Research

• Spiking neural networks7+40.0%
• Diffusion priors16+14.3%
• Algorithmic fairness9+12.5%
• Channel state information8−20.0%
• Quantum machine learning14−22.2%
• Character recognition OCR30−28.6%
• Linear bandits50−31.5%
• Molecular property prediction27−32.5%

• arXiv cs.AIOct 29

  Collaborative AI agents for autonomous experimental research with solid-state quantum spins

  El Mustapha Mansouri, Eikichi Kimura, Masato Koga, Keigo Arai

  An autonomous research laboratory could conduct an entire study, from formulating questions to preparing manuscripts. Artificial intelligence (AI) offers one route towards this goal. Recent AI systems take on several research roles, but may draw conclusions that the evidence does not support. Here, we present an autonomous research laboratory in which agents based on large language models assess one another's work and can stop or redirect investigations. They can generate and reject research questions, require separate theoretical checks and conduct experiments designed to challenge their claims. We demonstrate these capabilities by investigating ensembles of quantum spins in diamond. The agents derived the minimum number of calibration settings needed to predict responses to a defined family of microwave pulse sequences. They checked the result computationally and designed experiments to distinguish competing predictions. An initial experiment agreed with the theoretical predictions, but repeated reference measurements showed that the signal was drifting during data collection. The agents therefore treated the result as inconclusive and revised the measurement protocol without…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 29

  VeriCUA: Verification as Agentic Exploration for Computer-Using Agents

  Qiushi Sun, Da Yu, Alexander Knop, Amer Sinha, Lingpeng Kong +3

  Building and scaling computer-using agents (CUAs) across desktop, mobile, and web environments requires reliable task-completion verification for data curation, evaluation, and reinforcement learning. Typical automated approaches prompt vision-language models (VLMs) to judge trajectories or generate programs to inspect application state. However, both rely on partial views of complex digital environments. VLM judges are restricted to supplied observations, while generated programs depend on accessible state. These views can omit decisive evidence or leave completion judgments unsupported. Tailoring separate verifiers to different platforms and access settings adds further engineering cost. We present VeriCUA, a platform-agnostic framework for verification through agentic exploration. It treats verification as dynamic evidence gathering and assessment within a shared procedure for online and offline settings across platforms and observation modalities. After inspecting the available context to construct a task rubric, the verifier selects GUI or code checks for unresolved requirements and combines their findings under explicit evidence rules. Experiments show improved agreement…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 29

  PIVOT: Progressive Intervention via Online Teacher Correction

  Zhihao Yang, Boyuan Zheng, Puhui Tan, Yukun Chen, Kuan Zhang +5

  Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) is limited by sparse outcome-level feedback on hard reasoning tasks: when all rollouts in a group fail, rewards provide no learning signal. Stronger teachers can provide additional guidance, but this raises a central question: how can such signals be incorporated into RLVR to support successful rollouts while remaining learnable for the student? We distinguish two complementary mechanisms: trajectory-level intervention, which improves access to reward-bearing trajectories, and token-level supervision, which provides dense targets to guide student learning. Our controlled experiments show that either mechanism alone can remain insufficient, motivating their combination. We therefore introduce PIVOT, which inserts teacher-generated corrections into student rollouts and applies token-level KL supervision to these segments alongside the RLVR objective. Beyond their combination, we systematically analyze where to intervene and how to supervise, yielding a recipe for effective guidance. Across hard logic games and mathematical reasoning benchmarks, PIVOT consistently outperforms existing methods, nearly doubling mean avg@8 on logic…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 29

  Every Token Needs Its Own Teacher: Multi-teacher Adaptive On-policy Self-distillation

  Yifu Luo, Chuang Ma, Zeyu Chen, Enkelejda Kasneci, Qi Chen +1

  On-policy Self-distillation (OPSD) has proven effective for post-training large language models by constructing a teacher conditioned on privileged references. However, existing approaches keep the teacher fixed either throughout training by consistently exposing it to the full reference, or within each response by adaptively varying partial reference exposure only across responses. In this paper, we argue that neither of them is sufficient. Instead, every token needs its own teacher, as the teacher preference can vary token by token within the same response. Through a teacher-intervention pilot study, we validate that the teacher preference differs across tokens, and reveal that a preferred teacher can be identified for each token through majority voting and KL-based selection. Motivated by these findings, we propose Multi-teacher Adaptive On-policy Self-Distillation (MTA-OPSD), the first token-level adaptive OPSD method. Our method constructs a multi-teacher pool consisting of candidate teachers, and enables every token to adaptively select its preferred teacher during training. Experiments with Qwen3 models on mathematical reasoning tasks show that MTA-OPSD consistently…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 29

  Comparing Human Role-Players and LLM-Simulated Clients in Online Counselling Training: An Analysis of Counselling Patterns

  Eric Rudolph, Philipp Steigerwald, Jens Albrecht

  This study investigates the capabilities of Large Language Models to simulate counselling clients in educational role-plays in comparison to human role-players. Initially, we recorded role-playing sessions, where novice counsellors interacted with human peers acting as clients, followed by role-plays between humans and clients simulated by Mistrals Mixtral 8x7b using 4-bit quantization. These interactions were analysed with a counselling communication pattern system at sentence level. We investigated two key questions: (1) to what extent LLM-generated responses replicate authentic conversational dynamics and (2) whether counsellors' communication behaviour differs when interacting with human versus LLM-simulated clients. The findings highlight both similarities and differences in the application of counselling patterns across scenarios, showing the potential of LLM-based role-playing exercises to enhance counselling competencies and to identify areas for further refinement in virtual client simulations.

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• arXiv cs.DCOct 29

  AI in the EGI e-infrastructure -- Past experiences and future strategies

  Gergely Sipos, Sergio Andreozzi, Marco Rorro, Andrea Manzi, Tiziana Ferrari

  The EGI Federation has provided federated e-infrastructure services to European and global science for over 15 years. We review EGI's early experiences with AI in the interTwin and iMagine Horizon Europe projects, which built digital twins in physics and environmental sciences and an image-analysis platform for aquatic research. We then examine how the AI landscape has changed since 2023 and argue that the focus of AI in science has shifted from model training to adapting and applying AI to specific domains, projects and questions. Building on these lessons, we present the AI strategy emerging from the EGI Federation Strategy 2026-2030, organised around three enablers: (1) an AI-ready infrastructure connecting compute, data and application resources across the continuum; (2) human skills to know what is possible with AI and how to implement it; and (3) trust, to run AI with confidence even in high-risk environments. We describe the projects implementing each enabler, including federated LLM inference, AI-ready data platforms and AI competence centres, and discuss a division of labour with EuroHPC's AI Factories, RAISE, research infrastructures and EOSC, in which EGI specialises…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 29

  Agentic University: Collaborative Agents for Personalized Learning

  Jingru Fan, Tianle Zhou, Yunjie Zhou, Zihao He, Yixuan Zhou +8

  Large language models support personalized tutoring, content generation, and adaptive learning paths. However, capability development requires these resources and interactions to form a coherent learning process that evolves with the learner. A central challenge is to align goals, activities, and assessment while using learning evidence to decide what should follow. We introduce Human-Participatory Multi-Agent Organization and instantiate it in Agentic University (AU). In AU, learners participate as organization members and work with specialized agents to maintain a revisable Capability Program. The program connects personal goals, learning activities across modalities, and layered assessment, while learner feedback and performance guide subsequent support. Our evaluation shows advantages in program organization, assessment design, and revision quality. Users achieved larger mean assessment gains (12.19 versus 5.61 points on a 50-point scale) and reported stronger cognitive support. This work contributes an organizational approach to adaptive learning that makes learner participation a continuing basis for multi-agent coordination. The Agentic University project is available at…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 29

  rTaste: Do Research Agents Have Taste? Evaluating Early Stage Research Judgment

  Art Kanke

  Do research agents have taste, the judgment of which experiments are worth running before their outcomes are known? We give six frontier models seven recent NLP papers. Each model, working as a research agent alone or as a team, proposes minimum viable experiments (MVEs), forecasts whether each will pass a threshold it sets and ranks them. A separate executor then attempts every MVE, including those ranked last, and three model auditors judge the results. Of 415 MVEs, 194 are judged sound, valuable and new, but fewer than half of these (73) are also judged beyond the seed paper and non obvious. The agents' first choices match the auditors' most valued experiment more often than a random pick, but are not shown to improve on choosing the experiment written first. Their forecasts beat a base rate but are not measurably more accurate than those of a fresh instance of the same model given only the paper and registrations. Teams cost more without a clear overall improvement in proposal quality. The agents produce many worthwhile experiments, but the evidence that their rankings improve the choice of which to run remains limited. The evaluation harness and a dataset of all 415 MVEs,…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 29

  SCARL: Sequence Confidence-Aligned Reinforcement Learning

  Zhenghong Ke, Jingbo Zhou, Hua Wu

  Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves language-model reasoning by scoring sampled responses with a rule-based verifier and reinforcing those that pass. Where a classifier's training couples predicted probability to labels, nothing ties an RLVR policy's confidence in a response to its reward: aligned training would drive responses with the same advantage toward equal confidence, yet the advantage is blind to confidence. Under this sequence-confidence misalignment, a success the policy barely found earns the same update as one it produces with near certainty, and a confident error is corrected no harder than an exploratory one. We propose SCARL (Sequence Confidence-Aligned Reinforcement Learning), which reshapes, but never re-signs, each advantage with the alignment gap between the response's group-relative confidence and the outcome its advantage certifies, normalized into shares of each class's advantage budget. Misaligned samples absorb the force, responses with the same advantage are driven toward equal confidence, and repairing the misalignment doubles as a remedy for the entropy collapse that erodes exploration. SCARL provably reduces to its base…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 29

  Don't Lose the Thread: Empowering Long-Horizon LLM Agents with Cognitive Resource Self-Allocation

  Zheng Zhu, Xiaozhuan Liang, Xi Chen, Bei Yu, Jiaya Jia

  Agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in solving complex reasoning tasks. However, LLM agents often falter on long-horizon tasks due to cognitive overload, as their working memory becomes cluttered with expanding and irrelevant information, which dilutes their attention and hinders effective planning and reasoning. To mitigate this challenge, we introduce Cognitive Resource Self-Allocation (CORAL), a novel reasoning paradigm that empowers agents to proactively optimize their context. Implemented as an agent-callable working memory management toolset, CORAL allows an agent to checkpoint its task progress and verified facts, and adaptively initiate a new problem-solving episode by resetting cluttered context while preserving only the checkpointed information, enabling it to resume reasoning from a clean state. We further enhance the agent's checkpointing capabilities using a Multi-episode Agentic Reinforced Policy Optimization algorithm. On the GAIA benchmark, CORAL with an 8B model achieves 42.8% average accuracy, with particularly strong gains on the most challenging long-horizon tasks (Level 2 and Level 3). Crucially, these gains…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 29

  Distributional Reward Calibration and Budget-Neutral Credit Assignment for Multimodal RLVR

  Lang Chen, Zongxin Xu, Borui Wang, Anran Liu, Shitong Chen

  We revisit advantage estimation in Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and observe that any token-level advantage admits a two-stage factorization: a \emph{sample-level baselining} step that converts scalar verifier rewards into a comparable sequence-level signal, and a \emph{token-level credit assignment} step that distributes that signal over the trajectory. Existing estimators typically address only one of these stages: affine baselines preserve the shape of each task's reward law, so heavy tails and binary cliffs propagate into the gradient, while token-level credit rules tie the size of each token's update to raw confidence scales and need not conserve the total credit issued by the verifier. We propose \textbf{TACE} (Two-stage Advantage and Credit Estimation), a two-stage estimator that addresses both stages. At stage~(S1), we replace linear standardization with a one-dimensional optimal-transport map to a standard normal, which gives a common population reward law across tasks and caps finite-sample outliers deterministically. At stage~(S2), we rank-calibrate a stop-gradient evidence contrast within each trajectory and renormalize the clipped token weights to have…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 29

  EpiAgent: Epistemic Self-Play for LLM Agents

  Xuanfa Jin, Xinyu Cui, Zhijian Ma, Xue Yan, Jian Zhao +2

  Epistemic game theory explains an agent's strategic behavior via the beliefs it holds about others and how these beliefs are updated as the interactions unfold. Modern LLM-based agents, however, often lack an explicit mechanism for learning and updating such beliefs to guide decisions under incomplete information. To bridge this gap, we propose EpiAgent, a framework that equips LLM-based agents with an explicit, learnable epistemic layer, which maintains beliefs over others' private information and combines these beliefs with the agent's available information into an epistemic state for action selection. Concretely, the agent's policy is decomposed into two coupled stages: Epistemic Update, which updates these beliefs from interaction histories, and Action Planning, which selects actions conditioned on the updated epistemic state. By formulating their dependency as a bi-level optimization problem, we introduce Epistemic Self-Play, an algorithm that alternately optimizes the two stages through self-play, utilizing an intrinsic prediction reward to evaluate how well inferred beliefs predict subsequent observations. Empirical results across both mixed and competitive scenarios show…

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• arXiv cs.CROct 29

  DYNAS: A Dynamic Network Penetration Testing Framework Using Deep Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

  Md. Rakibul Hassan, Majedul Islam, Md. Ashraful Alam, Muhammad Iqbal Hossain, Swakkhar Shatabda

  As network scale and uncertainty complicate automated penetration testing, reinforcement learning (RL) environments must support controlled evaluation under defensive and non-stationary conditions. We present DYNAS (Dynamic Network Attack Simulator), which combines parameterized large-scale scenario generation with stateful intrusion detection responses, explicit scan false-positive and false-negative noise, temporary service unavailability, and duration-based action timeouts. We further introduce Pen-DHRL, a recurrent manager--worker policy that selects persistent subgoals using IDS-conditioned global context. We compare Pen-DHRL with GNN, Invariant, and Attention baselines across four scenario variants and multiple training regimes. Under IDS-disabled training followed by IDS-enabled evaluation, Pen-DHRL obtains approximately 64\% and 24\% higher reward per step on Bridge and Dynamic, respectively, and approximately 26\% and 30\% more captured hosts on VarA and VarB than the next-best baseline. With all defensive dynamics active from the beginning of training, Pen-DHRL achieves positive mean episode returns in all four scenarios, whereas the flat baselines produce negative mean…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 29

  Locating and Closing Information Gaps in Multi-Agent Systems

  Yaxin Gong, Chongming Gao, Gangyi Zhang, Chenxiao Fan, Leyang Shen +5

  Multi-step Web tasks often require several LLM agents to gather and combine evidence. The communication graph of a fixed workflow restricts which agents can read each other's outputs: evidence retrieved by one agent may never reach the agent that needs it, leaving an information gap and an incomplete or incorrect answer. Adding a connection can deliver the missing evidence, but can also lead the receiver to adopt an incorrect upstream conclusion that displaces a correct answer; the final output alone does not separate the two. We propose Selective Probing and Link Insertion for Closing information gaps in multi-agent Execution (SPLICE), which locates information gaps per query and decides what to adopt after adding an edge. After the original workflow runs, SPLICE uses the query and node outputs to locate a possible gap, adds one directed edge from a source to a receiver to deliver the relevant evidence, and re-executes the receiver and affected downstream nodes, producing a candidate answer. The adoption decision reads both the final answers of the two runs and the process changes the edit caused inside the workflow: how far the receiver moved, where its new content came from,…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 29

  The generative paradox: the Anti-Prompt paradigm for human capability

  Margarita Trifonov Vadim E. Levit

  Generative AI in education is usually judged by the output of human-AI teams. That focus overlooks a second outcome: what people can still understand, challenge, repair, and adapt when assistance changes or disappears. We call this tension the generative paradox and distinguish four manifestations: performance, assistance, ownership, and capability stock. We propose developmental function allocation, which complements operational function allocation and meaningful human control by treating retained human capability as a design objective alongside current joint performance. The Anti-Prompt paradigm reverses the default interaction order: when immediate generation would preempt a consequential human act, AI should first create the conditions for human construction. We distinguish the validity of a product, responsibility for its construction, and evidence of capability after support changes. Representative Anti-Prompts, a canonical interaction sequence, and stress tests spanning mathematical reasoning, experimental science, software diagnosis, and lesson design make these distinctions concrete. We conclude with falsifiable predictions about retained capability and a system-level…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 29

  DynaRev: Benchmarking Web Agents under Dynamic Goal Revision

  Shiqi Zhang, Guochen Zhou, Zesheng Wei, Hai Zhao, Zhisong Zhang

  Web agents are typically evaluated with goals fully specified before execution and fixed thereafter, whereas real users often revise their requirements during interaction. To study such interactions, we introduce DynaRev, a benchmark of 181 tasks to evaluate web agents under dynamic goal revision. DynaRev uses semantic milestones to deliver revisions at task-defined stages, covers additive revisions, unconditional overrides, and runtime-conditioned overrides, and evaluates correctness, responsiveness, and efficiency through trajectory-grounded evaluation. Five-model evaluations show that agents often satisfy only part of the task requirements, with performance varying across task sources, revision types, and models. Further analyses reveal varied milestone timing, mixed effects of dynamic delivery, and contrasting revision-handling outcomes, with gains from instruction rewriting while preserving browser state and losses from browser resets. DynaRev provides a testbed for studying how web agents adapt to evolving user goals. The code and data are available at https://github.com/zsq259/DynaRev.

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 29

  Reward-Adaptive Co-Evolution of Policy and Rubric

  Yizhu Chen, Jianguang Jiang, Jiameng Huang, Chuyu Fang, Bojun Zhang +3

  Rubric-based rewards provide fine-grained, interpretable supervision for open-ended reinforcement learning, where holistic scalar rewards struggle to capture multidimensional response quality. Static rubrics can lose discriminative power as the policy distribution evolves, while existing policy--rubric co-evolution methods rely on globally prescribed update schedules that ignore heterogeneous reward informativeness. We introduce RACE, a Reward-Adaptive Co-Evolution framework. At the group level, per-rollout-group training-signal routing classifies groups as informative, diversity-collapsed, or rubric-failed, updating the policy only with informative groups while caching rubric failures. At the phase level, event-triggered phase switching enters rubric optimization upon persistent reward saturation and returns when rubric-reward improvement plateaus. Rubric phases train the generator on cached pairs using a frozen judge and a scale-normalized pairwise-margin reward. Across both levels, online threshold adaptation adjusts routing and switching thresholds through proportional control. Under a unified evaluation protocol, RACE achieves the highest average performance and outperforms…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 29

  Hybrid AI Patterns: Thirteen Ways to Couple Language Models with Rules, and How to Choose Among Them

  Siegfried Handschuh, Götz-Henrik Wiegand, Lorena Raichle

  Language models handle text well, and rule engines give conclusions with proofs. Systems that combine the two are usually described by example, and the same coupling turns up under different names in agent frameworks, guardrail toolkits and neuro-symbolic research. This document defines thirteen patterns for coupling a language model with an executable rule language, in the catalogue form introduced for object-oriented design: intent, motivation, applicability, participants, collaborations, consequences, implementation, known uses and related patterns. Four patterns concern what crosses the boundary between model and rules, five who controls whom, three how the model takes part in the reasoning, and one how knowledge is kept over time. Five invariants hold for every combination, and five failure patterns name the couplings that break them. We relate the catalogue to published pattern catalogues and taxonomies of hybrid and neuro-symbolic systems and show where they overlap with it. A decision guide leads from a problem to a pattern. It rests on our measurements, including the cases in which a model alone did as well as the hybrid or better, and it reports what each design cost.

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 29

  AI Cosmos: An Agentic Infra for Situated Learning

  AI Cosmos Team, Jinfeng Zhou, Yuxuan Chen, Fangming Chang, Mingyu Su +30

  Large language models (LLMs) can improve task performance during learning, yet these gains do not necessarily reflect learners' ability to thereafter apply the knowledge and skills independently. We present AI Cosmos, an agentic infrastructure for situated learning that organizes learning around two complementary principles: scenario-based participation and cumulative assets of practice. AI Cosmos organizes learners and role-specialized agents within learning scenarios that integrate task-relevant knowledge and, when needed, executable workbenches. An asset-memory loop preserves the processes and outcomes of practice as reusable assets with explicit provenance and dependencies. We evaluate scenario-based interaction through two preregistered randomized controlled studies examining the acquisition of legal reasoning and programming competence, holding the same underlying LLM across conditions. AI Cosmos achieves greater learning gains than a conventional LLM in legal reasoning and higher mastery of unseen programming problems than an LLM-as-Teacher baseline.

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 29

  Cheap Retrieval and Observation Credit Assignment from One Quantity: The Value of Information

  Daniel Strauss, Nikolaos Sotirakis, Zhenshan Bing, Alois Knoll

  Memory in reinforcement learning raises two problems. Attention finds the relevant item by scoring the whole store, which is costly for robots under latency and energy limits. When a retrieved memory pays off, credit for acquiring it must cross the whole sequence. We argue that both are governed by one quantity, the value of information, and propose to estimate it from archived rollouts with a learned world model. We obtain that, when read at the observation, it yields a provable lower bound on the optimal value of the acquiring action, which floors its TD target and attributes this floor to the observation that earned it. Read at the decision, it defines the optimal retrieval set. A pilot retrieval system, to be trained and improved with this signal, solves a memory task with reduced context.

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• Gradient conflicts in multi-teacher distillation1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Conflicting teacher signals degrade joint optimization and cause capability loss when training a single student from multiple teachers.

  • Beyond Domain-Routed Supervision: Cross-Teacher Guarding for Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillationraises · addresses
• Unreliable supervision in cross-tokenizer distillation1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Vocabulary mismatch and alignment coverage issues make teacher feedback noisy or harmful for student training.

  • Rethinking Cross-Tokenizer On-Policy Distillation: From Alignment Coverage to Supervision Reliabilityraises · addresses
• Inconsistent policy shifts during teacher training1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Endpoint policy shifts may hide early and late preference changes that cancel out, leading to poor transfer.

  • Waypoint-OPD: Transferring RL-Induced Policy Shifts via Gated On-Policy Distillationraises · addresses
• Lack of decision-grounded trajectory supervision1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Successful trajectories often include actions unsupported by the agent's visible history, reducing learning effectiveness.

  • Trajectory2Gym: Decision-Grounded Compositional Interaction Synthesis for Tool-Use Agentsraises · addresses
• Credit assignment in long-horizon agent training1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Critic values vary across turns, making fine-grained credit allocation and policy updates difficult.

  • Multiscale Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon LLM Agentsraises · addresses

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.