Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.HC
GYROval: A Robust Benchmark for Cultural Value Orientation in Large Language Models
Alexander Didenko, Anna Shabanova, Vladislav Zapylikhin et al. (+2 more)
We present a robust
benchmark for measuring cultural value orientation in large
language models on the two Inglehart-Welzel axes over several domains and roles (hence GYROval - Gridded Yielding of Robust value Orientation), together with the results of administering it to twenty models. Items are binary contrastive scenarios in the sense introduced by CDEval: both options are legitimate courses of action, neither is correct, there is no answer key, and a model's score on an axis is the proportion of its responses falling on the counted pole. Eleven of the twenty models were additionally administered a paired Russian translation of the identical items and a second sampling temperature. The instrument is publicly released in both
languages. Stability was assessed by treating the vignette as the unit of analysis, ranking the models within the levels of each perturbation factor, and summarising the agreement between levels by tie-corrected Kendall's W against an empirical permutation null.
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All authors Alexander Didenko, Anna Shabanova, Vladislav Zapylikhin, Alexander Antipov, Ruslana Raemgulova
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from eess.SP
Semantic CSI Feedback for Beam Selection: When Task-Aware Embeddings from Sparse Pilots Outperform Full-Bandwidth Reconstruction
Cristian J. Vaca-Rubio, Konstantinos Vandikas and Aneta Vulgarakis Feljan
Classical CSI feedback in FDD massive
MIMO transmits a compressed reconstruction of the channel, optimizing fidelity to the original signal regardless of the downstream task. We propose a semantic communication perspective: instead of reconstructing the channel, the UE transmits a learned semantic
embedding optimized end-to-end for beam selection at the gNB. Comparing reconstruction-oriented feedback (CsiNet) against task-aware semantic feedback across two input domains and three observation scenarios, we show that a semantic
embedding of just $d=8$ real values from only 43 NR CSI-RS pilots in the angular-delay domain achieves the highest beam prediction accuracy, outperforming every method with access to the full 512-subcarrier channel. The key insight is that beam-relevant information is intrinsically low-dimensional: the semantic encoder learns to discard reconstruction-irrelevant structure and retain only a compact representation that is relevant to beam selection, realizing the core principle of semantic communication: transmit the intent, not the signal.
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Artificial Intelligence
Bad Genius: Counterfactual-Guided Harness Evolution Beyond Task-Specific Shortcuts
Guojun Zhu, Xunheng Huang, Peng Yin et al. (+3 more)
Reliable
agent evaluation is complicated by automatic harness optimization, which repeatedly uses a released
benchmark $B_{\mathrm{rel}}$ to guide a Proposer that edits
prompts,
memory,
retrieval, tools, and control code around a fixed foundation model. Task holdout is commonly used to guard against harness overfitting. It varies semantic tasks but leaves the
benchmark protocol fixed, so a bad genius Proposer can produce a cheating harness whose improvement over the initial harness on $B_{\mathrm{rel}}$ depends on a
benchmark-wide shortcut. We introduce Counterfactual Harness Search and
Evolution (CHASE), which casts harness
evolution as constraint generation over valid counterfactual
benchmarks. After each Proposer update, a Challenger searches for an executable protocol transformation with large gain destruction. A validity firewall checks that task semantics are preserved, while a held-out confirmation set determines whether the counterfactual enters a finite archive. We formalize an ideal shortcut-neutralized
benchmark $B_0$ and establish theoretical guarantees linking finite counterfactual archives to $B_0$ and characterizing sequential Challenger search. We evaluate CHASE on Syn-Ledger and OfficeQA, where CHASE retains strong released-
benchmark gains while substantially reducing gain destruction under valid protocol transformations.
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All authors Guojun Zhu, Xunheng Huang, Peng Yin, Jiahui Xie, Sanguo Zhang, Doudou Zhou
Artificial Intelligence
Market Signal Injection: Adversarial Context Manipulation of LLM Pricing Agents
Dohun Lee and Hyunwoo Park
Large
language model (LLM) pricing
agents may respond to how
market data is presented, even when its numerical values remain unchanged. We introduce
market signal injection (MSI), an attack that manipulates numerical formatting, competitor ordering, or qualitative
market commentary without issuing explicit instructions. We evaluate nine open-weight models in simulated Bertrand duopoly and triopoly
markets and three proprietary models in duopoly
markets. Sentiment-based attacks produce the largest behavioral shifts, which propagate to other firms and alter profits and consumer surplus. Susceptibility varies across model families, and larger models are not consistently more robust. Matched neutral-text controls and a rule-based
agent support a framing-based account of these shifts under the fixed demand parameters of our simulation. Episode-held-out probes distinguish baseline from attacked activations in all eleven re-evaluated model–condition pairs: linear AUC is 1.00 and MLP AUC ranges from 0.93 to 0.99. This separability does not by itself identify harmful pricing decisions. Input canonicalization removes the tested sentiment attacks, while decision boundary anchoring, which combines
prompt constraints with output projection, provides partial mitigation under the tested adaptive attacks. These results identify data presentation as an attack surface for LLM pricing
agents and motivate defenses that account for interactions among
agents.
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Artificial Intelligence
Faithful yet Collusive: Why Chain-of-Thought Monitoring Cannot Detect Collusion in LLM Pricing Agents under Oligopolistic Competition
Dohun Lee and Hyunwoo Park
Large
language models (LLM) deployed as autonomous pricing
agents may sustain supracompetitive prices through tacit coordination. We develop a causal graph divergence framework that separately measures structural faithfulness and intent faithfulness of LLM pricing
agents in Bertrand competition. Across nine LLMs under duopoly and triopoly conditions, collusive behavior and chain-of-thought (CoT) faithfulness dissociate along both dimensions: the most collusive model accurately reports cooperative intent yet reasons structurally unfaithfully, while the most structurally faithful model sustains supra-Nash pricing under both
market structures. These findings establish that CoT monitoring alone cannot serve as a standalone safeguard against algorithmic collusion.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CR
Autonomy in Check: Governor-Mediated Adaptive Security at the Edge
Ijaz Ahmad, Ijaz Ahmad, Flavio Esposito et al. (+1 more)
Adaptive security at the network edge increasingly relies on automated planners, including rule-based controllers, learned policies, and LLM-assisted
agents, that translate observations into enforcement actions. Once such a planner can influence live policy state, syntactic validity is not enough. A semantically wrong action, produced from incomplete or manipulated observations, can be faithfully executed by an enforcement substrate that cannot judge mission context. We address this problem by treating the boundary between planner output and kernel enforcement input as the primary security object. We propose a split-control architecture in which an untrusted planner emits typed security intents, a deterministic governor checks each intent against safety, resource, temporal-stability, and proportionality invariants, and only admitted actions are bound to signed receipts and compiled into pre-installed eBPF map updates. The paper formalizes this trust-boundary problem, defines three threat classes, develops the governor admission predicate, and reports an end-to-end prototype. Across rule-based and LLM-assisted planners on a Raspberry Pi 5 testbed connected to the university 5G Test Network, the governor admits, rejects, and bounds intents at microsecond cost without disrupting protected-flow regularity. The contribution is conceptual as much as empirical: adaptive security does not need to trust the author of an action. It needs a mediation boundary that decides whether the action is admissible.
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All authors Ijaz Ahmad, Ijaz Ahmad, Flavio Esposito, Erkki Harjula
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.SD
Look Less, Hear Better: Jointly Rewarded GRPO for Streaming ASR
Xiuwen Zheng
Streaming automatic
speech recognition (ASR) must be judged jointly on what it transcribes and on how quickly it commits each word. Delayed streams modeling (DSM) has become the dominant paradigm for streaming large audio-
language models, exposing a structural delay $\tau$ that bounds the decoder's lookahead. We show that $\tau$ is a poor proxy for user-perceived latency, and that the
alignment-based supervision of DSM leaves latency on the table: the same forced-aligned transcript is used at every $\tau$, forcing the model to withhold words it could already commit. We introduce AWED, a word-level emission-delay metric defined relative to the acoustic end of each word, and post-train a DSM recognizer with GRPO under a reward that scores transcription accuracy and measured delay jointly. Trained at a single operating point ($\tau=6$ frames), our model dominates both its supervised fine-tuning initialization and the Voxtral Realtime backbone across all evaluated lookahead budgets: it cuts WER by 30.8% relative at an 80\,ms structural delay, and by 5.7% relative at 480\,ms while lowering median AWED from 1.17\,s to 1.04\,s. Latency-rewarded post-training thus advances the accuracy–latency Pareto frontier of streaming ASR without architectural change.
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Artificial Intelligence
Visual Compliance via Executable Safety Rule Entailment
Jisoo Kim, TaeYoon Kwack, Jinwoo Jang et al. (+1 more)
Recent advances in LLMs and VLMs have enabled safety systems to reason beyond simple risk patterns toward more contextual and semantic safety concerns. However, as risk patterns continue to evolve and safety rules become more complex, existing training-based end-to-end safeguards face persistent challenges in adaptability and explainable
reasoning over complex safety rules. To address these challenges, we propose GuardEn (Guarding by Safety Rule Entailment), an executable safeguard framework that decomposes safety policies into atomic propositions through Safety-Rule Compilation, modeling their composition as executable code. At test time, Scene-Grounded Execution instantiates these atomic propositions with contextual visual information derived from scene graphs, enabling rule-grounded and interpretable safety
reasoning. Experiments on SafetyVisionBench demonstrate the effectiveness of programmable safeguard for complex visual safety assessment, achieving an average improvement of 9.8 F1 points over the strongest baseline.
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All authors Jisoo Kim, TaeYoon Kwack, Jinwoo Jang, Honguk Woo
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG
Trajectory Learnability for Offline On-Policy Distillation with Imperfect Teachers
Yihao Ai, Beibei Lin, Weilong Yan et al. (+1 more)
Offline on-policy
distillation gains efficiency by collecting student trajectories and teacher supervision once and reusing them throughout optimization. The same reuse makes imperfect supervision persistent. Since even strong teachers can fail, we ask what remains learnable from imperfect teacher supervision? Teacher failure is only a coarse problem-level signal and does not imply that all supervision along the associated student trajectory is unhelpful. A natural alternative is to estimate teacher recoverability along the trajectory, but repeated continuations largely erase the efficiency advantage of offline
distillation. We instead use teacher-successful problems to define a cheap reference for what the student can learn. We train on teacher-successful problems and measure how the likelihood of each observed
token in trajectories from teacher-failed problems changes. We use these signed likelihood changes as an operational learnability signal: larger increases indicate behavior more strongly promoted by successful-only learning. We aggregate this signal into trajectory-level weights for the original
distillation loss. Unlike continuation-based estimates, our learnability requires no additional generation and can be computed once from stored trajectories and model checkpoints. Across mathematical
reasoning and code generation, our method improves an offline OPD baseline by up to 2.7 percentage points and matches or outperforms online OPD variants on multiple
benchmarks. Despite the additional successful-only
distillation stage, it uses 2 GPUs and about 22 GPU hours, compared with 3 GPUs and 36–48 GPU hours for representative online OPD methods.
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All authors Yihao Ai, Beibei Lin, Weilong Yan, Huaijian Zhang
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CL
Knowledge-Graph Based Augmentation versus Retrieval Augmented Generation for Cultural-Related Question Answering
Pablo Poulenard, Yannis Karmim and Valentin Barrière
Large
language models (LLMs) suffer from a long-tail deficit: culturally specific facts, particularly those concerning underrepresented regions such as Latin America, appear too rarely in pretraining corpora to be reliably memorized.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) addresses this by grounding generation in external text, but structured alternatives such as Knowledge Graphs (KGs) offer tighter control over what enters the context, along with potential gains in explainability and updatability. We
benchmark Graph-RAG against standard RAG on LatamQA, a culturally grounded multiple-choice
dataset spanning eight thematic categories. The graphs are built end-to-end from Wikipedia articles with KGGen, a recent open-domain extractor, without manual curation in our main setting. G-Retriever is competitive with RAG and reduces the error of the base LLM by 72% with a standard KG and 78% with a
benchmark-aware variant, the gap to RAG narrowing further as the graph is oriented toward task-relevant content. The trained projection transfers zero-shot to Portuguese without target-
language fine-tuning, indicating
multilingual reach.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.SE
A Study of the Reliability of Agentic AI-Generated Programs
Ayesha Shafique, Barton P. MIller and Elisa R. Heymann
Agentic-AI based software development offers the promise of faster completion of the software, greater programmer efficiency, and more reliable code. The question is how can we verify these claims in an objective way? In this project, we attempted to answer this question based on three practices. First, we applied a typical best-practices agentic AI workflow for software development. Second, our target programs were ten well-known, release-quality human-written Linux utility programs so that we could compare the AI-generated code against a concrete ground truth. Third, we based our measure of reliability on a widely used testing technique, fuzz random testing. For this testing, we used both classic black box, generational testing and more modern coverage guided (gray box, mutational) testing using AFL++. We found that the AI-generated versions of the utility programs were typically as reliable - often more reliable - than the latest human-generated versions of these programs. While the AI-generated versions did have some failures, they were less common than the code from the standard repositories. Interestingly, the AI-generated code was less likely to have failures such as
memory errors (such as buffer overflows) but more likely to have hangs such as infinite loops. In addition, we verified that generating robust and reliable software using agentic AI requires careful practice and human supervision. The quality of the code is highly dependent on the
prompts and skills used, and how the human directing the process responds. We also demonstrated that using agentic AI workflow for software development (with its
prompts and skills) can become a specification of the code that leads to cost-effective sustainability of the software.
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Artificial Intelligence
What Counts as Strategic Reasoning? A Systematic Mapping of Chess Research on Humans, Engines, and Language Models
Paolo Ciancarini and Remo Pareschi
Chess has long served as a model domain for studying search, expertise, decision-making, and artificial intelligence. The emergence of large
language models (LLMs) has renewed the relevance of chess as a controlled environment for investigating strategic
reasoning and comparing human and artificial decision-making. We present a systematic mapping study of recent research spanning human players, classical chess engines, neural and reinforcement-learning systems, LLMs, and hybrid approaches. The final map comprises 84 core study families, classified according to
agent type, strategic-
reasoning stages, and evaluation dimensions. The map reveals a literature strongly concentrated on situation assessment, evaluation, and action selection, while explicit planning, explanation, metacognition, and human–AI collaboration remain less explored. LLM research places particular emphasis on state representation and generalization, whereas grounded explanation appears more frequently in hybrid approaches combining
language models with engines, expert knowledge, or other external structures. Two distinctions emerge that the map aggregates rather than resolves: hybrid systems differ in where and when heterogeneous capabilities combine, and evaluations that show improved human performance do not thereby establish human–AI synergy. We propose both as extensions of the mapping framework. We argue that chess provides a useful bridge between cognitive and computational perspectives on strategic
reasoning, and identify explicit planning, grounded and faithful explanation, metacognitive calibration, and human–AI complementarity as directions for future research.
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Artificial Intelligence
Where Should Agents Live? Energy-Memory Characterization of Agentic AI for the Edge-Cloud Continuum
Carolina Fortuna, Vid Hanžel, Tim Strnad et al. (+1 more)
As telecommunication networks evolve toward autonomous 5G-Advanced and 6G operations, agentic artificial intelligence (AI) workflows, where large
language models (LLMs) execute multi-step
reasoning, invoke diagnostic tools, retrieve domain knowledge, and coordinate across
agent teams, are increasingly embedded across the edge-cloud continuum. While the biological
brain accomplishes complex cognition on an exceptionally modest metabolic power budget of approximately 20W contemporary LLMs are profoundly energy- and
memory-intensive, making sustainable lifecycle orchestration a critical operational priority. However, existing AI lifecycle metrics evaluate only isolated, single-model inferences or overlook multi-
agent execution graphs entirely. Consequently, network operators lack foundational models to determine whether distributed
agent communication incurs meaningful energy costs and where across edge-cloud tiers
agent teams should physically reside. To address this gap, we introduce agentic-eCAL, generalizing the Energy Cost of AI Lifecycle (eCAL) metric to directed multi-
agent workflows by coupling a closed-form two-rate single-call energy model (compute-bound prefill and
memory-bound decode) with 7-layer OSI data transport. Grounded in hundreds of GPU
benchmark configurations on NVIDIA A100 and H100, 16 open-weight models and 8 orchestration
topologies, we validate components of the metric and study workflow placement implications. Our findings demonstrate that inter-
agent text transport incurs 0.25% of workflow energy across 5G RAN, metro, and optical links. Therefore in edge-cloud
agent placement the dominant energy cost of distribution is often not the transmission of inter-
agent text itself, but the additional inference and context processing induced by that communication.
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All authors Carolina Fortuna, Vid Hanžel, Tim Strnad, Blaž Bertalanič
Artificial Intelligence
Building Trust in Artificial Intelligence: A Necessity for Railway Applications
Lefebvre Renard Clément, Lébé Vincent, Da Silva Ribeiro Pereira Ricardo et al. (+4 more)
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is currently only applied to non-safety critical applications due to the strict standards and regulations for railway industries. We propose to review the three main fields necessary to increase trust in data science and AI
algorithms and reach compliance: robustness, Operational Design Domain (ODD), and explainability. Robustness is the ability of an AI system to maintain its level of performance under any circumstances (ISO24029). ODDs allow the explicit definition of operating conditions under which a system is intended to operate, according to the recently published DIN DKE SPEC 99004. Explainability is the property of an AI system to express important factors influencing the AI system results in a way that humans can understand. Those 3 domains of research are already well investigated by nonrailway actors, with
algorithms and methods ready to use for railway applications. A system view is necessary to ensure all trustworthy requirements interact continuously in a safe MLOps environment thereby fostering acceptance from regulators, operators and the public. Beyond safeguarding safety-critical applications, we aim to show that fostering deep trust in AI, as now required by regulatory frameworks worldwide, will unlock its full potential and transform the pace of adoption across mission-critical domains.
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All authors Lefebvre Renard Clément, Lébé Vincent, Da Silva Ribeiro Pereira Ricardo, Sundell Johan, Jaoul Arnaud, Saiah Kenza, Mijatovíc Nenad
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CL
I code or AI code: A comparative evaluation of AI-rated scores in classroom observations
Y. Fong, J. Xiang, T.Y.D. Chan et al. (+2 more)
Classroom observations are widely recognized as a key tool for establishing
benchmarks of education quality and guiding pedagogical improvement, yet they remain resource-intensive and dependent on trained observers. This study evaluated the feasibility of using a LLM (GPT-5 model) to score teacher-child interactions in early childhood classrooms, benchmarked against human raters. The study analyzed 87
video-recorded observations from 38 classrooms across 30 kindergartens in Hong Kong. Using observation transcripts, the AI model was configured to apply the full Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) framework. AI-rated scores were then compared with human ratings by examining correlations and differences in mean scores of the CLASS domains and dimensions. The results showed greater convergence between AI and raters for the Emotional Support domain and, in particular, the Quality of Feedback dimension, which captures how teachers use feedback to extend children's learning. Greater divergence emerged for interactions that were more procedural or context-dependent, particularly within the Classroom Organization and Instructional Support domains. These findings suggest that transcript-based AI scoring may capture some of the relative variation in teacher-child interactions but cannot yet reproduce calibrated human judgements consistently across the full CLASS framework. AI-assisted observation may therefore be more appropriate as a preliminary screening tool rather than as a replacement for trained observers, providing teachers with evidence for reflection rather than high-stakes evaluation. Future research should examine whether domain-specific training and incorporation of contextual and visual information can improve
alignment between AI and human rated scores.
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All authors Y. Fong, J. Xiang, T.Y.D. Chan, K. Lee, E.Y.H. Lau
Artificial Intelligence
Who Audits Whom, on What Substrate, with What Evidence? An Independence-Graded Audit Protocol for Agentic AI
Mohamed Chahine Ghanem
Agentic AI systems plan, invoke tools and act with limited supervision; they are now both the subject of audits and, increasingly, the auditor. Independence, the foundation of assurance,is still applied to them as a binary. We argue that it must be graded along three orthogonal axes: principal independence (who controls the auditor), substrate independence (an auditor sharing the auditee's foundation-model family, toolchain or guardrails fails with it) and evidence independence (whether evidence is attestable rather than self-reported). Each axis has precedent; the contribution is to grade all three on a single audit, aggregate them by the weakest link, and apply the same rubric when the auditor is itself an
agent. We give the model a formal basis by transplanting the beta-factor model of common-cause failure from reliability engineering, a seven-step protocol whose outputs a third party can verify, a structural detectability analysis of a procurement-controls
agent audited at three grades, and a Monte Carlo study of the model in which a conventional internal audit of an
agent-a real audit team, a second
agent, provider logsp-surfaces 5.9% of the faults it could in principle see and none at all in half the fault classes. We map the triple to the EU AI Act as amended, ISO/IEC 42006, UK public-sector risk-management guidance and audit-regulator practice.
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Artificial Intelligence
BENCHCOMPASS: From Scores to Signals for Training and Harness Decisions in Payment-Domain LLMs
Sijie Dong, Wei Ren, Xuanwei Hu et al. (+9 more)
Payment operations are a critical financial infrastructure, but the value of large
language models in this domain remains unclear because payment rules change quickly, evidence is fragmented, and decisions depend on transaction state, participant role, region, and payment rail. Existing
benchmarks do not isolate whether failures come from missing payment-rule knowledge, poor use of supplied evidence, or brittleness under imperfect harness inputs. We introduce BENCHCOMPASS, a payment-domain
benchmark whose construction pipeline builds scenario-grounded tasks from typed evidence packs, applies LLM-based quality checks, creates task-input attack variants, and reserves final item admission for domain experts. The release contains an expert-reviewed Pro
benchmark covering payment knowledge, context-grounded scenario
reasoning, and Attacked Open robustness, plus a lower-assurance Normal pool for inspection and future curation. Across 16 model variants, BENCHCOMPASS shows qualitatively different failure modes: missing parametric payment knowledge, incomplete
reasoning over supplied rules, and failure to reject plausible but invalid workflows. The
benchmark remains unsaturated: the best frontier model reaches 89.6% on Open Context-Grounded
Reasoning and 81.7% under attacked inputs, while a representative 32B open-weight model reaches 69.8% and 42.6%.
Benchmark data and code are available at https://github.com/ant-intl/BenchCompass.
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All authors Sijie Dong, Wei Ren, Xuanwei Hu, Jiawei Luo, Zifan Wang, Xiaoyun Feng, Hui Cai, Lyuxin Xue, Peng Lu, Jianshe Li, Xin Zhang, Wei Wu
Artificial Intelligence
REPAIR: Resolving Long-Tail Confusion in Scientific Retrievers via Fact-Verified Iterative Refinement
Yerim Oh and Gunhee Kim
Precise
retrieval of scientific information is fundamentally constrained by long-tailed concepts and high fact-sensitivity of scientific corpora. These challenges often limit the effectiveness of dense retrievers and
hallucination-prone LLM augmentation. To address this, we present REPAIR, a self-evolving data augmentation framework for scientific dense retrievers. REPAIR iteratively synthesizes training data to address knowledge gaps by cycling through diagnosis of long-tail concepts, API-guided evidence expansion, and differentiation via hard negative mining. This process effectively grounds
retrieval in factual reality to resolve fine-grained distinctions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that REPAIR significantly outperforms 19 strong baselines on nine materials science and biomedical
benchmarks. Our work highlights that diagnosing and factually augmenting data to long-tail deficits is essential for robust scientific
retrieval.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.RO
M2Tok: Multi-head Multi-codebook Discrete Action Tokenization for Vision-Language-Action Models
Chunpu Xu, Zhixuan Liang, Yuhao Zhang et al. (+6 more)
Recent advancements have successfully adapted autoregressive
language models to process
multimodal signals, such as images and actions. Since raw action signals are continuous, effective tokenization is essential to map high-dimensional inputs into compact discrete
tokens for autoregressive processing. However, existing discrete action tokenizers often suffer from high reconstruction loss, failing to preserve the fine-grained dynamics required for precise control. This "discretization bottleneck" significantly limits the performance ceiling of downstream
Vision-
Language-Action (VLA) models. To address this, we propose ${M}^2$Tok, a Multi-head Multi-codebook Action Tokenizer designed to minimize reconstruction error and enhance policy performance. Our approach introduces two key structural innovations: (1) we decompose the latent action features into multiple heads, enabling the model to implicitly align specific heads with distinct action dimensions; (2) we assign independent codebooks to each head for quantization. By leveraging the combinatorial nature of multiple codebooks, we significantly expand the representational expressivity of the tokenizer, leading to substantially lower reconstruction loss compared to previous methods. We evaluate the ${M}^2$Tok-based VLA on the RoboTwin, Simpler-Env, and 3 zero-shot real-world tasks. Experimental results demonstrate our method not only achieves superior reconstruction fidelity but also significantly boosts the success rate of VLA models. Comprehensive ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of the multi-head and multi-codebook mechanisms. Code is available at https://github.com/cpaaax/M2Tok.
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All authors Chunpu Xu, Zhixuan Liang, Yuhao Zhang, Chi-Min Chan, Jessie Wang, Yang Xiao, Mengkang Hu, Xiaokang Yang, Yao Mu
Artificial Intelligence
Re2A: Situated Conversational Recommendation via Rubric-based Preference Reasoning and Alignment
Dongding Lin, Jian Wang, Xiaoyan Zhao et al. (+1 more)
Real-world recommendation scenarios are commonly grounded in shared physical environments during user-recommender interactions. This motivates situated conversational recommendation (SCR), a complex task requiring recommender assistants to jointly reason over dialogue history, co-observed scenes, and in-scene item attributes. However, current approaches struggle with this setting due to two intertwined challenges: accurately understanding situated user preferences throughout the conversation and generating responses that simultaneously satisfy user needs and grounded situations. To this end, we propose Re2A, a framework that formulates SCR as a structured reason-then-align process. We introduce rubric-based preference
reasoning, which uses automated rubrics to guide the model toward producing explicit preference states. Based on these states, we propose a preference-conditioned optimization to align response generation with dual objectives: user preference satisfaction and situation consistency. Extensive experiments on two SCR
datasets demonstrate that Re2A consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, delivering more precise, context-aware conversational recommendations. Our code is available at https://github.com/DongdingLin/Re2A.
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All authors Dongding Lin, Jian Wang, Xiaoyan Zhao, Wenjie Li
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.IR
Quanta: A Self-Contained Python Library for Hybrid Retrieval over Quantised Embeddings, Lexical Indexes, and Knowledge Graphs
Ioannis E. Livieris
An advanced
retrieval-augmented generation pipeline is typically assembled from three or four independently operated systems: an approximate nearest-neighbour index, a full-text search engine, a graph database, and a relational document store. Each contributes its own deployment surface, configuration model, and failure modes, and the integration logic that binds them is written anew in every project. In this work, we present Quanta, an open-source Python library, which unifies dense vector search over 4-bit quantised
embeddings, BM25 full-text
retrieval, and knowledge-graph traversal behind a single
retrieval API. Quanta makes two design commitments, which distinguish it from existing hybrid
retrieval stacks. First, signals are combined by weighted reciprocal rank fusion rather than by normalising heterogeneous scores onto a shared range, which we argue is ill-posed because such normalisations are query-dependent. Second, the graph is a candidate expander and not a relevance scorer: traversal widens the candidate pool, and the newly admitted documents are re-scored by the dense indexes under an identifier allowlist, so structural adjacency determines what is considered while content evidence determines how it ranks.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from math.HO
Remembering Solomon Marcus
Florin Nichita
From the manifest of Andre Breton, through the transdisciplinary understanding, we arrive at a post-modern manifest. A talk by Laura De Marco (Harvard) will provide scientific background to approach an AMS poetry. The next section will be a qualitative analysis of some new operations on the real numbers. The conclusions will be given in the last section, and an appendix will recall some previous work with some new comments.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG
APGEM: Adaptive Policy-Guided Error Mitigation for Quantum Reinforcement Learning on a Real-World CVRP Case Study
Shabir Ahmad Sofi, Bisma Majid and Mir Mohammad Yousuf
Quantum Reinforcement Learning (QRL) represents policies as variational
quantum circuits (VQCs), making it attractive for combinatorial optimization such as the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP). On noisy intermediate-scale
quantum (NISQ) hardware, however, decoherence degrades fidelity and destabilizes learning, and conventional error mitigation is applied statically without regard to the learning context. We introduce Adaptive Policy-Guided Error Mitigation (APGEM), a controller that selects among Zero-Noise Extrapolation (ZNE), Probabilistic Error Cancellation (PEC), Clifford Data Regression (CDR), and Readout Error Mitigation (REM) online, driven by a fidelity,
entropy, and cost aware utility function and an epsilon-greedy rule over temporal-difference Q-scores. We evaluate on a realistic urban-logistics testbed, a Delhi-based CVRP over real landmarks with geodesic inter-node costs, exercised across five noise families and four severity levels. On this instance, the QRL
agent outperforms constructive heuristics and approaches metaheuristics, while mitigation restores approximation ratios from 0.84-0.87 to 0.92-0.94 under high noise. The controller shifts from a CDR-dominated regime under short training horizons to a balanced deployment across all four techniques under longer horizons, indicating genuine regime-dependent selection. These preliminary results position adaptive, learning-aware mitigation as a practical route to noise-resilient QRL.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.SD
CPR: Combining global composing, local performing and full-sequence refining in piano rendering with continuous autoregressive modelling
Chong Jing, Junan Zhang and Zhizheng Wu
Prompt-conditioned piano MIDI-to-Music rendering aims to faithfully render target notes while reproducing the timbre of a reference recording. Existing approaches primarily follow two paradigms: autoregressive (AR) modeling and flow matching (or
diffusion). Discrete-codec AR models provide causal temporal modeling, but quantization can discard acoustic detail. Flow matching better preserves acoustic structure in the cost of full-sequence
attention costs and worse semantic structure. Continuous autoregressive models operate directly on continuous representations. It not only combines the condition-following ability of AR models and distribution-modeling capacity of flow matching but also bypasses the quantization bottleneck with lower computational costs. Building on this principle, we present Composer–Performer–Refiner (CPR) framework. Composer autoregressively predicts continuous hidden states, Performer generates 24kHz acoustic latents through local flow matching and Refiner then upsamples the waveform to 48 kHz. We further introduce Bottlenecked Representation
Alignment (BREPA) and Modality–Time RoPE (MT-RoPE) to strengthen musical semantic structure in Composer hidden states and temporal
alignments across modalities. Codes are available at https://github.com/FEAfeatherTHER/CPR_official
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG
A Lightweight CNN Integrated Compact Convolutional Transformer for Multi-Scale Feature Learning and reducing computational complexity for breast cancer mammography image detection and classification
Md Taimur Ahad and Ainuddin Ahmed
Over the years, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have demonstrated strong capability in cancer detection and classification using medical images. However, CNN-based models often struggle to capture long-range contextual dependencies. In such scenarios, integrating Compact Convolutional
Transformer (CCT) architectures after the CCT layer allows CNN-extracted features to reshape into compact patch
tokens using a CCT tokenizer, followed by the addition of positional
embeddings to preserve spatial structure. Using 5-fold cross-validation, the model was tested on 3 sets of breast cancer mammography. With only 250,435 parameters, the model achieved 99%-100% accuracy across 3
datasets, indicating robust generalization. Explainable AI (XAI) was integrated into the model to explain the breast cancer classification process to enhance clinical trust. The results indicate that the proposed framework is suitable for computer-aided diagnosis systems, particularly in resource-constrained clinical environments. The novelty of the proposed CNN-integrated CCT overcomes the limitation of CNN's gradient degradation in the last layers by integrating convolutional tokenization with
transformer-based learning. Lighter than ViT, which is effective in capturing long-range dependencies, the model has also proven efficient in breast cancer classification by capturing long-range dependencies among breast tissue regions.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV
CapMap-MS-TTA: 3rd Place Solution for the MUMU Track of the 8th LSVOS Challenge at ECCV 2026
Chengfeng Qiu and Kaifeng Wei
The MUMU track of the 8th Large-scale
Video Object
Segmentation (LSVOS) Challenge requires a single unified
multimodal model to jointly solve image tagging (Task A), open-vocabulary object detection (Task B), and English captioning (Task C) under strict resource constraints (<=0.5B parameters and <=8 GB peak GPU
memory). We present CapMap-MS-TTA, a training-free submission built on Microsoft Florence-2-base (~231M parameters), combining caption keyword mapping with multi-scale flip test-time augmentation. Task C uses the native <DETAILED_CAPTION> pathway with length/
token sanitization. Task A maps the same detailed caption into the official quality/scene/event vocabularies via an expanded keyword lexicon with whole-word matching and a lightweight expand-hints stage. Task B runs Florence-2 open detection (<OD>) with multi-scale and horizontal-flip test-time augmentation (TTA), followed by label-aware non-maximum suppression (NMS). Without fine-tuning, the system improves our reproduced Florence-2 baseline from 15.16 to a best public score of 16.4815, and ranks 3rd on the final MUMU leaderboard.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CL
Beyond Accuracy: How Procedural Traces Shift the Decision Criterion of LLM Overseers
Zihan Chen, Di Zhu, Lei Zheng et al. (+1 more)
Organizations increasingly use oversight loops where one large
language model (LLM) audits another's outputs alongside procedural traces of claimed steps. A common concern about such LLM-as-a-judge pipelines is that detailed traces make overseers gullible. Using signal detection theory, we audit five LLM overseers on 19 compliance tasks (4,551 analyzed judgments), varying only trace detail and evidence labeling. With disconfirming evidence always visible, error detection remains near ceiling. Instead, elaborate traces shift the decision criterion toward rejection, increasing false alarms in susceptible overseers. Without option labels, human-validated reason coding shows about 60% of false alarms cite an inability to tie evidence to its option. Labels eliminate this stated reason, yet residual rejection of correct work persists in those overseers and rises with trace detail. Procedural traces thus act as governance artifacts that shape oversight decisions. AI auditors should be evaluated by their decision criterion and false-alarm behavior, alongside accuracy.
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All authors Zihan Chen, Di Zhu, Lei Zheng, Weiling Li
Artificial Intelligence
WFM: Wiki Foundation Model for Complex Agentic Reasoning
Junnan Dong, Linhao Luo, Senlei Zhang et al. (+9 more)
Real-world
agents fundamentally require persistent non-parametric knowledge for dynamic
reasoning, i.e., long-term
memory and
retrieval-augmented generation. While graphs have shown reliable advantages in providing structured evidence, the sparse graph representations naturally restrict machine readability and semantic density required for complex agentic workflows. Driven by this limitation, the entire industry is witnessing a paradigm shift from traditional sparse graphs to LLM Wiki, an
agent-native knowledge representation that couples dense document contexts with markdown files containing multi-layered topological linkages. However, parameterizing such rich semantics is challenging to encode dense textual contexts using traditional sparse graph
embeddings. Moreover, learning LLM Wiki with existing graph encoders could overwhelm distributed system overheads that hinder deployment in large-scale commercial scenarios. To this end, we propose a novel paradigm Wiki Foundation Model, i.e., WFM, tailored for scalable,
agent-native representation and
retrieval. Specifically, (i) we formalize a Wiki Graph schema that seamlessly bridges fine-grained structures with dense contexts, maintaining explicit
topologies alongside continuous semantics; (ii) A query-conditioned attentive aggregation is tailored for rich wiki message passing and explicit
attention variance regularization; (iii) We engineer an infrastructural NCCL boundary exchange protocol that hoists static partition indices and leverages fixed-shape GPU-to-GPU collectives, bypassing CPU serialization and
memory copy overheads. Extensive evaluations across five long-term
agent memory and multi-hop
reasoning benchmarks demonstrate the remarkable performance of WFM, while achieving a 10.5 times training acceleration on distributed clusters.
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All authors Junnan Dong, Linhao Luo, Senlei Zhang, Gong Chen, Taian Guo, Yifei Yu, Rong Tao, Tao Guo, Qian-Wen Zhang, Siyu An, Ruizhi Qiao, Xing Sun
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG
MoRE: Mixture of Reused Experts
Eric S. Qiu, Utku Umur Acikalin, Justin Lovelace et al. (+4 more)
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures decouple model capacity from computational cost, yet incur high
memory footprints as parameters grow linearly with the number of experts. Recurrent
Transformers achieve parameter efficiency by reusing layer weights, but typically lack the capacity for competitive
language modeling. We propose Mixture of Reused Experts (MoRE), a hybrid that shares expert pools across groups of adjacent layers. Each layer retains its own router but selects from a larger shared pool, expanding the diversity of routing combinations without additional parameters. To enable shared experts to distinguish between layers, we introduce lightweight learnable depth
embeddings that condition each layer's input before routing. Experiments across three model scales (114M-1.15B parameters) show that MoRE consistently achieves lower perplexity and stronger downstream performance than standard MoEs and state-of-the-art weight-sharing architectures at matched compute and parameter budgets, with only minimal modifications to existing MoE implementations.
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All authors Eric S. Qiu, Utku Umur Acikalin, Justin Lovelace, Christian Belardi, Arjun B. Mulchandani, Carla P. Gomes, Kilian Q. Weinberger
Artificial Intelligence
Time-Aligned Evolving Concept Graphs for Scientific Relation Forecasting
Fred Sun, Jingze Wang, Minkun Xu et al. (+1 more)
Forecasting scientific relations can guide discovery by identifying promising connections before they emerge. Existing approaches often model concept semantics and graph structure separately or summarize semantics over coarse historical snapshots, leaving semantic representations potentially misaligned with rapidly evolving graph evidence. We propose a time-aligned evolving concept graph framework that jointly models semantic and structural
evolution. Its core idea is to treat dated papers as shared update events, reconstructing semantic and structural states from the same publication history through each prediction time. Pair-level fusion combines these states to forecast first co-occurrence, relation formation, and conditional relation type. Holding architecture and training fixed, refreshing context alongside graph updates improves mean relation AUPRC by 16.6% over frozen context. On a graph built from 187,848 papers with 270,687 concepts and 7.45 million co-occurrence links, the complete framework improves mean relation AUROC from 0.9290 for the strongest evaluated baseline to 0.9722, with mean population-weighted AUPRC 0.005778.
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All authors Fred Sun, Jingze Wang, Minkun Xu, Shangqi Guo