mstyslavity/prisma_v3 huggingface dataset:
Why do Vision Language Models (VLMs), despite success on standard benchmarks, often fail to match human performance on surprisingly simple visual reasoning tasks? While the underlying computational principles are still debated, we hypothesize that a crucial factor is a deficit in visually-grounded serial processing. To test this hypothesis, we compared human and VLM performance across tasks designed to vary serial processing demands in three distinct domains: geometric reasoning, perceptual enumeration, and mental rotation. Tasks within each domain varied serial processing load by manipulating factors such as geometric concept complexity, perceptual individuation load, and transformation difficulty. Across all domains, our results revealed a consistent pattern: decreased VLM accuracy was strongly correlated with increased human reaction time (used as a proxy for serial processing load). As tasks require more demanding serial processing -- whether composing concepts, enumerating items, or performing mental transformations -- the VLM-human performance gap widens reliably. These findings support our hypothesis, indicating that limitations in serial, visually grounded reasoning represent a fundamental bottleneck that distinguishes current VLMs from humans.
Current wireless networks are designed to optimize spectral efficiency for human users, who typically require sustained connections for high-data-rate applications like file transfers and video streaming. However, these networks are increasingly inadequate for the emerging era of machine-type communications (MTC). With a vast number of devices exhibiting sporadic traffic patterns consisting of short packets, the grant-based multiple access procedures utilized by existing networks lead to significant delays and inefficiencies. To address this issue the unsourced random access (URA) paradigm has been proposed. This paradigm assumes the devices to share a common encoder thus simplifying the reception process by eliminating the identification procedure. The URA paradigm not only addresses the computational challenges but it also considers the random access (RA) as a coding problem, i.e., takes into account both medium access protocols and physical layer effects. In this monograph we provide a comprehensive overview of the URA problem in noisy channels, with the main task being to explain the major ideas rather than to list all existing solutions.
Post-hoc explanation methods for black-box models often struggle with faithfulness and human interpretability due to the lack of explainability in current neural architectures. Meanwhile, B-cos networks have been introduced to improve model explainability by proposing an architecture that removes bias terms and promotes input-weight alignment. Although B-cos networks have shown success in building explainable systems, their application has so far been limited to computer vision models and their associated training pipelines. In this work, we introduce B-cos LMs, i.e., B-cos language models (LMs) empowered for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Our approach directly transforms pre-trained language models into B-cos LMs by combining B-cos conversion and task fine-tuning, improving efficiency compared to previous methods. Our automatic and human evaluation results demonstrate that B-cos LMs produce more faithful and human interpretable explanations than post-hoc methods, while maintaining task performance comparable to conventional fine-tuning. Our in-depth analysis explores how B-cos LMs differ from conventionally fine-tuned models in their learning processes and explanation patterns. Finally, we present a first exploration of transforming decoder-only models to B-cos LMs for generation tasks.
Multifarious assembly models consider multiple structures assembled from a shared set of components, reflecting the efficient usage of components in biological self-assembly. These models are subject to a high-dimensional parameter space, with only a finite region of parameter space giving reliable self-assembly. Here we use a continuous-time Gillespie simulation method to study multifarious self-assembly and find that the region of parameter space in which reliable self-assembly can be achieved is smaller than what was obtained previously using a discrete-time Monte Carlo simulation method. We explain this discrepancy through a detailed analysis of the stability of assembled structures against chimera formation. We find that our continuous-time simulations of multifarious self-assembly can expose this instability in large systems even at moderate simulation times. In contrast, discrete-time simulations are slow to show this instability, particularly for large system sizes. For the remaining state space we find good agreement between the predictions of continuous- and discrete-time simulations. We present physical arguments that can help us predict the state boundaries in the parameter space, and gain a deeper understanding of multifarious self-assembly.
This study introduces "Survey and Questionnaire Item Embeddings Differentials" (SQuID), a novel methodological approach that enables neural network embeddings to effectively recover latent dimensions from psychometric survey items. We demonstrate that embeddings derived from large language models, when processed with SQuID, can recover the structure of human values obtained from human rater judgments on the Revised Portrait Value Questionnaire (PVQ-RR). Our experimental validation on 1097 human respondents compares multiple embedding models across a number of evaluation metrics. Unlike previous approaches, SQuID successfully addresses the challenge of obtaining negative correlations between dimensions without requiring domain-specific fine-tuning. Quantitative analysis reveals that our embedding-based approach explains 55% of variance in dimension-dimension similarities compared to human data. Multidimensional scaling configurations from both types of data show fair factor congruence coefficients and largely follow the underlying theory. These results demonstrate that semantic embeddings can effectively replicate psychometric structures previously established through extensive human surveys. The approach offers substantial advantages in cost, scalability and flexibility while maintaining comparable quality to traditional methods. Our findings have significant implications for psychometrics and social science research, providing a complementary methodology that could expand the scope of human behavior and experience represented in measurement tools.
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems, and Large Language Models (LLMs) in particular, are increasingly employed for creative tasks like scientific idea generation, constituting a form of generalization from training data unaddressed by existing conceptual frameworks. Despite its similarities to compositional generalization (CG), combinatorial creativity (CC) is an open-ended ability. Instead of evaluating for accuracy or correctness against fixed targets, which would contradict the open-ended nature of CC, we propose a theoretical framework and algorithmic task for evaluating outputs by their degrees of novelty and utility. From here, we make several important empirical contributions: (1) We obtain the first insights into the scaling behavior of creativity for LLMs. (2) We discover that, for fixed compute budgets, there exist optimal model depths and widths for creative ability. (3) We find that the ideation-execution gap, whereby LLMs excel at generating novel scientific ideas but struggle to ensure their practical feasibility, may be explained by a more fundamental novelty-utility tradeoff characteristic of creativity algorithms in general. Importantly, this tradeoff remains persistent even at scale, casting doubt on the long-term creative potential of LLMs in their current form. Together, our conceptual framework and empirical findings provide a foundation for understanding and improving creativity in modern AI models, bridging the gap between human and machine intelligence.
lantar pressure mapping is essential in clinical diagnostics and sports\nscience, yet large heterogeneous datasets often contain outliers from technical\nerrors or procedural inconsistencies. Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM)\nprovides interpretable analyses but is sensitive to alignment and its capacity\nfor robust outlier detection remains unclear. This study compares an SPM\napproach with an explainable machine learning (ML) approach to establish\ntransparent quality-control pipelines for plantar pressure datasets. Data from\nmultiple centers were annotated by expert consensus and enriched with synthetic\nanomalies resulting in 798 valid samples and 2000 outliers. We evaluated (i) a\nnon-parametric, registration-dependent SPM approach and (ii) a convolutional\nneural network (CNN), explained using SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP).\nPerformance was assessed via nested cross-validation; explanation quality via a\nsemantic differential survey with domain experts. The ML model reached high\naccuracy and outperformed SPM, which misclassified clinically meaningful\nvariations and missed true outliers. Experts perceived both SPM and SHAP\nexplanations as clear, useful, and trustworthy, though SPM was assessed less\ncomplex. These findings highlight the complementary potential of SPM and\nexplainable ML as approaches for automated outlier detection in plantar\npressure data, and underscore the importance of explainability in translating\ncomplex model outputs into interpretable insights that can effectively inform\ndecision-making."
Time-series anomaly detection (TSAD) increasingly demands explanations that articulate not only if an anomaly occurred, but also what pattern it exhibits and why it is anomalous. Leveraging the impressive explanatory capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), recent works have attempted to treat time series as text for explainable TSAD. However, this approach faces a fundamental challenge: LLMs operate on discrete tokens and struggle to directly process long, continuous signals. Consequently, naive time-to-text serialization suffers from a lack of contextual grounding and representation alignment between the two modalities. To address this gap, we introduce AXIS, a framework that conditions a frozen LLM for nuanced time-series understanding. Instead of direct serialization, AXIS enriches the LLM's input with three complementary hints derived from the series: (i) a symbolic numeric hint for numerical grounding, (ii) a context-integrated, step-aligned hint distilled from a pretrained time-series encoder to capture fine-grained dynamics, and (iii) a task-prior hint that encodes global anomaly characteristics. Furthermore, to facilitate robust evaluation of explainability, we introduce a new benchmark featuring multi-format questions and rationales that supervise contextual grounding and pattern-level semantics. Extensive experiments, including both LLM-based and human evaluations, demonstrate that AXIS yields explanations of significantly higher quality and achieves competitive detection accuracy compared to general-purpose LLMs, specialized time-series LLMs, and time-series Vision Language Models.
Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) is typically trained and evaluated on majority-voted labels, which simplifies benchmarking but masks subjectivity and provides little transparency into why predictions are made. This neglects valid minority annotations and limits interpretability. We propose an explainable Speech Language Model (SpeechLM) framework that frames SER as a generative reasoning task. Given an utterance, the model first produces a transcript, then outputs both an emotion label and a concise natural-language rationale grounded in lexical and acoustic cues. Rationales are generated by a reasoning-capable teacher LLM and used as intermediate supervision, combined with majority labels during fine-tuning. Unlike prior work primarily focused on boosting classification accuracy, we aim to enhance explainability while preserving competitive performance. To this end, we complement majority-label metrics with annotator-aware scoring that credits matches with any annotator label. On MSP-Podcast v1.12, our model maintains improvements over zero-shot SpeechLM baselines, and produces rationales that 7 human evaluators find plausible and well grounded. This demonstrates that incorporating rationale supervision offers a practical path toward interpretable SER without sacrificing predictive quality.
Retinal disease diagnosis is critical in preventing vision loss and reducing socioeconomic burdens. Globally, over 2.2 billion people are affected by some form of vision impairment, resulting in annual productivity losses estimated at $411 billion. Traditional manual grading of retinal fundus images by ophthalmologists is time-consuming and subjective. In contrast, deep learning has revolutionized medical diagnostics by automating retinal image analysis and achieving expert-level performance. In this study, we present EYE-DEX, an automated framework for classifying 10 retinal conditions using the large-scale Retinal Disease Dataset comprising 21,577 eye fundus images. We benchmark three pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models--VGG16, VGG19, and ResNet50--with our finetuned VGG16 achieving a state-of-the-art global benchmark test accuracy of 92.36%. To enhance transparency and explainability, we integrate the Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) technique to generate visual explanations highlighting disease-specific regions, thereby fostering clinician trust and reliability in AI-assisted diagnostics.
This article presents a modular, component-based architecture for developing and evaluating AI agents that bridge the gap between natural language interfaces and complex enterprise data warehouses. The system directly addresses core challenges in data accessibility by enabling non-technical users to interact with complex data warehouses through a conversational interface, translating ambiguous user intent into precise, executable database queries to overcome semantic gaps. A cornerstone of the design is its commitment to transparent decision-making, achieved through a multi-layered reasoning framework that explains the "why" behind every decision, allowing for full interpretability by tracing conclusions through specific, activated business rules and data points. The architecture integrates a robust quality assurance mechanism via an automated evaluation framework that serves multiple functions: it enables performance benchmarking by objectively measuring agent performance against golden standards, and it ensures system reliability by automating the detection of performance regressions during updates. The agent's analytical depth is enhanced by a statistical context module, which quantifies deviations from normative behavior, ensuring all conclusions are supported by quantitative evidence including concrete data, percentages, and statistical comparisons. We demonstrate the efficacy of this integrated agent-development-with-evaluation framework through a case study on an insurance claims processing system. The agent, built on a modular architecture, leverages the BigQuery ecosystem to perform secure data retrieval, apply domain-specific business rules, and generate human-auditable justifications. The results confirm that this approach creates a robust, evaluable, and trustworthy system for deploying LLM-powered agents in data-sensitive, high-stakes domains.
Since the advent of large language models (LLMs), research has focused on instruction following and deductive reasoning. A central question remains: can these models discover new knowledge, and how can we evaluate this ability? We address this by studying abductive reasoning-the generation of plausible hypotheses to explain observations-and introduce GEAR (General Evaluation for Abductive Reasoning), a general-purpose, fully automated, transparent, and label-free evaluation paradigm. GEAR scores hypothesis sets by three metrics: consistency (each hypothesis explains the observations), generalizability (consistent hypotheses make meaningful predictions on unseen inputs), and diversity (the set covers distinct predictions and patterns). Built this way, GEAR is scalable (no human gold answers), reliable (deterministic scoring aligned with classical abduction), and open-ended (scores improve only when models produce new plausible hypotheses, unlike static benchmarks that saturate once accuracy is high). Using GEAR, we conduct a fine-grained study of nine LLMs on four abduction benchmarks with 1,500 problems, generating over 50,000 candidate hypotheses and revealing model differences obscured by gold-answer or purely human evaluations. We further propose a momentum-based curriculum that adjusts GEAR-derived training data by learning velocity: it starts with what the model learns quickly and shifts toward harder objectives such as generating diverse hypotheses once the model is confident on foundational objectives. Without gold-label supervision, this strategy improves all GEAR objectives and these gains transfer to established abductive reasoning benchmarks. Taken together, GEAR provides a principled framework that evaluates abduction and supplies label-free, scalable training signals that help LLMs produce more diverse and reliable hypotheses.
Facial Beauty Prediction (FBP) has made significant strides with the application of deep learning, yet state-of-the-art models often exhibit critical limitations, including architectural constraints, inherent demographic biases, and a lack of transparency. Existing methods, primarily based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), excel at capturing local texture but struggle with global facial harmony, while Vision Transformers (ViTs) effectively model long-range dependencies but can miss fine-grained details. Furthermore, models trained on benchmark datasets can inadvertently learn and perpetuate societal biases related to protected attributes like ethnicity. To address these interconnected challenges, we propose \textbf{FairViT-GAN}, a novel hybrid framework that synergistically integrates a CNN branch for local feature extraction and a ViT branch for global context modeling. More significantly, we introduce an adversarial debiasing mechanism where the feature extractor is explicitly trained to produce representations that are invariant to protected attributes, thereby actively mitigating algorithmic bias. Our framework's transparency is enhanced by visualizing the distinct focus of each architectural branch. Extensive experiments on the SCUT-FBP5500 benchmark demonstrate that FairViT-GAN not only sets a new state-of-the-art in predictive accuracy, achieving a Pearson Correlation of \textbf{0.9230} and reducing RMSE to \textbf{0.2650}, but also excels in fairness. Our analysis reveals a remarkable \textbf{82.9\% reduction in the performance gap} between ethnic subgroups, with the adversary's classification accuracy dropping to near-random chance (52.1\%). We believe FairViT-GAN provides a robust, transparent, and significantly fairer blueprint for developing responsible AI systems for subjective visual assessment.
The chemical reaction recommendation is to select proper reaction condition parameters for chemical reactions, which is pivotal to accelerating chemical science. With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), there is growing interest in leveraging their reasoning and planning capabilities for reaction condition recommendation. Despite their success, existing methods rarely explain the rationale behind the recommended reaction conditions, limiting their utility in high-stakes scientific workflows. In this work, we propose ChemMAS, a multi-agent system that reframes condition prediction as an evidence-based reasoning task. ChemMAS decomposes the task into mechanistic grounding, multi-channel recall, constraint-aware agentic debate, and rationale aggregation. Each decision is backed by interpretable justifications grounded in chemical knowledge and retrieved precedents. Experiments show that ChemMAS achieves 20-35% gains over domain-specific baselines and outperforms general-purpose LLMs by 10-15% in Top-1 accuracy, while offering falsifiable, human-trustable rationales, which establishes a new paradigm for explainable AI in scientific discovery.
A central challenge in explainable AI, particularly in the visual domain, is producing explanations grounded in human-understandable concepts. To tackle this, we introduce OCEAN (Object-Centric Explananda via Agent Negotiation), a novel, inherently interpretable framework built on object-centric representations and a transparent multi-agent reasoning process. The game-theoretic reasoning process drives agents to agree on coherent and discriminative evidence, resulting in a faithful and interpretable decision-making process. We train OCEAN end-to-end and benchmark it against standard visual classifiers and popular posthoc explanation tools like GradCAM and LIME across two diagnostic multi-object datasets. Our results demonstrate competitive performance with respect to state-of-the-art black-box models with a faithful reasoning process, which was reflected by our user study, where 927 participants consistently rated OCEAN's explanations as more intuitive and trustworthy.
Electrospun yarns often fall short of the strength and stiffness of their\nconstituent nanofibers because of loose packing and inter-fiber slip. We report\na simple, twist-free route to close this gap by liquid-assisted rolling: yarns\nare briefly wetted (water or ethanol) and subjected to gentle rolling action\n(mechanical strokes perpendicular and parallel to the yarn axis), then dried\nunder controlled conditions so that meniscus forces compact the assembly into\ntightly bound bundles. The treatment yields large gains in tensile strength and\nmodulus, and as yarn diameter decreases the properties of liquid-treated yarns\napproach single-fiber limits, indicating more efficient load transfer.\nDry-rolling controls produce negligible changes compared to as-spun yarns,\nconfirming that capillarity-driven consolidation, rather than mechanical\npressing, dominates the improvement. Water consistently outperforms ethanol,\nreflecting its larger elastocapillary driving term gamma*(1 + cos theta) on PAN\nand thus stronger capillary compaction; a short post-treatment anneal near Tg\nfurther increases stiffness with a corresponding reduction in ductility. To\nrationalize these trends, we quantify microstructure via SEM-derived alignment\nand packing density and show that these complementary descriptors jointly\nexplain variability in mechanical response. A compact constitutive framework,\ngrounded in distributed fiber recruitment and adhesion/frictional contact,\ncaptures the observed strengthening-ductility trade-off across processing\nroutes. The results establish capillarity-driven consolidation as a scalable\npathway to engineer processing-structure-property relationships in hierarchical\npolymer fiber assemblies and provide practical guidance f"
Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) suffer from high inter-subject variability and limited labeled data, often requiring lengthy calibration phases. In this work, we present an end-to-end approach that explicitly models the subject dependency using lightweight convolutional neural networks (CNNs) conditioned on the subject's identity. Our method integrates hyperparameter optimization strategies that prioritize class imbalance and evaluates two conditioning mechanisms to adapt pre-trained models to unseen subjects with minimal calibration data. We benchmark three lightweight architectures on a time-modulated Event-Related Potentials (ERP) classification task, providing interpretable evaluation metrics and explainable visualizations of the learned representations. Results demonstrate improved generalization and data-efficient calibration, highlighting the scalability and practicality of subject-adaptive BCIs.