Research

• General in-context learning for embodied agents1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  Enables models to adapt to new tasks and environments without retraining, improving robustness in real-world deployment.

  • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
• Cost and latency in embodied control loops1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  High computational and time costs limit real-time applicability of agentic systems in dynamic environments.

  • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
• Physical-state verification and failure recovery1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  Agents must reliably detect and correct errors in physical interactions to avoid irreversible failures in real-world tasks.

  • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
• Long-horizon task preservation in embodied agents1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  Maintaining progress over extended sequences is critical for complex, multi-step tasks in robotics and navigation.

  • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
• Open-source stacks for generalist computer-use agents1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Closed systems hinder reproducibility and systematic study of agent design for real-world computer tasks.

  • OpenGCUA: Toward a Fully Open Stack for Generalist Computer Useraises · addresses

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.

• Code models23+2200.0%
• Training & fine-tuning61+1933.3%
• Small LLMs11+1000.0%
• AI safety43+975.0%
• Evals97+781.8%
• Robotics28+600.0%
• Image & video generation34+580.0%
• Computer vision43+437.5%

• arXiv cs.CVOct 18

  Image Dehazing as In-Context Tabular Inference

  Le-Anh Tran

  Image dehazing is traditionally addressed through handcrafted physical priors or task-specific deep learning models, often requiring carefully designed architectures or extensive model training. Recent advances in tabular foundation models (TFMs), however, offer an alternative learning paradigm in which continuous relationships can be inferred directly from contextual examples without task-specific model training. Motivated by this capability, this paper investigates whether single-image dehazing can be effectively reformulated as an in-context tabular regression problem and introduces DehazeTab, a framework that estimates atmospheric transmission from structured image-patch representations. Specifically, overlapping patches extracted from hazy images are transformed into tabular samples using handcrafted haze-related descriptors, pretrained visual embeddings, or their hybrid combinations, while corresponding transmission patches are summarized as scalar regression targets. A pretrained TFM then performs in-context regression using labeled reference patches to predict transmission values for unseen images without any further fine-tuning. These predictions are spatially aggregated…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 18

  Spectral Adaptive Graph Transformer for Efficient and Scalable Traffic Forecasting

  Amirhossein Ghaffari, Susanna Pirttikangas, Ekaterina Gilman

  Traffic forecasting models based on spectral graph convolution offer an interpretable account of how information is mixed between sensors, but they rely on an eigendecomposition of the graph Laplacian. It costs cubic time, is fixed by the road network, and provides a symmetric operator that cannot represent the directed propagation of traffic congestion. Attention-based spatio-temporal transformers remove these limitations but generate a dense sensor-by-sensor attention map at each layer and time step, so memory, rather than accuracy, becomes the binding constraint on large networks. We introduce the spectral adaptive graph transformer, whose spatial operator is learned rather than derived from the Laplacian, directed rather than symmetric, and conditioned on the current traffic state rather than a static state, at a cost linear in the number of sensors. A sparse road graph diffusion branch provides the strictly local propagation that a low-rank operator cannot express, and a zero-initialized gate learns the balance between the two. Before spatial mixing, a unit-mean-gain frequency-bin attention module reweights each sensor's short-term periodicities according to its identity and…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 18

  Reflection-Guided Dynamics Rectification for Text-to-Image Generation

  Shuo Xu, Hanrui Ying, Debin Liu, Jianjun Li, Zhiyuan Ma

  Fine-grained rectification of existing generations under a limited additional budget remains a key problem in test-time optimization (TTO) for image generation. As for prior approaches, they could identify residual errors, but could not directly ensure that the model acts on the feedback during reasoning. Such errors stem from multiple sources, such as the initial noise or text prompt, and ultimately induce an execution gap of failing to handle potential deviations along the trajectory generating. However, classic models generally cannot remedy this gap. To narrow it, we propose Reflection-Guided Dynamics Rectification (RGDR), which turns reflections on completed outputs into corrective interventions on the process of sampling dynamics at the trajectory level. Specifically, RGDR could impact every sampling step by adapting to instantaneous intervention. Moreover, RGDR generates flexible candidates while adjudicating between them and the reference. As experiments show, rectification from RGDR starts from the existing base trajectory and reflection, and RGDR is substantially more effective than former trajectory exploration. Under matched budgets for additional image generation,…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 18

  HullProbe: Measuring Interventional Part Reliance in Maritime Vessel Classifiers

  Faisal Mohammad, Mohamed Younis

  Recognizing a vessel's type from an image supports maritime surveillance and sanctions monitoring, but a classifier can reach high accuracy by leaning on the generic hull instead of the more distinctive superstructure, and is then fooled when a vessel is re-hulled or occluded. De-biasing methods claim to remove such reliance, yet the field certifies them with worst-group accuracy, a proxy that needs group labels and only infers reliance from accuracy. We measure the reliance directly. HullProbe swaps a registered anatomical part of a vessel for another instance's and reads how much that part drives the decision, using a same-class swap to control for compositing artifacts. Because a surface vessel is a hull and a superstructure arranged along one axis, its parts form a 2x3 grid whose 2^6 = 64 swaps we evaluate exhaustively, and a single Walsh transform returns each part's interventional influence and its interaction spectrum. On planted shortcuts, where the true reliance is known, the measure tracks worst-group accuracy (r = -0.94 over 45 configurations), and replacing its learned segmenter with human annotations changes the hull-share by less than the audit's resolution. On the…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 18

  TIRE: Top-Down Formula Instantiation with Reliable Execution for Physics Problem Synthesis

  Xiaoyu Wu, Zhaoxin Yu, Xinglin Xiao, Nan Xu

  Advancing physics reasoning in large language models requires scalable training data that connect physical laws, concrete problem scenarios, and verifiable numerical answers. Expert-designed problems offer top-down control over physical laws, conditions, and scenarios, but require costly human effort. LLM-based synthesis from texts scales efficiently, but model-generated answers and assessments leave supervision vulnerable to hallucinations. We introduce TIRE, a framework for Top-Down Formula Instantiation with Reliable Execution that brings knowledge-driven problem construction to large-scale data generation. Top-down instantiation uses reusable physical formulas and their applicability conditions to control the physical relations and numerical configurations of generated problems. Reliable execution establishes reference answers before problem generation, providing a common numerical foundation for problem construction and teacher distillation. Together, these mechanisms combine control over problem content with execution-grounded supervision for both supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. Using TIRE, we construct TIRE-19k, spanning nine subfields of physics. Across…

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• arXiv cs.CROct 18

  Many Repairs, One Direction: Steering Code Models Toward Safer Cryptographic API Use

  Tianhe Lu, Sakuna Harinda Jayasundara, Eric Spero, Ewan Tempero, Robert Biddle +1

  Cryptographic API misuse in large language model-generated code can compromise software security. While many existing approaches improve code security by modifying model parameters or inputs, how representation changes associated with different cryptographic API repairs can support a shared intervention for safer code generation remains underexplored. To investigate this, we construct 48,000 matched program pairs across four programming languages and ten cryptographic API misuse categories. Each pair changes a specified API decision while preserving the programming task. Subtracting the misuse program's internal representation from its secure counterpart's gives a repair vector. Across five models, comparisons of mean repair vectors reveal stronger organization by misuse category than by language. These category-specific patterns also support a shared intervention. We introduce CrypSteer, which extracts a shared direction by normalizing repair differences and selecting a principal component aligned with repairs across misuse categories. With model weights fixed, adding one shared direction per model to its internal activations during generation improves aggregate target security…

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• arXiv stat.MLOct 18

  Decision-Target Reversal under Informative Label Missingness

  Farinborz Setoudehtazangi, Geoffrey J. McLachlan

  Informative label missingness can improve classification efficiency because the pattern of label availability may itself contain information about the discriminant structure. We show that this advantage need not persist across deployment objectives: with the data-generating model and statistical experiments held fixed, informative partial classification can be favourable under one loss and unfavourable under another. We call this phenomenon decision-target reversal. For binary Gaussian discrimination, we derive a local cost-sensitive excess-risk expansion and, in one dimension, obtain explicit critical cost ratios at which the first-order risk ordering reverses. We show that the required covariance geometry arises under finite uncertainty-dependent missingness mechanisms with a fixed marginal missing-label proportion. We then extend the analysis to multiclass finite-action problems through loss-specific active-boundary curvature, yielding a general decision-target frontier. Monte Carlo experiments illustrate the predicted reversals, and a descriptive gastrointestinal-lesion application with agreement-defined label availability illustrates sensitivity to deployment costs. The…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 18

  MemBubble: Benchmarking How Agent Memory Shapes LLM Response Diversity

  Jiajun Tan, Fei Sun, Xinyu Ma, Shixuan Zhang, Du Su +4

  Memory serves as the core component of LLM-based agents, enabling personalized responses via extracting and using user preferences from past interactions. However, its use may reduce response diversity, thereby narrowing the range of information available to users. Existing evaluations rely largely on synthetic interactions and cover few memory systems, leaving the effects of memory on response diversity insufficiently evaluated in real-world scenarios. We introduce MemBubble, a benchmark of 1000 instances built on preferences extracted from real user-assistant conversations. To measure the extent to which memory concentrates response distributions, we construct test queries in scenarios distinct from user preferences while preserving topical relevance through shared preference categories. Across multiple LLMs and memory mechanisms, entropy decreases by 34.7% on average compared with directly providing the full interaction history, highlighting the important role of memory processing in diversity loss. We also explore simple user-side interventions and changes in information availability but find that these do not effectively close the diversity gap. Our findings highlight the…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 18

  Trackable Skill Library Lifecycle Management for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

  Xi Zhu, Yuanlin Duan, Changyi Yang, Kai Mei, Riyang Bao +2

  Skill-augmented agentic RL has emerged as an effective approach to improving LLM agents on long-horizon tasks. Despite this progress, individual skills may follow distinct trajectories as the policy evolves, with some becoming redundant after the model internalizes their capabilities, others remaining valuable as external scaffolding, and still others turning harmful. However, existing skill library systems fail to identify each skill's true contribution due to free-riding among co-retrieved skills, difficulty confounding across tasks, and the absence of skill-specific counterfactual evidence, which prevents reliable skill lifecycle management. We propose TrackRL, an agentic RL framework where skill tracking drives skill library full lifecycle management. Specifically, within each GRPO group, we turn grouped sampling into online randomized controlled experiments. Independent random injection and within-group contrasts on the same task isolate each skill's true contribution, and reliability-weighted aggregation accumulates evidence across groups. As evidence accumulates, we continuously track skill utility, which measures the skill's causal contribution as external scaffolding,…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 18

  The Bottleneck Is Retrieval, Not Reading: Diagnosing Evidence-Based Generation with RAG for Long Context Question Answering

  Debopriyo Banerjee, Owais Aijaz, Ahmer Tabassum, Zhuohan Xie, Preslav Nakov +1

  Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is the dominant paradigm for grounding large language models in external corpora, but its similarity-driven, chunked pipeline has structural blind spots: it cannot anticipate which passages a question requires and discards document-level context that resolves cross-passage references. We introduce evidence-based generation (EBG), requiring models to return an answer with line-level citations, and a joint Ans+Evid metric that scores correctness and grounding simultaneously. We reformulate two corpora into evidence-grounded multi-document QA benchmarks- MultiHop-RAG and QASPER-MP, a multi-paper adaptation of QASPER with realistic short paper cues, and pair them with a controlled synthetic two-hop haystack and an evidence-augmented NoLiMa spanning 10K-1M characters. Across ten proprietary frontier and three open-weight LLMs, EBG isolates two RAG limitations that long-context models avoid: similarity retrieval surfaces any relevant chunk far more reliably than all required chunks for multi-fact queries, and chunking destroys document meta-information needed to resolve identity-bearing queries. EBG also exposes grounding failures invisible to…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 18

  Beyond Policy Discrepancy: Capability-Aware Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation

  Xuanfeng Yang, Le Gui, Jiaming Wang, Xuan Zhang

  Multi-teacher on-policy distillation (MOPD) integrates domain specialists into a shared student, but determining how strongly each teacher should supervise remains challenging. Existing discrepancy-based allocation can assign strong supervision even when the student already matches or exceeds the teacher's task performance, since behavioral mismatch does not necessarily imply a remaining capability deficit. We propose Capability-Aware Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation (CA-MOPD), which combines specialist merging with capability-guided allocation to account for what the student has already learned. CA-MOPD first merges reinforcement-learning specialists into a strong student initialization, then uses verifier-estimated teacher--student capability gaps to adjust domain-level distillation strength. Supervision decreases as capability gaps close and increases when estimated student capability regresses, while dense token-level guidance remains provided by the teachers. Across six benchmarks spanning mathematics, code generation, and instruction following, CA-MOPD achieves an average score of 32.22, outperforming naive MOPD, Open-MOPD, and the merged initialization by 0.86, 0.83,…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 18

  Memories That Outlive Their Reasons: Dependency-Tethered Memory for Tool-Using LLM Agents

  Yiqi Wang, Jinqian Ju, Jiaqi Zhang, Zhangkai Wu, Yiqun Duan +3

  Agents now act on the Web, publishing packages, models and datasets through registry APIs, and remembering past verifications spares them the work. But a verdict rests on premises. When a signing key is revoked, everything built on it stops passing, yet the advisory names only the key, and the old verdicts of its dependents may never share a retrieval window with it. This non-locality of invalidation turns memory into a liability: in long simulated chats, an agent reading a memory of atomic facts publishes 62% of the objects whose failure lies upstream, each backed by a record that was true when written. Yet derivation is local even when invalidation is not. Tether records, at write time, the exact versions each verdict derives from, and at read time withdraws any verdict whose support has failed anywhere in the store; the agent reads the same fields as before. On Fallout, a generator of versioned worlds with hypothesis-blind simulated histories shared by every memory, Tether publishes 0.3% of upstream-failing objects across three domains when relations are stated with their verdicts, with 37% fewer verification calls than checking everything. A-Mem and Graphiti re-verify most…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 18

  Behave Like Experts: Fusing Data with Semantic Knowledge for Effective and Efficient Semantic Map Construction

  Zhu Liu, Zhen Hu, Yuxuan Liu, Ying Liu

  Semantic map models (SMMs) construct a graph that reflects conceptual similarity by comparing cross-lingual form-meaning mappings. Experts build such models not only by obeying the data constraint, i.e., the connectivity hypothesis, which states that conceptual nodes belonging to the same form must be connected, but also by incorporating their prior semantic knowledge. Current automatic methods ignore this knowledge, which harms both accuracy and efficiency by enlarging the search space of candidate graphs. In this paper, we fuse the distributional semantic knowledge hidden in the internal representations of language models into a top-down, data-driven algorithm. This expert-like behavior re-sorts the candidates in a huge search space, guided by conceptual semantics similarity. Experiments on a self-collected benchmark of 10 datasets and comprehensive metrics show that our method builds SMMs both effectively and efficiently.

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 18

  ClinSDT: LLM-Encoded Clinical Semantic Guidance for Sepsis Treatment via Decision Transformer

  Yanyan Wu, Guanyu Zhu, Changbin Zhao, Jin Zhang, Dexu Yu +5

  Offline sepsis treatment aims to learn treatment policies from retrospective ICU trajectories. Decision Transformer-based methods provide a natural sequence modeling framework for this task, but they mainly rely on raw physiological states and historical clinician actions. Such raw trajectory tokens may not explicitly capture clinical semantics that clinicians use in practice, such as patient severity, recent treatment response, and current risk priorities. To address this limitation, we propose ClinSDT, an LLM-assisted Decision Transformer framework for offline sepsis treatment. ClinSDT uses a frozen LLM as a semantic bridge rather than a treatment decision maker. It constructs three clinical semantic views from ICU trajectories, namely Profile, Context, and Advisory, and inserts their encoded representations as independent tokens into a Decision Transformer policy. To support policy refinement and rollout, ClinSDT further trains a Treatment-Response Forecaster to estimate the next physiological state, SAPS-II change, and predictive uncertainty from state-action inputs. In the second training stage, the forecaster screens local counterfactual treatment candidates, and only…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 18

  LC-TSRNet: A Land-Cover-Guided Two-Stage Network for Annual MODIS Surface Reflectance Time Series Reconstruction

  Wenjuan Zhang, Xuesong Ma, Zhen Li, Meixiang Wang, Caimeng Yi +3

  MODIS surface reflectance (SR) products often suffer from data gaps due to cloud contamination and sensor malfunctions, limiting their applications in long-term and large-scale studies. Most existing methods rely on cloud-free observations from optical time series or introduce SAR time series as auxiliary information. However, due to the coarse spatial resolution of MODIS, cloud-free reference images are difficult to obtain, and SAR imagery is not well matched to the spatial resolution of MODIS, making it difficult to provide effective prior constraints. To address these issues, this study proposes LC-TSRNet for seamless reconstruction of annual MODIS SR products. In the first stage, an annual land cover map is introduced as prior knowledge, and CSPM is designed by leveraging the spectral similarity within identical land cover types, thereby providing prior spectral constraints for missing regions. In the second stage, to address large-area, persistent, and overlapping gaps in MODIS imagery, SMRM is designed to adaptively exploit and integrate multi-scale spatiotemporal contextual information. Meanwhile, to address the limited collaborative utilization of spatio-temporal-spectral…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 18

  Memory as Belief: Bayesian Evolution of Memory for Self-Evolving LLM Agents

  Yiming Xu, Qian Yang, Zihan Chen, Yuefei Wu, Wenhan Zeng +2

  Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external memory to accumulate past experiences for continual adaptation. However, effectively reusing memory requires accurately assessing its value, as retrieved experiences may become unreliable when transferred across task contexts. Despite its importance, memory valuation remains largely underexplored, with existing methods relying on historical retrieval success rates that overlook the context dependency of memory usefulness and the varying reliability of estimates under different amounts of evidence. Inspired by the Bayesian brain hypothesis, we propose BEAM (Bayesian-style Evolutionary Agentic Memory), a framework that reformulates memory value evaluation as a parameterized cognitive inference process, where memory value is represented as a context-conditioned dynamic belief rather than a passive historical statistic. Specifically, BEAM infers memory value beliefs from current task contexts and continuously calibrates them using execution feedback as empirical evidence, transforming memory from passive storage into an adaptive cognitive mechanism for continual self-evolution. Extensive experiments across reasoning and…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 18

  Polynomial Learning of Positive ReLU Networks under Gaussian Inputs

  Zhijie Zheng

  We study positive, bias-free, one-hidden-layer ReLU networks under standard Gaussian inputs. We obtain algorithms with polynomial sample and real-arithmetic complexity, without separation or conditioning assumptions on the hidden directions. When the conditional label mean is a width-$k$ network with total output weight at most one, the learner achieves squared prediction error $\varepsilon$ with output width at most $k+\min\{k,d\}$ and complexity linear in one plus the residual second moment. For arbitrary labels with bounded second moment, we obtain a positive ReLU network of width $O(k\log(2/\varepsilon))$. Its risk is bounded by the irreducible noise variance plus $Ck^3\log^{9/2}(2k/\varepsilon)$ times the squared distance of the conditional mean to the target class, plus $\varepsilon$. The proofs combine implicit Hermite moments, orthogonal tensor-train compression, and a direction decoder whose probability of returning a direction far from every atom is bounded linearly in the compression and estimation errors. Exact Gaussian localization refines the resulting direction covers. In the agnostic setting, a cone-constrained convex program with a scale-dependent penalty…

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• arXiv cs.ROOct 18

  Compile Once, Run Cheap: Frozen, Portable Skills for Embodied Agents, and What Recursive Self-Improvement Adds

  Jingwen Bai, Guochao Bai, Canbo Zhang, Shuangqi Li, Minchao Hu +2

  Embodied AI lacks the data-rich pretraining that gave language models their agents and skills, so new manipulation capability costs demonstrations per task or a frontier model in every episode. We study a third route: a strong general model acts only as an offline author that writes, runs, diagnoses and repairs a manipulation skill in simulation until it passes an exam on layouts drawn after freezing; the frozen skill then runs as code alone or under a cheap caller that reads only its description. We call this skill-level recursive self-improvement Skill-RSI and specify a compile protocol (isolated, audited author; hidden validation layouts; no-feedback and inherit-only controls; tamper-evident ledger) and a reuse protocol that runs the identical files with executors from another model family. On 7 RoboTwin 2.0 tasks with cluttered tables, Claude Code compiled 4 tasks into 7 frozen skills, 5 from a first draft needing only qualification, at USD 4.29-8.22 of author cost each (USD 55 per skill counting the 13 failed campaigns). The other three tasks did not compile in 18 campaigns, including five with GPT-6 and a pre-registered 150-layout run: on the hardest task every campaign…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 18

  Self-organizing reinforcement learning: a swarm approaches the explore-exploit optimum

  Galen J. Wilkerson

  The explore/exploit trade-off is the core problem of reinforcement learning (RL). We show that a minimal foraging swarm approaches its optimum - the ideal-free / Nash allocation of a multi-agent resource-sharing game (an equilibrium, not a return maximum) - with no learner and no reward signal. Agents explore by heavy-tailed (Levy) flights, recruit neighbours to a discovery through a threshold cascade on their proximity network, and disperse as a patch crowds; this cascade cycle balances exploration and exploitation and drives foragers toward the ideal free distribution. The swarm attains the shape of this optimum (committed foragers track richness with slope 0.94) but not its exact equilibrium - it stays measurably exploitable - reaching it dynamically (~150 steps) through the coupling of recruitment to movement: remove the coupling and matching collapses (0.94 -> 0.08). The RL sits at the level of the problem and the allocation reached, not the micro-rule: no step evaluates payoff (reward-free by construction, though the crowd signal is informationally tied to payoff), and the swarm reaches the allocation without learning it (quality plateaus and re-settles after resources…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 18

  Explore or Confirm? LLM Agents Misallocate Measurements Under Noise

  Abdul Karim, Matt Keon

  As model reasoning gets cheaper, the physical experiment becomes the slow and costly step in discovery. Each experiment returns a noisy reading: a high value can mean a good candidate or a lucky draw. With a fixed budget, an AI agent must keep choosing between exploring a new candidate and confirming a promising one by re-testing it. We measure that choice in Wellocate, a simulated assay campaign with known true values. It is built on a generated landscape and on two real protein datasets, GB1 and PhoQ, scrambled so no model can answer from memory. We test five language models as minimal agents, with no tools and no memory beyond the history in each prompt. They misallocate in both directions. Three over-confirm, spending most of the budget re-testing. On the generated landscape one under-confirms, trusting single readings, and there every model ends with a worse final pick than a basic scripted strategy. Each failure has its own cause. The over-confirmers run short of new candidates worth trying: a list of untried candidates cuts their re-testing and, on real protein data, makes two of them pick much better. A running summary of their readings or a description of the landscape…

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