Papers

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), harnesses have become essential infrastructure for deploying agents across a wide range of domains. The fast-evolving harness ecosystem has also made rigorous capability evaluation increasingly important. However, efficiently building an end-to-end, systematic, and comprehensive evaluation pipeline remains a significant challenge. To address this challenge, we introduce $A^2E$ (Agent Auditing Engine), an end-to-end evaluation engine designed for agent harnesses. $A^2E$ leverages our newly proposed Agent Task Protocol (ATP) to enable the rapid integration of evaluation tasks with different harnesses. Through an automatically instrumented Monitor, it captures and generates standardized execution traces during experiments. In the Evaluation stage, $A^2E$ systematically assesses harness capabilities using a suite of multidimensional metrics. Compared with correctness alone, these metrics provide a more fine-grained characterization of differences among harnesses in execution efficiency, tool use, task planning, and error recovery. Experiments conducted with $A^2E$ further reveal that model-harness combinations exhibit substantial performance variation across different types of tasks, and that no single combination consistently outperforms all others across every task. These findings not only demonstrate the necessity of systematic evaluation but also provide useful guidance for the co-evolution of models and harnesses. Our code is available at https://github.com/datamllab/A2E.

Test data from public benchmarks inevitably leaks into pretraining corpora, inflating evaluation scores once memorized. Contamination mitigation evaluation intervenes in the decoding process to suppress memorization and restore a contaminated model's genuine capability, but its prevailing metric, the G-AP (Gap of Aggregate Performance), is flawed. Discrete correct/incorrect readouts cannot characterize per-question performance, averaging before differencing lets over- and under-suppression cancel out, and uniform per-question weighting invites strategies to push solve probabilities onto the clean model's high-frequency values. We propose SA-PPG (Stratified Aggregate of Per-question Probability Gaps): estimate each question's solve probability by sampling, difference it against the clean model per question, and aggregate within groups defined by the clean model's solve probability. Existing mitigation strategies first estimate where contamination lies and then operate on the estimate, so they are only as correct as the estimate. RailCap instead judges contamination during generation: whenever a sample falls back onto the greedy trajectory, the next trajectory token is capped to the runner-up, accumulating suppression until the response distribution becomes sufficiently dispersed. Across multiple contaminated models and benchmarks, SA-PPG reveals that prior strategies' restoration is substantially overestimated, while RailCap attains the lowest SA-PPG.

Registration-based Few-shot medical image segmentation (RFMIS) aims to generate pseudo-labels for unlabeled images by warping a labeled image through registration. However, existing methods primarily perform pixel-level optimization and inference in Euclidean space, treating anatomical structures as flat and disjoint. This neglect of inherent hierarchies degrades pseudo-label quality and weakens the discrimination of ambiguous regions, limiting the segmentation performance. To overcome this challenge, we propose a Hyperbolic Hierarchy-aware Aggregative Learning framework for RFMIS, termed H2AL, that enhances both deformation plausibility and anatomical discrimination for dual-task learning. Specifically, we introduce a Hyperbolic Hierarchy-aware Infusion (H2I) module, which leverages the hierarchical modeling capability of hyperbolic space to learn precise hierarchy-aware representations via transformation-guided supervised hyperbolic contrastive learning, and injects such hierarchical priors into Euclidean space through a gated infusion block while preserving semantic richness. Furthermore, we propose an end-to-end joint optimization algorithm by gradient aggregation, where the gradients from the registration and segmentation decoders, embedding semantic and hierarchical cues, are aggregated to update the shared encoder to promote collaborative learning across tasks. Extensive experiments on two anatomical regions, with five experimental settings, demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method in both registration and segmentation. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/JiamingCai469/H2AL.

Replay-free parallelized Q-learning removes the large experience replay buffers and target networks used by conventional deep Q-learning, but the role of network architecture in this training regime remains comparatively underexplored. We investigate this question through a progressive three-phase study within the Parallelized Q-Network (PQN) framework. First, we compare eight convolutional encoder topologies on Atari-57 under a common training protocol while jointly considering performance and computational complexity. Second, we integrate Hadamax-style multiplicative feature interactions and explicit pooling into the selected encoder hierarchy. Third, with the visual representation fixed, we compare complete categorical-dueling, ensemble-dueling, and categorical ensemble-dueling value-estimation configurations. The resulting architecture, Aftab, achieves an interquartile mean human-normalized score of $6.592$ on Atari-57, compared with $2.715$ for our independently rerun PQN reference, with a game-level Probability of Improvement of $0.86$. After completing all architecture selection on Atari-57, we evaluate Aftab on Procgen Hard. Aftab achieves a terminal IQM normalized score of $0.418$ compared with $0.382$ for PQN and increases the normalized area under the learning curve from $0.216$ to $0.541$, although terminal performance remains heterogeneous across environments. These results show that visual topology, multiplicative representation, and downstream value-estimation design can substantially affect replay-free Q-learning, and that their benefits should be evaluated jointly with computational complexity. The complete Aftab framework, including model definitions, training configurations, reproducibility settings, and raw experimental logs, is open-sourced at https://github.com/tahashieenavaz/aftab

The AI-Native Manifesto envisions large-scale agile software development in which humans increasingly govern intent, risk, and exceptions while agents execute more of the engineering process. Realizing that end-state requires more than better code generation: it requires assurance closure, meaning that the system can establish what must be true, determine and obtain appropriate evidence, judge the credibility of that evidence, preserve its validity through change, and use the resulting uncertainty to bound agent authority. Existing work already provides many of the necessary mechanisms across formal methods, testing, simulation, assurance cases, digital twins, and runtime assurance. We identify six residual gaps in making the surrounding assurance reasoning sufficiently machine-operable, propose a high-level architecture with six corresponding capabilities built on a shared semantic assurance layer, and formulate four research questions to turn that architecture into dependable, human-on-the-loop, AI-native R&D.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) models predicting mental health outcomes rarely specify what they measure: contextual knowledge, emotional content, or syntactic structure. NLP Psychometrics treats psychological prediction from text as a psychometric problem, linking scores to interpretable linguistic evidence and testing beyond the training text format. Nine LLMs, conditioned on controlled personas (cognitive digital shadows), completed psychometric questionnaires with textual explanations per item. We extracted emotional profiles and syntactic-semantic structure via textual forma mentis networks, combined with personality and sociodemographic variables in ablated random forest (RF) regressors, using SHAP to identify which features drove performance and in which direction. Full RF models explained up to 70.8% of variance in life satisfaction (SWLS), 55.7% in depression (PHQ-9), and, for DASS-21, 68.5% depression, 76.0% anxiety, 72.4% stress. Sociodemographics alone explained no meaningful variance in depression, anxiety, or stress, but did so for life satisfaction, where emotion features and income were the strongest predictors; neuroticism and network topology instead dominated depression and anxiety, reversing direction between them. Without retraining, RF models separated diaries from low- and high-score personas ($r$ up to 0.91) and, using only network/emotion features, classified clinical from control participants in real transcripts with up to 68% accuracy. These results show the promise and limits of synthetic data: LLM personas can expose model biases, recover patterns consistent with clinical rumination, and support psychometric prediction from human text without a matched questionnaire, but cannot substitute for human validation. NLP Psychometrics makes these distinctions explicit, measurable, and testable through interpretable AI and network/emotional features.

Comparisons between AutoML systems at short time budgets – tens of seconds rather than hours – are common in tool READMEs and workshop papers, and they are easy to get wrong. We report a case study in which a simple AutoML engine, Orcetra, appeared to beat FLAML and AutoGluon on 513 OpenML datasets, winning 57.1% of them at a nominal 60-second budget and 78.4% of datasets against FLAML alone at 30 seconds. Both margins came from protocol defects that a results table cannot show. The search loop scored every candidate on the test split and reported the best, making the headline metric a maximum over dozens of noisy estimates while the baselines selected on training data and touched the test set once; and the budget was checked before launching a candidate but never enforced during one, so the system consumed a median of 120 s against a 60-second budget, 2.24x the wall-clock AutoGluon used. Re-running with selection moved to a validation split, the deadline enforced externally and every framework pinned to an equal share of the machine, Orcetra's win rate on the re-run subset falls from 59.4% to 34.3% and no pairwise difference against either competitor remains significant. Recording both estimands inside a single search lets us attribute the collapse: the selection rule accounts for 4.8 percentage points and unequal compute for most of the rest. The same traces give the selection bias as a function of budget, measured rather than assumed: it grows with $K$ but reaches only 0.27 accuracy points, about five times below the $\sigma\sqrt{2\ln K}$ bound a marginal-standard-error argument predicts, because candidates scored on shared test rows cancel most of the noise. We close with a checklist for short-budget comparisons. Code, per-dataset results and the scripts that regenerate every number and figure in the paper are released with it.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) often suffer from object hallucination, generating objects that are absent from the image. Prior work largely attributes this to insufficient visual attention. However, we find that both real and hallucinated objects receive equally strong visual attention in the model's mid-to-late layers, suggesting that the key issue may not be how much the model attends, but what it attends to and why. To this end, we decode the visual features of high-attention regions using Logit Lens, and observe that regions corresponding to real objects can be correctly decoded to the target object tokens, whereas those for hallucinated objects cannot. Building on this, we identify two hallucination mechanisms: (i) visual uncertainty, triggered by semantically similar or confusable regions; masking these regions eliminates the hallucination. (ii) contextual prior, triggered by strong co-occurrence priors; even when the initially attended region is masked, the hallucination persists and attention drifts to other regions. Based on these findings, we propose a simple yet effective training-free Detect-Mitigate framework comprising a Logit-Lens Consistency Check to detect hallucination and targeted remedies: High-Attention Regions Masking (HARM) for visual uncertainty hallucination, and Visual Evidence Enhanced Decoding (VEED) for contextual prior hallucination. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple hallucination benchmarks. Code will be available.

Radiology reports describe clinical observations but do not specify executable segmentation targets. They may contain present, negated, prior,uncertain, or irrelevant findings, while multiple valid abnormalities may coexist. Existing segmentation methods largely bypass this ambiguity by receiving a target identity or spatial prompt before inference, which acts as a hidden target oracle. We study report-grounded abnormality segmentation, where a model must determine target eligibility, cardinality, and finding-to-mask correspondence directly from an unfiltered report before delineating the corresponding regions. We propose EliSeg, an atcor–verify–revise framework that integrates target construction with mask generation. A grammar-constrained Actor proposes target slots and masks, an independent text-only Verifier reconstructs the eligible finding inventory, and Revision selectively re-executes the shared Actor when their target structures disagree. EliSeg requires no predefined target identity, finding prompt, point, or bounding box. Experiments on MIMIC-CXR-ILS show that EliSeg consistently outperforms direct segmentation methods and extract-then-segment cascades across findings, while effectively suppressing masks for ineligible report mentions. Ablation studies confirm the complementary roles of verification and revision, and evaluation on CheXlocalize demonstrates effective transfer of the EliSeg to an external dataset.Code is available at https://github.com/Maybach-dream/EliSeg.

Generating mixed-type tabular data requires jointly modeling diverse feature distributions and their complex cross-column dependencies. Variational flow matching handles distinct endpoints via factorized distributions, yet leaves feature-specific processing and cross-column interactions implicit within a shared backbone. We introduce Feature-wise Unified Specialization with cross-column Exchange (FUSE) to explicitly separate these roles. FUSE applies separate adaptive mixture modules to numerical and categorical features, allowing each feature to combine shared specialized subnetworks, while joint attention preserves information exchange across all columns. We also characterize the excess population risk from restricted conditioning contexts and bound the continuous Wasserstein generation error by endpoint-prediction risk. Comprehensive experiments on eight tabular datasets demonstrate that FUSE achieves strong and consistent performance across distributional fidelity and downstream utility metrics.

AI-generated music is increasingly used at the stem level, with producers integrating synthetic drums, basslines, or vocals alongside human-performed instruments. However, current AI music detection systems are binary, treating tracks as either fully AI or fully human. In this paper, we reformulate AI music detection as a regression problem on a continuous AI energy ratio, alpha in [0, 1]. We propose a methodology that leverages a multi-track music dataset to assemble mixtures of human-performed and AI-reconstructed stems (obtained using a neural audio codec) with known proportions of each content type. Using this approach, we first show that a CNN-based model trained on fully AI-generated or human-performed tracks, which achieves >99% accuracy as a binary detector, when faced with mixed content, yields an output that rises with the AI stems' energy contribution, acting as a noisy and miscalibrated estimator. Our analysis of the influence of different stems shows that detection sensitivity depends on the instrument and reflects its frequency content: drums and guitar carry strong codec-artifact signatures, while vocals and bass are less detectable. Based on these insights, we train a similar CNN-based model for regression of alpha, achieving MAE = 0.076 and R^2 = 0.85 on held-out mixtures from the same pipeline. These results suggest that the regression formulation is an initial promising step towards AI-music detection in realistic music production workflows.

A group is an E-group if every element commutes with each of its endomorphic images. Caranti asked whether a finite E-group can have nilpotency class three. We prove that the $3$-group of order $3^{84}$ introduced by Abdollahi, Faghihi, and Mohammadi Hassanabadi, and later shown by Abdollahi, Faghihi, Linton, and O'Brien to have the corresponding automorphism property, is an E-group. Let $P$ denote this group and put $V=P/\Phi(P)\cong \mathbb{F}_3^9$. The nine power relations of $P$ determine a linear map $q:V\longrightarrow\Lambda^2 V$. We prove that $q$ has no nonzero proper subspace $U$ satisfying $q(U)\subseteq\Lambda^2 U$. Since the image induced by any endomorphism of $P$ on $V$ has precisely this closure property, every endomorphism acts on $V$ either invertibly or trivially. The invertible case is the known A-group case. In the trivial case the image first lies in $\Phi(P)=P'$, and the power relations then force it into $\Omega_1(P')=Z(P)$. Thus every element commutes with every endomorphic image. The tensor rigidity is reduced to an exact finite calculation on the $9841$ points of $\mathrm{PG}(8,3)$.

Split Federated Learning (SFL) facilitates privacy-preserving collaborative training with reduced client-side overhead. However, its split architecture introduces unique attack surfaces, rendering it vulnerable to diverse poisoning attacks. Most existing defenses fail to exploit the split paradigm, limiting their ability to detect and contain malicious behaviors at an early stage. To bridge this gap, we propose Target-Oriented Feature Decoupling (TOFD), a unified framework that jointly enables proactive detection and robust optimization against a wide range of poisoning attacks. TOFD operates in three stages: (1) Target Inference, which identifies potential attack targets by refining class-wise safe zones via class-specific Margin Perturbation (MP); (2) Sample Purification, which adaptively filters poisoned smashed data using thresholds calibrated through cross-class min-max normalization of MP; and (3) Decoupling Optimization, which leverages an adversarial guidance model to capture attack-induced patterns and decouple their influence during optimization, thereby suppressing residual adversarial effects. We provide theoretical guarantees for the convergence of TOFD. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate that TOFD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art defenses under diverse attack scenarios, achieving superior robustness with low computational overhead suitable for practical deployment.

Recent vision-language navigation (VLN) systems increasingly adapt pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) into vision-language-action (VLA) policies that map egocentric observations and language instructions directly to navigation actions. Although semantically capable, such action-centric training does not explicitly model how the agent's visual observations evolve under its predicted motion. Generative world-action models (WAMs) jointly predict future observations and actions, yet existing WAMs for continuous VLN do not condition joint future-view and action generation on geometry-aware representations inferred from the observation history. We present WNM-3D, a generative World Navigation Model with 3D scene conditioning for continuous VLN. A frozen feed-forward geometry encoder extracts cross-view representations from monocular RGB history, and a trainable 3D Scene-to-Token Adapter converts them into a fixed-length scene prefix for the world-action Diffusion Transformer. Through block-causal attention, this prefix remains visible to every future video-action block throughout joint denoising, providing persistent geometric context. We train WNM-3D with supervised world-action learning, DAgger-style adaptation on policy-visited states, and Counterfactual DanceGRPO refinement. Across GN-Bench and VLN-CE, WNM-3D consistently outperforms the backbone-matched WNM-2D counterpart, demonstrating gains from 3D scene conditioning across distinct visual domains. WNM-3D further outperforms strong VLN baselines on GN-Bench and demonstrates closed-loop deployment on a physical robot. Component and stage-wise ablations support the Adapter design and the complementary roles of DAgger-SFT and subsequent reward-guided refinement.

The increasing specialization of scientific research challenges existing classification systems, which provide effective representations of broad disciplines and research topics but often fail to capture the fine-grained conceptual structure of contemporary science. Author keywords offer greater specificity, but their fragmentation, redundancy, and terminological variability limit their use as stable units of knowledge organization. We introduce SCALE (Scientific Concept Aggregation via LLMs and Embeddings), a framework that extends the OpenAlex taxonomy with a new level of scientific Concepts below Topics. Rather than treating keywords as isolated descriptors, SCALE organizes semantically related terms into coherent and interpretable conceptual units and integrates them within the existing disciplinary hierarchy. The framework combines scientific text embeddings, large language models, and graph-based community detection to construct this additional layer at scale. The resulting taxonomy enables scientific literature to be read through an intermediate conceptual level between broad research topics and individual documents. This perspective provides a more detailed representation of how scientific knowledge is structured, specialized, and connected across disciplines. By transforming heterogeneous author terminology into reusable hierarchical units, SCALE offers a foundation for fine-grained scholarly classification, scientometric analysis, research monitoring, and future ontology development.

This paper documents an applied natural-language-processing framework for measuring the tone of Brazilian Monetary Policy Committee (Copom) statements. The project is explicitly inspired by iSent, Itaú's Central Bank sentiment classifier, particularly its sentence-level division of official communication into hawkish, dovish, neutral, and out-of-context classes. The implementation extends that idea in three directions. First, an LLM identifies short hawkish and dovish expressions and assigns each a 0-to-1 intensity weight. Second, the document index combines sentence counts with document-specific average signal intensities, producing a bounded score from -1 to 1. Third, a separate full-document layer measures forward-guidance direction, guidance explicitness, uncertainty level, and change in uncertainty. The empirical sample is restricted to communications dated August 2016 or later and contains 80 statements and 1,498 classified sentences from August 31, 2016 through August 5, 2026. Across this sample, 33.3% of sentences are hawkish, 18.0% dovish, 42.1% neutral, and 6.5% out of context. The average document score is +0.107, while the most hawkish reading is +0.570 in August 2021. The latest statement, dated August 5, 2026, scores +0.232, with eight hawkish, two dovish, and nine neutral sentences. Its structural overlay is more nuanced: guidance is directionally ambiguous but partly explicit, while uncertainty is classified as central and higher than at the prior meeting. Tone and the guidance-direction score have a contemporaneous Pearson correlation of 0.719. These are descriptive outputs, not a validated forecast of Selic decisions or DI returns. The main contribution is therefore methodological: a transparent, incremental, auditable system that separates rhetorical tone from policy guidance and uncertainty.

Confirmed oncogenic microbes contribute significantly to cancer burden. Identifying novel microbial oncogenicity could yield strategies that will reduce disease burdens. However, relevant evidence is dispersed and infeasible for humans to comprehensively synthesize. LLMs may enable scalable, expert-level systematic evidence synthesis to identify microbe-cancer pairs; however, such capabilities have not yet been demonstrated. Domain experts were recruited to create a dataset to benchmark LLM performance (Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Flash, GPT-5, GPT-5 Nano) on 24 research papers using MMTV-LV and breast cancer as a case study. We devised a structured template for evidence extraction and appraisal, consisting of MCQ, Likert-scale, multi-select, and free-text question types (77 items across 24 papers). Agreement between (1) experts and (2) experts and each LLM was determined per question instance using novel metrics. LLMs were assessed by comparing inter-expert and expert-LLM agreement distributions to determine whether LLMs behaved as additional experts by increasing or maintaining inter-expert agreement. Free-text responses were further evaluated qualitatively. Across all question types, LLM responses aligned closely with experts, with GPT-5 and GPT-5 Nano achieving score distributions indistinguishable from experts. Gemini models behaved similarly but were significantly more lenient in applying microbial oncogenesis criteria. Hallucinations were rare. Methodological appraisal and identification of contradictions within full-texts were the most persistent LLM vulnerabilities. GPT-5 and GPT-5 Nano were indistinguishable from experts on structured domain research paper evaluation tasks. This supports use of LLMs for automated systematic evidence synthesis. However, methodological appraisal tasks and contradiction identification in full-texts remain weaknesses requiring strengthening.

Generative models are often evaluated through singular artifacts, whereas human creativity typically emerges through iterative generation, appraisal, and refinement. This pilot study examines whether iterative search improves LLM creativity by adapting FunSearch to recipe generation for the 2024 Pillsbury Bake-Off and evaluating outputs against human benchmarks using TTCT-based LLM evaluation. Across two experiments, we test iteration count, generator temperature, and in-loop selection-scorer model size. Results show that iterative generation-selection can produce recipes with creativity scores comparable to human benchmarks, but additional iterations alone do not improve creativity. The in-loop evaluator matters most: a smaller selection scorer yields significantly higher scores across most TTCT dimensions, while temperature has limited effects except for originality. These findings suggest that evaluator design is a first-order design variable in subjective creative search.

Probabilistic logic programming is a formalism of statistical relational artificial intelligence that supports causal queries, including interventions from outside the system. When the structure of a probabilistic logic program is learned from data, however, only probabilistic information is used, and a single probability distribution may be compatible with several causal orders. This leads to ambiguity in interventional reasoning, raising the question of when the causal order is uniquely determined by the distribution. Exploiting the relationship between acyclic probabilistic logic programs and Bayesian networks, we derive conditions under which the probabilistic information encoded in a program determines a unique causal order. We also incorporate constraints arising from relational structure by taking into account prescribed sets of causal symmetries induced by the underlying relational vocabulary. The result is a method for verifying when a learned probabilistic logic program supports well-defined intervention semantics.

Mixed strategy equilibrium predicts i.i.d play: past actions should not help predict future decisions. Human players, however, systematically depart from this benchmark, and in O'Neill's zero sum card game, these departures can be predicted by black box sequence models such as LSTMs. This paper asks whether that predictive power can be achieved by transparent alternatives that also reveal the behavioural structure behind it. Using 84,060 decisions from 2,802 pairs, the analysis first benchmarks naive and behavioral models against interpretable machine learning and deep learning models, then evaluates the modified EWA specifications of prior work against these benchmarks and uses the LASSO diagnostics to motivate a further nested frequency tracking extension. The results show that repeat or avoid behavior, especially players' management of their own recent action histories, accounts for most of the interpretable and strategically exploitable signal, while frequency tracking adds little out of sample.

Modern AI is no longer a single model but an ecosystem: classical ML predictors, deep and multimodal models, large language models, and agents, each trained and tuned over different data sources and each producing outputs at scale that become inputs to the others. Operating such an ecosystem is fundamentally a data integration problem - the knowledge it depends on is fragmented across dozens of heterogeneous, independently governed sources that must be reconciled and continually maintained. Yet integration alone is not enough. The predictions these systems make are shaped by many interacting factors, and the events, decisions, and variables that drive an outcome are routinely entangled with the ones that merely accompany it; treated as a basis for action, such correlational signals invite confounded decisions. This becomes acute once agents act autonomously: to be trustworthy and reliable, an agent must anticipate the consequences of its actions, not merely extrapolate from what has co-occurred before. Causal reasoning is what closes this gap, distinguishing the drivers of an outcome from its correlates, and enabling prescriptive and counterfactual analysis over the ecosystem's data. We therefore argue that the integrated ecosystem needs an explicit causal layer, and we propose to build it as a shared, persistent, queryable Causal World System (CWS).

Recent work shows that Large Language Models (LLMs) encode more information in their activations than they show in their responses. We ask whether the information contained in activations could be used as a source of measurement for the presence of concepts. We compare two algorithms for extraction of concepts, i.e., Recursive Feature Machine (RFM) algorithm and linear probing against an embedding baseline, surface baselines, and the model's own response using a human-annotated Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) dataset of financial texts. The best linear probe ranges from 0.6 to 3.3 percentage points below fine-tuned domain classifiers. The probes also outscore the model's own response in all comparisons. Furthermore, the probes outperform the RFM concept vectors in all accuracy comparisons. In a synthetic mixture test, their mean-pooled score tracks the number of concept sentences in a paragraph better than the concept-vector score. Put together, a linear probe on a frozen LLM is a cost-effective and generalizable alternative to fine-tuning a domain classifier.

Systematic reviews of Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) are routinely used as evidence for clinical care guidelines. Such evidence has to meet high research integrity standards to prevent low quality or false research outputs influencing the clinical care. However, assessing research integrity of published RCTs is a complex process requiring manual effort, and potentially resulting in diverse opinions of the human assessors. This paper describes INSPECT-AI, an LLM-based interactive tool that assists human reviewers with research integrity assessments of published RCTs based on the community approved INSPECT-SR framework, and the Research Integrity Provenance and Evidence ontology (RIPE-O) for documenting the provenance of the assessment process. In addition, we present the Research Integrity Provenance and Evidence knowledge graph (RIPE-KG), an initial set of 140 expert research integrity assessments of 95 RCT publications generated by INSPECT-AI and described using RIPE-O.

Many methods for automated multi-agent system design optimize prompts and topologies during an initial design stage and then deploy the resulting system unchanged on subsequent samples. Experience from these samples is rarely consolidated into reusable system updates, while accuracy-oriented designs may incur high token costs. We introduce EMAS (Evolving Multi-Agent System), which uses this experience to revise MAS topology and prompts without updating LLM parameters, either to improve accuracy or to reduce cost. EMAS converts traces into structured diagnoses that specify a revision operation and target. It generates a candidate revision only when the same diagnosis recurs across samples and applies it only if paired validation against the current MAS meets the corresponding acceptance criterion. Across four benchmarks and two LLMs, EMAS attains the highest task-weighted overall accuracy for both backbones and is best or tied in six of eight model–benchmark settings. Within two evolution epochs, EMAS achieves relative gains of 6.30% and 20.10% in task-weighted accuracy on Kimi-K2-6 and Qwen3.6-27B, respectively. On MBPP with Qwen3.6-27B, EMAS raises accuracy from 55.09% to 89.12% while reducing token use per task by 62.2%. These results show that EMAS can turn experience from new samples into reusable updates to MAS topology and prompts.

SetEasy optimizes classroom engagement in fixed seating grids. It fuses multimodal sensing (wristband physiology, 4K video, environmental data) and trains a v-Gage model grounded in a revised ISEQ. Each week, two-week engagement forecasts are mapped to a student-seat utility matrix, and CP-SAT generates seating plans under visual-access and social-dynamics constraints. In a four-week deployment (23 students, 331 classes), v-Gage converged across affective, behavioral, cognitive, and overall dimensions, cutting RMSE from 0.75 to 0.53. Optimization raised mean engagement from 0.30 to 0.70, with over two-thirds of seats reaching high engagement and back-row low-activity patterns markedly reduced. These results show that, without hardware changes, interpretable, data-driven seating strategies can substantially enhance engagement. The multimodal "assessment + optimization" paradigm offers a transferable, sustainable path to culturally responsive, differentiated spatial design amid global homogenization.

Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have shown that improving neural network architectures can yield substantial gains in sample efficiency and asymptotic performance without altering the underlying algorithms. In contrast, work on multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL), which aims to discover a set of policies that balance trade-offs among conflicting objectives, has predominantly focused on algorithmic innovations, leaving the area of architectures underexplored. While the optimal policies and value functions can differ significantly depending on the trade-offs, MORL algorithms commonly represent them with simple feedforward networks conditioned on the trade-off. This raises the question of whether the performance of the algorithms could be improved with more expressive function approximators. In this paper, we integrate recent advances in neural network design: (i) observation and feature normalization, (ii) weight normalization, and (iii) modeling of distributional returns with an entropy-regularized MORL algorithm. The empirical results across standard continuous control benchmarks demonstrate that these changes substantially improve the quality of the produced solution sets without requiring major changes to the underlying algorithm.

Developing foundation generative models for endoscopy is limited by the gap between natural and clinical images and the computational cost of training large Diffusion Transformers. Although representation alignment has improved efficiency in general computer vision, its role within the highly specialized endoscopic image space remains unclear. We introduce REVEAL (Representation-driven Endoscopic Visual Embedding Alignment), the largest generative foundation model for endoscopy to date, trained on GastroNet-5M (GN-5M), a multicenter dataset of 5 million endoscopic frames. Instead of depending on out-of-domain priors, REVEAL employs encoders pretrained directly on the endoscopic distribution to align diffusion latents with domain-specific visual features, preserving fine textures and intricate anatomical structures. Beyond image generation, REVEAL also serves as a powerful feature extractor; in multiple benchmarks, it delivers performance that is competitive with, and in several cases exceeds, endoscopic foundation models such as EndoViT and Endo-FM, specifically tuned for classification tasks, while demonstrating strong representation robustness under realistic imaging corruptions. REVEAL produces high-fidelity images and maintains robust structural coherence in latent-space edits such as inpainting and outpainting. This high-capacity backbone lowers the computational threshold for building specialized clinical tools, offering an open, versatile foundation for conditional synthesis, segmentation, and out-of-distribution detection in future intelligent gastroenterology systems.

Memory systems have shown promise for improving agent performance, but their potential remains largely unexplored for small language models, which struggle to generate sufficient successful trajectories on their own. We propose Agent Memory Distillation (AMD), a training-free framework that transfers structured knowledge from a large teacher agent to a small student agent through hierarchical memory. AMD constructs three complementary memory types from successful teacher trajectories: Workflow memory encodes task-level strategies, Subtask memory provides concrete behavioral examples at an intermediate granularity, and Function memory captures per-function calling conventions and common pitfalls. Workflow and Subtask memories are injected proactively at the start of each task, while Function memory is retrieved reactively upon tool-calling errors. We evaluate AMD on three tool-use benchmarks using four student models (4B-8B parameters) with GPT-5-mini as the teacher, achieving average accuracy gains of 27.2%p, 11.2%p, and 3.4%p on AppWorld, BFCL V3, and ToolSandbox, while consistently outperforming existing memory-based baselines. Further analysis shows that Subtask memory contributes the largest gains, teacher effectiveness depends on both teacher capability and student compatibility, and 4B-sized students benefit most from AMD.

Autonomous LLM agents with tool execution capabilities introduce severe security risks through prompt injection, goal hijacking, and unauthorized action invocation. Existing guardrails rely on unverified, host local software filters system prompts, semantic classifiers, policy engines that share the execution environment of the untrusted agent, offering no guarantee to an external observer that a safety policy was correctly evaluated. A compromised host produces no evidence of its own failure. This paper presents NiyamAI, an intent bound runtime guardrail architecture providing cryptographically verifiable execution integrity for autonomous agents. At session initialization, permitted tools and operational constraints are sealed into an immutable Intent Contract under a SHA256 commitment. Every tool invocation is intercepted by a deterministic authority gate and classified by a dedicated neural Judge (11->8->2 feedforward network). For each authorized action, NiyamAI generates a succinct zkSNARK proof certifying correct policy evaluation under the committed contract; execution proceeds only after that proof verifies. Across 2,000 AgentSafetyBench scenarios under 5fold stratified crossvalidation with out of fold scoring, NiyamAI achieves 88.8% F1 at a 1.0% false positive rate (bootstrap 95% CI [85.5%, 92.1%]), against 66.8% for Llama Prompt Guard 2, 46.2% for GPTOSSSafeguard, and 40.4% for NeMo Guardrails; McNemar's exact test confirms each margin at p < 0.0001. Proof generation adds 1.7 s per approved action, verification 51 ms, with an 18.6 KB proof verifiable by any third party without access to model parameters. We further subject NiyamAI's own enforcement mechanism to 18 adversarial vectors across six classes, disclosing two implementation vulnerabilities identified and remediated during development.

Simulating complex fluid flows requires capturing full equilibrium distributions rather than just mean trajectories, yet high-fidelity solvers remain computationally prohibitive. Recent advances, such as Diffusion Graph Networks (DGNs), have combined diffusion models with graph neural networks to sample equilibrium states directly from unstructured meshes, enabling distributional accuracy even from short simulations. However, graph-based diffusion approaches suffer from hand-crafted architectural constraints, limited receptive fields in message passing, and costly multi-scale designs, which restrict scalability to larger and more complex domains. We propose Fluid-DiT, a Graph-Free Diffusion Transformer that replaces graph message passing with attention-based denoising, eliminating explicit graph design while preserving the ability to model distributions of chaotic flows. Our framework introduces a latent-space formulation that disentangles geometric fidelity from distributional learning, reducing high-frequency artifacts and accelerating sampling. By leveraging the transformer's global receptive field, Fluid-DiT naturally captures both local flow structures and long-range correlations without requiring hierarchical graph coarsening. On canonical benchmarks including laminar cylinder wakes, ellipse-flow systems, and turbulent 3D wing experiments, Fluid-DiT consistently outperforms graph-based diffusion baselines in both sample quality and distributional accuracy, achieving higher $R^2$ correlations and lower Wasserstein distances. Moreover, it generalizes robustly from short, incomplete trajectories to unseen Reynolds numbers and geometries, demonstrating strong scalability.