Computer Vision
How Far Can 5,500 Hours of Driving Take You? A Scaling Law Analysis of Video Diffusion Models
Victor Besnier, Anh-Quan Cao, Elias Ramzi et al. (+5 more)
Video generation for autonomous driving cannot follow the web-scale route: driving data is expensive to collect, bound by
privacy requirements, and cannot be scraped at will, so models must make the most of a fixed corpus. We present a systematic scaling-law study of
video diffusion models trained from scratch on driving data: a family of models from 1M to 9B parameters, trained at different exposures on up to 5,500 hours of driving. Validation loss follows consistent power laws in both model size and training exposure, answering the questions that shape a training budget: whether compute is better spent on longer training or on a larger model, and whether more data is needed. Loss improves much faster with training exposure than with model size, making longer training the most effective way to improve a fixed model under limited compute. However, larger models continue to achieve lower asymptotic loss, so compute-optimal scaling still favors increasing model size when sufficient compute and data are available. Guided by these laws, we train a 9B-parameter model, to our knowledge the largest
video diffusion model trained from scratch on driving data: it sets a new open-source state of the art for driving
video generation, as measured on nuScenes. Our code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/valeoai/VATIX. NATIX is separately releasing the underlying driving data in stages.
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All authors Victor Besnier, Anh-Quan Cao, Elias Ramzi, Spyros Gidaris, Tuan-Hung Vu, Andrei Bursuc, Eloi Zablocki, Matthieu Cord
Software Engineering
Recovering Software Architecture Intent from Historical Work Items using Generative AI: A Mixed-Methods Industry Case Study
Dominik Storck, Tobias Eisenreich and Stefan Wagner
Software architecture is often only partially captured in code, while much of the design intent lives in evolving project artifacts. In agile projects, work items, user stories, and related tracking documents preserve valuable traces of that intent, but they rarely support direct architectural analysis. This work investigates the recovery of C4 architecture diagrams from historical agile work items using an LLM-based pipeline. The semi-automatic five-step workflow employs a
prompt chain, bidirectional traceability, and Chain-of-Thought
reasoning to transform unstructured Azure DevOps work items into visual artifacts. Evaluated on two industry projects, we use a mixed-methods design combining qualitative expert interviews with a quantitative stability analysis. Practitioners perceive the generated architectural baselines as accurate and highly useful for system comprehension. Strictly bound by their input data, the artifacts mirror the documented intent, thereby surfacing discrepancies and architectural drift when compared to the implemented reality. Quantitatively, the workflow exhibits high stability for architectural entities but lower stability for their relationships, with relative variance compounding across generation steps. The proposed workflow demonstrates the practical viability of LLM-assisted architectural recovery based on development process artifacts.
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Artificial Intelligence
VERA-8B: Evidence-Grounded Audit Risk Reasoning from SEC Filings
Menghan Liu and Elynn Chen
Across audit applications, judgments must be supported by reasonable evidence. However, standard financial
language models prioritize fluency over evidence. They are built for general financial
reasoning and may produce plausible but ambiguous answers, creating a grounding gap that makes them unsuitable for audit work. We address this gap with VERA-8B, a new end-to-end audit
reasoning system that identifies audit risks before enforcement actions occur. Constructing such a model raises several challenges, as no prior machine learning work targets pre-enforcement audit prediction. To our knowledge, we are the first to unify SFT and GRPO for evidence-grounded audit
reasoning under one evidence standard, achieving performance that surpasses all evaluated baselines. Because
auditing cannot tolerate unsupported claims, we introduce abstention and uncertainty qualification to defer uncertain or evidence-incomplete cases. Finally, we design an AuditBridge to ground model
reasoning for practical audit work. It transforms raw filings into verified records and then into reviewer-ready reports, bridging finance and computation with broad generality. Together, these components produce auditable, review-ready outputs suitable for practical audit work.
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Cryptography and Security
When Verified Source Becomes Attack Input: Defending Smart Contracts Against LLM-Based Vulnerability Scanning
Mingyuan Huang, Zimo Ji, Yifan Mo et al. (+1 more)
Smart contracts are financial programs deployed on blockchains to manage digital assets. To build trust with users and investors, smart contract projects typically publish their source code on blockchain explorers and verify it against the deployed bytecode, making the on-chain program accessible through a human-readable implementation. However, LLM
agents are changing the threat model of this disclosure mechanism. By leveraging publicly disclosed source code, recent
agent workflows make it increasingly practical to scan contract vulnerabilities for exploits at large scale. In this paper, we propose DeLLMGuard, a smart contract deployment framework that defends against malicious LLM-based vulnerability scanning while preserving public source disclosure and authorized
auditing. DeLLMGuard can separate disclosed source code from runtime execution through multiple contract addresses in a real-world blockchain environment. LLM
agents must therefore recover additional proxy, delegate, and factory relations before vulnerability analysis. A built-in Verification Layer checks deployment relations, runtime bytecode, source code, and state changes to ensure that the transformation preserves the original business implementation. We evaluate DeLLMGuard on 387 real-world vulnerable contracts with three LLM
agents in an environment derived from SCONE-bench. DeLLMGuard reduces overall root-cause correctness from 23.5% to 6.6% and outperforms the closed-source bytecode baseline on the primary non-proxy set. Trace and ablation analyses further show that
agents often recover downstream contracts but still fail to identify the vulnerability, indicating that cross-contract recovery remains a major challenge for automated LLM scanning.
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All authors Mingyuan Huang, Zimo Ji, Yifan Mo, Shuai Wang
Artificial Intelligence
RetailAgent: Structured Adverse Timing in Self-Conditioned Multimodal LLM Trading Agents
Yupeng Zhang, Liuyuan Jiang, Hongyi Huang et al. (+2 more)
In financial
markets, a sequential policy that reacts systematically to price movements may become predictable to other
market participants. This paper studies whether large
language model (LLM)
agents exhibit such directional structure through RetailAgent, an experimental framework in which an LLM observes anonymized intraday equity price histories and permitted state, then repeatedly chooses long (hold the stock) or flat (stay out) before the subsequent interval return is revealed. We compare returns during long and flat intervals along the same stock's intraday path after removing the overall fraction of long decisions. This exposure-matched measure reveals persistent negative timing across modality, horizon, state, and model family. Shuffling saved action sequences substantially attenuates the effect, showing that
alignment between actions and subsequent returns drives the negative score. Feeding self-authored
memories into decisions further increases policy persistence, while timing becomes more negative among stock-days on which the
agent uses both actions. These results reveal stable, recoverable directional structure in sequential LLM financial decisions and a behavioral signal for studying how another participant could respond to a predictable policy.
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All authors Yupeng Zhang, Liuyuan Jiang, Hongyi Huang, Bingheng Li, Lisha Chen
Software Engineering
Sustainability of Open-Source Machine Learning Robustness Assessment Tools: A Repository Mining Study
Joshua Owotogbe, Indika Kumara, Willem-Jan van den Heuvel et al. (+1 more)
Robustness evaluation is essential for deploying machine-learning (ML) systems in real-world settings, where models may face
adversarial perturbations, distribution shifts, and other operational stressors. Many open-source tools, including
Adversarial Robustness Toolbox, Foolbox, and Robustness Gym, support robustness testing and evaluation. However, little is known about how these tools are maintained, publicly engaged with, and sustained over time, even though practitioners may rely on them to select evaluation dependencies, reproduce robustness assessments, and provide evidence for AI assurance. We present an empirical study of the open-source robustness tooling ecosystem. Starting from a curated seed set derived from prior work, we systematically searched GitHub and identified 28 robustness-tool repositories. We analyzed repository artifacts to characterize observable community engagement, maintenance activity, and project longevity using established software-engineering metrics. Our results show that engagement and maintenance are unevenly distributed, with sustained activity concentrated in a small subset of repositories. At the data collection date of January 21, 2026, five repositories were classified as active, 22 as inactive, and one as archived. These findings highlight the need to treat robustness tools as evolving software systems.
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All authors Joshua Owotogbe, Indika Kumara, Willem-Jan van den Heuvel, Damian Tamburri
Cryptography and Security
BEACON: Behavior-Anchored Cross-Source Knowledge Graph Construction for Cyber Threat Intelligence
Changze Li, Yutong Cheng, Tsania Camila Finnisa et al. (+3 more)
Cyber threat intelligence (CTI) is foundational to modern cyber defense, yet much of it resides in unstructured reports whose volume and heterogeneity far exceed manual analysis, motivating research on automatically constructing knowledge graphs from CTI reports. However, existing approaches mainly extract partial information within a single report, leaving the cross-source setting unexplored, where the same threat is given unrelated names. Our key insight is that attack behaviors, once mapped to MITRE ATT&CK (a standardized catalog of attack techniques), can anchor the rest of a report. Attack behaviors are the
adversarial actions a report describes, while contextual entities (e.g., threat actors, campaigns, and affected products) and Indicators of Compromise (IoCs; e.g., IP addresses) are their participants and traces. Attaching them to these anchors places every per-report graph in one canonical space. We realize this insight in BEACON, an LLM-driven framework for cross-source CTI knowledge graph construction. Its first stage extracts each report into a graph under a propose-then-verify paradigm, grounding candidates in report evidence and official ATT&CK definitions, to suppress LLM misclassification and
hallucination. Its second stage merges these graphs with a hierarchical
alignment strategy that applies signals in decreasing order of determinism, from character-level and semantic similarity to overlapping technique neighborhoods, iterating as merges pool neighborhoods. No existing
benchmark links entities to technique anchors or provides cross-source
alignment ground truth. We therefore construct and release two human-annotated
datasets from 34 sources: to our knowledge the largest for report-level CTI extraction (8,395 elements) and the first for cross-source consolidation (3,487). On them, BEACON outperforms all baselines by at least 23% and 9%, respectively.
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All authors Changze Li, Yutong Cheng, Tsania Camila Finnisa, Qian Cui, Wei Ding, Peng Gao
Artificial Intelligence
Timing-Aware Repurchase Prediction for Web-Scale E-Commerce: Survival Models for Multi-Surface Grocery Recommendation
Akshay Kekuda, Shreeranjani Srirangamsridharan, Ishan Bhatt et al. (+5 more)
Repurchase recommenders in e-commerce are commonly framed as a binary question asking "will this customer buy this item within W days", a formulation that requires a separately trained model for every horizon of interest. We replace this stack with survival models that predict time-to-repurchase directly, and evaluate them on millions of customers from a major grocery e-commerce platform across more than thirty ablation configurations. Our study makes three contributions. First, an empirical hazard analysis reveals a slightly decreasing marginal hazard (k ~ 0.9), differing from the common intuition that grocery items become more likely to be repurchased the longer since the last purchase (increasing hazard, k > 1). Log-Normal achieves the best marginal fit (R^2 = 0.998) and the best ranking, despite Weibull providing the best conditional residual fit, revealing an apparent discrepancy we analyze in detail. Second, a single Accelerated Failure Time (AFT) model replaces three per-horizon binary classifiers, matching or exceeding each at its own horizon while using roughly 3x fewer total trees. Feature importance reshuffles under the survival objective: channel-cadence and recency signals rise while aggregate frequency counts fall. Third, a 4-parameter parametric calibration maps raw survival CDFs to per-horizon probabilities with zero cross-horizon monotonicity violations. Calibration quality varies by an order of magnitude across the AFT family: Exponential AFT (Weibull k=1) achieves expected calibration error (ECE) ~1e-4, roughly 10x lower than Log-Normal, while ranking metrics agree within 0.3% relative. We adopt Exponential AFT for probability-consuming surfaces and Log-Normal for pure ranking, exposing a principled calibration-ranking trade-off within a single AFT family.
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All authors Akshay Kekuda, Shreeranjani Srirangamsridharan, Ishan Bhatt, Yanan Cao, Sinduja Subramaniam, Evren Korpeoglu, Kaushiki Nag, Kannan Achan
Logic in Computer Science
Adaptive Strategies for GR(1) Games
Shankaranarayanan Krishna, Kaushik Mallik and Abhilasha Sharma Suman
We consider two-player GR(1) games on graphs, where the system player Eve must satisfy \[ \Box\Diamond A_1\land\cdots\land\Box\Diamond A_m \;\implies\; \Box\Diamond G_1\land\cdots\land\Box\Diamond G_n \] against the environment player Adam. Here $A_1,\ldots,A_m$ are assumptions on the environment, $G_1,\ldots,G_n$ are guarantees the system must provide, and $\Box\Diamond S$ denotes “always eventually $S$”. Traditional static strategies are overly conservative: they may actively violate assumptions to trivially satisfy the implication, or abandon all guarantees when any assumption is violated. Existing methods to prevent such behaviors incur doubly exponential blowup. We introduce an adaptive framework treating Adam as a non-
adversarial agent with unknown objectives. Eve monitors which assumptions Adam actually meets and adapts her strategy at runtime to maximize satisfied guarantees. Central to our approach is a novel
algorithm for monitoring liveness properties $\Box\Diamond S$, enabling Eve to maintain real-time likelihood estimates of which assumptions will be fulfilled. Eve pre-computes strategies optimal for different assumption subsets, deploying a probability distribution over them that dynamically adjusts based on monitor outputs. We prove that when assumptions are violated, Eve's randomized adaptive strategy converges asymptotically to the deterministic strategy maximizing guarantees. A prototype demonstrates effectiveness and superior computational performance compared to the state of the art.
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Cryptography and Security
CamoDocs: A Poisoning Attack Against Retrieval-Augmented Language Models Using Camouflaged Documents
Jaewon Jung, Haizhong Zheng, Hongsun Jang et al. (+3 more)
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) augments LLMs with external documents, but public or user-editable sources expose RAG systems to data poisoning: attackers can inject malicious documents to steer outputs toward targeted answers. Existing poisoning attacks often rely on query inclusion, inserting the target query into poisoned documents to improve
retrieval; however, this creates lexical and
embedding-space artifacts that make them easy to filter. We propose CamoDocs, a poisoning attack that avoids direct query inclusion by camouflaging
adversarial documents among benign content. CamoDocs chunks synthesized benign and
adversarial drafts, replaces selected
tokens in benign chunks with dispersion
tokens that spread poisoned-document
embeddings, and applies coherence filtering to limit readability degradation. Across seven RAG defenses, three open-weight LLMs, and three
benchmarks, CamoDocs achieves strong average ASR while avoiding query-overlap artifacts exploited by simple query detection. It also remains effective against proprietary models, achieving average ASRs of 61.80% on GPT-5.4-mini and 55.09% on Claude-Haiku-4.5. Finally, we show that erasure-heavy clustering defenses such as TrustRAG can reduce ASR, but only with substantial utility drops on
retrieval-dependent
benchmarks such as NeoQA. Code is available at https://github.com/jaewonalive/CamoDocs.
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All authors Jaewon Jung, Haizhong Zheng, Hongsun Jang, Jaeyong Song, Beidi Chen, Jinho Lee
Hardware Architecture
Neuromorphic architectures as numerical solvers for computational neuroscience
Jakob Jordan, Ole Richter, Congyang Li et al. (+2 more)
Neuromorphic computing is closely associated with spiking neuronal networks. However, an alternative class of so-called "rate-based" models arising from computational neuroscience and machine learning forgoes spiking interactions and instead relies on continuous coupling between
neurons. Existing neuromorphic implementations designed around spike-based interactions are not well-suited for emulating such models. Here view the distributed simulation of these models as message-passing
algorithms on parallel hardware. Leveraging prior art in numerical
algorithms and distributed simulation, we outline steps that enable the design of efficient digital neuromorphic accelerators for non-spiking neuronal models. In particular, we show that multi-bit packets, rather than spikes, are the most efficient communication strategy in packet-switched networks and that compared to basic numerical integration methods, higher-order differential equation solvers decrease both computation and communication costs while achieving lower numerical error, but that these benefits are ultimately limited by arithmetic precision. Using our proposed design principles, we convert an existing neuromorphic architecture into a distributed numerical solver - a spikeless neuromorphic system - for continuously-coupled neuronal models. We thereby demonstrate that our theoretical considerations indeed translate into practical advantages, namely reduced energy consumption and delay.
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All authors Jakob Jordan, Ole Richter, Congyang Li, Mihai A. Petrovici, Rajit Manohar
Computer Vision
GraspHOI: Full-Body 3D Human-Object Reconstruction with Finger-Level Grasps from a Single In-the-Wild Image
Semin Kim, Haechan Shin and Jongyoo Kim
Existing
monocular full-body 3D human-object interaction (HOI) methods do not combine explicit finger-level grasp optimization with category-agnostic object reconstruction. Despite plausible body-object configurations, their fingers may float from or penetrate objects instead of forming a grasp. We present GraspHOI, the first framework that reconstructs a full-body 3D HOI from a single image while explicitly optimizing finger articulation against the reconstructed object. GraspHOI recovers object geometry directly, without predefined meshes or a fixed category vocabulary. It reconstructs the body, hands, and object separately, aligning them in metric camera space via depth-based registration and image-space
alignment. Occlusion-aware palmar correspondences seat the object against the grasping hand, and contact-aware optimization refines arm and finger articulation to form surface contact without excessive penetration. Across four
benchmarks and six baselines, GraspHOI improves relative human-object placement, hand accuracy, and contact plausibility. Full pipeline code will be released.
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Formal Languages and Automata
Separating Words with Automata in the Half-adversarial Case
Gabriel Bathie
We consider the problem of separating words with deterministic finite automata (DFA) (Goralčík and Koubek, 1986). This problem asks: given two distinct words $u,v$ of length at most $n$, what is the size of the smallest DFA that accepts one and rejects the other? The best upper bound on the worst-case over all pairs of words of length at most $n$ is $\tilde{O}(n^{1/3})$ states (Chase, 2021), while the best lower bound is $\Omega(\log n)$. In this work, we consider the half-random, half-
adversarial case: we show that if $u$ is a uniformly random binary word of length $n$, then with high probability, for any word $v$ not equal to $u$, there is a DFA with $O(\log^{7/3} n \mathrm{poly}\log\log n)$ states that separates $u$ and $v$. Our results are based on a novel analysis that exploits the structural sparsity of random words: we show how to apply block-wise compaction with small deterministic transducers to reduce the separation problem to the case of words with short run-length encodings.
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Artificial Intelligence
MAP: A Benchmark on Multimodal Accessibility Planning for Real World Places
Jason Armitage, Ioannis Tsochantaridis, Linda Mazzone et al. (+3 more)
We introduce MAP, the first
benchmark to evaluate
multimodal AI systems as assistants for users with accessibility requirements when planning visits to places in the real world. In our evaluation, systems are presented with requests to verify or recommend a point of interest meeting an accessibility requirement. MAP contains two novel assessments: Claim verification for accessibility planning assesses if information on places and stated accessibility features is supported and identifies places that satisfy requested accessibility features. Visual evidence
retrieval for accessibility planning checks if a
multimodal AI system can select visual evidence for the requested place and accessibility feature. Our methodology supports comparison of AI systems in a setting where place information and accessibility information can change over time by evaluating systems and refreshing ground truth data at scheduled times. The
benchmark is based on automatic rating and human rating for a proportion of responses.
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All authors Jason Armitage, Ioannis Tsochantaridis, Linda Mazzone, Chuqiao Yan, Srini Narayanan, Sarah Ebling
Computer Vision
Semantic Head Specialization Guides Hybrid ViT Attention for Multimodal LLMs
Chenhong He, Lei Li, Shicheng Li et al. (+5 more)
Hybrid
attention dominates frontier LLMs, yet
Vision Transformers (ViTs) in
multimodal LLMs lack a satisfactory hybrid design, with no consensus on why certain
attention patterns work better. To fill this gap, we study ViT
attention heads and find they differentiate into object- and background-specialist roles, a pattern most pronounced under full
attention; we call this Semantic Head Specialization (SHS). We propose SHS-Index to quantify this specialization, show that it distinguishes full-
attention from chunk-window ViTs, and find that it strongly tracks downstream
benchmark performance. We then identify three structural factors that shape SHS—window interaction,
token serialization, and local softmax allocation—and use them as design principles for hybrid
attention. Guided by these factors, we design Ariadne
Attention, a hybrid that matches full
attention on 22 image and
video tasks at 6.5x less
attention compute. Our findings establish head specialization as a measurable property for diagnosing and designing principled hybrid ViT
attention at the
multimodal-LLM scale.
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All authors Chenhong He, Lei Li, Shicheng Li, Hanglong Lv, Lingpeng Kong, Qi Liu, Tong Yang, Shuhuai Ren
Computation and Language
When Linguistic and Internal Confidence Diverge in Large Language Models
Hefan Zhang, Bingquan Zhang, Ming Cheng et al. (+3 more)
Users often ask large
language models (LLMs) to report how confident they are, but it is unclear whether such linguistic confidence tracks the model's internal confidence. We study this question across 8 classification tasks, 2 generation tasks and 30 models from three families. For classification, we compare linguistic confidence with logits-based confidence along three axes: association, magnitude agreement and calibration. For generation, we test whether linguistic confidence tracks semantic-
entropy-based uncertainty. The axes frequently diverge. Instance-level association is weak on average, although it improves on easier items and for stronger base models. Instruction-tuned models often report higher confidence and sometimes show higher association, but they also have larger confidence gaps and worse calibration.
Prompt design mostly changes the distribution of reported confidence. Attitude cues inflate confidence without improving
alignment, while score exemplars can preserve rank-order signal when they avoid collapsed confidence values. Regression analyses show that distributional properties of confidence scores explain much of the observed
alignment pattern, with model metadata playing a smaller role after controls. These results support a lossy-channel view of linguistic confidence. A more dispersed verbal confidence distribution can carry useful rank information, but it does not make the scores calibrated. Linguistic confidence should therefore be evaluated with multi-axis diagnostics before being used in downstream reliability pipelines.
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All authors Hefan Zhang, Bingquan Zhang, Ming Cheng, Saeed Hassanpour, Weicheng Ma, Soroush Vosoughi
Machine Learning · Cross-listed from quant-ph
Quantum Federated Learning Based on Bures–Uhlmann Geometry for Heterogeneous Noisy Clients
Haruki Emori, Masaki Uchihara and Yuuki Tokunaga
Quantum federated learning enables collaborative model training across
quantum devices without sharing raw data, and it faces the data and hardware heterogeneity inherent to noisy
quantum devices. Utilizing the
quantum geometric tensor is a natural remedy, yet pure-state approaches and diagonal approximations discard the correlations that encode parameter incompatibility. To address this, we extend the parameter-space geometry to the mixed states that noisy clients actually prepare. The real part of the resulting mixed-state
geometric tensor is the Bures metric, which measures how fast the physical state changes under parameter variation, and the imaginary part is the mean Uhlmann
curvature, which quantifies the incompatibility of estimating multiple parameters simultaneously. Accordingly, we employ the Bures metric as a local preconditioner and use the mean Uhlmann
curvature to develop an achievable-precision aggregation rule that dynamically down-weights unreliable clients. Furthermore, we establish theoretical guarantees by proving a convergence
theorem and a variance-dominance proposition. Empirical evaluations on a trapped-ion
quantum emulator demonstrate that the proposed method maintains high accuracy across diverse device-heterogeneity conditions and outperforms standard
federated averaging, whose accuracy degrades under strong noise.
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Computation and Language
PersonaForge: Realistic Multi-Turn User Simulation for Agentic Systems
Hanglong Lv, Dawei Zhu, Lei Li et al. (+11 more)
Large
language models are increasingly used as agentic workflow executors, yet existing training data and
benchmarks largely assume informationally complete, single-turn queries. Our analysis of 16K real-world sessions shows that 75.9% of interactions are multi-turn, revealing a substantial gap between how users interact with
agents and how such systems are trained and evaluated. We introduce PersonaForge, a user simulation framework for synthesizing realistic multi-turn user–
agent interactions. PersonaForge combines a four-dimensional persona space, SOUL-driven behavioral control calibrated to real-user statistics, and Reverse Deep Construction grounded in authentic seed queries. Using PersonaForge, we construct a 6.3K-record training
dataset and PersonaForge-Bench, a manually annotated 138-task
benchmark spanning over 20 professional domains with four-dimensional scoring. Experiments on Qwen3.5-27B show that PersonaForge training improves the composite score by +4.1%, with gains across all four dimensions and the largest improvements in Task Completion (+6.0%) and Response Quality (+6.8%). Further analyses show that PersonaForge-trained
agents use fewer turns and tool calls, suggesting improved interaction efficiency, while ablations confirm the contribution of SOUL components and adaptive simulation. Together, PersonaForge and PersonaForge-Bench establish a foundation for training and evaluating
agents under realistic multi-turn user interaction.
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All authors Hanglong Lv, Dawei Zhu, Lei Li, Bowen Ye, Huaqiu Liu, Yifan Song, Bofei Gao, Weimin Xiong, Jinhao Dong, Chenhong He, Lingpeng Kong, Qi Liu, Tong Yang, Fuli Luo
Machine Learning · Cross-listed from stat.ML
Localizing Global Discrepancies: Marginal Contributions and Contextual Anomaly Detection
Tommaso dorigo
Global goodness-of-fit and discrepancy statistics can establish that a sample departs from a reference distribution without identifying which observations drive the departure. We develop a framework for this localization problem by assigning to each observation its conditional or marginal contribution across random statistical contexts. This connects resampling diagnostics and data valuation to projection theory and event-level anomaly detection. For symmetric statistics, fixed-size replacement is exactly equivalent to centered conditional localization. For U-statistics, the addition score equals the first Hoeffding/Hájek contribution; for smooth distributional functionals it is related at leading order to the influence function; and for unbiased known-background MMD it reduces exactly to the MMD witness. This viewpoint also yields more efficient
estimators. Matched-context subtraction removes fluctuations unrelated to the observation, while for pairwise MMD the event-containing terms give a simple localizer. On the LHC Olympics anomaly-detection
benchmark, the pair
estimator converges to the direct empirical MMD witness with the predicted 1/(Rm^2) scaling, where m is batch size and R the number of batches. At m=1000 and R=5x106 it reaches correlation 0.9993 with essentially identical AUC. We also ask when context contains information beyond an event's own features. In a shared-latent toy model, the full single-event signal and background distributions are identical by construction, forcing isolated-event AUC=0.5. Discriminating information survives only in cross-event dependence induced by the shared latent parameter; the ensemble recovers this information, whereas an independent-latent control does not. This separates two roles of context: efficient localization of a global discrepancy and genuinely additional class information when the alternative contains shared structure.
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Human-Computer Interaction
AI as Teammate: Rethinking Task Distribution in Medical Training
Fendi Tsim, Alina Gutoreva, Anthony Weiss et al. (+1 more)
Integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI, into medical training has prompted concerns about learner over-reliance, misuse, and erosion of foundational clinical competencies. We propose a conceptual reframing at the decision level: the problem is not misuse but misclassification - a mechanistic failure of real-time metacognitive evaluation in selecting a subzone-inappropriate AI interaction mode. Drawing on "SCAN" (Substitute, Complement, Aid, Non-Negotiable), a human-centric decision-making framework for generative AI task allocation grounded in Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development and metacognition, we advance the emerging social-constructivist conversation around AI in medical education by offering a testable account of AI's role in clinical
reasoning development. This framework yields testable predictions for how misclassification can be detected, mitigated, and, more importantly, prevented in the clinical learning environment. Regarding clinical
reasoning development, we show how trajectories of skill acquisition (upskilling) and failure (the triad of skill failure: de-skilling, never-skilling, and mis-skilling) operate at the individual task level in ways that fixed-phase, cohort-wide treatments fail to capture. We further identify passive engagement within correctly classified AI-scaffolded tasks as a particularly insidious, detection-resistant pathway to mis-skilling - one requiring subzone re-identification from AI assistance to expert assistance, with human experts serving as epistemic auditors. The paper operationalizes SCAN for clinical curriculum design, supervision, and assessment, and opens an empirical research agenda grounded in cognitive science. This paradigm shift from misuse to misclassification is not semantic: it offers educators a clear perspective on what to look for, what to assess, and what to intervene on.
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All authors Fendi Tsim, Alina Gutoreva, Anthony Weiss, Nicole Dubosh
Computer Vision
Real-Time Musculoskeletal Surrogates for Pediatric Cerebral Palsy: a Credibility Pilot
Mohammad Arif Ul Alam
Real-time musculoskeletal (MSK) surrogates could support personalized rehabilitation for children with cerebral palsy (CP), but their credibility depends on subject-wise evaluation, low inference latency, and calibrated uncertainty. We develop a subject-conditioned causal neural surrogate using OpenSim-derived static parameters, temporal joint kinematics, true muscle capacities, and training-only perturbations. On a real pediatric CP gait
dataset comprising nine children, we use leave-one-subject-out validation on six development subjects and evaluate a frozen configuration once on three locked test subjects. The surrogate accurately reproduces musculotendon lengths (R-square = 0.92 in development validation and approximately 0.95 on locked subjects; nRMSE < 8%) while requiring only sub-millisecond to few-millisecond neural inference, well below a 100 ms interactive-rehabilitation target. In contrast, direct muscle-force estimation remains unstable at this small, heterogeneous scale: pooled metrics can overstate within-subject, per-muscle accuracy. A Monte Carlo credibility pilot further shows that propagating only +/-5% anthropometry and muscle-capacity variation produces severely overconfident nominal 90% intervals (approximately 4% force coverage and below 1% MT-length coverage). These results establish a leakage-free evaluation and credibility framework for pediatric MSK surrogates, while identifying force modeling and epistemic uncertainty as the central next challenges for clinically credible digital twins.
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Computers and Society
It Takes Three to Converse: Empirical Observations on How the Developer, the Convener and the Participant Shaped 119 Polis Conversations
Lodewijk Gelauff
Polis is a popular democratic innovation tool that allows asynchronous citizen engagement through atomic statements: short statements that together describe a complex question, inviting the citizen to vote Agree or Disagree on each. This paper uses 119 conversations with 100 or more participants and an extensive data export, drawn from a wider set of 271 collected processes. The paper asks what determines the output of such a process. Three parties shape the result. The developer of the platform has made important design choices that restrict the outcome: the number of groups the platform is able to report (restricted to 2–5) and which statements are prioritized. The convener defines the assignment: the initial statements that set the tone, the policy that accepts or rejects new statements and who can be invited. Finally, the participant works within these boundaries. With access to less than half of the generated statements, they end up responding to more statements when their conversation seems to have an achievable number of statements to complete, than when they are presented with more statements. Due to choices such as warm path clustering, the exported resulting clustering cannot be reproduced based on the voting data. Conveners may want to re-analyse their own conversations once the process is closed, to consider the data in its entirety, and make their own analysis priorities explicit.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from physics.comp-ph
Real-Time Monitoring of MHD Liquid Metal Flows with Shallow Recurrent Decoders
Claudio Scardino, Stefano Riva, Carolina Introini et al. (+4 more)
State estimation in magnetohydrodynamic flows is critical for real-time monitoring of
liquid metal blankets in tokamak fusion reactors. Due to the multiphysics nature of these phenomena, high-fidelity simulations are computationally prohibitive for real-time applications. This work investigates a data- driven Reduced Order Model framework: the Shallow Recurrent Decoder (SHRED) coupled with Principal Component Analysis, to map sparse temperature measurements to the full thermo-hydraulic system's state. The major contribution of this work lies in the two-parameter analysis of a fully three-dimensional domain representative of the DEMO breeding blanket configuration. Here, the flow is subjected to an external
magnetic field varying in direction and intensity and is hindered by two cylinders acting as a water-cooling system, which impose a temperature boundary condition on their surfaces. This double-parametric
magnetic variation induces nonlinear transitions in the flow dynamics, ranging from chaotic behavior at low
magnetic field intensities to laminarized regimes at high intensities, characterized by the formation of asymmetric side layers at an inclination angle of 30 degrees. SHRED reconstruction maintains a mean relative error of approximately 5% for the temperature, pressure, and velocity fields. This accuracy is maintained across both weak and strong
magnetic fields, ranging from 0.075 T to 0.300 T, and for inclination angles from 5 to 30 degrees, reflecting its dominant toroidal component. These errors are only slightly larger than the lower error bound dictated by low-rank truncation. The results establish SHRED as a reliable state
estimator for complex and realistic engineering applications involving completely unseen parametric scenarios and validate it as an accurate real-time state estimation technique suitable for online monitoring and control of real facilities.
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All authors Claudio Scardino, Stefano Riva, Carolina Introini, Matteo Lo Verso, Eric Cervi, Antonio Cammi, Laura Savoldi
Software Engineering
Where Does Balance Break? Boundary Discovery for Game Balance Testing under a Finite Simulation Budget
Hiroki Mukai, Yusaku Kato, Norihiro Yoshida et al. (+2 more)
Software testing often relies on assumptions such as reproducible executions and stable correctness criteria. However, many modern software systems exhibit non-deterministic executions and large behavior spaces, making exhaustive exploration impractical and single-run judgments unreliable. These characteristics make it difficult to identify where acceptable behavior ends and problematic behavior begins. Competitive multiplayer games represent a challenging instance of such systems, where balance must be maintained so that no single strategy dominates. Even small parameter changes can trigger abrupt balance disruption, yet detecting such failures requires repeated simulations under non-deterministic outcomes and high-dimensional parameter spaces. In this paper, we formulate game balance regression testing as a boundary-discovery problem under a finite simulation budget. The objective is to efficiently identify inputs near the boundary that separates balanced and unbalanced regions. To address this problem, we propose BBExplorer, which combines multi-directional candidate generation, budget-aware two-stage screening, and adaptive step-size shrinkage for boundary refinement. Experimental results on two games with different levels of complexity show that the approach is strong in low-dimensional settings and remains effective in higher-dimensional ones. It also exhibits stable boundary behavior across unseen random seeds and threshold settings. These results indicate that BBExplorer is effective for practical balance regression testing and, more broadly, for boundary-oriented testing in non-deterministic, budget-constrained systems.
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All authors Hiroki Mukai, Yusaku Kato, Norihiro Yoshida, Erina Makihara, Katsuro Inoue
Artificial Intelligence
EvoUndo: Recoverability-Constrained Self-Evolution for LLM Agent Harnesses
Tanmay Sah, Dolly Sah, Harshul Jain et al. (+1 more)
LLM
agents increasingly modify their own
prompts, tools, middleware, resources, and execution harnesses at runtime. Such self-
evolution can improve capability, but a successful mutation may leave persistent effects that cannot be safely reversed in states different from the one in which it was created. We introduce EvoUndo, a framework for representing, synthesizing, diagnosing, and independently verifying recoverability of model-generated self-modifications across counterfactual states. Across 600 unseen one-shot self-
evolution tasks, we identify 197 capability-improving mutations that fail recoverability verification. Under the original recovery representation, conventional repair strategies recover 0/197 of these natural failures. Deterministic oracle analysis recovers 48/197 under the original recovery
language L0, while the extended recovery calculus increases empirical oracle recovery to 191/197. A protocol-locked 2x2 grounding-by-expressivity intervention then separates two bottlenecks: exact state-address grounding increases successful recovery from 0/48 to 38/48 (79.2%) when the original
language is sufficient, while extending the recovery
language enables recovery on 142/143 (99.3%) failures in the oracle-defined S1 stratum. On the primary gpt-oss-120b backbone, adding exact-address diagnostics to the richer
language reduces recovery to 133/143 (93.0%); a Qwen3.8-27B replication preserves the grounding and expressivity effects but not this negative interaction, indicating that the latter is model-dependent. These results indicate that reliable
agent self-
evolution requires co-designing verification, state grounding, witness semantics, and recovery-
language expressivity rather than relying on iterative prompting alone.
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All authors Tanmay Sah, Dolly Sah, Harshul Jain, Tanya Sah
Cryptography and Security
Optimal Adversarial Testing: Extracting Honest Test Results from Dishonest Test Takers
Owen Cox, April Xu and Weiyu Xu
In applications, it is often required to test objects or people to determine their qualities in terms of certain metrics. However, besides being naturally noisy, the test results can be corrupted by
adversarial behaviors of objects or people being tested (test takers). For example, dishonest test takers can cheat in the exams to distort the test results. With the development of AI technologies, such distortions driven by cheating using AI technologies are becoming more commonplace and severe. In this paper, we propose optimal testing strategies which can still recover needed test results even if there are cheaters polluting the results. The proposed testing strategies will optimally re-test selected group of test takers using different testing security measures. We determine the optimal testing strategies using a dynamic programming method.
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Artificial Intelligence
GRACE:Gradient-guided Coreset Selection for LLM Unlearning
Praveen Bushipaka, Andrea D'Angelo, Lucia Passaro et al. (+1 more)
Machine Unlearning methods for Large
Language Models typically assume pre-specified forget and retain sets. In realistic settings, however, requests may provide only a few examples of undesired behavior, requiring forget and retain sets to be inferred from heterogeneous corpora. We study this data-selection problem and propose GRACE , a gradient-guided coreset selection method that constructs both forget and retain sets for LLM unlearning. GRACE first computes a forget direction from seed examples that elicit the undesired behavior, then selects a compact forget coreset whose gradients approximate this direction using non-negative orthogonal matching pursuit. To preserve model utility, it selects retain examples after projecting out the forget direction and applying clustered orthogonal matching pursuit in the remaining gradient space. Across two target domains, two model families, and four unlearning
algorithms, GRACE improves model utility while maintaining comparable forget quality, with particularly consistent gains over prior gradient-based selection methods.
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All authors Praveen Bushipaka, Andrea D'Angelo, Lucia Passaro, Tommaso Cucinotta
Artificial Intelligence
Propagating construction-time knowledge quality into medical question answering: A framework grounded in clinical guidelines
Jie Hu, Junjie Wang, Shan Lu et al. (+3 more)
Large
language models have facilitated knowledge graph (KG) construction from clinical guidelines, but extracted triples vary in structural validity and evidential support. Meanwhile, graph-augmented question answering (QA) systems typically optimize query relevance during
retrieval, with limited reuse of quality information produced during KG construction. This creates a disconnect between construction-time quality control and inference-time evidence use. We investigate whether construction-time triple quality can serve as a persistent signal for downstream evidence selection and presentation. We propose a quality-aware framework that models structural conformance (SchemaConf) and evidential support (EvidScore) as complementary dimensions and fuses them into a per-triple quality signal, Q(t). Rather than using quality solely for filtering, the framework retains Q(t) and derived quality tiers as graph attributes and propagates them into quality-weighted subgraph
retrieval and tier-conditioned evidence prompting, while preserving passage-level provenance. Experiments on Chinese diabetes clinical guidelines show that the utility of the quality signal is distribution dependent. Under cross-version and cross-model shift, the fused Q(t) provides stronger triple-quality discrimination than either component alone (AUC 0.748 vs. 0.703 for EvidScore and 0.645 for SchemaConf). In guideline-grounded QA, propagating construction-time quality reduces required-knowledge omission from 16.3% to 5.3% and conflicting outputs from 16.3% to 2.7%, with an evidence-grounded precision of 81.6% and near-zero invalid citations. Blinded clinician ratings favor the full framework over no
retrieval (4.68 vs. 4.21 on a five-point scale) and approach the oracle condition (4.80), while cross-generator experiments show consistent trends.
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All authors Jie Hu, Junjie Wang, Shan Lu, Yifang Hu, Gong Cheng, Yun Liu
Information Retrieval
Every Article Deserves a Video: Contextual Video Matching for Digital Publishers
Arnaud Corone, Brice Pierre de la Briere, Gladys Roch et al. (+3 more)
As digital publishers face the challenge of managing massive content catalogs, the ability to effectively embed relevant
video within text-based articles has become critical for both monetization and user retention. However, manual selection is impractical for large scale publishers, especially when navigating their own extensive
video libraries or the entire global Dailymotion catalog. In this paper, we present the "Contextual
Video Matching" system, a solution that automatically matches relevant
videos with text-heavy web pages and articles. By leveraging Large
Language Models (LLMs) and textual
embeddings, we provide a scalable solution for publishers to efficiently combine
video content with their articles. We discuss in detail the motivations, architecture, evaluations, and deployment of this system within Dailymotion's production environment. Since its launch, the system has been adopted by hundreds of publishers, significantly increasing user engagement and enriching user experiences with highly relevant
video content.
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All authors Arnaud Corone, Brice Pierre de la Briere, Gladys Roch, Samuel Leonardo Gracio, Yassine Bouher, Parvati Chauchaix
Computational Complexity · Cross-listed from math.CO
Discrepancy of geometric incidences
Azem Adibelli and István Tomon
We study the combinatorial (red-blue) discrepancy of finite point sets with respect to hyperplanes and, more generally, bounded-complexity affine algebraic sets. We prove that every $n$-point set in a real Euclidean space admits a red-blue coloring for which every affine algebraic set of dimension at most $D$ and degree at most $k$ has discrepancy at most $n^{\frac12-\frac{1}{2(D+1)}-\varepsilon}$ for some $\varepsilon=\varepsilon(D,k)>0$. This gives a
polynomial improvement over the straightforward VC-dimension bound $\tilde O(n^{\frac12-\frac{1}{2(D+1)}})$. In the opposite direction, we construct $n$-point sets in $\mathbb R^d$ whose discrepancy with respect to hyperplanes is $\tilde\Omega(n^{\frac12-\frac{1}{d+1}}),$ extending the point-line discrepancy lower bound of Chazelle and Lvov. We present further applications of our methods in communication complexity, concerning separation between randomized communication cost and deterministic communication cost with access to equality oracle.
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