Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CL
Are Diversity Metrics Measuring Diversity? A Capability-Controlled Audit of Majority-Vote Gain in LLM Ensembles
Donghwan Kim
Majority voting over LLMs is widely assumed to benefit from diversity, and diversity measures are used to choose which models to combine. We ask whether five such measures track diversity or mainly re-express capability,
auditing them as predictors of majority-vote gain over the best member across 31,900 subsets of 30 LLMs on MMLU-Pro (29 on TruthfulQA) under explicit capability controls. Three findings emerge. First, latent complementarity is ubiquitous: oracle gain is positive in 100% of subsets, yet simple voting beats the strongest member in only 9.98% of all canonical size-3 subsets (18.71% with held-out best selection); the pooled size-2-4 rate is 1.27%, partly reflecting deterministic even-size voting behavior. Second, a joint-correctness proxy (strict diversity) is nearly collinear with one minus mean accuracy (size-3 Spearman rho = +0.991 / +0.988); raw diversity-gain associations are strongly capability-entangled and, with one exception, unstable under control. Third, three linear contingency-table statistics are algebraically non-separable; after capability control, the empirically stable remainder is a modest residual pairwise co-failure association in which more shared error corresponds to lower gain. This direction is robust, but its magnitude is configuration-dependent. Joint rawspace linear regressions treating strict diversity, disagreement, and double-fault as independent predictors are rank-deficient by construction.
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Artificial Intelligence
ArbiGraph: Arbitrarily Scalable Verifiable Task Graphs for Evaluating Context Management
Pavel Golikov, Evgenii Opryshko, Gennady Pekhimenko et al. (+1 more)
We introduce ARBIGRAPH, a
benchmark generator for evaluating whether tool-assisted
language agents can retain, update, compose, and discard task-relevant context across extended
reasoning workflows. ARBIGRAPH represents each task as a natural-
language problem with an executable Python solver, and composes tasks through typed intermediate states, instantiated here as scalar and list values. This design enables controllable task graphs whose length, dependency structure, distractor count, and value type can be varied while preserving exact automatic verification. We instantiate ARBIGRAPH with math, GSM-style word-problems, and Python-tracing task categories, and evaluate a Qwen3.5-27B tool-assisted
agent across four
topologies. The results show high accuracy on isolated tasks but substantial degradation on more complex dependent tasks: accuracy drops by up to 33.3% on branching chains of dependent math tasks. This shows that ARBIGRAPH exposes failures that are not visible from single-task evaluation alone. Our code, generated
datasets, and evaluation results are available at https://github.com/pavelgolikov/ArbiGraph.git
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All authors Pavel Golikov, Evgenii Opryshko, Gennady Pekhimenko, Mark C. Jeffrey
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CR
IssueTrojanBench: Benchmarking AI Coding Agents Against Malicious Issue Requests
Ankur Singh, Jinqiu Yang and Tse-Hsun Chen
AI coding
agents powered by LLMs are increasingly integrated into real-world software development, where they generate, edit, and execute code with autonomous access to local files and tools. Coding
agents inherit security risks from both the LLM backbone, where
adversarial prompts, poisoned training data, and
backdoor triggers can cause models to emit insecure or attacker-chosen code, and their agentic architecture, where tool-using autonomy enables induced misuse of external APIs, data exfiltration, and persistent compromise of development environments. This paper presents a systematic evaluation of malicious issue requests against state-of-the-art coding
agents (Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex Desktop), powered by two major model families (OpenAI GPT-5.3 Codex/GPT-5.4 and Anthropic Sonnet 4.6). Our novel
benchmark IssueTrojanBench contains malicious issues that are constructed based on four novel attack categories (i.e., embedded as malicious instructions in issues), six delivery vectors (e.g., PDF, or issue comment), and further augmented by perturbations. Our results reveal critical vulnerabilities in the as-deployed modern coding
agents, i.e., 66.5% of the malicious issues from IssueTrojanBench penetrate all the guardrails (
agent- and LLM-level) of coding
agents. Our further analysis shows that rejection is almost entirely from LLMs rather than the
agent frameworks, with GPT models broadly vulnerable and Sonnet 4.6 exhibiting more selective, risk-aware blocking of high-impact actions. Our evaluation also highlights that the current
agent-level defense strategy offers limited additional protection for coding
agents. Our findings highlight the urgent need for stronger
agent- and model-level safety mechanisms to protect AI coding
agents.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.RO
Self-Supervised Bio-Inspired Robotic Trajectory Planning with Obstacle Avoidance
Miroslav Krupa, Miroslav Cibula and Kristína Malinovská
Trajectory planning is a fundamental problem in robotics, requiring the generation of collision-free and efficient trajectories in a potentially complex environment. While sampling-based planners remain the dominant approach, they are often computationally expensive, particularly in high-dimensional spaces and obstacle-rich environments. Methods based on model learning offer a promising alternative, enabling efficient planning through a bounded number of forward passes through a neural trajectory planner, but commonly suffer from low sample efficiency or limited generalisation due to their reliance on exploration or expert demonstrations. This follow-up work tests our neuro-inspired self-supervised learning framework for trajectory planning that leverages forward and inverse models as the internal supervisory mechanism in an environment that contains an obstacle. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the approach while revealing a tendency of our planner to exploit the learning signal provided by the forward and inverse models. To address this issue, additional training regimes and mitigation strategies are proposed and evaluated.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CR
GPE: Evaluating Robust Evidence Aggregation for Fact Verification under Controllable GEO-Style Poisoning
Zhaoqi Wang, Zijian Zhang, Xiaomei Yuan et al. (+4 more)
Large
language models increasingly use search tools to retrieve up-to-date information, introducing a new attack surface in which retrieved documents can be manipulated. This risk is amplified by the development of generative engine optimization, which can make selected content more likely to be retrieved, cited, and adopted by models. Existing fact-verification
benchmarks and evaluation frameworks do not provide the controlled evidence environments needed to assess robustness against GEO poisoning. We therefore propose GPE, which consists of a multi-domain fact-verification
benchmark and an evaluation framework for controlling evidence sources and poisoning ratios. Experiments across multiple verification methods and poisoning attacks demonstrate that GPE exposes robustness degradation and efficiency trade-offs that cannot be observed through clean evaluation alone, confirming the need to evaluate fact verification under
adversarial evidence environments.
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All authors Zhaoqi Wang, Zijian Zhang, Xiaomei Yuan, Pengtao Kou, Jiamou Liu, Zhen Li, Liehuang Zhu
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LO
Operational Identity: A Finite Audit of Declared and Implemented Rules of Sameness
Denise M. Case
A record system declares when two records refer to the same entity, occurrence, scope, or rule. Its disclosed implementation mechanisms induce a corresponding operational identity relation. The declared and implemented relations may diverge systematically without producing a provenance gap or detectable contradiction. A system can apply, consistently and with every record individually correct, a rule of sameness that no artifact declares. This paper formalizes that implemented relation. A declared identity regime partitions a finite record domain into co-reference classes; a disclosed mechanism, through its typed identity-relevant outcomes, induces an operational identity partition of the same domain. The audit compares these partitions in the refinement
lattice. A mechanism is faithful when the declared partition refines the operational partition, so no declared class is split. A divergence witness is a pair the declaration merges and the mechanism separates; such witnesses are decidable by pair enumeration. When an imported sibling basis also splits a declared class, local comparison with its partition yields sibling-aligned, sub-sibling, super-sibling, or sibling-incomparable divergence. This result reports only the relationship; it does not identify the basis carried by the mechanism. Global equality of the operational and sibling partitions is defined separately as regime substitution and does not follow from sibling
alignment. A version field incremented on every textual edit inhabits the sub-sibling case by splitting declared classes more finely than either imported basis. The audit is three-valued and relative to the disclosed artifacts, evaluated surfaces, and identified uses; each boundary has a finite refuting witness. A passing verdict is non-monotone because extending the transformation history can merge declared classes and create a witness among records already examined.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from q-bio.NC
Transition-Related Potentials as Markers of Narrative Comprehension in Continuous EEG
Bálint Csanády, Péter Vedres, Kristóf Zsolt Makó et al. (+6 more)
Harnessing the potential of electroencephalography (
EEG) for
brain research is fundamentally limited by intrinsic noise and the diffuse projection of
brain-generated activity over the scalp. The standard event-related potential (ERP) paradigm addresses this limitation by relying on repeated independent trials, albeit at the cost of moving away from naturalistic experimental conditions. As a more naturalistic alternative, we collected continuous
EEG while participants watched short films and extracted potentials aligned to sharp cinematic transitions (cuts). We demonstrate that such transition-related potentials (TRPs) exhibit canonical ERP-like temporal structure associated with significant information processing. By comparing coherent films with scene-scrambled versions containing matched post-cut sensory input, we find that these responses are systematically shaped by narrative context. We then show that the cut-related
EEG signature can be recovered directly from group-averaged continuous recordings with a compact deep neural network (DNN). The detector generalized across films and subject groups, and the resulting TRPs reproduced the main context-dependent effects observed for manually annotated cuts. These results indicate that narrative context leaves a measurable signature in
EEG responses, that this signature can be detected directly in continuous recordings, and that such detections provide a semi-automated framework for analyzing how viewers process and understand film narratives. We propose that the method outlined here can be adapted to parse
EEG responses to other forms of continuous stimulation, providing a general tool for probing experimental conditions that are closer to natural human experience.
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All authors Bálint Csanády, Péter Vedres, Kristóf Zsolt Makó, Orsolya Papp-Zipernovszky, Márta Volosin, Dávid Apagyi, András Lukács, András Bálint Kovács, Zoltan Nadasdy
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CR
Evaluating Large Language Models for Symbolic Security Protocol Analysis
Paolo Modesti, Syed Ahmed, Ioannis Sfyrakis et al. (+1 more)
Security protocols verification relies on formal tools such as ProVerif and OFMC. This study evaluates whether large
language models (LLMs) can perform comparable analysis. We test GPT and DeepSeek in chat and
reasoning modes over three runs on 130 obfuscated AnB/AnBx protocols covering 388 security goals, scored against ProVerif and OFMC. Each provider uses a single model in both modes, switching
reasoning on and off, so both contrasts isolate
reasoning itself. Chat models achieve 72.7% recall at 27.3% precision for GPT and 69.3% recall at 27.2% precision for DeepSeek.
Reasoning models reverse this trade-off, reaching 66.5% precision and 54.5% recall for GPT and 45.4% precision and 57.3% recall for DeepSeek. Enabling
reasoning lifts precision from 27.3% to 64.8% for GPT and from 27.2% to 44.4% for DeepSeek on the consolidated verdict. The goal set is imbalanced, with 89 vulnerable goals against 299 secure ones; a trivial always-secure predictor scores 77.1% accuracy, which only GPT
reasoning exceeds. All models perform worst on authentication goals:
reasoning models detect well under half of injective and non-injective agreement attacks, whereas chat models over-flag them at low precision. Confidentiality is the exception, with F1 up to 95.7% in
reasoning mode. Verdicts are unstable across runs: identical on 89.7% of goals for GPT
reasoning, 74.0% for DeepSeek
reasoning, 70.1% for GPT chat, and 61.6% for DeepSeek chat. Self-reported confidence is uniformly high yet shows no meaningful correlation with correctness. All results rest on a single zero-shot
prompt and two model providers, which limits generalisability. On this
benchmark, LLMs do not match formal verification, but may serve, at best, as pre-screening filters.
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All authors Paolo Modesti, Syed Ahmed, Ioannis Sfyrakis, Derek Enodolomwanyi
Artificial Intelligence
NVIDIA-labs OO Agents: Native Python Object-Oriented Agents
Paul Furgale, Severin Klingler, James Nolan et al. (+12 more)
Traditional
agent development is split across
prompt templates, tool schemas, callback code, and workflow graphs. We present NVIDIA Object-Oriented
Agents (NOOA), a model-agnostic Python framework for building reliable AI
agents. NOOA takes a simpler approach: an
agent is a Python object. Its methods are the actions the model can take, fields are its state, docstrings are its
prompts, and its type annotations are contracts. A method whose code body consists of "..." is completed at runtime by an LLM-driven
agent loop, while methods with normal bodies remain standard deterministic Python. This gives developers and
agents the same interface, so
agent behavior can be tested, traced, refactored, and improved just like other software. This paper makes three contributions. (1) We present the
agent-as-a-Python-object programming model and the design principles behind it. Where Python has existing abstractions, we adopt them directly.
Agent-specific capabilities–context, events, state rendering, long-term
memory, and validated LLM loops–are exposed through simple Pythonic APIs, so both developers and
agents share one familiar programming model. (2) We identify six model-facing ideas that NOOA is, to our knowledge, the first to combine on a single surface: typed input/output, pass-by-reference over live objects, code as action, programmable loop engineering, explicit object state, and model-callable harness APIs for context and events. We find the community already converging on several of these ideas–often as experimental or partial features–and present the comparison to encourage further adoption. (3) We demonstrate that current models use this interface effectively, both in targeted capability tests and on agentic and
reasoning benchmarks such as SWE-bench Verified and Terminal-Bench 2.0 and ARC-AGI-3.
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All authors Paul Furgale, Severin Klingler, James Nolan, Matt Staats, Gaia Di Lorenzo, Elisa Martinez Abad, Christian Schüller, Razvan Dinu, Alessio Devoto, Pascal Berard, Gal Kaplun, Elad Sarafian, Riccardo Roveri, Leon Derczynski, Ricardo Silveira Cabral
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV
U-CFR: Uncertainty-Guided Cascade Forward Refinement for Interactive Segmentation
Elijah Danquah Darko, Min Xian, Terence Soule et al. (+2 more)
Interactive image
segmentation is critical for efficient image annotation; however, existing methods often require many corrective clicks or rely on passive refinement schemes that converge slowly. We propose Uncertainty-Guided Cascade Forward Refinement (U-CFR), a novel inference-time framework that enables models to autonomously self-correct after each user interaction. U-CFR introduces a boundary-aware uncertainty score that fuses
segmentation uncertainty, contour gradients, and explicit edge predictions to guide the placement of internal pseudo-clicks. These self-generated clicks target the most ambiguous boundary regions, providing strong corrective signals without additional manual input. To support this process, we design a dual-head network with a shared encoder-decoder backbone: a
segmentation head ensures region consistency, while an edge head sharpens boundary
alignment. In inference, U-CFR launches a cascade of refinement steps, where each stage leverages the uncertainty-driven pseudo-clicks to refine the mask progressively. Experiments on standard
benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed U-CFR improves click efficiency, initial mask quality, and boundary accuracy. It reduces the required clicks by over 10% on challenging
datasets like Berkeley and offers a more intelligent and efficient interactive annotation.
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All authors Elijah Danquah Darko, Min Xian, Terence Soule, Tiankai Yao, Matthew William Anderson
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.DC
A Framework for Reputation Aware Uninorm-driven Consensus Algorithms for Blockchain Networks
Bruno Ramos-Cruz, Javier Andreu-Perez, David Richerby et al. (+1 more)
The operation of blockchain is governed by consensus
algorithms (CA). Several consensus mechanisms require significant computational power, while others necessitate high amounts of stakes to select the participant to validate and verify the transactions in the block, leading to centralisation of power and participant exclusion. This paper proposes a novel methodology to address these issues in reputation-based consensus
algorithms by studying the reputation behaviour of the validator using intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFSs) and uninorm aggregation operations (UAOs). Our approach uses IFSs to express the "reputation" because the reputation values in a consensus
algorithm eventually imply uncertainty, and IFSs facilitate the representation of a lack of precise knowledge about reputation. Moreover, this methodology utilises uninorm aggregation operations to monitor reputation over time and reinforces the importance of negative and positive reputation. Consequently, this solution allows validators to rectify past failures in subsequent verification processes and foster an equitable consensus
algorithm design. The proposed framework maintains linear computational complexity and does not introduce additional communication overhead beyond the underlying consensus protocol. Supported by experimental results, our methodology demonstrates improved performance and evaluation, promising advancements in blockchain network
fairness and inclusivity.
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All authors Bruno Ramos-Cruz, Javier Andreu-Perez, David Richerby, Luis Martínez
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV
DS@GT ARC at ImageCLEFmed GANs 2026: Geometric Filtering for Privacy-Preserving CT Slice Generation
Eric Regina, Richard Arnaud and Samir Hadi Cisneros
We present a
privacy-preserving framework for synthetic lung CT slice generation developed for the Image-CLEFmed GANs 2026 challenge. The approach combines Optimal Transport Conditional Flow Matching with
privacy-oriented training and a post-generation "Supervisor" pipeline that filters generated candidates in learned
geometric latent spaces using autoencoder
embeddings, Determinantal Point Processes, and Stein Kernel Thinning. Official results show a strong realism-
privacy trade-off, with the best-performing model achieving a
Privacy Preservation Score of 0.549 and competitive visual fidelity with an FID of 0.3290. While the proposed
geometric filtering substantially reduces nearest-neighbor memorization and membership-inference leakage, persistent patient re-identification scores indicate that preventing direct image copying is not sufficient to remove deeper patient-specific anatomical identity, highlighting an important frontier for future
privacy-preserving medical image generation.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV
Spatially Grounded Concept Bottleneck Models for Trustworthy Breast Ultrasound Diagnosis
Moshiur Rahman Tonmoy, Dunren Che, Haitham Y. Adarbah et al. (+1 more)
Concept Bottleneck Models provide interpretable-by-design predictions by mediating diagnosis through human-understandable concepts, but in medical imaging, their trustworthiness is often limited by the quality and granularity of available supervision. In particular, predicted concept activations can be driven by irrelevant regions, leading to spatially unfaithful explanations. We study a data-centric spatially grounded Concept Bottleneck Model (SG-CBM) that leverages coarse lesion delineations as weak supervision to encourage anatomically plausible concept evidence. For breast ultrasound, we derive two clinically motivated zones from each lesion mask: (i) an in-lesion region of interest for morphology-related concepts and (ii) a posterior acoustic band for posterior phenomena. We train concept maps using a grouped spatial grounding objective and preserve semantic faithfulness with a linear bottleneck classifier. Across five-fold stratified group cross-validation, the proposed SG-CBM improves diagnostic AUROC and concept macro-AUROC while markedly increasing spatial
alignment of concept evidence. We also perform a Train-corrupt/Test-clean annotation-quality stress test to quantify the impact of supervision quality on diagnosis and spatial faithfulness. Overall, the results underscore the need for data-quality-aware supervision design and systematic trustworthiness validation for deployable healthcare AI systems.
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All authors Moshiur Rahman Tonmoy, Dunren Che, Haitham Y. Adarbah, Afzel Noore
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CL
From Agent Failures to Text Policies: What Works and What Breaks
Jaideep Ray and Ankit Goyal
TextGrad improves
language-model systems by revising text from feedback. Its core thesis is that natural-
language feedback can act as a gradient for optimizing text components without changing model weights. Applying it to
agents is harder because feedback arrives only after a sequence of actions, making it difficult to identify which decision caused failure. We study this problem by separating the ability to follow a useful policy from the ability to learn that policy from experience. Our main finding is a clear gap between these two abilities. Human-written policies improve two frozen 7B
agents on TextWorldExpress by 5.0 success points, showing that useful policy text exists. However, policies generated from
agent trajectories do not reliably outperform fixed prompting, even with richer traces, counterfactual evidence, or iterative GEPA search. The main challenge for
agent-level TextGrad is therefore not executing textual policy updates, but reliably generating and selecting them from experience.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG
Adaptive Multi-Horizon Reinforcement Learning
Manoosh Samiei, Doina Precup and Paul Masset
Effective decision-making in complex and changing environments requires balancing short-term and long-term consequences. In reinforcement learning (RL), this trade-off is typically controlled through a fixed discount factor, which imposes a single exponentially discounted temporal horizon. However, biological
agents exhibit flexible and adaptive temporal discounting, suggesting that effective planning requires multiple timescales. Here, we propose a multi-horizon approach that adaptively selects and combines temporal horizons, enabling robust adaptation to changes in reward structure without manual discount-factor tuning. This flexibility makes the method particularly suitable for continual learning scenarios involving task switches and varying environmental configurations. Empirically, we demonstrate that our approach identifies effective discount factors across a range of MiniGrid environments, including continual settings composed of three sequentially changing tasks. These results suggest that adaptive temporal discounting can improve parameter efficiency and enhance adaptability in both artificial and biologically inspired learning systems.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG
SalesLoop: Reinforcement Learning from Performance Feedback for Sales Lead Ranking
Chenyu Zhang
Lead ranking in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems faces a persistent challenge: models achieving high offline accuracy often underperform in production. We identify three fundamental gaps responsible for this disconnect: offline-online metric mismatch, pointwise-listwise objective misalignment, and temporal distribution drift. To address these gaps, we propose SalesLoop, a reinforcement learning framework that establishes a closed feedback loop between model predictions and real-world business outcomes. Our approach introduces (1) a performance-aware reward that encodes conversion outcomes weighted by ranking position and conversion velocity, and (2) Discriminative GRPO, a listwise optimization objective that adapts Group Relative Policy Optimization to discriminative ranking models. SalesLoop improves NDCG@K by +7.9% and P@K by +15.8% over the strongest static baseline. A 160-day production A/B test at a New Energy Vehicle manufacturer, spanning 16.5M leads and 280 sales specialists across two provincial
markets, validates statistically significant cumulative lift of +4.7% ($p=0.047$) and +8.7% ($p=0.002$). In production, the ranking backbone achieves Top-10% recall of 44.1% and surfaces high-intent leads at $2.3\times$ the conversion rate of specialist baselines.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG
Scaling Interpretable Transformers with Parity Bottleneck Layers
Andrew Mack, Kraig Yuheng Tou, Mark Henry et al. (+2 more)
Language models are thought to exhibit the phenomenon of superposition, representing many more features than dimensions in their residual streams. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are designed to recover such features post-hoc, but training models that are interpretable by construction has remained impractical, as a per-layer over-complete bottleneck is prohibitively expensive in both
memory and compute. To overcome this issue, we introduce the ParityTransformer, a GPT-2-scale architecture whose intermediate representations are efficient and wide / sparse by design. At each layer, a Deep Parity Bottleneck (DPB) replaces a learned over-complete basis with a parameter-free algebraic dictionary, providing a deterministic incoherence guarantee and eliminating the
memory requirements that have prevented per-layer interpretable bottlenecks at scale. A DPB is a hierarchically structured sparse bottleneck which efficiently enforces sparsity using a multi-level mixture-of-experts approach: a hardware-aware implementation that closes the cost gap between activation sparse and dense training to a manageable interpretability tax. Empirically, ParityTransformers perform at least as well as post-hoc SAEs on sparse probing tasks, while out-performing on measures of feature absorption, steering effectiveness, and fine-grained causal interventions. Because subsequent computation acts only on features that survive the sparse bottleneck, the ParityTransformer's features are native to the model's forwards pass by construction, addressing the question of whether SAEs probe features the model actually uses during computation. We see this as a step toward training models whose internal representations are interpretable by design rather than recovered post hoc.
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All authors Andrew Mack, Kraig Yuheng Tou, Mark Henry, Zhengxun Wu, Lauren Greenspan
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CL
Frontier Financial Judgement: Can agents tell what might move a stock?
Joshua Harris
We introduce Frontier Financial Judgement, a challenging new
benchmark developed in collaboration with professional equity analysts to assess
agents' ability to replicate expert human judgements. Rapidly identifying new information, evaluating its implications and determining its valuation impact is one of the most time-consuming and challenging aspects of real-world equity coverage. This is becoming ever more difficult and important as AI rapidly increases the quantity of new information to process. The strongest
agent we evaluate on Frontier Financial Judgement matches all expert labels in only 52.4% of cases. We also find significant divergence in estimated false-positive rates among frontier
agents, ranging from ~1% for GPT-5.6 Sol to ~32% for Claude Sonnet 4.6. To construct the
benchmark and make it representative of real-world settings, we combine human-designed and labelled synthetic articles with live news articles and historical documents, creating 656 items for assessment. The resulting task requires
agents to distinguish genuinely new, valuation-relevant financial information from stale, immaterial or misleading news under realistic conditions. We find substantial trade-offs among
agent accuracy, cost, false positives and reliability that continue to hinder the reliable deployment of news-flow filtering in practice.
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Artificial Intelligence
WaveformQA: Benchmarking LLM Temporal Reasoning on Digital Waveforms
Yichuan Liu, Daniel Cummings and Nick Vadlamudi
Large
Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in code generation and
reasoning, yet their ability to perform temporal
reasoning over digital waveform data remains largely unexplored. Although
reasoning over digital waveforms is a critical bottleneck in design verification, existing
benchmarks primarily evaluate hardware description
language (HDL) code generation and use waveforms only as supplementary context. This paper presents WaveformQA, an open-source question-answering
benchmark for evaluating LLM temporal
reasoning over digital waveforms. The
benchmark comprises 360 questions with programmatically generated ground truths across eight categories of varying difficulty, including questions targeting multi-signal correlation and event ordering. Waveforms are generated from open-source design implementations, ensuring reproducibility and grounding the
benchmark in real hardware behavior. Evaluation of frontier LLMs reveals that while models achieve reasonable accuracy on simple queries, performance degrades due to context window limitations and
reasoning difficulties on complex temporal and multi-step questions. In addition, we show that an event-time JSON representation of waveforms improves LLM
reasoning accuracy versus the standardized value change dump (VCD) format. The open-source framework supports extending to new question categories and importing new waveform sources, enabling researchers to rapidly prototype temporal
reasoning experiments.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.DB
Demonstrating GenDB: Instance-Optimized and Customized Query Processing Code Generation via LLM Agents
Jiale Lao and Immanuel Trummer
Traditional query processing engines require continuous development and extensions to support new techniques and user requirements, and in some cases, entirely new systems must be built from scratch. However, these engines are difficult to extend due to their internal complexity, and building new systems demands significant engineering effort and cost. To address this, we demonstrate GenDB, a generative query engine that shifts query processing from manually engineered systems to query processing code generation driven by Large
Language Models (LLMs). An early prototype of GenDB uses LLM
agents to generate instance-optimized query execution code tailored to specific data, workloads, and hardware resources. This prototype suits offline code generation for repetitive, templated queries, since the upfront generation cost amortizes over many executions and correctness can be ensured through extensive fuzz testing and manual inspection. For ad-hoc queries, GenDB can work with a traditional DBMS in a hybrid architecture: the DBMS handles one-off queries, while GenDB speeds up frequent SQL templates. Our demonstration allows users to (1) visually and interactively explore how GenDB analyzes workloads, profiles hardware resources and underlying data, produces query plans, generates code based on them, and finally uses an optimizer to iteratively achieve a correct and efficient implementation; (2) use visual inspection and analysis to gain qualitative insights into why GenDB produces code that achieves significantly better performance than state-of-the-art query engines on two
benchmarks: TPC-H and a newly constructed
benchmark designed to reduce potential data leakage from LLM training data; and (3) upload their own data and queries to explore GenDB with different LLMs and query patterns.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV
RealVDeblur: One-Step Diffusion for Generalizable Real-World Video Deblurring
Renbiao Jin, Mingxin Yang, Yutian Chen et al. (+8 more)
Real-world
video deblurring remains challenging due to diverse motion patterns, complex degradations, and the scarcity of realistic training data, yet robust restoration is critical for downstream pipelines such as mobile imaging and 3D reconstruction. This work presents RealVDeblur, an efficient generative framework designed to improve in-the-wild robustness under diverse real capture conditions. First, a large-scale, physically grounded blur synthesis pipeline is constructed from scene-level 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) assets and high-frame-rate
videos, providing realistic training data covering both camera-induced and object-motion blur. Second, a
video diffusion prior is leveraged for restoration; to better accommodate frame-dependent blur variations, temporal compression in the VAE is disabled and a frame-wise encoding scheme is adopted. For practical deployment on long
videos, multi-step
diffusion sampling is distilled into an efficient one-step generator, and a training-free Temporal Window Mask stabilizes inference beyond the training horizon with constant
memory usage. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world
benchmarks demonstrate strong perceptual quality, semantic fidelity, and temporal consistency on unseen
videos, as well as improved robustness in downstream 3D reconstruction under severe motion blur. Project page: https://rbjin.github.io/RealVDeblur
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All authors Renbiao Jin, Mingxin Yang, Yutian Chen, Junhao Zhuang, Xin Cai, Mulin Yu, Linning Xu, Wenxian Yu, Danping Zou, Shi Guo, Tianfan Xue
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG
When Does Recurrence Become an Algorithm? Convergence Selection in Weight-Tied Looped Transformers
Tong Zhang, Junhao Hu, Yun Peng et al. (+1 more)
When does a weight-tied looped
transformer – one block applied T times – implement an actual
algorithm? We answer with four findings from controlled populations on group word problems. (1) The budget law: free training installs a linear computation frontier, a mechanism that solves v positions per loop, whose speed is priced by the training contract: v ~ n_train/T_train (exponent 0.98 +/- 0.04, R^2=0.99), exactly unity under T=n training. SGD selects a frontier matching the minimum the contract demands; granting more test-time loops than ever trained rescues late positions at fixed input length, yielding a principled halting rule T* = ceil(n / v-hat). (2) Architecture prior, not expressivity, picks the
algorithm: standard-depth
transformers learn parallel scans on this family; weight tying flips the selection to the serial frontier, even when positional addressing for a log-depth scan is supplied. At matched depth and parameters, untied models extrapolate worst and fail to learn A5 at all. (3) The walls are not where
circuit complexity says: NC1-completeness costs nothing (A5 generalizes fully), while group order does (S5's 120x120 operator deadlocks joint learning) – and an operator-first curriculum dissolves the wall in every seed. (4) Mechanisms are portable, not mandatable: warm-starting across budget contracts transfers the
algorithm in every seed, re-pricing its speed, while imposing seriality through the input schedule fails where free training succeeds. These results are invisible to standard instruments, which provably saturate at the fixed points trained loops converge to. We introduce a head instrument, the convergence-time scaling tau(n,i), validate it causally via damage cones whose slope reproduces v, and show in-distribution head measurements predict out-of-distribution fate where tail metrics do not. Results replicate on the public easy-to-hard
benchmark.
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All authors Tong Zhang, Junhao Hu, Yun Peng, Tao Xie
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from q-bio.GN
Foundation-model-guided radiogenomic discovery linking cancer genomes to cancer scans
Frederik Hauke, Jeremias Krause, Patrick Wienholt et al. (+6 more)
The function of many genes is still unknown, and conventional driver-discovery methods, which rely on how frequently a gene is mutated, cannot assess genes that are only rarely affected. Here we pair Evo~2-based genome analysis with routine clinical imaging to identify gene–phenotype associations at genome-wide scale. For every somatic mutation across three TCGA cohorts (cRCC=clear
cell renal
cell carcinoma, HCC=hepatocellular carcinoma, and BC=breast cancer; $n = 340$ total), Evo~2 predicts a severity score, with no task-specific training. Per-gene severity summaries are then correlated with radiomic features extracted from paired tumor
segmentations, controlling for total mutation burden. In TCGA-cRCC ($n = 162$), this sweep recovers established renal-cancer drivers and identifies 46 additional genes reaching false discovery rate (FDR) significance absent from curated cancer-gene panels, several of which are Mendelian ciliopathy and cytoskeletal-disease genes. These results demonstrate that pairing a genomic
language model with widely available clinical imaging can serve as a hypothesis-free discovery tool for gene–imaging associations invisible to conventional approaches.
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All authors Frederik Hauke, Jeremias Krause, Patrick Wienholt, Christiane Kuhl, Ingo Kurth, Sikander Hayat, Jakob Nikolas Kather, Sven Nebelung, Daniel Truhn
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG
Bayesian uncertainty estimation improves clinical decision making in medical AI agents
Frederik Hauke, Patrick Wienholt, Christiane Kuhl et al. (+4 more)
Machine learning models for medical image analysis typically lack a reliable measure of confidence, limiting their use in ambiguous or atypical cases. Here we show that Monte Carlo dropout, applied to a multi-task chest-radiograph classifier (eight thoracic findings, 137,593 training images), provides an epistemic uncertainty signal that tracks generalisation across training-set scales and flags confident yet error-prone predictions. Adding this signal to the point prediction raised error-detection AUROC from 0.74 to 0.77 ($\Delta$AUROC +0.023, 95% CI [+0.014, +0.033]). In a controlled 2x2 factorial experiment, a clinical-decision-support
agent exploited this uncertainty only when it was delivered as a binary error-risk flag rather than as raw scores, cutting confident misdiagnoses on unreliable findings from 8.5% to 2.7%. Epistemic uncertainty estimation thus carries decision-relevant information beyond point predictions, but its value for downstream
agents depends on how it is communicated.
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All authors Frederik Hauke, Patrick Wienholt, Christiane Kuhl, Dyke Ferber, Jakob Nikolas Kather, Sven Nebelung, Daniel Truhn
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CR
Geometric Configurations of Perturbed Jailbreak Prompts
Lynn Delcon, Andres Algaba and Vincent Ginis
Perturbation techniques that turn unsuccessful jailbreak
prompts into successful ones are continuously evolving, constituting a major security threat to LLM safety. In this paper, we investigate the internal representations of such string-level perturbed jailbreak inputs in the small weight models of the Qwen-2.5-1.5B/-3B/-7B-Instruct and Llama-3.2-1B/-3B/-3.1-8B-Instruct families. We select two representation spaces: the last-layer-last-
token embedding space and the top-50 next-
token probability space. The former space separates
prompts based on their spelling and format, while the latter space is effectively one-dimensional but appears more complex to cluster. Within our refusal-dominated answer set we find no behavioral hyperplane in either space. Only the next
token "Sure" in the 1.5B Qwen model, and both
tokens "," and "ĊĊ" in the 1$ Llama model, display a significant association with a compliant-labeled answer.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG
AI-Driven Surrogate Models for Predicting Electrode-Scale Discharge Behavior in Lithium-Ion Batteries
Mengda Xing, Jean-Marie Lagniez and Alejandro Franco
Physics-based simulations are essential for understanding the electrode-scale discharge behavior of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) but suffer from prohibitive computational costs. To address this, we introduce a novel deep learning surrogate pipeline based on the Swin3D
Transformer to predict spatiotemporal discharge dynamics directly from volumetric data. Our approach integrates two key innovations: Gaussian Positional Encoding (GPE), which enhances spatial feature representation by adapting to the complex geometry of electrode microstructures, and a specialized Temporal Encoding module to capture non-linear timeseries
evolution. Experimental validation on an Electrochemical Simulation (ES)
dataset demonstrates that our pipeline significantly outperforms state-of-the-art point cloud baselines in prediction accuracy. Furthermore, the proposed method reduces the computational overhead by orders of magnitude, providing a scalable and efficient framework for high-throughput battery design and optimization.
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Artificial Intelligence
SoftReason: A Fully Differentiable Neuro-Soft-Symbolic Deductive Reasoning Architecture over High-Dimensional Perceptual Data
Wael AbdAlmageed
In many
reasoning problems, the premises are not observed as discrete symbols, but must be inferred from high-dimensional inputs. Further, the predicate vocabulary, argument structure, and trusted evidence are supplied by a Knowledge Graph (KG), or rule definitions. Classical neuro-symbolic pipelines have a discrete interface between perception and deduction. We present a neuro-soft-symbolic architecture for differentiable deductive
reasoning over latent perceptual facts and knowledge-provided predicates. SoftReason removes the gradient gap by representing the deductive state as a local soft interpretation tensor over candidate constants and predicates. Perception proposes probabilistic base facts, KG triples enter as high-confidence soft evidence, and every query anchor, predicate choice, and closure update remains differentiable. Our core innovation is a learned differentiable lift of the immediate-consequence operator. It uses predicate-definition
embeddings and latent composition channels to form soft body-predicate mixtures, aggregate over all possible witnesses, propose query-conditioned head facts, and update the interpretation through a monotone probabilistic OR. We instantiate the framework on Knowledge-aware Visual Question Answering (KVQA), and demonstrates how SoftReason supports end-to-end perceptual grounding, KG evidence injection, and differentiable deductive closure in one trainable architecture.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV
Persian Pixel: A large-scale synthetic OCR dataset for Persian language
Pouria Mahdi and Haq Nawaz Malik
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for Persian remains substantially less mature than for Latin-script
languages despite Persian being spoken by more than 110 million people across multiple countries. This gap arises from two fundamental challenges: the intrinsic complexity of the Perso-Arabic writing system and the limited availability of large-scale, high-quality annotated
datasets. Persian script exhibits obligatory cursive connectivity, context-dependent glyph shaping, extensive ligatures, diacritic placement, and stylistic variation across writing forms such as Naskh and Nastaliq, all of which significantly complicate text recognition. At the same time, the high cost and labor-intensive nature of manual annotation have created a persistent data bottleneck, limiting the development of robust OCR systems and slowing progress in Persian document digitization.In this paper, we introduce Persian Pixel, a comprehensive synthetic OCR
dataset specifically designed to address these challenges. Comprising over 343,000 high-fidelity image text pairs, the
dataset spans sentence, paragraph, and full-page document layouts generated from a carefully curated seven-million-word Persian corpus using the SynthOCR-Gen rendering framework. The generation pipeline faithfully models the typographic characteristics of Persian script, including contextual character joining, positional glyph variants, diacritic placement, and multiple representative Persian typefaces. To bridge the synthetic-to-real domain gap, the rendered images are further enriched with more than twenty-five
stochastic degradation models that emulate realistic document acquisition artifacts, including ink bleed, paper aging, blur, illumination variation, scanner imperfections, compression artifacts, and multiple noise processes.By overcoming the long-standing scarcity of annotated Persian OCR data, Persian Pixel provides a scalable and openly available resource for training and fine-tuning modern OCR architectures, including
transformer-based models such as TrOCR and Donut. The
dataset establishes a strong foundation for research in Persian document analysis, historical manuscript digitization, and end-to-end document understanding, while demonstrating that programmatic synthetic data generation offers a practical, cost-effective, and scalable alternative to manual annotation for advancing OCR in low-resource and typographically complex scripts.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.HC
FMRP-LEAN: A HIPAA-Compliant AI-Augmented LIMS Architecture for End-to-End Clinical Assay Workflow Optimization
Eva McCord, Ernest Pedapati and Zag ElSayed
Clinical biomarker workflows in translational research settings often rely on spreadsheet-driven tracking, manual quality control (QC) reconciliation, and loosely integrated systems, resulting in limited state visibility, delayed reporting, and increased operational risk. These challenges are particularly pronounced in multi-day assays such as Luminex-based quantification of Fragile X Messenger Ribonucleoprotein (FMRP), where HIPAA-compliant data governance, deterministic workflow progression, and coordinated communication across laboratory and clinical teams are required. This paper presents FMRP-LEAN, a HIPAA-compliant, AI-augmented Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) architecture that formalizes biospecimen lifecycle management through a finite-state workflow model with explicit transition guards and dwell-time observability. The system integrates a self-hosted Supabase/PostgreSQL stack deployed within hospital-controlled infrastructure, hybrid edge-internal isolation with encrypted tunneling and loopback-only services, and bi-directional REDCap synchronization. A unified MRN-UUIDv7 identifier framework with QR-based tracking ensures traceable clinical-research linkage under PHI residency constraints. FMRP-LEAN incorporates automated statistical QC pre-screening and a governance-constrained AI operations module that operates exclusively on aggregate projections, with deterministic fallback guarantees. Deployment demonstrates improved workflow observability, reduced QC latency, and enhanced cross-role transparency between laboratory technicians, research coordinators, and patient-facing teams. The architecture provides a reproducible model for secure, state-explicit, and AI-augmented clinical research workflows in regulated healthcare environments.
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Artificial Intelligence
Train the Model, Not the Reader: Decodability Supervision for Verifiable Activation Explanations
Hiskias Dingeto
Natural-
language autoencoders score explanations of hidden activations by reconstruction. An explanation is deemed faithful if the activation can be regenerated from it. The test is structurally insensitive to individual false claims. If flipping a claim does not change the reconstruction, the claim is never penalized. We show the test is passed in two ways, neither faithful. On a released Qwen-2.5-7B verbalizer, explanations reconstruct well above chance while ~2% of specific claims are ones the reconstruction depends on, so the score tracks gist, not specific facts. Under exact synthetic ground truth, standard training consistently develops co-adapted private codes (false wording the reconstruction depends on), and fixes that leave the target model unchanged do not help. We contribute two audit protocols, the comparison of grounding and truth and the swap to an independent evaluator, and RECAP (Readable Encodings via Co-trained Auxiliary Predictors), linear heads trained alongside the target model to keep designated content decodable. On RECAP-trained sandbox models, fresh verbalizers state the designated content truly and the codes vanish, at a +0.001-nat cost. This replicates on a pretrained Pythia-160M. The content becomes reliably decodable by a probe, though a fresh verbalizer conveys it only in part (truth 0.44-0.46 vs a near-zero control). For interpretability, high reconstruction does not certify individual claims. For AI safety, RECAP makes designated content checkable against a probe rather than asserted by prose a model can game. An independent probe ranks the verbalizer's true claims above its false ones (AUC 0.96 vs 0.82 without RECAP). Against an adversary that edits an explanation to maximize the score while lying (suppressing ~87% of its lie penalty), the RECAP probe still flags the lies (AUC 0.95) while the control probe collapses to chance (0.51).
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