AEGIS: Exploring the Limit of World Knowledge Capabilities for Unified Mulitmodal Models

The capability of Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) to apply world knowledge across diverse tasks remains a critical, unresolved challenge. Existing benchmarks fall short, offering only siloed, single-task evaluations with limited diagnostic power. To bridge this gap, we propose AEGIS (\emph{i.e.}, \textbf{A}ssessing \textbf{E}diting, \textbf{G}eneration, \textbf{I}nterpretation-Understanding for \textbf{S}uper-intelligence), a comprehensive multi-task benchmark covering visual understanding, generation, editing, and interleaved generation. AEGIS comprises 1,050 challenging, manually-annotated questions spanning 21 topics (including STEM, humanities, daily life, etc.) and 6 reasoning types. To concretely evaluate the performance of UMMs in world knowledge scope without ambiguous metrics, we further propose Deterministic Checklist-based Evaluation (DCE), a protocol that replaces ambiguous prompt-based scoring with atomic ``Y/N'' judgments, to enhance evaluation reliability. Our extensive experiments reveal that most UMMs exhibit severe world knowledge deficits and that performance degrades significantly with complex reasoning. Additionally, simple plug-in reasoning modules can partially mitigate these vulnerabilities, highlighting a promising direction for future research. These results highlight the importance of world-knowledge-based reasoning as a critical frontier for UMMs.

Comparative Efficiency Analysis of Lightweight Transformer Models: A Multi-Domain Empirical Benchmark for Enterprise NLP Deployment

In the rapidly evolving landscape of enterprise natural language processing (NLP), the demand for efficient, lightweight models capable of handling multi-domain text automation tasks has intensified. This study conducts a comparative analysis of three prominent lightweight Transformer models - DistilBERT, MiniLM, and ALBERT - across three distinct domains: customer sentiment classification, news topic classification, and toxicity and hate speech detection. Utilizing datasets from IMDB, AG News, and the Measuring Hate Speech corpus, we evaluated performance using accuracy-based metrics including accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, as well as efficiency metrics such as model size, inference time, throughput, and memory usage. Key findings reveal that no single model dominates all performance dimensions. ALBERT achieves the highest task-specific accuracy in multiple domains, MiniLM excels in inference speed and throughput, and DistilBERT demonstrates the most consistent accuracy across tasks while maintaining competitive efficiency. All results reflect controlled fine-tuning under fixed enterprise-oriented constraints rather than exhaustive hyperparameter optimization. These results highlight trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency, recommending MiniLM for latency-sensitive enterprise applications, DistilBERT for balanced performance, and ALBERT for resource-constrained environments.

CropNeRF: A Neural Radiance Field-Based Framework for Crop Counting

Rigorous crop counting is crucial for effective agricultural management and informed intervention strategies. However, in outdoor field environments, partial occlusions combined with inherent ambiguity in distinguishing clustered crops from individual viewpoints poses an immense challenge for image-based segmentation methods. To address these problems, we introduce a novel crop counting framework designed for exact enumeration via 3D instance segmentation. Our approach utilizes 2D images captured from multiple viewpoints and associates independent instance masks for neural radiance field (NeRF) view synthesis. We introduce crop visibility and mask consistency scores, which are incorporated alongside 3D information from a NeRF model. This results in an effective segmentation of crop instances in 3D and highly-accurate crop counts. Furthermore, our method eliminates the dependence on crop-specific parameter tuning. We validate our framework on three agricultural datasets consisting of cotton bolls, apples, and pears, and demonstrate consistent counting performance despite major variations in crop color, shape, and size. A comparative analysis against the state of the art highlights superior performance on crop counting tasks. Lastly, we contribute a cotton plant dataset to advance further research on this topic.

MACA: A Framework for Distilling Trustworthy LLMs into Efficient Retrievers

Modern enterprise retrieval systems must handle short, underspecified queries such as ``foreign transaction fee refund'' and ``recent check status''. In these cases, semantic nuance and metadata matter but per-query large language model (LLM) re-ranking and manual labeling are costly. We present Metadata-Aware Cross-Model Alignment (MACA), which distills a calibrated metadata aware LLM re-ranker into a compact student retriever, avoiding online LLM calls. A metadata-aware prompt verifies the teacher's trustworthiness by checking consistency under permutations and robustness to paraphrases, then supplies listwise scores, hard negatives, and calibrated relevance margins. The student trains with MACA's MetaFusion objective, which combines a metadata conditioned ranking loss with a cross model margin loss so it learns to push the correct answer above semantically similar candidates with mismatched topic, sub-topic, or entity. On a proprietary consumer banking FAQ corpus and BankFAQs, the MACA teacher surpasses a MAFA baseline at Accuracy@1 by five points on the proprietary set and three points on BankFAQs. MACA students substantially outperform pretrained encoders; e.g., on the proprietary corpus MiniLM Accuracy@1 improves from 0.23 to 0.48, while keeping inference free of LLM calls and supporting retrieval-augmented generation.

Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Topic-Enriched Embeddings: A Hybrid Approach Integrating Traditional NLP Techniques

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems rely on accurate document retrieval to ground large language models (LLMs) in external knowledge, yet retrieval quality often degrades in corpora where topics overlap and thematic variation is high. This work proposes topic-enriched embeddings that integrate term-based signals and topic structure with contextual sentence embeddings. The approach combines TF-IDF with topic modeling and dimensionality reduction, using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to encode latent topical organization, and fuses these representations with a compact contextual encoder (all-MiniLM). By jointly capturing term-level and topic-level semantics, topic-enriched embeddings improve semantic clustering, increase retrieval precision, and reduce computational burden relative to purely contextual baselines. Experiments on a legal-text corpus show consistent gains in clustering coherence and retrieval metrics, suggesting that topic-enriched embeddings can serve as a practical component for more reliable knowledge-intensive RAG pipelines.

LeanCat: A Benchmark Suite for Formal Category Theory in Lean (Part I: 1-Categories)

Large language models (LLMs) have made rapid progress in formal theorem proving, yet current benchmarks under-measure the kind of abstraction and library-mediated reasoning that organizes modern mathematics. In parallel with FATE's emphasis on frontier algebra, we introduce LeanCat, a Lean benchmark for category-theoretic formalization -- a unifying language for mathematical structure and a core layer of modern proof engineering -- serving as a stress test of structural, interface-level reasoning. Part I: 1-Categories contains 100 fully formalized statement-level tasks, curated into topic families and three difficulty tiers via an LLM-assisted + human grading process. The best model solves 8.25% of tasks at pass@1 (32.50%/4.17%/0.00% by Easy/Medium/High) and 12.00% at pass@4 (50.00%/4.76%/0.00%). We also evaluate LeanBridge which use LeanExplore to search Mathlib, and observe consistent gains over single-model baselines. LeanCat is intended as a compact, reusable checkpoint for tracking both AI and human progress toward reliable, research-level formalization in Lean.

Semantic Tree Inference on Text Corpa using a Nested Density Approach together with Large Language Model Embeddings

Semantic text classification has undergone significant advances in recent years due to the rise of large language models (LLMs) and their high dimensional embeddings. While LLM-embeddings are frequently used to store and retrieve text by semantic similarity in vector databases, the global structure semantic relationships in text corpora often remains opaque. Herein we propose a nested density clustering approach, to infer hierarchical trees of semantically related texts. The method starts by identifying texts of strong semantic similarity as it searches for dense clusters in LLM embedding space. As the density criterion is gradually relaxed, these dense clusters merge into more diffuse clusters, until the whole dataset is represented by a single cluster -- the root of the tree. By embedding dense clusters into increasingly diffuse ones, we construct a tree structure that captures hierarchical semantic relationships among texts. We outline how this approach can be used to classify textual data for abstracts of scientific abstracts as a case study. This enables the data-driven discovery research areas and their subfields without predefined categories. To evaluate the general applicability of the method, we further apply it to established benchmark datasets such as the 20 Newsgroups and IMDB 50k Movie Reviews, demonstrating its robustness across domains. Finally we discuss possible applications on scientometrics, topic evolution, highlighting how nested density trees can reveal semantic structure and evolution in textual datasets.

AI4Reading: Chinese Audiobook Interpretation System Based on Multi-Agent Collaboration

Audiobook interpretations are attracting increasing attention, as they provide accessible and in-depth analyses of books that offer readers practical insights and intellectual inspiration. However, their manual creation process remains time-consuming and resource-intensive. To address this challenge, we propose AI4Reading, a multi-agent collaboration system leveraging large language models (LLMs) and speech synthesis technology to generate podcast, like audiobook interpretations. The system is designed to meet three key objectives: accurate content preservation, enhanced comprehensibility, and a logical narrative structure. To achieve these goals, we develop a framework composed of 11 specialized agents,including topic analysts, case analysts, editors, a narrator, and proofreaders that work in concert to explore themes, extract real world cases, refine content organization, and synthesize natural spoken language. By comparing expert interpretations with our system's output, the results show that although AI4Reading still has a gap in speech generation quality, the generated interpretative scripts are simpler and more accurate.

Trustworthy Machine Learning under Distribution Shifts

Machine Learning (ML) has been a foundational topic in artificial intelligence (AI), providing both theoretical groundwork and practical tools for its exciting advancements. From ResNet for visual recognition to Transformer for vision-language alignment, the AI models have achieved superior capability to humans. Furthermore, the scaling law has enabled AI to initially develop general intelligence, as demonstrated by Large Language Models (LLMs). To this stage, AI has had an enormous influence on society and yet still keeps shaping the future for humanity. However, distribution shift remains a persistent ``Achilles' heel'', fundamentally limiting the reliability and general usefulness of ML systems. Moreover, generalization under distribution shift would also cause trust issues for AIs. Motivated by these challenges, my research focuses on \textit{Trustworthy Machine Learning under Distribution Shifts}, with the goal of expanding AI's robustness, versatility, as well as its responsibility and reliability. We carefully study the three common distribution shifts into: (1) Perturbation Shift, (2) Domain Shift, and (3) Modality Shift. For all scenarios, we also rigorously investigate trustworthiness via three aspects: (1) Robustness, (2) Explainability, and (3) Adaptability. Based on these dimensions, we propose effective solutions and fundamental insights, meanwhile aiming to enhance the critical ML problems, such as efficiency, adaptability, and safety.

Comment on: Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt When Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Tasks

Recently published work titled Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt When Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task by Kosmyna et al. (2025) has sparked a vivid debate on the topic of artificial intelligence (AI) and human performance. We sincerely congratulate Kosmyna et al. for initiating such important research, collecting a valuable dataset, and establishing highly automated pipelines for Natural Language Processing (NLP) analyses and scoring. We aim to provide constructive comments that may improve the manuscript's readiness for peer-reviewed publication, as some results by Kosmyna et al. (2025) could be interpreted more conservatively. Our primary concerns focus on: (i) study design considerations, including the limited sample size; (ii) the reproducibility of the analyses; (iii) methodological issues related to the EEG analysis; (iv) inconsistencies in the reporting of results; and (v) limited transparency in several aspects of the study's procedures and findings.