Conversation Tree Architecture: A Structured Framework for Context-Aware Multi-Branch LLM Conversations

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for extended, multi-topic conversations, yet the flat, append-only structure of current conversation interfaces introduces a fundamental limitation: all context accumulates in a single unbounded window, causing topically distinct threads to bleed into one another and progressively degrade response quality. We term this failure mode logical context poisoning. In this paper, we introduce the Conversation Tree Architecture (CTA), a hierarchical framework that organizes LLM conversations as trees of discrete, context-isolated nodes. Each node maintains its own local context window; structured mechanisms govern how context flows between parent and child nodes, downstream on branch creation and upstream on branch deletion. We additionally introduce volatile nodes, transient branches whose local context must be selectively merged upward or permanently discarded before purging. We formalize the architecture's primitives, characterize the open design problems in context flow, relate our framework to prior work in LLM memory management, and describe a working prototype implementation. The CTA provides a principled foundation for structured conversational context management and extends naturally to multi-agent settings.

AwesomeLit: Towards Hypothesis Generation with Agent-Supported Literature Research

There are different goals for literature research, from understanding an unfamiliar topic to generate hypothesis for the next research project. The nature of literature research also varies according to user's familiarity level of the topic. For inexperienced researchers, identifying gaps in the existing literature and generating feasible hypothesis are crucial but challenging. While general ``deep research'' tools can be used, they are not designed for such use case, thus often not effective. In addition, the ``black box" nature and hallucination of Large Language Models (LLMs) often lead to distrust. In this paper, we introduce a human-agent collaborative visualization system AwesomeLit to address this need. It has several novel features: a transparent user-steerable agentic workflow; a dynamically generated query exploring tree, visualizing the exploration path and provenance; and a semantic similarity view, depicting the relationships between papers. It enables users to transition from general intentions to detailed research topics. Finally, a qualitative study involving several early researchers showed that AwesomeLit is effective in helping users explore unfamiliar topics, identify promising research directions, and improve confidence in research results.

When Documents Disagree: Measuring Institutional Variation in Transplant Guidance with Retrieval-Augmented Language Models

Patient education materials for solid-organ transplantation vary substantially across U.S. centers, yet no systematic method exists to quantify this heterogeneity at scale. We introduce a framework that grounds the same patient questions in different centers' handbooks using retrieval-augmented language models and compares the resulting answers using a five-label consistency taxonomy. Applied to 102 handbooks from 23 centers and 1,115 benchmark questions, the framework quantifies heterogeneity across four dimensions: question, topic, organ, and center. We find that 20.8% of non-absent pairwise comparisons exhibit clinically meaningful divergence, concentrated in condition monitoring and lifestyle topics. Coverage gaps are even more prominent: 96.2% of question-handbook pairs miss relevant content, with reproductive health at 95.1% absence. Center-level divergence profiles are stable and interpretable, where heterogeneity reflects systematic institutional differences, likely due to patient diversity. These findings expose an information gap in transplant patient education materials, with document-grounded medical question answering highlighting opportunities for content improvement.

Towards automatic smoke detector inspection: Recognition of the smoke detectors in industrial facilities and preparation for future drone integration

Fire safety consists of a complex pipeline, and it is a very important topic of concern. One of its frontal parts are the smoke detectors, which are supposed to provide an alarm prior to a massive fire appears. As they are often difficult to reach due to high ceilings or problematic locations, an automatic inspection system would be very beneficial as it could allow faster revisions, prevent workers from dangerous work in heights, and make the whole process cheaper. In this study, we present the smoke detector recognition part of the automatic inspection system, which could easily be integrated to the drone system. As part of our research, we compare two popular convolutional-based object detectors YOLOv11 and SSD widely used on embedded devices together with the state-of-the-art transformer-based RT-DETRv2 with the backbones of different sizes. Due to a complicated way of collecting a sufficient amount of data for training in the real-world environment, we also compare several training strategies using the real and semi-synthetic data together with various augmentation methods. To achieve a robust testing, all models were evaluated on two test datasets with an expected and difficult appearance of the smoke detectors including motion blur, small resolution, or not complete objects. The best performing detector is the YOLOv11n, which reaches the average mAP@0.5 score of 0.884. Our code, pretrained models and dataset are publicly available.

MzansiText and MzansiLM: An Open Corpus and Decoder-Only Language Model for South African Languages

Decoder-only language models can be adapted to diverse tasks through instruction finetuning, but the extent to which this generalizes at small scale for low-resource languages remains unclear. We focus on the languages of South Africa, where we are not aware of a publicly available decoder-only model that explicitly targets all eleven official written languages, nine of which are low-resource. We introduce MzansiText, a curated multilingual pretraining corpus with a reproducible filtering pipeline, and MzansiLM, a 125M-parameter language model trained from scratch. We evaluate MzansiLM on natural language understanding and generation using three adaptation regimes: monolingual task-specific finetuning, multilingual task-specific finetuning, and general multi-task instruction finetuning. Monolingual task-specific finetuning achieves strong performance on data-to-text generation, reaching 20.65 BLEU on isiXhosa and competing with encoder-decoder baselines over ten times larger. Multilingual task-specific finetuning benefits closely related languages on topic classification, achieving 78.5% macro-F1 on isiXhosa news classification. While MzansiLM adapts effectively to supervised NLU and NLG tasks, few-shot reasoning remains challenging at this model size, with performance near chance even for much larger decoder-only models. We release MzansiText and MzansiLM to provide a reproducible decoder-only baseline and clear guidance on adaptation strategies for South African languages at small scale.

Mathematical Foundations of Deep Learning

This draft book offers a comprehensive and rigorous treatment of the mathematical principles underlying modern deep learning. The book spans core theoretical topics, from the approximation capabilities of deep neural networks, the theory and algorithms of optimal control and reinforcement learning integrated with deep learning techniques, to contemporary generative models that drive today's advances in artificial intelligence.

Inducing Sustained Creativity and Diversity in Large Language Models

We address a not-widely-recognized subset of exploratory search, where a user sets out on a typically long "search quest" for the perfect wedding dress, overlooked research topic, killer company idea, etc. The first few outputs of current large language models (LLMs) may be helpful but only as a start, since the quest requires learning the search space and evaluating many diverse and creative alternatives along the way. Although LLMs encode an impressive fraction of the world's knowledge, common decoding methods are narrowly optimized for prompts with correct answers and thus return mostly homogeneous and conventional results. Other approaches, including those designed to increase diversity across a small set of answers, start to repeat themselves long before search quest users learn enough to make final choices, or offer a uniform type of "creativity" to every user asking similar questions. We develop a novel, easy-to-implement decoding scheme that induces sustained creativity and diversity in LLMs, producing as many conceptually unique results as desired, even without access to the inner workings of an LLM's vector space. The algorithm unlocks an LLM's vast knowledge, both orthodox and heterodox, well beyond modal decoding paths. With this approach, search quest users can more quickly explore the search space and find satisfying answers.

ReXInTheWild: A Unified Benchmark for Medical Photograph Understanding

Everyday photographs taken with ordinary cameras are already widely used in telemedicine and other online health conversations, yet no comprehensive benchmark evaluates whether vision-language models can interpret their medical content. Analyzing these images requires both fine-grained natural image understanding and domain-specific medical reasoning, a combination that challenges both general-purpose and specialized models. We introduce ReXInTheWild, a benchmark of 955 clinician-verified multiple-choice questions spanning seven clinical topics across 484 photographs sourced from the biomedical literature. When evaluated on ReXInTheWild, leading multimodal large language models show substantial performance variation: Gemini-3 achieves 78% accuracy, followed by Claude Opus 4.5 (72%) and GPT-5 (68%), while the medical specialist model MedGemma reaches only 37%. A systematic error analysis also reveals four categories of common errors, ranging from low-level geometric errors to high-level reasoning failures and requiring different mitigation strategies. ReXInTheWild provides a challenging, clinically grounded benchmark at the intersection of natural image understanding and medical reasoning. The dataset is available on HuggingFace.

Context Selection for Hypothesis and Statistical Evidence Extraction from Full-Text Scientific Articles

Extracting hypotheses and their supporting statistical evidence from full-text scientific articles is central to the synthesis of empirical findings, but remains difficult due to document length and the distribution of scientific arguments across sections of the paper. The work studies a sequential full-text extraction setting, where the statement of a primary finding in an article's abstract is linked to (i) a corresponding hypothesis statement in the paper body and (ii) the statistical evidence that supports or refutes that hypothesis. This formulation induces a challenging within-document retrieval setting in which many candidate paragraphs are topically related to the finding but differ in rhetorical role, creating hard negatives for retrieval and extraction. Using a two-stage retrieve-and-extract framework, we conduct a controlled study of retrieval design choices, varying context quantity, context quality (standard Retrieval Augmented Generation, reranking, and a fine-tuned retriever paired with reranking), as well as an oracle paragraph setting to separate retrieval failures from extraction limits across four Large Language Model extractors. We find that targeted context selection consistently improves hypothesis extraction relative to full-text prompting, with gains concentrated in configurations that optimize retrieval quality and context cleanliness. In contrast, statistical evidence extraction remains substantially harder. Even with oracle paragraphs, performance remains moderate, indicating persistent extractor limitations in handling hybrid numeric-textual statements rather than retrieval failures alone.

From Topic to Transition Structure: Unsupervised Concept Discovery at Corpus Scale via Predictive Associative Memory

Embedding models group text by semantic content, what text is about. We show that temporal co-occurrence within texts discovers a different kind of structure: recurrent transition-structure concepts or what text does. We train a 29.4M-parameter contrastive model on 373 million co-occurrence pairs from 9,766 Project Gutenberg texts (24.96 million passages), mapping pre-trained embeddings into an association space where passages with similar transition structure cluster together. Under capacity constraint (42.75% accuracy), the model must compress across recurring patterns rather than memorise individual co-occurrences. Clustering at six granularities (k=50 to k=2,000) produces a multi-resolution concept map; from broad modes like "direct confrontation" and "lyrical meditation" to precise registers and scene templates like "sailor dialect" and "courtroom cross-examination." At k=100, clusters average 4,508 books each (of 9,766), confirming corpus-wide patterns. Direct comparison with embedding-similarity clustering shows that raw embeddings group by topic while association-space clusters group by function, register, and literary tradition. Unseen novels are assigned to existing clusters without retraining; the association model concentrates each novel into a selective subset of coherent clusters, while raw embedding assignment saturates nearly all clusters. Validation controls address positional, length, and book-concentration confounds. The method extends Predictive Associative Memory (PAM, arXiv:2602.11322) from episodic recall to concept formation: where PAM recalls specific associations, multi-epoch contrastive training under compression extracts structural patterns that transfer to unseen texts, the same framework producing qualitatively different behaviour in a different regime.