GenCAR: Generative Counterfactual Alignment with Risk-Controlled Selection for Out-of-Distribution Recommendation

Serving useful recommendations under distribution shift is crucial for balancing utility and risk in out-of-distribution (OOD) recommendation. However, most existing OOD methods improve ranking or construct counterfactual candidates without controlling the proxy-label false discovery rate (FDR) of the served set. In this work, we formulate OOD serving as the $α$-Valid Counterfactual Recommendation ($α$-VCR) problem to retain candidate support learned from counterfactual supervision while controlling proxy-label FDR, and propose GenCAR, which couples preference-grounded counterfactual supervision with calibrated set selection. In particular, GenCAR fixes the stable-preference representation while intervening on the environmental factor, grounds offline large language model proposals through preference anchors and trust-radius filtering, and uses conformal $p$-values for Benjamini--Hochberg selection. We theoretically bound conditional counterfactual approximation error and prove finite-sample, distribution-free control of proxy-label FDR under exchangeability and positive regression dependence, with a Benjamini--Yekutieli guarantee under arbitrary dependence. Extensive experiments audit realized proxy false discovery proportions and demonstrate that GenCAR consistently enhances OOD candidate recovery across diverse benchmarks.

LCoT-GV: Graph Attention Networks for Verifying Long Reasoning Chains in Large Language Models

Large Reasoning Models produce Long Chains-of-Thought (LCoTs) which involve breaking down the problem into smaller reasoning steps before reaching the conclusion. However, these steps often contain contradictions, unsupported inferences, or irrelevant steps, even when the final answer is correct. We propose Long Chain-of-Thought Graph Verifier (LCoT-GV), a graph-based framework that represents LCoTs as reasoning graphs. Each node in the graph represents a reasoning step and the edges encode semantic and logical relations. A Graph Attention Network is then trained to predict chain-of-thought correctness from the reasoning graph. We construct a new graph-oriented verification dataset from multiple reasoning benchmarks for question answering in various domains. The results show that our method is competitive with the most similar approaches.

Chat-Edit-3D++: Interactive 3D and 4D Scene Editing via Large Language Models

Recent work on image content manipulation based on vision-language pre-training models has been effectively extended to text-driven 3D scene editing. However, existing schemes for 3D scene editing still have certain shortcomings, hindering their further development as interactive design tools. Such schemes typically adhere to fixed input patterns, limiting flexibility in text input. Furthermore, their editing capabilities are constrained by a single or a few 2D visual models and require intricate pipeline design to integrate these models into 3D reconstruction processes. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose the Hash-Atlas network, which reformulates 3D scene editing as operations on 2D atlas images, thereby achieving a workflow decoupling of the 2D editing and 3D reconstruction processes. Building on this foundation, we introduce a dialogue-based 3D scene editing approach, termed CE3D++, which is centered on a large language model (LLM) that allows arbitrary textual input from users and interprets their intentions, subsequently facilitating the autonomous invocation of the corresponding visual models. Additionally, we extend CE3D++ to monocular 4D scenes by imposing motion constraints on moving objects and further fine-tuning the LLM by creating a trajectory dataset related to editing tasks, which enables the smaller LLM to schedule up to 30 different visual tools accurately. Experimental results demonstrate that CE3D++ effectively integrates multiple visual models to achieve diverse visual editing effects, possessing strong scene comprehension and multi-round dialog capabilities. The source codes and trained models are available at https://github.com/Fangkang515/CE3D.

A Physical Response-and-Memory Model for Muon Optimization

Training large language models is costly. How low a loss the same compute can ultimately reach depends on how each step's gradient is converted into a weight update; the rule that performs this conversion is the optimizer. From SGD and AdamW to the recent Muon, effective update rules have mostly been shaped by engineering intuition and then selected on benchmarks. Muon semi-orthogonalizes the momentum matrix before applying the update and has kept breaking records on public training benchmarks; yet why the semi-orthogonalized direction works, and over how long a history the momentum should average, are two questions at present answered mainly by experience. Here we treat the weight matrix during training as a responsive medium with memory and build a physical model for it, in which both questions find answers: the semi-orthogonalized direction is the maximally dissipative response under an output-side safety budget, which explains why it works; momentum is the internal stress accumulated by the medium; how long it should average is set by the relaxation of this stress, and a real medium relaxes on more than one timescale, the simplest form being one fast and one slow. On this basis we propose the Bi-Maxwell optimizer. The framework further yields a testable consequence: gradient directions change fast early in training and more slowly later, so the optimal memory length should grow with training stage; step-by-step measurements of a proxy for it by a read-only probe across 8 independent training trajectories are consistent with this consequence. Replacing the memory kernel alone, from a single timescale to two, brings training to the target loss in noticeably fewer steps on a public large-language-model optimizer benchmark.

Target-Aware Calibration Data Selection for Preserving Uncertainty in Quantized Language Models

Quantization is widely used to deploy large language models, but its effect on uncertainty behavior, such as confidence, margins, and abstention, is rarely treated as a primary objective. We frame calibration-data selection for quantization as a target-dependent uncertainty-preservation problem. Different deployments emphasize different regions of the input distribution, yet prior work mainly optimizes accuracy-oriented compression metrics or adjusts scores after quantization. We formalize this goal with distributional and boundary preservation risks, and provide a simple mixture-mismatch argument explaining why no single calibration recipe should be expected to fit all targets. We introduce Doubt-Preserving Quantization (DPQ), a lightweight pre-quantization recipe family that uses full-precision predictions to construct target-aligned calibration mixtures of high-doubt examples and generic anchors. Across 8 language models, 9 NLP benchmarks, and 22 comparison methods, the leading fixed recipe changes with the preservation target: DPQ-r75 leads on SQuAD2 answerability-boundary preservation, while milder or single-signal variants, including DPQ-r50, confidence-only, and entropy-only, better preserve broad multiple-choice QA behavior. These results show that calibration data should be selected for the specific full-precision score behavior a deployment needs to preserve, rather than treated as a fixed quantization detail.

Handover of In-Context Learning State Across Session Boundaries

This study investigates the methodological and theoretical properties of session handover in applications that use large language models. A task may continue in a new session when the context reaches the model's input limit, when the application restarts, or when another agent is asked to finish the task. The application must then decide which information from the earlier session to pass on. We formulate handover as the transfer of a task-relative in-context learning (ICL) state and distinguish exact recovery of earlier material from preservation of the target distribution. Under an exogeneity condition, predictive equivalence characterizes the coarsest deterministic sufficient handover and gives a fixed-length bit requirement. The analysis isolates the effects of the memory constraint, the writer, and the continuation procedure, and quantifies the cost of writing before the realized downstream query is known. We propose a three-part record that stores decisions and constraints exactly, uses task-justified statistics for repeated evidence, and retains original observations whose effect is not preserved by those statistics. Gaussian linear regression gives an exact finite-dimensional handover and finite-bit perturbation bounds, while nonparametric regression gives upper and lower bounds that relate memory to squared prediction error. These results provide a theory and method for deciding what a handover must retain and how its memory requirement depends on the continuation task.

Federated Prompt Learning: A Unified Framework, Empirical Analysis, and Future Directions

Large language models (LLMs) have become core components of cloud-based intelligent services in academia and industry, yet their training and deployment are hindered by high computational costs, data centralization, and privacy concerns. Federated learning (FL) offers a decentralized training paradigm that enables clients to collaboratively train a learning model without sharing raw data, making it a promising solution for privacy-preserving LLM training and reasoning. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of federated prompt learning (FPL) to review recent advances in integrating the federated learning paradigm and large language models, answering the following research questions: RQ1: The fundamental motivations, characteristics, and enabling technologies of FPL, and how it differs from conventional FL and full-model federated fine-tuning; RQ2: The trade-offs FPL approaches exhibit in performance, communication efficiency, computational overhead, scalability, personalization, and heterogeneity handling; RQ3: The remaining security, privacy, robustness, and system challenges, along with key future research directions. To this end, we systematically examine existing FPL methods across the full model lifecycle: pre-training, fine-tuning, and practical applications, while discussing security, privacy, and robustness issues and summarizing existing defense mechanisms. Finally, we highlight open challenges and future directions, aiming to help readers understand how the insights drive research in FPL.

LibraSpec: Dynamic Diffusion-Based Speculative Decoding via Marginal-Gain-Driven Optimization

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference by drafting multiple tokens for parallel verification, with efficiency critically determined by the speculative length selected at each decoding round. Existing dynamic speculation methods select the speculation length by estimating how many tokens will be accepted, which is reasonable for autoregressive drafters that generates tokens sequentially. The recent wave of diffusion-based drafters, however, generates candidate blocks in parallel at substantially lower drafting cost, shifting the key question from how many tokens to generate to how many generated tokens are worth verifying. We therefore reformulate dynamic speculative-length selection as expected-speedup optimization and derive a marginal criterion that extends the speculative sequence only when its acceptance gain outweighs the additional verification cost. Building on this criterion, we develop \textit{LibraSpec}, a training-free and plug-and-play algorithm that iteratively determines the speculative length using drafter confidence scores. Theoretically, we prove that LibraSpec monotonically converges toward the optimal speculative length. Experiments across six target models, three diffusion-based speculative decoding methods, and math, coding, and chat benchmarks show consistent improvements under both greedy and sampling settings, achieving a further $0.5\sim1.5\times$ improvement over baselines and up to $8.49\times$ speedup over autoregressive decoding.

Quantization Degradation in Large Language Models: A Signal-Noise Perspective

Post-training quantization reduces the deployment cost of large language models, yet how severely a quantized model degrades is not determined by bit-width alone. We systematically study weight-only post-training quantization across bit-widths, quantization methods, model scales and downstream tasks on multiple model families. We observe that such degradation varies substantially across these factors: 4-bit quantization usually preserves performance, 2-bit often causes broad degradation, and at 3-bit, degradation becomes apparent but varies markedly with task type, quantization method and model scale. To explain this variability, we use the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to measure how strongly quantization perturbs full-precision representations. We trace degradation back to two linked processes: how quantization errors arise within individual modules, and how they accumulate across layers. First, a source SNR decomposition shows that newly introduced errors depend on three factors: the magnitude of the weight error, the strength of the task-specific signal, and how strongly the quantization error aligns with task-specific activations. Different factors affect these components in distinct ways. Second, a cross-layer propagation analysis shows that these errors can be attenuated, preserved, or amplified as they pass across layers, and that larger models benefit from weaker error amplification. Together, these results establish that quantization degradation is governed by how errors are introduced at the source and how they accumulate across the network.

STAIL: Semantic Text-Anchored Incremental Learning for Medical Imaging via Large Language Models

Deep learning models applied to medical image analysis suffer from severe catastrophic forgetting when continually adapting to new clinical tasks in dynamic environments. Mainstream incremental learning methods typically mitigate this by rehearsing raw historical images. However, this pixel-level rehearsal incurs significant storage overhead, raises privacy concerns, and fails to adequately capture the true data distribution with sparse exemplars. Inspired by human cognitive mechanisms, we propose a novel framework termed Semantic Text-Anchored Incremental Learning (STAIL) for sequential clinical tasks. To overcome the rehearsal bottleneck, STAIL introduces an asymmetric semantic consolidation buffer (SCB). By incorporating a minimal set of image anchors and extensive textual descriptions, the SCB enables dense semantic reconstruction of old tasks at a minimal storage cost. Furthermore, we design an LLM-derived Semantic Anchoring Mechanism (LSAM) that leverages the stable semantic space of frozen large language models as developmental priors. This mechanism explicitly anchors evolving visual features to textual representations, guiding and constraining plasticity and stability at both macroscopic and microscopic levels. Extensive experiments across three heterogeneous medical datasets, covering fundus, ultrasound, and X-ray imaging, demonstrate that STAIL acts as a highly effective plug-and-play module. It comprehensively enhances the performance of various existing baselines, achieving average gains of 2.24\% in AAA-AUC for sustained performance and 3.55\% in BWT-AUC for reduced forgetting. Code is available.

DBLAST: Dependent Block Drafting for Stochastic Speculative Decoding

Speculative decoding accelerates large language models' inference by using a lightweight drafter to propose multiple future tokens and a target model to verify them. While recent block and diffusion-style drafters can predict several positions in a single pass, their training and sampling procedures are typically optimized for greedy decoding or assume that positions in the draft block are conditionally independent. This assumption becomes brittle in non-greedy speculative decoding, where the target distribution is deliberately stochastic and multiple continuations become plausible. We study this mismatch for block diffusion drafters and show that the accepted draft length degrades as the entropy of the target sampling distribution increases. We propose a dependent block drafter based on a low-rank latent mixture over token positions, complemented by an acceptance-oriented training objective that directly targets the expected verified length. Experiments with Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-8B on GSM8K, MT-Bench, HumanEval, and creative-writing benchmarks show that our approach, namely DBLast, consistently improves accepted length over independent block sampling, especially in higher-entropy decoding regimes.

Noise-Aware Shrinkage for Differentially Private Zeroth-Order Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models

Differentially private zeroth-order optimization (DP-ZO) enables memory-efficient private fine-tuning of large language models using only forward evaluations. Existing aggregation-based DP-ZO methods reconstruct model updates at a fixed scale, ignoring that the strength of useful signals varies throughout training. Consequently, noise-dominated updates may receive excessive weight and degrade model utility. To address this issue, we propose SAGE, a noise-aware shrinkage method that adaptively attenuates privatized estimates according to their estimated signal quality. SAGE subtracts the known Gaussian noise variance from the observed second moment to estimate the underlying signal energy, stabilizes this estimate through temporal tracking, and compares its current signal-to-noise level with a warm-up reference to derive a bounded shrinkage factor. As pure post-processing, SAGE requires neither additional privacy budget nor model queries and introduces only constant additional state. Our theoretical analysis shows that shrinkage reduces the quadratic update-risk term faster than the linear descent term, preserving useful descent while limiting the influence of noise-dominated updates. Experiments on RoBERTa-large, OPT-1.3B, and OPT-6.7B demonstrate that SAGE outperforms existing baselines in most settings under the same privacy budgets while preserving the forward-only memory efficiency of DP-ZO.

Retraction-Free Optimization over the Stiefel Manifold for the LoRA Fine-Tuning

Optimization over the Stiefel manifold plays a significant role in various machine learning tasks. Existing methods either use the retraction operators, requiring costly orthonormalization for large-scale matrices, or employ landing methods that rely on careful step size selection and penalty parameter tuning. To address these challenges, we propose a retraction-free and penalty parameter-free algorithm that directly lands on the manifold. By leveraging the strongly-convex-like property of the quadratic penalty function and the proximal smoothness of the Stiefel manifold, we establish global convergence guarantees with the best-known iteration complexities under both constant and diminishing step sizes. Then, we reformulate the low-rank adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning problem for large language models as a manifold optimization problem, introducing Manifold-LoRA for geometry-accelerated adaptation. This approach employs the proposed landing technique and a carefully designed step size strategy to accelerate the training process. Numerical experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the efficiency and strong downstream performance of the proposed method.

From Operations to Elderly Care Outcomes: A Thematic Review of Industrial Engineering and Decision-Support Approaches

The rapid growth of the global aging population presents severe challenges to healthcare systems, necessitating efficient, equitable, and patient-centered care models. While Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (OR) provide robust optimization and decision-support tools to address these multidimensional complexities, current applications often remain fragmented. This paper presents a thematic review of 30 seminal studies at the intersection of OR and elderly care, categorizing the literature into home healthcare operations, polypharmacy management, and clinical chronotherapy. Our analysis highlights a significant methodological evolution from static, deterministic models toward dynamic and stochastic frameworks integrated with artificial intelligence (AI). Despite these advancements, a critical translational gap persists: the current OR literature is heavily dominated by process-level optimizations, such as staff routing, and struggles to translate these operational efficiencies into measurable clinical outcomes. Furthermore, holistic models bridging the transition between hospital and community care remain critically underexplored. To develop resilient and smart healthcare systems, this study proposes a conceptual framework that shifts the research focus from isolated operational tasks to integrated, multi-level decision-making. We emphasize the critical need for robust systems analysis, human-inclusive design, and the smartification of care through emerging digital technologies - including digital twins and large language models - to successfully bridge the gap between theoretical operational metrics and tangible patient-level health outcomes.

GFlowRL: Scaling Distribution-Matching RL to Large Language Models

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) offer a promising alternative to reward-maximizing reinforcement learning (RL) for large reasoning models, encouraging diverse reasoning paths by matching reward distributions rather than collapsing to dominant modes. Recent work shows promise on math and code, but scaling GFlowNet-style RL to modern post-training pipelines remains difficult: as model size, rollout horizon, reward noise, and distributed-systems complexity grow together, a learned prompt-conditional partition function becomes a source of gradient instability and engineering overhead rather than a useful normalizer. Through systematic analysis, we find that the learned partition function, previously treated as essential, can be replaced by an in-batch Monte Carlo estimate computed from the rollout group already required for training. We propose GFlowRL, a streamlined GFlowNet-style RL algorithm that removes the auxiliary partition network entirely while preserving the reward-distribution-matching objective, completed by two stabilizers: importance-sampling correction for rollout/trainer drift and asymmetric flow-gap clipping for outlier residuals. GFlowRL exceeds all counterparts on math, code, and adversarial red-teaming benchmarks, reaching a Codeforces rating of 2048 at the 14B scale (within 25 Elo of o3-mini) and attaining the highest average ASR@1 on AdvBench and HarmBench, outperforming the previous SOTA multi-turn attacker in a regime where FlowRL, a prior GFlowNet-style method, diverges. The same recipe transfers to all evaluated MoE configurations up to 235B parameters, where FlowRL again fails to converge. To our knowledge, GFlowRL is the first GFlowNet-style RL algorithm to scale stably across both dense and sparse architectures. Code will be at: https://github.com/microsoft/gflowrl

HRO: Hierarchical Room-to-Object Framework for Zero-Shot Object Goal Navigation with Large Language Models

Zero-shot object-goal navigation aims to enable an intelligent agent to explore and navigate to objects of unknown categories in an unfamiliar environment without specific target training. In zero-shot navigation tasks, pre-trained large models are usually employed to leverage their prior knowledge for guiding the agent's navigation. However, existing zero-shot object-goal navigation methods based on large language models (LLMs) merely utilize LLMs as flat reasoning tools to directly associate objects or regions. They lack the hierarchical spatial cognition modeling of human-like room semantics to object localization, which leads to strong blindness in exploration, insufficient accuracy in semantic association, and failure to fully unleash the common-sense reasoning potential of LLMs. This paper proposes an LLM-driven hierarchical room-to-object (HRO) framework for zero-shot object-goal navigation, which guides the agent to explore and navigate to the target object in a coarse-to-fine manner. Experiments on Gibson and HM3D datasets verify that our HRO framework achieves superior success rate and generalization over existing LLM-based methods, underscoring LLMs' strong potential for zero-shot object-goal navigation.

PromptGNN-sim: Deep Fusion and Alignment of GNN and LLMs for Text-Attributed Graph Learning

Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) combine textual semantics with graph structure and are central to many graph learning tasks. However, existing fusion methods often treat text and structure as separate inputs in a shallow, one-way pipeline, which limits deep interaction between modalities and weakens performance under sparse connectivity or cross-graph generalisation. To address this issue, we propose PromptGNN-sim, a bi-directional structure-semantic fusion framework for collaborative GNN-LLM learning. PromptGNN-sim uses a Graph Attention Network (GAT) for semantically aware neighborhood selection by combining structural attention with textual similarity. The selected structural context is then used to generate structure-aware prompts for an LLM, including the target node summary, label categories, and representative keywords from similar neighbors. During training, bi-directional cross-modal contrastive learning and cross-attention are introduced to jointly optimize the GNN and LLM components. Experiments on six public datasets, including Cora, Pubmed, and WikiCS, evaluate accuracy, generalisation, and robustness under cross-task transfer, cross-dataset generalisation, and sparse perturbations. Results show that PromptGNN-sim outperforms classical GNNs, LLMs, and recent GNN-LLM fusion methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of interactive structure-semantic collaboration for text-attributed graph learning.

Do We Still Need Fine Tuning? Turkish Sentiment Analysis in the Era of Large Language Model

This study examines whether supervised fine-tuning remains necessary for Turkish sentiment analysis in the era of large language models. We compare classical machine learning methods, fine-tuned pretrained language models, and prompted large language models on a Turkish e-commerce review dataset with negative, neutral, and positive labels. Fine-tuned BERTurk models perform best overall and outperform all prompted large language models in the full three-class task. The neutral class emerges as the main difficulty: while several large language models are much more competitive in binary positive--negative classification, they degrade substantially in the three-class setting by collapsing neutral reviews into polarized categories. The findings suggest that, in realistic Turkish sentiment classification, prompted large language models do not yet match supervised fine-tuning in the zero-shot setting, and that including the neutral class is crucial for robust evaluation.

Labeling Training Data for Entity Matching Using Large Language Models

Recent large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on entity matching without requiring task-specific training data. However, applying these models to large sets of candidate pairs remains slow and costly. In contrast, entity matchers using traditional machine learning methods or small language models (SLMs), such as RoBERTa, offer much faster inference but require task-specific training data. This paper investigates whether the need to provide task-specific training data can be avoided by using knowledge-distillation workflows, in which an LLM serves as a teacher model to label training pairs that are subsequently used to train a smaller student model. We investigate knowledge distillation for entity matching along the following dimensions: pair-selection strategy, teacher model, label post-processing method, and student model. We evaluate the workflows using the Abt-Buy, Walmart-Amazon, WDC Products, DBLP-ACM, and DBLP-Scholar benchmarks, and compare the performance of student models trained with machine-labeled data to the performance of the same models trained using the benchmark training sets. Our experiments show that student models trained using the machine-labeled sets perform approximately on par with models trained on the benchmark training sets, with the remaining differences in both directions staying below two F1 points. Using GPT-5.2 to label the training sets for all five benchmarks costs US\$28.31 to US\$40.88, whereas manually labeling the same training sets is estimated to require 470 hours of work. At inference time, Ditto is 41.5 to 534 times faster than directly using an LLM to perform the matching tasks. These results indicate that current LLMs, when combined with a suitable pair-selection method, can substantially reduce or even eliminate the manual effort required to label use case-specific training data for entity matching.

SOS-LoRA: Static Orthogonal-Subspace Low-Rank Adaptation with Fixed Multi-Scale Scaling

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a widely used parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method for large language models. Under a fixed rank budget, LoRA parameterizes each adapted weight through a single low-dimensional input-side pathway, which may couple heterogeneous behaviors through shared input directions and induce interference during optimization. We propose Static Orthogonal Subspace LoRA (SOS-LoRA), a drop-in extension that reparameterizes a rank-rtot update as a sum of K static (always-on, non-routed) low-rank experts. SOS-LoRA (i) decomposes the total rank across experts, (ii) applies a fixed multi-scale scaling scheme to encourage scale-separated optimization dynamics, and (iii) promotes diverse input-side directions via cross-expert orthogonal initialization and a lightweight regularizer. SOS-LoRA remains fully mergeable, adding no inference-time parameters or latency after merging. Experiments on reasoning and knowledge-intensive benchmarks (Llama 2/3), encoder-based NLU (GLUE), and math reasoning (GSM8K/MATH) show consistent gains over matched-budget LoRA baselines and recent variants. Code is available at https://github.com/llm172/sos-lora.

On the Expressive Power of Weight Quantization in Large Language Models

In recent years, weight quantization that encodes the learnable parameters of large language models in an $n$-bit format has garnered significant attention due to its potential for model compression and inference acceleration. Many practical techniques have been developed; however, the theoretical understanding of many aspects, especially the approximation and degradation of expressive power as the number of quantization bits decreases, remains unclear. In this paper, we provide a theoretical investigation into the expressive capability of large language models relative to the number of quantization bits. We argue that 1.58-bit is the limiting precision for weight quantization by establishing the universal approximation and expressive collapse properties of weight-quantized models with respect to the number of quantization bits. Additionally, we confirm that weight quantization leads to expressive degradation, in which the expressive capacity of weight-quantized models degrades polynomially as the number of quantization bits decreases. These theoretical findings provide a solid foundation for advancing weight quantization in the context of scaling laws and shed insights for future research in model compression and inference acceleration.

PreLort: Prefix-Nested LoRA for Federated Fine-Tuning under Rank Heterogeneity

Federated fine-tuning of large language models using parameter-efficient methods such as LoRA enables privacy-preserving adaptation of foundation models. Heterogeneous hardware resources introduce challenges, as clients with different adapter ranks cannot be directly aggregated. While existing methods enable aggregation under heterogeneous ranks, they fail to control how information is distributed across rank dimensions, leading to suboptimal use of shared low-rank representations. Instead, we propose PreLort: a nested low-rank formulation for federated LoRA that organizes adapter dimensions into a prefix hierarchy. Our approach ensures that lower-rank dimensions encode task-relevant information, while higher-rank dimensions capture additional capacity. Building on this, we introduce (i) a segment-wise aggregation rule that averages only over clients contributing to each rank segment, avoiding dilution from zero-padded lower-rank clients, and (ii) a prefix-nested training strategy that optimizes each adapter under multiple rank truncations, encouraging useful signal to concentrate in low-rank prefix dimensions. Together, these components encourage a consistent low-rank prefix capturing the most task-relevant information, while higher-rank dimensions learn additional capacity. This allows low-rank clients to benefit from richer information contributed by higher-rank clients, as prefix dimensions are consistently learned and aggregated. Experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms prior heterogeneous federated LoRA methods in accuracy and ROUGE-L, while achieving lower or comparable perplexity across multiple base models.

Zero-order Parameter-free Optimization for LMO-based Methods: Novel Approach for Efficient Fine-tuning

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) has become a central application of modern optimization, enabling pretrained models to adapt to diverse downstream tasks and domain-specific data. A major obstacle in large-scale fine-tuning is the memory overhead of backpropagation, which requires storing activations, gradients, and optimizer states. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization offers a memory-efficient alternative, but its performance is highly sensitive to the stepsize and smoothing parameter, often requiring costly task-specific tuning. Parameter-free (PF) optimization addresses this issue by adapting algorithmic parameters without prior knowledge of problem-dependent constants. Moreover, large-scale fine-tuning can benefit from geometry-aware updates that account for the heterogeneous structure of parameter blocks, which can be modeled through methods that exploit linear minimization oracle (LMO). In this work, we study PF adaptation for LMO-based ZO optimization and introduce $\texttt{AdaNAGED}$, a method that unifies gradient-free training, adaptive tuning, and non-Euclidean update geometry. We establish convergence guarantees and validate the method on large-scale LLM fine-tuning task with $\texttt{OPT}-1.3\mathrm{B}$ model.

Breaking the Bubble: Asynchronous Pipeline Parallel Training with Bounded Weight Inconsistency

Pipeline parallelism is essential for training large neural networks, but existing schedules trade off throughput, memory, and optimization consistency. Synchronous pipelines preserve forward/backward weight consistency but suffer from bubbles; asynchronous pipelines remove bubbles but introduce weight-version mismatch, typically requiring weight stashing, prediction, or correction mechanisms. We introduce PACI (Pipeline Asynchronous training with Controlled Inconsistency), a bubble-free asynchronous pipeline method that bounds forward/backward version drift without weight stashing, prediction, additional parameter copies, or global synchronization. The key idea is to use local gradient accumulation as a version-control mechanism: by slowing parameter-version evolution relative to pipeline delay, PACI limits the number of optimizer updates crossed by any micro-batch while preserving steady-state utilization. In GPT-style language-model pretraining, PACI matches the stability and final perplexity of synchronous 1F1B-flush, retains the same peak memory footprint, achieves fully utilized pipeline throughput, and improves training time-to-accuracy by up to $1.69\times$ over the fastest flush baseline. These results show that forward/backward inconsistency need not be eliminated: when explicitly bounded, it can be safely traded for substantial efficiency gains.

Hearing the Unspoken: Language Model Priors for Acoustic Adversarial Attacks

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems operating in real-time settings must process acoustic input under strict temporal constraints, where transcription decisions are inherently made on incomplete information. This causal constraint serves as an information bottleneck on attackers, significantly limiting attack performance. Our new Semantic Gambit attack breaks this causal limitation by augmenting the adversary with predictive context derived from a Large Language Model in real-time. Our experiments show that this form of augmentation can elevate the corpus-level Word Error Rate to 35.6% -- a three-fold increase over the current state-of-the-art. Ultimately, this work reveals how common, low-latency LLM tooling can be exploited to systematically subvert real-time ASR pipelines.

Spectral Scaling Laws of Muon

Orthonormalized update rules have rapidly become a leading choice of optimizer for training large language models, with recent open-source state-of-the-art models adopting Muon. To keep these updates tractable, Muon performs the orthonormalization with the Newton--Schulz (NS) iteration. Since NS is only approximate, directions with small singular values fail to be orthonormalized. In Muon, NS is applied to the momentum matrix at every step, yet little is known about how the singular value spectrum of these momentum matrices behaves during training, or how that behavior changes with model size. We present the first systematic study of this question. Tracking singular value quantiles of the momentum buffer across layers in models ranging from 77M to 2.8B parameters, we observe a consistent picture: after a short burn-in, the quantiles stabilize at a value determined by the layer type and model size. These stabilization values follow remarkably clean power laws in model size, with layer-dependent exponents. Layers up to mid-late depth scale very mildly with model size $M$ (around $M^{-0.25}$), so the standard 5-step NS configuration used at academic scale will continue to orthonormalize them at much larger scales. Some of the late layers, however, scale much more aggressively (up to $M^{-0.96}$) and will fall into the NS failure regime at frontier scale unless one uses more NS iterations or better-tuned coefficients. NS iterations are computationally expensive at scale; our laws give practitioners a principled, layer-aware recipe for choosing the minimum NS configuration that still orthonormalizes the directions that matter -- avoiding unnecessary computation without sacrificing update quality.

Breaking the Information Silo: Semantic Personas for Cross-Domain Recommendation

Digital platforms increasingly operate as isolated information silos, limiting their ability to construct comprehensive user representations across domains. Cross-domain recommender systems seek to overcome this limitation by transferring knowledge from a source domain to a target domain, yet most existing approaches depend on shared users, shared items, or structurally similar interaction graphs. These assumptions are often unrealistic across independent platforms. We propose SPHERE (Semantic Personas for Heterogeneous cross-domain Recommendation), a design artifact that enables recommendation knowledge transfer across strictly disjoint domains with no shared users or items. Rather than aligning domains through identity or graph structure, SPHERE uses large language models to induce a shared behavioral vocabulary, generate structured semantic personas for users, and retrieve behaviorally similar source-domain communities that form a Community Source Persona. This semantic signal is integrated with collaborative signals through a dual-tower architecture and dynamic fusion gate, allowing SPHERE to augment standard recommender backbones. Empirical evaluation across Amazon Books, Goodreads, and Steam demonstrates consistent improvements over NCF, SVD++, and LightGCN baselines under full-ranking evaluation. The results show that cross-domain transfer effectiveness is not determined solely by semantic proximity between domains; rather, it depends critically on the structural density and native predictive strength of the target domain. The study contributes to information systems research by reframing cross-domain personalization as behavior-based semantic alignment, offering a practical mechanism for overcoming information silos while preserving interpretability and modularity.