Abstract:Graph neural networks frequently encounter significant performance degradation when confronted with structural noise or non-homophilous topologies. To address these systemic vulnerabilities, we present AdvSynGNN, a comprehensive architecture designed for resilient node-level representation learning. The proposed framework orchestrates multi-resolution structural synthesis alongside contrastive objectives to establish geometry-sensitive initializations. We develop a transformer backbone that adaptively accommodates heterophily by modulating attention mechanisms through learned topological signals. Central to our contribution is an integrated adversarial propagation engine, where a generative component identifies potential connectivity alterations while a discriminator enforces global coherence. Furthermore, label refinement is achieved through a residual correction scheme guided by per-node confidence metrics, which facilitates precise control over iterative stability. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that this synergistic approach effectively optimizes predictive accuracy across diverse graph distributions while maintaining computational efficiency. The study concludes with practical implementation protocols to ensure the robust deployment of the AdvSynGNN system in large-scale environments.
Abstract:Multimodal systems are vulnerable to partial or complete loss of input channels at deployment, which undermines reliability in real-world settings. This paper presents ModalImmune, a training framework that enforces modality immunity by intentionally and controllably collapsing selected modality information during training so the model learns joint representations that are robust to destructive modality influence. The framework combines a spectrum-adaptive collapse regularizer, an information-gain guided controller for targeted interventions, curvature-aware gradient masking to stabilize destructive updates, and a certified Neumann-truncated hyper-gradient procedure for automatic meta-parameter adaptation. Empirical evaluation on standard multimodal benchmarks demonstrates that ModalImmune improves resilience to modality removal and corruption while retaining convergence stability and reconstruction capacity.
Abstract:As the burgeoning power requirements of sophisticated neural architectures escalate, the information retrieval community has recognized ecological sustainability as a pivotal priority that necessitates a fundamental paradigm shift in model design. While contemporary neural rankers have attained unprecedented accuracy, the substantial environmental externalities associated with their computational intensity often remain overlooked in large-scale deployments. We present GaiaFlow, an innovative framework engineered to facilitate carbon-frugal search by operationalizing semantic-guided diffusion tuning. Our methodology orchestrates the convergence of retrieval-guided Langevin dynamics and a hardware-independent performance modeling strategy to optimize the trade-off between search precision and environmental preservation. By incorporating adaptive early exit protocols and precision-aware quantized inference, the proposed architecture significantly mitigates operational carbon footprints while maintaining robust retrieval quality across heterogeneous computing infrastructures. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that GaiaFlow achieves a superior equilibrium between effectiveness and energy efficiency, offering a scalable and sustainable pathway for next-generation neural search systems.
Abstract:Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising distributed machine learning (ML) that enables collaborative model training across clients without exposing raw data, thereby preserving user privacy and reducing communication costs. Despite these benefits, traditional single-server FL suffers from high communication latency due to the aggregation of models from a large number of clients. While multi-server FL distributes workloads across edge servers, overlapping client coverage and uncoordinated selection often lead to resource contention, causing bandwidth conflicts and training failures. To address these limitations, we propose a decentralized reinforcement learning with conflict risk prediction, named RL CRP, to optimize client selection in multi-server FL systems. Specifically, each server estimates the likelihood of client selection conflicts using a categorical hidden Markov model based on its sparse historical client selection sequence. Then, a fairness-aware reward mechanism is incorporated to promote long-term client participation for minimizing training latency and resource contention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed RL-CRP framework effectively reduces inter-server conflicts and significantly improves training efficiency in terms of convergence speed and communication cost.
Abstract:Entropy-based confidence signals are increasingly leveraged to improve reasoning in large language models (LLMs), yet existing approaches treat confidence as a static quantity -- typically aggregated over tokens. We show that the \emph{temporal evolution} of confidence during generation carries richer information than aggregate statistics alone. Analyzing token-level entropy trajectories, we identify characteristic patterns distinguishing correct from incorrect reasoning: erroneous solutions exhibit unstable dynamics, including burst spikes (sustained uncertainty growth) and peak-valley spikes (sharp rebounds following transient confidence). These patterns persist across models and training stages, suggesting they reflect intrinsic properties of reasoning failure rather than superficial noise. To formalize this observation, we introduce the Entropy Dynamics Instability Score (\textbf{EDIS}), a trajectory-level metric quantifying instability in entropy evolution. EDIS serves as an effective diagnostic signal for inference-time selection, substantially improving reasoning accuracy, and offers a promising direction for training-time sample curation. Our findings establish entropy dynamics as an underexplored yet informative lens for understanding and improving LLM reasoning.
Abstract:With the rapid growth of Web-based academic publications, more and more papers are being published annually, making it increasingly difficult to find relevant prior work. Citation prediction aims to automatically suggest appropriate references, helping scholars navigate the expanding scientific literature. Here we present \textbf{CiteRAG}, the first comprehensive retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-integrated benchmark for evaluating large language models on academic citation prediction, featuring a multi-level retrieval strategy, specialized retrievers, and generators. Our benchmark makes four core contributions: (1) We establish two instances of the citation prediction task with different granularity. Task 1 focuses on coarse-grained list-specific citation prediction, while Task 2 targets fine-grained position-specific citation prediction. To enhance these two tasks, we build a dataset containing 7,267 instances for Task 1 and 8,541 instances for Task 2, enabling comprehensive evaluation of both retrieval and generation. (2) We construct a three-level large-scale corpus with 554k papers spanning many major subfields, using an incremental pipeline. (3) We propose a multi-level hybrid RAG approach for citation prediction, fine-tuning embedding models with contrastive learning to capture complex citation relationships, paired with specialized generation models. (4) We conduct extensive experiments across state-of-the-art language models, including closed-source APIs, open-source models, and our fine-tuned generators, demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework. Our open-source toolkit enables reproducible evaluation and focuses on academic literature, providing the first comprehensive evaluation framework for citation prediction and serving as a methodological template for other scientific domains. Our source code and data are released at https://github.com/LQgdwind/CiteRAG.
Abstract:Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) aims to predict the outcomes of legal cases based on factual descriptions, serving as a fundamental task to advance the development of legal systems. Traditional methods often rely on statistical analyses or role-based simulations but face challenges with multiple allegations, diverse evidence, and lack adaptability. In this paper, we introduce JurisMMA, a novel framework for LJP that effectively decomposes trial tasks, standardizes processes, and organizes them into distinct stages. Furthermore, we build JurisMM, a large dataset with over 100,000 recent Chinese judicial records, including both text and multimodal video-text data, enabling comprehensive evaluation. Experiments on JurisMM and the benchmark LawBench validate our framework's effectiveness. These results indicate that our framework is effective not only for LJP but also for a broader range of legal applications, offering new perspectives for the development of future legal methods and datasets.
Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities across many domains, yet their evaluation in financial quantitative tasks remains fragmented and mostly limited to knowledge-centric question answering. We introduce QuantEval, a benchmark that evaluates LLMs across three essential dimensions of quantitative finance: knowledge-based QA, quantitative mathematical reasoning, and quantitative strategy coding. Unlike prior financial benchmarks, QuantEval integrates a CTA-style backtesting framework that executes model-generated strategies and evaluates them using financial performance metrics, enabling a more realistic assessment of quantitative coding ability. We evaluate some state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary LLMs and observe substantial gaps to human experts, particularly in reasoning and strategy coding. Finally, we conduct large-scale supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning experiments on domain-aligned data, demonstrating consistent improvements. We hope QuantEval will facilitate research on LLMs' quantitative finance capabilities and accelerate their practical adoption in real-world trading workflows. We additionally release the full deterministic backtesting configuration (asset universe, cost model, and metric definitions) to ensure strict reproducibility.
Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) excel at semantic understanding, yet their ability to reconstruct internal structure from scrambled inputs remains underexplored. Sentence-level restoration is ill-posed for automated evaluation because multiple valid word orders often exist. We introduce OrderProbe, a deterministic benchmark for structural reconstruction using fixed four-character expressions in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which have a unique canonical order and thus support exact-match scoring. We further propose a diagnostic framework that evaluates models beyond recovery accuracy, including semantic fidelity, logical validity, consistency, robustness sensitivity, and information density. Experiments on twelve widely used LLMs show that structural reconstruction remains difficult even for frontier systems: zero-shot recovery frequently falls below 35%. We also observe a consistent dissociation between semantic recall and structural planning, suggesting that structural robustness is not an automatic byproduct of semantic competence.
Abstract:Cryptocurrency trading increasingly depends on timely integration of heterogeneous web information and market microstructure signals to support short-horizon decision making under extreme volatility. However, existing trading systems struggle to jointly reason over noisy multi-source web evidence while maintaining robustness to rapid price shocks at sub-second timescales. The first challenge lies in synthesizing unstructured web content, social sentiment, and structured OHLCV signals into coherent and interpretable trading decisions without amplifying spurious correlations, while the second challenge concerns risk control, as slow deliberative reasoning pipelines are ill-suited for handling abrupt market shocks that require immediate defensive responses. To address these challenges, we propose WebCryptoAgent, an agentic trading framework that decomposes web-informed decision making into modality-specific agents and consolidates their outputs into a unified evidence document for confidence-calibrated reasoning. We further introduce a decoupled control architecture that separates strategic hourly reasoning from a real-time second-level risk model, enabling fast shock detection and protective intervention independent of the trading loop. Extensive experiments on real-world cryptocurrency markets demonstrate that WebCryptoAgent improves trading stability, reduces spurious activity, and enhances tail-risk handling compared to existing baselines. Code will be available at https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/WebCryptoAgent.