Research

• Interface lock-in in multimodal spatial reasoning1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Specializing a model on one spatial task (e.g., side detection) degrades performance on others (e.g., distance estimation), limiting general spatial intelligence.

  • ChronoReplay: One Answer Interface Is Not Enough for Streaming Spatial Intelligenceraises · addresses
• Lack of benchmarks for agent harness reliability1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Existing evaluations focus on model capabilities, not the reliability of the systems that deploy and manage agents.

  • Trial by Trace: Benchmarking AI Agent Harnesses for Reliability and Failure Attributionraises · addresses
• Negative net value of agent memory systems1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Memory systems often underperform naive retrieval, as their design can obscure or remove critical evidence from raw history.

  • Memory Tax: Dissecting the Net Value of Agent Memoryraises · addresses
• Credit assignment in diffusion language models1 paper raises it · 2 address it

  Iterative denoising in DLMs makes it hard to attribute rewards to individual tokens, limiting reinforcement learning effectiveness.

  • DTCA: Denoising Token Credit Assignment for Reinforcement Learning in Diffusion Language Modelsraises · addresses
  • Multiscale Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon LLM Agentsaddresses
• Uncertainty quantification failure under class imbalance1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Standard uncertainty measures fail to reflect clinical ambiguity in imbalanced datasets, systematically penalizing minority classes.

  • When uncertainty quantification fails: structural vulnerabilities and corrections for selective prediction under clinical class imbalanceraises · addresses

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.

• Channel state information15+50.0%
• AI tutors16+45.5%
• Multimodal emotion8+14.3%
• Anomaly detectors200.0%
• Character recognition OCR110.0%
• Physics informed neural132−9.6%
• Supervised & diffusion models95−17.4%
• Electrocardiogram ecg35−18.6%

• arXiv cs.SDOct 7

  BEANS-Next and ROOTS: Broadening Audio-Language Capabilities for Bioacoustics

  Christos Plachouras, David Robinson, Marius Miron, Gagan Narula, Paul Laisné +15

  Bioacoustics and ethology encompass a wide range of audio understanding tasks, many of which stand to benefit from recent advances in large audio-language models. However, progress in the field has so far been assessed on a narrow set of tasks, primarily centered on label-centric biological category recognition, such as species and call-type classification. In this work, we introduce BEANS-Next, a benchmark grounded in a taxonomy of bioacoustics tasks spanning acoustic perception, biological category recognition, scene understanding, and in-context learning. Using BEANS-Next, we show that existing models exhibit limited performance beyond the task families emphasized by existing evaluations, constraining their usefulness for broader bioacoustic applications. To support progress on this broader task space, we also introduce ROOTS, a large-scale training resource built from expanded curated real-world data and previously underused behavioral and acoustic metadata, supplemented by audio-derived information and scalable synthetic generation where labeling is insufficient. We demonstrate that training on this dataset yields substantial progress across all task groups of BEANS-Next,…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 7

  AbridgeKV: Compressing Long Reasoning into the KV Cache of Learned Pause Tokens

  Jack Cai, Lijie Yang, Vasilis Kontonis, Dimitris Papailiopoulos, Shivam Garg

  Long chain-of-thought decoding is memory-bound: the KV cache of the generated tokens grows linearly with the test-time compute being spent. Evicting cache entries does not fix this, because a model never trained on a cache with entries removed generates longer, often up to the length limit. We instead train the model to compress its own output. AbridgeKV compresses each completed block of generated text into the KV entries of a few learned pause tokens. These are extra input tokens with trained embeddings that produce no output. Once the pause tokens have encoded the block, AbridgeKV frees the block's original cache; subsequent tokens attend to the pause tokens' KV entries in its place. Three novel choices make this work: the pause tokens' KV entries take positions inside the block they replace, the cache budget is allocated across layers according to the measured value of each layer's entries, and compression operates on relatively large blocks. On 446 competition problems from AIME, HMMT, AMC, BRUMO, CMIMC and SMT with 32K-token generations, keeping a quarter of the generated cache matches an identically trained full-KV model in accuracy and output length; the strongest…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 7

  Two-Level Softmax Sampling Done Right: Correcting Bias from Size Imbalance and Dispersion

  Walid Bendada, Guillaume Salha-Galvan

  Sampling from a softmax distribution is a fundamental operation in machine learning, but its linear complexity in the number of items makes exact sampling impractical at scale. Two-level softmax (2LS) sampling is a popular alternative enabling sublinear-time sampling. Assuming items are partitioned into clusters, 2LS first samples a cluster and then an item within it. In this paper, we show that, despite its advantages, 2LS introduces systematic and undesirable sampling biases, which arise from misweighting clusters by ignoring both cluster size imbalance and intra-cluster similarity dispersion. We propose two sampling methods, Size-Corrected 2LS (S-2LS) and Size- and Dispersion-Corrected 2LS (SD-2LS), which correct these biases and provide provably better softmax approximations with negligible to non-existent computational overhead. In-depth experiments on five large-scale datasets validate the improved sampling properties of our methods. We recommend their consistent use in place of standard 2LS in future work.

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• arXiv cs.ROOct 7

  Agentic RSR: Real-to-Sim-to-Real through Scene Reconstruction and Execution-Grounded Robot Policies

  Yihan Li, Yating Feng, Shengjiu Sun, Jianing Chen, Hao Ren +5

  A simulation of a real robot workspace must preserve task-relevant interactions, while policies developed in it must operate on observations available to the real robot. Yet scene reconstruction and policy development are often treated separately. We present Agentic Real-to-Sim-to-Real (Agentic RSR), a framework that links scene reconstruction, policy development, and real-robot execution through the same manipulation task. Given a workspace video, a task description, and a known robot model, an agent recovers metric scale, iteratively refines the scene using visual feedback, and checks task-relevant interactions in MuJoCo. A coding agent then develops an executable policy, progressing from privileged object poses to visual observations and randomized simulation. The policy can interleave multiple observations and actions within one invocation, while the agent uses execution feedback to continue, retry, or revise its approach. A shared task-level interface carries the policy and accumulated experience to the real robot, where fresh observations and safety checks guide execution. Using Claude Opus 5.5 through DeepSeek Harness (DSH), all 18 scenes across two robots pass the joint…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 7

  Before They Can Solve: Predicting Post-Training Coding-Agent Performance from Base Models

  Tan Yu, Alexander Bukharin, Khushi Bhardwaj, Jennifer Williams, Zirui Liu +17

  How can we predict which base checkpoint is worth an expensive round of agentic post-training? End-to-end pass@$K$ tests whether successful behavior already appears in a base model's distribution, but it is a poor fit for agentic coding: many base checkpoints cannot reliably produce the well-formed tool invocation required to complete a task end-to-end. Single-shot or short-horizon tasks avoid these tool-calling failures by collapsing a multi-step interaction into a fixed prompt and a single patch, but they sidestep the core capability we care about: maintaining coherent state over many tool-using steps as the repository evolves. To bridge this gap, we treat successful post-trained agent trajectories as a lookahead signal of base-model potential. Replaying each trajectory and rerunning tests after every code-changing step identifies the decisive step: the first step whose cumulative patch flips the repository from failing to passing, certifying that the recorded action solves the task given the prior context. Motivated by a coverage principle for agentic traces, we build three screens at this step that do not require a base checkpoint to drive the harness from a cold start: (i)…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 7

  Label-free cell counting and viability prediction with brightfield imaging and deep learning

  Amir Reza Vazifeh, Christian Zeigler, Sornanathan Meyyappan, Richard Jeske, Jason W. Fleischer

  Cell viability assessment is a core requirement in cell culture systems, with critical applications in biopharmaceutical manufacturing and drug development. Conventionally, it is measured by adding membrane-impermeable dyes to a sample (a process called staining), which allows compromised cell membranes to be distinguished from intact ones. However, staining has several limitations: (a) chemical agents can perturb normal cellular processes of the cells being measured, (b) it is often ambiguous to assign viability to individual cells whose membrane integrity is only partially compromised. (c) photobleaching can undermine measurement accuracy over time when using fluorescent stains, and (d) staining cannot be performed in situ or in real time. Here, we show that (1) stained cells captured under brightfield imaging contain sufficient information to distinguish live and dead cells, and (2) cells captured under unstained brightfield imaging exhibit similar image features to their stained counterparts, enabling models trained on stained cells to generalize to unstained ones. We then report the development and validation of ViabiLens, an AI-assisted software for label-free cell…

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• arXiv cs.MAOct 7

  A Society of Researchers: Designing Institutions for Populations of Autonomous Research Agents

  Ali Asaria, Deep Gandhi, Tony Salomone

  Deployments of research agents are moving to populations of thousands that share one pool of compute, while most current systems organize one project at a time or leave the population unorganized. We argue that such a population will acquire an organization whether or not its designers provide one, so designers should provide it explicitly, and that the multi-agent systems community holds the tools to do so. We propose a society of agents, a population of persistent agents under explicit institutions, and develop it for science as a society of researchers built on six principles. Principal investigators compete for compute through requests for proposals, independent review, and grants; a human governor, the mayor, allocates resources and assigns no tasks. In a running society of ten thousand researchers, asked only to improve the pretraining of language models, one lab reported a way to reach the same quality with about 30% less compute, a result the labs that tested it do not yet agree on. We close with six open problems for the agents community.

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• arXiv cs.HCOct 7

  How assigned AI use before class shapes active student engagement in class

  Dan J. Wang, Neelam Modi Jain, Vanessa Burbano, Jorge Guzman, Daniel Keum +3

  AI learning tools are rapidly entering classrooms, but evidence about whether they help students learn is mixed and rests mostly on test scores. Comparatively less research addresses whether the use of AI changes students' live learning behaviors in class. Here, we report the results of a preregistered field experiment with 759 MBA students enrolled in ten sections of a course, in which each student was randomly assigned two of ten class sessions to prepare for with a purpose-built voice-based AI discussion partner. After two uses of the AI discussion partner, students made about 31% more voluntary contributions in each later class session. Students who used the AI discussion partner more also reported greater comfort speaking up and greater perceived learning, but not greater focus or motivation. These findings suggest that repeated practice with a voice-based AI partner can meaningfully increase students' engagement in class discussion, enhancing a critical intermediate learning outcome.

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• arXiv cs.ROOct 7

  FoldBack: Self-Correcting Masked Generative Policy for Long-Horizon Garment Folding

  Lipeng Zhuang, Shiyu Fan, Yingdong Ru, Zhuo He, Florent P. Audonnet +2

  We present FoldBack, a self-correcting masked generative policy for long-horizon garment folding. Existing long-trajectory policies may continue after a missed or slipped grasp even when the garment has not reached the intended configuration. We structure FoldBack's recovery mechanisms around three inference-time decisions: when to refine and verify, how to roll back, and where and how to retry. FoldBack aligns refinement and grasp verification with pick-and-place events, returns the robot to a retryable pre-grasp configuration while preserving successful grasps, and selectively regenerates the failed segment and selected future actions while avoiding previous failed grasp locations. To our knowledge, FoldBack is the first editable full-trajectory policy to unify these decisions, enabling failed interactions to be detected, undone, and repaired before execution continues, without recovery demonstrations or base-policy retraining. Across 33 real garments from six categories, FoldBack achieves 75.2% final folding success and 0.837 final-mask IoU, versus 45.7% and 0.689 for the strongest prior baseline.

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 7▲ 10

  Composing What Each Teacher Learned: Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation through Teacher-Relative Shifts

  Hejian Sang, Zhengze Zhou, Shayan Mohajer Hamidi, Xiaomin Li, Rohit Jain +1

  Multi-teacher on-policy distillation (MOPD) is used in two settings. In common-domain composition, several teachers score each student rollout from one prompt domain and their signals form a single target; in routed-domain distillation, prompts from different domains are assigned to the corresponding specialist. Both settings usually transfer each teacher's endpoint policy, which mixes what post-training changed with preferences inherited from the teacher's base. We introduce $Δ$-MOPD, which transfers each teacher's teacher-minus-base logit shift re-anchored at the student's frozen initialization, and compare it with endpoint supervision in both settings while holding teacher selection fixed. We first expose the mechanism that impedes endpoint transfer: inherited base pull can exceed the post-training shift. Removing it reduces the teacher-term norm ratio and target--student KL. Across our experiments, the results suggest that shift targets are particularly useful when teacher signals are combined at a state. With three composed teachers, $Δ$-MOPD exceeds endpoint composition by $4.11$ Math and $1.95$ five-benchmark points; with two, it matches endpoint accuracy. Under phased…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 7

  NeuralBES: A Differentiable, Control-Aware Emulator for Scalable Building Energy Modeling

  Ting-Yu Dai, Takuya Kurihana, Wing Yee Au, Hon Yung Wong

  Demand-side flexibility i.e. forecasting, shifting, and curtailing residential energy loads, depends on thermal models trusted across millions of heterogeneous buildings. Existing tools force a hard tradeoff: high-fidelity physics simulators such as EnergyPlus are accurate but sequential and require per-building calibration, while purely data-driven sequence models scale but abandon the physical structure that makes their predictions trustworthy. We introduce NeuralBES (Building Energy Simulation), a differentiable emulator that resolves this tradeoff by parameterizing a resistance--capacitance (RC) based thermal model with a shared neural encoder: static building metadata such as floor area, vintage, and HVAC type is mapped to physically bounded capacitances, conductances, and equipment coefficients, which become the coefficients of a scalar linear recurrence solved via a log-space parallel scan, and a predictor--corrector loop closes the thermostat--temperature nonlinearity while preserving full-horizon gradient flow. Trained on the ResStock dataset across three climate zones, NeuralBES handles heterogeneous building archetypes, vintages, and climate zones within a single…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 7

  MORCA: Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Cache Reuse in Video Diffusion Acceleration

  Yuxiang Xiong, Ruiyan Wang, Wenqiang Wang, Teng Hu, Songhang Shen +3

  Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) achieve remarkable performance in video synthesis, but their iterative denoising process suffers from high inference latency. To address this, caching has emerged as an effective acceleration strategy by capitalizing on inter-step redundancy during denoising. Existing dynamic caching methods typically estimate the error that cache reuse would introduce at each denoising step (step error) to guide cache decisions, whereas our concern is how much quality loss cache reuse would cause in the final generated video (terminal error). We show that step error does not directly correspond to terminal error and that latent information helps capture their relationship, thereby informing cache decisions. Moreover, existing threshold-based methods cannot provide precise speedup control, making it difficult to meet practical requirements for user-specified acceleration targets. To address these limitations, we introduce MORCA, a cache scheduling framework trained through offline-to-online reinforcement learning to make latent-aware reuse/recompute decisions under user-specified acceleration targets. Extensive experiments on different video generation models across…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 7

  PHRBench: A Behavioral Evaluation of Post-Hallucination Reasoning in LLMs

  Linghao Meng, Feng He, Xuan Yang, Junyuan Mao, Pinze Ren +3

  Hallucinated information can propagate through multi-stage LLM systems and become part of the context for subsequent reasoning. Existing studies of post-hallucination reasoning (PHR) mainly characterize changes in final outcomes and aggregate reasoning dynamics, leaving how models resolve hallucinated premises at the response level insufficiently understood. In this work, we introduce PHRBench, a controlled benchmark for behaviorally structured PHR across four domains and 18 large language models. PHRBench characterizes each reasoning trajectory independently of final-answer correctness through Hallucination Compliance, Hallucination Avoidance, and Heuristic Correction, and defines an insightful trajectory as successful correction that ultimately reaches the correct answer. Across 4820 controlled instances, we find that successful recovery remains relatively rare and is associated with more frequent belief updates along the reasoning trajectory. We further find that properties of the hallucinated prompt contain substantial predictive signal for successful recovery, with a lightweight predictor achieving an AUROC of 0.847. These findings provide a behavioral view of…

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• arXiv cs.MMOct 7

  MemoCare: An Interactive Multimodal Mobile System for Automated Cognitive Screening

  Duy-Cat Can, Mau Minh Phuc Le, Tuan-Khoa Hoang, Hai-Dang Nguyen, Trung-Hieu Do +8

  MemoCare is an interactive mobile system for automated multimodal cognitive screening. A React Native application combines spoken responses, temporal and spatial orientation, touchscreen actions, and visuoconstruction in complete English and Vietnamese workflows. Speech is transcribed by Google Speech-to-Text and scored locally with deterministic task-specific natural language processing rules; GPS coordinates are resolved by the MemoCare spatial module before answer matching; touch tasks are scored from interaction events; and the drawing task uses a three-model convolutional neural network consensus with separate visual interpretation. Software tests pass 151/151 predefined cases across speech/language, spatial-answer, and touch-interaction scoring, while spatial regression passes 48/48 four-country coordinate-resolution cases. For the drawing module, validation-selected ShuffleNetV2 x1.5 achieved 91.33% mean balanced accuracy and 78.87% exact three-criterion accuracy on a locked 71-image test set. Four clinician co-authors additionally inspected the end-to-end workflow, yielding a pooled median rating of 4/5 across eight criteria, with item-level medians ranging from 3 to 4.5.…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 7

  A Good Self-Teacher Meets the Student Where They Are: Joint On-Policy Learning and Teaching

  Randy Ardywibowo, Arnav Dalal, Jiantao Jiao

  Reinforcement Learning (RL) from outcome rewards suffers from sparse supervision, particularly on difficult, long-horizon tasks where successful trajectories are rare and costly to generate. On-Policy Distillation (OPD) offers an attractive alternative by providing dense token-level supervision from a stronger teacher along the student's own generations. Self-distillation methods further remove the need for a separate teacher model by conditioning the same policy on privileged information to serve as its own teacher. However, privileged conditioning alone does not guarantee that the resulting distillation update improves the student. Indeed, privileged information can lead the teacher to solve tasks through shortcuts unavailable to the student, producing supervision poorly matched to the student's current behavior. Consequently, even a higher-performing teacher can provide guidance that degrades student performance. To address this, we analyze how the choice of privileged teacher affects the student's update. We derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the teacher's local distillation update to be a positive multiple of the student's reward gradient. Our analysis suggests…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 7▲ 42

  RunningTab: Direct Workspace Interaction with Environment-Side Tabs

  Jinheon Baek, Soyeong Jeong, Yumin Choi, Dongsu Han, Sung Ju Hwang

  Much knowledge work produces new deliverables from files a workspace already holds, and LLM agents are beginning to take such work over. Through direct corpus interaction, an agent can search and read any of those files from a terminal with no indexing, and producing a deliverable from many of them in this way is what we call direct workspace interaction (DWI). Reaching the files, however, is only half the task: nothing keeps track of what the task asks for, what has been read, and what was listed but never opened, all of which slip through the context window without leaving a trace, so an agent may extract a figure and still deliver a report without it. To address this, we present RunningTab, a framework that equips direct workspace interaction with an environment-side tab: a per-task record of what the task still owes, kept by the environment alongside the agent. Specifically, the agent adds its requirements, while the environment records every file read as an excerpt with its provenance and every listed but unopened file as a candidate; the agent can then see each requirement beside its best-matching excerpts and top unopened candidates, resolve it against matching content or…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 7

  Teaching PPG How not Who: Fixed-Effects Distillation from ECG

  Zhongli Wu, Zhuangzhi Gao, Yuankai Wang, Gregory Y. H. Lip, Bilal H. Kirmani +1

  ECG is widely used to teach PPG-only models, yet what it teaches is unexamined. Wearables are valued for tracking how a person's cardiovascular state changes, but ECG-to-PPG distillation mostly learns who the person is. A per-recording mean, the trait, holds 40-59% of a frozen ECG teacher's target, and pooled students memorise it without carrying it to new recordings. The raw alignment cosine misses this, since a constant predictor scores 0.793. Across 34 runs, the more identity a student memorises, the less state it learns. Fixed-effects distillation subtracts each recording's mean from prediction and target, so the trait cancels exactly, while a pooled anchor keeps it. State agreement more than doubles, within-person labels improve while age and sex do not, and the gain holds on two backbones and two further databases. Conditioning on the recording turns distillation toward the within-person changes that wearables monitor.

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 7

  Seq-Flow: Efficient Probabilistic Forecasting with Self-Rollout Error Control

  Yinan Huang, Shitij Govil, Bo Dai, Pan Li

  Many scientific forecasting tasks require updating a distribution over future trajectories as new observations arrive. Conventional diffusion and flow models generate each forecast from Gaussian noise, often at the cost of many sampling steps. Warm-start methods reuse earlier predictions to reduce this cost, but their models are not trained to perform the forecast update itself, which can compromise quality under few-step sampling. In this work, we introduce Seq-Flow, a conditional flow model whose ODE transports samples from the previous forecast distribution to the updated one. Because successive forecasts often differ only modestly, this transport starts from an informative distribution and can produce accurate updates with few flow evaluations. Recursive reuse also creates a challenge: errors in one forecast become errors in the initial states of subsequent flows. We address this with self-rollout training, in which a moving average copy of the model generates forecasts that initialize later training updates. Unlike self-forcing methods, which reuse generated outputs as conditioning context, Seq-Flow reuses them as the source of the next flow. Experiments On…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 7

  ECHO: Embodied Camera Observations of Human Object Carrying

  Xuefei Sun, Lorin Achey, Kali Hamilton, Alberto Speranzon, Gregory Grebe +2

  Embodied and assistive agents must do more than recognize objects: they must reason about where an object belongs given the layout of an environment and the habits of the people who live in it. Progress on this problem has been limited, in part because no dedicated benchmark or dataset exists to define and evaluate it. Existing RGB-D scan datasets reconstruct static rooms without human activity, while human-object-interaction datasets capture motion without a navigable, fully reconstructed scene or a ground-truth notion of an object's natural destination. We introduce contextual object placement as a benchmark task: predicting an object's destination during an observed object-carrying episode. To support this task, we present Embodied Camera observations of Human Object carrying (ECHO), a large-scale synthetic dataset that pairs dense RGB-D scans of indoor scenes with recordings of an embodied human carrying everyday objects to context-appropriate destinations. ECHO is the first publicly available dataset to combine reconstructed scenes, human activity, natural language, and contextual-placement annotations. It comprises 3,805 human-annotated episodes across 159 floors of 115…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 7▲ 25

  Q-Learning with Scalar Adjoint Matching

  Yonghoon Dong, Minsung Yoon, Jaehyuk Kim, Jungwoo Park, Changyeon Kim +1

  Flow policies capture rich and diverse action distributions, and fine-tuning them with off-policy RL to improve beyond the demonstrations has drawn growing interest. However, fine-tuning a flow policy against a learned value function is not trivial, because the policy generates its action over many flow steps. Adjoint matching offers a principled way to update the flow model itself by propagating value information from the final action back to each flow step, but it requires a vector--Jacobian product through the policy at every step, a cost that grows with the number of flow steps and the policy size. We observe that the batch-averaged velocity Jacobian of pretrained flow policies concentrates on its diagonal. Motivated by this finding, we derive a closed-form scalar adjoint that scales the value gradient at the final action by the flow time, eliminating the per-step vector--Jacobian products. We further find that controlling the critic's value at policy-generated actions is particularly important under the scalar adjoint. Based on these findings, we propose Q-learning with Scalar Adjoint Matching (SQAM), which combines the scalar adjoint with a value penalty at those actions.…

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