BIASINSPECTOR: Detecting Bias in Structured Data through LLM Agents

Detecting biases in structured data is a complex and time-consuming task. Existing automated techniques are limited in diversity of data types and heavily reliant on human case-by-case handling, resulting in a lack of generalizability. Currently, large language model (LLM)-based agents have made significant progress in data science, but their ability to detect data biases is still insufficiently explored. To address this gap, we introduce the first end-to-end, multi-agent synergy framework, BIASINSPECTOR, designed for automatic bias detection in structured data based on specific user requirements. It first develops a multi-stage plan to analyze user-specified bias detection tasks and then implements it with a diverse and well-suited set of tools. It delivers detailed results that include explanations and visualizations. To address the lack of a standardized framework for evaluating the capability of LLM agents to detect biases in data, we further propose a comprehensive benchmark that includes multiple evaluation metrics and a large set of test cases. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves exceptional overall performance in structured data bias detection, setting a new milestone for fairer data applications.

DBF-UNet: A Two-Stage Framework for Carotid Artery Segmentation with Pseudo-Label Generation

Medical image analysis faces significant challenges due to limited annotation data, particularly in three-dimensional carotid artery segmentation tasks, where existing datasets exhibit spatially discontinuous slice annotations with only a small portion of expert-labeled slices in complete 3D volumetric data. To address this challenge, we propose a two-stage segmentation framework. First, we construct continuous vessel centerlines by interpolating between annotated slice centroids and propagate labels along these centerlines to generate interpolated annotations for unlabeled slices. The slices with expert annotations are used for fine-tuning SAM-Med2D, while the interpolated labels on unlabeled slices serve as prompts to guide segmentation during inference. In the second stage, we propose a novel Dense Bidirectional Feature Fusion UNet (DBF-UNet). This lightweight architecture achieves precise segmentation of complete 3D vascular structures. The network incorporates bidirectional feature fusion in the encoder and integrates multi-scale feature aggregation with dense connectivity for effective feature reuse. Experimental validation on public datasets demonstrates that our proposed method effectively addresses the sparse annotation challenge in carotid artery segmentation while achieving superior performance compared to existing approaches. The source code is available at https://github.com/Haoxuanli-Thu/DBF-UNet.

Towards Fast, Memory-based and Data-Efficient Vision-Language Policy

Vision Language Models (VLMs) pretrained on Internet-scale vision-language data have demonstrated the potential to transfer their knowledge to robotic learning. However, the existing paradigm encounters three critical challenges: (1) expensive inference cost resulting from large-scale model parameters, (2) frequent domain shifts caused by mismatched data modalities, and (3) limited capacity to handle past or future experiences. In this work, we propose LiteVLP, a lightweight, memory-based, and general-purpose vision-language policy generation model. LiteVLP is built upon a pre-trained 1B-parameter VLM and fine-tuned on a tiny-scale and conversation-style robotic dataset. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that LiteVLP outperforms state-of-the-art vision-language policy on VIMA-Bench, with minimal training time. Furthermore, LiteVLP exhibits superior inference speed while maintaining exceptional high accuracy. In long-horizon manipulation tasks, LiteVLP also shows remarkable memory ability, outperforming the best-performing baseline model by 18.8%. These results highlight LiteVLP as a promising model to integrating the intelligence of VLMs into robotic learning.

MeshPad: Interactive Sketch Conditioned Artistic-designed Mesh Generation and Editing

We introduce MeshPad, a generative approach that creates 3D meshes from sketch inputs. Building on recent advances in artistic-designed triangle mesh generation, our approach addresses the need for interactive artistic mesh creation. To this end, we focus on enabling consistent edits by decomposing editing into 'deletion' of regions of a mesh, followed by 'addition' of new mesh geometry. Both operations are invoked by simple user edits of a sketch image, facilitating an iterative content creation process and enabling the construction of complex 3D meshes. Our approach is based on a triangle sequence-based mesh representation, exploiting a large Transformer model for mesh triangle addition and deletion. In order to perform edits interactively, we introduce a vertex-aligned speculative prediction strategy on top of our additive mesh generator. This speculator predicts multiple output tokens corresponding to a vertex, thus significantly reducing the computational cost of inference and accelerating the editing process, making it possible to execute each editing step in only a few seconds. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MeshPad outperforms state-of-the-art sketch-conditioned mesh generation methods, achieving more than 22% mesh quality improvement in Chamfer distance, and being preferred by 90% of participants in perceptual evaluations.

Empowering LLMs with Logical Reasoning: A Comprehensive Survey

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable successes on various natural language tasks. However, recent studies have found that there are still significant challenges to the logical reasoning abilities of LLMs. This paper summarizes and categorizes the main challenges into two aspects: (1) Logical question answering, LLMs often fail to generate the correct answer within complex logical problem which requires sophisticated deductive, inductive or abductive reasoning given a collection of premises and constrains. (2) Logical consistency, LLMs are prone to producing responses contradicting themselves across different questions. For example, a state-of-the-art Macaw question-answering LLM answers Yes to both questions Is a magpie a bird? and Does a bird have wings? but answers No to Does a magpie have wings?. To facilitate this research direction, we comprehensively investigate the most cutting-edge methods and propose detailed taxonomies of these methods. Specifically, to accurately answer complex logic questions, previous methods can be categorized based on reliance on external solvers, prompts, pretraining, and fine-tuning. To avoid logical contradictions, we discuss concepts and solutions of various logical consistencies, including implication, negation, transitivity, factuality consistency, and their composites. In addition, we review commonly used benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics, and discuss promising research directions, such as extensions to modal logic to account for uncertainty, and efficient algorithms satisfying multiple logical consistencies simultaneously.

Exploring LLM-based Student Simulation for Metacognitive Cultivation

Metacognitive education plays a crucial role in cultivating students' self-regulation and reflective thinking, providing essential support for those with learning difficulties through academic advising. Simulating students with insufficient learning capabilities using large language models offers a promising approach to refining pedagogical methods without ethical concerns. However, existing simulations often fail to authentically represent students' learning struggles and face challenges in evaluation due to the lack of reliable metrics and ethical constraints in data collection. To address these issues, we propose a pipeline for automatically generating and filtering high-quality simulated student agents. Our approach leverages a two-round automated scoring system validated by human experts and employs a score propagation module to obtain more consistent scores across the student graph. Experimental results demonstrate that our pipeline efficiently identifies high-quality student agents, and we discuss the traits that influence the simulation's effectiveness. By simulating students with varying degrees of learning difficulties, our work paves the way for broader applications in personalized learning and educational assessment.

Learning Counterfactual Outcomes Under Rank Preservation

Counterfactual inference aims to estimate the counterfactual outcome at the individual level given knowledge of an observed treatment and the factual outcome, with broad applications in fields such as epidemiology, econometrics, and management science. Previous methods rely on a known structural causal model (SCM) or assume the homogeneity of the exogenous variable and strict monotonicity between the outcome and exogenous variable. In this paper, we propose a principled approach for identifying and estimating the counterfactual outcome. We first introduce a simple and intuitive rank preservation assumption to identify the counterfactual outcome without relying on a known structural causal model. Building on this, we propose a novel ideal loss for theoretically unbiased learning of the counterfactual outcome and further develop a kernel-based estimator for its empirical estimation. Our theoretical analysis shows that the rank preservation assumption is not stronger than the homogeneity and strict monotonicity assumptions, and shows that the proposed ideal loss is convex, and the proposed estimator is unbiased. Extensive semi-synthetic and real-world experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Decomposing and Fusing Intra- and Inter-Sensor Spatio-Temporal Signal for Multi-Sensor Wearable Human Activity Recognition

Wearable Human Activity Recognition (WHAR) is a prominent research area within ubiquitous computing. Multi-sensor synchronous measurement has proven to be more effective for WHAR than using a single sensor. However, existing WHAR methods use shared convolutional kernels for indiscriminate temporal feature extraction across each sensor variable, which fails to effectively capture spatio-temporal relationships of intra-sensor and inter-sensor variables. We propose the DecomposeWHAR model consisting of a decomposition phase and a fusion phase to better model the relationships between modality variables. The decomposition creates high-dimensional representations of each intra-sensor variable through the improved Depth Separable Convolution to capture local temporal features while preserving their unique characteristics. The fusion phase begins by capturing relationships between intra-sensor variables and fusing their features at both the channel and variable levels. Long-range temporal dependencies are modeled using the State Space Model (SSM), and later cross-sensor interactions are dynamically captured through a self-attention mechanism, highlighting inter-sensor spatial correlations. Our model demonstrates superior performance on three widely used WHAR datasets, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art models while maintaining acceptable computational efficiency. Our codes and supplementary materials are available at https://github.com/Anakin2555/DecomposeWHAR.

A Two-Stage Pretraining-Finetuning Framework for Treatment Effect Estimation with Unmeasured Confounding

Estimating the conditional average treatment effect (CATE) from observational data plays a crucial role in areas such as e-commerce, healthcare, and economics. Existing studies mainly rely on the strong ignorability assumption that there are no unmeasured confounders, whose presence cannot be tested from observational data and can invalidate any causal conclusion. In contrast, data collected from randomized controlled trials (RCT) do not suffer from confounding, but are usually limited by a small sample size. In this paper, we propose a two-stage pretraining-finetuning (TSPF) framework using both large-scale observational data and small-scale RCT data to estimate the CATE in the presence of unmeasured confounding. In the first stage, a foundational representation of covariates is trained to estimate counterfactual outcomes through large-scale observational data. In the second stage, we propose to train an augmented representation of the covariates, which is concatenated to the foundational representation obtained in the first stage to adjust for the unmeasured confounding. To avoid overfitting caused by the small-scale RCT data in the second stage, we further propose a partial parameter initialization approach, rather than training a separate network. The superiority of our approach is validated on two public datasets with extensive experiments. The code is available at https://github.com/zhouchuanCN/KDD25-TSPF.

Towards Understanding Extrapolation: a Causal Lens

Canonical work handling distribution shifts typically necessitates an entire target distribution that lands inside the training distribution. However, practical scenarios often involve only a handful of target samples, potentially lying outside the training support, which requires the capability of extrapolation. In this work, we aim to provide a theoretical understanding of when extrapolation is possible and offer principled methods to achieve it without requiring an on-support target distribution. To this end, we formulate the extrapolation problem with a latent-variable model that embodies the minimal change principle in causal mechanisms. Under this formulation, we cast the extrapolation problem into a latent-variable identification problem. We provide realistic conditions on shift properties and the estimation objectives that lead to identification even when only one off-support target sample is available, tackling the most challenging scenarios. Our theory reveals the intricate interplay between the underlying manifold's smoothness and the shift properties. We showcase how our theoretical results inform the design of practical adaptation algorithms. Through experiments on both synthetic and real-world data, we validate our theoretical findings and their practical implications.