We study the mechanism design problem of facility location on a metric space in the learning-augmented framework, where mechanisms have access to imperfect predictions of the optimal facility locations. Our objective is to design strategyproof (SP) mechanisms that truthfully elicit agents’ preferences over facility locations and, using the given prediction, select a facility location that approximately minimizes the maximum cost among all agents. In particular, we seek SP mechanisms whose approximation guarantees depend on the prediction error: they should achieve improved performance when the prediction is accurate (the property of consistency) while still ensuring strong worst-case guarantees when the prediction is arbitrarily inaccurate (the property of robustness). On the real line, we characterize all deterministic SP mechanisms with consistency strictly better than 2 and bounded robustness for the maximum cost. We show that any such mechanism must coincide with the MinMaxP mechanism, which returns the prediction if it lies between the two extreme agent locations and otherwise returns the agent location closest to the prediction. For any prediction error η≥ 0 , we prove that MinMaxP achieves a (1+min (1, η )) -approximation and that no deterministic SP mechanism can obtain a better approximation ratio. In addition, for two-dimensional spaces with the ℓ ^p distance, we analyze the approximation guarantees of a deterministic mechanism that applies MinMaxP independently on each coordinate, as well as a randomized mechanism that selects between two deterministic mechanisms with carefully chosen probabilities. We further extend these results to the L_p -norm social cost objective on the line metric and the maximum cost objective on the tree metric. Finally, we examine the group strategyproofness of the mechanisms.
Large language model (LLM)-based systems are becoming increasingly popular for solving tasks by constructing executable workflows that interleave LLM calls, information retrieval, tool use, code execution, memory updates, and verification. This survey reviews recent methods for designing and optimizing such workflows, which we treat as agentic computation graphs (ACGs). We organize the literature based on when workflow structure is determined, where structure refers to which components or agents are present, how they depend on each other, and how information flows between them. This lens distinguishes static methods, which fix a reusable workflow scaffold before deployment, from dynamic methods, which select, generate, or revise the workflow for a particular run before or during execution. We further organize prior work along three dimensions: when structure is determined, what part of the workflow is optimized, and which evaluation signals guide optimization (e.g., task metrics, verifier signals, preferences, or trace-derived feedback). We also distinguish reusable workflow templates, run-specific realized graphs, and execution traces, separating reusable design choices from the structures actually deployed in a given run and from realized runtime behavior. Finally, we outline a structure-aware evaluation perspective that complements downstream task metrics with graph-level properties, execution cost, robustness, and structural variation across inputs. Our goal is to provide a clear vocabulary, a unified framework for positioning new methods, a more comparable view of existing body of literature, and a more reproducible evaluation standard for future work in workflow optimizations for LLM agents.
Traditional graduate engineering training often lacks frameworks to view engineering as a socio-technical endeavour in the service of vulnerable populations, while graduate engineering research is often done to advance the careers of graduate advisors, presented in professional conferences, published in academic journals, and evaluated according to its contributions to the output of research labs. This paper shows how graduate students working on Engineering-for-Community-Development (ECD) research projects (1) acquire socio-technical education that critically connects their personal histories with ECD (formation); (2) translate their scholarship into formats and language for effective and responsible engagement with the communities they want to serve (translation); and (3) extend their scholarship into opportunities for undergraduate engineers interested in ECD (extension). With the growth of ECD-related graduate programs, there is an increasing need for effective models for formation, research translation, and extension, like those proposed in this paper.
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on some task-specific datasets has been a primary use of LLMs. However, it has been empirically observed that this approach to enhancing capability inevitably compromises safety, a phenomenon also known as the safety-capability trade-off in LLM fine-tuning. This article presents a theoretical framework for understanding the interplay between safety and capability in two primary safety-aware LLM fine-tuning strategies, providing new insights into the effects of data similarity, context overlap, and alignment loss landscape. Our theoretical results characterize the fundamental limits of the safety-capability trade-off in LLM fine-tuning, which are also validated by numerical experiments.
Going beyond simple text processing, financial auditing requires detecting semantic, structural, and numerical inconsistencies across large-scale disclosures. As financial reports are filed in XBRL, a structured XML format governed by accounting standards, auditing becomes a structured information extraction and reasoning problem involving concept alignment, taxonomy-defined relations, and cross-document consistency. Although large language models (LLMs) show promise on isolated financial tasks, their capability in professional-grade auditing remains unclear. We introduce FinAuditing, a taxonomy-aligned, structure-aware benchmark built from real XBRL filings. It contains 1,102 annotated instances averaging over 33k tokens and defines three tasks: Financial Semantic Matching (FinSM), Financial Relationship Extraction (FinRE), and Financial Mathematical Reasoning (FinMR). Evaluations of 13 state-of-the-art LLMs reveal substantial gaps in concept retrieval, taxonomy-aware relation modeling, and consistent cross-document reasoning. These findings highlight the need for realistic, structure-aware benchmarks. We release the evaluation code at https://github.com/The-FinAI/FinAuditing and the dataset at https://huggingface.co/collections/TheFinAI/finauditing. The task currently serves as the official benchmark of an ongoing public evaluation contest at https://open-finance-lab.github.io/SecureFinAI_Contest_2026/.
