Research

• General in-context learning for embodied agents1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  Improving adaptability of models to new tasks and environments without task-specific fine-tuning is critical for scalable embodied intelligence.

  • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
• Cost and latency in agentic systems2 papers raise it · 1 addresses it

  High computational and time costs limit practical deployment of agentic systems for real-world tasks.

  • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
  • PremiseCheck: Efficient Fact-Checking of Human and AI Peer Reviewsraises · addresses
• Physical-state verification and failure recovery1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  Robustness to irreversible failures and accurate state tracking are essential for reliable embodied control.

  • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
• Evidence-grounded multimodal reasoning benchmarks1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Current benchmarks often fail to ensure models use necessary audio-visual evidence, weakening evaluation reliability.

  • EvaOmni: An Evidence-Grounded Benchmark for Audio-Visual Reasoningraises · addresses
• Length generalization in sequential state tracking1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Models struggle to maintain performance on problems much longer than their training data, limiting scalability.

  • PAR: Progress-Aligned Recurrence for Length Generalization in State Trackingraises · addresses

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.

• Training & fine-tuning42+90.9%
• AI safety29+61.1%
• Computer vision29+31.8%
• Evals60+25.0%
• Federated learning50+22.0%
• Code models13+18.2%
• Quantum machine learning26+13.0%
• Adversarial training53+8.2%

• arXiv cs.SEOct 15

  Enjoying the Product but Not Joining the Builders: Investigating Why Students Don't Contribute to OSS

  Italo Santos, Briana Lee, Derek Garcia, Yick Ching Wong, Anthony Peruma

  Open-source software (OSS) participation provides students with authentic exposure to collaborative, real-world software development, yet active contributions remain limited. This short paper presents an exploratory study of computing students' perceptions, knowledge, and experiences with OSS at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. We administered a survey and analyzed 122 responses using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Students reported moderate OSS familiarity and frequent OSS use in coursework and personal projects, yet only 12.3% actively contributed and engagement with OSS communities was limited. Key barriers included skill gaps (72.89% of non-contributors), time constraints (59.81%), and codebase complexity (66.67% of contributors), often alongside imposter syndrome (36.45%). Students indicated that more time, mentorship, beginner-friendly issues, better onboarding/documentation, and curricular incentives (e.g., course credit) would most increase participation, while most reported their courses do not require or incentivize OSS contributions (58.20%). Grounded in a single institutional context, this study provides a nuanced understanding of how curriculum…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 15

  Edit Discovery in Human-AI Interactions

  Alireza Mirrokni, Shayan Kiyani, George Pappas, Hamed Hassani

  Human-AI interactions are becoming a rich source of data for improving AI systems: while many model responses are already satisfactory, others expose failures that could become valuable supervision if identified and corrected. We study this setting through the notion of an editor: a more capable evaluation process that can inspect a response and either confirm it or modify it, but whose invocation is costly. The editor may be a human expert, a stronger AI system, or the same model equipped with additional computation, context, tools, or information. The key challenge is to decide which interactions to send to the editor before knowing whether an edit will actually be made, since invoking the editor itself consumes limited resources such as expert time, inference cost, latency, or tool-use overhead. We formulate this problem as Edit Discovery Optimization (EDO), which seeks to minimize edit opportunities missed among skipped interactions while controlling unnecessary confirmations and respecting an editor-cost budget. We characterize the population-optimal policy and show that it takes the form of a cost-adjusted threshold on the posterior probability of an edit. Building on this…

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• arXiv cs.CROct 15

  Exploring The Empirical Privacy Landscape of Synthetic Data

  Zihao Zhao, Avi Schwarzschild, Casey Meehan, Katherine Lee, Zhili Feng +1

  Methods for training language models on sensitive data differ in how they balance capability gains against the risk of leaking private information. In this paper, we present a controlled comparison of data-level and training-level interventions for navigating the capability-privacy tradeoff on synthetic medical records with canaries to probe for leakage. Direct finetuning performs best on capability metrics but leads to the most privacy leakage, while DP-SGD reduces leakage at substantial cost to capabilities. Generating synthetic data from these records offers a more favorable balance, particularly when guided by a uniqueness-aware instruction to replace private details. Relative to naive paraphrasing, privacy-aware rewriting improves privacy protection across a variety of different rewriting models. We also find that more capable rewriting models generally reduce the risks of downstream privacy leakage, although held-out fit does not improve monotonically and increased test-time compute yields inconsistent gains. Overall, these results highlight privacy-aware rewriting as a promising direction for achieving a more favorable trade-off between capabilities and empirical privacy…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 15

  Secondhand Stress: How Stressful Disclosures Affect Psychosocial Wellbeing in Online Graduate Admissions Communities

  Veda Duddu, Agam Goyal, Sabelle Huang, Ayush Umashankar Prasad, Mingquan Yi +1

  Online communities provide spaces for individuals navigating stressful life transitions to disclose difficulties and seek peer support. Yet encountering others' distress may also have psychosocial implications for community members. Drawing on stress crossover theory, we examine how engagement with peer distress during graduate admissions is associated with subsequent psychosocial expression and participation, and whether similar associations extend through downstream interactions. We analyze 171,981 posts and 1,130,413 comments from two Reddit communities across three admissions cycles, using propensity-score stratification and baseline-adjusted comparisons. Users who engaged with distress disclosures during application preparation subsequently exhibited higher classifier-estimated anxiety, depression, and stress expression, alongside greater commenting activity and lexical redundancy. These associations recurred across admissions cycles, while no significant psychosocial associations were detected among downstream respondents interacting with previously exposed users. Our findings highlight how greater distress-related expression can coexist with continued community…

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• arXiv stat.MLOct 15

  Is a Linear Probe Evidence of a Linear Representation?

  Nadir Kutluozen, Christian Internò, David Klindt

  The linear representation hypothesis holds that pretrained vision models encode generative factors as linearly decodable directions in feature space, and comes with a standard methodology: train a linear probe, declare a factor represented if accuracy is high. We show this test is too permissive. Asymptotically, any sufficiently rich feature map, including a random one, admits a linear readout, so high probe accuracy is consistent with two very different geometries: a true linear world model, where the latent-aligned subspace dominates the representation, or a kernel machine, where the latents lie linearly inside a much larger curved manifold. This distinction matters because the curved structure orthogonal to the probe is relevant for out-of-distribution generalization, robustness, and compositional transfer. We propose three asymmetric diagnostics that distinguish the two cases: reverse predictivity, spectral concentration, and out-of-distribution generalization. We validate them in a fully observed simulation where ground truth is known. Applied to six pretrained vision transformers on SVG-World, our deterministic generative benchmark with paired visual styles, and to two of…

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• arXiv eess.IVOct 15

  An Anatomy-Aware Staged Pipeline for Vessel-Specific Intracranial Aneurysm Segmentation in CT and MR Angiography

  Gniewosz Drwiega, Wojciech Szymanski, Marek Wodzinski

  The TopAneu 2026 challenge requires intracranial aneurysms to be segmented at the voxel level and assigned to one of more than fifty vessel-specific classes, on CT and MR angiography alike. We address it with a six-stage anatomy-aware pipeline rather than a single segmentation network. A logistic-regression classifier routes each scan to a modality-specific branch; networks segment the vasculature, first as a binary mask and then over the full 36-class arterial taxonomy; a candidate localiser turns raw angiography and vessel priors into suspicious regions; a candidate-centred network segments the lesion in each crop; connected components become instances; and a per-instance classifier assigns each its anatomical location. Two principles organise the design. Whenever an upstream model output becomes a downstream training input it is generated out-of-fold, so no stage trains on unrealistically clean predictions of itself. And the anatomical decision is made once per lesion rather than once per voxel, which fits the data: of 406 connected aneurysm components in the full release, 405 carry exactly one location label. Task 1 is read off the Task 2 mask, making the two consistent by…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 15

  Evidence-Gated Bilingual RAG for Reliable Consumer Banking Search

  Ahmed Mohamed Mahmoud Rayyan, Rana Mahmoud Mohammed, Aya Abdallah Abdelmonem, Mohamed Khaled Goda Othman, Rahatara Ferdousi

  Consumers often describe what they need rather than use the terminology found on a banking website. For example, a natural-language request ("a card for travel") may not share the keywords of the relevant product page, and the problem is harder in bilingual services, where the same intent may be expressed in Arabic or English. This paper presents an evidence-gated bilingual retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework for consumer banking search that operates entirely on local infrastructure. The framework combines structured web-content refinement, hybrid dense-lexical retrieval, intent-aware evidence selection, cross-encoder reranking, and a three-outcome Answer / Related Mismatch / No Answer decision mechanism. On 210 URL-labeled Arabic and English queries, the proposed approach improves Top-1 hit rate from 50.48% to 79.05% and MRR@5 from 0.571 to 0.797 over a hybrid baseline. A separate 26-case end-to-end evaluation achieved 69.2% strict success, with 72.7% of generated answers classified as supported by an automated faithfulness judge. These results are preliminary: the retrieval queries are paraphrases of a small reference set, and the end-to-end test is small and uses an…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 15

  The Ephemeral Cost of Switching Optimizers Across LLM Training Stages

  Xinyu Zhao, Davis Wertheimer, Ashutosh Sharma, Rameswar Panda, Paul Pu Liang

  Recent work suggests that switching optimizers between pretraining and subsequent training stages incurs a performance cost, but systematic investigation of this phenomenon is lacking. We study the mismatch between AdamW and Muon optimizers by pretraining 1.2B Llama-3 models from scratch while varying the proportion of updates taken with each optimizer, and similarly interpolating between the two optimizers during continued pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Surprisingly, we find little evidence of a meaningful optimizer mismatch penalty: final performance is largely explained by the independent effects of the pretraining and post-training optimizers, with downstream performance generally improving as the proportion of Muon updates during SFT increases. Although matching the pretraining optimizer can reduce forgetting during SFT, this does not translate into improved final benchmark performance. We further evaluate AdamW and Muon for task-general SFT of open-weight models, across the Llama and Qwen families up to 14B parameters, where Muon remains competitive with AdamW, despite these models having been pretrained with AdamW. Together, our results suggest that the…

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• arXiv eess.IVOct 15

  LGGS: Longitudinal MRI Reconstruction via Guided Group Sparsity

  Nikola Janjušević, Hersh Chandarana, Yao Wang, Li Feng

  Serial MRI is routinely performed in current clinical practice for disease surveillance and applications such as MR-guided radiotherapy. However, long MRI scan times increase costs and limit patient access, making accelerated image reconstruction of broad clinical importance. Previous scans of the same patient contain image information highly correlated with the current exam, yet existing reconstruction methods rarely exploit this information. Major challenges in the effective use of prior scans include inter-visit misregistration, pathological changes, and image phase variation. In this work, we propose Longitudinal Guided Group Sparsity (LGGS), an interpretable deep-learning framework for longitudinally informed MRI reconstruction derived from classical group sparsity. The prior scan is incorporated into the reconstruction regularizer through learned phase-invariant circulant attention that identifies corresponding features across exams. This formulation provides robustness to local in-plane and through-plane misregistration as well as inter-visit phase variation. Across acceleration rates, LGGS achieves state-of-the-art performance on longitudinal T1-weighted multi-coil brain…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 15

  SAFETYEDIT: Sparse Internal Targets with Prompt-Wide Control for LLM Jailbreak Backdoors

  Yutong Ke, Yansu Wang, Zeyu Zhang, Xihao Guo, Chongwen Zhao +1

  Model-editing backdoors aim to induce harmful responses under a trigger while preserving ordinary behavior on untriggered input. Recent model-editing approaches target affirmative response prefixes through rank-one updates to a small subset of model weights. Yet when this prefix-level target is satisfied, the model may still revert to refusal or produce a coherent, apparently compliant response that does not address the request. To overcome this limitation, existing internal-representation approaches shift focus from output tokens to dense, high-dimensional compliance directions in latent space. Existing representation-level approaches rely on preservation constraints to maintain conditionality, motivating us to ask whether a smaller internal target can offer a different effectiveness-preservation trade-off. Motivated by the comparable control capability of single-coordinate interventions, we investigate a sparse refusal-related MLP coordinate as this target. We propose SAFETYEDIT, which optimizes a single refusal-related coordinate and uses KV-cache marking in early attention layers to propagate a prefix-trigger signal across subsequent instruction positions. On some checkpoints…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 15

  Inductive Learning of Concept Embeddings from Cross-Linguistic Colexification Patterns with Textual Attributes

  Arne Rubehn

  The advent of distributional semantics as a framework for computational semantics marked a paradigm shift in the nature of representations, by which meanings are represented as dense vectors commonly known as word embeddings. Computational approaches to historical or typological language comparison, on the other hand, still mostly rely on discrete representations, while the potential of embedding-based methods remains largely untapped in this context. Recent studies have proposed concept embeddings as a language-independent, onomasiological counterpart to word embeddings, based on networks of cross-linguistic colexification patterns. While the resulting concept embeddings reflect meaningful semantic properties and relations, they suffer from a lack of scalability, since they rely on transductive embedding approaches which only learn embeddings for nodes present in the training data. In this study, we present an inductive framework for learning concept embeddings, combining the structural properties of full and partial colexification networks with semantic information from short concept descriptions. This framework allows the embedding of unseen concepts based on a short…

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• arXiv cs.DSOct 15

  Hard Instances on Demand

  Jamie Fravel, Martin Koutecký, Pavlo Tsitsei

  The conclusions of an experimental study of algorithms are only as good as the instances they are run on. Benchmark libraries for well-studied problems took decades to curate, while evaluations of new problems often fall back on random instances, which are known to be misleading: they may say more about the random generator than about the algorithmic question at hand. We treat instance generation as an optimization problem: parameterize the instance space, take the solver's running time as the objective, and let a black-box optimizer search for hard instances. We develop a widely applicable workflow built on the Nevergrad optimization platform and demonstrate it on four NP-hard problems: satisfiability, traveling salesperson, Hamiltonian cycle, and non-permutation flow-shop scheduling. The search needs only the solver, an instance encoder, and a compute budget. Our evolved instances beat the hardest instance of a budget-matched random draw in all four case studies, by an order of magnitude or more in three. They are often competitive with long-curated benchmark sets: our SAT champion is harder (for a three-solver portfolio) than 78% of the 498 SAT Competition formulas in its size…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 15▲ 3

  Measuring Mechanistic Uncertainty in Large Language Models via Causal Robustness

  Aneesh Komanduri, Majid Afshar, Timothy A. Miller, Yanjun Gao

  Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in critical domains, where their susceptibility to hallucinations makes reliable and interpretable uncertainty quantification essential. We introduce the concept of mechanistic uncertainty, which characterizes uncertainty through the stability of the internal mechanisms supporting a model's response. We propose the causal robustness margin, defined as the minimum internal intervention required to deviate the model's output, and operationalize it using Jacobian Lens (Jlens) concept steering vectors. Across three open-source models and five question-answering datasets, we show incorrect and uncertain responses exhibit smaller margins, indicating greater sensitivity to internal interventions, and the causal robustness margin complements conventional output-based uncertainty methods. Finally, in a controlled knowledge injection experiment, correctly learned facts show increased margins after training, suggesting that causal robustness provides a mechanistically grounded signal of uncertainty.

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 15

  Alert-List Concordance for Evaluating Imputation Strategies in ICU Sepsis Prediction

  Priyanka Siddappa, Muntaqim Ahmed Raju, Shifat Haider Al Amin, Ruizhe Ma

  Preprocessing is an under-measured reliability risk in clinical prediction: a model can keep a similar AUROC and still change who receives an alert. Imputation quality is commonly evaluated using reconstruction error or aggregate discrimination, neither of which directly measures agreement on which patients are flagged. At a matched alert rate, pipelines with similar aggregate performance can produce different patient lists. This question is especially relevant under the frequent, structured missingness of real ICU records. We therefore introduce alert-list concordance, which asks whether two pipelines identify the same high-risk patients, measured by the Jaccard similarity of their top-k% alert sets with patient-level bootstrap confidence intervals. On PhysioNet/CinC 2019 (40,336 patients, 71.9% missingness), we compare nine imputation strategies and a native-missingness baseline using a fixed XGBoost configuration, fitted and Platt-calibrated separately for each strategy. After Bonferroni correction, 22 of the 28 reconstruction-method pairs showed no statistically significant difference in patient-level AUROC, yet their alert lists overlap at Jaccard 0.518 to 0.750. Similar…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 15

  ToMStories: Interpreting Theory-of-Mind in Synthetic Narratives

  Melanie Subbiah, Chia-En Jacklyn Tsai, Kathleen McKeown

  Understanding people often requires inferring what they feel or want from how they behave rather than from what they state outright. We ask whether language models can make these inferences, and how they do so. We introduce Theory-of-Mind Stories (ToMStories), an evaluation dataset of ~6,000 short synthetically generated narrative vignettes, each paired with a multiple-choice or open-ended question about a character's emotion, fear, motivation, or emotional wound. These psychological states are conveyed implicitly (showing), explicitly (telling), or with conflict between dialogue and description. Evaluating thirteen open-weight models (1B-72B parameters), we find that the largest models match humans on multiple choice but not open-ended questions. Our analyses point to simplifications models make in both interpretation and generation of implicit psychological states, indicating that synthetic data can help us understand how models perform interpretation, but likely overestimates how well models interpret humans.

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 15

  A Plausible Explanation Is Enough to Mislead Multimodal Judges

  Anglin Cai, Zhiqi Wang, Xiaozhi Yang, Yurun Lin, Dongwon Lee +1

  Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) increasingly serve as judges in training and evaluation pipelines, often assessing answers together with explanations. Although AI judges are sensitive to textual factors, it remains unclear whether ordinary plausible explanations can sway judgments requiring visual verification. We introduce JUPE, a visual-question-answering (VQA)-style benchmark that fixes answers while varying explanations. Across 14 MLLM judges, ordinary explanations that sound plausible mislead judges, with effects comparable on average to deliberately persuasive arguments. Plain justifications and chain-of-thought rationales reduce rejection of incorrect answers by 12.7 and 13.8 percentage points, respectively. We call this failure plausibility capture. Using signal detection theory, we find a significant mean shift in decision criterion toward acceptance, without a clear change in mean discriminability. Explanations sway judgments across domains, explanation generators, and judging protocols, while tested mitigations offer limited, model-dependent protection. Such shifts can inflate performance estimates when judges evaluate answers with explanations.

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 15

  Network-Wide Freeway Speed Nowcasting and Forecasting from Sparse Fixed Sensors with a Probe-Supervised Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network

  Ran Tu, Zihao Li, Arash Mirzaei

  Traffic agencies need current and near-future speeds on every link of their network, but their fixed sensors cover only part of it. We study joint nowcasting and next-hour forecasting of hourly speeds on all 4{,}127 directional freeway links of the Dallas--Fort Worth region from sensors on 643 links (15.6%). Historical probe-vehicle data supervise every link in training; only sensor readings are used at inference. We call this setting probe-supervised sparse sensing. We propose GCRN+, a graph convolutional recurrent network that predicts deviations from a historical speed profile. It combines a parameter-free, direction-aware kernel interpolation of sensor anomalies, used as input features and as an output baseline, with a diffusion-convolutional GRU on the directed road graph, a low-rank adaptive graph and learnable link embeddings. It scales linearly with network size and trains on a CPU. Sensor readings are emulated from probe speeds, which isolates spatio-temporal inference from detector calibration. On four held-out test days, GCRN+ attains an RMSE of 2.21~mph for the current hour and 2.39~mph for the next hour on unsensored links, against 3.23~mph for the historical…

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• arXiv cs.CROct 15

  StratFL: Countering Covert Model Poisoning Attacks with Strategic Federated Learning

  Manoj Twarakavi, Venkata Sriram Siddhardh Nadendla

  Advanced persistent threats (APTs) are a major concern in federated learning (FL) deployments in critical sectors such as healthcare, and finance. Traditional defense mechanisms fail to contain APTs due to their intermittent attacking behavior. This paper addresses a specific type of APT called covert model poisoning (CMP) where the attacker intermittently injects poisoned model updates in a covert manner. The interaction between the FL server and a CMP attacker is modeled as an imperfect repeated game where both players cannot observe each other's actions. A novel adversarial search algorithm called StratFL is designed alongside novel belief update algorithms at both the server and adversary. Experiments are designed using MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets to evaluate and compare StratFL's performance against state-of-the-art methods. Empirical convergence of belief update algorithms is demonstrated across various security vignettes. At the same time, StratFL is found to exhibit an improved accuracy of 10% compared to state-of-the-art methods.

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 15

  Understanding Stability of Outer Nesterov Momentum on Stochastic Pseudo-Gradients

  Nishant Sharma, Laura Gomezjurado Gonzalez, Ganesh Talluri, Sarath Chandar, Hiroki Naganuma

  Large neural networks are commonly trained across many workers, and communication between them is a major cost. Workers therefore take several local optimization steps before sending their net parameter displacements, or pseudo-gradients, to an outer optimizer, which often applies Nesterov momentum. We study how the outer momentum, the number of local steps and the averaging over workers control the training dynamics, and in particular their stability. For random quadratics, we derive an exact mean-square stability criterion in any dimension, which reveals that the inner batch size determines whether increasing the number of local steps eventually stabilizes or destabilizes the outer iteration. Moreover, while averaging the pseudo-gradients of independent workers can make larger outer momentum values admissible, the number of workers required for stability can grow exponentially with the number of local steps. Finally, we show that the mean-square dynamics governing stability can be probed directly at intermediate neural-network checkpoints using shared-minibatch perturbations. We test our theoretical findings across networks, and measure their consequences for training loss.

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 15

  Noise-shaped Sampling and Annealing for Scalable On-the-edge Training of Binary and Ternary AI Models

  Zihao Chen, Zhili Xiao, Rui-Jie Zhu, Yipeng Wang, Jason Eshraghian +1

  The training loss of binary and ternary neural networks, expanded as a multilinear polynomial over the discrete weights, is structurally equivalent to the energy of a hierarchical high-order Ising model. We exploit this equivalence to apply Ising solvers to discrete-weight network training, while accounting for a fundamental difference in objectives: an Ising solver seeks the ground state of a fixed energy function, whereas training seeks solutions that generalize to unseen data. Our key contribution is $ΣΔ$-Sampler, an optimizer that reconciles these objectives by embedding a stochastic sampling-and-annealing step as a noisy quantizer inside a first-order $ΣΔ$ noise-shaping loop. The loop pushes noise from weight quantization, high-order frustration, and mini-batch sampling out of the low-frequency adaptation band, so that discrete weight updates follow the smooth descent trajectories embedded in the rugged loss landscape. We validate the framework on a planted quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) benchmark with a known minimizer; on CIFAR-10, where a $13$M-parameter ternary model comes within $1\%$ of full-precision accuracy; on ImageNet-1k, where a ternary…

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