Publications

mSTEB: Massively Multilingual Evaluation of LLMs on Speech and Text Tasks
Luel Hagos Beyene
Min Ma
Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi
Fabian David Schmidt
Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende
Large Language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on a wide range of tasks, including in multimodal settings such as spe… (voir plus)ech. However, their evaluation is often limited to English and a few high-resource languages. For low-resource languages, there is no standardized evaluation benchmark. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing mSTEB, a new benchmark to evaluate the performance of LLMs on a wide range of tasks covering language identification, text classification, question answering, and translation tasks on both speech and text modalities. We evaluated the performance of leading LLMs such as Gemini 2.0 Flash and GPT-4o (Audio) and state-of-the-art open models such as Qwen 2 Audio and Gemma 3 27B. Our evaluation shows a wide gap in performance between high-resource and low-resource languages, especially for languages spoken in Africa and Americas/Oceania. Our findings show that more investment is needed to address their under-representation in LLMs coverage.
Neural signatures of associational cortex emerge in a goal-directed model of visual search
NeuroFaith: Evaluating LLM Self-Explanation Faithfulness via Internal Representation Alignment
Jean-Noël Vittaut
Nicolas Chesneau
A. Chandar
Marie-Jeanne Lesot
Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate plausible free text self-explanations to justify their answers. However, these natural language ex… (voir plus)planations may not accurately reflect the model's actual reasoning process, pinpointing a lack of faithfulness. Existing faithfulness evaluation methods rely primarily on behavioral tests or computational block analysis without examining the semantic content of internal neural representations. This paper proposes NeuroFaith, a flexible framework that measures the faithfulness of LLM free text self-explanation by identifying key concepts within explanations and mechanistically testing whether these concepts actually influence the model's predictions. We show the versatility of NeuroFaith across 2-hop reasoning and classification tasks. Additionally, we develop a linear faithfulness probe based on NeuroFaith to detect unfaithful self-explanations from representation space and improve faithfulness through steering. NeuroFaith provides a principled approach to evaluating and enhancing the faithfulness of LLM free text self-explanations, addressing critical needs for trustworthy AI systems.
Parity Requires Unified Input Dependence and Negative Eigenvalues in SSMs
Jayesh Khullar
Franccois Rivest
A. Chandar
Preservice Teachers’ Computational Thinking Profiles
Tanya Chichekian
Annie Savard
Robust Reward Modeling via Causal Rubrics
Pragya Srivastava
Harman Singh
Rahul Madhavan
Sravanti Addepalli
Arun Suggala
Rengarajan Aravamudhan
Anirban Laha
Aravindan Raghuveer
Karthikeyan Shanmugam
Reward models (RMs) for LLM alignment often exhibit reward hacking, mistaking spurious correlates (e.g., length, format) for causal quality … (voir plus)drivers (e.g., factuality, relevance), leading to brittle RMs. We introduce CROME (Causally Robust Reward Modeling), a causally-grounded framework using targeted augmentations to mitigate this. CROME employs: (1) Causal Augmentations, pairs isolating specific causal attribute changes, to enforce sensitivity, and (2) Neutral Augmentations, tie-labeled pairs varying spurious attributes while preserving causal content, to enforce invariance. Crucially, augmentations target LLM-identified causal rubrics, requiring no prior knowledge of spurious factors. CROME significantly outperforms baselines on RewardBench (Avg +5.4\%, Safety +13.2\%, Reasoning +7.2\%) and demonstrates enhanced robustness via improved Best-of-N performance across RewardBench, WildGuardTest, and GSM8k.
Spectral State Space Model for Rotation-Invariant Visual Representation Learning
Sahar Dastani
Ali Bahri
Mehrdad Noori
David Osowiechi
Gustavo Adolfo Vargas Hakim
Farzad Beizaee
Milad Cheraghalikhani
Arnab Kumar Mondal
Christian Desrosiers
State Space Models (SSMs) have recently emerged as an alternative to Vision Transformers (ViTs) due to their unique ability of modeling glob… (voir plus)al relationships with linear complexity. SSMs are specifically designed to capture spatially proximate relationships of image patches. However, they fail to identify relationships between conceptually related yet not adjacent patches. This limitation arises from the non-causal nature of image data, which lacks inherent directional relationships. Additionally, current vision-based SSMs are highly sensitive to transformations such as rotation. Their predefined scanning directions depend on the original image orientation, which can cause the model to produce inconsistent patch-processing sequences after rotation. To address these limitations, we introduce Spectral VMamba, a novel approach that effectively captures the global structure within an image by leveraging spectral information derived from the graph Laplacian of image patches. Through spectral decomposition, our approach encodes patch relationships independently of image orientation, achieving rotation invariance with the aid of our Rotational Feature Normalizer (RFN) module. Our experiments on classification tasks show that Spectral VMamba outperforms the leading SSM models in vision, such as VMamba, while maintaining invariance to rotations and a providing a similar runtime efficiency.
A Systematic Literature Review of Large Language Model Applications in the Algebra Domain
Test Time Adaptation Using Adaptive Quantile Recalibration
What Matters when Modeling Human Behavior using Imitation Learning?
As AI systems become increasingly embedded in human decision-making process, aligning their behavior with human values is critical to ensuri… (voir plus)ng safe and trustworthy deployment. A central approach to AI Alignment called Imitation Learning (IL), trains a learner to directly mimic desirable human behaviors from expert demonstrations. However, standard IL methods assume that (1) experts act to optimize expected returns; (2) expert policies are Markovian. Both assumptions are inconsistent with empirical findings from behavioral economics, according to which humans are (1) risk-sensitive; and (2) make decisions based on past experience. In this work, we examine the implications of risk sensitivity for IL and show that standard approaches do not capture all optimal policies under risk-sensitive decision criteria. By characterizing these expert policies, we identify key limitations of existing IL algorithms in replicating expert performance in risk-sensitive settings. Our findings underscore the need for new IL frameworks that account for both risk-aware preferences and temporal dependencies to faithfully align AI behavior with human experts.
AIF-GEN: Open-Source Platform and Synthetic Dataset Suite for Reinforcement Learning on Large Language Models
Improving Context Fidelity via Native Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning
Jinlin Wang
Xinyu Wang
Shiqi Li
Xiangru Tang
Sirui Hong
Xiao-Wen Chang
Chenglin Wu
Large language models (LLMs) often struggle with context fidelity, producing inconsistent answers when responding to questions based on prov… (voir plus)ided information. Existing approaches either rely on expensive supervised fine-tuning to generate evidence post-answer or train models to perform web searches without necessarily improving utilization of the given context. We propose CARE, a novel native retrieval-augmented reasoning framework that teaches LLMs to explicitly integrate in-context evidence within their reasoning process with the model's own retrieval capabilities. Our method requires minimal labeled evidence data while significantly enhancing both retrieval accuracy and answer generation performance through strategically retrieved in-context tokens in the reasoning chain. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world and counterfactual QA benchmarks demonstrate that our approach substantially outperforms supervised fine-tuning, traditional retrieval-augmented generation methods, and external retrieval solutions. This work represents a fundamental advancement in making LLMs more accurate, reliable, and efficient for knowledge-intensive tasks.