La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia
Abstract:Test-time scaling has emerged as an effective way to improve language models on challenging reasoning tasks. However, most existing methods treat each problem in isolation and do not systematically reuse knowledge from prior reasoning trajectories. In particular, they underutilize procedural knowledge: how to reframe a problem, choose an approach, and verify or backtrack when needed. We introduce Reasoning Memory, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework for reasoning models that explicitly retrieves and reuses procedural knowledge at scale. Starting from existing corpora of step-by-step reasoning trajectories, we decompose each trajectory into self-contained subquestion-subroutine pairs, yielding a datastore of 32 million compact procedural knowledge entries. At inference time, a lightweight in-thought prompt lets the model verbalize the core subquestion, retrieve relevant subroutines within its reasoning trace, and reason under diverse retrieved subroutines as implicit procedural priors. Across six math, science, and coding benchmarks, Reasoning Memory consistently outperforms RAG with document, trajectory, and template knowledge, as well as a compute-matched test-time scaling baseline. With a higher inference budget, it improves over no retrieval by up to 19.2% and over the strongest compute-matched baseline by 7.9% across task types. Ablation studies show that these gains come from two key factors: the broad procedural coverage of the source trajectories and our decomposition and retrieval design, which together enable effective extraction and reuse of procedural knowledge.
Abstract:Moderation layers are increasingly a core component of many products built on user- or model-generated content. However, drafting and maintaining domain-specific safety policies remains costly. We present Deep Policy Research (DPR), a minimal agentic system that drafts a full content moderation policy based on only human-written seed domain information. DPR uses a single web search tool and lightweight scaffolding to iteratively propose search queries, distill diverse web sources into policy rules, and organize rules into an indexed document. We evaluate DPR on (1) the OpenAI undesired content benchmark across five domains with two compact reader LLMs and (2) an in-house multimodal advertisement moderation benchmark. DPR consistently outperforms definition-only and in-context learning baselines, and in our end-to-end setting it is competitive with expert-written policy sections in several domains. Moreover, under the same seed specification and evaluation protocol, DPR outperforms a general-purpose deep research system, suggesting that a task-specific, structured research loop can be more effective than generic web research for policy drafting. We release our experiment code at https://github.com/xiaowu0162/deep-policy-research.
Abstract:Multimodal-attributed graphs (MAGs) are a fundamental data structure for multimodal graph learning (MGL), enabling both graph-centric and modality-centric tasks. However, our empirical analysis reveals inherent topology quality limitations in real-world MAGs, including noisy interactions, missing connections, and task-agnostic relational structures. A single graph derived from generic relationships is therefore unlikely to be universally optimal for diverse downstream tasks. To address this challenge, we propose Task-aware Modality and Topology co-Evolution (TMTE), a novel MGL framework that jointly and iteratively optimizes graph topology and multimodal representations toward the target task. TMTE is motivated by the bidirectional coupling between modality and topology: multimodal attributes induce relational structures, while graph topology shapes modality representations. Concretely, TMTE casts topology evolution as multi-perspective metric learning over modality embeddings with an anchor-based approximation, and formulates modality evolution as smoothness-regularized fusion with cross-modal alignment, yielding a closed-loop task-aware co-evolution process. Extensive experiments on 9 MAG datasets and 1 non-graph multimodal dataset across 6 graph-centric and modality-centric tasks show that TMTE consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TMTE-1873.
Abstract:Most existing text-to-speech (TTS) systems either synthesize speech sentence by sentence and stitch the results together, or drive synthesis from plain-text dialogues alone. Both approaches leave models with little understanding of global context or paralinguistic cues, making it hard to capture real-world phenomena such as multi-speaker interactions (interruptions, overlapping speech), evolving emotional arcs, and varied acoustic environments. We introduce the Borderless Long Speech Synthesis framework for agent-centric, borderless long audio synthesis. Rather than targeting a single narrow task, the system is designed as a unified capability set spanning VoiceDesigner, multi-speaker synthesis, Instruct TTS, and long-form text synthesis. On the data side, we propose a "Labeling over filtering/cleaning" strategy and design a top-down, multi-level annotation schema we call Global-Sentence-Token. On the model side, we adopt a backbone with a continuous tokenizer and add Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning together with Dimension Dropout, both of which markedly improve instruction following under complex conditions. We further show that the system is Native Agentic by design: the hierarchical annotation doubles as a Structured Semantic Interface between the LLM Agent and the synthesis engine, creating a layered control protocol stack that spans from scene semantics down to phonetic detail. Text thereby becomes an information-complete, wide-band control channel, enabling a front-end LLM to convert inputs of any modality into structured generation commands, extending the paradigm from Text2Speech to borderless long speech synthesis.
Abstract:Verification-guided self-improvement has recently emerged as a promising approach to improving the accuracy of large language model (LLM) outputs. However, existing approaches face a trade-off between inference efficiency and accuracy: iterative verification-rectification is computationally expensive and prone to being trapped in faulty reasoning, while best-of-N selection requires extensive sampling without addressing internal model flaws. We propose a training-free regeneration paradigm that leverages an offline-curated contrastive Reflection Memory (RM) to provide corrective guidance, while regenerating from scratch helps break out of faulty reasoning. At inference time, the method performs RM-guided self-verification followed by a single RM-guided regeneration, avoiding both iterative correction and multi-sample selection. We evaluated our method on nine benchmarks that span algorithmic, reasoning, symbolic, and domain-specific tasks in both small- and large-scale LLMs. Experiment results show that our method outperforms prior methods while maintaining low computational cost.
Abstract:In real-world Federated Learning (FL) deployments, data distributions on devices that participate in training evolve over time. This leads to asynchronous data drift, where different devices shift at different times and toward different distributions. Mitigating such drift is challenging: frequent retraining incurs high computational cost on resource-constrained devices, while infrequent retraining degrades performance on drifting devices. We propose DriftGuard, a federated continual learning framework that efficiently adapts to asynchronous data drift. DriftGuard adopts a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) inspired architecture that separates shared parameters, which capture globally transferable knowledge, from local parameters that adapt to group-specific distributions. This design enables two complementary retraining strategies: (i) global retraining, which updates the shared parameters when system-wide drift is identified, and (ii) group retraining, which selectively updates local parameters for clusters of devices identified via MoE gating patterns, without sharing raw data. Experiments across multiple datasets and models show that DriftGuard matches or exceeds state-of-the-art accuracy while reducing total retraining cost by up to 83%. As a result, it achieves the highest accuracy per unit retraining cost, improving over the strongest baseline by up to 2.3x. DriftGuard is available for download from https://github.com/blessonvar/DriftGuard.
Abstract:Automated theorem proving (ATP) benchmarks largely consist of problems formalized in MathLib, so current ATP training and evaluation are heavily biased toward MathLib's definitional framework. However, frontier mathematics is often exploratory and prototype-heavy, relying on bespoke constructions that deviate from standard libraries. In this work, we evaluate the robustness of current ATP systems when applied to a novel definitional framework, specifically examining the performance gap between standard library problems and bespoke mathematical constructions. We introduce TaoBench, an undergraduate-level benchmark derived from Terence Tao's Analysis I, which formalizes analysis by constructing core mathematical concepts from scratch, without relying on standard Mathlib definitions, as well as by mixing from-scratch and MathLib constructions. For fair evaluation, we build an agentic pipeline that automatically extracts a compilable, self-contained local environment for each problem. To isolate the effect of definitional frameworks, we additionally translate every problem into a mathematically equivalent Mathlib formulation, yielding paired TaoBench-Mathlib statements for direct comparison. While state-of-the-art ATP models perform capably within the MathLib framework, performance drops by an average of roughly 26% on the definitionally equivalent Tao formulation. This indicates that the main bottleneck is limited generalization across definitional frameworks rather than task difficulty. TaoBench thus highlights a gap between benchmark performance and applicability, and provides a concrete foundation for developing and testing provers better aligned with research mathematics.
Abstract:Modern edge applications increasingly require multi-DNN inference systems to execute tasks on heterogeneous processors, gaining performance from both concurrent execution and from matching each model to the most suited accelerator. However, existing systems support only a single model (or a few sparse variants) per task, which impedes the efficiency of this matching and results in high Service Level Objective violation rates. We introduce model stitching for multi-DNN inference systems, which creates model variants by recombining subgraphs from sparse models without re-training. We present a demonstrator system, SparseLoom, that shows model stitching can be deployed to SoCs. We show experimentally that SparseLoom reduces SLO violation rates by up to 74%, improves throughput by up to 2.31x, and lowers memory overhead by an average of 28% compared to state-of-the-art multi-DNN inference systems.
Abstract:Unlearnable Examples (UEs) serve as a data protection strategy that generates imperceptible perturbations to mislead models into learning spurious correlations instead of underlying semantics. In this paper, we uncover a fundamental vulnerability of UEs that emerges when learning starts from a pretrained model. Crucially, our empirical analysis shows that even when data are protected by carefully crafted perturbations, pretraining priors still furnish rich semantic representations that allow the model to circumvent the shortcuts introduced by UEs and capture genuine features, thereby nullifying unlearnability. To address this, we propose BAIT (Binding Artificial perturbations to Incorrect Targets), a novel bi-level optimization formulation. Specifically, the inner level aims at associating the perturbed samples with real labels to simulate standard data-label alignment, while the outer level actively disrupts this alignment by enforcing a mislabel-perturbation binding that maps samples to designated incorrect targets. This mechanism effectively overrides the semantic guidance of priors, forcing the model to rely on the injected perturbations and consequently preventing the acquisition of true semantics. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks and multiple pretrained backbones demonstrate that BAIT effectively mitigates the influence of pretraining priors and maintains data unlearnability.
Abstract:Vision-language foundation models (VLFMs) promise zero-shot and retrieval understanding for Earth observation. While operational satellite systems often lack full multi-spectral coverage, making RGB-only inference highly desirable for scalable deployment, the adoption of VLFMs for satellite imagery remains hindered by two factors: (1) multi-spectral inputs are informative but difficult to exploit consistently due to band redundancy and misalignment; and (2) CLIP-style text encoders limit semantic expressiveness and weaken fine-grained alignment. We present SATtxt, a spectrum-aware VLFM that operates with RGB inputs only at inference while retaining spectral cues learned during training. Our framework comprises two stages. First, Spectral Representation Distillation transfers spectral priors from a frozen multi-spectral teacher to an RGB student via a lightweight projector. Second, Spectrally Grounded Alignment with Instruction-Augmented LLMs bridges the distilled visual space and an expressive LLM embedding space. Across EuroSAT, BigEarthNet, and ForestNet, SATtxt improves zero-shot classification on average by 4.2%, retrieval by 5.9%, and linear probing by 2.7% over baselines, showing an efficient path toward spectrum-aware vision-language learning for Earth observation. Project page: https://ikhado.github.io/sattxt/