Daily Papers

Signature-based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) detect malicious activities by matching network or host activity against predefined rules. These rules are derived from extensive Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI), which includes attack signatures and behavioral patterns obtained through automated tools and manual threat analysis, such as sandboxing. The CTI is then transformed into actionable rules for the IDS engine, enabling real-time detection and prevention. However, the constant evolution of cyber threats necessitates frequent rule updates, which delay deployment time and weaken overall security readiness. Recent advancements in agentic systems powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) offer the potential for autonomous IDS rule generation with internal evaluation. We introduce FALCON, an autonomous agentic framework that generates deployable IDS rules from CTI data in real-time and evaluates them using built-in multi-phased validators. To demonstrate versatility, we target both network (Snort) and host-based (YARA) mediums and construct a comprehensive dataset of IDS rules with their corresponding CTIs. Our evaluations indicate FALCON excels in automatic rule generation, with an average of 95% accuracy validated by qualitative evaluation with 84% inter-rater agreement among multiple cybersecurity analysts across all metrics. These results underscore the feasibility and effectiveness of LLM-driven data mining for real-time cyber threat mitigation.

Different from a unimodal model whose input is from a single modality, the input (called multi-modal input) of a multi-modal model is from multiple modalities such as image, 3D points, audio, text, etc. Similar to unimodal models, many existing studies show that a multi-modal model is also vulnerable to adversarial perturbation, where an attacker could add small perturbation to all modalities of a multi-modal input such that the multi-modal model makes incorrect predictions for it. Existing certified defenses are mostly designed for unimodal models, which achieve sub-optimal certified robustness guarantees when extended to multi-modal models as shown in our experimental results. In our work, we propose MMCert, the first certified defense against adversarial attacks to a multi-modal model. We derive a lower bound on the performance of our MMCert under arbitrary adversarial attacks with bounded perturbations to both modalities (e.g., in the context of auto-driving, we bound the number of changed pixels in both RGB image and depth image). We evaluate our MMCert using two benchmark datasets: one for the multi-modal road segmentation task and the other for the multi-modal emotion recognition task. Moreover, we compare our MMCert with a state-of-the-art certified defense extended from unimodal models. Our experimental results show that our MMCert outperforms the baseline.

Despite growing enthusiasm for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), where multiple LLM agents collaborate to accomplish tasks, their performance gains across popular benchmarks remain minimal compared to single-agent frameworks. This gap highlights the need to analyze the challenges hindering MAS effectiveness. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive study of MAS challenges. We analyze five popular MAS frameworks across over 150 tasks, involving six expert human annotators. We identify 14 unique failure modes and propose a comprehensive taxonomy applicable to various MAS frameworks. This taxonomy emerges iteratively from agreements among three expert annotators per study, achieving a Cohen's Kappa score of 0.88. These fine-grained failure modes are organized into 3 categories, (i) specification and system design failures, (ii) inter-agent misalignment, and (iii) task verification and termination. To support scalable evaluation, we integrate MASFT with LLM-as-a-Judge. We also explore if identified failures could be easily prevented by proposing two interventions: improved specification of agent roles and enhanced orchestration strategies. Our findings reveal that identified failures require more complex solutions, highlighting a clear roadmap for future research. We open-source our dataset and LLM annotator.

We present the NVIDIA NeMo team's multi-channel speech recognition system for the 7th CHiME Challenge Distant Automatic Speech Recognition (DASR) Task, focusing on the development of a multi-channel, multi-speaker speech recognition system tailored to transcribe speech from distributed microphones and microphone arrays. The system predominantly comprises of the following integral modules: the Speaker Diarization Module, Multi-channel Audio Front-End Processing Module, and the ASR Module. These components collectively establish a cascading system, meticulously processing multi-channel and multi-speaker audio input. Moreover, this paper highlights the comprehensive optimization process that significantly enhanced our system's performance. Our team's submission is largely based on NeMo toolkits and will be publicly available.

Recent efforts to combine low-rank adaptation (LoRA) with mixture-of-experts (MoE) for adapting large language models (LLMs) to multiple tasks still exhibit prevailing limitations: they either swap entire attention/feed-forward layers for switch experts or bolt on parallel expert branches, diluting parameter efficiency and task fidelity. We propose the LoRA-Mixer, a modular and lightweight MoE framework that integrates LoRA experts. Our core innovation lies in replacing the projection matrices of the attention module's input/output linear layers with dynamically routed, task-specific LoRA experts. This design ensures seamless compatibility with diverse foundation models, including transformers and state space models (SSMs), by leveraging their inherent linear projection structures. The framework supports two operational paradigms: (1) joint optimization of LoRA experts and routing mechanisms via a novel hard-soft routing strategy, or (2) direct deployment of pre-trained, frozen LoRA modules sourced from external repositories. To enable robust router training with limited data while ensuring stable routing decisions and maximizing expert reuse, we introduce an adaptive Specialization Balance Loss (SBL) that jointly optimizes expert balance and task-specific alignment. Extensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets, including MedQA, CoLA, SST-2, GSM8K, ARC-E, ARC-C, and HumanEval, demonstrate the effectiveness of LoRA-Mixer. On datasets such as GSM8K, HumanEval, and MedQA, LoRA-Mixer achieves significant improvements of 7.61%, 4.88%, and 3.08% over the base models, respectively. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, LoRA-Mixer achieves additional improvements of 1.09%, 1.45%, and 1.68%, respectively, using only 48% of the parameters, demonstrating its efficiency and strong performance.

By utilizing more computational resources at test-time, large language models (LLMs) can improve without additional training. One common strategy uses verifiers to evaluate candidate outputs. In this work, we propose a novel scaling dimension for test-time compute: scaling the number of verifiers. We introduce Multi-Agent Verification (MAV) as a test-time compute paradigm that combines multiple verifiers to improve performance. We propose using Aspect Verifiers (AVs), off-the-shelf LLMs prompted to verify different aspects of outputs, as one possible choice for the verifiers in a MAV system. AVs are a convenient building block for MAV since they can be easily combined without additional training. Moreover, we introduce BoN-MAV, a simple multi-agent verification algorithm that combines best-of-n sampling with multiple verifiers. BoN-MAV demonstrates stronger scaling patterns than self-consistency and reward model verification, and we demonstrate both weak-to-strong generalization, where combining weak verifiers improves even stronger LLMs, and self-improvement, where the same base model is used to both generate and verify outputs. Our results establish scaling the number of verifiers as a promising new dimension for improving language model performance at test-time.

In order to streamline the fine-tuning of foundation models, Low-Rank Adapters (LoRAs) have been substantially adopted across various fields, including instruction tuning and domain adaptation. The underlying concept of LoRA involves decomposing a full-rank matrix into the product of two lower-rank matrices, which reduces storage consumption and accelerates the training process. Furthermore, to address the limited expressive capacity of LoRA, the Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) has been introduced for incorporating multiple LoRA adapters. The integration of LoRA experts leads to a visible improvement across several downstream scenes. However, the mixture of LoRAs (MoE-LoRA) still exhibits its low robustness during tuning and inferring. Inspired by the Riemannian Preconditioners which train LoRA as a sub-space projector, we propose a new training strategy for MoE-LoRA, to stabilize and boost its feature learning procedure by multi-space projections. Examinations on SGD and AdamW optimizers demonstrate the effectiveness of our methodology. Source code is available at https://github.com/THUDM/MoELoRA_Riemannian.

We propose Chain-of-Experts (CoE), a new Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture that introduces sequential expert communication within each layer. Unlike traditional MoE models, where experts operate independently in parallel, CoE processes tokens iteratively across a chain of experts inside a layer. To support dynamic expert selection across iterations, CoE employs a dedicated router at each iteration step within a layer. This design allows tokens to re-evaluate and select different experts during each iteration, rather than being statically assigned. As a result, CoE introduces a flexible routing mechanism that increases the diversity of expert combinations and enriches the model's representational capacity. CoE demonstrates improved performance under fixed compute: on math reasoning tasks, it reduces validation loss from 1.20 to 1.12 compared to a standard MoE. Beyond performance, CoE offers a new scaling axis: depth through expert iteration, which complements conventional width/depth scaling. For example, using 2x iterations matches the performance of 3x expert selections (in width), while reducing memory usage by 17.6-42% relative to other scaling strategies. Our analysis reveals that CoE's benefits stem from its iterative residual structure and enhanced expert specialization empowered by iterative routing, which together unlock more expressive representations. Code is available at https://github.com/ZihanWang314/coe.

This paper introduces a theoretical framework for a Transformer-augmented, sectional Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture that aims to enhance computational efficiency while preserving model scalability. Unlike conventional MoE models, which route entire token embeddings to selected experts, our approach portions the embedding dimension itself -- assigning segments of each token's representation to dedicated experts. To combat losses in token representation, we utilize a pre-expert transformer layer to recompute attention across tokens and reduce the sequence length dimensionality. We extend our theory by deriving optimal scaling laws that a non-linear relationship between the number of experts and factors such as model dimensionality, sequence length, and system overhead. These formulations yield closed-form and numerically-solvable expressions for identifying the optimal expert count under given architectural and hardware constraints. As a result, our framework not only provides theoretical bounds for computing efficiency with varying frameworks but also guides practical design choices for scaling large models effectively. While empirical validation is pending, we present a comprehensive experimental road map to evaluate the framework's efficiency, scalability, and practicality in future work.

Modern analyst agents must reason over complex, high token inputs, including dozens of retrieved documents, tool outputs, and time sensitive data. While prior work has produced tool calling benchmarks and examined factuality in knowledge augmented systems, relatively little work studies their intersection: settings where LLMs must integrate large volumes of dynamic, structured and unstructured multi tool outputs. We investigate LLM failure modes in this regime using crypto as a representative high data density domain. We introduce (1) CryptoAnalystBench, an analyst aligned benchmark of 198 production crypto and DeFi queries spanning 11 categories; (2) an agentic harness equipped with relevant crypto and DeFi tools to generate responses across multiple frontier LLMs; and (3) an evaluation pipeline with citation verification and an LLM as a judge rubric spanning four user defined success dimensions: relevance, temporal relevance, depth, and data consistency. Using human annotation, we develop a taxonomy of seven higher order error types that are not reliably captured by factuality checks or LLM based quality scoring. We find that these failures persist even in state of the art systems and can compromise high stakes decisions. Based on this taxonomy, we refine the judge rubric to better capture these errors. While the judge does not align with human annotators on precise scoring across rubric iterations, it reliably identifies critical failure modes, enabling scalable feedback for developers and researchers studying analyst style agents. We release CryptoAnalystBench with annotated queries, the evaluation pipeline, judge rubrics, and the error taxonomy, and outline mitigation strategies and open challenges in evaluating long form, multi tool augmented systems.

Due to the cumbersome nature of human evaluation and limitations of code-based evaluation, Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used to assist humans in evaluating LLM outputs. Yet LLM-generated evaluators simply inherit all the problems of the LLMs they evaluate, requiring further human validation. We present a mixed-initiative approach to ``validate the validators'' -- aligning LLM-generated evaluation functions (be it prompts or code) with human requirements. Our interface, EvalGen, provides automated assistance to users in generating evaluation criteria and implementing assertions. While generating candidate implementations (Python functions, LLM grader prompts), EvalGen asks humans to grade a subset of LLM outputs; this feedback is used to select implementations that better align with user grades. A qualitative study finds overall support for EvalGen but underscores the subjectivity and iterative process of alignment. In particular, we identify a phenomenon we dub criteria drift: users need criteria to grade outputs, but grading outputs helps users define criteria. What is more, some criteria appears dependent on the specific LLM outputs observed (rather than independent criteria that can be defined a priori), raising serious questions for approaches that assume the independence of evaluation from observation of model outputs. We present our interface and implementation details, a comparison of our algorithm with a baseline approach, and implications for the design of future LLM evaluation assistants.

Recent advancements in the field of reasoning using Large Language Models (LLMs) have created new possibilities for more complex and automatic Hardware Assertion Generation techniques. This paper introduces SANGAM, a SystemVerilog Assertion Generation framework using LLM-guided Monte Carlo Tree Search for the automatic generation of SVAs from industry-level specifications. The proposed framework utilizes a three-stage approach: Stage 1 consists of multi-modal Specification Processing using Signal Mapper, SPEC Analyzer, and Waveform Analyzer LLM Agents. Stage 2 consists of using the Monte Carlo Tree Self-Refine (MCTSr) algorithm for automatic reasoning about SVAs for each signal, and finally, Stage 3 combines the MCTSr-generated reasoning traces to generate SVA assertions for each signal. The results demonstrated that our framework, SANGAM, can generate a robust set of SVAs, performing better in the evaluation process in comparison to the recent methods.

As of September 2023, ChatGPT correctly answers "what is 7+8" with 15, but when asked "7+8=15, True or False" it responds with "False". This inconsistency between generating and validating an answer is prevalent in language models (LMs) and erodes trust. In this paper, we propose a framework for measuring the consistency between generation and validation (which we call generator-validator consistency, or GV-consistency), finding that even GPT-4, a state-of-the-art LM, is GV-consistent only 76% of the time. To improve the consistency of LMs, we propose to finetune on the filtered generator and validator responses that are GV-consistent, and call this approach consistency fine-tuning. We find that this approach improves GV-consistency of Alpaca-30B from 60% to 93%, and the improvement extrapolates to unseen tasks and domains (e.g., GV-consistency for positive style transfers extrapolates to unseen styles like humor). In addition to improving consistency, consistency fine-tuning improves both generator quality and validator accuracy without using any labeled data. Evaluated across 6 tasks, including math questions, knowledge-intensive QA, and instruction following, our method improves the generator quality by 16% and the validator accuracy by 6.3% across all tasks.

Wireless foundation models (WFMs) have recently demonstrated promising capabilities, jointly performing multiple wireless functions and adapting effectively to new environments. However, while current WFMs process only one modality, depending on the task and operating conditions, the most informative modality changes and no single modality is best for all tasks. WFMs should therefore be designed to accept multiple modalities to enable a broader and more diverse range of tasks and scenarios. In this work, we propose and build the first multimodal wireless foundation model capable of processing both raw IQ streams and image-like wireless modalities (e.g., spectrograms and CSI) and performing multiple tasks across both. We introduce masked wireless modeling for the multimodal setting, a self-supervised objective and pretraining recipe that learns a joint representation from IQ streams and image-like wireless modalities. We evaluate the model on five tasks across both modality families: image-based (human activity sensing, RF signal classification, 5G NR positioning) and IQ-based (RF device fingerprinting, interference detection/classification). The multimodal WFM is competitive with single-modality WFMs, and in several cases surpasses their performance. Our results demonstrates the strong potential of developing multimodal WFMs that support diverse wireless tasks across different modalities. We believe this provides a concrete step toward both AI-native 6G and the vision of joint sensing, communication, and localization.

Multimodal Foundation Models (MMFMs) have shown remarkable performance on various computer vision and natural language processing tasks. However, their performance on particular tasks such as document understanding is still limited. They also require more compute, time, and engineering resources to finetune and deploy compared to traditional, unimodal models. In this report, we present Multimodal Structured Generation, a general framework which constrains the output logits of frozen MMFMs to force them to reason before responding with structured outputs that downstream APIs can parse and use. We provide a detailed account of our approach, including the technical details, theoretical discussions, and final evaluation results in the 2nd Multimodal Foundation Models Challenge hosted by the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference. Our approach achieved the second highest score in the hidden test set for Phase 2 and third highest overall. This shows the method's ability to generalize to unseen tasks. And that simple engineering can beat expensive & complicated modelling steps as we first discussed in our paper, Retrieval Augmented Structured Generation: Business Document Information Extraction as Tool Use. All of our scripts, deployment steps, and evaluation results can be accessed in https://github.com/leloykun/MMFM-Challenge

Large multimodal models (LMMs) are increasingly adopted as judges in multimodal evaluation systems due to their strong instruction following and consistency with human preferences. However, their ability to follow diverse, fine-grained evaluation criteria remains underexplored. We develop Multi-Crit, a benchmark for evaluating multimodal judges on their capacity to follow pluralistic criteria and produce reliable criterion-level judgments. Covering both open-ended generation and verifiable reasoning tasks, Multi-Crit is built through a rigorous data curation pipeline that gathers challenging response pairs with multi-criterion human annotations. It further introduces three novel metrics for systematically assessing pluralistic adherence, criterion-switching flexibility, and the ability to recognize criterion-level preference conflicts. Comprehensive analysis of 25 LMMs reveals that 1) proprietary models still struggle to maintain consistent adherence to pluralistic criteria--especially in open-ended evaluation; 2) open-source models lag further behind in flexibly following diverse criteria; and 3) critic fine-tuning with holistic judgment signals enhances visual grounding but fails to generalize to pluralistic criterion-level judgment. Additional analyses on reasoning fine-tuning, test-time scaling, and boundary consistency between open-source and proprietary models further probe the limits of current multimodal judges. As a pioneering study, Multi-Crit lays the foundation for building reliable and steerable multimodal AI evaluation.

Low frequency oscillator (LFO) driven audio effects such as phaser, flanger, and chorus, modify an input signal using time-varying filters and delays, resulting in characteristic sweeping or widening effects. It has been shown that these effects can be modeled using neural networks when conditioned with the ground truth LFO signal. However, in most cases, the LFO signal is not accessible and measurement from the audio signal is nontrivial, hindering the modeling process. To address this, we propose a framework capable of extracting arbitrary LFO signals from processed audio across multiple digital audio effects, parameter settings, and instrument configurations. Since our system imposes no restrictions on the LFO signal shape, we demonstrate its ability to extract quasiperiodic, combined, and distorted modulation signals that are relevant to effect modeling. Furthermore, we show how coupling the extraction model with a simple processing network enables training of end-to-end black-box models of unseen analog or digital LFO-driven audio effects using only dry and wet audio pairs, overcoming the need to access the audio effect or internal LFO signal. We make our code available and provide the trained audio effect models in a real-time VST plugin.

Music source separation in the time-frequency domain is commonly achieved by applying a soft or binary mask to the magnitude component of (complex) spectrograms. The phase component is usually not estimated, but instead copied from the mixture and applied to the magnitudes of the estimated isolated sources. While this method has several practical advantages, it imposes an upper bound on the performance of the system, where the estimated isolated sources inherently exhibit audible "phase artifacts". In this paper we address these shortcomings by directly estimating masks in the complex domain, extending recent work from the speech enhancement literature. The method is particularly well suited for multi-instrument musical source separation since residual phase artifacts are more pronounced for spectrally overlapping instrument sources, a common scenario in music. We show that complex masks result in better separation than masks that operate solely on the magnitude component.

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a milestone in aligning large language models with human instructions and adapting them to downstream tasks. In particular, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has gained widespread attention due to its parameter efficiency. However, its impact on improving the performance of large models remains limited. Recent studies suggest that combining LoRA with Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) can significantly enhance fine-tuning performance. MoE adapts to the diversity and complexity of datasets by dynamically selecting the most suitable experts, thereby improving task accuracy and efficiency. Despite impressive results, recent studies reveal issues in the MoE routing mechanism, such as incorrect assignments and imbalanced expert allocation. Inspired by the principles of Redundancy and Fault Tolerance Theory. We innovatively integrate the concept of Mixture of Experts into the routing mechanism and propose an efficient fine-tuning method called Mixture of Routers (MoR). It employs multiple sub-routers for joint selection and uses a learnable main router to determine the weights of the sub-routers. The results show that MoR outperforms baseline models on most tasks, achieving an average performance improvement of 1%. MoR can serve as a plug-and-play, parameter-efficient fine-tuning method suitable for a wide range of applications. Our code is available here: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MoR-DFC6.

Answer verification is crucial not only for evaluating large language models (LLMs) by matching their unstructured outputs against standard answers, but also serves as the reward model to guide LLM optimization. Most evaluation frameworks rely on regularized matching or employ general LLMs for answer verification, which demands extensive, repetitive customization for regex rules or evaluation prompts. Two fundamental limitations persist in current methodologies: 1) the absence of comprehensive benchmarks that systematically evaluate verification capabilities across different LLMs; and 2) the nascent stage of verifier development, where existing approaches lack both the robustness to handle complex edge cases and the generalizability across different domains. In this work, we develop CompassVerifier, an accurate and robust lightweight verifier model for evaluation and outcome reward. It demonstrates multi-domain competency spanning math, knowledge, and diverse reasoning tasks, with the capability to process various answer types, including multi-subproblems, formulas, and sequence answers, while effectively identifying abnormal/invalid responses. We introduce VerifierBench benchmark comprising model outputs collected from multiple data sources, augmented through manual analysis of metaerror patterns to enhance CompassVerifier. We anticipate that CompassVerifier and VerifierBench will facilitate answer verification, evaluation protocols, and reinforcement learning research. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/open-compass/CompassVerifier.

Scaling test-time computation, or affording a generator large language model (LLM) extra compute during inference, typically employs the help of external non-generative evaluators (i.e., reward models). Concurrently, LLM-judges, models trained to generate evaluations and critiques (explanations) in natural language, are becoming increasingly popular in automatic evaluation. Despite judge empirical successes, their effectiveness as evaluators in test-time scaling settings is largely unknown. In this paper, we introduce the Judge Evaluation for Test-Time Scaling (JETTS) benchmark, which evaluates judge performance in three domains (math reasoning, code generation, and instruction following) under three task settings: response reranking, step-level beam search, and critique-based response refinement. We evaluate 10 different judge models (7B-70B parameters) for 8 different base generator models (6.7B-72B parameters). Our benchmark shows that while judges are competitive with outcome reward models in reranking, they are consistently worse than process reward models in beam search procedures. Furthermore, though unique to LLM-judges, their natural language critiques are currently ineffective in guiding the generator towards better responses.

The rapid evolution of autonomous, agentic artificial intelligence within financial services has introduced an existential architectural crisis: large language models (LLMs) are probabilistic, non-deterministic systems operating in domains that demand absolute, mathematically verifiable compliance guarantees. Existing guardrail solutions -- including NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails and Guardrails AI -- rely on probabilistic classifiers and syntactic validators that are fundamentally inadequate for enforcing complex multi-variable regulatory constraints mandated by the SEC, FINRA, and OCC. This paper presents the Lean-Agent Protocol, a formal-verification-based AI guardrail platform that leverages the Aristotle neural-symbolic model developed by Harmonic AI to auto-formalize institutional policies into Lean 4 code. Every proposed agentic action is treated as a mathematical conjecture: execution is permitted if and only if the Lean 4 kernel proves that the action satisfies pre-compiled regulatory axioms. This architecture provides cryptographic-level compliance certainty at microsecond latency, directly satisfying SEC Rule 15c3-5, OCC Bulletin 2011-12, FINRA Rule 3110, and CFPB explainability mandates. A three-phase implementation roadmap from shadow verification through enterprise-scale deployment is provided.

While LLM-as-a-Judge is widely used in automated evaluation, existing validation practices primarily operate at the level of observed outputs, offering limited insight into whether LLM judges themselves function as stable and reliable measurement instruments. To address this limitation, we introduce a two-phase diagnostic framework for assessing reliability of LLM-as-a-Judge, grounded in Item Response Theory (IRT). The framework adopts Graded Response Model (GRM) of IRT and formalizes reliability along two complementary dimensions: (1) intrinsic consistency, defined as the stability of measurement behavior under prompt variations, and (2) human alignment, capturing correspondence with human quality assessments. We empirically examine diverse LLM judges with this framework, and show that leveraging IRT-GRM yields interpretable signals for diagnosing judgments systematically. These signals provide practical guidance for verifying reliablity of LLM-as-a-Judge and identifying potential causes of unreliability.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly employed as automated evaluators to assess the safety of generated content, yet their reliability in this role remains uncertain. This study evaluates a diverse set of 11 LLM judge models across critical safety domains, examining three key aspects: self-consistency in repeated judging tasks, alignment with human judgments, and susceptibility to input artifacts such as apologetic or verbose phrasing. Our findings reveal that biases in LLM judges can significantly distort the final verdict on which content source is safer, undermining the validity of comparative evaluations. Notably, apologetic language artifacts alone can skew evaluator preferences by up to 98\%. Contrary to expectations, larger models do not consistently exhibit greater robustness, while smaller models sometimes show higher resistance to specific artifacts. To mitigate LLM evaluator robustness issues, we investigate jury-based evaluations aggregating decisions from multiple models. Although this approach both improves robustness and enhances alignment to human judgements, artifact sensitivity persists even with the best jury configurations. These results highlight the urgent need for diversified, artifact-resistant methodologies to ensure reliable safety assessments.

Finetuning specialized generative evaluators has emerged as a popular paradigm to meet the increasing demand for scalable evaluation during both training and test-time. However, recent work has largely focused on applying new methodology, such as reinforcement learning (RL), to training evaluators, shying away from large-scale, data-driven development. In this work, we focus on data scaling, curating a set of 2.5M samples spanning five unique evaluation tasks (pairwise, step-level, reference-free and reference-based verification, and single rating) and multiple domains focused on reasoning evaluation. With our data, we train Foundational Automatic Reasoning Evaluators (FARE), a family of 8B and 20B (with 3.6B active) parameter evaluators, with a simple iterative rejection-sampling supervised finetuning (SFT) approach. FARE-8B challenges larger specialized RL-trained evaluators and FARE-20B sets the new standard for open-source evaluators, surpassing specialized 70B+ evaluators. Beyond static benchmarks, we evaluate FARE in real-world tasks: As inference-time rerankers, FARE-20B achieves near-oracle performance on MATH. As verifiers in RL training, FARE improves the downstream RL-trained model performance by up to 14.1% vs. string-matching verifiers. When initialized from FARE, a continually-finetuned FARE-Code outperforms gpt-oss-20B by 65% on evaluating test-case quality.

RAG systems are increasingly evaluated and optimized using LLM judges, an approach that is rapidly becoming the dominant paradigm for system assessment. Nugget-based approaches in particular are now embedded not only in evaluation frameworks but also in the architectures of RAG systems themselves. While this integration can lead to genuine improvements, it also creates a risk of faulty measurements due to circularity. In this paper, we investigate this risk through comparative experiments with nugget-based RAG systems, including Ginger and Crucible, against strong baselines such as GPT-Researcher. By deliberately modifying Crucible to generate outputs optimized for an LLM judge, we show that near-perfect evaluation scores can be achieved when elements of the evaluation - such as prompt templates or gold nuggets - are leaked or can be predicted. Our results highlight the importance of blind evaluation settings and methodological diversity to guard against mistaking metric overfitting for genuine system progress.

According to the Test-Time Scaling, the integration of External Slow-Thinking with the Verify mechanism has been demonstrated to enhance multi-round reasoning in large language models (LLMs). However, in the multimodal (MM) domain, there is still a lack of a strong MM-Verifier. In this paper, we introduce MM-Verifier and MM-Reasoner to enhance multimodal reasoning through longer inference and more robust verification. First, we propose a two-step MM verification data synthesis method, which combines a simulation-based tree search with verification and uses rejection sampling to generate high-quality Chain-of-Thought (COT) data. This data is then used to fine-tune the verification model, MM-Verifier. Additionally, we present a more efficient method for synthesizing MMCOT data, bridging the gap between text-based and multimodal reasoning. The synthesized data is used to fine-tune MM-Reasoner. Our MM-Verifier outperforms all larger models on the MathCheck, MathVista, and MathVerse benchmarks. Moreover, MM-Reasoner demonstrates strong effectiveness and scalability, with performance improving as data size increases. Finally, our approach achieves strong performance when combining MM-Reasoner and MM-Verifier, reaching an accuracy of 65.3 on MathVista, surpassing GPT-4o (63.8) with 12 rollouts.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a common paradigm to use Large Language Models (LLMs) alongside private and up-to-date knowledge bases. In this work, we address the challenges of using LLM-as-a-Judge when evaluating grounded answers generated by RAG systems. To assess the calibration and discrimination capabilities of judge models, we identify 7 generator failure modes and introduce GroUSE (Grounded QA Unitary Scoring of Evaluators), a meta-evaluation benchmark of 144 unit tests. This benchmark reveals that existing automated RAG evaluation frameworks often overlook important failure modes, even when using GPT-4 as a judge. To improve on the current design of automated RAG evaluation frameworks, we propose a novel pipeline and find that while closed models perform well on GroUSE, state-of-the-art open-source judges do not generalize to our proposed criteria, despite strong correlation with GPT-4's judgement. Our findings suggest that correlation with GPT-4 is an incomplete proxy for the practical performance of judge models and should be supplemented with evaluations on unit tests for precise failure mode detection. We further show that finetuning Llama-3 on GPT-4's reasoning traces significantly boosts its evaluation capabilities, improving upon both correlation with GPT-4's evaluations and calibration on reference situations.

Customizing an LLM judge to a specific task or domain often involves optimizing its prompt across multiple evaluation criteria simultaneously. Textual gradient methods automate this for a single judge criterion, however they produce natural-language critiques, not numerical vectors. Thus, the conflict-resolution toolkit of multi-task learning (PCGrad, MGDA) doesn't apply to the multi-objective textual gradient setting. We test five decomposition modes of textual gradient optimizers by varying how much cross-task information the loss, gradient and optimizer LLMs share. In 6 of 10 configurations, we observe that optimization never improves over the initial prompt. Gradient specificity drops by 59% (from 9.0 to 3.7) when the gradient LLM processes multiple criteria jointly. Separately, we observe that naively combining per-task instructions into a single prompt degrades Spearman's rho by -5.3%. These results identify two separable failure modes: optimization-time gradient dilution and inference-time instruction interference, which together constrain the design space for multi-objective judge customization using textual feedback.

Qualitative research faces a critical reliability challenge: traditional inter-rater agreement methods require multiple human coders, are time-intensive, and often yield moderate consistency. We present a multi-perspective validation framework for LLM-based thematic analysis that combines ensemble validation with dual reliability metrics: Cohen's Kappa (κ) for inter-rater agreement and cosine similarity for semantic consistency. Our framework enables configurable analysis parameters (1-6 seeds, temperature 0.0-2.0), supports custom prompt structures with variable substitution, and provides consensus theme extraction across any JSON format. As proof-of-concept, we evaluate three leading LLMs (Gemini 2.5 Pro, GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet) on a psychedelic art therapy interview transcript, conducting six independent runs per model. Results demonstrate Gemini achieves highest reliability (κ= 0.907, cosine=95.3%), followed by GPT-4o (κ= 0.853, cosine=92.6%) and Claude (κ= 0.842, cosine=92.1%). All three models achieve a high agreement (κ> 0.80), validating the multi-run ensemble approach. The framework successfully extracts consensus themes across runs, with Gemini identifying 6 consensus themes (50-83% consistency), GPT-4o identifying 5 themes, and Claude 4 themes. Our open-source implementation provides researchers with transparent reliability metrics, flexible configuration, and structure-agnostic consensus extraction, establishing methodological foundations for reliable AI-assisted qualitative research.

The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) approach has demonstrated outstanding scalability in multi-task learning including low-level upstream tasks such as concurrent removal of multiple adverse weather effects. However, the conventional MoE architecture with parallel Feed Forward Network (FFN) experts leads to significant parameter and computational overheads that hinder its efficient deployment. In addition, the naive MoE linear router is suboptimal in assigning task-specific features to multiple experts which limits its further scalability. In this work, we propose an efficient MoE architecture with weight sharing across the experts. Inspired by the idea of linear feature modulation (FM), our architecture implicitly instantiates multiple experts via learnable activation modulations on a single shared expert block. The proposed Feature Modulated Expert (FME) serves as a building block for the novel Mixture-of-Feature-Modulation-Experts (MoFME) architecture, which can scale up the number of experts with low overhead. We further propose an Uncertainty-aware Router (UaR) to assign task-specific features to different FM modules with well-calibrated weights. This enables MoFME to effectively learn diverse expert functions for multiple tasks. The conducted experiments on the multi-deweather task show that our MoFME outperforms the baselines in the image restoration quality by 0.1-0.2 dB and achieves SOTA-compatible performance while saving more than 72% of parameters and 39% inference time over the conventional MoE counterpart. Experiments on the downstream segmentation and classification tasks further demonstrate the generalizability of MoFME to real open-world applications.

While deep learning has advanced speech enhancement (SE), effective phase modeling remains challenging, as conventional networks typically operate within a flat Euclidean feature space, which is not easy to model the underlying circular topology of the phase. To address this, we propose a manifold-aware magnitude-phase dual-stream framework that aligns the phase stream with its intrinsic circular geometry by enforcing Global Rotation Equivariance (GRE) characteristic. Specifically, we introduce a Magnitude-Phase Interactive Convolutional Module (MPICM) for modulus-based information exchange and a Hybrid-Attention Dual-FFN (HADF) bottleneck for unified feature fusion, both of which are designed to preserve GRE in the phase stream. Comprehensive evaluations are conducted across phase retrieval, denoising, dereverberation, and bandwidth extension tasks to validate the superiority of the proposed method over multiple advanced baselines. Notably, the proposed architecture reduces Phase Distance by over 20\% in the phase retrieval task and improves PESQ by more than 0.1 in zero-shot cross-corpus denoising evaluations. The overall superiority is also established in universal SE tasks involving mixed distortions. Qualitative analysis further reveals that the learned phase features exhibit distinct periodic patterns, which are consistent with the intrinsic circular nature of the phase. The source code is available at https://github.com/wangchengzhong/RENet.

As the research of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) becomes popular, an advancing MLLM model is typically required to handle various textual and visual tasks (e.g., VQA, Detection, OCR, and ChartQA) simultaneously for real-world applications. However, due to the significant differences in representation and distribution among data from various tasks, simply mixing data of all tasks together leads to the well-known``multi-task conflict" issue, resulting in performance degradation across various tasks. To address this issue, we propose Awaker2.5-VL, a Mixture of Experts~(MoE) architecture suitable for MLLM, which acquires the multi-task capabilities through multiple sparsely activated experts. To speed up the training and inference of Awaker2.5-VL, each expert in our model is devised as a low-rank adaptation (LoRA) structure. Extensive experiments on multiple latest benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of Awaker2.5-VL. The code and model weight are released in our Project Page: https://github.com/MetabrainAGI/Awaker.

Conventional acoustic beamformers assume that noise is stationary within short time frames. This assumption prevents them from exploiting correlations between frequencies in almost-periodic noise sources such as musical instruments, fans, and engines. These signals exhibit periodically varying statistics and are better modeled as cyclostationary processes. This paper introduces the cyclic MVDR (cMVDR) beamformer, an extension of the conventional MVDR that leverages both spatial and spectral correlations to improve noise reduction, particularly in low-SNR scenarios. The method builds on frequency-shifted (FRESH) filtering, where shifted versions of the input are combined to attenuate or amplify components that are coherent across frequency. To address inharmonicity, where harmonic partials deviate from exact integer multiples of the fundamental frequency, we propose a data-driven strategy that estimates resonant frequencies via periodogram analysis and computes the frequency shifts from their spacing. Analytical and experimental results demonstrate that performance improves with increasing spectral correlation. On real recordings, the cMVDR achieves up to 5 dB gain in scale-invariant signal-to-distortion ratio (SI-SDR) over the MVDR and remains effective even with a single microphone. Code is available at https://github.com/Screeen/cMVDR.