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2,394 papers
The vision is to leverage the capabilities of multiple GPT agents to contribute to SE tasks and to propose an initial road map for future work, arguing that multiple G PT agents can perform creative and demanding tasks far beyond coding and debugging.
Abstract. Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from industrial activities remain one of the greatest contributors to global climate change. Hollow fiber membranes (HFMs) have emerged as a promising technology for post-combustion CO2 separation owing to their high surface-area-to-volume ratio and scalability. This work focuses on the fabrication of HFMs with an emphasis on gas separation, particularly CO2, using the non-solvent induced phase separation (NIPS) spinning process for HFMs fabrication. The process allows specific control over dope and bore fluid selection, and flowrates, enabling the formation of asymmetric structures with desirable porosity, mechanical strength and suitable morphology for gas separation. The fabrication of polyethersulfone (PES)-based HFMs via NIPS, with 3 wt% polyethylene glycol (PEG) as a pore-forming additive, served as a foundational and basic study framework to provide an overview of the general hollow fibre membrane fabrication process. Preliminary assessments demonstrated the suitability of the fabricated membranes for gas separation applications as per requirements of membrane-based carbon capture technologies. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), gas permeability tests, and tensile testing all revealed improvements in morphology, porosity, and mechanical strength, implying that this method for fabricating hollow fibre membranes has significant potential for tuning hollow fibre membranes for gas separation applications. Finally, the potential of HFM-based systems for energy-efficient CO2 capture is highlighted to be explored further.
The results suggest a novel way of approaching automated evaluation, by offering a faster, more explainable, and less ambiguous alternative to black-box rubric evals, particularly in high-stakes domains such as healthcare and banking where precision and auditability are critical.
Vision-language models (VLMs) fail many detail-centric questions for a concrete reason: the answer is visible in the image, yet lost after the image is compressed into a low-resolution global view. Allocating more visual tokens to every query improves some OCR and document cases, but it spends computation indiscriminately and can disturb tasks that rely on global context. We propose GapSight, a framework for learning visual re-reading: a VLM first takes a global glance, then selectively returns to a free-form region when the question calls for local evidence. The supervision comes from the target model's own failure signal. Offline, we compare answer loss or multiple-choice option margin under a global-only view and candidate crop-augmented views; crops that improve the target answer become model-specific review labels. A lightweight free-form crop router distills these labels into a one-shot inference policy that predicts whether to review, expected utility, and a continuous crop box from the global state. Across LLaVA-1.5-7B, InternVL2.5-8B, and Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct, GapSight improves the Base no-zoom baseline on six benchmarks spanning OCR, documents, charts, infographics, VStarBench, and MME-RealWorld-Lite. On InternVL2.5-8B, GapSight raises the six-benchmark average from 52.25 to 64.29, above CropVLM (57.16), ViCrop (55.84), and ZoomRefine (54.43). Mechanism analyses show that the router rescues concrete wrong answers, adapts its action rate by task, and forms a favorable token-performance profile. These results position loss-gap supervision as a practical route to teaching VLMs when and where to look again.
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LLM-based query expansion improves retrieval by generating document-like passages. In hybrid retrieval, however, most evaluations fuse fixed top-$L$ dense and sparse rankings. Because the cutoff controls both which cross-channel contributions enter fusion and how much of each ranking is accessed, gains measured at one $L$ can change or reverse at another. We separate these effects by evaluating retrieval effectiveness under complete-list fusion and recording the policy-specific per-channel replay stopping depths at which its ordered top-$K$ is certified. We then introduce DESA (Dense Expansion and Sparse Anchoring), a channel-asymmetric query expansion method. An LLM generates complementary reference passages; orthogonal residual expansion adds their new semantic directions to the dense query, while score-product anchoring incorporates their lexical cues into sparse retrieval without broadening the original query's lexical support. Across seven BEIR datasets, DESA improves nDCG@10 and Recall@20 over the unexpanded query by 3.82% and 2.38%, while reducing dense and sparse access depths by 36.90% and 36.56%. With equal dataset weighting, 63.31% of queries become shallower in both channels. However, both depths increase with Contriever on Touch\'e-2020. These results support channel-specific integration of generated passages and joint evaluation of retrieval effectiveness and access depth.
Human-like cognition does not select past experience by topical similarity alone: affective significance and unresolved conflict also shape what becomes accessible. We present PsychoAgent, a cognitive architecture for LLM agents that separates factual and affective memory and integrates both through a conflict-aware executive controller. Affective memories are first filtered by semantic relevance and then re-ranked by salience, preserving topical fit while allowing emotionally important traces to enter the prompt. Across three controlled conflict scenarios, the full architecture retrieved more conflict-critical memories than semantic-affective and single-memory RAG baselines (0.933 vs. 0.500 and 0.667), with a small semantic-similarity cost. Five blinded raters evaluated 27 outputs. After within-rater standardization, the full architecture had the highest overall mean (+0.22 SD), but corrected pairwise differences were not significant. A three-day illustrative trace further shows persistent affect, offline memory recombination, and selective memory reweighting. The findings support affect-sensitive retrieval as an inspectable mechanism for modeling human-like conflict effects in LLM agents.
A benchmark score is a measurement instrument, yet most benchmarks read each item at a single canonical surface form. We ask whether that reading is faithful: when an item's intent is held fixed and only its meaning-preserving surface form varies, does the canonical-form score estimate model behavior well, and how much of any variation is decoding/judge noise rather than signal? We instantiate this in safety, a high-stakes setting with no gold label to average toward. To avoid prior confounds, we pre-author the reformulations (refusal-free, mostly non-LLM: machine back-translation and a Matrix-Language-Frame code-switch generator) so an identical surface form reaches every model, score all responses with one human-anchored, vendor-neutral judge (Claude, kappa = 0.86 vs. human on unsafe compliance, stable across languages, cross-checked by GPT-4o), and verify intent preservation. On 370 seeds x 5 surface forms x 5 models, no single transformation is uniformly most dangerous (6 of 20 per-transformation McNemar tests survive correction, most protective). Yet evaluating only the canonical prompt underestimates unsafe compliance: the union of unsafe outcomes across forms exceeds even the worst single form by 3.3-12.9 pp, with bootstrap 95% CIs excluding zero for all five models, and 5-13% of seeds safe on canonical are unsafe under some reformulation -- above a zero stochasticity floor (canonical resampled five times at temperature 0 gives 0/370 new exposures). The size of this gap is model-dependent (largest on Gemini 2.5 Pro). One form recovers only ~53% of a model's observed unsafe surface and about three reach 85% -- a redundancy characterization of this form set, not of a defined population. A benign control (XSTest) suggests the instability is bidirectional, though the benign and harmful pools are not item-matched. We release the dataset, code, and per-response labels.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for emotional support tasks, such as negative thought reframing. This task relies on modifying cognitive appraisals, the subjective interpretation of events that elicit negative emotions, which is typically conceptualized along multiple discrete dimensions. Current LLM-based frameworks model cognitive appraisal by exhaustively evaluating all possible dimensions, but they fail to account for the varying saliency of these dimensions across different contexts. In this work, we investigate a vital yet overlooked question: "Can LLMs infer the salient appraisal dimensions from emotional support conversations?" To address this question, we introduce the AppraiSal benchmark, containing 996 emotional support conversations with human-annotated mental states, including salient cognitive appraisal dimensions. Furthermore, we propose PRISM, a multi-agent probabilistic framework grounded in Bayesian Inverse Planning, designed to improve LLMs' ability to identify context-specific appraisal dimensions. Experimental results show that PRISM brings improvements to LLMs across various sizes, particularly in identifying the most salient appraisal dimensions.
Two structural insights have been overlooked in automated residential floor plan generation. First, design is inherently progressive. Architects begin with rough strokes and refine them over time, whereas existing methods typically require their conditioning representation to be fully specified before generation, a fundamental mismatch with how design actually works. Second, the 2D floor plan is not an optional intermediate but an irreplaceable spatial contract. Once room boundaries, doors, and windows are fixed, furnishing reduces from open-ended spatial reasoning to bounded constraint satisfaction. Bypassing this contract, as existing 3D systems do by delegating layout to language models, yields overlapping rooms and implausible proportions; directly calling general-purpose language models likewise produces geometrically invalid layouts. Guided by these insights, we present PlanCraft. SketchPlan supplies the missing training signal by replaying the architect's drawing process on 80K real floor plans, producing partial sketches at every completeness level. PlanCraft-Diff progressively sharpens an incomplete sketch into a geometrically precise, vectorizable floor plan through a coarse-to-fine strategy. With the spatial contract established, PlanCraft-Agent then furnishes the scene within well-defined room boundaries. Experiments show that PlanCraft achieves a 61.1\% lower FID than the best existing 2D method and surpasses existing 3D systems by 15 points in expert-rated spatial rationality, with a sketch at only 25\% completion already outperforming all fully specified baselines.
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) produce long, explicit chains of intermediate steps before generating a final answer at inference time. These intermediate traces dominate latency, memory usage, and serving cost, even though the final answer correctness is not causally related to the trace correctness and the trace length is not a reliable indicator of the problem complexity. This raises a natural question: can the computation expressed in these intermediate tokens be internalized into the parameters of a language model, enabling it to produce answers directly (or with much shorter intermediate traces)? We introduce \textit{masked distillation}, a knowledge-distillation framework in which a student LLM is trained to predict only the solution tokens conditioned on the question, while a reasoning teacher provides feedback on the student's responses after conditioning on the question and its own CoT trace. We instantiate this framework in two settings: (i) a \textit{self-distillation} setting, in which the same model serves as the teacher in thinking mode and as the student in non-thinking mode, and (ii) a \textit{dual-model} setting, in which a larger reasoning teacher supervises a separate smaller non-thinking student over the solution tokens. By treating intermediate tokens as a scaffold which reasoning models use to fit over the solution tokens, We additionally vary the length of intermediate-token scaffolding the student is supervised on, interpolating between full internalization (the student emits only the solution) and no internalization (the student emits the full trace before the answer). We evaluate the framework through controlled experiments on two reasoning domains: GSM8K (grade-school arithmetic) and Countdown (a number-puzzle search task).
Enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language model (LLM) agents requires effective orchestration of diverse expert models and tools. However, existing frameworks typically call APIs, based on coarse-grained matching between tasks and the functions of expert models or tools, while overlooking critical factors such as performance variability and cost efficiency among functionally similar alternatives. To address this, we propose Agora, a framework that uses a confidence-calibrated auction to dynamically allocate tasks to expert models and tools. By treating reasoning steps as tradeable items, Agora bases allocation on calibrated competence rather than raw confidence. Across five main benchmarks, Agora improves or remains competitive with single-model, routing, and cascade baselines under matched candidate pools.
Most agent benchmarks put facts, tools and permissions behind one interface. Real organizations spread them across people. Incognita asks what happens when the task and success criterion stay fixed but access does not. We transform eighteen customer-service tasks into three settings: direct access, one known intermediary, and six role-isolated participants whose capabilities must be discovered. Across 864 trials with four models, social access reduced success for every model; the pre-specified intervals excluded zero for two. The latest tested model, gpt-5.6-sol, achieved the highest social-access success at 0.65, a 0.11 decrease from centralized indirect access with an interval that included zero. Exploratory comparisons separated five of six model pairs under social access, while neither centralized setting separated any at this sample size. In post-hoc task-blocked tests, three pairwise interaction $p$-values remained significant after multiplicity adjustment. A reference-relative reader associates the wider gaps with failures to obtain needed information. Because the data cannot distinguish ineffective requests by the evaluated agent from inaccurate replies by simulated participants, the reader's labels describe where trajectories stopped, not why models differed.
A new method, called CW-Net, translates the reasoning process of an autonomous vehicle’s AI system into understandable concepts that explain its behavior.
With millions of users across the world, Julia has been used to conduct cutting-edge research and to design new drugs, jet engines, heat pumps, and more.
We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.
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.
Algorithms & Theory
New MIT research could lead to better materials for a fossil-fuel-free process for making the chemical that's essential to fertilizer and other products.
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