The Costs of Early-career Disciplinary Pivots: Evidence from Ph.D. Admissions
Sidney Xiang, Nicholas David, Dallas Card, Wenhao Sun, Daniel M Romero, Misha Teplitskiy
AI 速览：分析17万份博士申请发现，申请者从先前学位转向语义距离更远的目标项目时，录取概率更低，且入学后毕业更慢，但发表和引用表现无显著差异。
Science often advances when researchers pivot from one discipline to another and import new ideas. However, for established researchers, such pivots are associated with fewer publications and citations. Here, we investigate pivoting at the beginning of a research career--doctoral admissions--when the benefits of importing ideas might outweigh the switching costs. Analyzing 171,347 PhD applications at a large research university from 2013 to 2023, we measured the semantic distance between each applicant's prior degree and target program. Applicants who pivot further had lower undergraduate grades and, controlling for academic and demographic predictors, lower admission chances: the average pivot corresponds to a 5.3% lower admission probability (0.80 percentage points). Among enrollees, the average pivoter takes longer to graduate than non-pivoters, with a 10.7% lower graduation hazard, and similar publication and citation counts on average and at the tails. Our results suggest that pivoting at the outset of research careers, even if it benefits research communities, comes with significant costs to individuals.
The Just-In-Time (JIT) defect prediction model serves as a critical tool for ensuring the quality of software development and enhancing software performance. It assists development teams in promptly identifying and addressing potential issues by predicting whether code submissions may introduce defects. However, due to the existence of data noise and insufficient semantic connections in real-world scenarios, existing approaches face challenges in accurately identifying the code commits that introduce defects and capturing the potential semantic relationships. To address these challenges, we propose the BIC- Hunter(Bug-Inducing Commits Hunter) model, which mitigates data noise and improves semantic understanding, thereby enhancing the accuracy of bug-inducing commit identification. BIC - Hunter model consists of two components: a data denoising component and a semantic relationship capturing component. Specifically, the data denoising component addresses the challenges posed by inaccurate annotations and inconsistencies in real-world data, enhancing the reliability of training data and improving overall model robustness. The semantic relation- ship capturing component constructs homogeneous graphs and applies graph convolutional networks to facilitate a more comprehensive analysis of code context, enabling the identification of defects caused by code commits and enhancing the confidence in pinpointing their root causes. Experimental studies on a large-scale dataset integrated from three open-source datasets show that BIC- Hunter exhibits outstanding performance. BIC- Hunter outperforms the state-of-the-art by 6.16%, 7.13%, and 5.53% on Recall@1, Recall@2, and Recall@3, respectively, while the MFR index increases by 8.43% to 32.82%. These results demonstrate the superior capability of our method in identifying bug-inducing commits.
Ronghuan Wu, Wanchao Su, Kede Ma, Jing Liao, Rafał K. Mantiuk
High-dynamic-range (HDR) formats and displays are becoming increasingly prevalent, yet state-of-the-art image generators (e.g., Stable Diffusion and FLUX) typically remain limited to low-dynamic-range (LDR) output due to the lack of large-scale HDR training data. In this work, we show that existing pretrained diffusion models can be easily adapted to HDR generation without retraining from scratch. A key challenge is that HDR images are natively represented in linear RGB, whose intensity and color statistics differ substantially from those of sRGB-encoded LDR images. This gap, however, can be effectively bridged by converting HDR inputs into perceptually uniform encodings (e.g., using PU21 or PQ). Empirically, we find that LDR-pretrained variational autoencoders (VAEs) reconstruct PU21-encoded HDR inputs with fidelity comparable to LDR data, whereas linear RGB inputs cause severe degradations. Motivated by this finding, we describe an efficient adaptation strategy that freezes the VAE and finetunes only the denoiser via low-rank adaptation in a perceptually uniform space. This results in a unified computational method that supports both text-to-HDR synthesis and single-image RAW-to-HDR reconstruction. Experiments demonstrate that our perceptually encoded adaptation consistently improves perceptual fidelity, text-image alignment, and effective dynamic range, relative to previous techniques.
Supernumerary robotic fingers augment human dexterity by enabling a single hand to perform complex "hold-and-manipulate" tasks that typically require bimanual coordination. However, existing devices are often hindered by bulky hardware that limits interaction to large objects and rely on explicit hand motion triggers that lack environmental context. To address these challenges, we present EgoThumb, a fully open-source, vision-driven supernumerary robotic thumb. EgoThumb features a compact, dual tendon-driven finger whose actuation is relocated to the forearm, reducing distal weight while enabling precise active joint control. The system utilizes a visual imitation learning policy that maps egocentric images from a palm-facing camera directly to continuous joint positions. By implicitly decoding human intent from visual cues capturing both the hand and the object of interest, EgoThumb achieves robust autonomous manipulation and strong generalization across diverse users and environments. All hardware designs and software implementations are fully open-sourced at https://ego-thumb.github.io.
Chao-Yeh Chen, Tiffany Chen, Lin Duan, Tianyi Hu, Yu-Hsiang Huang, Umar Iqbal, Jiefeng Li, Edy Lim 等 15 位作者
We introduce EgoHand, a monocular 3D hand reconstruction model that achieves state-of-the-art performance on egocentric video. Central to our approach is the curation of a high-quality training corpus of 14 million images, combining synthetic data, in-the-wild video, and multi-camera motion capture to balance scene diversity and supervision quality. The model adopts SOMA-Hand as its parametric representation and processes 2D hand crops with a transformer encoder, incorporating camera cues and an auxiliary 2D branch to improve geometric consistency and image alignment. Zero-shot evaluations on HOT3D, ARCTIC, and H2O demonstrate strong out-of-domain generalization, with lower joint-position, root-translation, and acceleration errors than competing baselines at an inference latency of approximately 9.01 ms. A blinded user preference study further shows that participants favor EgoHand's reconstructed hand poses over those from Apple EgoDex and Ropedia Xperience-10M. We release the EgoHand model and source code under the OpenMDW license, allowing free commercial use of the model.
Zhanwei Wu, Jianhao Su, Brian Zhang, ShengTing Huang, Weidong Feng, Gang Liu, Zhiguo Li, Wei Huang 等 14 位作者
Deploying and optimizing a PyTorch inference project on a dedicated accelerator, especially an on-device NPU, requires more than using a framework device API as with CUDA. The project must be converted into hardware-runtime artifacts and adapted to the target toolchain and application interface. Differences in model formats, quantization flows, operator support, and toolchain interfaces create cross-layer problems spanning PyTorch/ONNX models, toolchains, runtimes, and device execution. LLM Agents can invoke tools to address such problems, but may drift because of insufficient domain knowledge, large configuration and repair spaces, or poor path selection. We propose AIPC (AI Porting & Conversion), an Agent method for deploying PyTorch inference projects. AIPC combines structured Skills with toolchain, runtime, and profiling evidence to drive cross-layer diagnosis and repair, organizing model adaptation, artifact building, on-target execution, accuracy repair, and performance optimization into one deployment flow. We evaluate AIPC on the on-device NPU path of Qualcomm QAIRT across vision, speech, LLM, and diffusion models. In two optimization cases, 6/7 Skill-arm Whisper-Small runs meet predefined accuracy and latency criteria versus 0/6 control runs, while YOLO-Worldv2 achieves a 2.791x end-to-end speedup versus 1.599x for the control. Under a pre-fixed deployment contract, Skill, tool permissions, and check conditions, some runs achieve zero in-run human intervention (0-HITL). We also examine Qwen3.8-27B as a locally deployable model for driving an Agent workflow.
In long-term interactions with large language model (LLM) agents, users reveal habits through their choices and actions. These habits capture implicit user information that agents must infer across conversations. However, individual observations may provide only partial evidence about a habit or when it applies. Retaining past interactions alone does not ensure that agents can infer habits and apply them appropriately. We introduce HABIT-Bench to evaluate how well agent memory systems infer habits from weak evidence and apply them to later requests. We construct synthetic user histories from task-oriented dialogue data and controlled habit graphs. The histories span hundreds of sessions across food, finance, software, and travel. Four-choice tasks assess agents' ability to infer user habits and apply them appropriately. They include temporary exceptions, changes in habits, and suggestions that users have not accepted. Sampled tasks undergo independent human review. We evaluate eight memory methods with Qwen3-235B-A22B and GLM-5.3-Flash. The best-performing memory method achieves 33.61\% macro accuracy across the four domains. Performance remains limited even when annotated evidence is supplied directly. These results expose a persistent gap between access to past interactions and the ability to infer and appropriately use user habits.
Yeqi Huang, Yue Chen, Yanwei Ye University of Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh, Guanhao Su, Luo Mai University of Edinburgh
General-purpose VLMs remain unreliable for biomedical research because valid answers in scientific papers depend on evidence split across figures, tables, charts, captions, and referring text.Existing post-training pipelines are bottlenecked by costly expert annotation and by synthetic data that drops this evidence structure.We present Ryze, a fully automated system that converts raw biomedical papers into an evidence-enriched training set and a domain-specialized VLM.Ryze synthesizes QA pairs with complete supporting evidence (visual element, caption, extracted structure, and referring paragraphs), reduces layout and OCR errors via chart/table-aware extraction and LLM-based cleansing, and applies a two-stage post-training strategy combining supervised fine-tuning with reinforcement learning.Starting from Qwen3-VL-8B, Ryze produces BioVLM-8B at under $200, achieving 48.0% weighted accuracy on LAB-Bench—outperforming the base model by +12.6% and surpassing GPT-5.2 by +3.8%.We release Ryze as open source together with the trained BioVLM-8B model.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations) · 2026 · 正式发表
Hao Sun, Yu Song Ritsumeikan University, Teng Shiyu, Ziwei Niu, Yen-wei Chen Ritsumeikan University
VLA models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for transferring semantic knowledge from web-scale data to physical robotic control. However, current single-frame architectures suffer from intrinsic limitations: temporal myopia that discards historical dynamics, reasoning gaps between high-level instructions and low-level motor commands, and inference inefficiency due to autoregressive scalar decoding. In this work, we propose MIRTH, a unified framework designed to address these challenges. MIRTH augments a pretrained VLA backbone with three key innovations: (1) dual-scale temporal memory hubs that compress long-term scene evolution and short-term motion trends into compact embeddings; (2) latent reasoning tokens optimized via a mutual-information objective carving out a semantic plan space to align multimodal context with action trajectories; and (3) a parallel action decoding scheme that replaces autoregressive generation with vector-wise prediction to maximize control throughput. Extensive evaluations on the LIBERO simulation benchmark and a real-world LeRobot platform demonstrate that MIRTH achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibiting emergent error recovery capabilities. We will release our code and collected datasets to facilitate reproducible research in embodied AI upon publication.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Yang Zhao, Hepeng Wang Harbin Institute of Technology, Xiao Ding, Yangou Ouyang, Bibo Cai, Kai Xiong Harbin Institute of Technology, Jinglong Gao Research Center for Social Computing and Information Retrieval, Zhouhao Sun 等 11 位作者
Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as an efficient paradigm for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its efficacy is primarily confined to domains with verifiable ground truths. Extending GRPO to open-domain settings remains a critical challenge, as unconstrained generation entails multi-faceted and often conflicting objectives—such as creativity versus factuality—where rigid, static reward scalarization is inherently suboptimal. To address this, we propose MAESTRO (Meta-learning Adaptive Estimation of Scalarization Trade-offs for Reward Optimization), which introduces a meta-cognitive orchestration layer that treats reward scalarization as a dynamic latent policy, leveraging the model’s terminal hidden states as a semantic bottleneck to perceive task-specific priorities. We formulate this as a contextual bandit problem within a bi-level optimization framework, where a lightweight Conductor network co-evolves with the policy by utilizing group-relative advantages as a meta-reward signal. Across seven benchmarks, MAESTRO consistently outperforms single-reward and static multi-objective baselines, while preserving the efficiency advantages of GRPO, and in some settings even reducing redundant generation.
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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
Yang Zhao, Yangou Ouyang, Xiao Ding, Hepeng Wang Harbin Institute of Technology, Bibo Cai, Kai Xiong Harbin Institute of Technology, Jinglong Gao Research Center for Social Computing and Information Retrieval, Zhouhao Sun 等 11 位作者
While Hybrid Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become the standard paradigm for training LLM agents, effective mechanisms for data allocation between these stages remain largely underexplored. Current data arbitration strategies often rely on surface-level heuristics that fail to diagnose intrinsic learning needs. Since SFT targets pattern consolidation through imitation while RL drives structural adaptation via exploration, misaligning data with these functional roles causes severe optimization interference. We propose PRISM, a dynamics-aware framework grounded in Schema Theory that arbitrates data based on its degree of cognitive conflict with the model’s existing knowledge. By analyzing the spatial geometric structure of gradients, PRISM identifies data triggering high spatial concentration as high-conflict signals that require RL for structural restructuring. In contrast, data yielding diffuse updates is routed to SFT for efficient consolidation. Extensive experiments on WebShop and ALFWorld demonstrate that PRISM achieves a Pareto improvement, outperforming state-of-the-art hybrid methods while reducing computational costs by up to 3.22 \times. Our findings suggest that disentangling data based on internal optimization regimes is crucial for scalable and robust agent alignment.
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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
Xiaoyu Xu, Yulan Pan, Xiaosong Yuan, Zhihong Shen, Minghao Su Fuzhou University, Yuanhao Su, Xiaofeng Zhang
Large reasoning models (LRMs) that generate long chains of thought now perform well on multi-step math, science, and coding tasks. However, their behavior is still unstable and hard to interpret, and existing analysis tools struggle with such long, structured reasoning traces. We introduce Step-Saliency, which pools attention–gradient scores into step-to-step maps along the question–thinking–summary trajectory. Across several models, Step-Saliency reveals two recurring information-flow failures: Shallow Lock-in, where shallow layers over-focus on the current step and barely use earlier context, and Deep Decay, where deep layers gradually lose saliency on the thinking segment and the summary increasingly attends to itself and the last few steps. Motivated by these patterns, we propose StepFlow, a saliency-inspired test-time intervention that adjusts shallow saliency patterns measured by Step-Saliency via Odds-Equal Bridge and adds a small step-level residual in deep layers via Step Momentum Injection. StepFlow improves accuracy on math, science, and coding tasks across multiple LRMs without retraining, indicating that repairing information flow can recover part of their missing reasoning performance.
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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
Lihao Sun Microsoft, Hang Dong Microsoft Research, Bo Qiao Microsoft Research, Qingwei Lin Microsoft Research, Dongmei Zhang Microsoft, Saravan Rajmohan Microsoft
This work characterizes large language models’ chain-of-thought generation as a structured trajectory through representation space. We show that mathematical reasoning traverses functionally ordered, step-specific subspaces that become increasingly separable with layer depth. This structure already exists in base models, while reasoning training primarily accelerates convergence toward termination-related subspaces rather than introducing new representational organization. While early reasoning steps follow similar trajectories, correct and incorrect solutions diverge systematically at late stages. This late-stage divergence enables mid-reasoning prediction of final-answer correctness with ROC–AUC up to 0.87. Furthermore, we introduce trajectory-based steering, an inference-time intervention framework that enables reasoning correction and length control based on derived ideal trajectories. Together, these results establish reasoning trajectories as a geometric lens for interpreting, predicting, and controlling LLM reasoning behavior.
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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
Xueyang Zhou, Weidong Wang, Lin Lu, Jiawen Shi, Guiyao Tie, Xu Yongtian, Lixing Chen Shanghai Jiaotong University, Pan Zhou Huazhong University of Science and Technology 等 10 位作者
LLM-based agents are rapidly being deployed in real-world applications (e.g., digital assistants and customer service), making safety a critical concern. However, in multi-turn, tool-augmented settings, dynamic user interactions, external tool use, and unintended harmful behaviors make robust safety assurance challenging. To address these challenges, we propose SafeAgent, a framework that improves agent safety through fully automated synthetic data generation. SafeAgent introduces (1) an open and extensible threat model OTS that decomposes agent risk into instruction-, context-, and action-induced sources to ground safety analysis and alignment; and (2) an automated pipeline that instantiates OTS to surface scenario-specific failure modes, stress-test agents, and generate self-reflective safe responses—without hazardous real-world data collection. We evaluate SafeAgent on two safety benchmarks and one real-world terminal task. Across four widely used open-source models, SafeAgent improves safety performance by 45% on average and delivers a 28.91% gain on the real-world task, outperforming state-of-the-art closed-source models. These results highlight the practical advancement and scalability of SafeAgent in building safer LLM agents for real-world deployment.
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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
Zehua Cheng Wuhan University, Wei Dai, Jiahao Sun Imperial College London, Imperial College London, Thomas Lukasiewicz Institute of Logic and Computation, Technische Universität Wien and Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford
The large language models offer a scaleable solution for the generation of synthetic data faced with a trade-off between maintaining the diversity of generation and achieving factually accurate results. This paper introduces Graphsynth, a framework which leverages a probabilistic factor graph modeling the universe of attributes. The framework leverages a high-level schema mapping compiled into efficient hard masks during the decoding phase for maintaining the syntactic truth and a span-synchronized verifier for dismissing logical contradictions at the decode time. The experiments conducted on biomedical, legal, and generic domains show that the method outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines with a structural integrity approaching perfection, a coverage of around 94% attributes on the factor graph solution, and a boost in performance on downstream tasks such as +17.9% on TruthfulQA.
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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
Huawei Ji, Yuanhao Sun, Yuan Jin, Cheng Deng University of Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh, Jiaxin Ding Shanghai Jiaotong University, Luoyi Fu, Xinbing Wang Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Visual token pruning methods effectively mitigate the quadratic computational growth caused by processing high-resolution images and video frames in vision-language models (VLMs). However, existing approaches rely on predefined pruning configurations without determining whether they achieve computation-performance optimality. In this work, we introduce , a novel framework that formulates visual token pruning as a Pareto configuration optimization problem to automatically identify optimal configurations. Our approach employs continuous relaxation and straight-through estimators to enable gradient-based search, solved via the Augmented Lagrangian method. Extensive experiments across 8 visual benchmarks demonstrate that effectively approximates the empirical Pareto frontier obtained through grid search and generalizes well across various pruning methods and VLM architectures. Furthermore, through learnable kernel functions, we investigate layer-wise pruning patterns and reveal that multi-step progressive pruning captures VLMs’ hierarchical compression structure, achieving superior accuracy-efficiency trade-offs compared to single-layer approaches.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表