ECCoT: A Framework for Enhancing Effective Cognition via Chain of Thought in Large Language Model

In the era of large-scale artificial intelligence, Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in natural language processing. However, they often lack transparency and generate unreliable outputs, raising concerns about their interpretability. To address this, the Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting method structures reasoning into step-by-step deductions. Yet, not all reasoning chains are valid, and errors can lead to unreliable conclusions. We propose ECCoT, an End-to-End Cognitive Chain of Thought Validation Framework, to evaluate and refine reasoning chains in LLMs. ECCoT integrates the Markov Random Field-Embedded Topic Model (MRF-ETM) for topic-aware CoT generation and Causal Sentence-BERT (CSBert) for causal reasoning alignment. By filtering ineffective chains using structured ordering statistics, ECCoT improves interpretability, reduces biases, and enhances the trustworthiness of LLM-based decision-making. Key contributions include the introduction of ECCoT, MRF-ETM for topic-driven CoT generation, and CSBert for causal reasoning enhancement. Code is released at: https://github.com/erwinmsmith/ECCoT.git.

YOLO-FireAD: Efficient Fire Detection via Attention-Guided Inverted Residual Learning and Dual-Pooling Feature Preservation

Fire detection in dynamic environments faces continuous challenges, including the interference of illumination changes, many false detections or missed detections, and it is difficult to achieve both efficiency and accuracy. To address the problem of feature extraction limitation and information loss in the existing YOLO-based models, this study propose You Only Look Once for Fire Detection with Attention-guided Inverted Residual and Dual-pooling Downscale Fusion (YOLO-FireAD) with two core innovations: (1) Attention-guided Inverted Residual Block (AIR) integrates hybrid channel-spatial attention with inverted residuals to adaptively enhance fire features and suppress environmental noise; (2) Dual Pool Downscale Fusion Block (DPDF) preserves multi-scale fire patterns through learnable fusion of max-average pooling outputs, mitigating small-fire detection failures. Extensive evaluation on two public datasets shows the efficient performance of our model. Our proposed model keeps the sum amount of parameters (1.45M, 51.8% lower than YOLOv8n) (4.6G, 43.2% lower than YOLOv8n), and mAP75 is higher than the mainstream real-time object detection models YOLOv8n, YOL-Ov9t, YOLOv10n, YOLO11n, YOLOv12n and other YOLOv8 variants 1.3-5.5%.