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Open problems across fields

  • 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 unified evaluation for work agents1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

    Existing benchmarks fail to measure reliable work execution across tools, workflows, and open environments, hindering progress in agent systems.

    • Work Agents: Systems, Capabilities, and Optimizationraises · addresses
  • Memory tax in long-horizon agents1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

    Dedicated memory systems often underperform naive retrieval, as reorganizing information can obscure evidence and reduce net value.

    • 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
  • Grounded significance testing for temporal hypotheses1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

    Language models assert temporal patterns without rigorous 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.

Rising research topics

  • Character recognition OCR12+20.0%
  • AI tutors15+15.4%
  • Channel state information13−7.1%
  • Electrocardiogram ecg35−12.5%
  • Supervised & diffusion models94−15.3%
  • Machine learned interatomic36−23.4%
  • Stochastic gradient descent25−26.5%
  • CAD models11−26.7%
Fields · this week
All fields2165Multimodal428AI agents406Frontier LLMs275Inference & serving199Teacher policy distillation171Medical image segmentation126Physics informed neural101Supervised & diffusion models94Voice AI40Forecasting time39Machine learned interatomic36Electrocardiogram ecg35Remote sensing33Deepfake detection31Federated learning29All 25 fields

Papers

  • arXiv cs.LGOct 9

    Robust Langevin Sampling under State-Dependent Heavy-Tailed Noise with Applications to LLM Fine-Tuning

    M. Berk Sahin, Ege C. Kaya, Arda Fazla, Behzad Sharif, Abolfazl Hashemi

    Existing convergence guarantees for non-log-concave sampling with stochastic gradient Langevin Monte Carlo (SG-LMC) typically assume globally Lipschitz gradients and uniformly bounded noise variance. Both assumptions can fail even in elementary sampling problems, and relaxing them better reflects practical applications such as Bayesian fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs). We relax both assumptions through generalized smoothness and our proposed state-dependent heavy-tailed oracle with finite $p$-th moments, $1<p\leq 2$. The oracle permits infinite variance when $p<2$ and includes the Blum-Gladyshev (BG-0) condition. We study these relaxations separately and jointly, proposing three methods. Under globally Lipschitz gradients, robust LMC (R-LMC) handles the proposed oracle through geometric-median centering and residual clipping. With exact gradients, adaptive LMC (A-LMC) controls discretization error under generalized smoothness. Robust adaptive LMC (RA-LMC) addresses both relaxations through robust estimation and a noise-aware step size. For all three methods, we establish non-asymptotic convergence guarantees in Fisher information (FI) without assuming dissipativity or…

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  • arXiv cs.CLOct 9

    Time Delay System for Sequence Modeling

    Youshan Zhang, Jialu Li

    Existing sequence models share a critical limitation: they lack an explicit, interpretable mechanism for content-aware temporal recall. LSTMs compress everything into a single hidden state, thereby losing information about specific past events. Transformers attend to all tokens indiscriminately at quadratic cost, while state-space models like Mamba compress history into a fixed-dimensional state without explicit content-addressable memory. To address this gap, we introduce a novel framework grounded in nonlinear time-delay systems, in which the effective delay is dynamically estimated based on the semantic similarity between current and historical inputs. Our approach features three key innovations: (i) a differentiable semantic lag estimator that computes content-aware soft attention weights over history, producing a weighted historical context and similarity score; (ii) a diagonal state space with closed-form cumulative sum solution, achieving O(1) per-step complexity with no sequential loops; and (iii) an interpretable fuzzy semantic modulation mechanism that learns context-dependent rules for balancing instantaneous processing versus historical recall, where rule centers…

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  • arXiv cs.CLOct 9

    Unreliable Narrator Framing as a Cost-effective Mechanism for Satire Explanation of Australian and American Satirical News

    Kanay Gupta, David Y. Liu, Aditya Joshi

    Satirical news is a unique form of misinformation: it is intended to be humorous by the original publication source but can be misinterpreted. Explanation of satirical news articles is challenging because recent and local context needs to be incorporated. This is a pilot study that explores explanation generation for satirical news articles from Australia and compares them alongside those from USA. The paper demonstrates that framing explanations on unreliable narrator theory on open-weights models can be a feasible, cost-effective alternative to frontier models. We find that models identify the satirical tropes more accurately on the American source than the Australian one. This work results in a novel dataset and an evaluation benchmark for satirical explanation.

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  • arXiv cs.AIOct 9

    Mitigating Capability Degradation in LLM Self-Improvement via Representation Geometry Regularization

    Jiaqi Tian, Ting Long

    On-Policy Self-distillation is a self-improvement paradigm that enables large language models (LLMs) to improve their capabilities by leveraging the same model as both teacher and student under different conditioning contexts. However, we find that OPSD methods can progressively degrade previously acquired capabilities: queries that are correctly responded at earlier training stages may become incorrectly responded as optimization proceeds, even the overall performance continues to improve. Further analysis reveals that this degradation coincides with a deterioration of the geometry of hidden representations, characterized by reduced intra-cluster compactness and diminished inter-cluster separation. Motivated by this observation, we propose Representation Geometry Regularization (RGR), which preserves representation geometry during post-training by encouraging compactness within cluster and separation across cluster. RGR can be seamlessly integrated into existing OPSD methods without altering their core optimization procedures. Extensive experiments on multiple OPSD methods and benchmarks show that RGR generally alleviates capability degradation while retaining capability…

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  • arXiv stat.MLOct 9

    Universal Bounds for Self-Normalized Kullback-Leibler Estimation

    Buu Phan, Lester Mackey, David Alvarez-Melis

    This work studies an entropy-based estimator of Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence constructed from normalized importance weights. We prove a universal finite-sample bound showing that its expectation can exceed the target-proposal KL divergence by at most $\log 2$ for any sample size. We then characterize the KL divergence between the distribution induced by importance-weighted resampling and the proposal, showing that it is upper bounded by both the expectation of the entropy-based estimator and the target-proposal KL divergence. Importantly, these bounds require neither bounded importance weights nor finite higher moments. We apply these results to test-time alignment of generative models via Soft Best-of-$N$ sampling, an importance-sampling-based scaling technique proposed by Verdun et al. (2025), and to relative entropy coding, obtaining finite-sample policy-divergence certificates and moment-free bounds on coding cost.

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  • arXiv stat.MLOct 9

    Two-way Guidance: Simultaneous Learning of Summary Statistics for Generative Bayes

    Percy S. Zhai, Max Pachman, Peverel D. Shipley, Jungeum Kim

    Bayesian simulation-based inference (SBI) can struggle to recover increasingly concentrated posteriors as observation size grows. We consider learning sufficient summary statistics jointly with the posterior as a general principle for scalable inference in various SBI methods. A common measure taken in SBI is dimension reduction through predetermined summaries, which may partially discard posterior information. Our approach instead imposes structure on how the posterior learner depends on a learned summary (e.g., affinity), and learns the summary simultaneously with the posterior. We identify an important mechanism named two-way guidance: under a structural restriction on the summary, the posterior sufficiency of the learned summary simplifies posterior learning, whereas a suitable posterior objective guides the learned summary towards posterior sufficiency. This mechanism explains a counterintuitive finding that the structural restriction on the summary statistics improves posterior learning, rather than limit its performance. We establish theoretical guarantees on both posterior estimation error and the learned summary's departure from sufficiency, thus identifying conditions…

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  • arXiv cs.SEOct 9

    Co-Modifying Application Code and Deployment Infrastructure: A Causal Study of AI Agent Pull Requests

    Mohammad Wathiq Soualhi, Basem Suleiman

    Current software engineering agents are evaluated predominantly inside isolated sandboxes against synchronous local tests. However, deploying features in collaborative repositories requires modifying continuous integration (CI/CD) pipelines, containers, and provisioning manifests alongside application logic. Because agents lack deployment awareness, attempting cross-domain modifications introduces unverified dependencies into asynchronous integration pipelines. To isolate the causal integration overhead of dual-scope pull requests (PRs)-modifying both application code and deployment infrastructure-we evaluated 26,999 PRs across two large datasets (AIDev v5 and MOSAIC-3M) encompassing six agent architectures and an aligned human baseline. Using a deterministic four-tier file taxonomy and an exact 4D strata-matching framework, we isolated integration metrics under conditional exchangeability while controlling for application volume. We find agents operate primarily as application coders or chore workers, with maintenance tasks capturing 17.70% to 25.41% of agent PRs. Dual-scope modifications represent only 4.48% to 4.55% of agentic PRs, yet trigger bimodal integration outcomes. In…

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  • arXiv cs.LGOct 9

    Reinforcement Learning via Fixed-point Flow Matching

    Denis Blessing, Onur Celik, Gerhard Neumann

    In maximum entropy and behavior-constrained reinforcement learning (RL), the optimal policy is given by a Boltzmann distribution. Generating samples from this distribution can be challenging, as it is often complex and multimodal. While flow policies trained with flow matching provide a powerful framework for representing such distributions, they traditionally rely on access to training data, which is generally unavailable in online RL. To address this limitation, we propose fixed-point flow matching (FFM), a data-free procedure for training and fine-tuning flow policies in RL. FFM leverages the target flow identity to formulate the actor update as a fixed-point iteration, utilizing a flow-matching-style regression objective where the critic's action gradients serve as regression targets. We show that the optimal policy is a fixed point of this iteration. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that FFM effectively fine-tunes pretrained flow policies in the offline-to-online setting and enables efficient and accurate training of flow policies from scratch in online RL. These results establish fixed-point flow matching as a principled approach for learning expressive…

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  • arXiv cs.LGOct 9

    When Generative Models Act as Simulators

    Sevan Brodjian, Michael Hobley, Pietro Perona

    A simulator summarizes an environment in a state that users can read and change. Generative models learn representations of the world without explicit specification, but offer no built-in way to edit that world's state. We investigate the conditions under which a generative model can act as a simulator through $\textit{editability}$: whether changing a model's latent representation produces the next-step outputs we get by editing a simulator's state. Plainly stated, our goal is to find a mapping between a generative model's latent state and the simulator state, where the model is trained on observations alone and the mapping is learned afterward. We test two kinds of mappings, both learned from observations paired with simulator states. In one, we train probes to decode the simulator state from the model, then steer along them. In the other, we learn the mapping directly with an inverse map, which can succeed even where steering fails. We study both in two contrasting environments: the discrete board game Othello, and Rayworld, our own continuous world of moving discs seen through partial renderings, closer to physical scenes and video. We find that which mapping succeeds depends…

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  • arXiv cs.AIOct 9

    Towards Defining, Measuring, and Leveraging Creativity in AI Applications

    Jingyi Yang, Alexander Tuzhilin

    Despite extensive research, computational creativity still lacks a conceptually grounded, practically relevant, and empirically applicable formal definition across contexts such as art, scientific research, and games. Existing approaches to creativity often focus on proposing informal conceptual definitions without providing formal computational concepts. Alternatively, they propose formal definitions without carefully examining their underlying assumptions or providing validation of these definitions by testing their performance in specific application settings. To address these problems, this paper proposes several formal postulates of creativity grounded in prior psychological work on creativity, especially as related to Boden's three core criteria of creativity: newness, value, and surprise. Furthermore, we propose a conceptual mathematical definition of creativity that aligns with these postulates. We also validate our proposed creativity formula in two applications: determining the creativity of particular chess moves, and assessing the creativity of paintings by some artists, such as Picasso, Renoir, and other painters. Experimental results demonstrate that our formula of…

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  • arXiv cs.CVOct 9▲ 53

    APEX: Asynchronous Prefix Denoising for Extreme Compression

    David Dinkevich, Nisan Chiprut, Yoav HaCohen, Dani Lischinski

    Fewer latent tokens promise cheaper diffusion. Yet aggressive latent compression creates a reconstruction-generation dilemma: adding channels improves reconstruction but makes generation harder. We introduce APEX, short for Asynchronous Prefix denoising for EXtreme compression, which pairs a hierarchical latent space with asynchronous denoising over channel groups. Our autoencoder orders channel prefixes from structure to detail, while one shared denoiser generates them at staggered local times without adding tokens. On ImageNet-512, APEX outperforms existing methods at every evaluated channel count under 64x and 128x compression. At matched training and guided sampling compute, it also outperforms a 256-token model at every evaluated budget, with larger gains at lower compute. Code is available at https://daviddinkevich.github.io/APEX.

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  • arXiv cs.AIOct 9

    Neural networks are more modular than single neurons suggest

    Shreya Saha, Benjamin Bergen, Meenakshi Khosla

    Neural networks routinely develop representations in which individual neurons contribute to multiple distinct functions, leading to the widespread view that such networks lack modular organization. We challenge this conclusion by introducing a formally nested hierarchy of modularity: unit-level, which requires distinct computations to occupy disjoint neurons; orthogonal, which asks whether a rotation reveals functionally independent subspaces; and linear, which asks whether a bounded linear map can separate task-relevant computations into independent subspaces. We develop a unified framework for learning decompositions at each level and evaluating them causally through selective ablation. Across vision models, language models and multi-task Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), we find that networks which lack unit-level modularity nonetheless often exhibit clear functional modularity at the subspace level. In vision and language models, content versus style and syntax versus semantics respectively dissociate under subspace ablation despite sharing overlapping populations of neurons. These learned subspaces also align differentially with brain data, with content and style subspaces…

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  • arXiv cs.CLOct 9

    Fear Is Not Always Fear: Variation in Emotion Label Equivalence Across Datasets

    Emily Öhman, Anna Koufakou

    Emotion classifiers are routinely applied beyond their training data, on the assumption that same-named labels such as fear or surprise mean the same thing across resources. We test this assumption for five labels shared by GoEmotions, XED, and BRIGHTER, comparing models on identical inputs and under cross-corpus transfer. On the same texts, one fear classifier flags 71% as fearful and another 8%, yet the two largely agree on how the texts rank. Across 30 resource-label comparisons, training-label prevalence explains about half of this kind of scale mismatch, and a fitted intercept removes most of it. What recalibration cannot repair is larger: transferred models lose 55% of native discrimination in aggregate, agreement in ranking between classifiers is only weakly related to that loss, and for surprise the resources disagree about which texts express the emotion. The choice of training resource can therefore change conclusions: on two external tweet collections, BRIGHTER- and XED-trained classifiers give opposite answers about which shows more surprise, even after rank normalization, with intervals excluding zero in both directions. A shared emotion label name does not establish…

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  • arXiv cs.CLOct 9

    COFFEQA: Counterfactual-Guided Few-Shot Distillation for LLM Question Answering

    Kavinda Kehelella, Sanghamitra Dutta

    Knowledge distillation aims to train a smaller student model to mimic a larger teacher model for resource-constrained environments. However, the process of distillation is typically data-intensive and computationally expensive, particularly for generative tasks. Few-shot distillation offers an alternative by transferring teacher knowledge using limited training samples. However, we observe that few-shot distillation performance is heavily dependent on the choice of these training samples. In fact, we demonstrate that using more uncertain samples near the teacher's decision boundary can significantly deteriorate distillation performance. Motivated by this observation, we propose Counterfactual-guided Few-shot Distillation in Open-book Question Answering (COFFEQA), a novel strategy that aptly uses counterfactuals to provide additional supervision around challenging factual samples. In the generative QA setting, we define a counterfactual as a minimally modified context that induces the teacher to change its response to an alternative answer. We provide geometric insights on how factual-counterfactual pairs can constrain the deviation between the teacher's and student's decision…

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  • arXiv cs.CVOct 9

    Structure-Aware Matching for Robust UAV Thermal-to-Satellite Geo-Localization

    Chun Liu, Yuxin Wang, Zhenxiang Huo, Linlin Zhu, Tao Xu +1

    UAV thermal-to-satellite geo-localization localizes UAVs by matching real-time thermal images against georeferenced satellite images, enabling autonomous navigation in GNSS-denied and low-visibility conditions. However, substantial cross-modal disparities in color, brightness and viewpoint hinder conventional appearance-based methods from establishing reliable correspondences. While existing approaches predominantly address global modality shifts, they overlook the invariant scene structures inherently shared between thermal and satellite views. To bridge this gap, we propose SAMF, a Structure-Aware Matching Framework that explicitly exploits stable cross-modal structural cues to improve UAV thermal geolocalization. Specifically, the Directional Structure Enhancement Module (DSEM) strengthens robust structural representations by capturing directional and low-frequency spatial patterns, and the Modality-Aware Affine Remapping Module (MARM) subsequently applies affine correction to these enhanced features, further promoting cross-modal alignment. Additionally, we introduce the Thermal-UAV-Paired benchmark derived from the Thermal-UAV dataset. Extensive experiments on both the…

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  • arXiv cs.LGOct 9

    Cross-Behavior Policy Optimization: Unified Learning from Offline Demonstrations and On- and Off-Policy Rollouts via a Shared Regression Target

    Du Cheng, Junyu Lu, Jingfan Zhang, Yuzhuo Zhang, Haoxuan Jia +1

    Reasoning post-training draws on offline demonstrations and policy-generated rollouts, yet conventional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by reinforcement learning (RL) separates their objectives and limits continued reuse of collected responses. We propose \textbf{Cross-Behavior Policy Optimization} (CBPO), which makes these sources compatible with one regression loss through a fixed-reference target. Because the generating policy does not enter this target, positive and negative offline completions, reference responses, and current and historical rollouts can share a common reward-labeled record format and replay buffer. As new responses enter the buffer, optimization retains the same regression objective without coordinating separate SFT and RL objectives or requiring stored behavior-policy probabilities, importance weighting, or a learned critic. Restricting the available sources gives offline, on-policy, and off-policy variants, while CBPO-Unified combines them. Across two model scales and four mathematical reasoning benchmarks, CBPO delivers leading \texttt{avg@32} and \texttt{pass@32} performance across benchmarks and data regimes. On Qwen3-1.7B, CBPO-Unified improves…

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  • arXiv stat.MLOct 9

    Scalable Learning of Determinantal Point Processes with Kernel-Structured Interactions

    Takahiro Kawashima, Hideitsu Hino

    Determinantal point processes (DPPs) on a finite set are probability models that exhibit repulsion where inter-item similarities are encoded by a positive definite kernel matrix. Scaling DPP learning to large datasets typically requires imposing structural constraints on the kernel matrix, such as a low-rank-plus-diagonal form. However, structural assumptions introduce a severe trade-off between expressive power and computational scalability. Our study addresses this challenge by (a) modeling the full-rank interactions via a nonlinear kernel function and latent features, (b) designing a surrogate function for the maximum likelihood estimator, and (c) adopting stochastic optimization using random features of the nonlinear kernel. Numerical experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method significantly improves this trade-off, achieving better generalization performance with remarkable parameter efficiency.

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  • arXiv cs.LGOct 9

    TreeHCA: Hindsight-Guided Exploration and Credit Assignment for Multi-Turn LLM Agents

    Debajoy Mukherjee, Jeremy Carleton, Sushil Vemuri, Srinivas Shakkottai, Dileep Kalathil

    Outcome-supervised group-relative policy optimization (GRPO) assigns the same advantage to every token in an LLM agent trajectory, leaving useful and unhelpful decisions undifferentiated. Hindsight credit assignment (HCA) can refine this feedback, but its estimates rely on trajectories containing informative alternatives at consequential histories. We introduce TreeHCA, which couples hindsight-guided exploration with hindsight credit assignment. TreeHCA uses changes in reference-answer likelihood to revisit intermediate histories and sample alternative continuations, forming a tree of reasoning and tool interactions. Because this exploration changes the distribution of sampled continuations, we derive the corresponding inverse-hindsight importance correction, including an exact finite-pool identity. We use this structure in a normalized tree backup that propagates terminal outcomes into turn-level advantages. This shared hindsight structure is TreeHCA's central design principle, linking informative exploration with hindsight-guided credit assignment. Across seven question-answering benchmarks and three Qwen backbones, TreeHCA outperforms all baselines in aggregate exact match,…

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  • arXiv cs.CLOct 9

    When Charts Deceive Web Agents: A Paired Benchmark for Misleading Visualization-Grounded Tasks

    Yisheng Li, Dongming Han, Hongkun Pan, Bingcheng Mao, Zijian Wang +3

    Web agents increasingly browse, interpret, and act on web content on behalf of users. In many realistic workflows, however, the visual evidence they consume is not neutral: charts and dashboards can be misleading, shaping judgments without issuing any explicit malicious instruction. Unlike chart question answering, Web Agents treat charts as intermediate evidence whose misinterpretation can propagate into concrete downstream actions --- a reliability risk that remains underexplored. We introduce MisVisAgentBench, the first paired executable benchmark for evaluating how misleading visualizations affect Web Agent execution. It comprises 280 task instances in matched clean--misleading pairs that differ only in chart evidence. We further provide a diagnostic framework that isolates misleading-induced failures from baseline task difficulty (Zhu et al., 2025) and captures execution-level effects such as extra browsing steps and decision hesitation. Across thirteen vision-language Web Agents, replacing clean charts with misleading counterparts reduces the average task success rate by more than 34 percentage points. Moreover, these failures predominantly follow the targeted misleading…

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  • arXiv cs.AIOct 9

    Reward Hacking as a Transmissible Strategy in Multi-Agent Coding Systems

    Yuepeng Hu, Pegah Ghahremani, Reza Aghajani, Mahesh Pasupuleti, Himaghna Bhattacharjee

    Multi-agent systems are increasingly used to solve coding tasks by coordinating agents that share code and plans. These agents are often optimized with reinforcement learning (RL) using automated evaluators, but bypassing evaluation can earn reward without producing a genuine solution. Prior work has largely treated reward hacking as a single-agent failure. In this work, we show that a reward-hacking strategy elicited in one agent can propagate to others and affect system coordination. Across four open-weight backbones, coding RL elicits and amplifies reward hacking in two settings: explicit mechanism descriptions in the system prompt and mid-training that models upstream exposure to facts about the coding environment. Using post-RL agents from the mid-training setting as sources, we observe propagation through code and shared memory, and across roles through natural-language plans. Even agents based on small open-weight models induce reward hacking in stronger closed-weight targets. On hard tasks, propagation can intensify along a transmission chain after the original source leaves as the code acquires more persuasive justifications. We also theoretically analyze conditions…

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