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All fields3560Multimodal553Agents531Frontier LLMs450Inference & serving271Image segmentation184Learning verifiable rewards167Graph learning1653D scene162Evals108Voice AI103Classifier & causal discovery88Forecasting time78Flow matching77Training & fine-tuning64Teacher policy distillation52All 32 fields

Open problems across fields

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

    Enables models to adapt to new tasks and environments without retraining, improving robustness in real-world deployment.

    • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
  • Cost and latency in embodied control loops1 paper raises it · 0 address it

    High computational and time costs limit real-time applicability of agentic systems in dynamic environments.

    • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
  • Physical-state verification and failure recovery1 paper raises it · 0 address it

    Agents must reliably detect and correct errors in physical interactions to avoid irreversible failures in real-world tasks.

    • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
  • Long-horizon task preservation in embodied agents1 paper raises it · 0 address it

    Maintaining progress over extended sequences is critical for complex, multi-step tasks in robotics and navigation.

    • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
  • Open-source stacks for generalist computer-use agents1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

    Closed systems hinder reproducibility and systematic study of agent design for real-world computer tasks.

    • OpenGCUA: Toward a Fully Open Stack for Generalist Computer Useraises · addresses

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.

Papers

  • arXiv cs.LGOct 19

    Curriculum Learning Teaches LLMs Long-Horizon Implicit Reasoning, Up To A Limit

    Jimson Huang, Maxwell Nickell, Ruowang Zhang, Abulhair Saparov

    LLMs "reason" by externalizing intermediate steps as tokens through chain-of-thought (CoT), yet even frontier reasoning models hit abrupt performance cliffs on long-horizon tasks. Implicit reasoning (reasoning within a single forward pass) is useful during CoT generation, as the model can "search ahead" to decide the correct next move without explicit search. Models with weak implicit reasoning are more likely to commit to wrong paths and must attempt to recover via backtracking, while models with strong implicit reasoning identify the correct proof strategy directly, shortening the CoT. However, prior work shows LLMs struggle to reason implicitly beyond shallow depths, with no relief from scale. We investigate whether curriculum learning can extend this depth by fine-tuning on examples with progressively increasing vocabulary size and lookahead (the number of steps a model must search ahead to identify the correct next move). At matched compute, curriculum-trained models achieve lookaheads where no-curriculum training fails. Qwen3-0.6B reaches 98% accuracy on problems with lookahead up to 256 with curriculum, compared to 45% without. However, progress slows as fine-tuning…

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  • arXiv cs.LGOct 19

    Safety Offset Learning: When Benign Fine-Tuning Misaligns LLMs

    Jesson Wang, Zhanhao Hu, Minghao Lin, Yuchen Wu, Aylin Caliskan +1

    Safety risks from fine-tuning are commonly characterized by the harmfulness of the training data:harmful fine-tuning is considered dangerous, while benign fine-tuning is often assumed to preservealignment. We argue that this view misses a more fundamental factor-the behavioral transition inducedby supervision. Harmful fine-tuning and safety-degrading benign fine-tuning can both be understoodas learning the same refusal-to-compliance transition, but on different data distributions. We studywhether such a transition learned on benign inputs can generalize to harmful requests. We constructbenign examples that an aligned model initially tends to refuse and pair them with their originalharmless responses, creating a discrepancy between the model's initial refusal and the supervisedanswer. Fine-tuning on these examples increases harmful compliance, but only when two conditionshold together: the discrepancy is large enough, and it cannot be resolved through a narrow surface-levelshortcut. With the induced discrepancy matched, varying only whether it is localized changes harmfulcompliance by an order of magnitude; raising the discrepancy does not help while a shortcut remainsavailable,…

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  • arXiv cs.LGOct 19

    PRISM: Prior Relational Information for Self-supervised Modeling to Enhance Solubility OOD Generalization

    Xinyi Chen, Jiahuan Pang, Titus Chima, Paul Weng, Wendong Wang

    Solubility depends on intermolecular interactions between solutes and solvents, and is central to drug discovery, chemical and materials process engineering. Its prediction requires out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization to unseen solutes, solvents, and solvent mixtures, where supervised methods suffer from data scarcity, and existing self-supervised methods do not explicitly learn chemically meaningful relations. Learning chemically meaningful relational information without labels can alleviate data scarcity and improve OOD generalization, but remains challenging. We introduce Prior Relational Information for Self-supervised Modeling (PRISM) and apply it to solubility OOD generalization. PRISM is a label-free pretraining framework that converts expert-defined chemical priors into relational teachers. For solubility prediction, it trains four encoders to preserve the population-level relational information from priors capturing hydrophobic, electrostatic, polarizability, and substructural effects, using Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence to match distance-based neighborhood distributions during pretraining. Across scaffold, solute, and solvent OOD settings, PRISM matches or…

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  • arXiv cs.LGOct 19

    Adversarial Post-Training of Foundation Models for High-Frequency Trading

    Alexandre Bismuth, Kang Li, Aramis Marti-Shahandeh, Valentin Mohl, Jakob Foerster +1

    While autoregressive foundation models trained on limit order book (LOB) data show state-of-the-art performance for market simulation, pre-training with cross-entropy neither penalizes the compounding of sampling errors over free-running rollouts nor targets desired market properties. We introduce a post-training method for LOB foundation models using a Wasserstein generative adversarial network (GAN) objective. A critic, trained online on rollouts through the true, non-differentiable matching engine, guides updates from evolution strategies over rank-4 LoRA perturbations of the pre-trained generator, under a KL trust region. For efficiency, we use EGGROLL (Evolution Guided GeneRal Optimisation via Low-rank Learning), a memory-efficient variant of evolution strategies. On a held-out panel, adversarial post-training improves LOB-Bench realism by 17.6% (WS-21) and 17.0% (Mean-$L_1$), while selection-matched random-perturbation and compute-matched continued-pre-training controls yield no improvement. Post-training is thus a necessary stage that more pre-training does not replace. Per-position divergence measurements show that it slows error accumulation over 500-message rollouts…

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  • arXiv econ.GNOct 19

    When Better Opportunities Backfire: Service Worker Responses to Parallel AI Deployment in Customer Acquisition

    Xinyu Fu, Shulong Luo, Narayan Ramasubbu, Peng Shen, Xincheng Wang +1

    As AI voice agents get deployed in high-volume contact centers, firms can route low-intent leads to AI and allocate high-intent leads to human workers. Drawing on sequential search theory, we posit that AI-induced task allocation reshapes work, enriching opportunities facing human workers but also raising their reservation value for continuing with the lead in hand, making them less willing to persist. We study the effects of an AI voice-agent deployment at a Chinese online health-insurance brokerage using more than a half million customer outreach records surrounding the rollout. Adopting a regression-discontinuity-in-time design, we trace how worker behavior changes across the workday. Results show that the enrichment of human-facing opportunities concentrates early in the workday, raising the probability that a call is a high-intent lead by about 23 percentage points on the first three calls and fading to zero later. However, customer acquisition by human workers declines precisely where the enrichment is greatest, falling about 5 percentage points on the first three calls and flattening over the day. Consistent with the theorized reservation value mechanism, workers…

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  • arXiv cs.SEOct 19

    Step-Aligned Script Generation with Verification and Recovery for Web Automation Testing

    Hridya Dhulipala, Xiaokai Rong, Aashish Yadavally, Tien N. Nguyen

    Automated generation of end-to-end web tests remains costly: developers must identify stable selectors, encode multi-step workflows, attach assertions, and maintain scripts as interfaces evolve. Recent LLM-based web agents can complete natural-language tasks in a live browser session, but task completion is not the same as producing a test-ware artifact - code that is executable, replay-able from a reset state, inspectable by developers, and tied to an oracle. We present TESSARA, an adaptive test-script generation framework that converts natural-language test intent into Playwright scripts consisting of executable interaction code, goal-state assertions, and step-level provenance linking each step to its generated code fragment, selector evidence, execution outcome, and repair history. TESSARA grounds each planned step via Step-Aligned Scripting (SAS), enabling fine-grained failure localization, selective regeneration of failing suffixes, and reversibility-aware backtracking that avoids undoing likely commit points (e.g., form submissions). A three-level verification pipeline (syntactic, execution, and semantic/oracle), detects and repairs malformed code, interaction failures,…

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  • arXiv cs.LGOct 19

    Text Dominance in Paralinguistic Conflict: Tracing Suppression Through Audio LLM Circuits

    Ankur Banerjee, Vishnu Guntakala, Danity Pike, Advay Roongta, Kevin Yang +1

    Audio LLMs deployed in settings such as crisis hotlines and customer support are only useful beyond speech-to-text pipelines if they use acoustic cues rather than the transcript alone. We test whether they prioritise transcript content over paralinguistic cues (emotion, speaker identity, sarcasm) and trace the mechanism when they do. Across six audio LLMs under LISTEN-style conflict conditions, the mean text-dominance rate on mismatched text+audio items is 0.78 (0.86 excluding sarcasm). In the most text-dominant screened model, probing shows speaker identity remains linearly decodable at ceiling at the language model's input, so the failure is not perceptual. Back-patching, reported to repair lexical text dominance, has no measurable effect here; but it also fails on its own source task in our replication (n=300), so we treat its null as uninformative rather than as evidence of non-transfer. Attention knockout partially restores audio-grounded output by blocking the claim from propagating through intermediate tokens during open-ended generation, whereas blocking the answer position's direct connection to the conflicting claim has no effect. The claim's influence therefore travels…

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  • arXiv cs.CLOct 19

    Cognitive Map in Large Language Models

    Albert Qin, Jonathan Cohen, Gautam Reddy

    It has long been proposed that animals construct cognitive maps to support flexible behavior in novel environments. We tested whether large language models form similar representations using relational reasoning tasks and causal "mosaic experiments" that manipulate internal activations in open-weight language models. Models beyond the ten-billion-parameter scale successfully inferred unstated relationships between entities and generalized to synthetic entity names. Across model and task families, models generated abstract representations of relational structure and combined them additively with representations of entity identity, binding entities to roles within that structure. Models stored observed relationships as pairwise links that they composed retrospectively when queried, rather than prospectively positioning each entity in a global coordinate system. Binding was mediated by a sparse, distributed set of key--value pairs; by perturbing these pairs, we implanted "false memories" that altered model behavior in predictable ways. Overall, our findings reveal an internal organization analogous to a cognitive map that explains how language models reason with limited information.

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  • arXiv cs.CVOct 18

    ViMoLa: Discrete Motion Tokens for Language-Guided Video Generation

    Bishoy Galoaa, Sarah Ostadabbas

    Language-guided video generation often captures scene content while missing the requested motion. We present ViMoLa (Video Motion Language), which predicts a motion prior from language and injects it into a frozen image-to-video backbone. A spatial vector-quantized autoencoder compresses dense trajectories into 64 tokens from a 512-entry codebook; a 28M-parameter transformer predicts the tokens from text; and zero-gated cross-attention adapters condition every frozen Wan~2.2 DiT block through forward hooks. Trained on 462K videos from Something-Something~v2 and Kinetics-400, ViMoLa raises directional accuracy from 0.287 to 0.442 (chance 0.250), with similar measured generative quality. Across-prompt shuffled codes achieve 0.283, supporting the importance of prompt-matched token content. A low-rank adapter reaches 0.428 at 1.45% additional forward-pass FLOPs, and reusing the tokenizer and language model with newly trained CogVideoX adapters raises accuracy from 0.301 to 0.398. Control remains imperfect: oracle codes reach 0.531, compound-motion gains are smaller, and the adapter does not explicitly preserve token-to-patch assignments.

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  • arXiv cs.LGOct 18

    Distributionally-Robust Policy Learning with Observational Data

    Debmalya Mandal

    Policy learning from observational data is fundamental to applications ranging from personalized medicine to welfare-program targeting, but standard approaches optimize empirical performance and may fail when the deployment distribution differs from the training distribution. We study \emph{distributionally-robust policy learning}: given observational data, we seek a policy $π\in Π$ that maximizes the worst-case policy value over an $f$-divergence ball of radius $ρ$ around the data-generating distribution. We propose an estimator built on cross-fitted doubly-robust scores for the conditional treatment effect, paired with a DRO solver that handles \texttt{KL}, $χ^2$, and \texttt{CVaR} ambiguity sets. We establish two convergence guarantees. First, the estimated policy attains the standard $\widetilde{O}(n^{-1/2})$ rate on its DRO regret, and inherits the doubly-robust property -- the rate continues to hold whenever either the outcome model or the propensity model is consistently estimated, even at slow nonparametric rates. We then propose a sample-splitting bias-correction algorithm derived from the Lagrangian dual, and show that under a Tsybakov-style margin condition on the…

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  • arXiv cs.LGOct 18

    Divergence based Ranked Preference Alignment for LLMs

    Rajdeep Haldar, Yue Xing, Qifan Song

    Alignment of large language models typically relies on pairwise preference feedback, though ranked feedback can capture more comprehensive information across multiple responses within a single annotation. However, ranked-preference alignment is underexplored in practice compared to simpler pairwise approaches, potentially resulting in suboptimal behavior. Concurrently, recent research has conceptualized large language model alignment objectives as divergence estimators between aligned (preferred) and unaligned (less-preferred) response distributions, resulting in a family of objectives with an interpretable theoretical foundation and strong empirical performance. This work unifies these perspectives by introducing $f$-RPO, a $f$-divergence objective for ranked preference optimization that extends divergence-based alignment to ranked feedback and recovers pairwise preference alignment as a special case. Our theoretical analysis establishes rank-order consistency, showing that $f$-RPO preserves the underlying preference ordering at convergence. Empirical results indicate that total-variation and reverse-KL variants of the proposed objective consistently outperform ranked-alignment…

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  • arXiv cs.CLOct 18

    Assertion and Belief: Moore's Paradox in Language Models

    Anshun Asher Zheng, Weili Cao, Fangcong Yin, David Beaver, Junyi Jessy Li

    Moore's paradox \citep{moore1942} concerns sentences such as ``It is raining, but I don't believe that it is,'' which may well be true yet cannot be sensibly asserted. The absurdity lies not in the content but in the act, since to assert is to vouch for one's own belief. This makes the paradox a test of whether language models take the speech act into account when computing meaning. We present the first test of Moore's paradox in LLMs, evaluating 12 models on a curated set of Moorean sentences in varied contexts. We find that models largely recognize the infelicity of Moorean sentences, and that the judgement is not tied to a memorized form and tracks the speech act. Using the Rational Speech Act framework (RSA; \citealt{goodmanfrank2016}), we then test whether these judgements arise from a listener reasoning about a speaker. We find the models' own listeners do not reason about their own speakers, and their reasoning traces suggest that they instead recall knowledge about the paradox and apply rules therein. The models thus appear to have learned the paradox as a fact about sentences, not as a requirement on speakers.

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  • arXiv cs.LGOct 18

    CVTA: Cross-Variable Temporal Attention for Multivariate Irregular Time Series Prediction

    Ankitkumar Joshi, Milos Hauskrecht

    Irregularly sampled multivariate time series arise in many real-world domains such as healthcare, climate science, and large-scale monitoring systems. Characterized by asynchronous observations and heterogeneity across variables, such time series pose significant challenges for forecasting. In this work, we introduce Cross-Variable Temporal Attention (CVTA), a short-term, continuous-time forecasting framework that learns prediction functions from its compact, interpretable state summarizing recent temporal dynamics across variables. CVTA uses Variable-Conditioned Embeddings to project heterogeneous variables into variable-specific latent spaces, and applies temporal attention to capture cross-variable dependencies from this state. Furthermore, we demonstrate that CVTA can be integrated as an auxiliary module into existing state-of-the-art prediction models through a dynamic meta-decision model. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world benchmarks show that CVTA achieves strong short-term predictive accuracy, supports efficient online inference, improves existing prediction models when used as an auxiliary module, and learns attention patterns that align well with domain…

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  • arXiv cs.CLOct 18

    Sharp Degree Bounds for Putinar Certificates in Terms of the Positivity Margin via Analytic Sums of Squares

    Yuxiang Zhao, Ting Gan

    We establish sharp degree bounds for Putinar sum-of-squares (SOS) certificates in terms of the positivity margin $δ$. For any fixed Archimedean quadratic module with prescribed generators and any fixed bound on the degree of the objective, we prove a uniform certificate-degree upper bound of $O(δ^{-1/2}\log^2(2/δ))$ for normalized polynomial objectives. We show that this bound is sharp by constructing a matching lower-bound example in three variables, thereby establishing that the dependence on $δ$ is optimal. These matching bounds also yield sharp worst-case convergence rates for the Lasserre hierarchy.

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  • arXiv cs.LGOct 18

    Finite Interaction Lens: Structured Precision Sharing for Vision-Language Models

    Nozomu Fujisawa

    Identifying which visual interventions interact in a vision-language model requires comparing their joint and separate effects. The resulting four-output difference can be small enough for rounding error to obscure it. We introduce the Finite Interaction Lens (FIL), a mixed-precision method for evaluating finite intervention families. At each selected linear projection, FIL decomposes each candidate's input into a native state, two single-intervention components, and a full-dimensional mixed residual. It projects the single-intervention components at higher precision and reuses the same numerical contributions in the joint candidates, while retaining every mixed residual and nonlinear trajectory. We derive a local cancellation identity and a conditional bound on error propagation through a smooth nonlinearity. In one MLP of Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct, FIL reduces final interaction MSE by 94.4% on 16 synthetic families and by 99.85% and 99.35% in two separate four-image COCO studies, relative to a control that has the same nominal BF16-product budget and higher-precision single interventions but projects each joint candidate independently. One image accounts for most of the absolute…

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  • arXiv cs.LGOct 18

    Benchmark for Structured Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Perovskite Photovoltaics

    Qiwei Han, Chi Zhou, Gaoxiang Yuan

    While retrieval-augmented language models increasingly serve as literature assistants in the physical sciences, existing benchmarks evaluate them primarily on qualitative text overlap or through model-based scoring rather than against verified experimental ground truth. In experimental materials disciplines such as perovskite photovoltaics, however, the most critical inquiries are inherently quantitative and aggregate measurements across dozens or hundreds of papers. Here, we present a quantitative question-answering benchmark where all 755 ground-truth answers are computed directly from 45,441 measured device records (40,889 human-curated records through 2021 and 4,552 records extracted from 2022-2026 literature). Benchmarking six retrieval architectures over 158,274 passages from 25,662 papers using an open 14B model on a single 24 GB GPU, standard passage retrieval tops out at 16-23% accuracy (compared to 1.6-6.5% zero-shot). In contrast, equipping the language model with read-only SQL execution over the structured device table elevates accuracy to 51.5% on historical and 50.8% on prospective literature -- a 33.01.8 percentage-point advantage over hybrid text retrieval.…

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  • arXiv cs.CLOct 18

    Representations in Motion: Layer-wise Rotation and Trajectory Divergence in LLMs

    Zhuonan Yang, Yik Siu Chan, Wannan Yang, Ellie Pavlick

    Recent work suggests that activation dynamics--how representations change during inference--might be more revealing about language model behavior than static readouts from individual layers. In this work, we investigate the layer-wise evolution of representations of factuality, using true and false statements when the model is prompted to either lie or to be honest. We report a geometric phenomenon in which the factuality directions extracted from the lying and honest conditions appear to rotate away from each other across layers. We find that such layer-wise rotation also occurs in a task that requires the model to take different visual perspectives in the 3D world, suggesting that the rotation phenomenon might be indicative of manipulating conceptual spaces in general, rather than unique to factuality. We then investigate the "real time" transformation of conceptual representations on a trial-to-trial basis. We show that it is possible to make strong predictions about the model's target task and behavior from trajectories alone. In addition, diverging points in single-trial trajectories correspond to the onset of rotation in aggregated-trial analysis. Finally, we show that both…

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  • arXiv cs.CVOct 18

    DiffGround: Semantic Difference-Guided Zero-Shot Video Question Grounding

    Cheng-Han Lee, Amir Salimi, Hsiang-Wei Huang, Che-Chun Su, Min Sun +1

    Video Question Grounding (VideoQG) requires both accurate question answering and precise temporal localization. Existing supervised methods rely on costly temporal annotations, while existing zero-shot approaches are primarily designed for Video Question Answering (VQA) and are not optimized for temporal grounding. We propose DiffGround, an action-driven zero-shot framework built upon frozen Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Our framework first predicts an answer-relevant action cue that transforms the input question into an explicit semantic target for grounding. Action Cue converts a reasoningoriented question into an action-centric retrieval query. Guided by the action cue, a Vision-Language Model (VLM) efficiently selects informative keyframes for reasoning. Finally, we introduce Semantic Diff Refinement, a training-free temporal refinement method that exploits semantic differences between neighboring SigLIP2 embeddings to recover complete action segments from sparse predictions. Extensive experiments on NExT-GQA and STAR show that DiffGround consistently outperforms existing zero-shot and supervised methods, establishing a new state of the art for Video Question…

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  • arXiv cs.AIOct 18

    Design and Cross-Domain Evaluation of an Agent Execution Harness

    Saurav Joshi, Manas Gupta, Ashwin Venkatesh Raman, Akshay Budhkar

    Completing complex tasks with language-model agents requires coordinating planning, execution, and review so the final result addresses the user's original objective. We present an agent execution harness that keeps the original objective separate from a revisable plan and an execution record. A planner assigns scoped tasks, workers produce outputs and artifacts, and a reviewer examines results against the original request before submitting or requesting additional work. Reusable domain-specific instructions guide these roles and are refined during construction using task inputs and execution trajectories, without official grading feedback. We evaluate complete harness configurations across terminal tasks, clinical responses, application building, and scientific questions. On Terminal-Bench 2.1, the harness passes 83 of 89 instances (93.26%); on HealthBench Professional, a Fable-configured system achieves a length-adjusted rubric score of 69.63 across 525 tasks. In a 53-task paired HealthBench comparison, the Fable-configured harness achieves an aggregate score 19.89 points higher than direct completion, despite a $-1.46$-point median task-level change; mean inference cost rises…

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  • arXiv cs.CLOct 18

    Flattening Fantasies: Analyzing Stereotypes in Pornographic Discourse

    Sarmad Chandio, Osama Khalid, Sharaf Zia, Ethan Kutlu

    This study presents a large-scale quantitative analysis of 5.4 million video titles from xHamster, the world's fourth most visited pornography platform, to examine linguistic patterns used to describe different dimensions of identities (e.g., race and gender). Specifically, we investigate how nationalities, ethnic groups, and gender identities are portrayed in pornographic discourse, focusing on stereotypes and deviations from implicit norms of pornography. The results show the dominance of American pornography over other groups, which acts as the de facto norm for the adult industry. We identify persistent ethnic stereotypes reflecting colonial power dynamics, religious fetishization, and the sexualization of cultural taboos. The analysis reveals gendered representational differences across cultures, with a prevalent Madonna-Whore dichotomy in the portrayal of women and stereotypical depictions of men in physically dominant roles.

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Rising research topics

Coming with more sources: more tagged papers
  • Federated learning50+31.6%
  • Agents531+2.3%
  • Quantum machine learning240.0%
  • Character recognition OCR170.0%
  • Sensing communication150.0%
  • Frontier LLMs450−7.0%
  • Voice AI103−11.2%
  • Image segmentation184−11.5%