Do LLMs Really Forget? Evaluating Unlearning with Knowledge Correlation and Confidence Awareness

Machine unlearning techniques aim to mitigate unintended memorization in large language models (LLMs). However, existing approaches predominantly focus on the explicit removal of isolated facts, often overlooking latent inferential dependencies and the non-deterministic nature of knowledge within LLMs. Consequently, facts presumed forgotten may persist implicitly through correlated information. To address these challenges, we propose a knowledge unlearning evaluation framework that more accurately captures the implicit structure of real-world knowledge by representing relevant factual contexts as knowledge graphs with associated confidence scores. We further develop an inference-based evaluation protocol leveraging powerful LLMs as judges; these judges reason over the extracted knowledge subgraph to determine unlearning success. Our LLM judges utilize carefully designed prompts and are calibrated against human evaluations to ensure their trustworthiness and stability. Extensive experiments on our newly constructed benchmark demonstrate that our framework provides a more realistic and rigorous assessment of unlearning performance. Moreover, our findings reveal that current evaluation strategies tend to overestimate unlearning effectiveness. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Graph-COM/Knowledge_Unlearning.git.

Multi-Modal Large Models Based Beam Prediction: An Example Empowered by DeepSeek

Beam prediction is an effective approach to reduce training overhead in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. However, existing beam prediction models still exhibit limited generalization ability in diverse scenarios, which remains a critical challenge. In this paper, we propose MLM-BP, a beam prediction framework based on the multi-modal large model released by DeepSeek, with full consideration of multi-modal environmental information. Specifically, the distribution of scatterers that impact the optimal beam is captured by the sensing devices. Then positions are tokenized to generate text-based representations, and multi-view images are processed by an image encoder, which is fine-tuned with low-rank adaptation (LoRA), to extract environmental embeddings. Finally, these embeddings are fed into the large model, and an output projection module is designed to determine the optimal beam index. Simulation results show that MLM-BP achieves 98.1% Top-1 accuracy on the simulation dataset. Additionally, it demonstrates few-shot generalization on a real-world dataset, achieving 72.7% Top-1 accuracy and 92.4% Top-3 accuracy with only 30% of the dataset, outperforming the existing small models by over 15%.

Bringing Interpretability to Neural Audio Codecs

The advent of neural audio codecs has increased in popularity due to their potential for efficiently modeling audio with transformers. Such advanced codecs represent audio from a highly continuous waveform to low-sampled discrete units. In contrast to semantic units, acoustic units may lack interpretability because their training objectives primarily focus on reconstruction performance. This paper proposes a two-step approach to explore the encoding of speech information within the codec tokens. The primary goal of the analysis stage is to gain deeper insight into how speech attributes such as content, identity, and pitch are encoded. The synthesis stage then trains an AnCoGen network for post-hoc explanation of codecs to extract speech attributes from the respective tokens directly.

Physics Informed Capsule Enhanced Variational AutoEncoder for Underwater Image Enhancement

We present a novel dual-stream architecture that achieves state-of-the-art underwater image enhancement by explicitly integrating the Jaffe-McGlamery physical model with capsule clustering-based feature representation learning. Our method simultaneously estimates transmission maps and spatially-varying background light through a dedicated physics estimator while extracting entity-level features via capsule clustering in a parallel stream. This physics-guided approach enables parameter-free enhancement that respects underwater formation constraints while preserving semantic structures and fine-grained details. Our approach also features a novel optimization objective ensuring both physical adherence and perceptual quality across multiple spatial frequencies. To validate our approach, we conducted extensive experiments across six challenging benchmarks. Results demonstrate consistent improvements of $+0.5$dB PSNR over the best existing methods while requiring only one-third of their computational complexity (FLOPs), or alternatively, more than $+1$dB PSNR improvement when compared to methods with similar computational budgets. Code and data \textit{will} be available at https://github.com/iN1k1/.

TV-LiVE: Training-Free, Text-Guided Video Editing via Layer Informed Vitality Exploitation

Video editing has garnered increasing attention alongside the rapid progress of diffusion-based video generation models. As part of these advancements, there is a growing demand for more accessible and controllable forms of video editing, such as prompt-based editing. Previous studies have primarily focused on tasks such as style transfer, background replacement, object substitution, and attribute modification, while maintaining the content structure of the source video. However, more complex tasks, including the addition of novel objects and nonrigid transformations, remain relatively unexplored. In this paper, we present TV-LiVE, a Training-free and text-guided Video editing framework via Layerinformed Vitality Exploitation. We empirically identify vital layers within the video generation model that significantly influence the quality of generated outputs. Notably, these layers are closely associated with Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE). Based on this observation, our method enables both object addition and non-rigid video editing by selectively injecting key and value features from the source model into the corresponding layers of the target model guided by the layer vitality. For object addition, we further identify prominent layers to extract the mask regions corresponding to the newly added target prompt. We found that the extracted masks from the prominent layers faithfully indicate the region to be edited. Experimental results demonstrate that TV-LiVE outperforms existing approaches for both object addition and non-rigid video editing. Project Page: https://emjay73.github.io/TV_LiVE/

Applying XAI based unsupervised knowledge discovering for Operation modes in a WWTP. A real case: AQUAVALL WWTP

Water reuse is a key point when fresh water is a commodity in ever greater demand, but which is also becoming ever more available. Furthermore, the return of clean water to its natural environment is also mandatory. Therefore, wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are essential in any policy focused on these serious challenges. WWTPs are complex facilities which need to operate at their best to achieve their goals. Nowadays, they are largely monitored, generating large databases of historical data concerning their functioning over time. All this implies a large amount of embedded information which is not usually easy for plant managers to assimilate, correlate and understand; in other words, for them to know the global operation of the plant at any given time. At this point, the intelligent and Machine Learning (ML) approaches can give support for that need, managing all the data and translating them into manageable, interpretable and explainable knowledge about how the WWTP plant is operating at a glance. Here, an eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) based methodology is proposed and tested for a real WWTP, in order to extract explainable service knowledge concerning the operation modes of the WWTP managed by AQUAVALL, which is the public service in charge of the integral water cycle in the City Council of Valladolid (Castilla y Le\'on, Spain). By applying well-known approaches of XAI and ML focused on the challenge of WWTP, it has been possible to summarize a large number of historical databases through a few explained operation modes of the plant in a low-dimensional data space, showing the variables and facility units involved in each case.

Perceptual Decoupling for Scalable Multi-modal Reasoning via Reward-Optimized Captioning

Recent advances in slow-thinking language models (e.g., OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in complex reasoning tasks by emulating human-like reflective cognition. However, extending such capabilities to multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) remains challenging due to the high cost of retraining vision-language alignments when upgrading the underlying reasoner LLMs. A straightforward solution is to decouple perception from reasoning, i.e., converting visual inputs into language representations (e.g., captions) that are then passed to a powerful text-only reasoner. However, this decoupling introduces a critical challenge: the visual extractor must generate descriptions that are both faithful to the image and informative enough to support accurate downstream reasoning. To address this, we propose Reasoning-Aligned Perceptual Decoupling via Caption Reward Optimization (RACRO) - a reasoning-guided reinforcement learning strategy that aligns the extractor's captioning behavior with the reasoning objective. By closing the perception-reasoning loop via reward-based optimization, RACRO significantly enhances visual grounding and extracts reasoning-optimized representations. Experiments on multi-modal math and science benchmarks show that the proposed RACRO method achieves state-of-the-art average performance while enabling superior scalability and plug-and-play adaptation to more advanced reasoning LLMs without the necessity for costly multi-modal re-alignment.

Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence for Robust Network Intrusion Detection: From Scratch to Transfer Learning

Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) play a vital role in protecting digital infrastructures against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. In this paper, we extend ODXU, a Neurosymbolic AI (NSAI) framework that integrates deep embedded clustering for feature extraction, symbolic reasoning using XGBoost, and comprehensive uncertainty quantification (UQ) to enhance robustness, interpretability, and generalization in NIDS. The extended ODXU incorporates score-based methods (e.g., Confidence Scoring, Shannon Entropy) and metamodel-based techniques, including SHAP values and Information Gain, to assess the reliability of predictions. Experimental results on the CIC-IDS-2017 dataset show that ODXU outperforms traditional neural models across six evaluation metrics, including classification accuracy and false omission rate. While transfer learning has seen widespread adoption in fields such as computer vision and natural language processing, its potential in cybersecurity has not been thoroughly explored. To bridge this gap, we develop a transfer learning strategy that enables the reuse of a pre-trained ODXU model on a different dataset. Our ablation study on ACI-IoT-2023 demonstrates that the optimal transfer configuration involves reusing the pre-trained autoencoder, retraining the clustering module, and fine-tuning the XGBoost classifier, and outperforms traditional neural models when trained with as few as 16,000 samples (approximately 50% of the training data). Additionally, results show that metamodel-based UQ methods consistently outperform score-based approaches on both datasets.

DualX-VSR: Dual Axial Spatial$\times$Temporal Transformer for Real-World Video Super-Resolution without Motion Compensation

Transformer-based models like ViViT and TimeSformer have advanced video understanding by effectively modeling spatiotemporal dependencies. Recent video generation models, such as Sora and Vidu, further highlight the power of transformers in long-range feature extraction and holistic spatiotemporal modeling. However, directly applying these models to real-world video super-resolution (VSR) is challenging, as VSR demands pixel-level precision, which can be compromised by tokenization and sequential attention mechanisms. While recent transformer-based VSR models attempt to address these issues using smaller patches and local attention, they still face limitations such as restricted receptive fields and dependence on optical flow-based alignment, which can introduce inaccuracies in real-world settings. To overcome these issues, we propose Dual Axial Spatial$\times$Temporal Transformer for Real-World Video Super-Resolution (DualX-VSR), which introduces a novel dual axial spatial$\times$temporal attention mechanism that integrates spatial and temporal information along orthogonal directions. DualX-VSR eliminates the need for motion compensation, offering a simplified structure that provides a cohesive representation of spatiotemporal information. As a result, DualX-VSR achieves high fidelity and superior performance in real-world VSR task.

Verbose ListOps (VLO): Beyond Long Context -- Unmasking LLM's Reasoning Blind Spots

Large Language Models (LLMs), whilst great at extracting facts from text, struggle with nested narrative reasoning. Existing long context and multi-hop QA benchmarks inadequately test this, lacking realistic distractors or failing to decouple context length from reasoning complexity, masking a fundamental LLM limitation. We introduce Verbose ListOps, a novel benchmark that programmatically transposes ListOps computations into lengthy, coherent stories. This uniquely forces internal computation and state management of nested reasoning problems by withholding intermediate results, and offers fine-grained controls for both narrative size \emph{and} reasoning difficulty. Whilst benchmarks like LongReason (2025) advance approaches for synthetically expanding the context size of multi-hop QA problems, Verbose ListOps pinpoints a specific LLM vulnerability: difficulty in state management for nested sub-reasoning amongst semantically-relevant, distracting narrative. Our experiments show that leading LLMs (e.g., OpenAI o4, Gemini 2.5 Pro) collapse in performance on Verbose ListOps at modest (~10k token) narrative lengths, despite effortlessly solving raw ListOps equations. Addressing this failure is paramount for real-world text interpretation which requires identifying key reasoning points, tracking conceptual intermediate results, and filtering irrelevant information. Verbose ListOps, and its extensible generation framework thus enables targeted reasoning enhancements beyond mere context-window expansion; a critical step to automating the world's knowledge work.