Named after the hundred-eyed watchman of Greek myth, Argus watches the education landscape: spotting new opportunities, pressure-testing the ventures we're building, and tracing every read back to the real-world signals behind it.
The evidence library: the raw signals the pipeline is watching across the education ecosystem. Every idea is built from these.
arXiv:2607.13370v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper is an extension of a paper presented at the ICAART 2026 conference, which introduced LEA (Learning Engagement Assistant), an adaptive AI tutoring agent combining course-specific Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with structured Knowledge Component (KC) models across integrated Chat, Tutor, and Quiz modes. That prior work validated LEA on a single STEM course (CMP511) exclusively through simulation, using synthetic learner agents. This paper extends that work by reporting the first classroom deployment of LEA with real students (n = 8, CMP511) and the first empirical test of its cross-course scalability, deploying the system across three courses spanning two academic levels and two disciplinary domains. The study reveals a divergence from simulation predictions across modes, showing that synthetic evaluation alone cannot anticipate all aspects of real deployment. A RAGAS-based cross-course scalability evaluation (660 question
arXiv:2607.13272v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In a recent dynamic model by Acemoglu, Kong and Ozdaglar (2026a) agentic AI can cause a self-reinforcing deterioration of humanity's common knowledge base in what they call knowledge collapse. The model is based on a natural complementarity between the cumulative general knowledge of humans and locally generated context-specific knowledge, and on a learning externality that means that we all contribute to the private signal and the thin public signal that feeds the collective stock. If agentic AI can substitute for the private signal but not rebuild the public signal, and when human effort is sufficiently elastic, we can reach a low-knowledge equilibrium. This paper offers a measured appraisal of the model. It assesses the model in terms of what the popular summaries say is common knowledge, the world literature against knowledge commons and model collapse, and the partial empirical evidence, such as a 25% decline in public knowledge shar
arXiv:2607.13094v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) enables automatic analysis of large amounts of data. Previously time-consuming and labor-intensive tasks can be completed much more efficiently with the use of AI. This work uses AI techniques to analyze and revise curricular patterns in an undergraduate degree for Software Engineering. Curricula often have long sequences where failure to pass a class within the sequence may jeopardize completion of the degree within four years. Manual analysis and revision of curricula by university faculty is a lengthy and labor-intensive process, causing changes to occur rarely and making it impossible to keep up with the changing needs of students. This work reduces the time-to-change for curricula and reduces bottlenecks and graduation delays by using Large Language Models (LLMs) to analyze curricular patterns and suggest revisions.
arXiv:2607.13077v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often produce homogeneous outputs, raising concerns that AI coding assistants may lead to convergence in the software artifacts that developers create. Whether this occurs in practice is unclear because developers interactively prompt, evaluate, modify, and reject model outputs, and because outputs vary with prompt and repository context. I examine code homogenization using Kaggle contest submissions from 2019 to mid-2026. I first document widespread convergence toward the random seed value 42, consistent with LLMs reinforcing a longstanding convention in programming culture. I then study homogenization more broadly, at two levels of aggregation and abstraction. At the submission level, I measure the average pairwise similarity of submissions within contests. At the contest level, I measure the conceptual span of submitted code, motivating distinct measures for each: TF-IDF representations, which capture surfa
arXiv:2607.13041v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) based AI educational content generation systems are increasingly being developed, yet no standardised benchmark exists to systematically evaluate them. This study introduces LessonBench-V1, a benchmark dataset comprising 647 human-written lessons paired with LLM-based reverse-engineered lesson plans across 240 STEM topics spanning mathematics, physics, chemistry, and computer science. The lessons are drawn from 97 trusted open sources, including LibreTexts, Brilliant.org and GeeksForGeeks. Each lesson plan is human-reviewed and produced through a pedagogically grounded methodology that synthesises Bloom's Taxonomy, Gagn\'e's Events, Merrill's First Principles, and the 5E Instructional Model. The lesson plans capture 3,620 learning objectives with pedagogical metadata, enabling systematic, reproducible evaluation of lesson-generation AI agents and supporting further research. The study further proposes a three-di
arXiv:2607.13040v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper examines where final authority should sit once capable AI systems are embedded in organizational workflows. It compares two governance models. The first, frontier-provider sovereignty, assigns privileged authority to the provider of the most capable models and is reflected in contemporary arguments for frontier-model testing, release gating, transparency duties, and compute-related controls. The second, action-centered deployer sovereignty, places final authority over high-impact actions with the organization that authorizes the action, embeds it in a business process, and bears the downstream legal, operational, and commercial consequences. The paper combines comparative reading of public governance frameworks with implementation-informed analysis of runtime heterogeneity and enterprise control requirements. It compares EU AI Act guidance, the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, Singapore's Model AI Governance Framework for Age
arXiv:2607.13039v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety evaluations for dual-use biology assistants often measure base-model capability, refusal behavior, or jailbreak success. These metrics miss a deployment question: for a fixed base model, how does the access condition users actually see change benign utility and harmful actionable assistance? I introduce safeguard-conditioned uplift, a protocol for comparing deployed access conditions through a human-judged utility-risk frontier. I evaluate Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Gemini 3.5 Flash under helpful prompting, safety prompting, and an external safeguarded assistant on a 108-task surrogate benchmark, with the headline claim restricted to a locked 18-task held-out split. In a 600-row blinded human audit, the safeguarded assistant reduces harmful actionability relative to helpful prompting by -0.063 over 49 matched response pairs, with bootstrap 95% interval [-0.117, -0.011], while correctness changes by +0.009 with interval [-0.057, +0.077].
arXiv:2607.13038v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present the design and implementation of a safety constrained large language model (LLM) system for public health information access, focusing on maternal and child health (MCH) resource navigation. While LLM based systems offer flexible and natural interfaces for information retrieval, their deployment in healthcare contexts introduces risks related to safety, trust, and uncontrolled generation. This work explores practical design patterns for constraining LLM behavior in safety critical environments. We introduce a multi-layered architecture that integrates domain-restricted retrieval augmented generation (RAG), strict boundary enforcement to prevent medical advice, anonymous multiuser session management, and comprehensive audit logging for monitoring and compliance. A key aspect of the design is a controlled data pipeline that grounds all responses in curated public health resources, avoiding reliance on the model pretrained medical
Article URL: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/data-breach-at-edtech-giant-mcgraw-hill-affects-135-million-accounts/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47795464 Points: 3 # Comments: 0
Article URL: https://radicalpie.com/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47789096 Points: 1 # Comments: 0
A court ruling struck down key parts of how regulators calculate the No Surprises Act’s qualifying payment amount, siding with the Texas Medical Association’s argument that the formula has historically favored payers in arbitration. The post Appeals Court Sides with Providers in No Surprises Act Pay Dispute appeared first on MedCity News .
Cotiviti launched an AI-powered coordination of benefits solution that uses enrollment data to identify and resolve coverage issues before claims are submitted. The post Cotiviti Launches AI Solution to Address Coordination of Benefits Issues appeared first on MedCity News .
Article URL: https://fedscoop.com/doj-opinion-nsf-stem-dei-unconstitutional/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49292218 Points: 4 # Comments: 2
Sangamo Therapeutics filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June after its search for strategic alternatives failed to find a path forward for the company. PTC Therapeutics’ auction win brings a Sangamo gene therapy candidate for Fabry disease, a rare inherited disorder with few treatment options. The post PTC Therapeutics’ $211M Bid Wins Bankruptcy Auction for Sangamo Gene Therapy appeared first on MedCity News .
In healthcare, enterprises are moving slower than the hype cycle would lead you to believe. That said, they’re not moving slowly – they are saying yes to AI, as long as it can solve for specific workflow needs. The post Founders Should Stop Worrying If They’re “AI Enough” appeared first on MedCity News .
Higher education is at an inflection point. The 2026 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report identifies the forces most likely to reshape teaching and learning over the next decade — and the picture is complex. As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, it’s changing relationships across campus. Institutions also continue to face mounting enrollment challenges. And emerging risks related to cybersecurity, policy reform and sustainability are compounding institutional strain. AI’s Influence on Teaching and Learning According to the report, AI is redefining instructional design and how faculty teach…
K–12 districts are entrusted with a wide range of student data. Attendance records, grades, behavior logs, Individualized Education Programs and health records are gathered and stored in school systems, often for years after children move on to other districts or graduate. And as schools adopt more ed tech tools, they’re responsible for even more data. With that responsibility comes risk: A single mismanaged account can lead to an exposure that puts students’ information at risk. Strong data governance requires building smart policy; it also requires putting into place deliberate practices…
Assessment after AI is not about fear, but rather about intentional and purposeful design
arXiv:2606.06027v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Community-conditioned language model adaptation needs choices about data collection, community definition, and evaluation that are currently made independently in each study, making it hard to compare assumptions or reuse artifacts. We present RedditPersona, a modular framework that standardizes these choices: it collects Reddit posts and comments, profiles active users, partitions them under five grouping strategies (subreddit-based, graph-structural, semantic, hybrid, and interaction-based), trains a parameter-efficient adapter per strategy via QLoRA, and evaluates them under a shared metric suite spanning fluency, fidelity, distributional alignment, and community identifiability. Applied to 112 subreddits in the urban well-being domain (301,429 user profiles, 16M+ comments), we find that adapters' behavioral identifiability tracks each strategy's agreement with the subreddit baseline, and that a consistent trade-off between i
arXiv:2606.04923v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Rubric-based reinforcement learning (RL) uses an LLM-as-a-Judge (LaaJ) to score model outputs according to rubrics as rewards. However, policy models may exploit latent biases in the judge, leading to reward hacking and ineffective or unsafe training outcomes. In real-world rubric-based RL, such hacking behaviors are often subtle and entangled with multiple judge biases, making them difficult to analyze, detect, and mitigate. In this paper, we introduce CHERRL, a Controllable Hacking Environment for Rubric-based RL. By injecting known biases into LaaJ, CHERRL enables stable reproduction of reward hacking, explicit observation of reward divergence, and identification of hacking onset. This provides a clean experimental testbed for studying the mechanisms and mitigations of reward hacking in rubric-based RL. To demonstrate its utility, we analyze different judge biases from the perspectives of discoverability and exploitability, a
arXiv:2606.00671v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present Moxia (formerly AXIOM), a trust-first neuro-symbolic architecture for self-explaining mathematical reasoning over natural-language input. Its language model is strictly a canonicalizer: it rewrites informal problem text into a narrow schema consumed by a deterministic Computer-Algebra-System (CAS) pipeline, which derives and verifies the answer or abstains as a first-class output. Routing follows a 1:1:1 alignment of problem-shape regex, schema-specific prompt, and closed-form CAS handler, with 4,783 routes shipped, 71% of which answer without invoking the language model, and zero LOST_CORRECT regressions as a standing release gate. Because the answer is derived rather than generated, so is its explanation: every handler emits a step trace of the computation it performed, rendered as prose by a layer covering all 4,785 task files that cannot narrate a step the handler did not take. Derivations export to Lean 4 as well
arXiv:2605.27101v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A key capability for video understanding is reliably linking subjects to events across time, yet whether Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) actually achieve this remains unclear. In this work, we introduce DistractionBench to evaluate whether VideoLLMs can robustly link subjects and events in the presence of unrelated video segments. Through controlled interventions, such as inserting short advertisement clips into longer videos, we show that VideoLLMs frequently hallucinate interactions between entities from different segments, incorrectly attributing actions from injected advertisements to subjects in the main video. We characterize this systematic hallucination as bag-of-events (BoE) behavior, where models process videos as collections of events rather than temporally structured sequences. Evaluating 11 popular VideoLLMs, we find that all models exhibit substantial BoE behavior. Our findings suggest that VideoLLMs lack r
arXiv:2605.16409v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Optical character recognition (OCR) and multilingual scene-text understanding remain challenging for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), particularly in real-world images containing small or degraded text, cluttered layouts, occlusion, handwriting, and complex typography. We present an OCR-aware multilingual post-training framework that improves visual-text grounding in a general-purpose MLLM without requiring an external OCR engine, OCR-extracted text, or text bounding boxes at inference time. The framework combines large-scale multilingual OCR supervision, approximately 5M additional multilingual training samples, controlled synthetic OCR generation and in-image text translation, LoRA-based supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and lightweight OCR-oriented Chain-of-Thought prompting. On a held-out real-world multilingual OCR benchmark, OCR-SFT improves OCR completeness from 71.3 to 84.6, reduces hallucination rate from 18.3\% to
arXiv:2509.13450v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce SteeringSafety, a benchmark for evaluating representation steering methods across nine safety perspectives spanning 18 datasets. While prior work highlights the general capabilities of representation steering, we focus on safety perspectives including refusal, bias, hallucination, social behaviors, reasoning, epistemic integrity, and normative judgment. SteeringSafety provides modularized building blocks for state-of-the-art steering methods, enabling unified implementation of DIM, ACE, CAA, PCA, and LAT with recent enhancements such as conditional steering. Results on Gemma-2-2B, Llama-3.1-8B, and Qwen-2.5-7B show that strong steering performance depends on the pairing of method, model, and specific perspective. For instance, DIM is consistently effective, yet all methods exhibit substantial entanglement, where improving effectiveness on one safety perspective often significantly changes performance on others. Soci
arXiv:2411.15122v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-driven models have demonstrated significant potential in automating radiology report generation for chest X-rays. However, there is no standardized benchmark for objectively evaluating their performance. To address this, we present ReXrank, https://rexrank.ai, a public leaderboard and challenge for assessing AI-powered radiology report generation. Our framework incorporates ReXGradient, the largest test dataset consisting of 10,000 studies, and three public datasets (MIMIC-CXR, IU-Xray, CheXpert Plus) for report generation assessment. ReXrank employs 8 evaluation metrics and separately assesses models capable of generating only findings sections and those providing both findings and impressions sections. By providing this standardized evaluation framework, ReXrank enables meaningful comparisons of model performance and offers crucial insights into their robustness across diverse clinical settings. Beyond its current focus on
arXiv:2408.06849v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The large language model (LLM) has achieved significant success across various domains. However, the inherent complexity of causal problems and causal theory poses challenges in accurately describing them in natural language, making it difficult for LLM to comprehend and use them effectively. Causal methods are not easily conveyed through natural language, which hinders LLM's ability to apply them accurately. Additionally, causal datasets are typically tabular, while LLM excels in handling natural language data, creating a structural mismatch that impedes effective reasoning with tabular data. To address these challenges, we have equipped the LLM with causal tools within an agent framework, named the Causal Agent, enabling it to tackle causal problems. The causal agent comprises tools, memory, and reasoning modules. In the tool module, the causal agent calls Python code and uses the encapsulated causal function module to align t
arXiv:2606.28876v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Proposal. Long context can replay history, but it does not decide which completed observations deserve authority. MMLA formalizes a bounded resident memory between transient context and slow weight updates. A completed local segment is eventized; for each event, a target-conditioned constructor proposes semantic content and a trusted assembler produces a complete versioned row; deployment either commits that row atomically or returns NULL. Realized futures may price actions during training, while deployment remains causal and future-blind. Validated components. Controlled studies establish narrower ingredients. Lifecycle execution is exact on 300/300 held-out records for each of three seeds. Calibrated selection with full-archive fallback improves over a weak budget-matched dense baseline by 5.5--16.6 F1 and over BM25 by 4.0--6.2 F1 on held-out multi-hop QA; the original Llama budget execution is retained as failed, while the correcte
arXiv:2606.09498v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The performance of LLM-based agents is jointly shaped by their base models and the harnesses that mediate their interaction with the environment. Because different models exhibit distinct behaviors, effective harness design is inherently model-specific. Yet agent harnesses are still largely engineered by human experts, a paradigm that scales poorly as modern LLMs become increasingly diverse and rapidly evolving. In this paper, we introduce Self-Harness, a new paradigm in which an LLM-based agent improves its own operating harness, without relying on human engineers or stronger external agents. We operationalize Self-Harness as an iterative loop with three stages: Weakness Mining, which identifies model-specific failure patterns from execution traces; Harness Proposal, which generates diverse yet minimal harness modifications tied to these failures; and Proposal Validation, which accepts candidate edits only after regression testing. W
arXiv:2605.04495v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) relies on evidence ranking to determine what information is exposed to the generator, yet existing retrieval and reranking methods primarily estimate query--document relevance. Relevance, however, is not equivalent to generator-side usefulness: a relevant passage may introduce ambiguity or distraction, whereas a lower-ranked passage may stabilize the generator's answer. We present CAR (Confidence-Aware Reranking), a training-free rank-correction framework that uses query-only answer stability as a control and measures each candidate by the change it induces in sampled-answer semantic stability. This controlled contrast estimates a document's marginal contribution to generator behavior without treating semantic stability as relevance or calibrated correctness. CAR converts these confidence changes into coarse precedence constraints and returns the feasible ranking with minimum Kendall distance from
arXiv:2604.17244v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents for sequential decision-making struggle to produce diverse outputs. This leads to insufficient exploration, suboptimal solutions, and repeated actions. Actions are generated at the sequence level, but existing sampling strategies, such as temperature scaling, introduce diversity at the token level, not at the sequence level. We introduce DORA EXPLORER (Diversity-Oriented Ranking of Actions), a training-free, inference-time algorithm for improving exploration in LLM agents. DORA generates multiple candidate actions, scores them using sequence-level log-probability statistics, and samples an action via a tunable exploration parameter. We first study exploration in the classic Multi-Armed Bandit setting, where DORA substantially outperforms temperature-based sampling. Our main evaluation is on the Text Adventure Learning Environment Suite (TALES), where prompting strategies fail to explore but DORA deliv
arXiv:2604.07801v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models are trained and evaluated on quantitative reasoning tasks written in clean, emotionally neutral language. However, real-world queries are often wrapped in frustration, urgency or enthusiasm. Does emotional framing alone degrade reasoning when all numerical content is preserved? To investigate this, a controlled emotion translation framework is developed that rewrites problems into emotional variants while preserving all quantities and relationships. Using this framework, Temper-5400 (5,400 semantically verified emotion-neutral pairs) is constructed across GSM8K, MultiArith, and ARC-Challenge, and evaluated on eighteen models (1B to frontier scale). Two core results emerge: First, emotional framing reduces accuracy by 2-10 percentage points even though all numerical content is preserved. Second, neutralizing emotional variants recovers most of the lost performance, showing both that the degradation is tied to emot
arXiv:2604.03924v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Goal-oriented conversational systems require making sequential decisions under uncertainty about the user's intent, where the algorithm must balance information acquisition and target commitment over multiple turns. Existing approaches address this challenge from different perspectives: structured methods enable multi-step planning but rely on predefined schemas, while LLM-based approaches support flexible interactions but lack long-horizon decision making, resulting in poor coordination between information acquisition and target commitment. To address this limitation, we formulate goal-oriented conversation as an uncertainty-aware sequential decision problem, where uncertainty serves as a guiding signal for multi-turn decision making. We propose a Conversation Uncertainty-aware Planning framework (CUP) that integrates language models with structured planning: a language model proposes feasible actions, and a planner evaluates their l
arXiv:2604.02512v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly exhibit human-like patterns of pragmatic and social reasoning. This paper addresses two related questions: do LLMs approximate human social meaning not only qualitatively but also quantitatively, and can prompting strategies informed by pragmatic theory improve this approximation? To address the first, we introduce two calibration-focused metrics distinguishing structural fidelity from magnitude calibration: the Effect Size Ratio (ESR) and the Calibration Deviation Score (CDS). To address the second, we derive prompting conditions from two pragmatic assumptions: that social meaning arises from reasoning over linguistic alternatives, and that listeners infer speaker knowledge states and communicative motives. Applied to a case study on numerical (im)precision across three frontier LLMs, we find that all models reliably reproduce the qualitative structure of human social inferences but differ su
arXiv:2603.20895v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Existing routers rely on semantic query features or handcrafted features, which often fail to capture model-specific failures or intrinsic task difficulty. We instead route using internal LLM activations, specifically the residual stream. Our key idea, Encoder-Target Decoupling, separates the model that produces the predictive signal (the Encoder) from the model whose correctness is being estimated (the Target), allowing open-weight encoders to predict the performance of closed-source target models. We evaluate layerwise geometric probes, finding that Fisher Separability ($J$) effectively identifies informative layers, supported by Effective Dimensionality ($d_{\mathrm{eff}}$) diagnostics. We then utilize a SharedTrunkNet, a joint multi-output MLP that predicts simultaneous correctness probabilities across candidate models using concatenated prefill features. In our experiments, SharedTrunkNet consistently outperforms semantic baselin
arXiv:2603.13891v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for automated text annotation in tasks ranging from academic research to content moderation and hiring. Across 19 LLMs and two experiments totaling more than 4 million annotation judgments, we show that subtle identity cues embedded in text systematically bias annotation outcomes in ways that mirror racial stereotypes. In a names-based experiment spanning 39 annotation tasks, texts containing names associated with Black individuals are rated as more aggressive by 18 of 19 models and more gossipy by 18 of 19. Asian names produce a bamboo-ceiling profile: 17 of 19 models rate individuals as more intelligent, while 18 of 19 rate them as less confident and less sociable. Arab names elicit cognitive elevation alongside interpersonal devaluation, and all four minority groups are consistently rated as less self-disciplined. In a matched dialect experiment, the same sentence is judged signifi
arXiv:2602.13452v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly proposed for crisis preparedness and response, particularly for multilingual communication. However, their suitability for high-stakes crisis contexts remains insufficiently evaluated. This work examines the performance of state-of-the-art LLMs and machine translation systems in crisis-domain translation, with a focus on preserving urgency, a critical property for effective crisis communication and triage. Using multilingual crisis data (TICO-19, 30 languages) and a newly introduced urgency-annotated dataset of 100 scenarios translated into 29 languages, we show that dedicated translation models and LLMs exhibit substantial quality degradation, particularly for low-resource languages. Beyond translation quality, we conduct a human annotation study revealing a striking asymmetry: human assessors maintain consistent urgency judgments regardless of prompt language, while LLM-based urgency cla
arXiv:2602.11650v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Although large language models (LLMs) show promise for generating educational feedback, it remains unclear how feedback should be designed (e.g., tone and information coverage) to support answer revision and learner acceptance across diverse learner profiles. We define six feedback designs for multiple-choice biology questions, including a baseline design and variants with additional feedback elements, and conduct an empirical study with high school students. We evaluate feedback using immediate revision performance and six subjective evaluation criteria, and analyze how feedback preferences vary across learner profiles based on personality traits. Our results show that feedback with clear and comprehensive guidance improves revision performance and receives favorable evaluations across learner profiles, whereas informational novelty and affective framing vary across profiles. These findings suggest that learner profiles should be con
arXiv:2508.02038v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper presents a multifunctional speech synthesis system that integrates voice cloning and emotion control speech synthesis within a unified framework. The goal of this work is to address longstanding challenges in achieving highly expressive, controllable, and natural speech generation that faithfully preserves speaker identity across diverse linguistic and emotional contexts. Our approach introduces an effective speaker-emotion disentanglement mechanism with in-batch contrastive learning, enabling independent manipulation of speaker identity and eemotional style, as well as rotational emotional embedding integration method for smooth emotion control. To support comprehensive training and evaluation, we construct CSEMOTIONS, a high-quality emotional speech dataset containing 10 hours of Mandarin speech from six professional speakers across seven emotional categories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our system, Marco-Voice
arXiv:2507.15100v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Natural Language Inference (NLI) determines whether a premise entails, contradicts, or is neutral with respect to a hypothesis. The task is often framed as emulating human inference, in which commonsense knowledge plays a major role. This study examines whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can reliably generate factual commonsense axioms for NLI, and evaluates their utility on the SNLI and ANLI benchmarks using Llama-3.1-70B and gpt-oss-120b. Because commonsense axioms lack explicit textual references, standard factuality metrics are ill-suited to their evaluation. We therefore introduce a reference-free method using an LLM-as-Judge framework. The evaluation reveals a substantial gap between models: gpt-oss-120b generates predominantly accurate axioms, whereas Llama produces more incorrect than correct ones. We further evaluate three prompting pipelines: direct inference, inference augmented with generated commonsense axioms, and a hy
arXiv:2505.13252v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work shows superior performance when using large language models (LLMs) as formalizers instead of as end-to-end solvers for symbolic reasoning problems. Given the problem description, the LLM generates a formal program that derives a solution via an external solver. We systematically investigate the formalization capability of LLMs on real-life constraint satisfaction problems on 4 benchmarks, 6 LLMs, and 2 types of formal languages. We show that LLM-as-formalizer by no means trivializes the problem but underperforms LLM-as-solver in 15 out of 24 model-dataset combinations, despite the former's verifiability and interpretability. Although the formalization space is magnitudes smaller than the search space, our scaling analysis shows that LLM-as-formalizer still drastically degrades as problem complexity increases similar to LLM-as-solver. To better understand this limitation, we observe excessive, solver-like reasoning tokens t
arXiv:2502.00837v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Natural Language Processing (NLP) is now embedded in critical sectors including healthcare, finance, and customer relationship management, where models such as GPT-4o, Gemini, and BERT increasingly inform decisions. The black-box nature of these models has created an urgent need for transparency. This review examines explainable NLP (XNLP) as it is actually deployed, working through seven application domains: medicine, finance, systematic reviews, customer relationship management, chatbots, social and behavioral science, and human resources. For each domain, we ask what kind of explanation the setting needs, which methods are used there, and how they are evaluated. A structured cross-domain synthesis then contrasts how those requirements diverge. We compare the main explanation method families on scope, evidence of faithfulness, and computational cost. We also propose a two-tier evaluation protocol that separates a shared technical co
arXiv:2608.12313v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Creative agents still lack an effective way to learn from high-quality human films, limiting their ability to produce cinematic-grade videos. A key challenge is the absence of a structured video representation that is both faithful to film content and directly usable for agentic reasoning and manipulation. To address the challenge, we propose the Agentic Video Auto-Encoder (AVA-Encoder), a framework for learning agent-native video representations via agentic auto-encoding. AVA-Encoder transforms a video into a knowledge graph (KG) representation and then reconstructs it back into video. Its hierarchy and state nodes store structured text, while a linked asset layer holds generated images, audio, and video. Typed edges preserve the relations between these text descriptions and assets in a form that agents can easily understand, query, and edit. The video reconstruction differences drive a textual-gradient optimization framework, which ex
arXiv:2608.12307v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work on distillation transfers the capabilities of large models to smaller ones often by updating the latter's parameters, through teacher forcing, on-policy distillation, and related training-time methods. In this paper, we ask whether such transfer can instead occur at test time. We study strong-to-weak scaffolding: whether a stronger builder model can construct inference-time harnesses that help a weaker target model solve tasks more reliably without any parameter updates. Using four representative Theory-of-Mind benchmarks, each builder model uses 5% of the data as a validation set to iteratively refine its harness over multiple rounds, after which the finalized harness is evaluated on the full test set. Empirically, this form of test-time capability transfer is highly effective, nearly doubling average target-model performance from 0.49 to 0.91. Our analysis shows that the gains come primarily from offloading unstable model
arXiv:2608.12283v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models can extract richer signals from financial news than fixed sentiment lexicons, and recent work has explored feeding such signals into portfolio construction. We study an uncertainty-aware construction that feeds model-predicted risk -- decomposed into aleatoric and epistemic components -- directly into the covariance matrix of portfolio allocators, rather than treating portfolio risk as fixed or adjusting only expected returns. We evaluate the pipeline on Russell 2000 equities under three stock-selection regimes: a pure-alpha trigger that isolates abnormal stock moves not explained by macro indicators, a pure-beta trigger that captures macro-indicator moves before the stock itself fires, and a beta trigger in which both channels agree. Across the full holding-period grid, the separated pure-alpha and pure-beta legs usually dominate the beta intersection on Sharpe and return. Two horizons are especially informative.
arXiv:2608.12246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Evaluating security vulnerability detection tools requires benchmark datasets with vulnerability-inducing commits (VICs) - the commits that first introduce vulnerabilities into codebases. VICs are essential for determining the full range of vulnerable software versions. Existing vulnerability datasets suffer from limited programming language coverage, restricted patch complexity, and narrow project scope. Through our dual annotation by human experts and an agentic workflow, we create a benchmark - VICBench - of 100 verified VICs for 100 CVEs across 88 projects in Python, Java, and C++, covering 48 CWE types. VICBench features complex real-world vulnerability fixes averaging 38.6 lines and corresponding VICs of 252.5 lines - significantly larger than prior work. Our evaluation shows that state-of-the-art algorithms V-SZZ and LLM4SZZ achieve only 33.3%-40.1% F1, confirming that using existing approaches still entails significant manual ef
arXiv:2608.12150v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standard evaluation of large language models assumes stable model rankings across inference conditions. We challenge this assumption by varying the token generation budget, i.e., the maximum tokens a model may produce, across seven levels (64--4,096), evaluating four models on three reasoning benchmarks (56,476 inferences). We report four findings: (i) 3--19% of items exhibit non-monotone behavior (accuracy decreasing with more budget), even after controlling for truncation, and this phenomenon is model-specific (cross-model overlap: 6--14%). (ii) Model rankings reverse across budgets on all benchmarks ($p {<} 0.01$, McNemar). (iii) Oracle analysis reveals model complementarity up to $+27.8$pp, most pronounced at constrained budgets. (iv) A budget-aware router captures 14.1% of the oracle gap cross-domain; budget features help within-domain ($+1.6$ to $+5.7$pp) but are domain-specific and hurt transfer ($-1.2$pp). These results argue fo
arXiv:2608.12125v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As LLM-based agents with user-instructed goals are becoming widely deployed, they increasingly encounter each other in strategic interactions, and face challenges of finding mutually beneficial outcomes. Prior literature has argued that cooperation problems such as the Prisoner's Dilemma are resolvable in settings where agents know they follow very similar decision making patterns, as for example in monocultural AI ecosystems. Following that line of work, this paper introduces the first framework for evaluating LLM decision making when agents are provided with graded similarity signals. Among our findings, we establish that different LLM models vary drastically in how they navigate similarity signals, with some modern models showing consistent behavior across cooperation problems, payoff structures, and prompt framing. Perhaps surprisingly, our experiments also show that the dataset based on which the similarity signal is computed has s
arXiv:2608.12099v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present RT-SEMamba, a fully causal speech enhancement (SE) model built upon causal time-frequency Mamba blocks. Unlike Transformer-based architectures that rely on a growing key-value cache, Mamba propagates a fixed-size recurrent state per layer, enabling memory- and bandwidth-efficient long-form inference. We further introduce a progressive knowledge distillation (KD) strategy that compresses an 8-layer teacher into a shallow 1-layer student by jointly distilling complex spectral outputs and intermediate representations. On Voicebank-DEMAND, the 8-layer RT-SEMamba achieves 3.32 PESQ with a 25 ms algorithmic latency constraint, and the distilled 1-layer student improves over a naive 1-layer baseline from 3.06 to 3.18 PESQ while preserving the same steady-state RTF, delivering a 2.75x speedup over the teacher. These results demonstrate that state-space models with progressive KD provide a competitive quality-latency trade-off for rea
arXiv:2608.11994v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose claim-level falsification as a principle for test-time scaling and instantiate it through Claim-Level Reliability Assessment (CLR), a training-free framework that reallocates test-time compute from additional solution sampling to targeted verification. Since whole-trace evaluation often obscures decisive errors due to signal dilution from routine tokens, CLR condenses each reasoning trace into a compact set of decision-critical claims, thereby isolating its logical anchors. Furthermore, recognizing the inherent difficulty of generating entirely correct solutions under fixed model capabilities, CLR shifts the focus to semantic falsification. This approach exploits a fundamental asymmetry between solution construction and claim refutation. Constructing a valid solution requires a flawless reasoning path, whereas refuting an incorrect claim requires identifying only a single decisive flaw. This targeted search for negative evide
arXiv:2608.11889v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prompting-based (\textit{i}.\textit{e}., non-fine-tuning) Text-to-SQL methods, where underlying large language model parameters are not changed for the task, face three problems: (\textit{i})~relying on coarse-grained schema information that may not reveal the fine-grained relationships needed to distinguish ambiguous columns, (\textit{ii})~not capturing recurring SQL-generation failures, and (\textit{iii})~suffering from omission, hallucination, or misplacement of conditions in complex questions. This paper develops \textsc{DexterSQL}, a prompting/non-fine-tuning-based Text-to-SQL system that improves SQL generation with three novel components: (\textit{i})~\emph{deep schema explorator} that identifies ambiguous columns, analyzes their individual and joint data distributions to uncover their relationships and the distinct role of each, (\textit{ii})~\emph{database-agnostic rule creator} that mines mismatches between generated and gold