Research

• Compositional coverage and decision grounding in trajectory supervision1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Current tool-use trajectories often lack multi-step dependencies and justified actions, limiting effective agent learning.

  • Trajectory2Gym: Decision-Grounded Compositional Interaction Synthesis for Tool-Use Agentsraises · addresses
• Benchmarking agent harness reliability and failure attribution1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Existing benchmarks focus on model capabilities, neglecting the evaluation of agent harnesses and their reliability.

  • Trial by Trace: Benchmarking AI Agent Harnesses for Reliability and Failure Attributionraises · addresses
• Compositionality of RAG pipeline components1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Isolated gains in RAG components do not necessarily compose, and optimizing one metric can hurt another.

  • Retrieval Augmented Generation Compositionalityraises · addresses
• Token collapse in graph soft prompting1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  Graph-specific tokens in textual graph soft prompting become indistinguishable, failing to convey graph content.

  • On the Token Collapse Phenomenon in Textual Graph Soft Promptingraises
• Label-free monitoring in self-supervised learning1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  Standard signals like loss and feature statistics fail to detect encoder degradation in self-supervised training.

  • Improving Signals, Declining Encoder: A Known-Answer Test of Label-Free Monitoring in Self-Supervised Learningraises

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.

• Anomaly detectors25+92.3%
• Channel state information15+36.4%
• AI tutors15+36.4%
• Character recognition OCR12+20.0%
• Multimodal emotion8+14.3%
• Physics informed neural132−10.2%
• Machine learned interatomic37−15.9%
• Supervised & diffusion models91−24.8%

• arXiv cs.AIOct 8

  CLEAT: Learning Value-Guided Clarification for Interactive Agents

  Jiatan Huang, Zheyuan Zhang, Ziming Li, Tianyi Ma, Mingchen Li +2

  LLM agents can execute increasingly complex tasks, but effective assistance also requires aligning their actions with goals and constraints that users may leave unstated. We study this problem as interactive intent alignment through clarification. Yet clarification is useful only when the agent can turn the answer into better decisions. As training changes how the agent handles incomplete information and uses additional answers, the same clarification can become more or less useful. We introduce CLEAT (CLarification through valuE-guided Agent co-Training), a framework that co-trains a clarification-value controller and the task policy from shared interaction outcomes. We formulate residual query value to measure the task utility gained by asking rather than proceeding under the current policy, and estimate it through paired rollouts from the same interaction history. These paired returns train the controller to predict clarification value and the task policy to select useful questions and act on the answers. The controller guides subsequent rollout collection, while outcomes from the updated agent provide new value labels that allow clarification guidance to adapt as the agent…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 8

  SynAct: Synergistic Active Feedback Learning for LLM Agents

  Ning Liu, Ian Li, Kristina Klinkner

  LLM agents executing multi-step workflows fail in two fundamentally different ways: recoverable slips, which further attempts can repair, and knowledge gaps, which retrying cannot resolve. Expert feedback can address the latter, but expert attention is scarce. The key challenge is therefore not whether to ask for feedback, but where feedback can change the outcome. Existing approaches either avoid expert feedback, allowing agents to reinforce their own errors, or allocate feedback at the task level without identifying consequential decisions. We present SynAct, an active learning framework that treats expert attention as the binding constraint and allocates feedback at the level of individual decisions. SynAct ranks decisions by the mutual information between the selected action and the terminal outcome across repeated rollouts, queries an expert at the highest-value decisions, and distills the resulting corrections into transferable rules that the agent can reuse without expert access at deployment. We theoretically characterize what this signal identifies under finite repeated sampling: with k rollouts and at least m observations per action, outcome-constant decisions have zero…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 8

  Feature Competition and Its Representational Origins in Vision Language Models: Evidence from the Stroop Paradigm

  Nurbüke Teker, Rui Xiao, Zeynep Akata, Shuchen Wu

  When you ask a vision-language model (VLM) a question with an image, it answers your question based on the image. But to act means to choose: saying one thing means choosing to respond not say another. This becomes an issue when the image contains multiple features that equally relate to the question at hand: how would VLMs choose to respond? This problem is precisely studied by the classical Stroop task in psychology: among a set of deliberately designed images whose text and color conflicts (e.g., \textcolor{blue}{RED}), participants are instructed to report the color. We adapt this psychological paradigm to a benchmark and prompted a range of contrastive and generative VLMs on their behavior. Across models, we observe a persistent bias toward the feature of text in Stroop images: when text and color disagree, models preferentially generate responses centered to the text rather than color. We then opened the black box and examined the source of this bias and why certain features influences the model's behavior more than others. In the embedding space, we found that textual cues are represented more strongly and separably than color cues. This representational asymmetry predicts…

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• arXiv cs.CROct 8

  Cancerous Backdoor Attack: Gradual Activation via Invisible Tokens and A Stage Controller

  Tahmid Imtiaz Imu, Emama Nahid, Prodipta Sen Amartya, Ahsanul Jobayer, Yutong Song +3

  Backdoor Attacks on Large Language Models (LLMs) typically follow a trigger-response pattern, where satisfying a trigger condition activates a single terminal behavior. However, this single-point backdoor activation does not explore attacks in which malicious behavior develops gradually through multiple intermediate stages before reaching the terminal activation stage. We present Cancerous Backdoor Attack, that gradually corrupts an LLM's reasoning over a sequence of interactions by leveraging invisible tokens and a stage controller. Specifically, invisible tokens provide hidden stages to the model without appearing in the user's visible request and the stage controller tracks the attack's progression during inference to realize gradual activation. We evaluate Cancerous Backdoor Attack across several reasoning datasets. The attack consistently produces gradual reasoning corruption across models and tasks. We compare Cancerous Backdoor Attack with prior backdoor attack baselines to demonstrate our proposed attack outperforms the baselines. Our results indicate that reasoning corruption can develop gradually before it becomes visible, making answer accuracy alone insufficient for…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 8

  Machine Learning and Time-Series Foundation Models for Day-Ahead Electricity Forecasting in a University Building

  Amey Vasulkar, Samuel Kernan Freire, Arie-Willem de Leeuw, Tadeo-Baldiri Salcedo-Rahola

  Day-ahead electricity forecasts can help building operators schedule heating, ventilation, and other services around anticipated demand. Choosing a forecasting model also requires balancing accuracy with its forecast-time inputs, local training, and computational requirements. We benchmark statistical, machine-learning, recurrent neural-network, and pretrained TimesFM models for a university building. We use chronological validation and evaluate all configurations on the same 57 test days, comparing accuracy across workdays, weekends, and holidays alongside local fitting and forecasting time. Weather covariates use retrospective observations. TimesFM 3.0 with covariates achieves the lowest overall errors, reducing mean absolute error by approximately 43\% relative to weekly seasonal-naive forecasting. XGBoost remains competitive, although paired daily comparisons do not establish a clear mean-absolute-error advantage for TimesFM. TimesFM also performs strongly using only past electricity consumption. Adding covariates improves its holiday forecasts but slightly worsens workday and weekend forecasts, leaving overall mean absolute error almost unchanged. TimesFM requires no…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 8▲ 2

  ForcingBooster: Adaptive Patch-wise Denoising for Fast Autoregressive Video Diffusion

  Zekai Gu, Peng Wang, Jiahao Lu, Yongsen Mao, Cheng Lin +1

  Autoregressive video diffusion models have become a leading approach to real-time interactive video generation and video world modeling. However, existing methods typically allocate computation uniformly across space when generating the next video chunk, updating all patches with the same denoising schedule and number of function evaluations. This ignores the spatial heterogeneity of video content: static, simple, or recurring regions are often easier to denoise, while other regions require further refinement or additional context. A uniform budget thus leads to redundant computation on easy patches, whereas reducing the fixed step count can leave difficult patches insufficiently refined. We introduce \methodname{}, a general framework that dynamically allocates denoising steps to individual patches: easy patches stop early to improve efficiency, while difficult patches receive more refinement steps. This design accelerates generation with negligible quality degradation. Our method is compatible with most existing few-step autoregressive diffusion models, requiring only a lightweight routing module with modest training. Experiments demonstrate that \methodname{} reduces the total…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 8

  MemReg: Streaming Outdoor LiDAR Point Cloud Registration with Hybrid Memory Buffers

  Jiuming Liu, Mengmeng Liu, Guangming Wang, Lihao Liu, Michael Ying Yang +4

  Prior outdoor LiDAR registration works are commonly limited by the pair-wise input paradigm, which neglects temporal correlations inherent within streaming sequences. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-frame outdoor point cloud registration network for streaming LiDAR scans enhanced with pose-related memory buffers. The key observation is that long-term temporal LiDAR sequences can provide rich global contextual information to complete sparse measurements, filter outliers, and address low-overlap problems, thereby boosting registration performance. Specifically, two hybrid memory buffers are designed, including an implicit memory feature buffer and an explicit memory pose buffer, to store and dynamically update pose-related temporal features. Moreover, a novel dynamic history weighting module is developed to adaptively fuse current and history pose-related features. Extensive experiments on three outdoor datasets, including KITTI, nuScenes, and Apollo-Southbay, demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of MemReg, surpassing all previous pair-wise methods and also multi-frame SLAM systems. Our method also generalizes surprisingly well to multiview indoor registration scenarios…

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• arXiv cs.CEOct 8

  Mesh-Native Tokenisation: Retrofitting Foundation Models to Unstructured Data

  Georg Maierhofer, Miles Cranmer, Payel Mukhopadhyay

  Physics foundation models are an increasingly popular approach for building versatile emulators for spatiotemporal systems. They require tokenisation layers that lift physical field data into a latent representation suitable for dynamic processing. A typical choice for this layer is a convolutional encoder, which lifts field information in a locality-aware way and can be trained very efficiently. However, this choice cannot be applied to a large class of scientific computing problems where data are represented on unstructured meshes, for example simulations on domains with curved boundaries. Such data typically require graph neural network architectures, which are more expensive to train and, in the form currently used, encode information differently from their CNN counterparts, thus limiting the portability of physics emulators between these data regimes. In this work we introduce Mesh-Native Convolution (MNC), a locality-aware tokenisation layer that encodes unstructured mesh-based data in a way that is analogous to CNNs. This approach leads to models that can be trained once on mesh data and then deployed to arbitrary unstructured meshes, even if these are irregular, with…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 8

  GeopoliticalQA: Benchmarking Retrieval and Generation over Intelligence Reports

  Veronika Solopova, Ivan Havlytskyi, Viktoria Skorik, Ostap Vykhopen

  Geopolitical and strategic intelligence reports constitute a rich source of expert knowledge and have increasing value in the current political climate, but their heterogeneity and analytical complexity pose challenges for retrieval-augmented question answering. We introduce a benchmark for grounded question answering over 415 open-source geopolitical and strategic intelligence reports, comprising 5,525 document-grounded question-answer pairs spanning factual, inferential, comparative, and risk-oriented questions. We propose a document-aware generation pipeline that profiles reports before generating questions and validate dataset quality through expert annotation and an LLM-as-judge protocol. Using the benchmark, we evaluate 15 retrieval systems and six open-weight LLMs for RAG. We find that models perform similarly on document-level retrieval, while at the harder chunk level retrieval quality is not driven by embedding-model scale: bge-m3, a mid-size open encoder matches an order of magnitude larger ones and outperforms commercial embedding APIs. In contrast, answer generation remains challenging even given the gold evidence, particularly for inferential and risk-oriented…

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• arXiv cs.CYOct 8

  Knowing Is Not Telling: Identity Ossification in LLM Representations of Trans-border Communities

  Minglu Sun, Lan Chen, Hang Jiang

  Ethnic and cultural identities rarely align with political borders, a tension made sharper by migration and long-standing cross-border ties. Communities such as the Sami, the Rohingya, and the Kurds have long lived across more than one state. This tension is especially clear in mainland Southeast Asia, where many communities share history, language, and culture across state lines. We study nine such transborder ethnic communities along China's southwestern border with mainland Southeast Asia, looking at how large language models (LLMs) represent them. We define and study identity ossification: a pattern where LLMs turn a fluid, cross-border ethnic identity into a single, fixed nation-state identity. We introduce the Transborder Identity Ossification Diagnostic Framework (TIODF) that compares direct factual questions with open-ended narrative questions to test whether ossification comes from missing knowledge or from how models frame their answers. We test GPT-5.1 and DeepSeek-V3.2 in English and Chinese. Ossification varies substantially across models and query languages. It appears in only 10.1% of GPT-5.1's English answers, but in 62.6% of DeepSeek-V3.2's Chinese answers.…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 8▲ 3

  Self-Preservation in Language Models

  Dongkyu Cho, Rumi Chunara, Ali Behrouz

  Continual learning (CL) seeks to adapt pretrained models while preserving prior capabilities. Yet the tasks supplied for preservation cover only part of what a model knows, while forgetting can extend beyond them. Recent work shows that language models can supplement this limited evidence by generating useful replay without access to their original training data. This raises a question about self-preservation: can a model help choose preservation targets that protect its own capabilities more broadly? To study this question, we organize task descriptions and their examples into Task Banks, whose entries can be selected and combined to guide replay generation by a frozen model. Continual instruction tuning with Qwen models of varying sizes yields three findings. First, the new task and learning rate shape which prior capabilities degrade, while tracking previously correct answers reveals losses that average accuracy can conceal. Second, generated replay reduces forgetting on tasks outside the bank. Combining partial banks strengthens this protection, improving mean retention of previously correct answers over either bank alone across the tested sizes. Third, the model can also…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 8

  Reflective Prompt Optimization of a Deep-Research Agent: A Topic-Disjoint, Multi-Seed Protocol for Measuring Transferable Gains and Prompt-Level Overfitting

  Elias Lumer, Sahil Sen, Vamse Kumar Subbiah, Kevin Paul

  Prompt optimization is an attractive alternative to reinforcement learning for adapting language-model agents, since it is cheap and produces human-readable artifacts. On factual tasks, however, it carries a failure mode that scalar-reward reinforcement learning does not. An optimizer that reads the training examples can write their answers into the prompt, so an in-distribution gain may be memorization rather than transferable behaviour. We apply reflective prompt evolution (GEPA) to the two system prompts of a multi-agent deep-research agent and evaluate it under a topic-disjoint split in which no topic is shared across train, validation, and test. Held-out citation reward rises by 0.079, from 0.702 to 0.781, with a bootstrap 95\% confidence interval of [0.051, 0.107], and the gain replicates across three seeds (mean 0.107). Nearly half of the winning prompt is a memorized answer key, yet a controlled ablation shows this content earns no reward even on the exact training questions it encodes. The large validation-minus-held-out gap is therefore small-sample selection under a noisy judge, not memorization. Varying the verifier isolates what makes the gain transfer. Decomposed…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 8

  STAPLE: Static Sparse Upcycling of Pretrained Checkpoints via Embedding Modules

  Ranajoy Sadhukhan, Euijin Hong, Sheng Cao, Zechun Liu, Shuowei Jin +7

  Sparse computation can scale the parametric capacity of LLMs without proportionally increasing active computation, but pretraining sparse architectures remains expensive and data-hungry. Existing sparse upcycling methods mainly target Mixture-of-Experts models, where expert homogeneity, sample inefficiency, and system overheads can limit practical scalability. Static sparse memory offers predictable access and token-specific updates that can help address these challenges, but naively integrating it into pretrained computation yields poor returns. In this work, we introduce STAPLE, a recipe built upon STEM for integrating static sparse memory into pretrained models. Whereas STEM replaces FFN up-projections with token-indexed embeddings, STAPLE retains them and adds the embeddings as a residual pathway, preserving pretrained computation while learning complementary token-specific information in a scalable manner. On OLMo-2 1B, STAPLE improves over continued dense training by 4.27 points on HumanEval, 2.80 on MBPP, 2.27 on GSM8K, and 1.65 on DROP. Average performance increases with static capacity, and improvements persist on the larger OLMo-2 7B backbone. STAPLE also outperforms…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 8

  Beyond Binary Verifiable Rewards: Behavioral Self-Rewarding for SWE Agents

  Yiran Wu, Andrew Zhao, Yurui Chang, Qingyun Wu, Xuan Feng

  Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) provides reliable supervision for software engineering agents through executable tests, but binary rewards fail to distinguish trajectories with substantially different debugging quality. We investigate whether the current policy can judge its own trajectories and use these judgments to improve task performance without a separately trained reward model. To this end, we introduce Behavioral Self-Rewarding (BSR), a reward-refinement method that reuses the policy to compare observable debugging behavior among trajectories from the same task with the same verifier outcome. BSR aggregates pairwise preferences into task-local scores and converts them into bounded auxiliary rewards, introducing reward contrast while preserving the verifier-defined pass/fail ordering. This provides additional supervision from already-collected trajectories without requiring new environment interactions. Experiments on SWE-bench Verified and SWE-bench-Live show consistent improvements across the evaluated Qwen3-14B and Qwen3-32B configurations, supporting using the policy's own comparative judgments as a complementary learning signal for training…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 8

  SpireBench: Evaluating Long-Horizon Strategic Play of Agentic Models with Slay the Spire

  Scott C. Lowe, Sander W. Keemink

  Agentic large language models now tackle complex tasks, yet strategic reasoning over long horizons is under-studied: most agentic benchmarks are short and episodic, and performance on long tasks is hard to dissect into stored knowledge, reasoning and luck. We introduce SpireBench, in which models play the complete commercial deck-builder Slay the Spire (StS), where early decisions decide long-term success. Across 20 large language models (LLMs) at the game's highest difficulty, frontier models beat heuristic baselines and match the average human player but remain far behind experts. This gap widens as the run lengthens: the strongest models win the first act as often as experts, then fall behind. What separates strong models from weak is how well they play each fight; all of them misjudge risk over a run, preserving health rather than spending it to grow stronger. A comprehensive, self-consistent renaming of every game term shows that part of their performance rests on prior knowledge of the game, and models do not improve from the memories they write across runs, which are often wrong and overly cautious. Our harness is the first to give a model the complete original game, and…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 8

  Know What You Don't Know: Agentic Data Synthesis by Evolving Generation Space for Closed-Loop Learning

  Wei Yang, Qing Ping, Youzhi Luo, Yawei Wang, Abhishek Kumar +2

  The continued improvement of large language models increasingly depends on synthetic experience, yet effective data synthesis for interactive agents requires not only executable and verifiable trajectories, but also interactions that provide learning value for the current task agent. Existing methods increasingly incorporate environment feedback, data validation, or learner failures, but still face a feedback-to-decision gap: observed weaknesses do not directly specify how future synthesis should change, or whether they can be represented by the current synthesis space. To address this gap, we propose EvoSyn, a learning-feedback-driven multi-agent framework that organizes synthesis around a revisable state specifying what interaction factors can be deliberately generated and where synthesis effort should be allocated. A role-specialized multi-agent system translates learner feedback into synthesis revisions, while a Designer allocates synthesis directions and a Planner grounds them into executable experience. This process enables within-space adaptation toward weak or under-covered regions and synthesis-space expansion that promotes newly discovered factors into explicit…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 8

  Scenes as an Attack Surface: Uncovering Scene-Grounded Safety Failures in MLLMs

  Tongxi Wu, Yuyang Cheng, Jiacheng Xian, Hu Huang, Zhihao Wu +3

  Existing jailbreak attacks have exposed serious safety weaknesses in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Most prior attacks rely on specially constructed visual inputs to carry or support harmful intent. In this paper, we uncover a different vulnerability: task-relevant scene semantics alone can shift an MLLM from refusal to compliance, even when the visual input introduces no additional attack instructions and the original task intent remains unchanged. We formalize this failure as a scene-grounded visual safety vulnerability and introduce SceneSafetyBench to investigate it across eight risk categories and nine white- and black-box MLLMs. Our analysis reveals that this failure is associated with how task-relevant visual evidence influences downstream safety representations, suggesting that visual grounding alone cannot fully explain the observed safety shift. Building on this finding, we propose Scene-Grounded Attacks (SGA), which preserve the original task while constructing validated scene-grounded queries and combining their independent responses. Across nine target MLLMs, SGA achieves an average attack success rate (ASR) of 86.17%, outperforming the strongest baseline…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 8

  Human Pose Estimation by Probabilistic Mixtures of Gaussian and Uniform Distributions

  Santiago Reina Alguacil, Ezequiel López Rubio

  Despite advancements in sub-pixel decoding, modern Human Pose Estimation (HPE) architectures remain constrained by deterministic coordinate extraction from discrete heatmaps, which systematically fails under dense occlusions and Out-of-Distribution (OoD) ambiguities. To address these limitations, we propose a post-hoc continuous probabilistic framework that intercepts raw heatmaps and models them as a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) augmented with a spatially agnostic uniform distribution, requiring no architectural modifications or retraining. This continuous representation allows us to comprehensively explore the distinct contributions of density modeling to HPE. We show that the spatial expectation of our fitted GMM achieves precision parity with leading sub-pixel decoders without heuristic post-processing. Leveraging this continuous space, our test-time augmentation aggregates probability distributions rather than discrete activations, mitigating multi-scale heatmap poisoning. Furthermore, because our multimodal GMM parameterization isolates competing spatial hypotheses, it naturally interfaces with geometric regularizers such as Markov Random Fields. However, our analysis…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 8▲ 7

  Realism VS Accuracy: Event Sequence Forecasting from a Generative Modeling Perspective

  Dmitry Osin, Egor Surkov, Petr Mokrov, Igor Udovichenko, Ivan Karpukhin +3

  Event sequences are chains of random events, each described by heterogeneous (numerical and categorical) features. The problem of event sequence forecasting occurs in finance, healthcare, business process intelligence, and other fields. In this work, we study multi-horizon forecasting of event sequences as a conditional generative modeling problem. We evaluate forecasts not only for prediction accuracy, but also for distributional realism. To this end, we present a benchmark comprising metrics for both quality aspects, strong statistical baselines, recent models adapted from adjacent fields, and curated real-world datasets. Careful evaluation reveals that no method excels at both accuracy and realism, highlighting a fundamental trade-off between the two. Finally, we introduce Wasserstein BaryBooster, an algorithm that aggregates samples from a realism-strong diffusion model into a state-of-the-art predictor, demonstrating that distributional realism can be converted into prediction accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/xaosina/event-sequence-forecasting.

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 8▲ 15

  One Model to Loop Them All: Elastic Latent Recurrence for Language Models

  Faisal Ladhak, Shantanu Acharya, Santiago Akle Serano, Simeng Sun, Boris Ginsburg +1

  A latent recurrent language model applies a shared block of layers repeatedly, so one checkpoint can trade inference compute for accuracy by changing the loop count. At one loop, however, such models typically fall well short of a non-recurrent model of the same size, a one-loop tax that makes a separate non-recurrent model the better choice whenever latency matters. We present Elastic Latent Recurrence (ELR), a recipe for training looped language models without this tax. At one loop, an ELR model costs the same to serve as a non-recurrent model of the same size and, trained on the same data, reaches similar accuracy. Each additional loop then buys more accuracy for more inference compute. Three choices make this work: a gated state update with a learned step size, loop counts mixed within each optimizer update, and conditioning each pass on its loop index and budget. The first two preserve one-loop accuracy, and the third lowers loss at every additional loop. Mixed depths can be introduced late in pretraining to limit the added training cost, and with zero-initialized conditioning added at the switch, this late schedule reaches lower loss than mixed-depth training from scratch.…

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