Aashish Chapagai, Angad Singh Gurtatta, Erik Cambria
Saliency maps are offered as a safeguard for medical image classifiers, but whether they reveal individual errors at a new hospital remains largely untested. We trained a convolutional network and a vision transformer on NIH ChestX-ray14 and evaluated 303,768 decisions per model at the training hospital and at two external sites, in the USA and Vietnam, with radiologist-consensus labels. We scored each explanation by its anatomical enrichment, the area-normalized concentration of attribution in a segmented thoracic region, and tested whether it detects errors beyond the model's confidence. Grad-CAM localized findings less often than radiologists (hit rate at most 0.575 versus 0.888). Adding enrichment to a confidence-based error detector calibrated at the training hospital never raised its area under the curve by more than 0.011, and for the convolutional network the relation between enrichment and correctness reversed between hospitals, degrading the transferred detector. Model confidence, not saliency, should anchor deployment monitoring.
Most parameters of a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model belong to its experts, and standard training keeps every expert gradient in GPU memory until the optimizer step. This memory grows with the number and size of the experts, so it rises as MoE models scale. We introduce Sonar-MoE, which updates each expert tensor during the backward pass and frees its gradient right away. It brings optimizer-in-backward from dense models to batched MoE expert tensors, so the GPU never holds more than one layer of expert gradients. When we fine-tune OLMoE-1B-7B and Granite-3.1-3B-A800M in bf16 with two expert-kernel backends, Sonar-MoE lowers peak memory by 19% to 22%. Its updates are bitwise identical to standard training without expert gradient clipping, and held-out loss stays within 0.003 of all baselines. Each step also takes 17% to 23% less time than standard training with global-norm clipping. Updating whole batched tensors rather than individual experts is what keeps Sonar-MoE fast, as it avoids a 20% to 72% slowdown while using the same memory. Sonar-MoE matches optimizer-in-backward over all parameters in memory and speed while still clipping the dense parameters.
Organisations increasingly deploy large language model agents that must follow organisational values. We check whether activation steering, which adds vectors to a model's internal activations during generation without changing its weights, can improve compliance beyond prompting alone. Since most scenarios involve several values at once, we focus on multi-value steering. A simple way to build these vectors is to contrast responses that follow all values relevant to a scenario with responses that violate them. However, this gives nearly identical vectors for different values: they capture a general compliance signal rather than individual values, which limits their use when combining several values. We propose Value-Isolating Activation Steering (VIAS), which contrasts responses to the same scenario under two prompts, one listing all relevant values and one omitting a single target value. We keep a pair only if the target value changes from compliant to non-compliant and both responses still meet a minimum compliance level on the other values. We evaluate VIAS on PROTECT, a workplace compliance dataset where each scenario is tagged with relevant values from a 21-value taxonomy. VIAS reduces overlap between value vectors, making them better suited for multi-value steering, although this alone does not lead to independent control over each value. Combined with prompting, VIAS complies with every tagged value on 69.6% of scenarios for Qwen2.5-7B, 75.2% for Mistral-7B, and 72.6% for Phi-3.5-mini, outperforming prompting alone for all three models.
Navya Gupta Singapore Institute of Technology and Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi, Rishitej Reddy Vyalla, Avinash Anand, Chhavi Kirtani, Erik Cambria Nanyang Technological University, Zhengchen Zhang, Zhengkui Wang, Timothy Liu NVIDIA 等 11 位作者
Curriculum learning helps language models tackle complex reasoning by gradually increasing task difficulty. However, it often fails to generate consistent step-by-step reasoning, especially in multilingual and low-resource settings where cross-lingual transfer from English to Indian languages remains limited. We propose IRIS: Interleaved Reinforcement with Incremental Staged Curriculum, a two-axis framework that combines Supervised Fine-Tuning on progressively harder problems (vertical axis) with Reverse Curriculum Reinforcement Learning to reduce reliance on step-by-step guidance (horizontal axis). We design a composite reward combining correctness, step-wise alignment, continuity, and numeric incentives, optimized via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). We release CL-Math, a dataset of 29k problems with step-level annotations in English, Hindi, and Marathi. Across standard benchmarks and curated multilingual test sets, IRIS consistently improves performance, with strong results on math reasoning tasks and substantial gains in low-resource and bilingual settings, alongside modest improvements in high-resource languages. Our code and dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/avinanand/IRIS-Interleaved-Reinforcement-
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Wuttikorn Ponwitayarat Vidyasirimedhi Institute of Science and Technology, Peerat Limkonchotiwat AI Singapore, Raymond Ng, Jann Railey Montalan Nanyang Technological University and AI Singapore, Thura Aung King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang, Jian Gang Ngui Nanyang Technological University, Yosephine Susanto National University of Singapore, William Chandra Tjhi National University of Singapore 等 12 位作者
Multilingual text embeddings are often assumed to encode meaning in a perspective-independent semantic space, yielding stable similarity judgments across tasks and languages. Our results show that this assumption does not hold in practice. We introduce SEA-BED, a large-scale benchmark covering 10 Southeast Asian (SEA) languages and diverse embedding tasks, designed to systematically examine how embedding performance varies across tasks, languages, and language-task combinations. Across extensive evaluations, we observe that no single model performs uniformly well across SEA languages; task difficulty differs markedly within languages, and success on one task does not reliably generalize to others. Language-task analyses further reveal highly non-uniform performance landscapes, where performance varies across different language-task combinations. These findings call for closer attention to performance measurements that provide an expansive view across languages and tasks to uncover inconsistencies in semantic representation. Based on these observations, we provide insights for future model development, including data, algorithmic, and architectural considerations.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表