ItinBench: Benchmarking Planning Across Multiple Cognitive Dimensions with Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) with advanced cognitive capabilities are emerging as agents for various reasoning and planning tasks. Traditional evaluations often focus on specific reasoning or planning questions within controlled environments. Recent studies have explored travel planning as a medium to integrate various verbal reasoning tasks into real-world contexts. However, reasoning tasks extend beyond verbal reasoning alone, and a comprehensive evaluation of LLMs requires a testbed that incorporates tasks from multiple cognitive domains. To address this gap, we introduce ItinBench, a benchmark that features one task of spatial reasoning, i.e., route optimization, into trip itinerary planning while keeping the traditional verbal reasoning tasks. ItinBench evaluates various LLMs across diverse tasks simultaneously, including Llama 3.1 8B, Mistral Large, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and GPT family. Our findings reveal that LLMs struggle to maintain high and consistent performance when concurrently handling multiple cognitive dimensions. By incorporating tasks from distinct human-level cognitive domains, ItinBench provides new insights into building more comprehensive reasoning testbeds that better reflect real-world challenges. The code and dataset: https://ethanwtl.github.io/IBweb/

Finding the Cracks: Improving LLMs Reasoning with Paraphrastic Probing and Consistency Verification

Large language models have demonstrated impressive performance across a variety of reasoning tasks. However, their problem-solving ability often declines on more complex tasks due to hallucinations and the accumulation of errors within these intermediate steps. Recent work has introduced the notion of critical tokens--tokens in the reasoning process that exert significant influence on subsequent steps. Prior studies suggest that replacing critical tokens can refine reasoning trajectories. Nonetheless, reliably identifying and exploiting critical tokens remains challenging. To address this, we propose the Paraphrastic Probing and Consistency Verification~(PPCV) framework. PPCV operates in two stages. In the first stage, we roll out an initial reasoning path from the original question and then concatenate paraphrased versions of the question with this reasoning path. And we identify critical tokens based on mismatches between the predicted top-1 token and the expected token in the reasoning path. A criterion is employed to confirm the final critical token. In the second stage, we substitute critical tokens with candidate alternatives and roll out new reasoning paths for both the original and paraphrased questions. The final answer is determined by checking the consistency of outputs across these parallel reasoning processes. We evaluate PPCV on mainstream LLMs across multiple benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate PPCV substantially enhances the reasoning performance of LLMs compared to baselines.

Dynamic Arthroscopic Navigation System for Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction Based on Multi-level Memory Architecture

This paper presents a dynamic arthroscopic navigation system based on multi-level memory architecture for anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction surgery. The system extends our previously proposed markerless navigation method from static image matching to dynamic video sequence tracking. By integrating the Atkinson-Shiffrin memory model's three-level architecture (sensory memory, working memory, and long-term memory), our system maintains continuous tracking of the femoral condyle throughout the surgical procedure, providing stable navigation support even in complex situations involving viewpoint changes, instrument occlusion, and tissue deformation. Unlike existing methods, our system operates in real-time on standard arthroscopic equipment without requiring additional tracking hardware, achieving 25.3 FPS with a latency of only 39.5 ms, representing a 3.5-fold improvement over our previous static system. For extended sequences (1000 frames), the dynamic system maintained an error of 5.3 plus-minus 1.5 pixels, compared to the static system's 12.6 plus-minus 3.7 pixels - an improvement of approximately 45 percent. For medium-length sequences (500 frames) and short sequences (100 frames), the system achieved approximately 35 percent and 19 percent accuracy improvements, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate the system overcomes limitations of traditional static matching methods, providing new technical support for improving surgical precision in ACL reconstruction.

A Survey of Deep Graph Learning under Distribution Shifts: from Graph Out-of-Distribution Generalization to Adaptation

Distribution shifts on graphs -- the discrepancies in data distribution between training and employing a graph machine learning model -- are ubiquitous and often unavoidable in real-world scenarios. These shifts may severely deteriorate model performance, posing significant challenges for reliable graph machine learning. Consequently, there has been a surge in research on graph machine learning under distribution shifts, aiming to train models to achieve satisfactory performance on out-of-distribution (OOD) test data. In our survey, we provide an up-to-date and forward-looking review of deep graph learning under distribution shifts. Specifically, we cover three primary scenarios: graph OOD generalization, training-time graph OOD adaptation, and test-time graph OOD adaptation. We begin by formally formulating the problems and discussing various types of distribution shifts that can affect graph learning, such as covariate shifts and concept shifts. To provide a better understanding of the literature, we systematically categorize the existing models based on our proposed taxonomy and investigate the adopted techniques behind. We also summarize commonly used datasets in this research area to facilitate further investigation. Finally, we point out promising research directions and the corresponding challenges to encourage further study in this vital domain. Additionally, we provide a continuously updated reading list at https://github.com/kaize0409/Awesome-Graph-OOD.

The QXS-SAROPT Dataset for Deep Learning in SAR-Optical Data Fusion

Deep learning techniques have made an increasing impact on the field of remote sensing. However, deep neural networks based fusion of multimodal data from different remote sensors with heterogenous characteristics has not been fully explored, due to the lack of availability of big amounts of perfectly aligned multi-sensor image data with diverse scenes of high resolution, especially for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data and optical imagery. In this paper, we publish the QXS-SAROPT dataset to foster deep learning research in SAR-optical data fusion. QXS-SAROPT comprises 20,000 pairs of corresponding image patches, collected from three port cities: San Diego, Shanghai and Qingdao acquired by the SAR satellite GaoFen-3 and optical satellites of Google Earth. Besides a detailed description of the dataset, we show exemplary results for two representative applications, namely SAR-optical image matching and SAR ship detection boosted by cross-modal information from optical images. Since QXS-SAROPT is a large open dataset with multiple scenes of the highest resolution of this kind, we believe it will support further developments in the field of deep learning based SAR-optical data fusion for remote sensing.