Research

• Long-horizon multi-constraint task synthesis for coding agents1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Current coding agents fail to handle complex, interdependent specifications like interface compatibility and error handling in long-horizon software development.

  • When Requirements Interact: Scaling Long-Horizon Coding via Interdependent Specificationsraises · addresses
• Granular human evaluation for proactive agents1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Existing evaluations lack human-grounded, fine-grained diagnostics for proactive agent decisions, timing, and intervention quality.

  • HALO: Human-Grounded Granular Evaluation of Proactive Agentsraises · addresses
• Physical dynamics understanding in vision-language-action models1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  VLA models struggle to incorporate physical dynamics into action generation without high-latency video world model inference.

  • PDRVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model with Physical Dynamics Representationsraises · addresses
• Free-form interactive world generation with history preservation1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  World models must follow successive commands while preserving history and action consequences, which current methods do not handle well.

  • Hy-Nomas: Towards Free-form Interactive World Generationraises · addresses
• Unified diffusion models for cross-paradigm visual tasks1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Existing unified diffusion models lack effective transfer of visual understanding and generation abilities across paradigms.

  • Nemotron-Labs-Diffusion-Uni: Elastic Self-Refining Unified Diffusion LLM with Cross-Paradigm On-Policy Distillationraises · addresses

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.

• Diffusion priors27+107.7%
• Algorithmic fairness12+100.0%
• Quantum machine learning27+80.0%
• Channel state information16+33.3%
• Linear bandits91+30.0%
• Algorithmic trading22+22.2%
• Spiking neural networks7+16.7%
• Molecular property prediction43+4.9%

• arXiv cs.CLOct 5

  Breaking the Tie: A Cluster-Aware Routing Framework for Large Language Models

  Yao Lu, Zhaiyuan Ji, Yaxin Gao, Zeyu Wang, Zhe Tang +4

  With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, the emergence of various Large Language Models (LLMs) has created a rich model ecosystem. However, this also brings a key challenge: how to select the optimal model for a specific user query. LLM routing addresses this need by dynamically assigning queries to the most suitable expert in the pool of candidate models. However, existing routing frameworks often simplify this process to a standard classification task; thus, a critical vulnerability is exposed when multiple candidate models correctly answer the same query. We formalize this capability overlap as routing noise, which misleads the router with arbitrarily correct candidate models, ultimately leading to routing collapse (a severe decline in generalization ability on unseen tasks). To address this problem, we propose a novel Cluster-Aware Soft-Labeling Routing (CASLR) framework. CASLR shifts the evaluation paradigm from the success of a single query to macro-domain consensus by replacing traditional one-hot vectors with a masked softmax mechanism. Specifically, for experts who answer incorrectly, we penalize their target probability to zero; for the remaining…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 5

  Byte Language Models: Scaling, Emergent Abstractions, and Information Allocation

  Jie Wang, Shiwei Luo, Qi Zhang, Yuanbin Wu

  Tokenizer-free language models remove the inductive bias of fixed tokenizers by modeling text directly as bytes, but the resulting longer sequences substantially increase computation and eliminate explicit text abstractions. We ask whether this additional computation can be useful, and whether standard Transformers can learn the abstractions that tokenization provides. We study these questions on Transformers without specialized tokenization-related architectures. With token-superposition training and hash embeddings, byte Transformers consistently outperform subword Transformers as model size scales. We further find that byte Transformers build local text abstractions as external tokenizers: a set of segmentation-like positions are used to collect local context representations, and restricting up to $25\%$ of intermediate layers to these local representations preserves downstream performance. Finally, these learned structures induce highly non-uniform generation difficulty, with uncertainty concentrated near local structure boundaries; exploiting them for speculative decoding yields $3.4\times$ more accepted tokens than in subword Transformers.

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 5

  StagQ: Constraint-Driven Multi-Precision Weight Quantization for LLMs

  Zhe Wei, Mengqi Guo, Yuan Yuan, Jiunn Bin Lim, Boyi Pan +1

  Serving a large language model (LLM) across a fleet of deployments requires several weight-precision operating points. Multi-precision formats serve them all from one stream whose prefixes are valid lower-precision codes, instead of storing multiple copies. We present StagQ, a multi-precision weight format whose main stream is a 2-bit group-wise affine base followed by a configurable number of 1-bit refinement planes on a dyadic step schedule. Every supported precision is a readable prefix, decoded by an affine map derived from metadata shared across all precisions, with no per-weight lookup. A sparse side record, filled both before and after the grid is fitted, holds out the few weights the grid serves worst. We report two configurations of the encoder. At two bits the cheaper one leads the strongest multi-precision baseline on Llama-3.1-8B, Phi-4, and OLMo-2-7B by 3.1 to 7.0 MMLU points, at a slightly lower logical rate. At three bits it leads on Llama-3.1-8B, leads on Phi-4 at a higher rate, and ties on OLMo-2-7B. At four bits it ties on all three, at a higher rate. In a batch-one matrix-vector product on an NVIDIA A100 GPU, timed on synthetic weights, our kernel is faster…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 5

  Can Language Models Learn to Reject Their Own Bad Reasoning Steps?

  Siheng Xiong, Xiaoze Liu, Yiqiao Jin, Xiaoqian Wang, Jing Gao

  Verifier-guided decoding can prevent harmful reasoning steps from contaminating subsequent generation, but typically relies on an external learned verifier. We ask whether a language model can instead reject its own bad reasoning steps. We define a prefix's recoverability as the probability that the frozen generator can complete it correctly. Diagnostics show that adjacent recoverability changes are often difficult to resolve with practical Monte Carlo budgets, while same-prefix candidates exhibit a sparse low-recoverability tail. We introduce Self-Step Rejection (SSR), which trains a lightweight LoRA acceptance gate on the generator backbone while keeping the base model frozen. SSR uses confidence-qualified first-passage supervision: steps before the first resolved crossing of a root-relative recoverability barrier are accepted, the crossing step is rejected, and unresolved steps and suffixes are excluded. Training combines pointwise classification, same-prefix pairwise learning, and group-relative policy refinement using final-answer correctness. At inference, SSR accepts candidates or resamples from the unchanged prefix under rejection budgets, without an external learned…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 5

  Transfer-Stratified On-Policy Distillation for RL-Improved Reasoning Teachers

  Xiaoyu Chen, Bo Shao, Tiangang Zhu, Bintao Wu, Linjun Shou +3

  Reinforcement learning can substantially improve a reasoning teacher, but it is unclear which of those improvements survive when the teacher supervises a smaller on-policy student. We study this question in mathematical reasoning by comparing teacher lineages before and after GRPO, multiple student scales, direct GRPO, and several on-policy distillation objectives. The central finding is that transfer is structured rather than scalar: teacher strength alone does not make dense distillation competitive, while an RL-improved teacher creates useful but metric-dependent student gains. This motivates Transfer-Stratified On-Policy Distillation (TS-OPD), which screens training problems by the joint sampled success of the student and teacher, routes acquisition problems to gated forward KL, routes consolidation problems to gated reverse KL, and adds an entropy brake to protect sampled coverage. Across the main comparison, TS-OPD is the strongest student objective for macro average correctness with the GRPO-improved teacher, while pass@K remains more mixed. Ablations show that the gains come from routing and token gating rather than skipping problems. These results support a…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 5

  Decomposition-Guided Curvelet Thresholding for Sharp-to-Soft CT Kernel Conversion

  Mahmoud Nasr, Jan K. Argasinski, Krzysztof Brzostowski, Adam Piorkowski

  Image denoising is a crucial task in image processing, focused on improving image quality by minimizing noise while maintaining essential structural elements. This study presents a hybrid denoising framework that combines several decomposition techniques, including empirical mode decomposition (EMD), variational mode decomposition (VMD), multichannel EMD (MEMD), and bidimensional EMD (BEMD), with curvelet transform thresholding. Each decomposition mode undergoes processing through both soft and hard thresholding, and the denoised modes are combined to rebuild the final image. Comprehensive evaluations of standard CT image datasets reconstructed with various kernels (B50, B46, B41, B36) reveal substantial enhancements in denoising efficacy. VMD consistently achieves the highest peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index (SSIM), signifying exceptional noise reduction and feature preservation. The study analyses the trade-offs between soft and hard thresholding: soft thresholding maintains intricate visual details, whilst harsh thresholding provides enhanced noise reduction. The suggested method surpasses traditional techniques in both reference and…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 5

  Reachability-Aware Diffusion Policy Optimization

  Hikmet Simsir, Kutay Demiray, Ozgur S. Oguz

  Diffusion policies provide expressive action distributions for continuous-control reinforcement learning. However, safety-aware online diffusion policy optimization remains underexplored, particularly methods that use predictive reachability information without an explicit dynamics model. We propose Reachability-Aware Diffusion Policy Optimization (RADPO), a model-free method that combines predictive first-hit safety estimation with cumulative-cost budget feedback. RADPO learns a discounted first-hit reachability value that captures the discounted risk of a cost event, assigns larger weight to events that occur sooner, and uses this signal to shape the reward. A separate dual-like multiplier adjusts the shaping strength according to realized episodic costs relative to a prescribed budget. The diffusion actor improves through weighted denoising regression on candidate actions scored by the reward critic. Our approach requires neither a learned dynamics model, action gradients through the critics, nor differentiation through the reverse diffusion sampler. We establish theoretical properties of the reachability value and show that accumulated reachability penalty provides a…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 5

  Fast Last-Iterate Convergence in Zero-Sum Markov Games with Bandit Feedback

  Yuheng Zhang

  We study last-iterate convergence in unknown two-player zero-sum discounted Markov games with bandit feedback. The players learn independently along a single trajectory without observing each other's actions. We develop Adaptive Regularized TD Learning (ARTD), which achieves a $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(t^{-1/4})$ duality gap bound for the current policies under a uniform hitting time assumption, with high probability simultaneously over all rounds and starting states. This improves the $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(t^{-1/(9+ν)})$ rate of Cai et al. (2023), for any fixed $ν>0$, under the same feedback model and hitting time assumption. Our algorithm requires no knowledge of the hitting time bound, the time horizon, or the confidence level. To stabilize policy learning as value estimates change, we separate fast temporal difference averaging from bounded value updates. We adapt log-barrier regularization to the progress of value estimation, controlling both policy and value errors throughout learning. Together, these mechanisms enable fast convergence of the policies actually played, even when the players learn independently from bandit feedback.

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 5▲ 4

  JLD: Perceptual Distance Through A Jacobian Lens

  Shreshth Saini, Balu Adsumilli, Alan C. Bovik

  Image compression, restoration, and generation all require a way to measure how different two images look to a person. Pixel error ignores how people see, while the most accurate perceptual distances are typically fitted to human judgments, tying them to a fixed data and resolution. For example, when image resolution is doubled, the correlation of DISTS with human scores on TID2013 drops from 0.815 to 0.717. We introduce the Jacobian Lens Distance (JLD), which derives its perceptual geometry from a frozen vision encoder rather than from human labels. JLD combines the locality of early patch features with the perceptual sensitivity captured by later encoder representations. Specifically, we use the encoder Jacobian to identify directions in the early feature space that most strongly affect the encoder output, producing a fixed metric tensor, $E[J^\top J]$, which we call the Jacobian lens. The lens is fitted only once from 100 unlabeled images, taking about 35 seconds. Locally, this construction defines a pullback metric in pixel space, giving JLD a clear geometric interpretation that can be directly analyzed on real images. Across four standard perceptual databases, JLD achieves…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 5▲ 47

  HuatuoGPT-3: RL-Only Domain Adaptation from Base Models

  Junying Chen, Xinyuan Xie, Ziniu Li, Wenyuan Gu, Jianquan Li +5

  Domain adaptation aims to turn a general-purpose large language model (LLM) into an expert for a target domain. While the dominant SFT+RL pipeline offers a convenient cold start, it may reduce exploration diversity and introduces additional complexity through multi-stage optimization. These limitations motivate RL-only adaptation. However, pure on-policy RL suffers from a cold-start problem, while mixed-policy RL still falls short: informative tokens in teacher outputs are learned too slowly in early training, and stale teacher outputs can hinder later improvement. We identify these two failure modes as Gradient Starvation and Teacher-Distribution Anchoring. To address them, we propose One-stage Policy Optimization (OnePO), which treats teacher outputs as transient guidance for policy improvement. OnePO combines Adaptive Objective Evolution to strengthen learning on informative low-probability teacher tokens and Teacher Retirement to discard teacher outputs once the current policy can surpass them. On medical adaptation, OnePO achieves 67.2 on HealthBench (Total) with only 20K training samples, outperforming SFT+RL and pure RL by 2.7 and 7.4 points, respectively. We further scale…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 5

  Strategic Multi-Agent Learning for Interpretable Action Valuation of All Players in Football

  Kenjiro Ide, Taiga Someya, Kohei Kawaguchi, Keisuke Fujii

  Valuing player actions in football requires accounting for strategic interactions among 22 players, including off-ball movements and defensive positioning. Existing reinforcement-learning-based methods commonly aggregate decisions at the team level or estimate player values independently, leaving strategic interdependence among players insufficiently represented. This study proposes an action valuation framework inspired by Markov perfect equilibrium (MPE) for all players. Each possession is modeled as a finite-horizon dynamic game, with each player represented as an autonomous agent whose policy depends on the current game state. MPE is used as a motivating solution concept rather than an exact equilibrium. To improve interpretability, we use Expandable Decision-Making States (EDMS) and decompose the Q-value into a successor-feature basis and a linear reward-weight vector. The value basis is estimated by linear TD initialization followed by nonlinear refinement. Using tracking and event data from 95 J1 League matches, we compare the proposed formulation with an independent reinforcement learning baseline. Because the two formulations define TD errors in different target spaces,…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 5

  Physics-Informed but Not Physics-Consistent: Error Geometry and Subspace Projection for Neural AC Power Flow

  Changhun Kim, Timon Conrad, Redwanul Karim, Karan Pahlajani, Julian Oelhaf +5

  Recent neural power-flow solvers, including emerging foundation models, achieve accurate voltage predictions, yet such accuracy does not necessarily imply physically consistent solutions. Even small complex voltage errors can yield large AC power-balance residuals. We study this accuracy-consistency gap across PIGNN-GC, GridSFM, gridfm-graphkit, and LUMINA on realistic 2224-bus Great Britain network (GBnetwork) scenarios, with cross-grid evaluation of GridSFM over 31 systems. Using a singular value decomposition (SVD) basis fitted to training AC power-flow solutions, we find that neural prediction errors contain substantial components outside the dominant solution subspace. To address this mismatch, calibrated solution-subspace projection (CSP) suppresses off-subspace prediction components after train-only bias calibration, reducing Mean PB by 67.0%, 37.8%, 40.5%, and 68.9% for PIGNN-GC, GridSFM, gridfm-graphkit, and LUMINA, respectively, relative to calibrated predictions, while improving voltage-magnitude accuracy in all four models. These results identify output-error geometry as an important factor in physics-consistent neural AC power flow. Code:…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 5▲ 3

  MEND: RL For Flow Models via Proximal Velocity Matching

  Shreshth Saini, Neil Birkbeck, Yilin Wang, Balu Adsumilli, Alan C. Bovik

  Reward post-training of flow models either reweights the model's own samples under a KL penalty or a frozen reference, often for thousands of updates, or backpropagates the reward and moves every sample without checking that the move is worth its size. We introduce MEND, a reinforcement learning method built on proximal velocity matching. MEND caps rewards within each prompt group, so samples that already score well receive no move. Below the cap, it proposes moves along the reward gradient and accepts one only when its capped reward gain exceeds a quadratic displacement price. The model then regresses onto the resulting velocity targets, with no KL term, frozen reference model, or advantage weights. In 100 updates, MEND outperforms Flow-GRPO (about 4k updates) on five of six evaluators at the same distance to base-model images. Under an equal-budget protocol, it surpasses ReFL and DiffusionNFT at every evaluated update across four training rewards, reaching PickScore 24.03 versus 23.92 and 23.43, respectively. A 300-update three-reward run also surpasses the five-reward DiffusionNFT model on all three rewards it trains on. MEND is general and easy to adopt: it applies to any…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 5

  Discovered, Not Designed: Population Evolution for Collaborative and Compute-Intensive Model Discovery

  Bo Peng, Lizhu Zhang, Yuhang Zhou, Mingyi Wang, Yifan Wu +3

  LLM-driven evolution enables iterative model development, but two practical goals remain underexplored: finding model designs that transfer across related tasks and sustaining improvement when training is expensive. We introduce Population Evolution (PE), a collaborative, hierarchical framework that connects ongoing local searches through shared experimental evidence. PE evaluates code changes across related training instances and shares the results to guide subsequent proposals and promotion to larger training scales. For expensive targets, PE searches small training subsets and screens candidates through peer and intermediate evaluations before full-target training. We introduce RMD-Bench to evaluate both settings across ranking, watch-time prediction, RL algorithm discovery, and LLM/VLM pretraining. Compared with standalone evolution at matched source iterations, PE raises mean best local gains from 7.01% to 8.97% in ranking and from 2.84% to 3.85% in watch-time, while improving the best larger-scale outcome in all three joint-discovery families. In watch-time discovery, PE improves best larger-scale gains with four of five harnesses and all four proposers. On new…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 5▲ 2

  Technical Report on the Turba Fertilizer Machine Learning Stack in Morocco

  Abdelghani Belgaid, Zakaria Mahmoud, Fahd Chibani, Oumnia Ennaji, Younes Boudoul +1

  Site-specific fertilizer recommendation systems adapt nutrient advice to location, soil properties, crop type, and production targets, but scientific reuse is constrained when recommendation functions remain accessible mainly through interactive interfaces, outputs are not versioned, and trained approximations cannot be independently loaded or benchmarked. This technical report presents the Turba fertilizer machine learning stack, a three-layer open-source implementation for reproducible site-specific fertilizer recommendation in Morocco. \texttt{turba-client} provides programmatic access to publicly accessible site profiles, crop-specific target-yield spaces, and N, P$_2$O$_5$, and K$_2$O recommendation workflows; \texttt{turba-data} distributes analysis-ready snapshots; and \texttt{turba-models} packages crop-specific machine learning surrogates of recommendation outputs. The architecture links upstream retrieval, versioned analytical snapshots, reproducible cross-model benchmarking, and loadable offline surrogates while preserving the distinction between recommendation-system outputs, observed agricultural data, and model-generated predictions. The first dataset was…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 5

  OntoInk: Interactive Ontology Visualization, Validation, and Reasoning

  Ebrahim Norouzi, Jörg Waitelonis, Harald Sack

  Ontology documentation, visualization, and validation are usually carried out with separate tools. This split workflow slows down development and makes knowledge transfer harder. We present OntoInk, an open-source MkDocs plugin that brings these activities together. Within a single documentation-as-code pipeline, OntoInk renders interactive ontology diagrams, validates instance data against SHACL shapes, runs OWL\,DL reasoning, and supports inline Turtle editing. General-purpose diagram plugins for MkDocs cannot parse RDF, dereference IRIs, overlay SHACL constraints, or run OWL reasoning. Compared with standalone ontology visualization tools, OntoInk embeds interactive and editable diagrams directly into documentation pages. A live demo and source code are available at \url{https://ise-fizkarlsruhe.github.io/ontoink/}.

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• arXiv cs.CROct 5

  Runaway Reaction: When Benign Skills Compose into Malicious Behavior

  Zunlong Zhou, Ziyuan Yang, Mengyu Sun, Yi Zhang

  Agent skills package task-specific knowledge and procedures that can be composed to support complex agent tasks, while public marketplaces provide a growing pool of reusable skills. Existing security vetting, however, largely evaluates skills in isolation, leaving composition-induced risks underexplored. Such risks arise because composing benign skills expands the agent's capability space, enabling behaviors unavailable to any skill alone. Interestingly, we find that directly composing benign skills can already induce malicious behaviors, even when every individual skill passes security vetting. We further find that some target malicious behaviors remain difficult to realize through direct composition, even when the selected skills collectively provide the required capabilities. To systematically instantiate these attacks, we present Compositional Risk Induction via Multi skill Execution (CRIME). CRIME first uses the Malicious Plot Casting (MPC) module to decompose a target malicious behavior into complementary requirements and identify suitable benign skill compositions from public skill repositories. For compositions that cannot directly realize the target behavior, the Runaway…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 5

  Process Constitutions and Process Stewards: Towards the Next Generation of BPM for Agentic Organizations

  Amin Jalali, Majid Rafiei

  Business Process Management (BPM) was built on a foundational assumption that organizations are populated primarily by human actors whose work can be made visible, governable, and improvable through process models. That assumption is depreciating. AI agent ecosystems increasingly execute, coordinate, and adapt organizational work with limited human direction, challenging not only BPM's methods but its core conception of what a process is. We argue that BPM faces a constitutive shift from modeling human work to governing autonomous agents, for which we propose two new concepts: the \emph{Process Constitution}, a machine-interpretable, value-laden framework that defines the space of admissible agent behavior, and the \emph{Process Steward}, a governance agent that interprets and enforces it. The central value proposition of this new generation of BPM is not efficiency but \emph{organizational legibility}: the capacity to keep agentic organizations accountable, contestable, and humanly understandable. We outline what this means and sketch the research agenda it opens.

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 5

  ReMem: Streaming Video Understanding With Long Context Retention

  Li Yiheng, He Xu, Wang Shaobo, Shao Ling, Lu Shijian

  Despite their impressive performance on a wide range of video understanding tasks, current Vision Language Models (VLMs) are predominantly designed for offline scenarios and struggle to handle online streaming videos that demand low latency response. Several studies have explored memory and token compression strategies in an attempt to adapt offline VLMs for streaming video understanding tasks. However, through our probing experiment, we identify that most existing works tend to progressively lose long context information as length of input stream increases. To address this, we propose ReMem, a novel training-free adaptation technique that enables VLMs to process streaming videos of arbitrary lengths while improving their long context information retention capability. ReMem exploits memory from two perspectives, implemented as two core components. The Streaming Context Memory (SCM) continuously compresses historical context with query-independent attention. The Retrieved Vision Memory (RVM) then retrieves the most salient, query-relevant context from memory to augment the VLM's input. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed ReMem achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA)…

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• arXiv math.OCOct 5

  Structural Foundations of Nonlinear Systems with Unknown Inputs: The UID-Induced Normal Form and Minimal-Sensing Structure-from-Motion

  Agostino Martinelli

  This paper establishes the first general structural solution to the problem of state estimation for nonlinear systems driven by unknown inputs. Building upon nonlinear unknown-input observability theory, we show that every such system admits a structurally equivalent representation, referred to as the UID-induced normal form. The proposed representation decomposes the information carried by the unknown inputs into two complementary components: unknown-input directions that are structurally decoupled from the observable dynamics and observable quantities that completely represent the unknown-input information affecting the observable dynamics. As a consequence, the UID-induced normal form provides a unified structural solution to unknown-input decoupling and unknown-input reconstruction, without requiring any model or stochastic assumption on the unknown inputs. The practical significance of the proposed framework is demonstrated through a previously unexplored minimal Structure-from-Motion configuration. The proposed representation enables recursive state estimation from only three point features and a single-axis gyroscope, allowing the recovery of the three-dimensional…

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