GenoMAS: A Multi-Agent Framework for Scientific Discovery via Code-Driven Gene Expression Analysis

Gene expression analysis holds the key to many biomedical discoveries, yet extracting insights from raw transcriptomic data remains formidable due to the complexity of multiple large, semi-structured files and the need for extensive domain expertise. Current automation approaches are often limited by either inflexible workflows that break down in edge cases or by fully autonomous agents that lack the necessary precision for rigorous scientific inquiry. GenoMAS charts a different course by presenting a team of LLM-based scientists that integrates the reliability of structured workflows with the adaptability of autonomous agents. GenoMAS orchestrates six specialized LLM agents through typed message-passing protocols, each contributing complementary strengths to a shared analytic canvas. At the heart of GenoMAS lies a guided-planning framework: programming agents unfold high-level task guidelines into Action Units and, at each juncture, elect to advance, revise, bypass, or backtrack, thereby maintaining logical coherence while bending gracefully to the idiosyncrasies of genomic data. On the GenoTEX benchmark, GenoMAS reaches a Composite Similarity Correlation of 89.13% for data preprocessing and an F$_1$ of 60.48% for gene identification, surpassing the best prior art by 10.61% and 16.85% respectively. Beyond metrics, GenoMAS surfaces biologically plausible gene-phenotype associations corroborated by the literature, all while adjusting for latent confounders. Code is available at https://github.com/Liu-Hy/GenoMAS.

EgoPrivacy: What Your First-Person Camera Says About You?

While the rapid proliferation of wearable cameras has raised significant concerns about egocentric video privacy, prior work has largely overlooked the unique privacy threats posed to the camera wearer. This work investigates the core question: How much privacy information about the camera wearer can be inferred from their first-person view videos? We introduce EgoPrivacy, the first large-scale benchmark for the comprehensive evaluation of privacy risks in egocentric vision. EgoPrivacy covers three types of privacy (demographic, individual, and situational), defining seven tasks that aim to recover private information ranging from fine-grained (e.g., wearer's identity) to coarse-grained (e.g., age group). To further emphasize the privacy threats inherent to egocentric vision, we propose Retrieval-Augmented Attack, a novel attack strategy that leverages ego-to-exo retrieval from an external pool of exocentric videos to boost the effectiveness of demographic privacy attacks. An extensive comparison of the different attacks possible under all threat models is presented, showing that private information of the wearer is highly susceptible to leakage. For instance, our findings indicate that foundation models can effectively compromise wearer privacy even in zero-shot settings by recovering attributes such as identity, scene, gender, and race with 70-80% accuracy. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/williamium3000/ego-privacy.

Can Vision Language Models Infer Human Gaze Direction? A Controlled Study

Gaze-referential inference--the ability to infer what others are looking at--is a critical component of a theory of mind that underpins natural human-AI interaction. In a controlled study, we evaluated this skill across 111 Vision Language Models (VLMs) using photos taken with manipulated difficulty and variability, comparing performance with that of human participants (N = 65), and analyzed behaviors using mixed-effects models. We found that 94 of the 111 VLMs failed to do better than random guessing, while humans achieved near-ceiling accuracy. VLMs even respond with each choice almost equally frequently. Are they randomly guessing? Although most VLMs struggle, when we zoom in on five of the top-tier VLMs with above-chance performance, we find that their performance declined with increasing task difficulty but varied only slightly across different prompts and scene objects. These behavioral features cannot be explained by considering them as random guessers. Instead, they likely use a combination of heuristics and guessing such that their performance is subject to the task difficulty but robust to perceptual variations. This suggests that VLMs, lacking gaze inference capability, have yet to become technologies that can naturally interact with humans, but the potential remains.

Machine Psychophysics: Cognitive Control in Vision-Language Models

Cognitive control refers to the ability to flexibly coordinate thought and action in pursuit of internal goals. A standard method for assessing cognitive control involves conflict tasks that contrast congruent and incongruent trials, measuring the ability to prioritize relevant information while suppressing interference. We evaluate 108 vision-language models on three classic conflict tasks and their more demanding "squared" variants across 2,220 trials. Model performance corresponds closely to human behavior under resource constraints and reveals individual differences. These results indicate that some form of human-like executive function have emerged in current multi-modal foundational models.

Proceedings of 1st Workshop on Advancing Artificial Intelligence through Theory of Mind

This volume includes a selection of papers presented at the Workshop on Advancing Artificial Intelligence through Theory of Mind held at AAAI 2025 in Philadelphia US on 3rd March 2025. The purpose of this volume is to provide an open access and curated anthology for the ToM and AI research community.

VideoOrion: Tokenizing Object Dynamics in Videos

We present VideoOrion, a Video Large Language Model (Video-LLM) that explicitly captures the key semantic information in videos--the spatial-temporal dynamics of objects throughout the videos. VideoOrion employs expert vision models to extract object dynamics through a detect-segment-track pipeline, encoding them into a set of object tokens by aggregating spatial-temporal object features. Our method addresses the persistent challenge in Video-LLMs of efficiently compressing high-dimensional video data into semantic tokens that are comprehensible to LLMs. Compared to prior methods which resort to downsampling the original video or aggregating visual tokens using resamplers, leading to information loss and entangled semantics, VideoOrion not only offers a more natural and efficient way to derive compact, disentangled semantic representations but also enables explicit object modeling of video content with minimal computational cost. Moreover, the introduced object tokens naturally allow VideoOrion to accomplish video-based referring tasks. Experimental results show that VideoOrion can learn to make good use of the object tokens, and achieves competitive results on both general video question answering and video-based referring benchmarks.

From RNNs to Foundation Models: An Empirical Study on Commercial Building Energy Consumption

Accurate short-term energy consumption forecasting for commercial buildings is crucial for smart grid operations. While smart meters and deep learning models enable forecasting using past data from multiple buildings, data heterogeneity from diverse buildings can reduce model performance. The impact of increasing dataset heterogeneity in time series forecasting, while keeping size and model constant, is understudied. We tackle this issue using the ComStock dataset, which provides synthetic energy consumption data for U.S. commercial buildings. Two curated subsets, identical in size and region but differing in building type diversity, are used to assess the performance of various time series forecasting models, including fine-tuned open-source foundation models (FMs). The results show that dataset heterogeneity and model architecture have a greater impact on post-training forecasting performance than the parameter count. Moreover, despite the higher computational cost, fine-tuned FMs demonstrate competitive performance compared to base models trained from scratch.

Pseudo-Probability Unlearning: Towards Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Machine Unlearning

Machine unlearning--enabling a trained model to forget specific data--is crucial for addressing biased data and adhering to privacy regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)'s "right to be forgotten". Recent works have paid little attention to privacy concerns, leaving the data intended for forgetting vulnerable to membership inference attacks. Moreover, they often come with high computational overhead. In this work, we propose Pseudo-Probability Unlearning (PPU), a novel method that enables models to forget data efficiently and in a privacy-preserving manner. Our method replaces the final-layer output probabilities of the neural network with pseudo-probabilities for the data to be forgotten. These pseudo-probabilities follow either a uniform distribution or align with the model's overall distribution, enhancing privacy and reducing risk of membership inference attacks. Our optimization strategy further refines the predictive probability distributions and updates the model's weights accordingly, ensuring effective forgetting with minimal impact on the model's overall performance. Through comprehensive experiments on multiple benchmarks, our method achieves over 20% improvements in forgetting error compared to the state-of-the-art. Additionally, our method enhances privacy by preventing the forgotten set from being inferred to around random guesses.

FedDTPT: Federated Discrete and Transferable Prompt Tuning for Black-Box Large Language Models

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP). By fine-tuning LLMs with data from specific scenarios, these foundation models can better adapt to various downstream tasks. However, the fine-tuning process poses privacy leakage risks, particularly in centralized data processing scenarios. To address user privacy concerns, federated learning (FL) has been introduced to mitigate the risks associated with centralized data collection from multiple sources. Nevertheless, the privacy of LLMs themselves is equally critical, as potential malicious attacks challenge their security, an issue that has received limited attention in current research. Consequently, establishing a trusted multi-party model fine-tuning environment is essential. Additionally, the local deployment of large LLMs incurs significant storage costs and high computational demands. To address these challenges, we propose for the first time a federated discrete and transferable prompt tuning, namely FedDTPT, for black-box large language models. In the client optimization phase, we adopt a token-level discrete prompt optimization method that leverages a feedback loop based on prediction accuracy to drive gradient-free prompt optimization through the MLM API. For server optimization, we employ an attention mechanism based on semantic similarity to filter all local prompt tokens, along with an embedding distance elbow detection and DBSCAN clustering strategy to enhance the filtering process. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to state-of-the-art methods, our approach achieves higher accuracy, reduced communication overhead, and robustness to non-iid data in a black-box setting. Moreover, the optimized prompts are transferable.

FedSpaLLM: Federated Pruning of Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve state-of-the-art performance but are challenging to deploy due to their high computational and storage demands. Pruning can reduce model size, yet existing methods assume public access to calibration data, which is impractical for privacy-sensitive applications. To address the challenge of pruning LLMs in privacy-preserving settings, we propose FedSpaLLM, the first federated learning framework designed specifically for pruning LLMs. FedSpaLLM enables clients to prune their models locally based on private data while accounting for system heterogeneity and maintaining communication efficiency. Our framework introduces several key innovations: (1) a novel $\ell_0$-norm aggregation function that ensures only non-zero weights are averaged across clients, preserving important model parameters; (2) an adaptive mask expansion technique that meets global sparsity targets while accommodating client-specific pruning decisions; and (3) a layer sampling strategy that reduces communication overhead and personalizes the pruning process based on client resources. Extensive experiments show that FedSpaLLM improves pruning performance in diverse federated settings. The source code will be released upon publication.