Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.SE
CodeGrep: An RL-Trained Retrieval Agent for LLM Coding Agents
Wuya Chen, Yihao yang, Yang Cao et al. (+1 more)
Modern LLM coding
agents such as Claude Code and OpenHands share a common inefficiency: they spend much of their
token budget finding the file to patch, rather than patching it. On SWE-Bench Verified, a 30B OpenHands
agent averages 23 rounds and 631K
tokens per resolved issue, with many calls spent on grep, glob, and view_file during repository exploration. We introduce CodeGrep, a 14B
retrieval agent trained end-to-end with GRPO to issue multi-turn parallel grep, glob, and read tool calls and return candidate files to a frozen downstream coding
agent. On all 500 SWE-Bench Verified instances, CodeGrep preserves resolve rate while substantially improving efficiency: 27.0% versus 25.8% for the no-
retrieval baseline, with 15% fewer rounds and 19% fewer
tokens on resolved instances. Across retrievers, downstream utility follows a precision threshold: BM25 with precision 0.375 degrades the
agent, Jina with precision 0.445 is neutral, and CodeGrep with precision 0.677 crosses the threshold at which
retrieval begins to reduce rollout cost. To enable this study, we mine supervision from 67K open-source
agent trajectories using CATM and build a Git-worktree environment for multi-turn
agent RL. In our setting, applying the efficiency signal at the advantage layer rather than the reward layer reduces KL drift and translates cleanly into downstream efficiency. We will release the model, training pipeline, RL environment, and evaluation harnesses.
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All authors Wuya Chen, Yihao yang, Yang Cao, Yue Lin
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG
Beyond Feature Importance: A Comparative Analysis of Pattern Detection Methods in Cluster Interpretation
Benjamin Connor, Anna Jurek-Loughrey, Lu Bai et al. (+1 more)
Interpreting clustering outcomes remains a fundamental challenge in data analysis, particularly in domains such as healthcare where meaningful patterns must be extracted from high-dimensional data. While numerous explainability techniques exist, they are primarily designed to assess feature importance or provide local instance-level explanations rather than to identify structured patterns present within clusters. This work presents a comparative evaluation of commonly used post-hoc analysis methods for pattern detection in clustering results. To enable controlled evaluation, we introduce a suite of synthetic
datasets in which predefined patterns are systematically injected. Three widely used techniques are evaluated: a Random Forest surrogate model with permutation feature importance, LIME (Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations), and principal component analysis. Results demonstrate that although each method can successfully recover relevant features, none consistently detects all injected pattern types. These findings high- light a critical gap between existing explainability tools and the requirements of pattern-level cluster interpretation, motivating the development of dedicated pattern detection methodologies.
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All authors Benjamin Connor, Anna Jurek-Loughrey, Lu Bai, Muhammad Fahim
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV
D-CLOT: Double Closed Loop Optimal Transport for Unsupervised Action Segmentation
Elena Bueno-Benito and Mariella Dimiccoli
Optimal transport (OT) has emerged as an effective framework for unsupervised action
segmentation. Yet, in existing OT-based methods, the latent action prototypes that define the OT costs are not re-estimated from the refined frame geometry. Instead, they evolve solely through gradients from the pseudo-label loss. We identify this representation–prototype inconsistency as a central bottleneck, particularly around ambiguous transitions and for short or infrequent actions. To address this issue, we build on the recently introduced CLOT, which refines frame
embeddings based on estimated segment
embeddings, and further re-estimates the action prototypes from the refined frame
embeddings. Specifically, we introduce a graph-constrained module that regularizes the OT-refined frame and segment representations by preserving the local neighborhood geometry of the encoder output. An action-
embedding refinement step then periodically re-anchors the prototypes to this stabilized representation geometry. We study two instantiations that share the same backbone, graph module, and objective: D-CLOT updates the prototypes using $k$-means, whereas D-CLOT$_{B}$ updates them as OT barycenters weighted by the refined transport plan, yielding an assignment-aware prototype update consistent with the current transport geometry. Across five established
benchmarks, both variants improve segment-level quality over CLOT, with per-
video gains of up to $+12.7$ F1 and $+10.2$ mIoU (YTI) and activity-level gains of up to $+8.9$ F1 (FS-Eval). We further establish the first unsupervised action-
segmentation baseline on Assembly101, a procedural and substantially more fine-grained
benchmark than those commonly used in prior work. Extensive ablations and sensitivity analyses demonstrate that the two refinement mechanisms are complementary and robust.
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Artificial Intelligence
Personalized Deep Research Query Refinement with Graph-Scaffolded Evidence Grounding
Soojin Yoon and Dongha Lee
User requests serve as research specifications for deep research
agents, shaping what evidence to seek and how to synthesize it. In personalized deep research, these specifications must additionally reflect user goals, constraints, preferences, and evaluation criteria. User context can be incorporated either within the deep research pipeline or into the research specification provided as its input. We focus on the latter, refining the user request into a personalized research specification before passing it to an unchanged deep research
agent. This requires resolving three coupled decisions: which framing factors are relevant, whether the available user context sufficiently supports them, and whether to retrieve user
memory, ask the user, or stop and refine the query. For training, G-STEER organizes framing factors as elicitation targets in an Intent Elicitation Graph that captures their dependencies. It learns a clarification policy from graph-scaffolded trajectories spanning diverse factor dependencies and evidence conditions. The policy produces a refined query while balancing target coverage against the costs of evidence acquisition. Experiments show that G-STEER achieves the strongest overall weighted target coverage and the highest downstream report personalization across both evaluated DRAs, while asking roughly one third as many user questions as a strong clarification baseline.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CL
MACRO: Markov Chain Routing of Transformer Layers
Paweł Batorski, Abtin Pourhadi, Akylgali Aitaza et al. (+2 more)
Standard Large
Language Models (LLMs) execute layers sequentially. Dynamic layer routing, i.e. search for a different execution path through layers involving layer repetitions, skips and other moves, can improve performance. Existing routing approaches often require updating model weights, running expensive search loops per test instance, or demand ground-truth labels during inference. In this work, we propose Markov Chain Routing of
Transformer Layers (MACRO), a framework that learns task-specific routes over LLM architectures without modifying underlying parameters. MACRO models layer routing as a context-dependent Markov policy conditioned on layer indices, computation budget phases, directional displacements, and operator context, supporting skip, repeat, and residual hidden-state addition operations. The Markov route distribution is updated via feedback on training data and decoded using a top-k Viterbi
algorithm to isolate high-probability candidate programs. We evaluate MACRO across diverse
reasoning and knowledge
benchmarks on multiple open-weight LLMs. MACRO achieves a +5.0% average accuracy improvement over the unrouted baselines, with largest gains on small models. We outperform the best dynamic routing approach Dr. LLM by +7.2%, while reducing route-search time 9.4x (from 14.8 to 1.6 hours). Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Batorskq/MACRO.
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All authors Paweł Batorski, Abtin Pourhadi, Akylgali Aitaza, Przemysław Spurek, Paul Swoboda
Artificial Intelligence
Improving Interoperability among Defence and National Security Ontologies: Analysis and Evaluation Tasks
Jonathon Dilworth, Pedro Giesteira Cotovio, David Herron et al. (+4 more)
The use of ontologies and knowledge graphs is becoming increasingly widespread in the defence and national security domain. Numerous ontologies have been developed through initiatives led by academia, industry, and government. Achieving interoperability across diverse defence and national security ontologies remains a major challenge due to the domain's breadth and specialisation. In this work, we analyse and document over 60 publicly available ontologies and introduce a new track for the Ontology
Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI). This track comprises eight matching tasks, consensus
alignments and manually-curated (silver-standard) mappings. The consensus
alignments are derived by aggregating the outputs of several state-of-the-art ontology
alignment systems. The silver-standard is obtained from the manual validation of the consensus
alignment together with a subset of the unique mappings (i.e., mappings suggested by only one system).
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All authors Jonathon Dilworth, Pedro Giesteira Cotovio, David Herron, Paul Cripps, Nigel Dewdney, Catia Pesquita, Ernesto Jiménez-Ruiz
Artificial Intelligence
Seeing Is Not Deciding: Can Multimodal LLMs Act as Effective CEOs?
Yuyang Dai, Xueqing Peng, Yuxia Wang et al. (+2 more)
Large
language models are increasingly applied as autonomous decision-making
agents. However, in executive business decisions, existing
benchmarks are limited to textonly settings. This makes it unclear whether models can perceive visual business evidence and effectively integrate it to improve decision quality. We introduce C-SUITEBENCH, a controlled
multimodal benchmark that includes five decision tasks under paired text-only and
multimodal conditions across 50 scenarios. We place nine frontier models in the role of a chief executive officer and evaluate their decision-making ability.
Multimodal inputs consistently improve evidence-centric
reasoning, with the largest and most reliable gains appearing in risk
forecasting and board-facing justification. However, we uncover a
multimodal integration paradox: adding visual business information degrades constrained resource allocation for all nine models, even as visual grounding itself improves. Ablation experiments reveal that this failure emerges from signal crowding, although each visual channel helps individually, their combination disrupts constraint satisfaction during decoding. These findings demonstrate that visual perception and constrained action are separable bottlenecks in
multimodal agents, and that indiscriminate visual augmentation can harm high-stakes decision making, motivating selective grounding strategies for future executive AI systems.
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All authors Yuyang Dai, Xueqing Peng, Yuxia Wang, Preslav Nakov, Zhuohan Xie
Artificial Intelligence
Runtime Observability for Heterogeneous Attention Memory
Fanzhe Wei, Li Liu, Ziyang Wang et al. (+1 more)
Modern models no longer keep a plain KV cache: latent caches, learned sparse selectors and recurrent states each carry the model's
memory in a different form, and each fails differently under compression. We give a runtime observability contract that covers all four
memory classes with three operators, instantiate it on six model configurations across five architecture families, and compose the per-stage bounds into an executable request-level risk ledger. Contracts carry their error metric as a type – composition is only defined when metrics match, and this check rejected our own first composed chain; the repaired chain crosses metrics through two proved bridges, and whatever no formal system can certify is measured instead, dropping the composed tier to empirical automatically: every claim is certified, partially certified, or empirical, composition inherits the weakest tier, and the tier is decided by the machine. Replayed over $12.4$M entry reads and run under eight-way concurrency with per-request budgets and fail-closed identity attribution, the ledger quantifies the honest trade-off on today's witness and holds its risk budget with zero violations. A fused always-on probe observes a declared one-layer subset under CUDA graphs inside the serving noise floor. Applied to a served DeepSeek-V4 stack with a packed compressed-KV prototype, the same machinery localizes a silent corruption to a precise structural boundary – exact in the eviction-free, identity-isolated regime, with every observed failure in an eviction or slot-reuse regime – through a machine-adjudicated discrimination campaign whose calculus rejected two of our own confounded inferences along the way. All artifacts, guards, and the Lean development are released at https://github.com/metask-ai/witprobe-
attention-
memory; every number in this paper regenerates from the shipped artifacts by one command.
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All authors Fanzhe Wei, Li Liu, Ziyang Wang, Chenyu Wang
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG
Evidential Rule Learning for Interpretable Classification with Abstention
Javier Fumanal-Idocin and Javier Andreu-Perez
Interpretable classification often requires more than accurate predictions for real-life deployment: models should be transparent about the evidence behind their decisions and abstain when they cannot decide reliably. We introduce Fast Evidential Rule Learning (FERL), a method that learns interpretable, accurate fuzzy rule models whose outputs are evidential. Unlike post-hoc calibration, FERL's belief, plausibility, and abstention capabilities arise directly from the fuzzy memberships in a single deterministic pass, with no auxiliary head, held-out set, or repeated inference. Our theoretical analysis further shows that FERL is Lipschitz stable, which means that its evidential outputs vary smoothly with the input. Against state-of-the-art rule learners, FERL is statistically significantly more accurate across a 30 tabular-
dataset benchmark ($+2.6\%$ average accuracy over the second best). Its native set predictions attain the best utility-discounted accuracy among credal classifiers ($u_{65}/u_{80}=0.80/0.83$ vs.\ $0.79/0.80$ for the naive credal classifier), at higher set coverage ($0.92$ vs.\ $\le0.82$). FERL also matches dedicated out-of-distribution detectors on tabular near-OOD detection ($77.7$ vs.\ $77.4$ AUROC for the strongest baseline). Under detector-class-disjoint concept-bottleneck evaluation, its it is within $2.3$ AUROC points of the strongest dedicated detector on both CUB and AwA2, while attaining the best AwA2 AUPR-Out ($68.3$) and novel-class rejection ($57.2$), while being able to name which attributes are anomalous.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CL
MameLoshnLM: Yiddish Language Model and Evaluation Benchmark
Uri Katz, Omer Goldman, Tomasz Limisiewicz et al. (+2 more)
We present MameLoshnLM, the first open-source 8B-parameter
language model built specifically for Yiddish. Despite Yiddish's rich textual tradition, its limited digital presence and the scarcity of reliable evaluation resources have constrained progress in Yiddish
language modeling. Existing
multilingual corpora and
benchmarks are often poor proxies for the
language, containing substantial amounts of noisy, machine-translated, and misclassified text. We address these gaps by introducing Oytser, a high-quality Yiddish pretraining corpus that combines contemporary web-native sources with literary materials, and Kashes, a multi-task
benchmark spanning translation, linguistic analysis, information extraction, and
language understanding. Using these resources, we continue pretraining Llama 3.1 8B to obtain MameLoshnLM. Across the tasks in the
benchmark, MameLoshnLM outperforms open baselines of similar scale. Our analyses show that these gains are not only quantitative: relative to general-purpose
multilingual models, MameLoshnLM better captures
language-defining lexical and morphological patterns, pointing to a broader failure mode of noisy web-scale
multilingual data for low-resource
languages. Our results provide both a foundation for Yiddish NLP and a practical template for
language model development in historically rich but digitally underrepresented
languages.
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All authors Uri Katz, Omer Goldman, Tomasz Limisiewicz, Reut Tsarfaty, Noah A. Smith
Artificial Intelligence
ViSR-KGC: Visual Subgraph Reasoning with Vision-Language Models for Multimodal Knowledge Graph Completion
Jiafan Li, Mengxue Yang, Jiaqi Zhu et al. (+3 more)
Knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to infer missing entities or relations from incomplete graph structures, and has evolved into
multimodal knowledge graph completion (MMKGC), where entities are associated with multiple modalities such as text and images. Traditional representation learning approaches follow the
embedding-based paradigm and may struggle when relation-specific evidence is limited. Meanwhile, LLM-based
reasoning methods typically linearize graph structures into textual
prompts, which obscures structural
topology and neglects vital visual information. While
vision-
language models (VLMs) excel at
multimodal reasoning, they cannot natively interpret structured graph
topology, particularly when it comes to knowledge graphs where nodes and edges carry complex semantics. To bridge this gap, we propose ViSR-KGC, a visual subgraph
reasoning approach for KGC. It integrates three complementary capabilities to capture semantic correlations: identifying global
topology dependencies via representation learning, analyzing local
multimodal evidence using VLMs, and providing necessary commonsense knowledge inherent in pre-trained models. Based on learned
multimodal embeddings, our framework first extracts a compact and query-aware subgraph from the MMKG. Then, this subgraph is transformed into a visually interpretable image using a layout strategy selected through empirical comparison. Finally, the visualized subgraph, entity images, textual descriptions, and candidate answers are combined into a unified
prompt, enabling the VLM to infer the missing entity.
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All authors Jiafan Li, Mengxue Yang, Jiaqi Zhu, Liang Chang, Ying Li, Hongan Wang
Artificial Intelligence
Cautious Context Steering for Language Model Personalization
Gihoon Kim, Jeyoung Lee, Suhan Woo et al. (+4 more)
Personalizing
language models (LMs) to individual user preferences is essential for aligning responses with diverse goals and backgrounds. Existing methods typically train a separate adapter for each user or learn a reward model whose scores depend on the user. Despite explicitly optimizing for each user, these methods must learn from limited observations and therefore suffer from data sparsity and poor generalization to unseen users and domains. In-context learning (ICL) and Context Steering (CoS) can instead provide more effective personalization by conditioning the base LM directly on user context and leveraging its pretrained capabilities without per-user training. Yet neither adapts the influence of that context across decoding steps: ICL leaves it uncontrolled, whereas CoS applies a fixed steering coefficient and requires two LM forward passes per step. We propose Cautious Context Steering (CCS), which adds a lightweight adapter to a frozen backbone LM to decide at each
token whether and how strongly user context should affect generation. The adapter learns this behavior from an oracle context-conditioned LM and preserves the base LM when the context is not helpful. A single CCS adapter trained on only one
dataset improves generation quality both in-domain and across four out-of-distribution personalization
benchmarks, demonstrating robust generalization to new users and domains. CCS also avoids per-user fine-tuning and the additional context-conditioned forward pass required by CoS, substantially reducing inference cost.
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All authors Gihoon Kim, Jeyoung Lee, Suhan Woo, Sekwon Oh, Minsu Jeon, Hyounsoo Han, Euntai Kim
Artificial Intelligence
When Self-Evolution Backfires: Pre-Commit Gating against Skill Contamination in LLM Agents
Linfang Shang, Ming Xu, Yiding Sun et al. (+4 more)
Self-evolving
agents accumulate capability by distilling reusable skills from their execution trajectories, but we find this process is not monotonic: past a critical pool size, newly added skills degrade performance instead of improving it. We formalize this capability-contamination phase transition and trace it to a structural cause: once a defective skill enters the decision context, it becomes reference material for distilling later skills, forming cross-round contamination chains. We further show the contamination is structurally irreversible: removing a source skill after the fact cannot erase the flawed
reasoning its descendants have already inherited, so post-hoc rollback recovers only a small fraction of the lost performance. This makes skill admission a pre-commit necessity rather than a post-hoc fix, and motivates Verifier-as-Gatekeeper (VaG): a progressive trust hierarchy whose three heterogeneous critics - structural validity, behavioral harmlessness, and semantic consistency - filter each skill individually, coupled with a marginal-gain subset selection that removes combinatorial contamination at the top tier before skills reach the runtime context. On Terminal-Bench 2, unconditional accumulation rises to a peak and then degrades, giving back most of its gains as the pool keeps growing, and post-hoc removal of the culprit skills recovers only a small part of the drop - the empirical signature of irreversibility. In contrast, VaG improves every round, reaching 72% pass@1 with a pool roughly 5x smaller, and its frozen skill pool transfers positively to four other backbones and a second
benchmark without re-
evolution. Ablations confirm the three critics are complementary and mutually non-substitutable, each intercepting a largely disjoint class of harmful skills.
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All authors Linfang Shang, Ming Xu, Yiding Sun, Tianle Xia, Lingxiang Hu, Lan Xu, Ning Zheng
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CL
Hierarchical Latent Prediction for Language Models
Chang Shi, Tim Pearce, Manan Tomar et al. (+2 more)
While standard Next-
Token Prediction (NTP) lays the foundation of
language model pre- training, its teacher-forced training paradigm may not be optimal for long-horizon
reasoning and planning. Recent works such as Multi-
Token Prediction (MTP) and Next-Latent prediction (NextLat) try to mitigate the problem through predicting multiple future
tokens and self-supervised prediction in the latent space. However, those auxiliary objectives either have a limited horizon or suffer from compounding error from multi-step rollout. We introduce Hierarchical Latent Prediction (HiLP), which introduces an auxiliary higher-level abstract latent to help reduce the error accumulation effect in latent-space rollouts. Experiments show that HiLP can lead to longer-horizon coherent belief state representation and demonstrate the effectiveness of our method across coding and multi-step
reasoning benchmarks, and offers more speculative decoding efficiency.
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All authors Chang Shi, Tim Pearce, Manan Tomar, Siddhartha Sen, John Langford
Artificial Intelligence
When Agentic AI Meets Integrated Sensing and Communication
Kai Li, Conggai Li, Sarah Ali Siddiqui et al. (+4 more)
Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming Integrated Sensing and Communication (
ISAC) from a function-oriented physical-layer technology into a goal-driven, closed-loop intelligent system, a paradigm we term AISAC. Existing work on learning-based sensing, resource allocation, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS), edge intelligence, multi-
agent coordination, and resilient networking has developed largely in isolation. This survey unifies the literature within a six-stage closed-loop framework comprising observation, contextualization,
reasoning and prediction, planning and orchestration, execution and collaboration, and feedback and resilience. It also introduces five levels of agentic maturity, ranging from physical-layer primitives to fully closed-loop agentic
ISAC. We use this framework to review advances in
multimodal intelligence, large
language models, reinforcement learning,
federated learning, RIS-assisted control, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (
UAV) and vehicular networks, and AI-native network management, and analyze
privacy, security, resilience, and sustainability as cross-cutting requirements of the full perception-
reasoning-action loop. An audit of representative studies against nine agentic-specific evaluation criteria shows that no system reports more than one or two of them, exposing a gap between claimed and demonstrated agentic maturity. We identify open challenges in physical-to-semantic grounding, predictive world models, real-time
agent-PHY interaction, safe tool use, heterogeneous multi-
agent collaboration, benchmarking, and resource-efficient autonomy.
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All authors Kai Li, Conggai Li, Sarah Ali Siddiqui, Syed Sohail Ahmed, Xin Yuan, Shenghong Li, Wei Ni
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.MA
A Two-Tier Perspective on Inference-Time Parallelism in Multi-Agent LLM Systems
Zihan Xu, Haolin Tian and Hai Jiang
Large
language model (LLM)-driven multi-
agent systems typically require multiple model invocations and complex coordination during inference, and their execution strategies directly affect system accuracy, latency, and computational cost. Parallel execution provides a means to improve inference-time efficiency. From the perspective of inference-time execution, this paper models parallelism in multi-
agent systems as two distinct levels of decision processes: Replica Parallelism, which explores multiple complete solution paths at the task level, and Structural Parallelism, which enables concurrent execution within a single solution path through task decomposition. However, the roles of different forms of parallelism and their interrelationships still lack systematic study in terms of unified organization and coordination. We therefore propose TIPEX, a controllable execution framework that unifies these two levels of parallelism and coordinates their roles within the inference process under a unified execution semantics while supporting systematic combinations and analyses of different parallel strategies and parameter configurations. Systematic experiments on the
GAIA benchmark demonstrate that inference-time parallelism can significantly improve accuracy and reduce end-to-end latency at the cost of increased
token consumption. Further analysis shows that Replica and Structural Parallelism exhibit complementary effects across task complexities, with tasks of intermediate difficulty benefiting most from their coordination, while overly aggressive parallel strategies do not necessarily yield better performance.
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Artificial Intelligence
ChainClaw: A Layered Agent Framework for Reliable On-Chain Execution
Jiacheng Wei, Zhaoxin Fan, Xin Wen et al. (+5 more)
General-purpose large
language model
agents have achieved strong performance on tool-augmented tasks, yet they rely on assumptions break down in blockchain environments. On-chain execution is stateful,
adversarial, and economically irreversible, exposing three fundamental gaps: Reactivity, Irreversibility, and Observability. We propose ChainClaw, a blockchain-native
agent framework built on OpenClaw, that addresses all three gaps through a layered architecture comprising an event-driven orchestration layer, a simulation-based safety intelligence layer, and an on-chain monitoring runtime layer, unified by a cross-layer
memory subsystem. ChainClaw closes the Reactivity gap via event ingestion and simulation feedback, the Irreversibility gap via a pre-execution safety pipeline with transaction simulation and action guard, and the Observability gap via an on-chain read adapter and transaction monitor. We evaluate ChainClaw on a purpose-built
benchmark covering seven tasks across four categories and five dimensions. ChainClaw consistently outperforms representative baselines on both safety and task completion.
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All authors Jiacheng Wei, Zhaoxin Fan, Xin Wen, Yuqin Lan, Dongrun Li, Wenjun Wu, Faguo Wu, Xiao Zhang
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CL
Task-Conditional Flow Matching for Balanced Multilingual Text Embedding Adaptation
Tirth Bhatt, Naren Kumar S and Mayank Singh
Multilingual text
embedding models are commonly adapted using a single training objective across diverse tasks, despite different tasks requiring fundamentally different optimization strategies. We introduce Task-Conditional Flow Matching (TCFM), a
multilingual embedding adaptation framework that selectively applies Flow Matching to translation tasks while optimizing
retrieval, classification, and pair-classification tasks with objectives better aligned to their learning dynamics. TCFM further combines teacher-guided representation preservation with a three-stage curriculum to enable stable adaptation. Evaluated on the Indic Massive Text
Embedding Benchmark, TCFM establishes a new state-of-the-art, consistently improving
embedding quality across a diverse set of
multilingual tasks and generalizing across
embedding model families. We will publicly release the codebase and
datasets upon acceptance of the paper.
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Artificial Intelligence
Activity Frames: Deterministic Screen-Activity Compilation for Agent Memory and Replay
Nossa Iyamu
Computer-use
agents pay full frontier inference to re-derive routines their user has already performed, because an
agent's
memory today records what the user said, not what the user did. We compile passively captured screen activity into
agent memory with a deterministic, zero-model pipeline: it segments a local capture stream into typed activity frames, bounded episodes carrying application, site, timing, input volume, and evidence pointers back to the raw rows, with no model in the loop, so the output is byte-identical, cacheable, and mechanically auditable. On one professional's single-user corpus of 128,756 frames over 51 active days, the compiler reduces a day of raw capture to a
prompt-ready context block 86x smaller in 68 ms, and an
agent reading that block answers questions about the day at 98.4% accuracy (Wilson 95% CI 91.7-99.7%) against an independent oracle, versus 66-80% for an LLM summary of the same capture, a mid-tier model reading the block matching a frontier one. The same compiler doubles as a demand-side cost instrument. Read off passive, pre-delegation human activity rather than
agent rollouts, it supplies two parameters that
agent-cost models assume but, to our knowledge, have not measured: the Routine Overhead Ratio R and the routine recurrence h. We report first values of R, a modeled upper bound, at 60-343x, and a delegable recurrence of 9.0% in-sample and 7.7% out-of-sample, for a realistic all-fleet
token ceiling near 8%; a compiled routine replays deterministically with the model out of the loop, demonstrated live at zero model
tokens on a guard-matched hit. Schema, compiler, and evaluation harness are open.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG
GROM: Gradient-Free Rapid One-Shot Machine Unlearning
Paweł Batorski, Przemysław Spurek and Paul Swoboda
Machine unlearning has become a critical capability for safely removing specific, sensitive knowledge from large
language models (LLMs). Current state-of-the-art approaches primarily rely on iterative, training-time unlearning via fine-tuning. However, even when utilizing parameter-efficient dimensionality reduction techniques like LoRA, gradient-based optimization remains computationally expensive and lacks explicit analytical formulations. It can also leave the targeted knowledge merely hidden rather than removed, to the point that simply quantizing the unlearned model restores much of what it was supposed to have erased. To resolve this, we propose a novel one-shot unlearning approach, abandoning iterative optimization in favor of a direct, exact analytical solution. We frame the unlearning process as a ridge-regularized least-squares optimization problem, deriving a closed-form additive update for targeted weight
matrices. This update forces the selected layer to suppress unwanted content while strictly preserving its behavior on retained data. Computed from gradient-free forward passes alone, with no backpropagation and no iteration to convergence, GROM applies the weight edit in mere seconds, which makes it orders of magnitude faster than traditional fine-tuning. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that GROM achieves state-of-the-art forgetting-utility trade-offs on TOFU-5%, TOFU-10%, MUSE-Books, MUSE-News and WMDP, significantly reducing computational overhead without sacrificing overall model performance. Because the update removes the targeted content from the weights instead of masking it, GROM also withstands the low-bit quantization attack that recovers much of the content a gradient-based baseline had appeared to forget. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Batorskq/GROM.
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Artificial Intelligence
When Do Prompt-Side Agent Playbooks Transfer? Accuracy, Cost, and Runtime Shift in Agent Deployment
Weihong Lin, Lin Sun and Xiangzheng Zhang
Prompt-side playbooks can improve tool-using
language agents without retraining, but their portability beyond the source setting is unclear. We study frozen playbook transfer under a shared distill–validate–transfer protocol. On ALFWorld, transfer is beneficial under controlled greedy decoding and, in one near-budget-matched comparison, distilled guidance outperforms five fixed demonstrations. On TAU2-Bench, a prespecified aggregate contrast supports a modest average matched-domain advantage, but global Holm correction retains only one of 135 route-level effects; the remaining grid provides descriptive evidence of compatibility-sensitive heterogeneity. On XBench-DeepSearch, one artifact–runtime pairing preserves useful first-try heuristics while producing repeated queries, delayed stopping, and substantial cost inflation after a context-runtime shift. Across
benchmarks, transferred and target-derived playbooks both require target-side validation of success, termination, protocol compatibility, and cost. Frozen transfer is therefore a conditional cold-start option, not a reuse-by-default strategy or a universally preferable alternative to target-side redistillation.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV
HyTBE: Hyperbolic Target-Background Expert Model for Cross-Domain Infrared Small Target Detection
Aohua Li, Jin Kuang, Yubing Lu et al. (+1 more)
Infrared small target detection (IRSTD) has achieved substantial progress under domain-consistent evaluation, yet detector performance often degrades markedly when generalizing to unseen infrared domains. Existing methods primarily improve detection by enhancing target responses and suppressing background interference. However, when trained on only a limited set of source domains, their learned decision rules are inevitably established from a restricted range of source-domain target-background relation patterns. We formulate this cross-domain failure as target-background relation shift: unseen domains may exhibit relation patterns that are not observed during training, thereby weakening the discriminative capability learned from the source domains. To address this problem, we propose HyTBE, a
Hyperbolic Target-Background Expert model that expands source-domain relation patterns and adaptively adjusts visual representations using explicit relation cues. The Target-Background Relation Intervention selectively perturbs either targets or backgrounds, broadening the observable relation patterns during training while maintaining valid supervision. Subsequently, the
Hyperbolic Relation Modeling maps multi-scale visual cues into a Poincaré ball and characterizes the target-background relation of each feature
token according to its relative distances to the target and background anchors. The
Hyperbolic-guided MoE Adapter further uses these
hyperbolic relation representations to calibrate multi-scale visual features and aggregate expert-specific feature corrections for different relation patterns. Leave-one-domain-out experiments on NUAA-SIRST, NUDT-SIRST, and IRSTD-1K demonstrate that HyTBE achieves stronger cross-domain generalization than competitive baselines.
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All authors Aohua Li, Jin Kuang, Yubing Lu, Pingping Liu
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV
UniVVT: A Unified End-to-End Framework for High-Fidelity Video Virtual Try-on
Yushe Cao, Shikun Feng, Fei Shen et al. (+5 more)
Video Virtual Try-On (VVT) synthesizes a
video of a person wearing a target garment while preserving identity, motion, and scene dynamics. Dominant approaches cast VVT as mask-conditioned
video inpainting and rely on separate modules for human parsing, pose estimation, and garment warping. This multi-stage design complicates deployment and, more critically, allows errors in explicit
geometric priors to propagate irreversibly into the generated
video. We present UniVVT, a unified end-to-end framework that reframes VVT as semantically conditioned
video generation, eliminating mask, pose, and warping modules at inference. At its core, a scene-task perceiver built on a
Multimodal Large
Language Model jointly encodes the source
video, target garment, and task instruction into compact, task-aware latent
tokens, implicitly capturing what to transfer and where and how to transfer it. A lightweight semantic bridge then aligns these
tokens with the conditioning space of a
diffusion-based
video generator, enabling coherent garment transfer. To robustly couple the heterogeneous components, we devise a three-stage progressive training strategy comprising semantic
alignment, joint task adaptation, and flexible-resolution refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniVVT achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple
benchmarks, validating implicit semantic guidance as a simple and effective alternative to fragile
geometric preprocessing for end-to-end virtual try-on.
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All authors Yushe Cao, Shikun Feng, Fei Shen, Haikuo Peng, Jianqiang Xia, Yiheng Zhu, Dianxi Shi, Chun Yu
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG
Multivariate Time Series Forecasting needs Cross Variable Loss
Kuiye Ding, Yifan Hu, Hao Xue et al. (+1 more)
Multivariate time series
forecasting presents unique challenges because future variables often co-evolve under shared system dynamics. While existing studies mainly focus on cross-variable dependencies in historical observations, dependencies among future values are much less explored. Specifically, modern
forecasting models largely follow the Direct
Forecasting (DF) paradigm, generating multi-step forecasts with point-wise objectives that do not explicitly constrain cross-variable structure. In this work, we show that the DF objective is mismatched in the presence of cross-variable and lagged dependencies, revealing an objective gap. To address this issue, we propose Cross-Variable Loss (CvLoss), a plug-in structural regularizer that constrains forecast residuals on a cross-variable graph. CvLoss penalizes inconsistent edge-wise residual differences over forecast patches, encouraging consistency across both synchronous and asynchronous interactions. Our experiments show that CvLoss consistently improves competitive
forecasting models, outperforms representative learning objectives, and is compatible with a variety of
forecasting backbones.
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All authors Kuiye Ding, Yifan Hu, Hao Xue, Hanchen Wang
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CL
Once a Response, Always a Response: Detecting LLM-generated Text via Latent Prompt Restoration
Hongrui Bao, Yubing Ren, Jinhan You et al. (+3 more)
Large
language models (LLMs) can generate fluent and convincing text at scale, creating growing risks for misinformation dissemination, educational misuse, and platform governance. These concerns make robust detection of machine-generated text increasingly necessary. Recent zero-shot detectors mainly exploit probability-based statistical discrepancies, but they do not explicitly account for the training process of LLMs, which leaves a distinct generation mechanism insufficiently modeled and limits detection robustness. To address this issue, we propose EchoPrompt, a training-free detector based on latent
prompt restoration. Our key intuition is that machine-generated text is typically produced conditioned on an upstream
prompt, and this hidden dependency can be partially reactivated by prepending a unified generic prefix. Specifically, EchoPrompt restores a generic assistant-response context, measures the induced likelihood gain with an instruction-tuned model, calibrates it against the corresponding base model, and aggregates the resulting differences into a score that quantifies latent
prompt dependency. Extensive experiments show that EchoPrompt achieves state-of-the-art performance among zero-shot detectors while maintaining strong robustness across challenging evaluation settings.
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All authors Hongrui Bao, Yubing Ren, Jinhan You, Fang Fang, Shi Wang, Yanan Cao
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CR
ABC: Numerical Data Collection under Local Differential Privacy without Prior Knowledge
Incheol Baek, Hyungbin Kim and Yon Dohn Chung
Local Differential
Privacy (LDP) provides strong
privacy guarantees for collecting numerical data. A fundamental challenge, however, is that existing LDP mechanisms require a predefined data domain, which is often unknown in practice. This lack of prior knowledge creates a critical dilemma for the data collector: if the chosen domain is too narrow, values outside the range are clipped, leading to information loss. Conversely, if the domain is too wide, excessive noise is added during the privatization process, which degrades the quality of collected data. This highlights the need for methods that can dynamically estimate the data domain. In this work, we propose an adaptive LDP framework that addresses this problem. In our method, each user sends two pieces of information: their perturbed numerical data, and a privatized signal indicating if their original value was clipped by the current domain. By aggregating these signals, our proposed method, Adaptive Bounding of Clipping regions (ABC) method, iteratively adjusts the domain to fit the underlying data distribution without prior knowledge. Our theoretical analysis shows that the estimated data domain converges to an appropriate range. In the empirical evaluation, the results demonstrate that our framework significantly improves the quality of numerical data collection across various
datasets and underlying LDP mechanisms. We also show that the estimated range successfully converges in practice and our approach is robust to its hyperparameters through comprehensive ablation studies.
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Artificial Intelligence
Subliminal Learning is Non-Semantic Distillation
Ethan Hadley and Eren Gultepe
Subliminal Learning (SL) is a surprising type of generalization displayed by modern
language models. It allows the transfer of a bias or behavior from a teacher model to a student by distilling from seemingly unrelated or random synthetic data from the teacher. This presents challenges in ensuring AI systems remain predictable and are trained safely, as standard
auditing of the input data would not catch the hidden subliminal signal. Here, we investigate several open questions as to the enabling mechanisms and drivers of SL. First is the nature of the process by which biases are encoded in the data. We find that by adding Gaussian noise to the weights of the teacher and student models, the magnitude of subliminal transfer is increased by a factor of 1.9 in Gemma and 1.3 in Llama, suggesting that non-semantic weight structures play a crucial role. We show that steering vectors can be applied to the teacher to produce subliminal data, in addition to prompting and finetuning as used in previous studies. Analysis of the activations of the student models that have been trained on steered and prompted data demonstrates that students inherit not just the semantic meaning of the teacher's bias, but also the type of intervention that was used to apply it: steered students imitate steering vectors, prompted students do not. Additionally, the gradients of steered subliminal data show a linear correlation with the teacher's steering vectors, showing promise for data
auditing. More broadly, as synthetic data becomes central to frontier training pipelines, being able to see the latent signals hidden in training data becomes paramount.
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Artificial Intelligence
Unified Agent: Managing Interactions across Devices
Xinshuang Liu, Runfa Blark Li, Shaoxiu Wei et al. (+2 more)
As capabilities rapidly increase, AI
agents can move from running inside one app to acting across a user's devices over time. Yet existing
agent systems still fall short in this scenario. This is because observations are scattered across devices and moments, but mainstream systems are not designed around this fact: a single
agent that treats devices as tools lacks effective state management for all devices across time, and multi-
agent systems coordinate across
agents but do not maintain the compact carried state a cross-device, cross-time request needs. We argue that the
agent should maintain an effectively designed state that organizes engagement evidence, stated facts, and the standing request in a compact, action-ready form for deciding its action given the current observation. To compare state designs, we construct a
benchmark of user-
agent interaction across devices and time. We instantiate this principle in Unified
Agent, a stateful
agent that carries interaction evidence across devices and moments and uses it with the current observation to act. In the default setting, it significantly outperforms our adaptations of four published designs. Across changes in
multimodal large
language model (MLLM) family, capability, and
reasoning effort, it remains ahead of all compared systems, demonstrating that the state-design advantage is robust across MLLM settings. Our code and data will be publicly available on GitHub.
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All authors Xinshuang Liu, Runfa Blark Li, Shaoxiu Wei, Xin Lin, Truong Nguyen
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CL
Mitigating Scoring Bias in LLM-as-a-Judge via Random Number Generation
Yuma Asato, Kiyoaki Shirai and Natthawut Kertkeidkachorn
Large
Language Models (LLMs) are often used as evaluators of text quality, known as LLM-as-a-Judge, which can outperform conventional automatic evaluation metrics that rely on reference texts. However, LLM evaluators tend to generate particular scores regardless of the context of the evaluated text, which is known as scoring bias. This study proposes a novel method to mitigate this scoring bias. An LLM is instructed to randomly generate number
tokens, and the latent numerical bias of the LLM is identified by measuring the deviation of the observed distribution of numbers from the uniform distribution. A definition of a downstream task, for which an LLM evaluator is used, is added to the
prompts for random number generation to measure task-specific latent number bias. In the evaluation by an LLM, the
token generation probabilities for a given input are rectified considering the LLM's latent number bias. Results of the experiment on four different tasks, evaluation of LLM
alignment, evaluation of summarization, Semantic Textual Similarity, and Semantic Textual Relatedness, demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the baselines, including an LLM without debiasing and previous calibration methods. In addition, it is confirmed that scoring bias varies across LLMs, tasks, and score ranges, indicating the importance of measuring latent number bias as the case may be.
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Artificial Intelligence
BlockPython: A Process-Aware Agent-Supported Platform for the Transition from Block-Based to Python Programming
Jesse Yusuf Chan, Haoming Wang, Mingwei Xu et al. (+1 more)
The transition from block-based to text-based programming requires learners to convert visible program structures into abstract textual expressions, which may create a cognitive gap between understanding computational concepts and expressing them in Python syntax. To support this transition, we designed and implemented BlockPython. The platform centers on bidirectional translation between blocks and Python and guides learners through four stages: Task Decomposition, Block-Based Practice, Code Challenge, and Extended Interaction. Across these stages, learners progressively establish connections among program structure, runtime behavior, and textual code. During learning, the platform continuously collects process evidence, including block artifacts, code versions, run outcomes, use of support, and dialogue. Deterministic diagnosis, program visualization, and the learning assistant use this evidence to identify different difficulties in computational understanding and Python expression. The rule-based system is responsible for program execution, objective evaluation, and stage control, while the learning assistant uses verified evidence to provide explanations,
prompts, and guiding questions. This report describes the design rationale, learning workflow, and process-aware support mechanisms of BlockPython and provides a system-design reference for supporting the transition from block-based to text-based programming and for analyzing learning processes.
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All authors Jesse Yusuf Chan, Haoming Wang, Mingwei Xu, Xianlong Xu