Research

• Understanding and adapting to evolving implicit user intent1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Current models fail to infer and continuously update implicit user intents, limiting real-world interactive applications.

  • StreamVibe: Proactive Video Agents for Evolving User Intentraises · addresses
• Trustworthy recursive self-improvement2 papers raise it · 2 address it

  Self-modifying systems risk flawed evaluations, capability regression, constraint violations, and security or privacy breaches without proper safeguards.

  • Trustworthy Recursive Self-Improvement in the Era of Large Models: Foundation, Risks, Evaluation and Open Challengesraises · addresses
  • The Trinity:Capability-Driven Recursive Self-Improvement for Multimodal Agentsraises · addresses
• Token-level credit assignment in diffusion language models1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Iterative denoising in diffusion models obscures token contributions, making reinforcement learning signals noisy and ineffective.

  • DTCA: Denoising Token Credit Assignment for Reinforcement Learning in Diffusion Language Modelsraises · addresses
• Physical dynamics understanding in vision-language-action models1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  VLA models lack robust physical reasoning, limiting their effectiveness in real-world robotics tasks.

  • PDRVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model with Physical Dynamics Representationsraises · addresses
• Rigorous significance testing for temporal clinical hypotheses1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Language models often assert temporal relationships without statistical validation, risking incorrect conclusions in high-stakes domains like healthcare.

  • Testimony from Timelines: Evidence-Grounded Significance Testing of Temporal Clinical Hypothesesraises · addresses

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.

• arXiv cs.LGOct 5

  Efficient Secure Federated Learning via Information-Theoretically Secure Key Distribution: A Medical Imaging Case Study

  Ivan Donà, Hans H. Brunner, Álvaro Troyano Olivas, Chi-Hang Fred Fung, Momtchil Peev +1

  Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative training of models across institutions without centralizing sensitive data, making it well-suited for privacy-concerned applications, such as medical imaging. To protect FL model updates during secure aggregation, additive masking is commonly employed. However, its underlying classical key establishment is only computationally secure. On the other hand, physics-based Information-Theoretically Secure (ITS) key exchange introduces practical constraints: finite key generation rates and time-limited storage severely limit throughput and sustained training of uncompressed models. In this work, we address this bottleneck by developing an FL framework that integrates frozen backbones, knowledge distillation, and quantization. These techniques reduce communication payload and, consequently, key material consumption. Moving beyond simulation, we benchmark this framework on a real physics-based key distribution testbed involving a chest X-ray classification application. Our results show that key usage can be reduced by $\sim$35$\times$ while maintaining predictive accuracy. This prevents buffer depletion and key expiration, enabling sustainable…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 5

  Training-Free Transformer Merging via Sequential Local Operator Alignment

  Akansh Maurya, Ya-Wei Eileen Lin, Stefanie Jegelka, Sebastian U Stich, Rotem Mulayoff

  Training-free model merging aims to combine multiple fine-tuned models into a single model without further optimization on labeled data. Yet, in transformers, independently merging individual layers can affect a shared attention computation because the query-key and value-output operators depend on composed matrices, overlooking the functional structure. Moreover, when merging earlier components, downstream components receive different activations than they do in the original model, thus, the merged and original execution paths no longer match. In this paper, we introduce Sequential Local Operator Alignment, a training-free method that merges transformers along the execution path of the partially merged model. Our method uses calibration data to estimate the local behavior of each functional component, aligns operators sequentially under the intermediate activation of the partially merged model, and subsequently factorizes the merged operators back into valid transformer parameters. We empirically show that this sequential step reduces error accumulation across layers. Furthermore, the proposed operator factorization step enables rank expansion, providing a principled mechanism…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 5

  SpatialChain: A Benchmark for Auditing Spatial Reasoning Faithfulness in VLMs

  Rafael Teixeira Sousa, Vinícius Paulo Lopes de Oliveira, Elisa Ayumi Masasi de Oliveira, Luiza Martins de Freitas Cintra, Fernanda Bufon Färber +3

  Thinking-enabled vision-language models (VLMs) report ever-higher accuracy on spatial benchmarks, yet final-answer scores cannot reveal whether a correct prediction reflects faithful spatial reasoning or a linguistic shortcut. We introduce SpatialChain, a dataset of 28,350 training and 899 test examples pairing spatially-oriented GQA questions with scene-graph-grounded reasoning chains, retained only when the generated answer matches the symbolic ground truth, and a two-axis evaluation combining objective chain-overlap metrics with a scene-graph-aware LLM judge that scores faithfulness and completeness independently of the final answer. Applied to nine thinking-enabled VLMs, the protocol surfaces three findings invisible to standard accuracy: (i) four of nine models achieve $\geq$79% VQA accuracy while exhibiting shortcut rates above 39%, i.e., correct answers whose reasoning the judge marks as unfaithful; (ii) chain quality significantly predicts answer correctness for seven of nine models, but the two exceptions (Claude Sonnet 4.6, InternVL3.5-8B) reveal qualitatively distinct failure modes, terse output vs. verbose-decorative reasoning, that benchmark accuracy alone conflates;…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 5

  From Benchmark to Bench: Can Agents Survive Real-World Drug Discovery?

  Pierre Llompart, Levent Guner, Helen Lai, Alessandro Tibo, Yijie Xu

  Agentic systems increasingly coordinate molecular-design tools, but it is unclear which layer of the stack limits outcomes on real projects. We developed MAGI, an open modular agent that authors objectives, launches and monitors optimization, interprets structure--activity relationships, and revises its strategy accordingly. MAGI generates molecules either directly through the LLM or by delegating to REINVENT 4, with scoring services interchangeable behind a common contract. We tested it across nine retrospective lead-optimization campaigns from three pharmaceutical companies, replayed under fixed temporal cutoffs. Both routes produced valid structures: LLM proposals stayed closer to local chemistry and reached comparable or higher primary activity in fewer operations, whereas REINVENT explored broader chemical space. Whether a campaign met its objective depended on the predictive models, not on the generation route: attainment followed model accuracy on the chemistry proposed, dropping once that chemistry moved outside the model's applicability domain. Separately, a blinded evaluation asked whether the MAGI's output could pass as expert work: chemists were not able to…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 5

  FlashCart: Fast Cartesian Tensor Products for Equivariant Interatomic Potentials

  Viktor Zaverkin, Payman Goodarzi, Sergey V. Sukhomlinov, Davit Hovhannisyan, Roland Aydin +2

  Machine-learned interatomic potentials extend atomistic simulations beyond the length- and timescales accessible to electronic-structure methods. However, the computational cost of equivariant architectures limits the local correlations they can represent in practice and therefore their achievable accuracy. Here we introduce FlashCart, which makes higher-order correlations affordable by combining generated GPU kernels with an architecture that recursively builds equivariant features and compresses them to a fixed width at each step. We express tensor products in independent Cartesian components and symbolically simplify them and their derivatives, producing fused kernels that often outperform optimized spherical counterparts. We then show that increasing correlation order improves accuracy more efficiently than increasing width, depth, or tensor rank. On SPICE-MACE-OFF, FlashCart models advance the measured accuracy-efficiency frontier: a model with $5.6$ million parameters achieves lower energy and force errors and $10\times$ faster inference than a transformer with $189$ million parameters.

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 5▲ 27

  What Did the Agent Actually Do? Evidence-Grounded Oversight for Long-Horizon Agents

  Zhongxiang Sun, Jiahao Yan, Hongkang Zhao, Haojie Ding, Boheng Zhang +3

  As agents take on long-horizon tasks, users shift from making individual decisions to overseeing autonomous execution. Yet the volume of agent activity and the fragmentation of supporting evidence make it difficult to determine which decisions warrant user verification. We study monitors that identify consequential decisions and locate evidence to help users assess their implications. We introduce AgentMonBench, a software-engineering benchmark comprising three subsets that cover two complementary dimensions: alignment between requirements and behavior, and awareness of consequential autonomous decisions for verification. To support these judgments, we propose the Evidence-Grounded Behavior Graph (EBG), a training-free method that groups source-linked evidence into behaviors and organizes their relationships into a graph. EBG presents task-oriented views of this graph to help monitors interpret behavior in context. Experiments across eight models show that EBG improves decision identification and evidence localization in most settings compared with direct access to the original context. Further experiments show that EBG's evidence-localization gains persist across input scales…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 5

  Quantifying the Stability of Multi-Step Reasoning via Error Amplification

  Dongyue Li, Ziniu Zhang, Minxuan Duan, Hongyang R. Zhang

  We consider the stability of multi-step reasoning processes, which have extensive applications in language models, including chain-of-thought and algorithmic reasoning. While longer sequences of reasoning can improve a model's generation capability at test time, the errors due to intermediate reasoning steps can accumulate in autoregressive generation, and thus grow substantially at the end. In this paper, we ask: What are the key factors determining the stability of multi-step reasoning? First, we show an inference error bound governed by the product of spectral norms of the Jacobians taken through the input space across generation steps. This product can be viewed as an error amplification factor, which could scale exponentially with the number of reasoning steps, serving as a quantitative measure of reasoning stability. Second, we analyze this measure in transformer models trained to predict simple tasks like linear and quadratic functions. We theoretically prove that the transformer model converges to a solution where the stability measure decays, thus yielding nearly zero inference loss over (arbitrarily) long steps. Finally, the stability analysis leads to several…

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• arXiv cs.CROct 5

  RAISED: Self-Distillation for Robustness to Prompt Injection in LLM Agents

  Mohamed Dhouib, Clement Elliker, Alexi Canesse, Maël Jenny, Lucas-Andrei Thil +3

  Tool-using language-model agents are vulnerable to indirect prompt injection because they must act on untrusted external content. Existing training-time defenses can reduce attack success rates, but often at the cost of general capabilities. We show that training-based defenses induce substantial drift in the model's output distribution, altering its behavior even in benign settings and providing a potential mechanism for utility degradation. We further identify a failure mode of these defenses: On benign tool-use tasks, the model refrains from a step needed to finish an authorized task, particularly when that step is indicated by a tool output. To address these limitations, we introduce RAISED (Robust Attack Invariance through Self-Distillation), a training framework that combines self-generation and self-distillation. The model first generates its own tool-use scenarios, with an emphasis on cases where task completion requires acting on legitimate guidance from tool outputs. Then, through self-distillation, the student is trained to match the teacher's clean-context behavior on both clean and injected variants of the same trajectory. RAISED substantially reduces the attack…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 5

  CVIF: A Criticality-Driven Visual Intervention Framework for Geometric Diagram Understanding in MLLMs

  Jiahui Kang, Bifan Wei, Lingling Zhang, Tianwen Jiang, Qiuyong Xiao +2

  Despite significant progress in visual tasks by Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), geometric diagram understanding remains challenging due to the presence of sparse visual cues and ambiguous symbol-primitive associations. MLLMs may therefore rely on textual priors, producing interpretations that conflict with visual evidence. We introduce the training-free Criticality-Driven Visual Intervention Framework (CVIF), an inference-time method that localizes critical layers and executes visual interventions during the transition from evidence aggregation to semantic decoding. At these layers, a Geometry-Constrained Local Relation Reconstruction (GCLR) module selects and weights vertex-centered visual evidence, while an Adaptive Visual Steering Operator (AVSO) redistributes attention mass toward the selected tokens. Experiments on PGPS9K and PGDP5K show that CVIF raises Overall F1 from 77.85 to 85.58 and from 75.23 to 82.84, respectively, establishing a novel inference-time visual intervention paradigm.

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• arXiv cs.DCOct 5

  T-CCL: Resource Efficient and Performant Collective Communication using Tensor Memory Accelerator

  Keyvan Dadashzadeh, Yuehong Zhou, Minyu Cui, Miquel Pericas

  Large transformer-based models increasingly depend on multi-GPU execution, which requires frequent collective communication among GPUs. Existing communication libraries often rely on many GPU threads to achieve high bandwidth or low latency, resulting in a large streaming multiprocessor (SM)-side resource footprint. This footprint can limit the resources available to other GPU work, particularly when communication and computation execute concurrently. Thus, efficient collective communication should not only achieve high collective performance but also reduce its SM-side resource usage. This paper presents T-CCL, a resource-efficient collective communication library based on the Tensor Memory Accelerator (TMA) for intra-node communication. T-CCL offloads both data movement and reduction operations to TMA and executes each collective as a pipelined series of asynchronous TMA operations, reducing the SM resources required for collective communication while maintaining high bandwidth. Evaluated across AllReduce, AllGather, and ReduceScatter collectives, T-CCL outperforms NCCL by up to 2.4x with unrestricted communication resources and up to 3.42x under restricted resource budgets,…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 5

  Learning Pareto Stationary Fronts via Single-Pass Backpropagation

  Elina Rojin Celik, Marcos Medeiros Raimundo, Isabel Valera

  We propose MOSEL (Multi-Objective Stackelberg Efficient Learning), a framework for a posteriori multi-objective optimization (MOO) in deep neural networks that recovers a full front of Pareto stationary solutions at the computational cost of standard single-objective training. MOSEL reformulates the problem as a bilevel optimization problem that leverages network modularity to decouple representation learning from objective-preference alignment. Casting the bilevel optimization problem as a Stackelberg game enables solving the original a posteriori MOO problem in a single forward-backward pass. As a result, MOSEL matches the time and memory efficiency of standard single-objective training while enabling scalable Pareto stationary front learning. Empirically, MOSEL uncovers diverse and optimal Pareto frontiers in strongly conflicting settings (e.g., fairness-accuracy). Remarkably, even in weakly conflicting regimes such as multi-task learning, it consistently converges to solutions closer to the utopia point, outperforming both standard single-objective training and specialized multi-task learning methods. These results highlight the broader potential of a posteriori MOO learning…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 5

  Harnessing Multimodal Large Language Models for Training-Free Human-Object Interaction Detection

  Zhaolin Cai, Huiyu Duan, Liu Yang, Yanjun Qin, Bo Ai +3

  Human-object interaction (HOI) detection aims to localize human-object pairs and recognize their interactions. Traditional supervised methods perform strongly but rely on task-specific training. Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offer a promising route to training-free HOI detection through their broad visual-semantic knowledge and versatile perceptual and reasoning capabilities. However, existing approaches largely invoke these capabilities through loosely coordinated inference stages. This fragmented execution restricts the role of interaction hypotheses in guiding visual exploration, leaving key participants overlooked and local ambiguities unresolved. Furthermore, propagating early semantic assumptions through subsequent visual grounding and relation prediction induces self-reinforcing semantic circularity. To resolve these challenges, we propose HarnessHOI, a training-free framework that transforms passive MLLM inference into an active interaction-centric harness. Specifically, we introduce an interaction-guided perception mechanism that projects emerging interaction hypotheses back into the visual space to discover missing participants and refine ambiguous…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 5

  Multi-Task Partially Supervised Learning for Super-Resolution and Semantic Segmentation on Earth Observation data

  Hoàng-Ân Lê, Minh-Tan Pham, Solange Lemai-Chenevier, Daniel Greslou

  Super-resolution and semantic segmentation are known to benefit one another, especially in the Earth observation context. However, learning both tasks in a joint model often requires both task annotations, which is impractical and expensive. In this paper, we study the multi-task partially supervised learning paradigm for both tasks, where each example is assumed to have only a single-task annotation. To that end, we examine two multi-task architectural variations, the sequential and shared variants, and then propose a hybrid variant and a re-projection loss to benefit from the shared representation and enforce image quality of super-resolution when training with semantic segmentation. Experiments show favorable results compared to the SOTA sequential variant. Source code will be published at https://github.com/lhoangan/munera.

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 5

  Scaling Down the Scaling Laws: Parameter Efficiency and Compute-Optimal Training in Resource-Constrained Large Language Models

  Joe Dwyer

  Large language models (LLMs) have achieved substantial performance gains through increases in model size, training data, and computational resources. However, traditional scaling approaches produce diminishing returns, rising financial and environmental costs, and barriers to participation for researchers operating outside large industrial laboratories. This review examines the evolution of LLM scaling theory from empirical scaling laws to compute-optimal training, with particular emphasis on parameter efficiency, token utilization, data efficiency, and resource-constrained environments. Foundational work on scaling laws is synthesized alongside later research on compute-optimal training, data pruning, efficient architectures, quantization, low-rank adaptation, and edge-oriented optimization. The literature indicates a shift from scale maximization toward more deliberate allocation of parameters, tokens, compute, and hardware resources. At the same time, important empirical, theoretical, and methodological gaps remain regarding whether scaling principles established on enterprise-grade infrastructure generalize to smaller models and constrained computing environments. This review…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 5

  Steering by Influence: Curvature Aware Data Weighting for Activation Steering

  James A. E. Dixon, Stephen J. Roberts, Francesco Quinzan

  Inference-time steering offers cheap, fine-grained control over a language model's outputs by estimating a concept's representation in activation space and shifting activations towards it. Existing methods build these representations from activation averages over contrastive datasets. These averages incorporate unrelated concepts and noise, and are dominated by a few tokens, meaning the activation transport encodes token-level rather than thematic concepts. In this work, we steer towards examples that most express a concept thematically, rather than towards an expectation over all. We identify these examples using influence functions, which estimate how much each data point contributes to a model's representation of a concept. Unlike simple model activation similarity, they incorporate the curvature of the model's loss landscape, allowing them to capture concept-relevant relationships beyond superficial token-level similarity. We then propose influence-weighted activation transport, which uses optimal transport to steer activations of non-concept text towards those of concept text, weighting concept examples by their influence scores. We evaluate on toxicity suppression (Jigsaw),…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 5

  MTOR: Generalizable AI-Generated Video Detection with Multimodal Semantics and Temporal Over-Regularity

  Hang Wang, Chao Shen, Lei Zhang, Zhi-Qi Cheng

  The rapid evolution of video generation has narrowed the perceptual gap between authentic and synthetic videos, making generalizable AI-generated video detection increasingly challenging. Existing detectors predominantly rely on visual representations, leaving caption-derived textual semantics underexplored. Meanwhile, temporal regularity in fine-grained visual representations has received limited attention. We find that caption-derived textual representations provide complementary discriminative cues to global visual representations. Our analysis further reveals that AI-generated videos exhibit stronger temporal persistence and lower temporal variability, a pattern we term temporal over-regularity (TOR). Based on these findings, we propose MTOR with a multimodal branch and a TOR component. The multimodal branch integrates global visual and caption-derived textual representations, while the TOR component models temporal over-regularity at three levels: coarse inter-frame continuity, fine-grained token correspondence, and frame-to-video stability. Extensive evaluations on five benchmarks covering 46 generator variants demonstrate state-of-the-art overall performance against 16…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 5

  Environmental sensor readings in two crop disease image datasets identify the session in which each image was taken

  Sungwoo Kang

  Integrating environmental sensor data with leaf imagery is widely reported to boost crop disease classification accuracy. In this work, we reveal that these reported gains are often artifacts of dataset construction: because a single sensor reading is shared across many images collected in a single session (one farm on one date), multimodal networks can predict disease simply by memorizing session identities. Analyzing two widely used Korean datasets, the Crop Disease Diagnosis (CDD) benchmark and an AI Hub pest/disease dataset, we demonstrate that nearly all images share sensor values, with 91.9% of CDD test images having exact sensor duplicates in the training set. Remarkably, an image-free classifier given only timestamps matches or exceeds sensor-driven predictions across all seven evaluated crops, and matches the published macro-F1 of a state-of-the-art CDD fusion model. These results indicate that performance gains on standard random splits cannot be disentangled from session leakage. We propose that multimodal crop studies must evaluate on session-held-out splits and report performance against sensor-free date-time baselines to ensure genuine generalization.

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• arXiv cs.CROct 5

  Correct Verdicts, Flawed Reasoning: Structured Auditing of LLM-based Vulnerability Reasoning

  Boyue Caroline Hu, Kaivalya Ahir, Ronghao Ni, Limin Jia

  Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for automated software vulnerability analysis. Binary classification alone is insufficient; practitioners need explanations to triage bugs and engineer patches. Standard practice relies on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, but free-form reasoning allows models to obscure logical leaps, hallucinated execution steps, and internal inconsistencies behind plausible prose. Our manual audit reveals that approximately 60% of correct vulnerability verdicts are accompanied by fabricated or unverifiable claims, and free-form explanations allow reasoning errors to evade LLM-as-a-judge evaluation. We present Vulnerability Explanation Reasoning Auditor (VERA), an automated framework for auditing LLM vulnerability reasoning. Rather than accepting free-form text, VERA asks models to output a Structured Reasoning Record (SRR) encoding tracked pointers, memory operations, and state transitions in machine-readable fields. A multi-stage judge audits each SRR against eight reasoning failure modes using deterministic checks, with LLM calls reserved for semantic interpretation. The standardized SRR schema also enables automated mutation testing to…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 5

  Multimodal Deep Survival Analysis for Sinkhole Susceptibility

  Lucas Yuan, Minhee Kim, Zihan Li, Chunli Dai, Sanduni S. Disanayaka Mudiyanselage +2

  Sinkholes are a widespread geohazard in karst terrain. In Florida, soluble carbonate bedrock, shallow groundwater, and intense rainfall combine to make subsidence both common and spatially heterogeneous. Predicting where and when sinkholes will occur is difficult for two reasons. First, locations without reported sinkholes cannot be directly labeled or sampled as true negative locations. Second, the potential factors governing sinkhole risk span heterogeneous data modalities and therefore require careful integration within a unified modeling framework. We address both problems with our proposed model, a multimodal Cox proportional hazards framework for sinkhole susceptibility. Our contributions are threefold. First, we extend the proportional-hazards formulation to heterogeneous multimodal input through modality-specific encoders and a cross-modal fusion layer. Second, we treat unreported locations as right-censored rather than negative, avoiding hard-negative labeling and yielding continuous, time-aware susceptibility from the predicted survival function. Third, a statewide Florida case study with spatially blocked validation and ablation studies quantifies the benefit of…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 5▲ 19

  Capability-Driven Self-Evolution of Agent Memory

  Yaoqi Chen, Yuru Feng, Qianxi Zhang, Baotong Lu, Jianan Lu +6

  Memory self-evolution uses task feedback to iteratively improve executable memory programs that store and retrieve information from past interactions. Existing approaches typically adopt holistic evolution, deriving revision directions from mixed feedback and judging progress by overall performance. This can obscure optimization directions and hide capability-specific gains offset by regressions elsewhere, leaving promising directions underexplored. We introduce capability-driven evolution, which extends search guidance from overall performance to individual capability dimensions, preserving promising revisions and expanding exploration beyond the boundaries of holistic evolution. We propose PrisMem, which uses dependency-aware capability selection to prioritize targets with potential cross-capability benefits and history-guided diagnosis to refine capability specialists. Trace-guided integration compares evaluated programs on paired differential cases, using their behavioral differences to consolidate complementary gains into a unified memory program. Experiments show that PrisMem outperforms the strongest baselines by 10.54 and 7.83 percentage points on BEAM-1M and…

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• Algorithmic fairness8+60.0%
• Diffusion priors17+41.7%
• Quantum machine learning20+33.3%
• Spiking neural networks7+16.7%
• Algorithmic trading15−21.1%
• Channel state information8−27.3%
• Linear bandits52−27.8%
• Molecular property prediction28−31.7%