements in sensing and computing, deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based methods have demonstrated significant potential in effectively tackling distribution system restoration (DSR) challenges under uncertain operational scenarios. However, the data-intensive nature of DRL poses obstacles in achieving satisfactory DSR solutions for large-scale, complex distribution systems. Inspired by the transformative impact of emerging foundation models, including large language models (LLMs), across various domains, this paper explores an innovative approach harnessing LLMs' powerful computing capabilities to address scalability challenges inherent in conventional DRL methods for solving DSR. To our knowledge, this study represents the first exploration of foundation models, including LLMs, in revolutionizing conventional DRL applications in power system operations. Our contributions are twofold: 1) introducing a novel LLM-powered Physics-Informed Decision Transformer (PIDT) framework that leverages LLMs to transform conventional DRL methods for DSR operations, and 2) conducting comparative studies to assess the performance of the proposed LLM-powered PIDT framework at its initial development stage for solving DSR problems. While our primary focus in this paper is on DSR operations, the proposed PIDT framework can be generalized to optimize sequential decision-making across various power system operations.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 30, 2024

Time-R1: Towards Comprehensive Temporal Reasoning in LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities but lack robust temporal intelligence, struggling to integrate reasoning about the past with predictions and plausible generations of the future. Meanwhile, existing methods typically target isolated temporal skills, such as question answering about past events or basic forecasting, and exhibit poor generalization, particularly when dealing with events beyond their knowledge cutoff or requiring creative foresight. To address these limitations, we introduce Time-R1, the first framework to endow a moderate-sized (3B-parameter) LLM with comprehensive temporal abilities: understanding, prediction, and creative generation. Our approach features a novel three-stage development path; the first two constitute a reinforcement learning (RL) curriculum driven by a meticulously designed dynamic rule-based reward system. This framework progressively builds (1) foundational temporal understanding and logical event-time mappings from historical data, (2) future event prediction skills for events beyond its knowledge cutoff, and finally (3) enables remarkable generalization to creative future scenario generation without any fine-tuning. Strikingly, experiments demonstrate that Time-R1 outperforms models over 200 times larger, including the state-of-the-art 671B DeepSeek-R1, on highly challenging future event prediction and creative scenario generation benchmarks. This work provides strong evidence that thoughtfully engineered, progressive RL fine-tuning allows smaller, efficient models to achieve superior temporal performance, offering a practical and scalable path towards truly time-aware AI. To foster further research, we also release Time-Bench, a large-scale multi-task temporal reasoning dataset derived from 10 years of news data, and our series of Time-R1 checkpoints.

  • 5 authors
·
May 16, 2025 3

How do Transformers Learn Implicit Reasoning?

Recent work suggests that large language models (LLMs) can perform multi-hop reasoning implicitly -- producing correct answers without explicitly verbalizing intermediate steps -- but the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this paper, we study how such implicit reasoning emerges by training transformers from scratch in a controlled symbolic environment. Our analysis reveals a three-stage developmental trajectory: early memorization, followed by in-distribution generalization, and eventually cross-distribution generalization. We find that training with atomic triples is not necessary but accelerates learning, and that second-hop generalization relies on query-level exposure to specific compositional structures. To interpret these behaviors, we introduce two diagnostic tools: cross-query semantic patching, which identifies semantically reusable intermediate representations, and a cosine-based representational lens, which reveals that successful reasoning correlates with the cosine-base clustering in hidden space. This clustering phenomenon in turn provides a coherent explanation for the behavioral dynamics observed across training, linking representational structure to reasoning capability. These findings provide new insights into the interpretability of implicit multi-hop reasoning in LLMs, helping to clarify how complex reasoning processes unfold internally and offering pathways to enhance the transparency of such models.

  • 11 authors
·
May 29, 2025

Toward Safe and Responsible AI Agents: A Three-Pillar Model for Transparency, Accountability, and Trustworthiness

This paper presents a conceptual and operational framework for developing and operating safe and trustworthy AI agents based on a Three-Pillar Model grounded in transparency, accountability, and trustworthiness. Building on prior work in Human-in-the-Loop systems, reinforcement learning, and collaborative AI, the framework defines an evolutionary path toward autonomous agents that balances increasing automation with appropriate human oversight. The paper argues that safe agent autonomy must be achieved through progressive validation, analogous to the staged development of autonomous driving, rather than through immediate full automation. Transparency and accountability are identified as foundational requirements for establishing user trust and for mitigating known risks in generative AI systems, including hallucinations, data bias, and goal misalignment, such as the inversion problem. The paper further describes three ongoing work streams supporting this framework: public deliberation on AI agents conducted by the Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab, cross-industry collaboration through the Safe AI Agent Consortium, and the development of open tooling for an agent operating environment aligned with the Three-Pillar Model. Together, these contributions provide both conceptual clarity and practical guidance for enabling the responsible evolution of AI agents that operate transparently, remain aligned with human values, and sustain societal trust.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 8

MSWEP V3: Machine Learning-Powered Global Precipitation Estimates at 0.1^circ Hourly Resolution (1979-Present)

We introduce Version 3 (V3) of the gridded near real-time Multi-Source Weighted-Ensemble Precipitation (MSWEP) product -- the first fully global, historical machine learning powered precipitation (P) dataset, developed to meet the growing demand for timely and accurate P estimates amid escalating climate challenges. MSWEP V3 provides hourly data at 0.1^circ resolution from 1979 to the present, continuously updated with a latency of approximately two hours. Development follows a two-stage process. First, baseline P fields are generated using machine learning model stacks that integrate satellite- and (re)analysis-based P and air-temperature products, along with static variables. The models are trained using hourly and daily observations from 15,959 P gauges worldwide. Second, these baseline P fields are corrected using daily and monthly gauge observations from 57,666 and 86,000 stations globally. To assess MSWEP V3's baseline performance, we evaluated 19 (quasi-) global gridded P products -- including both uncorrected and gauge-based products -- using observations from an independent set of 15,958 gauges excluded from the first training stage. The MSWEP V3 baseline achieved a median daily Kling-Gupta Efficiency (KGE) of 0.69, outperforming all evaluated products. Other uncorrected products achieved median daily KGE values of 0.61 (ERA5), 0.46 (IMERG-L V7), 0.38 (GSMaP V8), and 0.31 (CHIRP). Using leave-one-out cross-validation, the daily gauge correction was found to improve the median daily correlation by 0.09, constrained by the already strong baseline performance. We anticipate that MSWEP V3 -- accessible at www.gloh2o.org/mswep -- will enable more reliable monitoring, forecasting, and management of water-related risks in a variable and changing climate.

  • 15 authors
·
Feb 1

Assessing innovation in the nascent value chains of climate-mitigating technologies

Accelerating climate-tech innovation in the formative stage of the technology life cycle is crucial to meeting climate policy goals. During this period, competing technologies are often undergoing major technical improvements within a nascent value chain. We analyze this formative stage for 14 climate-tech sectors using a dataset of 4,172 North American firms receiving 12,929 early-stage private investments between 2006 and 2021. Investments in these firms reveal that commercialization occurs in five distinct product clusters across the value chain. Only 15% of firms develop end products (i.e., downstream products bought by consumers), while 59% support these end products through components, manufacturing processes, or optimization products, and 26% develop business services. Detailed analysis of the temporal evolution of investments reveals the driving forces behind the technologies that commercialize, such as innovation spillovers, coalescence around a dominant design, and flexible regulatory frameworks. We identify three patterns of innovation: emerging innovation (e.g., agriculture), characterized by recent growth in private investments across most product clusters and spillover from other sectors; ongoing innovation (e.g., energy storage), characterized by multiple waves of investments in evolving products; and maturing innovation (e.g., energy efficiency), characterized by a dominant end product with a significant share of investments in optimization and services. Understanding the development of nascent value chains can inform policy design to best support scaling of climate-tech by identifying underfunded elements in the value chain and supporting development of a full value chain rather than only end products.

  • 4 authors
·
May 14, 2025

Prompting Frameworks for Large Language Models: A Survey

Since the launch of ChatGPT, a powerful AI Chatbot developed by OpenAI, large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements in both academia and industry, bringing about a fundamental engineering paradigm shift in many areas. While LLMs are powerful, it is also crucial to best use their power where "prompt'' plays a core role. However, the booming LLMs themselves, including excellent APIs like ChatGPT, have several inherent limitations: 1) temporal lag of training data, and 2) the lack of physical capabilities to perform external actions. Recently, we have observed the trend of utilizing prompt-based tools to better utilize the power of LLMs for downstream tasks, but a lack of systematic literature and standardized terminology, partly due to the rapid evolution of this field. Therefore, in this work, we survey related prompting tools and promote the concept of the "Prompting Framework" (PF), i.e. the framework for managing, simplifying, and facilitating interaction with large language models. We define the lifecycle of the PF as a hierarchical structure, from bottom to top, namely: Data Level, Base Level, Execute Level, and Service Level. We also systematically depict the overall landscape of the emerging PF field and discuss potential future research and challenges. To continuously track the developments in this area, we maintain a repository at https://github.com/lxx0628/Prompting-Framework-Survey, which can be a useful resource sharing platform for both academic and industry in this field.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 21, 2023

ConceptWeaver: Weaving Disentangled Concepts with Flow

Pre-trained flow-based models excel at synthesizing complex scenes yet lack a direct mechanism for disentangling and customizing their underlying concepts from one-shot real-world sources. To demystify this process, we first introduce a novel differential probing technique to isolate and analyze the influence of individual concept tokens on the velocity field over time. This investigation yields a critical insight: the generative process is not monolithic but unfolds in three distinct stages. An initial Blueprint Stage establishes low-frequency structure, followed by a pivotal Instantiation Stage where content concepts emerge with peak intensity and become naturally disentangled, creating an optimal window for manipulation. A final concept-insensitive refinement stage then synthesizes fine-grained details. Guided by this discovery, we propose ConceptWeaver, a framework for one-shot concept disentanglement. ConceptWeaver learns concept-specific semantic offsets from a single reference image using a stage-aware optimization strategy that aligns with the three-stage framework. These learned offsets are then deployed during inference via our novel ConceptWeaver Guidance (CWG) mechanism, which strategically injects them at the appropriate generative stage. Extensive experiments validate that ConceptWeaver enables high-fidelity, compositional synthesis and editing, demonstrating that understanding and leveraging the intrinsic, staged nature of flow models is key to unlocking precise, multi-granularity content manipulation.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 29