Instruction-following is a critical capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). While existing works primarily focus on assessing how well LLMs adhere to user instructions, they often overlook scenarios where instructions contain conflicting constraints—a common occurrence in complex prompts. The behavior of LLMs under such conditions remains under-explored. To bridge this gap, we introduce ConInstruct, a benchmark specifically designed to assess LLMs' ability to detect and resolve conflicts within user instructions. Using this dataset, we evaluate LLMs' conflict detection performance and analyze their conflict resolution behavior. Our experiments reveal two key findings: (1) Most proprietary LLMs exhibit strong conflict detection capabilities, whereas among open-source models, only DeepSeek-R1 demonstrates similarly strong performance. DeepSeek-R1 and Claude-4.5-Sonnet achieve the highest average F1-scores at 91.5% and 87.3%, respectively, ranking first and second overall. (2) Despite their strong conflict detection abilities, LLMs rarely explicitly notify users about the conflicts or request clarification when faced with conflicting constraints. These results underscore a critical shortcoming in current LLMs and highlight an important area for future improvement when designing instruction-following LLMs.

Time series forecasting requires architectures that simultaneously achieve three competing objectives: (1) strict temporal causality for reliable predictions, (2) sub-quadratic complexity for practical scalability, and (3) multi-scale pattern recognition for accurate long-horizon forecasting. We introduce AutoHFormer, a hierarchical autoregressive transformer that addresses these challenges through three key innovations: 1) Hierarchical Temporal Modeling: Our architecture decomposes predictions into segment-level blocks processed in parallel, followed by intra-segment sequential refinement. This dual-scale approach maintains temporal coherence while enabling efficient computation. 2) Dynamic Windowed Attention: The attention mechanism employs learnable causal windows with exponential decay, reducing complexity while preserving precise temporal relationships. This design avoids both the anti-causal violations of standard transformers and the sequential bottlenecks of RNN hybrids. 3) Adaptive Temporal Encoding: a novel position encoding system is adopted to capture time patterns at multiple scales. It combines fixed oscillating patterns for short-term variations with learnable decay rates for long-term trends. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that AutoHFormer 10.76X faster training and 6.06X memory reduction compared to PatchTST on PEMS08, while maintaining consistent accuracy across 96-720 step horizons in most of cases. These breakthroughs establish new benchmarks for efficient and precise time series modeling. Implementations of our method and all baselines in hierarchical autoregressive mechanism are available at https://github.com/lizzyhku/Autotime.

Sequential recommendation systems require both temporal efficiency to handle long interaction histories and hierarchical representation to model complex user–item relationships. Existing approaches face a fundamental tension: Mamba-based methods offer linear-time efficiency ( \(\mathcal{O}(L)\) ) but operate in Euclidean space, which distorts hierarchical patterns; hyperbolic models capture taxonomies well but suffer quadratic complexity ( \(\mathcal{O}(L^{2})\) ). To solve this dual challenge , we propose Hyperbolic Mamba (HMamba), the first architecture that unifies curvature-aware state spaces with hyperbolic geometry. Our key insight is that hyperbolic curvature \(\kappa\) simultaneously governs: (1) state transition granularity through \(\mathbf{\bar{A}}=\exp(\Delta\mathbf{A}\odot\mathbf{K}(\kappa))\) and (2) hierarchical distance preservation via \(d_{\mathcal{L}}\propto\sqrt{\kappa}\log(\cdot)\) . This enables joint optimization of efficiency and hierarchy—addressing the previously unsolved problem of deep-long modeling . Experiments show HMamba achieves 3–11% accuracy gains while maintaining 3.2 \(\times\) faster training than attention-based models, establishing a new paradigm for hierarchy-aware sequential recommendation. The code and datasets accompanying our paper are publicly available at https://github.com/CoderPowerBeyond/HMamba .

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have gained considerable attention in recent years for traffic flow prediction due to their ability to learn spatio-temporal pattern representations through a graph-based message-passing framework. Although GNNs have shown great promise in handling traffic datasets, their deployment in real-life applications has been hindered by scalability constraints arising from high-order message passing. Additionally, the over-smoothing problem of GNNs may lead to indistinguishable region representations as the number of layers increases, resulting in performance degradation. To address these challenges, we propose a new knowledge distillation paradigm termed LightST that transfers spatial and temporal knowledge from a high-capacity teacher to a lightweight student. Specifically, we introduce a spatio-temporal knowledge distillation framework that helps student MLPs capture graph-structured global spatio-temporal patterns while alleviating the over-smoothing effect with adaptive knowledge distillation. Extensive experiments verify that LightST significantly speeds up traffic flow predictions by 5X to 40X compared to state-of-the-art spatio-temporal GNNs, all while maintaining superior accuracy.

Spatial-temporal graph representations play a crucial role in urban sensing applications, including traffic analysis, human mobility behavior modeling, and citywide crime prediction. However, a key challenge lies in the noisy and sparse nature of spatial-temporal data, which limits existing neural networks' ability to learn meaningful region representations in the spatial-temporal graph. To overcome these limitations, we propose HGAurban, a novel heterogeneous spatial-temporal graph masked autoencoder that leverages generative self-supervised learning for robust urban data representation. Our framework introduces a spatial-temporal heterogeneous graph encoder that extracts region-wise dependencies from multi-source data, enabling comprehensive modeling of diverse spatial relationships. Within our self-supervised learning paradigm, we implement a masked autoencoder that jointly processes node features and graph structure. This approach automatically learns heterogeneous spatial-temporal patterns across regions, significantly improving the representation of dynamic temporal correlations. Comprehensive experiments across multiple spatiotemporal mining tasks demonstrate that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods and robustly handles real-world urban data challenges, including noise and sparsity in both spatial and temporal dimensions.

Existing code generation benchmarks primarily evaluate functional correctness, with limited attention to code efficiency, and they are often restricted to a single language such as Python. To address this gap, we introduce EffiBench‑X, the first large‑scale multi‑language benchmark specifically designed for robust efficiency evaluation of LLM‑generated code. EffiBench‑X supports Python, C++, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, and Go, and comprises competitive programming tasks paired with human‑expert solutions as efficiency baselines. Evaluating state‑of‑the‑art LLMs on EffiBench‑X reveals that while models frequently generate functionally correct code, they consistently underperform human experts in efficiency. Even the most efficient LLM‑generated solutions (e.g., Qwen3‑32B) achieve only around 62% of human efficiency on average, with significant language‑specific variation: models tend to perform better in Python, Ruby, and JavaScript than in Java, C++, and Go (e.g., DeepSeek‑R1’s Python code is markedly more efficient than its Java code). These findings highlight the need for research into optimization‑oriented methods to improve the efficiency of LLM‑generated code across diverse languages. The dataset and evaluation infrastructure are publicly available at https://github.com/EffiBench/EffiBench-X.git and https://huggingface.co/datasets/EffiBench/effibench-x.

Subcircuit matching in a large-scale analog circuit is a fundamental problem in VLSI computer-aided design (CAD). Existing approaches suffer from a poor scalability issue for a large-scale analog circuit. In this article, we propose a graph learning-boosted subcircuit matching framework for large-scale analog circuits named SMART, consisting of two stages. In the first stage, we customize hypergraph neural networks to map circuit topology for embedding space. Then, coarse subcircuit recognition is directly performed in the embedding space by geometric relations between the query circuit and all candidate subcircuits within the target circuit. In the second stage, a radial matching method, including device attribute matching, connection relationship matching and uniqueness-based matching, is customized to perform fine matching and obtain matches between interconnections and devices in the query circuit and candidate subcircuits. Experimental results show our SMART can outperform state-of-the-art search-based method VF3 and learning-based method NeuroMatch, and achieve the fastest speed. Specifically, using our framework for subcircuit matching can achieve up to$135\times $speedup with slight accuracy loss, and up to$7\times $speedup while maintaining 100% accuracy.

The widespread adoption of smartphones and Location-Based Social Networks has led to a massive influx of spatio-temporal data, creating unparalleled opportunities for enhancing Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation systems. These advanced POI systems are crucial for enriching user experiences, enabling personalized interactions, and optimizing decision-making processes in the digital landscape. However, existing surveys tend to focus on traditional approaches and few of them delve into cutting-edge developments, emerging architectures, as well as security considerations in POI recommendations. To address this gap, our survey stands out by offering a comprehensive, up-to-date review of POI recommendation systems, covering advancements in models, architectures, and security aspects. We systematically examine the transition from traditional models to advanced techniques such as large language models. Additionally, we explore the architectural evolution from centralized to decentralized and federated learning systems, highlighting the improvements in scalability and privacy. Furthermore, we address the increasing importance of security, examining potential vulnerabilities and privacy-preserving approaches. Our taxonomy provides a structured overview of the current state of POI recommendation, while we also identify promising directions for future research in this rapidly advancing field.

Factual error correction (FEC) aims to revise factual errors in false claims with minimal editing, making them faithful to the provided evidence. This task is crucial for alleviating the hallucination problem encountered by large language models. Given the lack of paired data (i.e., false claims and their corresponding correct claims), existing methods typically adopt the ‘mask-then-correct’ paradigm. This paradigm relies solely on unpaired false claims and correct claims, thus being referred to as distantly supervised methods. These methods require a masker to explicitly identify factual errors within false claims before revising with a corrector. However, the absence of paired data to train the masker makes accurately pinpointing factual errors within claims challenging. To mitigate this, we propose to improve FEC by Learning to Inject Factual Errors (LIFE), a three-step distantly supervised method: ‘mask-corrupt-correct’. Specifically, we first train a corruptor using the ‘mask-then-corrupt’ procedure, allowing it to deliberately introduce factual errors into correct text. The corruptor is then applied to correct claims, generating a substantial amount of paired data. After that, we filter out low-quality data, and use the remaining data to train a corrector. Notably, our corrector does not require a masker, thus circumventing the bottleneck associated with explicit factual error identification. Our experiments on a public dataset verify the effectiveness of LIFE in two key aspects: Firstly, it outperforms the previous best-performing distantly supervised method by a notable margin of 10.59 points in SARI Final (19.3% improvement). Secondly, even compared to ChatGPT prompted with in-context examples, LIFE achieves a superiority of 7.16 points in SARI Final.

Graph augmentation with contrastive learning has gained significant attention in the field of recommendation systems due to its ability to learn expressive user representations, even when labeled data is limited. However, directly applying existing GCL models to real-world recommendation environments poses challenges. There are two primary issues to address. Firstly, the lack of consideration for data noise in contrastive learning can result in noisy self-supervised signals, leading to degraded performance. Secondly, many existing GCL approaches rely on graph neural network (GNN) architectures, which can suffer from over-smoothing problems due to non-adaptive message passing. To address these challenges, we propose a principled framework called GraphAug. This framework introduces a robust data augmentor that generates denoised self-supervised signals, enhancing recommender systems. The GraphAug framework incorporates a graph information bottleneck (GIB)-regularized augmentation paradigm, which automatically distills informative self-supervision information and adaptively adjusts contrastive view generation. Through rigorous experimentation on real-world datasets, we thoroughly assessed the performance of our novel GraphAug model. The outcomes consistently unveil its superiority over existing baseline methods. The source code for our model is publicly available at: https://github.com/HKUDS/GraphAug.

Nowadays, it becomes a common practice to capture some data of sports games with devices such as GPS sensors and cameras and then use the data to perform various analyses on sports games, including tactics discovery, similar game retrieval, performance study, and so forth. While this practice has been conducted to many sports such as basketball and soccer, it remains largely unexplored on the billiards sports, which is mainly due to the lack of publicly available datasets. Motivated by this, we collect a dataset of billiards sports, which includes the layouts (i.e., locations) of billiards balls after performing break shots, called break shot layouts, the traces of the balls as a result of strikes (in the form of trajectories), and detailed statistics and performance indicators. We then study and develop techniques for three tasks on the collected dataset, including (1) prediction and (2) generation on the layouts data, and (3) similar billiards layout retrieval on the layouts data, which can serve different users such as coaches, players and fans. We conduct extensive experiments on the collected dataset and the results show that our methods perform effectively and efficiently.

Detecting anomalous trajectories has become an important task in many location-based applications. While many approaches have been proposed for this task, they suffer from various issues including (1) incapability of detecting anomalous subtrajectories, which are finer-grained anomalies in trajectory data, and/or (2) non-data driven, and/or (3) requirement of sufficient supervision labels which are costly to collect. In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement learning based solution called RL4OASD, which avoids all aforementioned issues of existing approaches. RL4OASD involves two networks, one responsible for learning features of road networks and trajectories and the other responsible for detecting anomalous subtrajectories based on the learned features, and the two networks can be trained iteratively without labeled data. Extensive experiments are conducted on two real datasets, and the results show that our solution can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art methods (with 20-30% improvement) and is efficient for online detection (it takes less than 0.1ms to process each newly generated data point).

Spatial-temporal graph learning has emerged as the state-of-the-art solution for modeling structured spatial-temporal data in learning region representations for various urban sensing tasks (e.g., crime forecasting, traffic flow prediction). However, most existing models are vulnerable to the quality of the generated region graph due to the inartistic graph-structured information aggregation schema. The ubiquitous spatial-temporal data noise and incompleteness in real-life scenarios bring difficulties to generate high-quality region representations. In this paper, we propose a Spatial-Temporal Adversarial Graph contrastive learning model (STAG) to tackle this challenge for adaptive self-supervised graph augmentation. Specifically, we propose a learnable contrastive learning function that enables the automated distillation of important multi-view self-supervised signals for adaptive spatial-temporal graph augmentation. To enhance the representation discrimination ability and robustness, the designed adversarial contrastive learning mechanism empowers STAG to adaptively identify hard samples for better self-supervision. Finally, a cross-view contrastive learning paradigm is introduced to model the inter-dependencies across view-specific region representations and preserve the underlying relation heterogeneity. We verify the superiority of our STAG method in various spatial-temporal prediction tasks on several benchmark datasets.

Among various region embedding methods, graph-based region relation learning models stand out, owing to their strong structure representation ability for encoding spatial correlations with graph neural networks. Despite their effectiveness, several key challenges have not been well addressed in existing methods: i) Data noise and missing are ubiquitous in many spatio-temporal scenarios due to a variety of factors. ii) Input spatio-temporal data (e.g., mobility traces) usually exhibits distribution heterogeneity across space and time. In such cases, current methods are vulnerable to the quality of the generated region graphs, which may lead to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we tackle the above challenges by exploring the Automated Spatio-Temporal graph contrastive learning paradigm (AutoST) over the heterogeneous region graph generated from multi-view data sources. Our AutoST framework is built upon a heterogeneous graph neural architecture to capture the multi-view region dependencies with respect to POI semantics, mobility flow patterns and geographical positions. To improve the robustness of our GNN encoder against data noise and distribution issues, we design an automated spatio-temporal augmentation scheme with a parameterized contrastive view generator. AutoST can adapt to the spatio-temporal heterogeneous graph with multi-view semantics well preserved. Extensive experiments for three downstream spatio-temporal mining tasks on several real-world datasets demonstrate the significant performance gain achieved by our AutoST over a variety of baselines. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/HKUDS/AutoST.

When users move in a physical space (e.g., an urban space), they would have some records called mobility records (e.g., trajectories) generated by devices such as mobile phones and GPS devices. Naturally, mobility records capture essential information of how users work, live and entertain in their daily lives, and therefore, they have been used in a wide range of tasks such as user profile inference, mobility prediction and traffic management. In this paper, we expand this line of research by investigating the problem of inferring user socioeconomic statuses (such as prices of users’ living houses as a proxy of users’ socioeconomic statuses) based on their mobility records, which can potentially be used in real-life applications such as the car loan business. For this task, we propose a socioeconomic-aware deep model called DeepSEI. The DeepSEI model incorporates two networks called deep network and recurrent network, which extract the features of the mobility records from three aspects, namely spatiality, temporality and activity, one at a coarse level and the other at a detailed level. We conduct extensive experiments on real mobility records data, POI data and house prices data. The results verify that the DeepSEI model achieves superior performance than existing studies. All datasets used in this paper will be made publicly available.

With the proliferation of tracking devices such as cameras and/or GPS sensors, sports data is being generated at an unprecedented speed and the interest in collecting some data from sports games has grown dramatically as well. The collected data facilitates various sports analytic tasks; however, these studies are mainly concerning with sports such as football and basketball. It remains largely unexplored for billiards sports though it is a popular sport of both strategy and physical skill, and this is mainly due to the lack of publicly available datasets. Motivated by this, we collect a dataset of billiards sports, which includes the layouts (i.e., locations) of billiards balls after performing break shots, called break shot layouts, the traces of the balls as a result of strikes (in the form of trajectories), and detailed statistics and performance indicators. On top of the dataset, we investigate several tasks, including prediction and generation on the layouts data and similarity search on the trajectory data, which can serve different users such as coaches, players and fans. We conduct extensive experiments on the collected dataset for the tasks, and the results demonstrate the superior performance of the methods proposed in this paper.

Compared with traditional convolutions, grouped convolutional neural networks are promising for both model performance and network parameters. However, existing models with the grouped convolution still have parameter redundancy. In this article, concerning the grouped convolution, we propose a sharing grouped convolution structure to reduce parameters. To efficiently eliminate parameter redundancy and improve model performance, we propose a Bayesian sharing framework to transfer the vanilla grouped convolution to be the sharing structure. Intragroup correlation and intergroup importance are introduced into the prior of the parameters. We handle the Maximum Type II likelihood estimation problem of the intragroup correlation and intergroup importance by a group LASSO-type algorithm. The prior mean of the sharing kernels is iteratively updated. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that on different grouped convolutional neural networks, the proposed sharing grouped convolution structure with the Bayesian sharing framework can reduce parameters and improve prediction accuracy. The proposed sharing framework can reduce parameters up to 64.17%. For ResNeXt-50 with the sharing grouped convolution on ImageNet dataset, network parameters can be reduced by 96.875% in all grouped convolutional layers, and accuracies are improved to 78.86% and 94.54% for top-1 and top-5, respectively.

Trajectory data has been widely used in various applications, including taxi services, traffic management, mobility analysis, etc. It is usually collected at a sensor's side in real time and corresponds to a sequence of sampled points. Constrained by the storage and/or network bandwidth of a sensor, it is common to simplify raw trajectory data when it is collected by dropping some sampled points. Many algorithms have been proposed for the error-bounded online trajectory simplification (EB-OTS) problem, which is to drop as many points as possible subject to that the error is bounded by an error tolerance. Nevertheless, these existing algorithms rely on pre-defined rules for decision making during the trajectory simplification process and there is no theoretical ground supporting their effectiveness. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent reinforcement learning method called MARL4TS for EB-OTS. MARL4TS involves two agents for different decision making problems during the trajectory simplification processes. Besides, MARL4TS has its objective equivalent to that of the EB-OTS problem, which provides some theoretical ground of its effectiveness. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world trajectory datasets, which verify that MARL4TS outperforms all existing algorithms in effectiveness and provides competitive efficiency.

Quality control is of vital importance during electronics production. As the methods of producing electronic circuits improve, there is an increasing chance of solder defects during assembling the printed circuit board (PCB). Many technologies have been incorporated for inspecting failed soldering, such as X-ray imaging, optical imaging, and thermal imaging. With some advanced algorithms, the new technologies are expected to control the production quality based on the digital images. However, current algorithms sometimes are not accurate enough to meet the quality control. Specialists are needed to do a follow-up checking. For automated X-ray inspection, joint of interest on the X-ray image is located by region of interest (ROI) and inspected by some algorithms. Some incorrect ROIs deteriorate the inspection algorithm. The high dimension of X-ray images and the varying sizes of image dimensions also challenge the inspection algorithms. On the other hand, recent advances on deep learning shed light on image-based tasks and are competitive to human levels. In this paper, deep learning is incorporated in X-ray imaging based quality control during PCB quality inspection. Two artificial intelligence (AI) based models are proposed and compared for joint defect detection. The noised ROI problem and the varying sizes of imaging dimension problem are addressed. The efficacy of the proposed methods are verified through experimenting on a real-world 3D X-ray dataset. By incorporating the proposed methods, specialist inspection workload is largely saved.

Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) plays an important role in smart grid. On one hand, AMI makes the smart grid more vulnerable to cyber attacks. On the other hand, large amount of available usage data helps detect energy thefts using machine learning methods. In this paper, we focus on energy theft that results in customer usage pattern change in utility database. To overcome the imbalance problem between normal and anomaly behavior data, we propose an anomaly detection framework called semi-supervised generative Gaussian mixture model, which can be controlled with detection indicator thresholds to adjust the intensity of detection. Human knowledge is successfully introduced into the model using detection indicators. We analyze it with various machine learning based methods including one-class SVM and autoencoder, and show that our framework has the most effective performance validated by simulation that is based on real-world energy consumption data.