Hallucinations, the generation of apparently convincing yet false statements, remain a major barrier to the safe deployment of LLMs. Building on the strong performance of self-detection methods, we examine the use of structured knowledge representations, namely knowledge graphs, to improve hallucination self-detection. Specifically, we propose a simple yet powerful approach that enriches hallucination self-detection by (i) converting LLM responses into knowledge graphs of entities and relations, and (ii) using these graphs to estimate the likelihood that a response contains hallucinations. We evaluate the proposed approach using two widely used LLMs, GPT-4o and Gemini-2.5-Flash, across two hallucination detection datasets. To support more reliable future benchmarking, one of these datasets has been manually curated and enhanced and is released as a secondary outcome of this work. Compared to standard self-detection methods and SelfCheckGPT, a state-of-the-art approach, our method achieves up to 16% relative improvement in accuracy and 20% in F1-score. Our results show that LLMs can better analyse atomic facts when they are structured as knowledge graphs, even when initial outputs contain inaccuracies. This low-cost, model-agnostic approach paves the way toward safer and more trustworthy language models.
Unlike traditional recommendation tasks, finite user time budgets introduce a critical resource constraint, requiring the recommender system to balance item relevance and evaluation cost. For example, in a mobile shopping interface, users interact with recommendations by scrolling, where each scroll triggers a list of items called slate. Users incur an evaluation cost - time spent assessing item features before deciding to click. Highly relevant items having higher evaluation costs may not fit within the user's time budget, affecting engagement. In this position paper, our objective is to evaluate reinforcement learning algorithms that learn patterns in user preferences and time budgets simultaneously, crafting recommendations with higher engagement potential under resource constraints. Our experiments explore the use of reinforcement learning to recommend items for users using Alibaba's Personalized Re-ranking dataset supporting slate optimization in e-commerce contexts. Our contributions include (i) a unified formulation of time-constrained slate recommendation modeled as Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with budget-aware utilities; (ii) a simulation framework to study policy behavior on re-ranking data; and (iii) empirical evidence that on-policy and off-policy control can improve performance under tight time budgets than traditional contextual bandit-based methods.
Satellite Image Time Series (SITS) data has proven effective for agricultural tasks due to its rich spectral and temporal nature. In this study, we tackle the task of stress detection in sugar-beet fields using a fully unsupervised approach. We propose a 3D convolutional autoencoder model to extract meaningful features from Sentinel-2 image sequences, combined with acquisition-date-specific temporal encodings to better capture the growth dynamics of sugar-beets. The learned representations are used in a downstream clustering task to separate stressed from healthy fields. The resulting stress detection system can be directly applied to data from different years, offering a practical and accessible tool for stress detection in sugar-beets.
The structural analogies of ResNets and Multigrid (MG) methods such as common building blocks like convolutions and poolings where already pointed out by He et al.\ in 2016. Multigrid methods are used in the context of scientific computing for solving large sparse linear systems arising from partial differential equations. MG methods particularly rely on two main concepts: smoothing and residual restriction / coarsening. Exploiting these analogies, He and Xu developed the MgNet framework, which integrates MG schemes into the design of ResNets. In this work, we introduce a novel neural network building block inspired by polynomial smoothers from MG theory. Our polynomial block from an MG perspective naturally extends the MgNet framework to Poly-Mgnet and at the same time reduces the number of weights in MgNet. We present a comprehensive study of our polynomial block, analyzing the choice of initial coefficients, the polynomial degree, the placement of activation functions, as well as of batch normalizations. Our results demonstrate that constructing (quadratic) polynomial building blocks based on real and imaginary polynomial roots enhances Poly-MgNet's capacity in terms of accuracy. Furthermore, our approach achieves an improved trade-off of model accuracy and number of weights compared to ResNet as well as compared to specific configurations of MgNet.
