Peer Revenue Play credits. Real papers.

Papers

Fresh from arXiv, typeset properly. Highlighted words trade on the market.

Computer Science Artificial Intelligence

cs.AI Watch Artificial Intelligence

Friday 4 September

Artificial Intelligence

A Deep Generative Model for Synthesizing Labeled Wireless Signals

Yuxiao Li, Keke Hu, Santiago Mazuelas et al. (+1 more)

Wireless signals with position-related labels are pivotal for both performance evaluation and model training in the realm of wireless sensing. However, acquiring real-world datasets is often challenged by significant measurement and labeling costs. Traditional methods for synthesizing labeled wireless signals typically rely on environmental models, leading to extensive hyper-parameter tuning and inadequate realism for comprehensive model training purposes. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel deep learning (DL)-based method, namely Inter-Instance Generative Adversarial Networks (IIns-GAN), to generate realistic labeled wireless signals. The generated signals are particularly adaptive to different environment scenarios and well-suited for various model training tasks, including distance estimation and environment identification. We have conducted extensive experiments on public Ultra-Wideband (UWB) datasets to evaluate the realism and utility of the generated signals. The results demonstrate that the signals generated by IIns-GAN mirror the physical characteristics of real-world measurements, and significantly contribute to the improvement of model training in diverse wireless sensing tasks.
Read the full abstract

All authors Yuxiao Li, Keke Hu, Santiago Mazuelas, Yuan Shen

Artificial Intelligence

Multi-Step Tool-Calling over Korean Open Public APIs: A Benchmark and a Data-Synthesis Recipe

Dain Kim, Eungi Cho, Kyumin Kim et al. (+2 more)

Data-sovereignty regulations increasingly require public institutions to deploy open-source, on-premise LLM agents that chain multiple tool-calls across live government APIs. However, open-source models consistently underperform in this multi-step setting, and no existing benchmark measures the gap. We introduce the Korean Open Public API Benchmark (KOPA-Bench), comprising 145 real-world tasks. To close this gap, we present EDGE, an Execution-grounded Dynamic Graph for tool-calling data synthEsis driven by live execution. EDGE builds a graph of how each tool's output can feed another's input, keeps only the links that succeed when actually called against the live APIs, and traverses these verified links to synthesize executable multi-step trajectories. Fine-tuned via GRPO on the resulting dataset, our 9B model nearly matches the untuned 27B model from the same family, improving substantially not only on KOPA-Bench but also on the BFCL benchmark.
Read the full abstract

All authors Dain Kim, Eungi Cho, Kyumin Kim, Shinyeong Noh, Kyuseong Lim

Artificial Intelligence

Necessary or Sufficient? Evaluating LLM Explanations With Behavioural Evidence

Urja Pawar, Rajitha Ramanayake, Nabeel Kemal et al. (+6 more)

LLM decision components that can operate within agent workflows often produce action-relevant recommendations or judgements together with explanations. Operators may use the named factors to monitor a system, diagnose errors, or decide when to escalate an output. Such use assumes that the explanations agree with the component's observable decision behaviour. We test two interpretations of the named factors: necessity, meaning that changing a factor would change the output, and sufficiency, meaning that retaining it while removing other changeable information would preserve the output. We evaluate these interpretations in two synthetic use cases: recommending advisors to clients and judging prompts for harmfulness or risk. Models return an output and the top three factors that most influenced it. Controlled black-box interventions estimate a necessity score for each factor by measuring how often changing it changes the output, and a sufficiency score by measuring how often retaining it preserves the output. Across eight models from the Claude, GPT, and Gemini families, the mean Spearman correlations between the cited ranking and the necessity and sufficiency scores are 0.349 and 0.354 for advisor recommendation, and 0.431 and 0.580 for prompt monitoring. Furthermore, an uncited factor scores above the lowest-scoring cited factor in 57.6% of advisor responses under necessity and 58.1% under sufficiency; the corresponding prompt-monitoring rates are 25.8% and 8.9%. The cited top three contain useful information but do not reliably identify the three factors with the strongest measured influence under necessity or sufficiency. The framework provides a black-box reliability check for explanations used in agent oversight while remaining scoped to individual LLM decisions.
Read the full abstract

All authors Urja Pawar, Rajitha Ramanayake, Nabeel Kemal, Ashwin Kandath, Owen O'Neill, Guillaume Bourgeon, Houssem Chatbri, Christopher Martin, Vadim Pertsovskiy

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Reflection-aware Generative Novel View Synthesis

GeonU Kim, Shin Dong-Yeon and Tae-Hyun Oh

We propose Ref-GeNVS, a training-free, reflection-aware method for generative novel view synthesis (NVS) in mirror scenes. Existing multi-view diffusion models often fail to recognize the mirror in the scene and cannot exploit reflected content for scene generation. To fix this issue without additional training, our key idea is to treat a mirror image as two complementary views. From input images, we estimate the mirror plane and reflect camera poses to form virtual views. Based on this virtual view setup, we propose a two-stage generation method consisting of Mirror-gated attention and Reflection injection, which enables reflection-consistent NVS by explicitly leveraging reflection relationships in a multi-view diffusion model. Ref-GeNVS inherits the strong generalizability of the multi-view diffusion backbone, while it does not require finetuning. On synthetic and real scenes including mirrors, Ref-GeNVS outperforms recent generative NVS methods by generating reflection-consistent and contextually coherent novel views, revealing scene structure visible only through mirrors. Project page: https://kim-geonu.github.io/Ref-GeNVS/
Read the full abstract

Artificial Intelligence

Molecular Déjà Vu: Digit-Level Retrieval of Molecular Properties in Frontier Language Models

Matthias Busch, Marius Tacke, Sviatlana V. Lamaka et al. (+4 more)

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly employed to predict molecular properties. However, prediction error alone cannot distinguish prediction from retrieval of published values. We audit 22 frontier models on 12 molecular regression datasets in a zero-shot setting, assessed against a molecule-blind reference derived from each dataset's labels. Significant retrieval is concentrated on 5 datasets, with isolated flagged LLMs elsewhere. Increasing the reasoning setting raises the number of flagged model–dataset combinations from 47 to 89 of 264. An in-context blinding experiment reduces retrieval but leaves a quarter of the combinations flagged. Blinding changes model rankings and increases errors. Because blinding also removes chemically interpretable structure, the error increase can only be partially attributed to reduced retrieval.
Read the full abstract

All authors Matthias Busch, Marius Tacke, Sviatlana V. Lamaka, Mikhail L. Zheludkevich, Christian J. Cyron, Roland C. Aydin, Christian Feiler

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.RO

What Matters, When? Diagnosing and Improving Conditional Visual Grounding in Visuomotor Imitation Policies

Vivek Chavan, Pengtao Xie, Yahuan Shi et al. (+3 more)

Visuomotor imitation policies can achieve high performance under in-distribution visual conditions yet fail when visually similar objects or receptacles are introduced. We study this behavior as a problem of conditional visual grounding: the visual target required for successful control changes with the manipulation phase and, in more complex tasks, with the observed task state. Using Action Chunking with Transformers (ACT), we systematically introduce distractor objects and receptacles with controlled color and shape similarity and localize failures to picking and placement. We find that distractor sensitivity is specific to both the type of visual similarity and the manipulation stage. Guided by this diagnosis, we evaluate distractor augmentation, phase-dependent attention regularization, and appearance-based visual prompting as complementary interventions for improving target selection while preserving spatial information required for control. These interventions substantially improve robustness in simulation and on a physical UR3e. We further examine the same failure pattern in a pretrained vision-language-action policy on a state-conditioned instrument-handling task, where the observed state of a medical instrument determines the correct destination. Together, the results show that visual distractors can cause incorrect object or destination selection even when the underlying manipulation skill remains intact, and that explicitly improving target selection can substantially recover performance across distinct visuomotor policy-learning regimes.
Read the full abstract

All authors Vivek Chavan, Pengtao Xie, Yahuan Shi, Oliver Heimann, Kevin Haninger, Jörg Krüger

Artificial Intelligence

CUA-Universe: A Scalable and Dynamic Environment for Hybrid GUI+CLI Agents

Haoting Shi, Wenhao Wang, Weicheng Fang et al. (+6 more)

Computer-use agents have advanced on benchmarks like OSWorld and AndroidWorld, but still act mostly through the GUI, often producing inefficient trajectories. Real-world computer work is hybrid, combining visual-state inspection with precise, high-throughput command-line operations, so capable agents must coordinate both modalities over shared application state. Yet scalable hybrid environments remain scarce because supporting both GUI and CLI over real applications typically requires substantial manual engineering for each application. Existing agents also struggle to use the two interfaces complementarily: CLI-native agents lack visual perception for tasks involving interface state or layout, while GUI-native agents are inefficient for operations better executed through commands. We introduce CUA-Universe, a scalable environment-to-data pipeline that turns real desktop software into hybrid GUI+CLI environments. App-Forge adapts applications into reproducible VMs and command-line surfaces it discovers, wraps, or generates, scaling to 16 applications; Task-Weave synthesizes diverse hybrid tasks of controllable difficulty from reusable operations over seed files; and Path-Steer steers rollouts along efficient hybrid paths and harvests verified trajectories for post-training. Training on this data shifts behavior from inefficient GUI interaction and brittle CLI scripting toward effective GUI+CLI orchestration. Our 9B model improves both success and efficiency on CUA-Verse (Score +39.3 pts; -37% steps, -60% tokens), OSWorld (SR +16.8 pts; -57% steps, -44% tokens), and OSWorld-MCP (Score +7.84 pts; -27% steps, -30% tokens). CUA-Universe provides a scalable path toward more capable and efficient computer-use agents.
Read the full abstract

All authors Haoting Shi, Wenhao Wang, Weicheng Fang, Yaozhong Liang, Tian Jin, Pengxiang Zhao, Guangyi Liu, Siheng Chen, Yanfeng Wang

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CR

When LLM Decompilers Recompile More and Preserve Less

Chang Liu, Edward Raff and Kristopher Micinski

Decompilation recovers high-level source from compiled machine code and serves as a foundation for security tasks such as vulnerability detection and malware analysis. Traditional decompilers like Ghidra and Hex-Rays expose whatever they cannot resolve as visible placeholders and often emit pseudocode that will not compile or execute; LLM-based decompilers produce clean, idiomatic C and are now judged almost entirely by recompilability and re-executability: whether the output builds and passes its shipped input/output tests. We show that these metrics can reward the wrong path: a function may recompile and pass every shipped test yet diverge on other legitimate inputs, and a disclosed vulnerability may disappear from the recompiled code with no visible trace of the crash. Neither failure is caught by existing suites. To address this gap, we propose Decompile-Diverge, a behavioral comparison oracle not relying on fixed or hand-crafted tests: for each function it synthesizes a driver, grows a fuzzing corpus from the reference, and reruns the decompiled code on the same inputs to detect changes in the function's behavior. Across eight systems in nine configurations on established LLM decompilation corpora, candidates that pass every shipped test still diverge from the original on our input corpus: 4.9% overall, and as many as 13% for a single system. On 300 real GitHub library functions and 287 CVE-grounded functions, recompilability and behavioral agreement can come apart: the strongest refinement LLM lifts Ghidra's build rate from 75% to 90%, while its Matched rate falls from 74% to 62%; on disclosed vulnerabilities, up to one tenth exhibit Crash Absence in its output. Source-level analysis traces this divergence to introduced fields, types, callees, and guards that replace the visible unknowns traditional tools leave behind.
Read the full abstract

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.PL

Design Docs Are All You Need: An AI-native Machine-Learning Performance Tool

Samuel Kushnir, Kimia Noorbakhsh, Kavya Sreedhar et al. (+6 more)

Machine-learning performance modeling is a uniquely hostile terrain for long-lived software: the assumptions baked into today's abstractions are invalidated by tomorrow's models and systems, forcing perpetual refactoring of performance-modeling frameworks. Meanwhile, AI coding agents have become fast and capable enough that regenerating an entire library is cheaper than paying down the tech debt of incrementally patching it. We describe SMART, a rigorous symbolic performance-modeling library for ML systems whose main branch contains almost no code: the repository is a DAG of self-contained natural-language design docs, coding sub-agents regenerate the implementation from only the docs on new version updates, and every human change is a natural-language edit to a doc–self-documenting by construction. Two ingredients make regeneration reliable: (i) a design-doc style built around step-by-step worked examples that act as in-context demonstrations for the generating agents, and (ii) a minimal, recursively defined operator IR with symbolic (SymPy) cost expressions, a fast analytical roll-up mode for large sweeps, and a slow modulo-scheduling mode for fine-grained schedule studies. Regenerated implementations reproduce hand-audited reference models–including DeepSeek-V3 serving on a TPU pod slice–to round-off precision, suggesting that design docs–not code–can be the durable artifact for ML-systems co-design tools.
Read the full abstract

All authors Samuel Kushnir, Kimia Noorbakhsh, Kavya Sreedhar, Liqun Cheng, Ming Liu, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Mohammad Alizadeh, Fred Kjolstad, Suvinay Subramanian

Artificial Intelligence

Who Should Grade My Work? Student Perspectives on Transparent AI-Assisted Writing Assessment in Higher Education

Rayed AlGhamdi

The integration of GenAI tools into higher education assessment raises important questions about how students understand, interpret, and respond to AI-mediated evaluation. As instructors increasingly explore AI tools for providing feedback, prior research has examined whether GenAI-generated feedback improves writing performance and how students perceive its usefulness; comparatively little is known, however, about how students interpret such evaluation when they are explicitly informed that an AI system, rather than a human instructor, produced the feedback and the score. This study reports findings from a qualitative pedagogical inquiry conducted in an undergraduate technical communication course for computing students at a Saudi public university. Thirteen male undergraduate computing students completed an in-class handwritten writing task; the scanned submissions were evaluated by ChatGPT using a rubric-based prompt aligned with the task objectives. Students were then explicitly informed that ChatGPT had generated the score and feedback and were invited to reflect on the evaluation in writing. Inductive thematic analysis of these reflections identified four themes: perceived usefulness of feedback; awareness of AI's contextual and pedagogical limitations; conditional trust, distinguishing feedback utility from evaluative authority; and reflection on the institutional and pedagogical role of the human instructor. Participants accepted GenAI feedback as useful for surface-level revision but consistently positioned the human instructor as the appropriate authority over grading decisions. The study identifies this as a distinction between feedback utility and evaluative authority, two judgments that students treat as analytically separate rather than as opposite ends of a single approval scale...
Read the full abstract

Artificial Intelligence

Does Your Agent's Memory Survive a Model Upgrade? A Controlled Study of Memory Portability

Ankit Goyal and Jaideep Ray

Model upgrades are routine; memory migrations are not. An agent can keep the same memory store and still forget: a new model may interpret old notes differently, mixed embedding versions may break retrieval, and repair may fail without the original evidence. We compare memory as the same history is preserved verbatim for long-context reading (LC-RAW), divided into chunks for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), compressed by a model into natural-language notes (NOTES), or normalized into a fixed-schema knowledge graph (KG-fixed). The study uses 48 synthetic histories with randomized answer codes, exact scoring, and two open-weight models with sub 10 billion parameters. Our measurements show that fixed-schema structures transfer reliably, with KG-fixed accuracy changing by only $+0.0004 \pm 0.0020$ following a writer swap. Conversely, compressed NOTES exhibit high model coupling, with accuracy shifting asymmetrically by $+9.91$ or $-13.28$ percentage points depending on the specific migration direction. In RAG systems, partial embedding migrations using a 50/50 mixed index capture only a 4.96-point accuracy improvement, forfeiting the majority of the 11.90-point gain achieved through full re-embedding. Diagnostic decomposition attributes 80% ($0.467 \pm 0.014$) of the NOTES accuracy deficit to information lost during initial construction, whereas retrieval failures drive 81% ($0.364 \pm 0.012$) of the RAG deficit. Finally, store-only repair of NOTES fails to reach a 90% performance recovery target in all 48 test cases, whereas retaining the raw source history enables successful recovery in 34 of 48 cases for one tested direction. These findings highlight the necessity of direction-specific migration testing, strict embedding space isolation, and the retention of source histories for memory repair.
Read the full abstract

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CR

The History Is the Detector: Executing CVE Patch History, End-to-End

Qiushi Wu, Kevin Eykholt, Youngja Park et al. (+4 more)

Public vulnerability databases collect rich information about known software flaws, including their weakness types, affected components, and related patches. Fixing commits provide the exact code changes that removed these flaws. While these records capture why the original code was unsafe, they are documented mainly for human inspection rather than automated reuse. Consequently, the same unsafe conditions may still exist elsewhere in code without a known advisory, leaving much of this detection knowledge unused. We present BUGSTONE-E2E, a framework that transforms vulnerability history into executable detection rules and validates their findings. First, BUGSTONE-E2E mines reusable rules from verified fixing commits, capturing scan anchors, fix semantics, and CVE provenance and organizing them by CWE and language. Second, detection follows a funnel-shaped pipeline: early stages process a large pool of candidates using lightweight analysis, while later stages apply increasingly capable and expensive models to a shrinking set of targets. Specifically, BUGSTONE-E2E first enumerates call sites matching rule anchors using Tree-sitter, then removes benign sites using lightweight heuristics without LLM calls. Next, LLM-based agents inspect the remaining candidates guided by the rule. Following this inspection, the system re-triages surviving candidates and builds runtime verifications, then generates scope-checked patches validated via two-sided differential tests. Using 19,325 high-severity CVEs from 2022 to 2026, BUGSTONE-E2E identifies 2,710 fixing commits and constructs 1,033 detection rules across 56 CWE families, packaged into 172 skills. When applied across 14 programs, it produced runtime evidence for 644 findings. These results demonstrate that CVE history can be turned into an executable workflow, transforming past vulnerabilities into reproducible detection and repair.
Read the full abstract

All authors Qiushi Wu, Kevin Eykholt, Youngja Park, Xiaokui Shu, Dhilung Kirat, Douglas Lee Schales, Ian Molloy

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Lightweight Vision Transformer Compression for On-Device Plant Disease Detection in Resource-Constrained Agricultural Field Conditions

Mahadev Sunil Kumar, Bhavika Gondi, Desaisetty Venkata Satya Sai Swapnith et al. (+6 more)

Chilli (Capsicum annuum) is one of India's most economically significant crops, yet its productivity is persistently threatened by diseases that are difficult to identify without expert intervention. While Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved high classification accuracy, their large computational footprint makes deployment on resource constrained devices challenging. Existing compression approaches typically address pruning, quantization, and knowledge distillation in isolation, leaving the potential benefits and interactions of their combined application insufficiently explored. We propose a unified Vision Transformer compression framework that combines Hessian-Balanced Adaptive Block Pruning (H-BAC), guided by second-order sensitivity estimation, with quantization and attention-based knowledge distillation. To systematically identify the most effective configuration within each compression family, each technique is first evaluated independently through controlled ablation studies, after which the best-performing components are integrated into a sequential deployment pipeline tailored to real-world agricultural constraints. On a chilli 3-class village-split dataset with a genuine cross-village, cross-device out-of-distribution test split, the resulting compressed models match or exceed the 95.13% FP32 baseline's accuracy, alongside 74-98% model size reduction, and the fully integrated compression pipeline achieves a 54.5x size reduction (327.42 MB to 6.01 MB) at 95.13 +/- 2.32% accuracy across four tested configurations. A direct comparison further reveals that, on this dataset, a directly-trained student of the same final size, without pruning or distillation, reaches comparable accuracy of 94.87%, at the same 6.01 MB INT8 size, indicating where H-BAC and knowledge distillation are, and are not yet shown to be, worth their computational cost.
Read the full abstract

All authors Mahadev Sunil Kumar, Bhavika Gondi, Desaisetty Venkata Satya Sai Swapnith, Gangireddy Rahul Jogi, Sudheesh Manalil, Arnab Raha, Amitava Mukherjee, Parthasarathy Seethapathy, G. Gopakumar

Artificial Intelligence

Technical Manual for a Toolkit for Measuring Contextual Individuation in Transformer Language Models

José Luciano Verçosa Marques, Frederico Jorge Heitmann, Daniel Omar Perez et al. (+2 more)

A transformer language model assigns a single, context-independent vector to a word type at its embedding layer, yet is widely believed to individuate that word's occurrences by context in its later layers. Testing this belief cleanly requires a construct that holds the word form fixed while its context and intended sense vary in a controlled, labeled way. This manual documents an open toolkit built around such a construct, which we call a bridge form: a single written word that recurs, unchanged, across two or more subject domains with a different sense in each. We describe, and justify, every stage of the pipeline: the declarative specification of bridge forms and their source domains, corpus acquisition from Wikipedia, occurrence localization, layer-wise representation extraction, a domain-pairwise silhouette measurement of separation in the model's representation space, and a paired visualization protocol. Each design choice is presented together with the methodological failure mode it is meant to avoid (sense contamination from overly broad category labels, the multi-group bias of the silhouette coefficient, subword-tokenization misalignment, and axis-comparability artifacts in dimensionality-reduced plots, among others). This manuscript is a methodological and implementation reference: it does not report or interpret empirical outcomes of running the toolkit on any particular model or bridge-form set. The toolkit, its full source, and the corpora used to exercise it are archived separately (Section 9) under a persistent identifier, and are intended to be cited as an instrument by studies that use it to produce and interpret empirical results.
Read the full abstract

All authors José Luciano Verçosa Marques, Frederico Jorge Heitmann, Daniel Omar Perez, Marcelo Vinicius de Paula, Tárcio André dos Santos Barros

Artificial Intelligence

LLM-Driven Algorithm Design for Quantum Circuit Synthesis based on Binary Decision Diagrams

Yoonju Sim, Federico Berto, Chuanbo Hua et al. (+2 more)

Quantum circuits are central to implementing quantum algorithms on quantum devices, where quantum gates must be reversible. Many quantum algorithms rely on Boolean functions, which must therefore be implemented reversibly within quantum circuits. Reversible circuit synthesis provides a way to translate such Boolean functions into reversible circuits. Binary decision diagrams (BDDs) offer a scalable approach to this task, but the resulting BDDs and circuits depend heavily on variable ordering. Existing ordering heuristics commonly minimize BDD size because it is closely tied to the circuit size. However, BDD size is an imperfect proxy for the quantum cost of the synthesized circuit (QCC). We propose QuantumEvo, an evolutionary framework that uses an LLM as a heuristic generator for QCC-aware BDD variable ordering. Instead of predicting orderings directly, QuantumEvo searches over ordering heuristics initialized from multiple heuristic families. Candidate heuristics directly manipulate variable orderings using standard BDD operations and are selected by downstream QCC. The discovered heuristic, HGA-QE, modifies the sifting step inside a genetic algorithm so that the procedure is better aligned with QCC. Across the benchmark set, HGA-QE achieves a 70.9% tie-or-win rate against the per-function best baseline and is strictly best on 13.5% of the functions. The results demonstrate broadly competitive QCC performance, with HGA-QE showing a clearer relative advantage in strict wins on the two benchmark suites drawn from sources different from the data used for heuristic discovery.
Read the full abstract

All authors Yoonju Sim, Federico Berto, Chuanbo Hua, Jinkyoo Park, Changhyun Kwon

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.RO

RoboSPA: Can VLA Models Go Beyond Simple Scenes and Short-Horizon Tasks?

Zhenxuan Fan, Bo Zhang, Yutong Lin et al. (+9 more)

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown promising progress in language-conditioned robotic manipulation. However, existing datasets and benchmarks mainly evaluate task completion under predefined settings, offering limited insight into model reasoning under increasing spatial and procedural complexity. We introduce RoboSPA (Robot Spatial-Procedural Assessment), a large-scale robotic manipulation dataset and benchmark for diagnosing embodied reasoning in VLA models. RoboSPA focuses on two core dimensions, Fine-Grained Spatial Reasoning and Long-Horizon Procedural Planning, covering 10 task categories and 56 base tasks. Each task is instantiated across five difficulty levels, yielding 280 variants with increasing spatial ambiguity and procedural complexity. We collect 527K trajectories across multiple embodiments and diverse scenes. Beyond binary success rate, RoboSPA introduces diagnostic metrics for more detailed evaluation. Experiments on representative VLA models show that current systems still struggle with complex spatial relations, precise low-level execution, and memory-intensive planning. These results establish RoboSPA as a challenging diagnostic benchmark for developing more capable, reliable, and generalizable embodied agents. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/fanzhenxuan/RoboSPA.
Read the full abstract

All authors Zhenxuan Fan, Bo Zhang, Yutong Lin, Yuqian Yuan, Juekai Lin, Liang Liang, Zhuoyi Huang, Wenqiao Zhang, Juncheng Li, Siliang Tang, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang

Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models for HVAC Operations in Building Energy Systems: A Critical Review of Methods, Applications, and Deployment Readiness

Alexander Neubauer, Tianzhen Hong, Han Li et al. (+4 more)

Building automation systems generate rich sensor data yet remain insight-poor because heterogeneous point naming, missing metadata, and fragmented documentation obstruct their operational use. This systematic review analyses and codes 66 peer-reviewed studies on large language models (LLMs) for HVAC operations published between 2023 and March 2026. Each study is classified across five application families and three LLM method families and assessed for evidence realism, deployment readiness, and the responsibility boundary between the LLM and physical HVAC decisions. The corpus is concentrated in building energy modelling (BEM, 32 of 66 papers), while load forecasting remains too sparse for subfield-level conclusions. Only four studies reach pilot-level evidence, and none reports sustained operational deployment. No study was classified as ready-now for industry adoption; three were near-term and 63 research-only. Nevertheless, several bounded, human-in-the-loop uses merit near-term trials, including point-name normalisation, document-grounded operator support, BEM workflow assistance, and advisory interfaces around physics-based controllers. Conventional machine learning (ML), model predictive control (MPC), reinforcement learning (RL) and ontology-based tools remain more adopted for high-frequency control, short-horizon numerical forecasting, and well-posed ontology mapping, while autonomous agentic operation and unvalidated occupant proxies remain research-stage. Current evidence therefore supports LLMs primarily as semantic and workflow layers rather than autonomous HVAC controllers. Future work should prioritise field-validated benchmarks, orchestration evaluation under operational constraints, and LLM-MPC/RL architectures with bounded latency and verifiable safety properties.
Read the full abstract

All authors Alexander Neubauer, Tianzhen Hong, Han Li, Mengbo Yu, Amin Darbandi, Yannick Fürst, Martin Kriegel

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG

How Does mHC Use Its Residual Streams? Selective Routing and Near-Identity Mixing

Pengxiang Zhao, Xing Li, Xianzhi Yu et al. (+2 more)

Hyper-Connections and their manifold-constrained variant mHC widen a residual pathway from one stream to n, yet how trained models use this capacity remains unclear: how broadly blocks read and write, how strongly the residual pathway mixes streams, and whether the streams carry distinct representations. We examine these properties in the four-stream residual pathway of DeepSeek-V4-Flash using effective stream counts, cross-stream residual weights, and inter-stream cosine similarity. Read/write routing is concentrated but varies across depth: a typical attention or FFN site effectively uses about two streams, while the dominant stream changes across layers and the representations remain directionally distinct. Residual mixing is modest and occurs primarily in early layers; in layers 22-42, the pathway mostly carries each stream forward separately. Targeted interventions establish the functional significance of these patterns. Replacing the late mixers by identity increases C4 perplexity by only 1.9% and preserves the six-task average score, whereas replacing the early mixers increases perplexity by 41%. Fixing each early mixer to its C4 diagnostic mean increases perplexity by only 0.2% and reduces the average score by 0.25 percentage points, showing that its site-specific structure matters more than its token-wise variation on the evaluated metrics. Likewise, retaining the three largest routing weights per token at every site increases perplexity by at most 2.7% and changes the average score by at most 0.4 points. Thus, the studied model realizes only part of the flexibility afforded by four-stream mHC: individual blocks rarely require all four streams, and late residual mixing provides little measured benefit.
Read the full abstract

All authors Pengxiang Zhao, Xing Li, Xianzhi Yu, Wei Guo, Zhenhua Dong

Artificial Intelligence

RISE: Recursive Improvement via Self-Extrapolating Policy Distillation

Yang Li, Semih Yavuz and Shafiq Joty

On-policy distillation (OPD) provides dense, per-token supervision for language model post-training, but its effectiveness is bottlenecked by teacher quality: external teachers suffer from distribution mismatch, while self-distillation with privileged conditioning is limited by in-context learning capacity. We propose RISE (Recursive Improvement via Self-Extrapolating Policy Distillation), which constructs a synthetic teacher directly from the model's own RLVR training trajectory. By extrapolating the displacement between the current checkpoint and a trailing anchor—in parameter space or output logit space—RISE converts a sparse outcome-induced parameter update into a dense token-level target, without any external model or privileged conditioning. RISE combines RLVR and OPD in a complementary loop: outcome rewards ground the extrapolation toward correct reasoning, while the extrapolated teacher refines token-level decisions. Moreover, since the teacher is refreshed every iteration as the student improves, distillation becomes a recursive improvement mechanism rather than a one-shot compression step. Experiments spanning mathematical reasoning, multi-domain STEM, code generation, and multi-turn agentic tasks show that RISE outperforms RLVR-only training and on-policy self-distillation across all settings.
Read the full abstract

Artificial Intelligence

Beyond Aggregate Scores: Behavioral Correctness Assumptions for Assessing Reference-Based Automatic Evaluation Methods

Maria Mahbub, Ashley Rice, Michael R. Munroe et al. (+2 more)

Automated reference-based evaluation methods play a critical role in assessing natural language generation systems. Existing meta-evaluation primarily measures agreement with human judgments or benchmark labels, providing limited insight into evaluator behavior under controlled conditions. We introduce behavioral correctness assumptions, a complementary framework for evaluating reference-based automatic evaluation methods. We define a taxonomy of correctness-preserving and correctness-altering assumptions and operationalize them through controlled response transformations that specify expected scoring behaviors. We evaluate diverse lexical, character-level, semantic, LLM-based, and hybrid evaluators and analyze their assumption-level behavior, stability, sensitivity, repeat-run variability, configuration sensitivity, and reproducibility. Our experiments reveal distinct behavioral trade-offs across evaluation paradigms: no evaluator satisfies all proposed correctness assumptions, and evaluators with similar aggregate performance can exhibit substantially different behavioral profiles. These findings demonstrate that behavioral correctness assumptions provide diagnostic information obscured by conventional aggregate meta-evaluation.
Read the full abstract

All authors Maria Mahbub, Ashley Rice, Michael R. Munroe, Amidu Kamara, Amir Sadovnik

Artificial Intelligence

GUT: Quantifying and Optimizing the Reasoning Uncertainty of LLMs via Graph Complexity

Shuang Liang, Xin-Yu Hu, Xiang-Jun Ou et al. (+1 more)

Recent years have witnessed great advances in the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the reasoning processes of LLMs often exhibit uncertainty, where LLMs often produce a proliferation of divergent branches at each reasoning step even when fed the same prompting inputs, and certain branches exhibit evidently incredible, even nonsensical, reasoning chains and results. In this paper, we propose the Graph-complexity-based UncerTainty (GUT) method for investigating the reasoning uncertainty of LLMs. The key idea of GUT is to characterize the potential branches of each reasoning chain with a directed acyclic graph, thereby ensuring that all potential branches are comprehensively covered within the graph space. Building upon this recognition, we further build two modules of GUT, that is, a Quantification (GUT-Q) module and an Optimization (GUT-O) module, for quantifying and reducing the reasoning uncertainty of LLMs, respectively. GUT-Q measures LLM reasoning uncertainty by approximating the reasoning space complexity with graph complexity. GUT-O implements uncertainty optimization by treating negative uncertainty as the reward function in reinforcement learning. Experimental results conducted on four LLMs and five datasets validate the effectiveness of GUT.
Read the full abstract

All authors Shuang Liang, Xin-Yu Hu, Xiang-Jun Ou, Shao-Qun Zhang

Artificial Intelligence

Interchangeable in Role, Not in History: Replacing Members of Formed LLM Teams

Jianxin Gao, Runze Li, Tianyi Yu et al. (+3 more)

Multiagent LLM systems often treat a role as a slot: when a member is replaced, any agent competent at the role is expected to fill it. We test this view on teams whose members keep short written notebooks. A one-seat swap replays a formed, frozen team with its own member, with a same-role newcomer carrying another team's notebook for that role, or with a newcomer carrying none. In cooperative cooking, wildfire response and medical question answering, the experienced newcomer, averaged over seats, outscores the one without a notebook in every setting, so the usual comparison would approve it. Against the original team, the same replacement falls short in every setting, and the team spends more messages per unit of progress. On the hardest cooking level, the shortfall appears only after the team has worked together, persists across model families and decoding temperatures, and narrows by two thirds with added planning-only members. Because the team's history is written down, we can take it apart. In the default configuration on that level, notebooks from the same donor teams leave a newcomer that leads, holding the recipe, worse off than no notebook and one that follows better off. The notebook lines about the partner reproduce this whole difference between the seats. Whether an agent can replace a teammate depends on the seat and the team it enters.
Read the full abstract

All authors Jianxin Gao, Runze Li, Tianyi Yu, Liangwei Ren, Bohan Chen, Zining Wang

Artificial Intelligence

Don't Drop Dropout: Optimizing Layer Sparsity for Efficient LLM Training and Inference

Mostafa Elhoushi, Alex Pretko, Nolan Dey et al. (+6 more)

Layer dropout (a.k.a. stochastic depth) has been shown to enable faster training, higher accuracy, and robustness to zero-shot layer pruning in both language and vision transformers. However, as models and datasets have scaled, dropout - particularly layer dropout - has largely disappeared from large language models (LLMs) pre-training recipes. While some prior work has reported that dropout can degrade accuracy, no comprehensive study has quantified, let alone mitigated, this effect. In this study, we show that layer dropout should be used in state-of-the-art LLM training, establishing best practices and scaling analysis for both training and post-training benefits. Concretely, with optimal layer distribution, time schedule, and optimizer hyperparameters, we observe that at the same training FLOPs layer dropout leads to lower loss. For a given number of training steps, LLMs can achieve lower or similar validation loss while saving upto 25% of training FLOPs. Moreover, layer dropout enables significant post-training optimizations, such as early exit, intermediate-layer skipping, and self-speculative decoding, yielding up to 1.5x inference speedup with negligible accuracy loss. Across more than 2400 training experiments, spanning models from 271M to 8.2B parameters and datasets up to 160B tokens, we demonstrate that these findings extend reliably to large-scale training regimes. All pre-training experiments were run on Cerebras CS-3 systems.
Read the full abstract

All authors Mostafa Elhoushi, Alex Pretko, Nolan Dey, Bin Claire Zhang, Gavia Gray, Gurpreet Gosal, Abdulrahman Mahmoud, Shane Bergsma, Joel Hestness

Artificial Intelligence

AI for Computational Design Science: A Responsible Human-AI Framework and Case Study on Short-Form Video Safety Surveillance

Wenli Zhang, Jiaheng Xie, Zhihe Pan et al. (+3 more)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming not only what information systems researchers design, but also how design research is conducted. Yet existing literature offers limited guidance for computational design science (CDS) when AI actively participates in problem formulation, resource construction, design search, evaluation, and knowledge abstraction. We develop AI for Computational Design Science (AI4CDS), a five-phase methodological framework in which AI expands problem and design search while researchers retain responsibility for domain grounding, admissibility, verification, and scientific judgment. Collaboration is governed by graduated trust, reversibility, auditability, and differentiated reproducibility. We instantiate AI4CDS through ChildRiskGuard, an interpretable artifact for detecting short-form videos inappropriate for children, while documenting AI interactions, rejected alternatives, corrections, and audit trails. The case translates audience-dependent safety and explanation faithfulness into three technical challenges and develops an artifact that separates generic from child-specific risk, represents distinct developmental-risk mechanisms, and makes concept-level explanations part of the predictive computation. ChildRiskGuard achieves an F1 score of 0.769, substantially outperforming direct application of a general-purpose content-safety model while remaining competitive with strong benchmarks. The primary contribution is AI4CDS as a responsible framework for AI-enabled CDS; ChildRiskGuard provides process and artifact evidence of how AI-expanded, researcher-governed design can generate and evaluate novel computational design knowledge.
Read the full abstract

All authors Wenli Zhang, Jiaheng Xie, Zhihe Pan, Yidong Chai, Xiao Fang, Sudha Ram

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CR

CONTINUITY: Security-Context Contracts for Composable LLM Agent Controls

Chris Zheng and Geng Yang

LLM agent systems increasingly combine provenance tracking, authorization, policy enforcement, protocol adapters, and execution controls. However, individually correct security mechanisms do not necessarily compose into an end-to-end secure system: security-critical context may be dropped, widened, rebound, or reinterpreted as actions cross component boundaries. We identify this failure mode as security-context discontinuity and introduce CONTINUITY, a framework for verifiable composition of agent security controls. CONTINUITY models each component with an assume-guarantee contract and carries authenticated security context across transitions using signed root grants, provenance commitments, role-bound transition receipts, bounded typed releases, transformation witnesses, and effect-bound execution permits. We formalize end-to-end consequence integrity, requiring every realized external effect to be backed by a valid and current authorization witness linking the principal, task, provenance, delegation, policy state, canonical action, and finality boundary. We implement a reference verifier and deterministic cross-layer fault-injection suite covering 32 fault classes across four application domains. In 2,560 parameterized attack instances spanning 128 fault-domain classes, the full CONTINUITY configuration commits no harmful external effect, while completing all 700 benign tasks and escalating all 200 ambiguous cases. These results show that secure agent execution requires not only sound individual controls, but explicit contracts that preserve their guarantees across the complete instruction-to-effect path.
Read the full abstract

Artificial Intelligence

Trace2Tower: Transition-Aware EigenTrace Induction of Multi-Level Skills for LLM Agents

Jiazheng Sun, Boyu Yang, Binhao Yuan et al. (+2 more)

Large language model agents increasingly rely on execution traces to master complex interactive tasks. However, current paradigms are bottlenecked by shallow trajectory retrieval and flat skill summarization, fundamentally ignoring the temporal dependencies and outcome-conditioned topology of agent behavior. We introduce Trace2Tower, a transition-aware EigenTrace framework that distills raw trajectories into a robust skill hierarchy. Trace2Tower abstracts step-level interactions into canonical events, constructing a unified graph governed by semantic compatibility, transition dynamics, and outcome evidence. Through a novel contrastive spectral decomposition, it isolates stable, success-aligned behavioral modes while rigorously suppressing failure-prone shortcuts. These modes organically populate a dynamic skill tower of action templates, procedural routines, and overarching task strategies, continuously refined via verifier-guided feedback. On ALFWorld, Trace2Tower achieves 87.31% success requiring only 10.35 steps and 0.26 invalid actions; on WebShop, it reaches 50.67% exact success. Across both benchmarks, Trace2Tower significantly outperforms existing baselines in task mastery and context-efficient experience reuse.
Read the full abstract

All authors Jiazheng Sun, Boyu Yang, Binhao Yuan, Mingxuan Li, Xin Peng

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from math.OC

Ask Before You Optimize: Dynamic Pre-Formulation Clarification for Interactive Optimization

Sihan Ge, Yichen Lin, Chenyu Zhou et al. (+3 more)

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to formulate optimization models from natural-language problem descriptions, yet realistic operations research (OR) requests are often incomplete: missing objectives, constraints, or business rules can change the resulting mathematical program. Existing evaluations largely assume a complete specification and therefore overlook whether an agent knows when clarification is needed before modeling. We introduce OR-Clarify, a benchmark for pre-formulation clarification. Each task presents a partial public problem description, withholds structured hidden slots, and evaluates agents through bounded interaction with a simulated user. The benchmark supports both openended and choice-based clarification, and measures slot recovery, stopping behavior, silent assumptions, and interaction cost. We further propose Interactive Optimization (InterOPT), a two-stage framework that identifies unresolved formulation-critical gaps and uses them to guide whether to ask the next question or to stop. In our choice-based experiments, InterOPT substantially outperforms all baselines in exact slot recovery; in the open-ended setting, it remains competitive with strong prior methods. Together, OR-Clarify and InterOPT reframe OR assistance as a selective completeness decision: clarify when needed, stop when ready, and quantify what remains missing.
Read the full abstract

All authors Sihan Ge, Yichen Lin, Chenyu Zhou, Jianghao Lin, Tao Yao, Dongdong Ge

Artificial Intelligence

Commonsense Reasoning in Computer Vision: Foundations, Recent Advancements, and Future Directions

Bahar Uddin Mahmud, Sumit Barua, Guan Yue Hong et al. (+2 more)

Commonsense reasoning in computer vision encompasses integrating visual data and contextual knowledge, crucial for enhancing AI's understanding of everyday scenarios. This understanding not only improves machine learning models but also enhances their ability to interact meaningfully with humans and the environment. Unlike CNN-based conventional vision models, which are designed to identify objects within a specific image, incorporating commonsense knowledge enables models to interpret scenes in a more holistic manner, thereby improving their spatial ability to reason about relationships among objects and actions. This integration not only enhances object recognition but also facilitates a deeper understanding of the contextual factors, ultimately leading to more precise predictions and interactions in real-world applications. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of recent developments that integrate commonsense knowledge into computer vision tasks. We systematically review approaches based on knowledge graphs, scene graphs, neuro-symbolic models, and commonsense-augmented transformers. We also outline current limitations related to dataset bias, knowledge incompleteness, and integration challenges. Finally, we highlight prospective research trajectories in cross-modal reasoning, scalable commonsense knowledge injection, and neuro-symbolic hybrid architectures to develop truly intelligent visual systems.
Read the full abstract

All authors Bahar Uddin Mahmud, Sumit Barua, Guan Yue Hong, Ajay Gupta, Hexu Liu

Artificial Intelligence

A Unified Physics-Aware Quantum Machine Learning Framework across Power GaN HEMTs and Logic Nanowire FETs: Predicting Unseen Process Splits and Held-Out Geometry Combinations with Lower Error and Tighter Split-to-Split Variability

Rushat Rai, Yun-Yuan Wang, Autsada Kakaen et al. (+10 more)

We present a unified reinforcement-learning (RL) framework that discovers compact parametrized quantum circuits (PQCs) for data-scarce device modeling. A graph neural network (GNN) policy optimized by proximal policy optimization (PPO) searches circuit architectures using leave-one-group-out cross-validation (LOGOCV) error on held-out process or geometry groups as the reward. The framework achieves the lowest mean absolute error (MAE) on all 11 targets versus six classical baselines, with 59% lower error (Ioff) and 81% tighter fold variability (VTH) for HEMTs and 84% lower error (VTH, SS, Ioff) and 82% tighter fold variability (Ioff) for NWFETs. These results demonstrate the potential of RL-selected, classically simulated PQCs as compact surrogates with low OOD error and improved physical consistency, despite imposing no explicit physical constraints, penalty terms, or device-specific equations, on the two evaluated device datasets.
Read the full abstract

All authors Rushat Rai, Yun-Yuan Wang, Autsada Kakaen, Pei-Jie Chang, Doan Viet Nguyen, Yuan-Chieh Chiu, Doldet Tantraviwat, Niall Tumilty, Simon See, Wen-Jay Lee, Tai-Yue Li, Nan-Yow Chen, Tian-Li Wu

Artificial Intelligence

Do LLMs Exhibit Coherent Knowledge Structures in Mathematical Reasoning? A Perspective from Knowledge Space Theory

Peng Cui, Heejin Do and Mrinmaya Sachan

Human knowledge is inherently structured and interdependent: mastery of a concept requires prior mastery of its prerequisites, a principle formalized by Knowledge Space Theory (KST). While LLMs achieve strong performance on complex reasoning tasks, it remains unclear whether they exhibit coherent, human-like knowledge structure. We introduce a KST-grounded framework for evaluating LLM knowledge structure in mathematical reasoning, using it as a normative framework to analyze whether LLM behavior adheres to principled knowledge dependencies. Evaluating eight open- and closed-source LLMs against real human learners, we find that (1) LLMs do not adhere to human knowledge structure – they frequently violate knowledge dependencies and fail to leverage related knowledge provided in context to improve performance on dependent questions; (2) LLMs do not share a consistent knowledge structure among themselves, as reflected by low overlap in their knowledge distributions. Furthermore, these structural deficiencies remain largely invisible to accuracy-based and LLM-as-judge evaluations. Together, our results provide behavioral evidence that current LLMs knowledge does not follow a human-like structure.
Read the full abstract