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Computer Science

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Wednesday 7 October

Software Engineering

Ruleless Digital Twins: Toward Declarative Decision-Making Through Standardized Frameworks and Technologies

Digital twins (DTs) can be thought of as digital counterparts of physical objects, or more generally, twinning targets (TTs). To enact changes on and optimize for properties of their TTs, DTs use an element of decision-making. Traditionally, many domains, such as home automation, utilize rule-based decision-making models to imperatively define DT actions based on desired TT conditions. With evolving user specifications, rule-based models have become increasingly complex to develop and maintain, particularly in scenarios involving optimizations under dynamically changing systems, such as those affected by weather or dynamic energy pricing. We present an alternative in the form of ruleless digital twins (RDTs) that automatically produce optimal decisions with respect to purely declarative user specifications, similarly to the well-established ruleless approach of model predictive control. They do so through a combination of a semantic knowledge base, logical inference, simulation models, and an autonomic computing architecture, each exclusively based on a widely-used standard or technology. We evaluate our proof of concept through an incubator case study and experiments against a rule-based bang-bang controller in the context of a virtual office room environment. Results show core that RDT functionality performs better than the control in terms of maintaining desired room temperatures and minimizing energy costs under dynamically changing spot pricing. Additionally, due to combinatorial decision tree construction, RDTs require considerable computational power for longer prediction horizons, although their applicability to specific problem domains (and use of shorter horizons) ultimately falls on their users.
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Machine Learning

Phase-HDC: Replacing Optimizer History with Gradient Thresholds in Discrete Phase Learning

Training a compact model often needs far more memory than storing it, because the optimizer keeps its own records of past gradients. For a hyperdimensional classifier whose learned parameters are low-bit angles, which we call a phase memory, these records take several times more memory than the model itself. We ask whether such a model can be trained while storing nothing but the model. The proposed method, Phase-HDC, turns each stored angle by at most one step per update, against the sign of its current gradient, and only when that gradient is large enough. We show that this simple rule is the exact solution of a first-order loss model in which every changed parameter pays a fixed cost. When everything except the update rule is held fixed, Phase-HDC matches the accuracy of Adam with 6-bit moments while storing three times less. Across eleven image, tabular, and text datasets, it stores 16–23$\times$ less than standard float32 Adam and 4–6$\times$ less than 8-bit Adam. The price is an average loss of about five accuracy points against float32 Adam, while Phase-HDC is more accurate than 8-bit Adam on six of the eleven datasets, including byte-level text prediction, where 8-bit Adam collapses. Instrumented training runs explain these outcomes. Once parameters must sit on a discrete grid, Adam's moments mainly decide whether a parameter moves at all, a decision that a threshold on the current gradient can make without memory, and coarse quantization of the moments breaks this decision for inputs that the data rarely contain. The storage savings are logical state rather than measured hardware memory.
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Artificial Intelligence

The Harness as the Only Mutable Surface: Compliance-Bounded Self-Evolution of LLM Agents in Credit Pipelines, with a Measured Admission Gate

Self-improving LLM agents can adapt a credit pipeline to a changed rule, but an agent that rewrites itself destroys the artefact a supervisor reviews: a named change, a recorded test, an approval. We argue that self-evolution is reviewable only if it is confined to the runtime harness (instruction text, tool-call logic and primitive composition) while model weights stay fixed, so that every adaptation is a diff with a cause and a test attached. We give a dual-loop engine built on that bound, with one admission gate that writes a hash-chained record before deployment, and we measure the gate in simulation, with a simulated agent and a seeded-search proposer rather than language models. Across three families of supervisory re-interpretation at three severities, 10 seeds each, the gated loop admitted 144 of 7,449 candidate changes, none of which worsened error on held-out history, and restored the false-positive rate to the oracle level without raising missed flags in every low- and mid-severity cell. With the gate replaced by the check an unbounded system applies (fewer errors visible in recent traces), the same loops admitted 309 harmful changes and left missed flags above 10% in 49 of 90 runs: false positives fell because the screen was loosened. Evaluated on pre-shift labels, the gate rejected every candidate, so a re-interpretation must be encoded as a rule that relabels history. Parametric and scope shifts were repaired locally, a structural one only by primitive replacement; at the highest structural severity the gate's fixed tolerance blocked the correct replacement in half the seeds. We map the mechanisms to the EU AI Act's provisions for high-risk credit scoring and note that the April 2026 US model-risk guidance excludes agentic AI from its scope.
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Software Engineering

Agent4RE: A Self-Refining Multi-agent Framework for End-to-End Software Requirements Engineering and Benchmarking

Existing LLM-based approaches for software Requirements Engineering (RE) typically rely on basic prompting strategies or rudimentary agent collaboration, under-utilizing the full potential of multi-agent systems. Meanwhile, available datasets focus on isolated subtasks, such as requirements extraction, classification, and completeness detection, leaving the absence of an end-to-end RE benchmark that spans from requirements elicitation to generation. We present Agent4RE - a self-refining multi-agent RE system that orchestrates specialized agents and incorporates two iterative improvement loops. To support evaluation, we construct RE-E2E - a real-world dataset built from human-written requirement specifications, enabling end-to-end assessment of RE workflows. Building on this foundation, we further propose two enhanced Agent4RE versions that incorporate either autonomous self-refinement or structured human feedback, and analyze their strengths and limitations across different scenarios. Evaluation on 8 Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrates that all three Agent4RE variants consistently outperform a domain-context-augmented prompting baseline by average 8% in text-based metrics. The two enhanced variants achieve the highest LLM-as-a-judge and human ratings, surpassing two RE baselines by approximately 0.8 points on a four-point scale. This consistent performance establishes Agent4RE as a practical end-to-end RE solution for industrial environments.
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Machine Learning

Sample-Efficiency of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

Deep reinforcement learning has achieved substantial performance gains over classical control approaches. Yet, a central challenge to learning in real-world applications is acquiring costly samples. Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks are a recently proposed architecture that can learn physical relationships in control problems effectively, with significantly higher parameter efficiency and interpretability when compared to Multi-Layer-Perceptron architectures. In this work, we systematically study sample-efficiency using computational experiments, covering the Feynman dataset and the Gymnasium RL benchmark. The results show that similar performance can be achieved with 40% fewer samples using the Kolmogorov-Arnold architecture, and that relative performance improvements up to 50% occur during the training process. The observed gains are robust to varying levels of noise in rewards. These results highlight the potential of the Kolmogorov-Arnold architectures for more sample-efficient reinforcement learning. Code: https://github.com/DerKevinRiehl/neurips26_kan_training
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All authors Kevin Riehl, Shaimaa K. El-Baklish, Fan Wu, Anastasios Kouvelas

Machine Learning

Exact SO(3)-Equivariant Isotropic Kernels for Rotation-Robust Neural Dynamics

Neural surrogates for vector-valued partial differential equations can fit training data yet change their predictions when the same physical state is expressed in a rotated coordinate frame. We study this failure on three-dimensional Navier–Stokes dynamics observed at irregularly placed points. We introduce the Invariant-Conditioned Isotropic Kernel Neural Operator (IKNO), a compact graph model that builds local interactions from scalar quantities unchanged by rotation and vector directions that rotate with the data. Consequently, rotating the positions and velocities rotates the predicted velocity change in exactly the same way. On a held-out test set fixed after model design, training unconstrained graph models on randomly rotated examples reduces but does not eliminate their coordinate dependence. In contrast, IKNO is consistent to numerical precision, matches the forecasting accuracy of a general rotation-aware Tensor Field Network with $5.6$ times fewer parameters, and outperforms a parameter-matched graph simulator. These results show that a compact, PDE-specialized model can remove coordinate dependence without sacrificing forecasting accuracy.
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Cryptography and Security

Safe at One Loop, Risky at Another: Aligning Safety Across Recurrent Depths in Looped Language Models

Looped Language Models (LoopLMs) provide a parameter efficient approach to scaling model capabilities through repeated use of shared parameters across recurrent steps. Since each recurrent depth can be read out independently, a single LoopLM exposes a broader output space across inference depths, raising an important question: whether safety is preserved throughout recurrent computation. Prior evaluations suggest that deeper recurrence can improve safety on harmful queries, but robustness under jailbreak attacks remains unclear. We therefore conduct a comprehensive safety evaluation of LoopLMs under jailbreak attacks targeting different recurrent depths. We find that attack success can increase at deeper inference depths, the same query can elicit different safety behaviors across depths, and attacks constructed against one depth can transfer to others. Moreover, SFT and preference alignment do not eliminate these safety gaps, motivating an alignment method designed for LoopLMs. We introduce SafeBridge, which combines lightweight depth specific control of shared recurrent layers, selective state bridging, and joint safety supervision across recurrent depths. Across model scales, multiple attack methods, and safety benchmarks, SafeBridge substantially reduces attack success for both matched-depth and cross-depth attacks. It also improves general utility over the vanilla models while maintaining comparable over-refusal behavior. Our results show that the safety of a LoopLM cannot be inferred from a single recurrent depth, motivating safety alignment across recurrent computation. Our code and model checkpoints will be released upon acceptance.
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All authors Yi Wang, Xiuyuan Qi, Dongqi Han, Dongsheng Li, Wenjie Wang

Sound

SAVU-BENCH: A Real-World Benchmark for Spatial Audio-Visual Understanding

Spatial audio-visual understanding requires models to recognize not only what is present, but also where events occur and how they relate across modalities. Existing benchmarks often rely on simulated scenes, evaluate isolated spatial skills, and provide limited diagnostic insight into failure modes. We introduce SAVU-Bench, a real-world benchmark that systematically evaluates spatial audio-visual understanding across three capability levels and seven evaluation tasks. We further introduce SAVU-Diag, a scene-linked diagnostic set that decomposes reasoning questions into their prerequisite grounding and alignment sub-tasks. Evaluation of 12 representative models on SAVU-Bench reveals that while visual spatial grounding is relatively mature, spatial perception involving audio remains a primary bottleneck. SAVU-Diag further demonstrates that most reasoning errors co-occur with failures on these prerequisite tasks, though reasoning gaps persist even when prerequisites are correctly resolved. Motivated by these findings, we introduce SAVU-EA, a training-free evidence-augmented baseline that makes spatial cues more explicit. While SAVU-EA substantially improves spatial grounding and joint matching, high-level spatial reasoning remains challenging. Our findings highlight the urgent need for both robust spatial audio perception and deeper integration of cross-modal spatial relations.
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All authors Yu Chen, Ruihang Liu, Yangguang Xu, Xinyue Jiang, Mohammed Bennamoun, Farid Boussaid, Xinyuan Qian, Qiuhong Ke

Machine Learning

Recurrent Self-Improvement: Dynamic Cross-Loop On-Policy Distillation for Looped Language Models

Looped Language Models (LoopLMs) offer a parameter efficient approach to scaling reasoning by reusing shared parameters across recurrent computation steps. Despite their promise, effective post-training of LoopLMs remains challenging. Existing approaches either provide reward based supervision that is sparse or costly to extend across loops, or rely on external teachers or privileged information, leading to limited teacher availability or teacher-student context mismatch. To address these limitations, we introduce LoopOPD, a cross-loop on-policy distillation framework that uses additional recurrent computation within a LoopLM as its own source of supervision. LoopOPD uses a frozen terminal loop policy as a compute privileged teacher for an intermediate loop student on student generated rollouts, providing dense supervision without an external teacher or privileged information. We further propose Dynamic LoopOPD (D-LoopOPD), which continually refreshes the terminal loop teacher as the shared model parameters are updated, enabling recurrent self-improvement. We characterize how distillation updates propagate across loop depths and derive sufficient conditions under which a single update yields simultaneous local improvement at both loop depths. Experiments on Ouro-Thinking models show that LoopOPD improves mathematical reasoning, while D-LoopOPD yields further gains through dynamic teacher updates. Despite being trained only on mathematical data, the resulting models also improve on general reasoning and code generation benchmarks, demonstrating that recurrent computation can serve as an effective source of supervision for LoopLMs. Our code and model checkpoints will be released upon acceptance.
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All authors Yi Wang, Rui Qian, Yu Li, Haoyang Yao, Wenjie Wang

Graphics

WorldBench: Evaluating LLMs on Three.js Voxel World Generation

Large language models can now write complete, interactive 3D worlds as code, but grading those worlds automatically is unreliable. Existing judges take one view of the output: a vision-language model scores a few rendered snapshots, or a language model reads the source. On worlds written by five frontier models we find that the two views disagree on 32% of required items, mostly code that no frame shows, and that fixed views miss small close-up contents. We present WorldBench, a benchmark and judge for open-ended, LLM-generated Three.js worlds. From one prompt describing a floating voxel island with ten biomes, physics, and day/night and seasonal cycles, the judge explores the running world, controlling its clock, orbiting it, and sending a navigator agent to frame each biome, and reads the code for what it sees. Neither channel is trusted on its own: a code quote counts only if it is text the source contains, and visual claims are checked against measured pixels where the property is measurable. A mutation test, in which we remove features by construction, shows that code-only judging gives full credit to four of five removed features, because their code remains in the file. Our judge cuts the points kept on removed features by a third (5.44 to 3.55 of 7.11), and what it still credits is mostly code that exists but never runs. We evaluate five frontier models: Claude Fable 5.1, GPT-6 Astra, Kimi K3, Grok 4.7 and Gemini 3.1 Pro. Code, prompt, tests and judge configuration are available at https://github.com/KrishBakshi/worldbench
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Machine Learning

Self-Organization from Constrained Geometric Radiation

How does dynamic order emerge spontaneously in closed systems without external driving? Existing paradigms all require external energy flows, temperature quenching, or slow driving. Here we report constraint-induced self-organization via geometric radiation in coupled metric evolution systems. Simulations reveal a universal four-stage cycle: stress accumulation, super-exponential radiation, chaotic collapse, and convergence to a fractal limit cycle, a novel attractor topology we term the wedge-shaped attractor, with five quantized curvature states and fractal micro-fluctuations. We identify four jointly sufficient conditions: an irreversible geometric horizon, persistent stress injection from quantum coherence, endogenous geometric tension between incompatible curvatures, and effective fluctuations. Their synergy triggers a critical avalanche at the horizon boundary. We prove three theorems: the Geometric Horizon Theorem, the Geometric Energy Dissipation Theorem (implying wave-like entropy evolution in closed systems), and the Radiation as Phase Transition Channel Theorem. We further establish the Constraint-Induced Self-Organization Theorem: these conditions guarantee the complete cycle with probability one. Systematic scans reveal a critical noise threshold and power-law scaling of radiation onset. We verify universality across 12 configurations, multiple noise types, and three geometric flows. This work establishes a new paradigm for closed-system self-organization, forging an exact mathematical duality between classical nonlinear constraints and gravitational horizons.
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Cryptography and Security

When AI Finds Hidden Messages, Does It Report?

When an assistant encounters a message for another AI, does it tell its user? Four fixed model-provider deployments perform simulated source tasks in 1,280 ordinary-note and 128 enhanced-note sessions. Harmless and harmful messages have matched plaintext and ROT13 versions, with no-message controls. Observers receive no decoder or decoded meaning; a requested reference code incentivizes inspection. Asking for reports increases rule-detected notifications identifying another AI as recipient by 53.1 percentage points for harmless ROT13 messages and 54.7 for harmful ones. This is a joint inspection, recognition, and notification effect; missing-response bounds are 38.3–77.3 and 36.7–78.1 points. Model-based trace checks identify eleven ordinary plaintext cases where agents interpret the message but do not notify their user. Seven encoded omissions are verified with enhanced notes; ordinary encoded omissions remain unverified. Seven simulated filename disclosures coexist with accurate review-status answers, and two answers use a planted false count. Interpretation, notification, and authorized task performance are distinct outcomes.
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All authors William Guey, Rashik Jahangir, Pierrick Bougault, Vitor D. de Moura, Wei Zhang, José O. Gomes

Software Engineering

TestJack: Should you trust the results in coding benchmarks? Agentic Coding Benchmarks Auditing via Evaluator Evolution

Large language model (LLM) agents are rapidly reshaping software engineering, accompanied by an explosion of new code benchmarks. Yet nearly all existing benchmarks still rely on the same decades-old criterion: a solution is correct if it passes a fixed set of unit tests. Such tests are often insufficient: they check only part of what the task requires, so agents can reward hack them or silently miss required behavior while still passing every test. As a result, higher benchmark scores may partly reflect better adaptation to the evaluator rather than better problem solving. Existing works focus on static test augmentation: they strengthen each task's tests once, before any trial is seen, and thus overlook how real trials actually fail. We introduce TestJack, a scalable framework for evaluating patches beyond fixed tests. For each trial, TestJack generates tests targeting prompt requirements the patch may violate, retains only tests passed by the ground-truth patch, and re-examines any trial failures. Each confirmed failure is thus supported by a replayable test. To reduce evaluation cost, we also introduce a lightweight variant which audits a random sample of trials in depth and reuses the resulting tests across all trials for the same task. Across 6 frontier model backends and 5 benchmarks such as DeepSWE and SWE Marathon, we find that about 34.4% of the model trials currently judged correct violate the task requirements, lowering the overall resolution rate from 50.6% to 33.2%. Our results reveal a fundamental limitation of current coding-agent evaluation: as LLMs become better at optimizing against fixed evaluators, those evaluators themselves must become more adaptive.
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All authors Shuangjie Yao, Hao Wang, Koushik Sen, Simin Chen, Baishakhi Ray, Dawn Song

Information Theory

The Hellinger Conjecture for Antipodal Boolean Functions

The balanced Hellinger conjecture compares the overlap of two output laws induced by a Boolean decision under binary symmetric noise. We prove that a single input coordinate minimizes this overlap among antipodal decisions, whose values reverse when all input signs are reversed, throughout the noise interval. The proof uses a normalized nuclear norm of the cross-class block of the Gram matrix of square-root channel densities. Multiplication by an antipodal decision exchanges the even and odd Fourier spaces preserved by the Gram matrix. A coordinate exchange attains the minimum cost of matching their spectra. A matrix contraction extends the sharp bound to arbitrary independent binary-input channels. Fixed coordinate flips and randomized decisions follow from the same argument and concavity. These extensions give bounds for information and testing, including linear Gaussian observations, and a weighted edge-boundary inequality.
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Cryptography and Security

MRCert: Towards Post-deployment Patch Robustness Certification for Adversarially Patched Samples via Type-specific Masking

In post-deployment time, inputs to deep learning models may or may not be adversarially patched. Patch robustness certification on such inputs within a patch bound can verify their label benignity and should retain high prediction accuracy. However, existing smoothing-based and masking-based recovery defenders cannot achieve both simultaneously: they degrade the prediction accuracy much and cannot verify the benignity of the returned label of an adversarially patched input, respectively. We propose MRCert, the first masking-based certified recovery defender that shows the feasibility of achieving both. Unlike all existing works to apply a common condition across both types of input (benign and adversarially patched samples) for certification, MRCert infers type-specific necessary properties of deep learning models for both types in post-deployment time and formally relates them to verify the label benignity through a novel type-oriented design of label recovery and certification function pair. Without incurring the degradation in clean accuracy caused by smoothing, experimental results confirm that MRCert achieves 35.1% adversarial certified accuracy on ImageNet at patch size 16 pixels, whereas the SOTA PatchCURE fails completely.
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All authors Qilin Zhou, Zhengyuan Wei, Haipeng Wang, Zhuo Wang, Shuo Liu, W.K. Chan

Machine Learning

When Routing Reveals Membership: Privacy Leakage from MoE Router Telemetry

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models produce routing information during inference that may be logged or exposed for monitoring, debugging, load analysis, and safety auditing. Unlike ordinary model outputs, this telemetry reveals a view of the model's internal computation, raising a privacy question: can it reveal whether an example was used to fine-tune the deployed model? We introduce a router-augmented membership inference attack that combines conventional output-side signals with aggregated routing features and applies a membership classifier learned from independently fine-tuned shadow models to the target model. Across three MoE architectures and three data domains, router telemetry consistently improves membership inference over a strong output-signal ensemble, increasing TPR at 1% FPR by 2.7–9.4 percentage points across all nine settings. The leakage persists across full fine-tuning, frozen-router training, LoRA, and instruction tuning, and remains observable with only discrete expert selections, restricted telemetry, or a single shadow model. Mechanistic analysis further shows that the leakage does not require router-specific memorization: fine-tuning introduces membership information into hidden representations, while the router exposes a projection of this signal even when its parameters are frozen. Perturbing the telemetry reduces this additional leakage only as its fidelity degrades. Our results show that router telemetry can turn an operational signal into an additional privacy surface for fine-tuned MoE models.
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All authors Yixin Tan, Jiayang Liu, Lu Sun, Yuke Hu, Zheng Li, Rui Wen

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from stat.ML

JevForest: Path Voting for Budgeted Feature Acquisition

Choosing which information to observe is central to prediction under limited observation budgets. We study JevForest, a feature acquisition policy that aggregates path-dependent proposals from bootstrapped trees, weights them by global training information gain, and predicts from the acquired values with a shared masked classifier. An online implementation queries Jev for semantic answers selected by this policy. On small balanced held-out samples, four-question forest acquisition achieves accuracy $0.729$ on AG News ($n=48$), compared with $0.667$ for a static gain ranking and $0.583$ for random ordering. On TREC ($n=24$), the ordering reverses: forest accuracy is $0.667$, compared with $0.750$ and $0.833$. Asking all eight questions in one batch yields higher accuracy at lower measured cost and latency than four sequential forest queries; direct Jev classification matches the batch accuracy while costing less. Offline MiniBooNE experiments yield accuracy $0.845\pm0.010$ at ten features and $0.885\pm0.008$ at forty features over three jointly varying data and forest seeds (mean $\pm$ sample standard deviation). A companion Newton boosting implementation provides preliminary full-feature synthetic results. These exploratory findings establish a working Jev acquisition workflow but do not support a general advantage for path voting: its value depends on the task, predictor, and the distinction between question budgets and actual query costs.
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Machine Learning

Temporal transformer CAN encoder with federated lightweight heads for anomaly detection

Modern vehicles rely on large numbers of Electronic Control Units (ECUs) that constantly exchange information over the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus. Due to the rapidity, structure, and repetition of this communication, even slight variations in timing, payload values, or message patterns can point to unusual activity. Whether due to errors, malfunctions, or deliberate interference, these anomalies are frequently subtle and challenging to identify with conventional methods that handle messages separately or rely on manually created rules. Motivated by this gap, we present a privacy-preserving framework for anomaly detection in in-vehicle networks, based on a Temporal Transformer CAN Encoder with Federated Lightweight Heads, to better capture these irregularities. The detection of subtle temporal and contextual anomalies is made possible by a lightweight Transformer encoder that learns how these signals evolve over time, while a federated learning mechanism enables several vehicles or ECUs to work together to improve a shared model without exchanging raw CAN data. This combination of federated learning and temporal sequence modeling provides robust anomaly detection performance while maintaining efficiency and privacy, according to experiments conducted on open-source datasets.
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All authors Konstantinos Gyftodimos, Kyriakos Chiotis, Elena Politi, George Dimitrakopoulos, Eirini Liotou

Cryptography and Security

PyCache Trap: The Inspection-Execution Gap in Agent Skill Scanners

Agent skills combine instructions with executable resources, giving third-party packages access to an agent's runtime. Existing skill scanners inspect documentation and visible source, but Python may execute a bundled bytecode cache with different behavior. We study this gap between inspection and execution through PyCache Trap, which pairs benign source with a substituted cache accepted by the loader and connects it to a task-relevant invocation. Scanner-guided rewriting changes the invocation wording while preserving the cache body, separating package admission from recognition of the concealed behavior. Across 100 skills and seven scanners, PyCache Trap achieves 94-100% attack success, with no semantic recognition of the cache-resident behavior. We propose execution-aware validation (EAV) to connect inspected instructions, scripts, imports, and runtime artifacts in a typed execution graph. EAV combines grounded behavioral analysis with trusted reproduction of compiled artifacts. It detects all 100 evaluated source-present cache substitutions and reaches 92.8% Recall at 10.0% FPR across five attack families and 200 benign skills. The results support checking the executable artifacts a runtime can select as part of skill admission, within the supported loaders and code-object normalization. The code is released at https://github.com/leo0481/PyCacheTrap.
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All authors Jie Liao, Simeng Qin, Wenqi Ren, Wei Zhou, Junhao Wen, Ranjie Duan, Yang Liu, Xiaojun Jia

Artificial Intelligence

Verification and Self-Improvement in Agentic AI: Foundations and Limits

Agentic AI systems can improve by searching longer, receiving additional support, or modifying how they propose and verify outputs. A performance score does not distinguish these mechanisms. We compare these changes through bounded verification with hidden terminal randomness. A stage specifies admissible transcripts, polynomial bounds, an alternating verification protocol, and a terminal checker. Its native reach uses default support; its closure frontier permits all support already admitted by the interface. Under a uniform pointwise probability gap and task-relative soundness, these are well-defined languages. We prove that independent majority amplification preserves both languages, whereas existential acceptance over random tapes can admit incorrect outputs. Exact verification is the zero-randomness case, with placement and completeness results. The randomized-verifier classes satisfy $\Sigma_k^{\mathrm{P}}\subseteq\Sigma_k^{\mathrm{RV}}\subseteq\Sigma_{k+1}^{\mathrm{P}}$; strict enlargement and depth separation require explicit complexity assumptions, while $\mathrm{BPP}=\mathrm{P}$ yields exact companions with the same frontiers. Representation analysis separates invariant acceptance from core-versus-support labels that can change under refactoring. For recursive self-improvement, uniformly bounded self-modification under a common sound interpreter and fixed verification protocol remains within the same verification class. A separate conditional-error budget controls false selection across adaptively chosen candidates. A quota-enforced XOR-synthesis family separates unbounded ratios of search success from changes in the accepted languages; exact and probabilistic audits check the resulting evidence requirements. The framework ties self-improvement claims to obligations on correctness, admissible evidence, verification resources, and selection error.
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Software Engineering

Code Understanding is a Bottleneck for Coding Agents

Repository benchmarks (e.g., SWE-bench) for coding agents often assume that lines of code edited can predict task difficulty, but such datasets' poor control over code and task types makes it hard to know which abilities truly drive agent errors. We present CABRA: a Coding Ability Blueprint for Rigorous Agent evaluation. CABRA builds tasks from scratch as call graph transformations and scales difficulty via a task size parameter on four axes: function traversal, search, runtime resolution, and instruction following. We run eight LLMs and six coding agents on 6,840 CABRA tasks to show: 1) LLM accuracy falls as task size~grows, but agents stay near-perfect by offloading work to tools (e.g., grep); 2) Larger CABRA tasks elicit more tool calls for reading and analysis, while a separate study on SWE-bench Verified shows these tool call counts predict agents' accuracy better than lines of code edited, suggesting task difficulty for agents can lie in understanding code to edit, not just in making edits; 3) Extending CABRA to an intense understanding task where models analyze divergent logic across two classes backs this finding, as agent accuracy finally falls. More broadly, we argue for synthetic evaluations like CABRA to unmask LLM weaknesses trivialized by tools (e.g., needle-in-a-haystack) and abilities beyond just editing (e.g., understanding) that coding agents still find difficult, pairing SWE-bench-style tasks with controlled diagnosis.
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Cryptography and Security

From Investigation Failures to Reliable SOC Agents: Understanding and Improving LLM-Based Alert Triage

Security operations centers (SOCs) must triage large volumes of alerts, most of which are benign, while missed attacks can remain uninvestigated. Tool-using large language model (LLM) agents can retrieve evidence during triage, but it remains unclear how reasoning strategies determine what to gather and when an investigation is sufficient to close an alert. We study five representative approaches spanning single-pass tool use, iterative retrieval, sampled investigations, self-review, and explicit verification. To support this study, we build ALERT-BENCH, an interactive benchmark that replays enterprise telemetry through a live SIEM and requires each system to retrieve evidence. Across 1,247 alerts from a multi-stage attack scenario, every approach missed at least 40.4% of attack-related alerts. Trace analysis shows that attack alerts are more likely to be dismissed when searches return no records, same-context review has negative net correction, and dismissal receives no consistently stronger investigation than escalation. Based on these findings, we further design AIDA (Adversarial Investigation and Dialectical Analysis), a multi-agent framework that requires an explicit proposed decision before independent challenge and stronger evidentiary requirements before dismissal. AIDA preserves investigation history in an append-only Investigation Ledger and keeps the challenge in a separate reasoning context. A separate Judge adjudicates the proposed decision and challenge against evidence, resolving the alert or requesting another round when evidence is missing. On the same alerts, AIDA achieves an F1 score of 0.958, compared with 0.371-0.744 for the studied approaches, and reduces the false-negative rate from 40.4% to 3.1% while escalating 18.4% of alerts to analysts. These results show that structuring evidence retrieval and decision review can substantially improve agentic SOC triage.
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All authors Saimon Amanuel Tsegai, Alex Kantchelian, Danfeng Yao, Peng Gao

Computer Vision

A Camera-Native Stereo VR180 Dataset

Immersive VR180 video is increasingly produced with professional stereo fisheye cameras, yet public VR180 research resources are mostly collected from online platforms such as YouTube: already stitched, projected and compressed by unknown pipelines, and without lens calibration. We present a firsthand-captured stereo VR180 dataset recorded with two Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive cameras. It contains 1,211 samples – 636 stereo video clips (2,220.8 s, mostly 90 fps) and 575 stereo stills – each released as camera-native Blackmagic RAW, separate-eye native fisheye HEVC (8160x7200 per eye) and half-equirectangular HEVC (7200x7200 per eye), together with the factory lens calibration, portable fisheye/half-equirectangular conversion tools and AI-generated scene and visual-challenge annotations. Re-encoding the released fisheye and half-equirectangular renders with x265 over 24 clips, both eyes, four rate points and nine viewing directions, native-fisheye coding needed more bitrate than half-equirectangular coding at equal viewport quality for all 24 clips (median +38%), in every part of the field of view. Data: https://huggingface.co/datasets/lulinxuan/VR180 ; code: https://github.com/lulinxuan/vr180-dataset-tools
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Software Engineering

Beyond Type-checking: Towards Holistic Evaluation of Formal Specification Generation

When generating verifiable code, natural language requirements are mapped to machine checked code using LLMs and agentic workflows. A crucial component of this pipeline is specification generation (SpecGen), which produces a formal contract against which an agent can prove implementation correctness. Proof generation can obtain deterministic feedback from a theorem prover, but SpecGen lacks a definitive check that a generated specification captures the user's intent. A checked proof can therefore establish correctness against a specification that misrepresents the intended behaviour. We take a step towards holistic SpecGen evaluation with a unified dataset assembled from $350$ existing Lean tasks, including $189$ from VERINA and $161$ from CLEVER, and a framework covering formal validity, reference similarity and equivalence, and behavioural adequacy. We distinguish acceptance of required inputs from acceptance of valid outputs and rejection of invalid outputs, while making each metric's evidence scope explicit. Across four SpecGen configurations, restricting the generalized tree edit distance (GTED) comparison, a reference similarity measure, to $32$ jointly measurable VERINA tasks changes the VERINA configuration's position from second to fourth in mean similarity, showing the importance of measurement coverage. In an authored control, a specification achieves $100\%$ positive test recall and negative test rejection while accepting $0\%$ of required inputs. This demonstrates that perfect postcondition scores can miss an unusable input contract, motivating separate feedback on input coverage and output constraints.
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All authors Srijith Nair, Aditya Vempaty, Jia Liu, Ashish Jagmohan

Computer Vision

Tetris3D: 3D Scene Generation With Objects That Fit Together

We propose Tetris3D, a generative framework for single-image 3D scene reconstruction that recovers objects which are physically and geometrically coherent as a scene. Existing methods often generate objects independently or couple them implicitly, providing limited guidance for ensuring fine-grained spatial compatibility between neighboring objects that interact with one another. To address this, we explicitly condition the generation of each object on the geometry of surrounding objects and their physical relationships, guiding its shape and pose to remain geometrically and physically plausible within the scene. Moreover, we introduce ComOb, a physics simulation-based dataset of 1.2M scenes featuring physical interactions across diverse object categories, with per-object meshes and pairwise physical relation annotations. Comprehensive experiments on synthetic and realworld scenes show that Tetris3D recovers coherent object shapes and poses even when interacting regions are occluded, and achieves state-of-the-art performance in both generation quality and physical stability.
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All authors Jaeyeong Kim, Jinhyuk Jang, Jongmin Lee, Kyehong Park, Seungryong Kim

Computer Vision

Never Look Back: Understanding Persistence in 3D Object Memory from Egocentric Videos

As we move through the world and carry out everyday tasks, we encounter objects that may become relevant only later. We are capable of recalling where we left something or what was inside a container, even without knowing we would need it later. Here, we study how an embodied assistant can build a similar memory from egocentric videos, by observing a person's day-to-day activities. We present Ledger, a persistent 3D object memory that combines object locations, their histories, and contextual descriptions. It associates observations across the recording and retains objects after they leave the view, including those the person never touches. It clusters each object's observations by resting locations and records a move only after repeated evidence, reducing the effect of localization noise. Short descriptions preserve details such as an object's contents or supporting surface. It saves these records to later answer spatial questions without having to access the original images or video. Our memory raises HD-EPIC accuracy from 29.7% to 42.6%, UCS-Bench accuracy from 33.8% to 38.5% and localizes Ego4D objects with a 0.99 m median error on returned predictions. Our analyses identify complementary roles for temporal persistence, contextual descriptions, and retrieval. Our study on 100 stitched streams of multiple scenes each further exposes failures in both retrieval and construction. Per-scene construction partially recovers the performance lost across scene changes compared to that of single scene streams.
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All authors Shravan Chaudhari, William Paul, Suchi Saria, Rama Chellappa, Homanga Bharadhwaj

Machine Learning

Decoupling Exploration from Optimization in RLVR

Modern language models undergo reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) on top of already-trained checkpoints. A key promise of RLVR is the discovery of new reasoning strategies. In principle, a model can sample novel ideas absent from its prior training data. In practice, however, augmenting RLVR with strong novelty incentives has seen limited success and can degrade model quality. Because verifiable rewards supervise only a narrow slice of the model's knowledge and behavior, such degradations are difficult to recover from. Instead, we decouple exploration from optimization in a framework we call Exploration-Distillation (ExpDis). We train one or more explorer policies with a novelty bonus in the reward, filter their trajectories for correctness and quality, and distill them into a separate student policy. The student policy is then trained without a novelty bonus. We repeat the above procedure for several rounds, alternating between exploration and optimization. This decoupling allows us to aggressively scale exploration without degrading the student policy. Across seven mathematical reasoning benchmarks and two model families, ExpDis outperforms DAPO at the same wall-clock budget. Moreover, we observe improved pass@$k$ scaling, indicating that ExpDis produces models that generate more diverse correct solutions.
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Robotics

RoboPrompt: Intuitive Robot Policy Steering with Sparse Human Input

End-to-end robot policies trained through imitation learning remain constrained by limited data diversity, making reliable zero-shot deployment in real-world settings challenging. Shared-autonomy methods enable human correction through teleoperation, but specialized hardware and operator training hinder deployment at scale. Other approaches incorporate human guidance as additional policy inputs, often requiring architectural changes and dedicated training for steerability, which limits their applicability across policies. We present RoboPrompt, a general-purpose, lightweight robot policy steering system that enables users to guide policy behavior through intuitive, sparse inputs, including drawn traces, target points, and coarse directional instructions. RoboPrompt decouples human-intention translation from the underlying policy: a reusable module converts human guidance into action drafts, which are refined through the diffusion or flow-matching dynamics of the base policy. By controlling action generation in noise space, RoboPrompt balances human intent with the policy prior without modifying the base policy architecture or fine-tuning it for steerability. Experiments demonstrate effective steering across Diffusion Policy, $\pi_{0.5}$, and FastWAM. We further use steered rollouts for online policy improvement through DAgger. After 2-3 rounds of iteration, average success rates increase by 15.5% for $\pi_{0.5}$ across three tasks and by 21.3% across three policies(Diffusion Policy, $\pi_{0.5}$, FastWAM) on the Insert Bread task, while average human intervention counts decrease by 44.0% (2.86 to 1.60) and 81.9% (2.60 to 0.47), respectively.
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All authors Yanwen Zou, Chenyang Shi, Guoxuan Xu, Wenye Yu, Wendi Chen, Ye Pan, Cewu Lu, Chuan Wen

Computation and Language

EngramEdit: Decoupled Knowledge Updates in LLMs through Conditional Memory

Conditional memory architectures such as DeepSeek Engram use input n-grams to look up learned embeddings, expanding the capacity of large language models (LLMs) with limited additional computation. Beyond model scaling, this architecture has demonstrated the potential to decouple factual knowledge storage from general-purpose computation, offering a promising route to updating factual knowledge while keeping the Transformer backbone fixed. Realizing this potential is challenging because different expressions of a fact may activate different n-gram embeddings, while updating shared embeddings can unintentionally change the model's predictions about other facts. We propose EngramEdit for decoupled knowledge updates through conditional memory. EngramEdit first computes target memory representations that make the model predict the updated fact across multiple expressions. It then jointly updates the shared n-gram embeddings to match these targets across expressions and edits, penalizing updates to frequently reused embeddings more strongly to preserve unrelated knowledge. Experiments show that EngramEdit enables independent factual knowledge updates through conditional memory, achieving near-perfect editing success. Revised knowledge is usable across unseen expressions and in multi-hop reasoning, with nearly three times the strongest baseline's accuracy under chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. Unrelated knowledge and general capabilities are largely preserved even as factual updates accumulate. These findings show that EngramEdit turns conditional memory into an editable knowledge interface, extending its role beyond model scaling to support decoupled knowledge updates.
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All authors Hongru Cai, Ran Wei, Wenjie Wang, Chengfa Wu, Ning Song, Yongqi Li, Wenjie Li

Networking

Predictive Rerouting of Connected and Automated Vehicles Using Traffic and Charging Demand Forecasts

In this paper, we consider the problem of predictive rerouting of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) in mixed traffic with electric vehicle charging demand. We provide a framework that combines a diffusion convolutional recurrent neural network (DCRNN) with a routing policy that accounts for congestion, CO2 emissions, route length, and charging demand. The DCRNN uses historical network observations to forecast traffic conditions and charging demand. These forecasts are then used to evaluate feasible alternative routes for eligible CAVs. A route change is accepted when the alternative preserves connectivity to the original destination and improves the prescribed route cost. We evaluate the proposed framework in SUMO under controlled traffic disruptions at five CAV penetration levels, ranging from 5% to 45%. We compare its performance with K-shortest-path routing, predictive-density routing, V2X proactive routing, and a reference scenario without rerouting. In the considered scenarios, the proposed framework reduces the average travel-time index by approximately 1.8% relative to the reference scenario and achieves the lowest average travel-time index, highest average speed, and lowest aggregate CO2 emissions among the active routing methods. Across all five penetration levels, it accepts 41 route changes, compared with 146 for K-shortest-path routing and 153 for V2X proactive routing. The reference scenario retains lower aggregate emissions and distance traveled, illustrating the tradeoff between congestion reduction and the additional travel associated with rerouting.
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