High-Level Synthesis (HLS) compiles algorithmic C/C++ descriptions into hardware, with Quality of Results (QoR)---latency and resource utilization---critically governed by pragma configurations and code structure. Existing natural-language-to-HLS (NL-to-HLS) training approaches prioritize functional correctness while largely ignoring QoR. We observe that reinforcement learning (RL) for HLS does not require absolute synthesis results---only relative comparisons between candidates. Based on this insight, we propose \textbf{HLS-Seek}, a QoR-aware NL-to-HLS framework that avoids full synthesis-in-the-loop RL via a comparative proxy reward model achieving 99.53\% Pareto-dominance accuracy. To prevent reward hacking, we introduce \textit{uncertainty-aware Monte Carlo (MC) dropout switching} that selectively invokes real Vitis HLS synthesis for low-confidence candidates and online updates the proxy, creating a self-improving reward system. HLS-Seek achieves 84.7\% syntax correctness pass@1 and 81.4\% functional correctness pass@5 on HLS-Eval~\cite{abikaram2025hlseval} with only 7B parameters, surpassing GPT-5.1 on functional pass@5, while achieving 8.5$\times$ faster training than real-reward RL. On QoR evaluation, HLS-Seek achieves the lowest latency on 19/30 kernels and Pareto-dominates HLS-specific baselines on 9 kernels.
Qingyun Zou, Feng Yu, Hongshi Tan et al.· 0 citations
The trustworthy object detection capabilities of a novel Kolmogorov-Arnold network framework are examined here. The approach addresses a key limitation in computer vision for vehicle detection perception, and beyond. These systems offer limited transparency regarding the reliability of their confidence scores in visually degraded or ambiguous scenes. To this end, a Kolmogorov-Arnold network is employed as an interpretable post-hoc surrogate to model the trustworthiness of the You Only Look Once (Yolov10) detections using seven geometric and semantic features. The additive spline-based structure of the Kolmogorov-Arnold network enables direct visualisation of each feature's influence. This produces smooth and transparent functional mappings that reveal when the model's confidence is well supported and when it is unreliable. Furthermore, a bootstrapped language-image (BLIP) foundation model generates descriptive captions of each scene. This tool enables a lightweight multimodal interface without affecting the interpretability layer. Experiments on both Common Objects in Context (COCO), and images from the University of Bath campus demonstrate that the framework accurately identifies low-trust predictions under blur, occlusion, or low texture. This provides actionable insights for acceptance, review, or downstream risk mitigation. The resulting system delivers interpretable object detection with trustworthy confidence estimates. It offers a powerful tool for transparent and practical perception component for autonomous and multimodal artificial intelligence applications.
Marios Impraimakis, Daniel Vazquez, Feiyu Zhou· 0 citations
Real-world time series exhibit complex and evolving dynamics, making accurate forecasting extremely challenging. Recent multi-modal forecasting methods leverage textual information such as news reports to improve prediction, but most rely on token-level fusion that mixes temporal patches with language tokens in a shared embedding space. However, such fusion can be ill-suited when high-quality time-text pairs are scarce and when time series exhibit substantial variation in characteristics, thus complicating cross-modal alignment. In parallel, mixture-of-experts (MoE) architectures have proven effective for both time series modeling and multi-modal learning, yet many existing MoE-based modality integration methods still depend on token-level fusion. To address this, we propose Expert Modulation, a new mechanism for multi-modal time series prediction that conditions both routing and expert computation on textual signals, enabling direct and efficient cross-modal control over expert behavior. Through theoretical analysis and experiments, our proposed method demonstrates strong improvements in multi-modal time series prediction. The current code implementation is available at https://github.com/BruceZhangReve/MoME
Lige Zhang, Ali Maatouk, Jialin Chen et al.· 0 citations
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to telecom engineering tasks, yet perform poorly on 3GPP specifications. These standards encode much of their technical information in complex tables, but LLM knowledge and interpretation of such tables remain largely unexplored. We introduce TeleTables, a benchmark comprising 2,220 tables from 13 3GPP specifications in four formats and 500 human-verified MCQs spanning direct retrieval to multi-step reasoning. Evaluating 20 open-weight LLMs across non reasoning, multimodal, reasoning, and table specialized architectures reveals two distinct performance bottlenecks. In the closed-book setting, domain knowledge is the primary constraint, with no general-purpose model exceeding 41% accuracy. When the table is provided as context, the best models exceed 90%, but performance degrades systematically with reasoning depth, evidence scope, and structural complexity, with a 32.2pp spread across reasoning skills. Table specialization on non-telecom data provides no consistent benefit, while strong reasoning capabilities remain essential for reliable interpretation of complex technical tables.
Anas Ezzakri, Nicola Piovesan, Mohamed Sana et al.· 0 citations
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Agentic Workflows (AWs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for solving complex tasks. However, automatically generating high-quality AWs remains expensive because AW optimization requires evaluating a large number of candidate AWs via execution, resulting in high computational cost and latency. Recently, AW performance prediction has become a hot research topic to avoid costly execution-based evaluation, but existing methods primarily use Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to model workflow structures and insufficiently capture the semantic relationships among agents. To address this limitation, we propose GLOW, a unified framework for AW performance prediction that combines the graph-structure modeling ability of GNNs with the topology-aware semantic encoding capability of LLMs. Specifically, a graph-oriented LLM is first built through instruction-tuning on graph understanding tasks to extract topology-aware semantic representations from descriptive text of AWs. Meanwhile, a GNN explicitly models the structural information of AWs and produces corresponding structural representations. The semantic and structural representations are then fused in a shared latent space using a Transformer-based fusion module. A contrastive learning strategy is further introduced to learn more discriminative representations for AWs. Experiments on the FLORA-Bench benchmark demonstrate that GLOW consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both prediction accuracy and ranking utility. Moreover, when integrated into the AFLOW, an automatic AW generation framework, GLOW reduces optimization time by 98.7% with only a 0.031 average score decrease across three datasets, showing its effectiveness as an efficient surrogate evaluator for AW optimization.
High-performance concrete (HPC) requires complex mix design decisions involving interdependent variables and practical constraints. While data-driven methods have improved predictive modeling for forward design in concrete engineering, inverse design remains limited, especially when some variables are fixed and only the remaining ones must be inferred. This study proposes a cooperative neural network framework for the partial inverse design of HPC. The framework integrates an imputation model with a surrogate strength predictor and learns through cooperative training. Once trained, it generates valid and performance-consistent mix designs in a single forward pass without retraining for different constraint scenarios. Compared with baseline models, including autoencoder models and Bayesian inference with Gaussian process surrogates, the proposed method achieves strength consistency between the surrogate-predicted strength of the generated mixes and the target strength with R-squared values of 0.84 to 0.89 and substantially reduces the mean squared error of this strength consistency by approximately 42% and 60%, respectively. The results demonstrate a novel, accurate, and computationally efficient application of artificial intelligence in concrete science by applying a cooperative neural network for constraint-aware partial inverse design of HPC mix generation.
Agung Nugraha, Heungjun Im, Jihwan Lee· 0 citations
Deep learning models have attracted lots of research attention in time series classification (TSC) task in the past two decades. Recently, deep neural networks (DNN) have surpassed classical distance-based methods and achieved state-of-the-art performance. Despite their promising performance, deep neural networks (DNNs) have been shown to rely on spurious correlations present in the training data, which can hinder generalization. For instance, a model might incorrectly associate the presence of grass with the label ``cat" if the training set have majority of cats lying in grassy backgrounds. However, the shortcut behavior of DNNs in time series remain under-explored. Most existing shortcut work are relying on external attributes such as gender, patients group, instead of focus on the internal bias behavior in time series models.
In this paper, we take the first step to investigate and establish point-based shortcut learning behavior in deep learning time series classification. We further propose a simple detection method based on other class to detect shortcut occurs without relying on test data or clean training classes. We test our proposed method in UCR time series datasets.
Salomon Ibarra, Frida Cantu, Kaixiong Zhou et al.· 0 citations
Recommender systems (RS) serve as a fundamental tool for navigating the vast expanse of online information, with deep learning advancements playing an increasingly important role in improving ranking accuracy. Among these, graph neural networks (GNNs) excel at extracting higher-order structural information, while large language models (LLMs) are designed to process and comprehend natural language, making both approaches highly effective and widely adopted. Recent research has focused on graph foundation models (GFMs), which integrate the strengths of GNNs and LLMs to model complex RS problems more efficiently by leveraging the graph-based structure of user-item relationships alongside textual understanding. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of GFM-based RS technologies by introducing a clear taxonomy of current approaches, diving into methodological details, and highlighting key challenges and future directions. By synthesizing recent advancements, we aim to offer valuable insights into the evolving landscape of GFM-based recommender systems.
Bin Wu, Yihang Wang, Yuanhao Zeng et al.· 0 citations
Hypergraph is a data structure that enables us to model higher-order associations among data entities. Conventional graph-structured data can represent pairwise relationships only, whereas hypergraph enables us to associate any number of entities, which is essential in many real-life applications. Hypergraph learning algorithms have been well-studied for numerous problem settings, such as node classification, link prediction, etc. However, much less research has been conducted on anomaly detection from hypergraphs. Anomaly detection identifies events that deviate from the usual pattern and can be applied to hypergraphs to detect unusual higher-order associations. In this work, we propose an end-to-end hypergraph neural network-based model for identifying anomalous associations in a hypergraph. Our proposed algorithm operates in an unsupervised manner without requiring any labeled data. Extensive experimentation on several real-life datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of our model in detecting anomalous hyperedges.
Can pretrained models generalize to new datasets without any retraining? We deploy pretrained image models on datasets they were not trained for, and investigate whether their embeddings form meaningful clusters. Our suite of benchmarking experiments uses encoders pretrained solely on ImageNet-1k with either supervised or self-supervised training techniques, deployed on image datasets that were not seen during training, and clustered with conventional clustering algorithms. This evaluation provides new insights into the embeddings of self-supervised models, which prioritize different features to supervised models. We find evidence that supervised encoders offer more utility than SSL encoders within the training domain, and vice-versa far outside of it. However, fine-tuning SSL encoders for ImageNet-1k classification results in the opposite behaviour, with better performance than supervised-only models on in-domain and decreased performance on far out of domain data - worse at far-OOD than either SSL-only or supervised-only models. Clustering provides a way to evaluate the utility of self-supervised learnt representations orthogonal to existing feature quality estimation methods. Additionally, we find the silhouette score when measured in a UMAP-reduced space is highly correlated with clustering performance, and can therefore be used as a proxy for clustering performance on data with no ground truth labels. Our code implementation is available at https://github.com/scottclowe/zs-ssl-clustering/.
Scott C. Lowe, Joakim Bruslund Haurum, Sageev Oore et al.· 0 citations
Maintaining the safety of large language models (LLMs) is crucial as they are increasingly deployed in real-world applications. Existing safety guardrails typically rely on single-pass classification or, more recently, distilled reasoning. Reasoning-based guardrails significantly outperform classification-only baselines, but they incur substantial query latency and token overhead that make them impractical for highthroughput deployment. To address this challenge, we propose COLAGUARD, a guardrail model that transfers multi-step safety reasoning into a continuous latent space through a stage-wise training curriculum, enabling direct hidden-state propagation at inference. Evaluated on ten prompt- and response-moderation settings spanning eight safety benchmarks, COLAGUARD improves macro-F1 by 8.24 points over Llama Guard 3 and matches our explicit reasoning baseline, GuardReasoner, in macroF1 while delivering a 12.9X speedup and 22.4X reduction in token usage. Our results suggest that latent reasoning offers a practical alternative to explicit rationale generation for deployable guardrails, jointly improving safety robustness and inference efficiency rather than treating them as competing objectives.
With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), the safety of LLMs has become a critical concern. Despite significant efforts in safety alignment, current LLMs remain vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks. However, the root causes of such vulnerabilities are still poorly understood, necessitating a rigorous investigation into jailbreak mechanisms across both academic and industrial communities. In this work, we focus on a continuation-triggered jailbreak phenomenon, whereby simply relocating a continuation-triggered instruction suffix can substantially increase jailbreak success rates. To uncover the intrinsic mechanisms of this phenomenon, we conduct a comprehensive mechanistic interpretability analysis at the level of attention heads. Through causal interventions and activation scaling, we show that this jailbreak behavior primarily arises from an inherent competition between the model's intrinsic continuation drive and the safety defenses acquired through alignment training. Furthermore, we perform a detailed behavioral analysis of the identified safety-critical attention heads, revealing notable differences in the behaviors of safety heads across different model architectures. Grounded in these mechanistic findings, we propose Head Competition Steering (HCS), a mechanistically grounded inference-time strategy that explicitly leverages the competition between safety heads and continuation heads to suppress harmful generation, and further distill its behavioral signal into a student model via knowledge distillation, achieving inference-time safety improvements without additional computational overhead.
Yonghong Deng, Zhen Yang, Ping Jian et al.· 0 citations
A weeklong summer workshop brought higher education faculty to campus to explore how AI and machine learning materials can be adapted for their classrooms.
A new machine-learning framework aims to improve the success rate of computational protein design while moving away from results that reproduce sequences found in nature.
MIT News · Artificial Intelligence· news.mit.eduAug 24, 2026
