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.

• arXiv cs.LGOct 15

  Momentum, Commentary Tone, and Earnings Surprise in LLM Financial Forecasts

  Alina Khaybullina

  Which inputs drive a language model's financial forecast? We construct synthetic earnings announcements that independently reverse 20-day momentum, non-informational commentary tone, and whether fixed actual EPS beats a manipulated consensus. Six instruction/chat checkpoint conversions from four families (0.49-7.61B base parameters) receive 2,016 prompts each under a direct-answer Q8_0 protocol. The design includes 24 numerical blocks, six commentary pairs, profits and losses, rising and falling annual EPS, and two surprise sizes. Both A/B answer assignments and U/D cover all 384 primary scenarios per conversion. We estimate matched changes in conditional answer-prefix scores, not calibrated market probabilities. Across these checkpoints, the primary EPS contrast ranges from -0.19 to 86.80 percentage points. The magnitude of the primary signed tone contrast exceeds that of EPS in 5 of six models, and momentum exceeds it in 5. Natural-word numerical diagnostic accuracy ranges from 51.0 to 95.8 percent. Answer-encoding, wording, context, and conversion controls qualify these results. The experiment measures observable input reliance and numerical recognition; it establishes neither…

  AI20PDF
• arXiv cs.AIOct 15

  Null Controls Are Necessary but Not Sufficient: Evaluating Acceptance Guards for Scientific Discovery and Interpretability

  Tianyu Wu

  Automated discovery systems propose scientific explanations and test which to accept. Does passing a test establish the intended claim? We develop four executable operations for changing physical descriptions: identifying redundancies (L1), coarse-graining dynamics (L2), transferring structure (L3), and inferring missing quantities from conservation imbalances (L4). We evaluate these operations and three interpretability settings through null acceptance (NAR), positive acceptance (PAR), and consequence agreement (CAR). A reduction mapping every state to zero predicts its own future perfectly. It passes closure on 96% of 129 public chaotic systems despite retaining no dynamical variation. An independent observable-preservation test rejects it throughout. On controlled benchmarks, the combined criteria accept 24/24 genuine reductions and reject 72/72 nulls. The other operations distinguish symmetries from redundancies, validate transfers, and reject spurious conservation imbalances. In language and ESM-2 protein models, linear CKA remains unchanged when a proposed correspondence is randomly rotated, whereas localized interventions distinguish genuine mappings from tested nulls. In…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 15▲ 15

  Event-STVG: Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding for Long-Form Event Reasoning

  Yizhe Zhang, Xujia Wang, Songqi Tang, Xujie Tang, Leo Jiahao Jiang +8

  Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding (STVG) aims to jointly localize a target in space and time given a natural-language query. Despite continued advances, existing STVG benchmarks remain largely centered on localizing targets through instance-specific descriptions, leaving them largely decoupled from long-form reasoning increasingly emphasized in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). In this paper, we introduce Event-STVG, a task that shifts STVG from locating what is described toward event-level reasoning by unifying long-form context, repeated-event reasoning, event localization, role inference, and multi-target grounding. To facilitate research on Event-STVG, we construct a large-scale benchmark comprising 4,016 annotated event occurrences across soccer and seven additional domains. Experiments with state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal substantial difficulty, with the strongest model achieving only 5.4% m-vIoU at the 10-minute horizon. Across domains, we consistently observe confusion among repeated same-type events, spatial grounding bottlenecks, and rare success in jointly grounding all required roles. Event-STVG establishes a new challenge for visual understanding in MLLMs,…

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• arXiv cs.SECode modelsOct 15

  WEAVE: Weaving Real-World Code Evolution into Dependency-Structured Tasks for Benchmarking and Training Code Agents

  Weihao Li, Zihang Xu, Zhongqiu Wang, Songwei Yu, Wenqiang Zhu +5

  Real-world software engineering rarely consists of isolated changes. Features, migrations, and systematic fixes often unfold across multiple pull requests (PRs), requiring coordinated modifications across a repository. Yet most executable repository-level benchmarks retain a single issue or PR as the task unit, while existing multi-PR settings rely on coarse aggregation and structure-agnostic evaluation. This mismatch obscures dependencies among changes and limits progress measurement and learning signals for long-horizon code agents. We introduce WEAVE, a framework that transforms verified PR histories into executable, dependency-structured tasks. WEAVE leverages repository-calibrated typed change loci to organize related PRs into bounded DAGs and instantiate each as a unified executable task. We further introduce Graph Credit, a deterministic, test-grounded metric that measures dependency-consistent partial progress and supports dense, verifiable rewards for reinforcement learning. Experiments on task construction, agent evaluation, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning show that WEAVE yields coherent executable tasks, enables more faithful progress measurement…

  AIEvals90PDF
• arXiv cs.DCTraining & fine-tuningOct 15

  ETH: Data-Balanced Heterogeneous Pipeline Parallelism for Training Large Models

  Mianjie Yu, Zhongmin Zhao, Zizhao Mo, Jianxiong Liao, Wenxuan Li +7

  Current heterogeneity-aware training systems for large models balance workloads by assigning unequal numbers of layers across pipeline stages, a strategy aimed at equalizing execution time through a unique pipeline configuration. However, this approach fails to address critical memory constraints and suffers from inherently coarse balancing granularity. In this paper, we propose Heterogeneous Pipeline Parallelism (HPP), a novel approach enabling efficient and fine-grained data balance across heterogeneous pipelines. To address HPP's key challenges, prohibitive search overhead for optimal configurations and high communication overhead from asymmetric All-Reduce, we design the ETH training system. ETH employs a hierarchical workload balance framework that jointly optimizes balance across heterogeneous pipelines and within individual pipeline stages. To mitigate asymmetric communication costs, ETH implements block-wise gradient aggregation. Furthermore, it integrates specialized optimizations that dramatically reduce HPP configuration search overhead. Evaluations demonstrate ETH achieves up to 2x training speedup while reducing configuration generation overhead by up to 56x compared…

  AIInference & serving80PDF
• arXiv stat.MLOct 15

  Designing Experiments for External Decision Makers

  Sahel Iqbal, Tom Rainforth

  Standard Bayesian experimental design (BED) methods assume the experimenter alone will act on the data, choosing the best action given their own beliefs and goals. In practice, data are often acted on by external parties whose procedures the experimenter cannot change and may not know, particularly when the data are released publicly. To extend BED to such settings, we introduce usage-aware experimental design, a framework in which an adaptive design policy is trained to minimise the usage risk: the experimenter's expected loss when one or more external rules act on the collected data. These rules may be non-Bayesian or black-box, and when several may apply, we either average over them or take the worst case. We show that, unlike in standard BED, more informative data can be harmful under such rules, so the usage risk cannot in general be expressed as an expected uncertainty reduction; our framework thus strictly generalises standard BED. We then use it to tackle a range of problems that are difficult to address with existing approaches.

  AI20PDF
• arXiv cs.AIAgentsOct 15

  GraphACM: Graph-based Action Consistency Measurement for Uncertainty Quantification in LLM Agents

  Yaxin Ma, Wenbo Zhang, Satya Krishna Pothapragada, Alina Zare

  Behavioral consistency across repeated executions provides an informative signal for assessing the reliability of large language model (LLM) agents. However, existing approaches typically summarize consistency with a single task-level score, without identifying where behavioral differences occur or whether actions are compared under equivalent decision contexts. We propose a graph-based framework for fine-grained behavioral consistency measurement and uncertainty quantification. Given multiple rollouts of the same task, we merge equivalent states into a directed, action-labeled graph, enabling action comparisons at shared decision states. We introduce node-level and global measures of action consistency, using the global consistency score as a proxy for uncertainty to predict task success or failure. Experiments across three LLMs on ALFWorld, AppWorld, and WebShop demonstrate that our measure is positively associated with task success and achieves an average AUROC of 0.811 for task-success prediction, outperforming the strongest behavioral-consistency baseline (0.729) and verbalized confidence (0.769). These results highlight the effectiveness of state-conditioned behavioral…

  AIEvals80PDF
• arXiv cs.LGAgentsOct 15▲ 3

  Selection Is Not Learning: Choosing Model Futures

  Haoyi Yang, Kshitij Mishra, Nils Lukas, Salem Lahlou

  Self-evolving language models train on tasks they generate, so every round must decide which updated model the next round inherits. Current loops such as R-Zero, Agent0, and Skill Self-Play make this decision through the task, admitting tasks that look learnable and inheriting every resulting update. We identify a selection-to-update gap in these loops, where a task that looks learnable need not produce a useful update. Most updates on verified tasks fail to make correct answers more likely, yet these loops inherit them all. HeirCommit freezes the updated model and uses fresh evaluation questions to decide whether to inherit it or retain the current model. EvoHeir separates parameter inheritance from experience inheritance, using current and archived experience to repair failures and preserve successes before final confirmation. Our analysis characterizes selection-induced optimism and decomposes regret into selection, absorption, and confirmation errors. HeirCommit cuts the harmful share of accepted updates by 68-83% relative to random inheritance at the same acceptance rate. Across four backbones, EvoHeir achieves the best mathematics and general-reasoning averages, raising the…

  AITraining & fine-tuning80PDF
• arXiv cs.LGAgentsOct 15

  Augment the Cache, Replace the Activation: A 2x2 Study of Internal-State Sharing

  Adam Deng, Shicheng Liu, Yada Zhu

  Multi-agent systems built from frozen language models communicate through text, which discards the internal state the sender already computed and makes the receiver pay to rebuild it. Work on internal channels avoids that cost, framing the problem as transfer: agent A sends information to agent B. Every agent pair that must communicate needs its own transfer bridge, and every agent added to a system needs a new bridge fitted against each previous agent. We reframe this problem as sharing: an agent publishes its internal state once into a pool, and every peer reads that pool through a single mechanism fitted to no sender in particular, so adding an agent adds a publisher and no new bridge. Whereas the carrier of the internal state and the fusion mechanism are usually chosen independently in the literature, our main finding is that these two choices are coupled; the deciding factor is where the carrier enters the receiver's computation. Consumability is a property of the receiving computation rather than of the representation. We find that the key-value (KV) cache must be augmented rather than swapped in: the receiver cross-attends over a peer's cache while keeping its own, and…

  AIInference & serving80PDF
• arXiv cs.LGOct 15

  Not All Unlabeled Data Are Equal: Unlabeled Data Selection for Semi-Supervised QSAR Modeling with Large Chemical Repositories

  Oliver Majer, Saso Dzeroski, Jurica Levatic

  Semi-supervised learning (SSL) is particularly attractive in domains where labels are expensive to obtain, while unlabeled examples are readily available. Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship (QSAR) modeling, which predicts molecular biological activity from chemical structure, is one such domain. Obtaining activity measurements requires costly wet-lab experiments, resulting in small labeled datasets, while chemical repositories such as ChEMBL contain millions of unlabeled molecules. Despite this apparent suitability, the potential of large chemical databases to improve QSAR models via SSL remains largely unexplored. Furthermore, it is unclear how unlabeled data should be selected in realistic SSL settings with genuine unlabeled data. We conduct a systematic study of unlabeled-data selection using 10 QSAR datasets extracted from ChEMBL and a pool of more than 400,000 unlabeled molecules. To this end, we evaluate three established SSL algorithms (self-training, co-training, and label propagation) and formulate four unlabeled-data selection strategies based on random, nearest-neighbor, furthest-neighbor, and mixed sampling. Our results show that unlabeled data from large…

  AI30PDF
• arXiv cs.RORoboticsOct 15

  DemoStream: Batched Task-and-Motion-Plan Optimization for Automated Learning from Demonstration

  Caelan Garrett, Neel Jawale, Fabio Ramos

  Learning from demonstration is an effective strategy for endowing robots with manipulation capabilities but requires training on datasets comprised of massive amounts of demonstrations. Existing demonstration collection approaches either require constant human involvement, for example, via teleoperation or are specialized for a single task. Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) systems are able to autonomously solve and therefore generate demonstrations for general-purpose tasks; however, learning from their demonstrations has proven difficult due to multi-modality in their solutions. In this work, we build on recent work leveraging GPU acceleration for TAMP and propose DemoStream, a TAMP system that optimizes demonstration quality in order to improve behavior cloning success rates. First, we introduce batched TAMP sampling operations along with a new TAMP algorithm that correspondingly performs batched constraint satisfaction in order to explore many solutions in parallel. We conduct simulation experiments ablating different action spaces, cost functions, and batch sizes to analyze the effect of these choices on downstream policy success rates. Finally, we show that we can leverage…

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• arXiv cs.CLTraining & fine-tuningOct 15

  Priming Base Models for Agentic Post-Training: An Open Midtraining Recipe

  Soumye Singhal, Joseph Jennings, Ka Shun Shum, Alexander Bukharin, Khushi Bhardwaj +9

  Frontier models, general-purpose and domain-specific alike, now include a midtraining stage between pretraining and post-training, but little has been published about how this stage is built. We present an open midtraining recipe that primes base models for agentic post-training, and we show its effectiveness on two Nemotron models of different sizes. Pretraining typically runs at short context and sees almost no agent interactions, while SFT data is mostly synthetic, and very long SFT stages can hurt the model's later RL trainability. Our midtraining stage sits between the two. It trains at 256K context for hundreds of billions of tokens on a diverse mixture of natural software-engineering data like packed repositories, pull requests, commit histories, and build logs together with a small share of agentic traces. On Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, 500B midtraining tokens improve SWE-bench Verified from 60.7 to 64.5, SWE-bench Multilingual from 55.8 to 62.8, and SWE-bench Pro from 32.0 to 35.5 after identical full SFT. On the larger Nemotron 3.5 Super, 280B midtraining tokens improve DeepSWE, a harder benchmark of long-horizon tasks, from 11.7 to 15.7 and SWE-bench Verified from 72.9 to…

  AIFrontier LLMs90PDF
• arXiv cs.CVMultimodalOct 15

  When Models Misread Ink: Auditing VLMs for Arabic Calligraphy Recognition

  Niaz Mohaiman Abtahi, Evan Maksud, Reyana Shahid

  Arabic calligraphy is a high-stakes cultural visual domain for Muslim communities, yet VLM evaluations rarely test its fine-grained script traditions. We audit 12 VLMs on a cleaned 1,195-image six-way benchmark using numeric, visual-cue, and Diwani-first prompts. In this closed-set setting, the best numeric-prompt accuracy is 60.9% for closed/API models and 47.2% for open-weight models. The main failure is default-label collapse: every numeric run is dominated by a single label taking 33-63% of predictions, against an 18.8% majority-class baseline. For 8 of 12 models the default is Thuluth; GPT-4o labels 52.9% of all images as Thuluth although it is only 18.1% of the set. Prompting helps unevenly: visual cues move accuracy by more than 10 points for some models but hurt others, and foregrounding Diwani often relocates the default rather than removing it. Arabic calligraphy recognition is therefore a compact, culturally grounded stress test for VLM robustness and for measuring which visual traditions become legible to automated systems.

  AIEvals70PDF
• arXiv cs.AIAgentsOct 15

  CARA: Causally Guided Retrieval Agent for Question Answering

  Weicheng Liu, Xiangcheng Wu, Depeng Xu, Haopeng Zhang, Xi Niu

  Retrieval-augmented generation over text-rich knowledge graphs requires identifying evidence that contributes to answering a question, rather than merely matching its textual content. Existing agentic retrievers adaptively balance global search and multi-hop exploration but primarily rely on textual similarity to guide retrieval. We propose CARA, a training-free, CAusally guided Retrieval Agent that explicitly evaluates the causal relevance of retrieved evidence through two complementary criteria: consequentiality, measuring whether adding evidence improves answerability, and essentiality, assessing whether removing evidence weakens answerability. CARA integrates these assessments with path consistency to guide graph exploration and employs reciprocal rank fusion to aggregate evidence from multiple agents. We evaluate CARA on three STaRK datasets and augment STaRK with ground-truth answers to enable downstream question answering evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that CARA consistently outperforms existing retrievers. CARA also improves answer quality and faithfulness while examining fewer graph nodes and requiring fewer retrieval operations. These findings demonstrate…

  AIRAG80PDF
• arXiv cs.LGAgentsOct 15

  Close Enough is Nowhere Near: Fidelity-Consumability Decoupling in KV Caches

  Adam Deng, Shicheng Liu, Yada Zhu

  Multi-agent LLM systems communicate in text, which is lossy and wasteful: the sender throws away the reading it already did. A growing literature instead transmits the KV cache, the natural carrier of that reading. We study the most appealing form of the idea: both models stay frozen and the sender's cache is substituted for the reader's with nothing trained. It does not work, and the obstruction belongs to the reader. A frozen transformer reads only caches close to the one it would have written itself, a region we call its tolerable set. We show that geometric similarity to that cache does not predict whether the reader can use it, and the failure is not gradual, so a more faithful substitute is not the remedy it appears to be. We explain this phenomenon with competitive attention. Experimentally, we test eight diverse substitution methods against two measured anchors: an uninformative cache baseline and the reader's own accuracy from having read the passage. All sit at the baseline. That turns a long tail of separate negative results into one outcome with a stated condition for overturning it. A different design does work: if the reader keeps its own cache and attends over the…

  AIInference & serving80PDF
• arXiv cs.LGOct 15

  GraphBEAT: Graph-based Bucketized Event Aggregation Over Time for Early Risk Stratification of Gastrointestinal Cancers

  Leo Y. Li-Han, Chris Varghese, Elizabeth B. Habermann, Mark J. Truty, William R. G. Perry +2

  Longitudinal electronic health records (EHRs) contain complementary diagnostic and laboratory information about patient health. However, irregularity, sparsity, heterogeneity, and incompleteness in documentation complicate EHR modeling. To address the problem, we introduce GraphBEAT (Graph-based Bucketized Event Aggregation over Time), a temporal graph representation learning framework that groups clinical events into time buckets and transforms observed features into patient-specific, temporally directed graphs to enable early risk stratification for gastrointestinal cancers. Each node in an EHR graph encodes feature identity, observed value, and temporal position of clinical events. A context-aware, time-decay message-passing mechanism models transitions between successive buckets, followed by multi-head attention pooling to generate patient-level representations. GraphBEAT was trained and evaluated on multi-site longitudinal diagnosis codes and laboratory tests to predict pancreatic, liver, and intestinal cancer at 12-, 24-, and 36-month diagnostic lead times. In all experimental setups, GraphBEAT consistently outperformed baseline graph neural networks (GraphSAGE, GAT, and…

  AI20PDF
• arXiv cs.AIOct 15

  From Natural Language Intent to Executable Control: Hierarchical Feedback-Guided LLM Planning for Multi-component Cyber-Physical Systems

  Jinglin Dai, Jiawan Wang, Ruiqi Hong, Lei Bu

  Large language models (LLMs) provide a convenient interface for translating natural language commands into task plans for cyber-physical systems (CPSs). However, two gaps hinder their use for real execution: generated plans may misinterpret or omit the user's intent, and even a logically plausible plan may be infeasible under component dynamics, interactions, or safety constraints. Existing LLM-based planning approaches often lack informative feedback on why a generated plan fails, providing little guidance for revising the plan accordingly. To address these challenges, we present a hierarchical feedback framework that uses different types of feedback information to guide LLMs in generating executable plans for CPSs. We prompt LLMs to generate both a structured task plan and corresponding signal temporal logic (STL) constraints, and design a sound algorithm that identifies definite contradictions between them and provides feedback for revising inconsistencies. At the execution level, when control synthesis fails, we extract different types of diagnostic information, such as violated constraints and conflicting component assignments, and feed them back to guide task replanning.…

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• arXiv cs.CVMultimodalOct 15

  Visual Sanad: Auditing Vision-Language Models for False Acceptance of Qur'anic Citations

  Niaz Mohaiman Abtahi, Reyana Shahid, Evan Maksud

  Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used to interpret religious, educational, and culturally sensitive visual content, yet their reliability on citation verification remains underexplored. We introduce Visual Sanad, a controlled benchmark for testing whether VLMs falsely accept incorrect Qur'anic verse attributions when the same quote-reference pair is rendered under different visual framings. The benchmark contains 2,400 rendered images built from 100 English Qur'an verses, four factual states per verse, and six visual conditions ranging from plain text to decorative and authority-framed layouts. All quote-reference pairs were source-checked and human-audited before rendering. Across 24 full model-prompt runs, we observe a sharp capability split. Proprietary API-served VLMs range from near-perfect citation verification to moderate false acceptance, whereas recent open-weight VLMs often show weak discrimination and default to VALID on most images. De-biased prompting can reduce false acceptance, but often by shifting the decision threshold toward INVALID rather than by producing strong citation discrimination. Visual Sanad therefore exposes a culturally grounded…

  AIEvals80PDF
• arXiv cs.SEDeveloper toolingOct 15

  Stateful Testing for Deep Learning Compilers

  Jiatao Ge, Ruixiang Qian, Yibo Hu, Yanzhou Mu, Yinglong Zou +3

  Modern deep learning compilers compile models lazily and cache artifacts across invocations. Retained compiler state can make a later invocation incorrect even when it is correct in isolation. An analysis of 26 publicly reported issues in PyTorch, JAX, and TensorFlow shows that detecting such bugs requires sequences that first establish compiler state and then expose a failure. We present Rondo, a stateful testing method that represents each test case as a model paired with an invocation sequence. Rondo mutates invocation sequences and uses a Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler guided by compilation behavior to favor rarely observed behaviors. Its three-way differential oracle compares execution without compilation, compiled execution with compiler state reset, and compiled execution with state retained. It confirms stateful bugs by replaying the same invocation with state retained and reset while preserving inputs and program state, then shortens sequences while preserving the original bug. We evaluate Rondo on four deep learning frameworks using 24 common model architectures. Rondo detects 117 bugs, including 35 stateful bugs. We submit 39 bug reports, including 18 for stateful…

  AIInference & serving70PDF
• arXiv cs.CROct 15

  An Agentic ENF Framework for Forensic Video Authentication Against Generative AI

  Ryan Wyton, Bacha Rehman

  Generative models now synthesise video that is hard to distinguish from genuine footage, and learned detectors that key on a generator's artefacts degrade sharply on unseen models. This paper develops a forensic framework that authenticates video by a signal that generation does not control: the electric network frequency (ENF), the mains-driven hum in audio and flicker in video. A unified two-channel detector extracts the ENF from audio and from rolling-shutter video through one second harmonic estimator and a shared network; a synthetic-injection training method, driven by an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck drift model and anchored to real recordings, overcomes the scarcity of labelled ENF data; a reference-matching channel verifies a claimed time of recording and recovers an unknown one; and a two-axis agentic orchestrator fuses recording authenticity with content-manipulation evidence under an asymmetric rule, escalating expensive detectors only when needed. A central finding reframes the task: an ENF-band flicker is present in generated video at a prominence indistinguishable from real footage, so its presence is not proof of authenticity, and authentication must rest on consistency with…

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• Developer tooling2+100.0%
• Federated learning48+23.1%
• Adversarial training50+8.7%
• Forecasting time810.0%
• Quantum machine learning23−4.2%
• Frontier LLMs458−5.8%
• Agents514−6.9%
• Inference & serving264−9.9%